That makes me wonder. Why hasn't MS gotten around to buying themselves a small country yet? (Or, possibly, just buying an island and delcaring sovereignity, which might make them one of the first to do that and become actually recognized, as far as I know...) You'd think it'd be easier for them. They could just make up their own laws. (Open Source is illegal! Everyone must upgrade every product they own as soon as the next one comes out! )
Thanks! (And to the other person who replied similarly.) Still, the point stands--editing the preferences file shouldn't be required to turn off stuff like this.
It sounds good, sure. But, I can't be the only person out there for whom it's more of an irritant than a feature. On long pages, if you accidentally type something without focusing on, say, the form box... then it'll scroll you right down to the link it thinks you want.
I'm therefore waiting expectantly for the feature that lets you turn this *off*. I'm sure it's nice for some people, but if you don't want it, being forced to have it is a pain. If there/is/ a place to disable it... it's definitely not anywhere visible.
Their problem, I think, is a frequent but misguided idea that one's countrymen are better than those who happen to live elsewhere.
While there are those who slip through the cracks, America's kids aren't in that bad a shape. Even if they don't eat much at home, every public school I ever went to had free lunch and often breakfast if you were below a certain income level. If every kid didn't have a computer of his own, they did at least have a chance to use them on a semi-regular basis. American children are considered entitled to an education, including college.
Many other places, these things are not true.
Now, this project? Not aimed at helping starving six-year-olds in Bolivia. While I happen to think their aims are laudable--unlike those posters who still seem to be stuck in the cold war--the fact does remain that these computers are being sent elsewhere for a reason. Not because a small area is in need, but because those/countries/ are at a disadvantage, economically.
If anyone wants to say that America is a disadvantaged nation, as far as the world goes... they deserve to get beat over the head with a clue-by-four.
The one time I tried Kazaa, I didn't drop it because of the ads or any of that junk. I don't like it, but that's life. I dropped it, in the end, because every time I tried to download/anything/, it seemed like, the labels were wrong. The filename said one thing, the label said something else, and the thing itself was usually some third thing. I don't/think/ that the MP/RIAA has been masking Eminem as the Indigo Girls claiming to be Ani Difranco, but... I suppose I could be wrong.
I'd be willing to bet these same people pay for at least extended basic cable--I'm the only person I know who pays for cable and only gets pure basic, and that's because our reception is horrible at my house. Those same people may very well drive newish cars, buy new clothes with a fair frequency, and shell out $40 a month for a 4000 evening minutes that they don't actually use.
Broadband isn't a priority for them. If it were a priority, people would find the money, just as I always have.
Things will always be too expensive for those who don't have a need for them, until they're dirt-cheap. Until cable hits the price of AOL, most people will find it too expensive. And there will, after that, still be people who don't want to give up their handy-dandy AOL features.
I happen to be a sometimes-writer, and I have good friends who're far more serious about it than I am.
By your token, because I buy a book, I should therefore own all the contents of the book. This is the reason that copyright law exists--to protect the people who create things.
Cleanflicks obviously has to be making a profit off of this, or else they wouldn't be in business. (Well, one assumes, though you can never tell anymore.) If they're making a profit, they're making that profit because of the work of the people who created the movies... while not respecting that those people created a specific vision. Yes, sometimes that vision includes violence. You have plenty right to go see something else.
Ooh, I know. I'm going to go buy a bunch of big long books and cut out all the violence and sex and maybe the boring passages, too, and re-sell them. Of course, I'm not going to stop to ask the author what they think of this; it's my right to free speech, right? Forget the rights of the original creator. Forget, for that matter, their feelings, or that they're even human beings at all, because it's so much easier to think of them as the Evil Movie Industry whose sex and violence are so damaging to our precious little children.
In personal use, you're not making money for doing it. You do it for yourself, your family, sure. When you start doing it to make a buck, then you're doing the very thing that copyright law is designed to prevent.
It's suddenly private use when you start renting them out to other people, and selling them?
Funny, that's not generally what I consider private.
It's one thing for, say, a mother with some A/V experience to edit out a few scenes she doesn't want her son seeing. It's another for a business to edit things out and then sell them.
The issue isn't that it's censorship. Different edits happen all the time. The thing is, those edits are done with the permission of the people who made the movie in the first place. CleanFlicks, and other companies like them, have decided to take it into their own hands. They're editing and re-selling without the permission of the people who made the movies.
If they had permission, there'd be no need for a lawsuit. Just because they have a desire that isn't being filled doesn't mean that they have the right to break laws in order to fill it.
Maybe their efforts would be better turned, then, towards making movies that don't have violence and sex as a part of their plotlines, as so many do today? (The ones that it's not a part of the plotline, it generally takes up so much space anyway that you'd probably end up with a five-minute short if you cut it all out.)
If you don't like what's in a movie, you're within your rights to not watch that movie. There are good movies out there that don't have all those elements in them. Your desire to not see anything violent does not mean that Peter Jackson has a responsibility to cut out all the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings in order to let you watch it.
Nor does it mean that another company should be able to change Jackson's work to better suit your tastes.
I think more movies without the overload of sex and violence that we often see today would be a great thing. I don't think that gives third parties the right to cut out all the bits they don't like and then re-market films that they don't own the rights to.
I think, on this one, they're solidly in the right.
Sure, people have a right to not be exposed to that sort of content. They're free to find other movies to watch, ones that mesh better with their ideals. The idea that they have some sort of right to take a knife to someone else's work... and then/market/ that... seems idiotic, to me. I'm hoping the directors win.
Now, I have no problem with people doing their own editing. The main issue, as I see it, is that all these little companies are making money off of the destruction of someone else's creative vision. And that... just sits very badly with me.
I'm a roleplay MUSHer. (As opposed to social MUSHers, the other half of our particular subspecies of text-gamers.)
I do, occasionally, try to type 'look' while talking to someone.
But... you know, not only have I never turned in a paper with an IM abbreviation on it, I don't even use IM abbreviations in IMs. I can understand using them with cellphone text messages, where each letter takes a certain amount of time, but it amazes me how the same person who spends hours every day online in a text-based world... can have no idea how to properly converse in text.
Maybe if we were to actually start beating the IMers into using something resembling real English--a few abbreviations are one thing, every other word is quite another--then they'd have less problems in school.
In fact... you know, I think this is my civic duty. Quick, someone, fetch me my beating stick!
Quite possibly hypocritical... though, in general, I don't think this is quite the same severity as many of the MS ones seem to be. I'm not even bothering to apply the patch, at the moment, and I'm not so much upset as baffled. Usually, Mozilla's bugs don't stay around this long.
Which is not to say that they don't frequently disappear and reappear regularly as the flaws are hammered out, but for something to be completely untouched after this long is certainly not usual.
...is that the bug has apparently been a known one for months, and still hasn't been repaired.
I love Mozilla. I use Mozilla. This just troubles me greatly. Even now that it's known, I haven't heard anything about a fix. Hopefully it'll be arriving shortly, because I like my privacy.
...why not just ask them to send you their addressbook or whatever?
If people are going to be doing this to documents from people they don't know, I don't how they're going to be smart enough to figure out that joe12345@hotmail.com isn't actually their tech support guy/marketing person/whatever who needs this file for some real reason?
...from my Stats classroom, about 15 minutes before class starts, on my laptop, via the University of Akron's wireless connection.
I used to think this kind of stuff didn't matter. You use it once, and then after that, you wonder how you ever lived without it. No worrying about transferring files from lab computers back to my home computer, no worrying about missing messages, the ability to actually be productive during time when I'd normally just be waiting for stuff...
It's an incredible thing. What else can you call an innovation that lets a person read Slashdot at any time, from anywhere on campus?;)
Do programs that use a browser to render their content still use IE to render after it's been 'hidden'? Do programs that insist on popping up IE windows, despite your 'old' browser default settings, still pop up IE windows?
How specific *is* this patent, though? While a lot of the software patents out there are horrible--boo, hiss, yeah, let's move on--either WotC isn't enforcing theirs very well, or an awful lot of computer gaming companies must be paying them royalties. There are plenty of non-D&D computer games that use levelling... unless they're all paying to license the idea, I think that non-D&D tabletop games aren't in any danger of being prevented from using it.
Which isn't to say that levelling is the most important thing ever. Real people do not have levels.
First of all, I'd be willing to bet the numbers are rather high for fake addresses, across a good number of domain registrars besides VeriSign. There have to be some people out there creative enough to make up addresses that sound plausible... but just don't happen to belong to the person registering the data. (As opposed to 123 Main St, (123) 456-7890.)
I realize that keeping data on who domains belong to is somewhat important, but I don't see why this data has to be made available to the general public. Yes, it lets people trace the supposed owner of a domain... which can mean nothing, if the owner and the person maintaining the website aren't the same. It can also give people an avenue to harass you, especially if you happen to host any content that's in any way controversial.
Once, owning a domain was something businesses did. The average person had an email like jdoe@isp.net, and a web address that probably looked like http://www.isp.net/~jdoe. There are still plenty of those out there. There are also those of us who aren't content with the tiny amount of capability our ISP accounts come with, and so pay for third-party hosting... and a domain.
My domain holds a bunch of stuff. A forum for a hobby of mine. My public journal. Some links. Nothing out of the ordinary. I don't see why it's in any way important for other people to have easy access to my address and phone number. If the police need it, let them get it from my registrar.
I don't think there should be a blanket assumption that domains are going to belong to businesses who don't have anything to lose from their contact info being public.
Libertarians? That's almost as absurd as saying we have to take the Net back from the communists.
Moreso by a long shot, if you're talking someone who believes purely in those ideals. A communist would want to regulate the internet. (Which might or might not be a good thing. I won't argue either way.) The libertarian would be the one arguing to leave it alone and let whatever happens happen. On the most basic level, communism is about group control, and libertarianism is about individual control.
They might as well try to take the internet back from the anarchists. Not that I wouldn't be there--with popcorn--if they tried.
Does that mean that you could make them all stop crashing? Please?
I'm on reboot #26 today. And this with the supposedly stable Windows XP. Trustworthy computing--I can't even trust it to/run/. I have no illusions about it being secure.
You will note that there was an 'if' statement in front of that. I really don't know anything about the state of Malaysia's schools--but I think this applies to *any* school system, anywhere, if they lack the funding to properly educate their students.
If there is really no other software available to do what needs to be done, and your schools honestly do not have the money to pay for it... morally, I think it's okay for the schools to just copy it, legal or not. Knowledge trumps money.
A lot of software, though... you don't really need that commercial version, you can get something free, especially in educational institutions. If all you need is office software for writing papers, then get Linux and OpenOffice, don't pirate copies of Microsoft software.
Maybe this should be common sense, but it seems like common sense really isn't all that common, especially when it comes to intellectual property issues.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes me wonder. Why hasn't MS gotten around to buying themselves a small country yet? (Or, possibly, just buying an island and delcaring sovereignity, which might make them one of the first to do that and become actually recognized, as far as I know...) You'd think it'd be easier for them. They could just make up their own laws. (Open Source is illegal! Everyone must upgrade every product they own as soon as the next one comes out! )
Thanks! (And to the other person who replied similarly.) Still, the point stands--editing the preferences file shouldn't be required to turn off stuff like this.
It sounds good, sure. But, I can't be the only person out there for whom it's more of an irritant than a feature. On long pages, if you accidentally type something without focusing on, say, the form box... then it'll scroll you right down to the link it thinks you want.
/is/ a place to disable it... it's definitely not anywhere visible.
I'm therefore waiting expectantly for the feature that lets you turn this *off*. I'm sure it's nice for some people, but if you don't want it, being forced to have it is a pain. If there
Their problem, I think, is a frequent but misguided idea that one's countrymen are better than those who happen to live elsewhere.
/countries/ are at a disadvantage, economically.
While there are those who slip through the cracks, America's kids aren't in that bad a shape. Even if they don't eat much at home, every public school I ever went to had free lunch and often breakfast if you were below a certain income level. If every kid didn't have a computer of his own, they did at least have a chance to use them on a semi-regular basis. American children are considered entitled to an education, including college.
Many other places, these things are not true.
Now, this project? Not aimed at helping starving six-year-olds in Bolivia. While I happen to think their aims are laudable--unlike those posters who still seem to be stuck in the cold war--the fact does remain that these computers are being sent elsewhere for a reason. Not because a small area is in need, but because those
If anyone wants to say that America is a disadvantaged nation, as far as the world goes... they deserve to get beat over the head with a clue-by-four.
The one time I tried Kazaa, I didn't drop it because of the ads or any of that junk. I don't like it, but that's life. I dropped it, in the end, because every time I tried to download /anything/, it seemed like, the labels were wrong. The filename said one thing, the label said something else, and the thing itself was usually some third thing. I don't /think/ that the MP/RIAA has been masking Eminem as the Indigo Girls claiming to be Ani Difranco, but... I suppose I could be wrong.
I'd be willing to bet these same people pay for at least extended basic cable--I'm the only person I know who pays for cable and only gets pure basic, and that's because our reception is horrible at my house. Those same people may very well drive newish cars, buy new clothes with a fair frequency, and shell out $40 a month for a 4000 evening minutes that they don't actually use.
Broadband isn't a priority for them. If it were a priority, people would find the money, just as I always have.
Things will always be too expensive for those who don't have a need for them, until they're dirt-cheap. Until cable hits the price of AOL, most people will find it too expensive. And there will, after that, still be people who don't want to give up their handy-dandy AOL features.
I happen to be a sometimes-writer, and I have good friends who're far more serious about it than I am.
By your token, because I buy a book, I should therefore own all the contents of the book. This is the reason that copyright law exists--to protect the people who create things.
Cleanflicks obviously has to be making a profit off of this, or else they wouldn't be in business. (Well, one assumes, though you can never tell anymore.) If they're making a profit, they're making that profit because of the work of the people who created the movies... while not respecting that those people created a specific vision. Yes, sometimes that vision includes violence. You have plenty right to go see something else.
Ooh, I know. I'm going to go buy a bunch of big long books and cut out all the violence and sex and maybe the boring passages, too, and re-sell them. Of course, I'm not going to stop to ask the author what they think of this; it's my right to free speech, right? Forget the rights of the original creator. Forget, for that matter, their feelings, or that they're even human beings at all, because it's so much easier to think of them as the Evil Movie Industry whose sex and violence are so damaging to our precious little children.
In personal use, you're not making money for doing it. You do it for yourself, your family, sure. When you start doing it to make a buck, then you're doing the very thing that copyright law is designed to prevent.
It's suddenly private use when you start renting them out to other people, and selling them?
Funny, that's not generally what I consider private.
It's one thing for, say, a mother with some A/V experience to edit out a few scenes she doesn't want her son seeing. It's another for a business to edit things out and then sell them.
The issue isn't that it's censorship. Different edits happen all the time. The thing is, those edits are done with the permission of the people who made the movie in the first place. CleanFlicks, and other companies like them, have decided to take it into their own hands. They're editing and re-selling without the permission of the people who made the movies.
If they had permission, there'd be no need for a lawsuit. Just because they have a desire that isn't being filled doesn't mean that they have the right to break laws in order to fill it.
Maybe their efforts would be better turned, then, towards making movies that don't have violence and sex as a part of their plotlines, as so many do today? (The ones that it's not a part of the plotline, it generally takes up so much space anyway that you'd probably end up with a five-minute short if you cut it all out.)
If you don't like what's in a movie, you're within your rights to not watch that movie. There are good movies out there that don't have all those elements in them. Your desire to not see anything violent does not mean that Peter Jackson has a responsibility to cut out all the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings in order to let you watch it.
Nor does it mean that another company should be able to change Jackson's work to better suit your tastes.
I think more movies without the overload of sex and violence that we often see today would be a great thing. I don't think that gives third parties the right to cut out all the bits they don't like and then re-market films that they don't own the rights to.
I think, on this one, they're solidly in the right.
/market/ that... seems idiotic, to me. I'm hoping the directors win.
Sure, people have a right to not be exposed to that sort of content. They're free to find other movies to watch, ones that mesh better with their ideals. The idea that they have some sort of right to take a knife to someone else's work... and then
Now, I have no problem with people doing their own editing. The main issue, as I see it, is that all these little companies are making money off of the destruction of someone else's creative vision. And that... just sits very badly with me.
I'm a roleplay MUSHer. (As opposed to social MUSHers, the other half of our particular subspecies of text-gamers.)
I do, occasionally, try to type 'look' while talking to someone.
But... you know, not only have I never turned in a paper with an IM abbreviation on it, I don't even use IM abbreviations in IMs. I can understand using them with cellphone text messages, where each letter takes a certain amount of time, but it amazes me how the same person who spends hours every day online in a text-based world... can have no idea how to properly converse in text.
Maybe if we were to actually start beating the IMers into using something resembling real English--a few abbreviations are one thing, every other word is quite another--then they'd have less problems in school.
In fact... you know, I think this is my civic duty. Quick, someone, fetch me my beating stick!
...to get me to actually drink Pepsi.
They can call me once they start offering rights to human-inhabitable planets. Then... maybe. But I'm still not going to like it.
Give me my Coca-Cola any day.
Quite possibly hypocritical... though, in general, I don't think this is quite the same severity as many of the MS ones seem to be. I'm not even bothering to apply the patch, at the moment, and I'm not so much upset as baffled. Usually, Mozilla's bugs don't stay around this long.
Which is not to say that they don't frequently disappear and reappear regularly as the flaws are hammered out, but for something to be completely untouched after this long is certainly not usual.
...is that the bug has apparently been a known one for months, and still hasn't been repaired.
I love Mozilla. I use Mozilla. This just troubles me greatly. Even now that it's known, I haven't heard anything about a fix. Hopefully it'll be arriving shortly, because I like my privacy.
...why not just ask them to send you their addressbook or whatever?
If people are going to be doing this to documents from people they don't know, I don't how they're going to be smart enough to figure out that joe12345@hotmail.com isn't actually their tech support guy/marketing person/whatever who needs this file for some real reason?
...from my Stats classroom, about 15 minutes before class starts, on my laptop, via the University of Akron's wireless connection.
;)
I used to think this kind of stuff didn't matter. You use it once, and then after that, you wonder how you ever lived without it. No worrying about transferring files from lab computers back to my home computer, no worrying about missing messages, the ability to actually be productive during time when I'd normally just be waiting for stuff...
It's an incredible thing. What else can you call an innovation that lets a person read Slashdot at any time, from anywhere on campus?
Do programs that use a browser to render their content still use IE to render after it's been 'hidden'? Do programs that insist on popping up IE windows, despite your 'old' browser default settings, still pop up IE windows?
How specific *is* this patent, though? While a lot of the software patents out there are horrible--boo, hiss, yeah, let's move on--either WotC isn't enforcing theirs very well, or an awful lot of computer gaming companies must be paying them royalties. There are plenty of non-D&D computer games that use levelling... unless they're all paying to license the idea, I think that non-D&D tabletop games aren't in any danger of being prevented from using it.
Which isn't to say that levelling is the most important thing ever. Real people do not have levels.
First of all, I'd be willing to bet the numbers are rather high for fake addresses, across a good number of domain registrars besides VeriSign. There have to be some people out there creative enough to make up addresses that sound plausible... but just don't happen to belong to the person registering the data. (As opposed to 123 Main St, (123) 456-7890.)
I realize that keeping data on who domains belong to is somewhat important, but I don't see why this data has to be made available to the general public. Yes, it lets people trace the supposed owner of a domain... which can mean nothing, if the owner and the person maintaining the website aren't the same. It can also give people an avenue to harass you, especially if you happen to host any content that's in any way controversial.
Once, owning a domain was something businesses did. The average person had an email like jdoe@isp.net, and a web address that probably looked like http://www.isp.net/~jdoe. There are still plenty of those out there. There are also those of us who aren't content with the tiny amount of capability our ISP accounts come with, and so pay for third-party hosting... and a domain.
My domain holds a bunch of stuff. A forum for a hobby of mine. My public journal. Some links. Nothing out of the ordinary. I don't see why it's in any way important for other people to have easy access to my address and phone number. If the police need it, let them get it from my registrar.
I don't think there should be a blanket assumption that domains are going to belong to businesses who don't have anything to lose from their contact info being public.
Libertarians? That's almost as absurd as saying we have to take the Net back from the communists.
Moreso by a long shot, if you're talking someone who believes purely in those ideals. A communist would want to regulate the internet. (Which might or might not be a good thing. I won't argue either way.) The libertarian would be the one arguing to leave it alone and let whatever happens happen. On the most basic level, communism is about group control, and libertarianism is about individual control.
They might as well try to take the internet back from the anarchists. Not that I wouldn't be there--with popcorn--if they tried.
.oO($15,000 engagement ring?)
;)
So... what's a guy like you doing in a joint like this?
Does that mean that you could make them all stop crashing? Please?
/run/. I have no illusions about it being secure.
I'm on reboot #26 today. And this with the supposedly stable Windows XP. Trustworthy computing--I can't even trust it to
You will note that there was an 'if' statement in front of that. I really don't know anything about the state of Malaysia's schools--but I think this applies to *any* school system, anywhere, if they lack the funding to properly educate their students.
If there is really no other software available to do what needs to be done, and your schools honestly do not have the money to pay for it... morally, I think it's okay for the schools to just copy it, legal or not. Knowledge trumps money.
A lot of software, though... you don't really need that commercial version, you can get something free, especially in educational institutions. If all you need is office software for writing papers, then get Linux and OpenOffice, don't pirate copies of Microsoft software.
Maybe this should be common sense, but it seems like common sense really isn't all that common, especially when it comes to intellectual property issues.