Because things on the Internet have the potential to (a) be seen by a lot more people, and (b) last almost forever. There's a difference between calling someone a fatass in the classroom or schoolyard, and doing it on youtube.
I don't care if some student calls a teacher a "fatass" on network news, and that clip becomes part of the trailer for the news for the next 50 years. It still cannot be a crime as long as the First Amendment stands. It doesn't even reach the level of defamation; it's just a juvenile insult.
AMD still ahead for some things
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 1
As far as I can tell, if you're looking to build a machine with low power consumption and enough horsepower for HD, AMD is still considerably cheaper than Intel. Too bad for AMD that that's not where the money is.
Somehow, it just feels wrong to hope that a big, faceless, corporation crushes a couple of small inventors into dust with the power of their legal department. But in this case, I have to say "GO GOLIATH! CRUSH THOSE PIPSQUEAKS! WATCH OUT FOR THAT SLING!"
Well, if your alternative view was correct, it would be simple to improve both productivity and morale by
1) Imposing greater discipline over programmers
a) More closely monitoring their work
b) Banning Dilbert,/., and other unproductive outlets for programmer time.
2) Increasing workload by laying off some of the programmers and reassigning the work to those remaining
Certainly these methods (a.k.a "the floggings will continue until morale improves") are not uncommon... know of any case where they've actually worked?
On a more serious note, the reason why WikiLeaks' DNS provider in the US was shut down was, well, because they didn't show up for court. At all.
Nor were they invited to. They received notice of the hearing, by email, hours before it happened. This wasn't a matter of ignoring a summons; they were intentionally excluded. Baer and Dynadot stipulated to a bunch of stuff so Dynadot could get itself off the hook, Baer requested a few more things (including the nuking of the A records), and the judge agreed -- without Wikileaks input.
Why have [pirated] video downloads still not penetrated to the average household nearly as much as DVDs? For one thing, most people prefer not to sit back and watch a movie on a 17 inch screen, and they can't afford to buy a second PC for the room with a larger TV.
If you can afford a Blu-Ray player, you can afford a HTPC; they aren't that far apart in price. Actually, sans tuner I could build a "pirated download player" for cheaper than a Blu-Ray player; the ATSC tuners in my Myth DVR were a large part of the expense.
The big reason pirated movies haven't caught on as much as pirated music is probably rentals. Rentals are cheaper and easier than downloading for most people, and not illegal which is a nice bonus.
Next time someone talks about filesharing as if it's stealing, remind them that you lose money on every download. You have to pay for the bandwidth, the equipment, and - by golly! - that all gets very expensive. By the time you're done, you just don't have anything left to pay the record companies... sorry!
Right. Each download costs about $3 to my ISP, russotto.net, as amortized bandwidth cost. $10 in rent for the space in which I started the download, to Russotto Office Rentals. $2 for heat for the space, to Russotto HVAC. $6 in electricity to the Russotto Electricity Distribution Company. $5 in rent for the computer to Russotto Information Technology Equipment Leasing. and a few other miscellaneous expenses.
Amazing that I have anything left at all after that.
(for both/. users who don't know what I'm getting at, look up how royalty payments and percentages for music and movies are calculated)
Take a look at 17 USC 106(1), the definition of the word 'copy' in 17 USC 101, and the Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry case (in which the court discusses how it can be infringing to browse web pages that, unbeknownst to you, someone else put online unlawfully).
That's irrelevant; copyright is a strict liability statute. If you infringe, then you infringe, even if you didn't mean to and could not have acted more reasonably.
Those two statements, in themselves, show the absurdity of copyright laws. Were those principles to actually be enforced, then the web could not continue to exist as it does. Merely browsing the web would open one up to unlimited liability. Talk about a chilling effect! The only web which could exist would be one where website owners not only promised not to host copyrighted work, but -- as a condition for connection -- actually indemnified downloaders against copyright infringement. There's serious First Amendment implications there.
There can be. The Klingon language, for example, was (mostly? completely?) made up by Marc Okrand. But you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that they need Marc's permission to speak Klingon.
Paramount thinks you need their permission to do so.
As far as I know, Ritchie doesn't claim a similar copyright on all C programs...
It doesn't mean it's not a crime. And if it's not a crime, it's at the very least wrong, by any stretch of the imagination. And even if you don't feel it's wrong, it's a violation of the rights of the entities who sell the licenses to listen to that music.
Copyright infringement is often a crime, and it's a violation of the legal rights of the entities who sell that music. But both those things are only true because those entities have enough pull to buy laws, and I don't. There's no moral argument there; it's just might makes right, or a version of the Golden Rule (not that one, but "He who has the gold, makes the rules").
What you're paying for when you buy music is the right to listen to that work
This is not true, even in the current legal framework they've bought. There is no "right to listen". They can't sell such a right because it doesn't exist. There is no law giving them exclusive control over "listening to the copyrighted work". If they purport to sell you such, they are perpetrating a fraud on you. What you're buying when you buy a CD is a copy of the work.
Pay for the music. It won't hurt you.
Incorrect. Paying money, some of which will go to the RIAA, hurts me, as they use it to buy laws (like the DMCA) which harm me.
Don't have enough cash to pay for it? Then get a better job. I don't have enough cash to pay for a Ferrari, but I'm not about to go for a joy ride in someone else's.
If your rich buddy let you use his Ferrari when he wasn't using it, are you stealing from Ferrari?
It is all about risk reward. Shoplifting is riskier, thus less common, than file sharing. The record companies got caught with their pants down, and they're trying to make file sharing risky enough to reduce it - given they have a hard time catching suspects & proving they violated copyright rules - punishment is about the only stick they've got left. Trying to catch & prosecute everyone they found on limewire, eMule, bt, or wherever they get their list of defendants from would be insanely expensive - lobbying to get these absurd penalties is much cheaper.
There's a number of names for the strategy of penalizing only a very small percentage of people engaged in some activity, but penalizing those few extremely harshly. Few of them are complimentary; the least pejorative is probably "making an example out of them". One currently in-vogue name for this sort of thing is "terrorism".
What was the RIAA doing in the 70's and 80's, during the explosion of home taping where everyone and their mothers were making mix-tapes for their friends and relatives ? Did they run around suing everyone that just happened to own a dubbing deck ?
They tried to have home taping banned and/or taxed. However, they failed. A decade or so later, they did manage to kill DAT, but were blindsided by the recordable CD.
Every time you pirate a CD, you are undermining the copyright. You have created another source from which copyrighted works can come, which eats into the value of the copyright itself. You are gaining the value of the copyrighted work, yet there is no equivalent exchange. The copyright holder ends up with a slightly depreciated version of what he owned before you pirated the work. You are stealing value from the copyright holder for your own gratification.
You're begging the question. You've assumed the validity of copyright in order to make your argument.
Further, your argument fails to sustain "infringement is theft" even with the assumption of copyright's validity. Simply gaining financially while diminishing the value of someone else's property is not sufficient to establish "theft".
Consider, for example, if two people own adjacent plots of land. One plot has a house on it, with a nice view of the mountains across the other plot. One day, the second landowner decides to build a similar house on his plot. Because he's blocked some the view of the mountains, he's eaten into the value of his neighbor's property. Because he's increased the value of his land by more than the cost of the house, he's made a material gain for himself. Yet no rational being (not counting the neighbor) would say that he's committed theft.
Regarding government interception, GSM encryption is only from phone to station. At the Telco it's plaintext. So govs can (and probably do) listen to GSM phone calls. Should be common knowledge amongst telco people.
Bingo. I supposed I'd be called paranoid if I suggested the government had dedicated rooms at many telcos where they can intercept whatever phone traffic they care to. But I bet they do.
End to end encryption is a far better solution, but we'll never see it become mainstream.
You're going to turn it on later, right?
Let's say you've taken your disk-encrypted laptop home and you're doing work on it. Thugs break in, throw flash grenades, yell, etc. You cut power to your laptop just before they grab it... they rip it open, freeze the contents, then pop out the drams. They put the drams in another machine and read your key, and thus have access to your hard drive. Damn. And you thought turning it off would help.
My disk encryption system should wipe the key from RAM on sleep. So I just sleep the laptop and they're screwed.
The Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse was an engineering problem. The contractor asked to take a shortcut (instead of threading a nut up a three story threaded rod, they asked to cut the rod and offset it several inches) and the engineers rubber-stamped it without checking what the ramifications would be. The engineering part was not originally flawed, but it was when they approved the change order.
Right, except that the original design wouldn't have worked, as the integrity of the threads could not have been maintained during construction and thus the nut could not have been put on. So in software terms it was a last-minute patch to fix a show-stopper, which wasn't adequately unit-tested.
One does not ordinarily have the "right" to "use" copyrighted works without permission. In this sense, "use" means one of the exclusive rights in a copyright. They come from some license. When one buys a book, you have a right to "use" the book, but you don't have the right to reproduce it. One could understand this to be an IMPLIED license.
One could understand it that way, but one would be understanding it wrong. You're equivocating on "use". When one buys a book, one has a right to use the book, because ordinary use of the book (propping up tables, holding doors open, perhaps even reading it) does not have anything to do with any of the exclusive rights in copyright. There is no implied license; the copy owner is simply the owner of a copy and needs no license.
We understand it. But, please, understand too that we do not believe you anymore when you talk about "democracy", "change", etc. In our eyes you are not a carrier of democratic ideas anymore. You are just an angry traumatized country.
And what sort of hellhole are you from? Canada, with its identity based on being "not the US"? French Canada, with its identity based on being "not English-speaking Canada"? Western Europe, a decrepit corpse whose glory days were passed centuries ago? Africa, a mess anywhere you look? Mexico, South or Central America, where corruption is just a way of doing business? Russia, which threw off the yoke of communism only to embrace another dictator?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care if some student calls a teacher a "fatass" on network news, and that clip becomes part of the trailer for the news for the next 50 years. It still cannot be a crime as long as the First Amendment stands. It doesn't even reach the level of defamation; it's just a juvenile insult.
As far as I can tell, if you're looking to build a machine with low power consumption and enough horsepower for HD, AMD is still considerably cheaper than Intel. Too bad for AMD that that's not where the money is.
Somehow, it just feels wrong to hope that a big, faceless, corporation crushes a couple of small inventors into dust with the power of their legal department. But in this case, I have to say "GO GOLIATH! CRUSH THOSE PIPSQUEAKS! WATCH OUT FOR THAT SLING!"
Well, if your alternative view was correct, it would be simple to improve both productivity and morale by
/., and other unproductive outlets for programmer time.
1) Imposing greater discipline over programmers
a) More closely monitoring their work
b) Banning Dilbert,
2) Increasing workload by laying off some of the programmers and reassigning the work to those remaining
Certainly these methods (a.k.a "the floggings will continue until morale improves") are not uncommon... know of any case where they've actually worked?
Nor were they invited to. They received notice of the hearing, by email, hours before it happened. This wasn't a matter of ignoring a summons; they were intentionally excluded. Baer and Dynadot stipulated to a bunch of stuff so Dynadot could get itself off the hook, Baer requested a few more things (including the nuking of the A records), and the judge agreed -- without Wikileaks input.
Give me some credit, both the theoretical "Pirate Video Player" and my real HTPC run Linux.
If you can afford a Blu-Ray player, you can afford a HTPC; they aren't that far apart in price. Actually, sans tuner I could build a "pirated download player" for cheaper than a Blu-Ray player; the ATSC tuners in my Myth DVR were a large part of the expense.
The big reason pirated movies haven't caught on as much as pirated music is probably rentals. Rentals are cheaper and easier than downloading for most people, and not illegal which is a nice bonus.
Right. Each download costs about
$3 to my ISP, russotto.net, as amortized bandwidth cost.
$10 in rent for the space in which I started the download, to Russotto Office Rentals.
$2 for heat for the space, to Russotto HVAC.
$6 in electricity to the Russotto Electricity Distribution Company.
$5 in rent for the computer to Russotto Information Technology Equipment Leasing.
and a few other miscellaneous expenses.
Amazing that I have anything left at all after that.
(for both
Good. Because copyright law needs to be hit by a Big Hammer or a Clue By Four. The bigger and blunter, the better.
Those two statements, in themselves, show the absurdity of copyright laws. Were those principles to actually be enforced, then the web could not continue to exist as it does. Merely browsing the web would open one up to unlimited liability. Talk about a chilling effect! The only web which could exist would be one where website owners not only promised not to host copyrighted work, but -- as a condition for connection -- actually indemnified downloaders against copyright infringement. There's serious First Amendment implications there.
Paramount thinks you need their permission to do so.
As far as I know, Ritchie doesn't claim a similar copyright on all C programs...
Copyright infringement is often a crime, and it's a violation of the legal rights of the entities who sell that music. But both those things are only true because those entities have enough pull to buy laws, and I don't. There's no moral argument there; it's just might makes right, or a version of the Golden Rule (not that one, but "He who has the gold, makes the rules").
This is not true, even in the current legal framework they've bought. There is no "right to listen". They can't sell such a right because it doesn't exist. There is no law giving them exclusive control over "listening to the copyrighted work". If they purport to sell you such, they are perpetrating a fraud on you. What you're buying when you buy a CD is a copy of the work.
Incorrect. Paying money, some of which will go to the RIAA, hurts me, as they use it to buy laws (like the DMCA) which harm me.
If your rich buddy let you use his Ferrari when he wasn't using it, are you stealing from Ferrari?
There's a number of names for the strategy of penalizing only a very small percentage of people engaged in some activity, but penalizing those few extremely harshly. Few of them are complimentary; the least pejorative is probably "making an example out of them". One currently in-vogue name for this sort of thing is "terrorism".
They tried to have home taping banned and/or taxed. However, they failed. A decade or so later, they did manage to kill DAT, but were blindsided by the recordable CD.
You're begging the question. You've assumed the validity of copyright in order to make your argument.
Further, your argument fails to sustain "infringement is theft" even with the assumption of copyright's validity. Simply gaining financially while diminishing the value of someone else's property is not sufficient to establish "theft".
Consider, for example, if two people own adjacent plots of land. One plot has a house on it, with a nice view of the mountains across the other plot. One day, the second landowner decides to build a similar house on his plot. Because he's blocked some the view of the mountains, he's eaten into the value of his neighbor's property. Because he's increased the value of his land by more than the cost of the house, he's made a material gain for himself. Yet no rational being (not counting the neighbor) would say that he's committed theft.
Bingo. I supposed I'd be called paranoid if I suggested the government had dedicated rooms at many telcos where they can intercept whatever phone traffic they care to. But I bet they do.
End to end encryption is a far better solution, but we'll never see it become mainstream.
The stipulation is at Citizens Media Law Project
Mandatory methamphetamine for TSA workers.
What does Google get for this? Is this just a shot at Microsoft because Microsoft has been taking shots at Google?
One could understand it that way, but one would be understanding it wrong. You're equivocating on "use". When one buys a book, one has a right to use the book, because ordinary use of the book (propping up tables, holding doors open, perhaps even reading it) does not have anything to do with any of the exclusive rights in copyright. There is no implied license; the copy owner is simply the owner of a copy and needs no license.
And what sort of hellhole are you from? Canada, with its identity based on being "not the US"? French Canada, with its identity based on being "not English-speaking Canada"? Western Europe, a decrepit corpse whose glory days were passed centuries ago? Africa, a mess anywhere you look? Mexico, South or Central America, where corruption is just a way of doing business? Russia, which threw off the yoke of communism only to embrace another dictator?