I don't boycott DVDs, but I do point out to people how easy it is nowadays to become a felon for watching one's own (purchased) disks.
That's pretty interesting, since it's not a felony to circumvent something for a fair use purpose. It's not covered by criminal law, and it's not even illegal under civil law.
No one wants to stop buying from their favorite artist, who is most likely distributed through the RIAA.
There have to be alternatives to a boycott.
As to the RIAA, I have to disagree. There's two major alternatives: independent artists, and napster (note the lowercase "n"). Both are just as good, but take a little bit more effort.
It's difficult to boycott all "evil" companies, and impossible to boycott all companies which buy products from resellers which license them from companies which happen to be members of an organization which lobbies congress to pass "evil" laws (such as movie theatres and record stores).
So I take the "try my best" approach. I "steal" mp3s from friends or napster rather than give money to RIAA affiliated record companies. I try to go to theatres where I know the owner, so they will let me in without printing a ticket, so none of the money goes to the MPAA companies.
But ultimately, when someone asks me to go see a movie with them, I'm not going to say "no" just because a few dollars goes to an MPAA company. Never seeing a movie would decrease my number of friends, and how could I ever earn enough money to compete against the big record labels without any friends?
I found out today that my tickets are actually for the noon showing (12:00 PM) even though the tickets are printed as a midnight showing, caused by a glitch in the computers. I have a final that conflicts with me seeing it at noon, so it is essentially midnight or nothing. I went to discuss the matter with management and they referred me to their 'no refunds or exchanges' policy and showed me a sign which has now been posted on the kiosk that explains that 12:00 PM tickets are really for 12:00 AM.
So? You don't have a 12:00 PM ticket, do you? Or, if you do, then you can see the movie at 12:00 AM, like you want. Maybe you're making a big deal over nothing and you weren't clear enough when you talked to the manager. Take the shit out of your mouth and try again, there's probably a new manager there by now anyway.
When a commercial entity makes a mistake, I believe that it falls on them to correct it via the most simple and expedient method available. A "No refunds or exchanges" policy shouldn't affect this simple rule since it was the commercial entity itself that made the mistake.
Good, cause it doesn't (at least in any UCC state).
However, in reality things are much different, and hence, consumers are put at risk every time money changes hands. Why should such policies be legal even though it wasn't the consumers fault. Shouldn't the entity accepting the money have some form of obligation to the person paying them to get the service they intended?
My suggestion to the poster. Print out and show the manager the UCC. Print out the whole thing if you have access to a school computer and feel dickish, or specifically, "The buyer may revoke his acceptance of a lot or commercial unit whose non-conformity substantially impairs its value to him if he has accepted it
(a) on the reasonable assumption that its non-conformity would be cured and it has not been seasonably cured; or
(b) without discovery of such non-conformity if his acceptance was reasonably induced either by the difficulty of discovery before acceptance or by the seller's assurances.
Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users?
They should. The spammers connected to AOL without permission and put things on their computer. OTOH, the users voluntarily connected to AOL to download their mail. It would be like getting $.10 every time you read a troll post on Slashdot.
The problem itself might be boring (and really none of us can fix it without access to the machine), but it's a good opportunity to poke fun at Microsoft, so it gets accepted.
From memory J.A. Wheeler made some calculations some time ago that show that it is possible for species to continue to live forever in a universe that also cools and expands forever. The key is to hibernate at regular interval (that keep getting longer) and accumulate energy while doing so.
That's interesting. I'm tempted to look it up but I should really be studying for my physics final, and I doubt it has anything to do with QM.
Anyway, we're talking about billions of billions of years from now. The Sun will be history before this is an issue and the original poster is right. If humanity's descendants want to live forever at some point they'll have to move out.
I just don't see either as something we should be even remotely worried about right now.
Don't give poor access to learn technology by arresting people who provide books and software for free without permission of the megacorp which owns the copyright on it.
I think his main problem was the idea of Universal instantaneous collapse of the wavefunction (which leads to "spooky action at a distance"[2] and God playing "dice with the Universe"). These concepts came from the Copenhagen Interpretation, and was the best way the Quantum theoreticians could think to explain the seemingly counterintuitive results of QM - it's pure philosophy and has nothing to do with the Physics.
Of course not everyone necessarily subscribes Copenhagen now. My personal favourite explanation is the proposition popular in the 80s and in Sliders - that multiple Universes are created at each instant multiple outcomes are possible, each reflecting the different outcomes.
I think you're confusing two different phenomena here. The Copenhagen Interpretation is more about explaining the wave-particle duality observations. In a two-slit experiment it can be proven conclusively that some aspect of a photon travels down both slits simultaneously. This can be explained best by a wave. But in the photoelectric effect there is a cutoff wavelength before the number of electrons emitted is proportional to the intensity of light. Thus (and you should read the details cause it's nonobvious from what I've said), photons must be quantised, as well as localised (this is clear if you send one photon at a time down a double slit experiment.
So how can light (and later we find all matter) be both a particle and a wave? Well, the Copenhagen Interpretation says that it's a quantized wave. Thus, it travels as a wave, then collapses to a single point upon interation with any other measurable property. This interpretation properly explains all current experimental results, but it has philosophical problems in that it violates the principle of locality, the principle that something in one place can't instantaneously affect something in another place.
The multiple worlds theory does not explain this paradox. Still, Einstein's theory, that there are hidden variables contained within the wave itself, has not been disproven completely. Bell's theorem, in answer to the EPR paradox, only disproves certain simple hidden variables theories.
At this point now I'm out of my league of expertise, so I'll defer to someone who's taken more than QM I.
Slashdot Mirror
These practices legitimize the RIAA/MPAA position.
Only if you consider copyright a legitimate law.
Of course there will be DRM and the DMCA. It's because of jerks like you.
I have no problem with DRM. As for the DMCA, as long as you realize that it's because of jerks like me, and not me, fine, I agree.
If everyone behaved like me, there wouldn't any copyright law in the first place. So I don't feel guilty at all.
because they were first, and "P2P filesharing network" is too long.
Except that if you buy used that means someone else has to buy new.
I don't boycott DVDs, but I do point out to people how easy it is nowadays to become a felon for watching one's own (purchased) disks.
That's pretty interesting, since it's not a felony to circumvent something for a fair use purpose. It's not covered by criminal law, and it's not even illegal under civil law.
Amen. This boycott shit is as stupid as the Bush commercials saying that buying pot promotes terrorism.
When you watch network television, you are contributing by being an eyeball.
Only if you're a Neilson family.
No one wants to stop buying from their favorite artist, who is most likely distributed through the RIAA.
There have to be alternatives to a boycott.
As to the RIAA, I have to disagree. There's two major alternatives: independent artists, and napster (note the lowercase "n"). Both are just as good, but take a little bit more effort.
How does buying used help?
It's difficult to boycott all "evil" companies, and impossible to boycott all companies which buy products from resellers which license them from companies which happen to be members of an organization which lobbies congress to pass "evil" laws (such as movie theatres and record stores).
So I take the "try my best" approach. I "steal" mp3s from friends or napster rather than give money to RIAA affiliated record companies. I try to go to theatres where I know the owner, so they will let me in without printing a ticket, so none of the money goes to the MPAA companies.
But ultimately, when someone asks me to go see a movie with them, I'm not going to say "no" just because a few dollars goes to an MPAA company. Never seeing a movie would decrease my number of friends, and how could I ever earn enough money to compete against the big record labels without any friends?
Hmm, you're probably right. But there is usually a common law equivalent to the UCC which applies to things like movie tickets.
I found out today that my tickets are actually for the noon showing (12:00 PM) even though the tickets are printed as a midnight showing, caused by a glitch in the computers. I have a final that conflicts with me seeing it at noon, so it is essentially midnight or nothing. I went to discuss the matter with management and they referred me to their 'no refunds or exchanges' policy and showed me a sign which has now been posted on the kiosk that explains that 12:00 PM tickets are really for 12:00 AM.
So? You don't have a 12:00 PM ticket, do you? Or, if you do, then you can see the movie at 12:00 AM, like you want. Maybe you're making a big deal over nothing and you weren't clear enough when you talked to the manager. Take the shit out of your mouth and try again, there's probably a new manager there by now anyway.
When a commercial entity makes a mistake, I believe that it falls on them to correct it via the most simple and expedient method available. A "No refunds or exchanges" policy shouldn't affect this simple rule since it was the commercial entity itself that made the mistake.
Good, cause it doesn't (at least in any UCC state).
However, in reality things are much different, and hence, consumers are put at risk every time money changes hands. Why should such policies be legal even though it wasn't the consumers fault. Shouldn't the entity accepting the money have some form of obligation to the person paying them to get the service they intended?
My suggestion to the poster. Print out and show the manager the UCC. Print out the whole thing if you have access to a school computer and feel dickish, or specifically, "The buyer may revoke his acceptance of a lot or commercial unit whose non-conformity substantially impairs its value to him if he has accepted it
Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users?
They should. The spammers connected to AOL without permission and put things on their computer. OTOH, the users voluntarily connected to AOL to download their mail. It would be like getting $.10 every time you read a troll post on Slashdot.
and be done with it.
and 2starr has to pay CmdrTaco $0.25 for every post he makes with spelling errors!
The problem itself might be boring (and really none of us can fix it without access to the machine), but it's a good opportunity to poke fun at Microsoft, so it gets accepted.
Yeah, I was gonna say, lots of techs in Texas, if you can deal with the po lice.
From memory J.A. Wheeler made some calculations some time ago that show that it is possible for species to continue to live forever in a universe that also cools and expands forever. The key is to hibernate at regular interval (that keep getting longer) and accumulate energy while doing so.
That's interesting. I'm tempted to look it up but I should really be studying for my physics final, and I doubt it has anything to do with QM.
Anyway, we're talking about billions of billions of years from now. The Sun will be history before this is an issue and the original poster is right. If humanity's descendants want to live forever at some point they'll have to move out.
I just don't see either as something we should be even remotely worried about right now.
Don't give poor access to learn technology by arresting people who provide books and software for free without permission of the megacorp which owns the copyright on it.
Our species *is* eventually doomed to extinction, either by the big crunch or by absolute zero temperatures
of course he probably didn't pay up because his taxes were so high because of all the space program funding.
I think his main problem was the idea of Universal instantaneous collapse of the wavefunction (which leads to "spooky action at a distance"[2] and God playing "dice with the Universe"). These concepts came from the Copenhagen Interpretation, and was the best way the Quantum theoreticians could think to explain the seemingly counterintuitive results of QM - it's pure philosophy and has nothing to do with the Physics.
Of course not everyone necessarily subscribes Copenhagen now. My personal favourite explanation is the proposition popular in the 80s and in Sliders - that multiple Universes are created at each instant multiple outcomes are possible, each reflecting the different outcomes.
I think you're confusing two different phenomena here. The Copenhagen Interpretation is more about explaining the wave-particle duality observations. In a two-slit experiment it can be proven conclusively that some aspect of a photon travels down both slits simultaneously. This can be explained best by a wave. But in the photoelectric effect there is a cutoff wavelength before the number of electrons emitted is proportional to the intensity of light. Thus (and you should read the details cause it's nonobvious from what I've said), photons must be quantised, as well as localised (this is clear if you send one photon at a time down a double slit experiment.
So how can light (and later we find all matter) be both a particle and a wave? Well, the Copenhagen Interpretation says that it's a quantized wave. Thus, it travels as a wave, then collapses to a single point upon interation with any other measurable property. This interpretation properly explains all current experimental results, but it has philosophical problems in that it violates the principle of locality, the principle that something in one place can't instantaneously affect something in another place.
The multiple worlds theory does not explain this paradox. Still, Einstein's theory, that there are hidden variables contained within the wave itself, has not been disproven completely. Bell's theorem, in answer to the EPR paradox, only disproves certain simple hidden variables theories.
At this point now I'm out of my league of expertise, so I'll defer to someone who's taken more than QM I.
Yeah, but it's not exactly true. There is an exact uncertainty, which can be calculated using the Schrodinger equation.
Also, Delta here represents standard deviation. It can be calculated exactly from the Schroedinger equation.
please moderate it accordingly