I think this is exactly my point. Saying that legislative imperialism is bad is a good attack on this legislation. But (perhaps incorrectly) the way I read many of these attacks are 'This convention is bad, because the French are wrong to ban nazi memorabilia', or 'The rest of the world doesn't understand the importance of free speech, so we shouldn't follow their rules'. The point is that there are different ways of dealing with things. The xenophobia kicks in when people decide that the French (who probably have quite a large right to be very cautious about nazi's, etc.) should simply follow someone else's lead. Consider the Yahoo case, where a US judge is apparently going to rule whether a French court has juristiction - I very much hope he rules that they *do*, because to rule that the French have no right to deal with Nazi memorabilia in the way they feel they should really would be to claim that the US knows best, and everyone else should just tow the (Dubya) line...
In the UK, the internationalisation war is basically being fought about the country's place in the EU. Unfortunately, much of the debate is drowned in Xenophobic rhetoric, and I'm not convinced this sort of article (or at least parts of it) are going to do anyone any favours. Whilst of course different people hold different viewpoints, many people go on record as saying this is going to be terrible for the US because the US (with their obviously perfect legal system) will have to follow other countries rules. In the context of a debate about coming under international juristriction, such US-centric moans are absurd, just as the UK-centric ones about the EU are absurd. Nobody is suggesting that the convention is trying to lump the bad bits of other countries laws onto the whole world - the problem with the convention is that people disagree about which parts/are/ bad (most legislators think their own country's laws are the way to go). I'm as much terrified of what I see as insane and dangerous laws about freedom of speech, bearing arms, etc. being forced upon the UK (/EU) as I am of having to obey the DMCA.
So basically, xenophobically claiming that this convention is going to hurt *MY* country doesn't engage with the debate, and if these people, even RMS, want to make a serious defence against it, they're going to have to do so on the basis that legislative imperialism is bad, not simply on the basis that US law or UK law is perfect and we don't want other countries screwing it all up for us. Accept that different countries do things different ways and you might show that this is bad - it's only those that think there's a perfect universal law that would support such legislation.
And it isn't even this innocent. Why should I have to insert non-standard meta tags into my webpages to get standard functionality. We'll have a bizarre situation where to get your page to display like the w3c says it should, you have to add in a tag that isn't part of the w3c standard. That's mad! What it means is that effectively everyone that wants to opt out of Microsoft's new scheme will have to learn to program Microsoft What's the difference between this and something like if Microsoft made it so that any program that runs on Windows has to add an extra command at the beginning telling it that you want it to come up with a random number when you use a randomiser, rather thanthe new added functionality where it always comes up with 0.5.
Can anyone think of any other examples where you have to program something extra to get something/not/ to happen?
No, Mozilla doesn't 'try to do everything IE5 does' - it tries to do a LOT more. And it's getting to the stage where it can do this. All I'm saying is that on pure technical achievement Moz is impressive, not that it's super-stable IN ITS PRE-RELEASE STATE.
And no, IE *ISN'T* portable. A browser called 'IE' has been written for a number of different platforms. The Unix version is basically no longer being developed, and the Mac version, which is much nicer than the Windows version (but slower, according to some sources), but very different, has basically only just arrived. There is a very big difference between someone writing an application for a number of different platforms, and actually creating it almost totally cross-platform. The most important evidence you'll see of this is that when Moz 2.0 come out, it will be quickly ported to about 20 platforms. Why? Because the foundations will already be there, and you have to do very little to get it to work on one platform if it already works on another. The same is NOT true of IE.
What does Mozilla do that IE can't? Let's see. *FULL* standards compliance. It is a full email client. It has a nice WYSIWYG / HTML editor. It has an IRC chat client. It should soon have crash protection, which will resurrect what you were doing in case of a crash. It has very easily customised and created versatile sidebars. It will apparently soon have stop and resume buttons for downloads. It is very easily themeable, and there is a theming engine built upon it. There is an entire perl / python development environment built on it. Etc. Etc.
Fine, some of these may sound tiny, but many are only possible because of the way it has been written. And that is what I mean by technical accomplishment - to build something so versatile and powerful is very impressive, IMHO...
Whether it is execute as well is simply a different question, but it certainly is an IE5 level product - i.e. they're the same generation.
It's a little rich to argue that Netscape abandoned the users that they had built up by practically inventing the popular, easy browser. It's a lot easier for someone to jump on the bandwagon than to invent a whole new paradigm.
How is Mozilla more of a technical accomplishment? It'll have full standards support, it is cross-platform and very portable, and this is down to the fact that it is an entire platform (like it or loathe it), rather than just a browser, it is very modular, e.g. the rendering engine can be embedded into tiny devices, showing things just as on any other, and I personally think it's very intelligently designed, from the ground up. Regardless of whether you like it or not, most criticism is that Mozilla isn't just doing what IE does, but doing a great deal more - and I'm not convinced you can deny that this ambitious foray won't produce somehting more technically accomplished than IE...
I find this really bizarre - Microsoft took *more* than three years to produce IE5, and considering mozilla will be more of a technical accomplishment than IE6, I think the speed of development is really quite impressive.
Secondly, AOL/won't/ use Netscape, and they won't use Mozilla - they'll embed Gecko (which has been working very nicely for over a year) into their own client.
Erm. You're half right. The Netscape code was a complete and utter mess...
...which is why they abandoned the 4.7 codebase and started from scratch, so it doesn't actually share any code. Mozilla has actually been written from the ground up.
I just don't get why people think that Mozilla is taking so long. Everyone says 'Look at IE5.5, it's really good now'. But Microsoft have been developing IE for what, 4 / 5 years? Which basically means if by Q4 Mozilla is as good (and I honestly believe it will be better - and certainly technically more impressive, which will translate to future improvability) then mozilla.org has done what Microsoft did in a year less.
Mozilla appears chronologically after MSIE. So what? I know all the arguments about the browser war being lost, but I'm not so convinced, especially will the emergence of all the new platforms. Fact is, come 1.0, anyone will have the tools available to zap their new improved browser / internet suite / revolutionary cutting edge killer app into being in a very short time. Perhaps people won't adopt Mozilla, but the opportunity to do so and not reinvent the wheel is/surely/ what free software is about?
As much as people might disagree with this book (and agree with the critical review) - many people do seem to be taking a very narrow view of art. Art is defined as meaning what the artist intended it to - for it to be good art it must have meaning of its own, and must be open to interpretation.
This reminds me of the responses to the article about the director of Blade Runner saying that Deckard wasn't a replicant - and everyone saying 'Oh, that's spoilt it, how could he?' - as if that ended the debate. It's ART. The director doesn't get any more right to an opinion as to what it/means/ than you or I do. I don't care how many people involved in the writing of 2001 say it's nothing to do with any metaphor - that doesn't stop it having meaning and connotation against the backdrop of the whole of literature.
To assert otherwise is to blithly claim that nobody could/ever/ be a bad writer / director / actor. One mark of a good artist is, presumably, the ability to express what they're trying to express. If the metaphors in 2001 sink or swim at Kubrick's say-so, without any reference to what is/actually/ in the text / painting / film then directors needn't bother taking time to actually make the film well - after all, if Kubrick says HAL is really a human, that means he is, regardless of the fact that he failed utterly to show that in the film (this is an example - he didn't actually say that) - and regardless of the fact that HAL was acted really rather computationally, even if on the AI side of things.
Come on those who just dismiss interpretations - try to take a slightly more interesting / sophisticated / deep view of art, and actually let it live for itself, rather than being a fairly dull slave to (a random person chosen from) its creators!
Because of course we all want to be running random commands that could actually produce absolutely anything (since they're not even stored locally) that some Slashdot poster put in a comment. Oh, and you even have to run that as root!
The article claims that IBM obviously couldn't use the current open source projects to produce their own DVD player, but my question is why not. Sure, they'd probably have to licence the DVD spec from the DVD-CCA, for the sake of looking legitimate, but once they've done that they'll basically want to be producing the functionality of DeCSS - after all, all that program is for is decoding DVDs, just like any DVD player has to, which is what IBM have to do if they want to produce their own solution.
If they're worried that IBM couldn't open source their own work, sure they could. Nobody in their right mind would use IBM's alterations, but they could certainly publish the changes (presuably without altering the main part, and thus without having to republish that).
Re:hmm nice.. now get some work done... right now!
on
Ximian gets new CEO
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Erm, I think you're mistaken. What most people have 'always done' is to install packages provided from gnome.org. It's great that now there's Ximian there should be value added packages, but what aobut those that want plain gnome and don't want to have to compile it. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, and evidently (from other posts) there is a movement to get such packages...
Re:hmm nice.. now get some work done... right now!
on
Ximian gets new CEO
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· Score: 3
The big problem with this is that gnome.org is telling people to go to Ximian for binaries if they want them. So we either have a choice of compiling the source of Gnome 1.4 (which, easy as it may be, simply isn't really an option quite a lot of people want to consider), or waiting for Ximian to realease Ximian Gnome 1.4. But if there is going to be such a significant difference between Ximian Gnome and just plain Gnome that it takes 2.5+ weeks to get it ready, what about the people that want just plain Gnome as binaries? It's all very well for gnome.org telling people to go to Ximian to get 1.4 binaries, but if they do users can reasonably expect the binaries Ximian provides to be those of the same product - as it is that seems unlikely to be the case, even if the differences are mainly aesthetic.
Why is there a second America-only tld? Why isn't this.ac.us (in the uk we use.ac.uk for educational institutions). I always thought the main tlds were supposed to be international, with only the country codes being restricted by country... Evidently not, though...
Sorry, I really don't mean this as flamebait, though some may take it as such: do we really need to preface this article in such a negative way? Your blurb makes it sound like the only reason getting a man into space was good was because it meant that the Americans decided to put a man on the moon. What ever happened to getting a man into space (and back safely) being an amazing, incredible feat in itself? I for one think of this as the anniversary of the start of manned space travel, not however many years before the anniversary of the first man on the moon / the launch of the ISS / the first trip to Mars.
This really doesn't affect the issue at all. The point is when your data is edited and stored on someone else's computer, you already cede many rights. Fine, for now they're making the terms and conditions a little better - but we still have to face the fact that companies will be able to update such licences (as they inevitably will do), and whilst there will no doubt be screams of complaint if they try to do this retroactively, people/will/ end up having to abandon their usual tools because the policy for use has changed. This is absolutely why you want to/own/ the software (or at least the licence) to use it, so that it continues to work as it always has (c.f. the Tivo article a couple of days ago) that way the worst that can happen is you start to lag behind - you're never going to find things that used to work don't anymore. Unfortunately, for Americans, is seems that the DMCA gives publishers the right to retroactively change how things work, or the licence you have for it, retroactively, whether you 'own' it or not!
Am I really the only one that finds suggestions that legislation might be coming from (the American) congress to force this sort of protection really offensive? It's the sort of arrogant narrow-mindedness that leads to Norwegians being arrested because the US doesn't like something they've done, regardless of whether other countries are being really rather more enlightened. It won't need legislation from Congress, but by a (non-existent) world government, because as long as it's legal anywhere, products should hopefully be around to support it, at least outside the US.
Whilst there have been a small number of people on the site moaning, the general atmosphere over at h2g2 seems to be jubilant, and glad that it is back. The moderation is really very much in the background, with things being post-moderated, so you can write whatever you want, but it may be edited - mostly starring out most of the letters of swear words - if anyone complains. As anyone who's regularly used the site knows, in general it's a respective, kind, family-friendly place, and the only people who generally come out blazing with offensive material tend to be those stirring up trouble, and trying to prevent others enjoying the site.
There has *always* been some degree of protection on the site, with the editors stepping in when things get nasty, and basically all that is new reflects the fact that they can now afford to be more efficient in this.
The biggest effect this will have is just now, with people being asked to read their entries, make any changes if they don't think they're acceptable to the new terms and conditions, and resubmit them. This basically allows the moderators to read through entries as and when they're resubmitted, rather than have the enormous target of the entire guide.
Overall, though, everyone seems aware that this means that h2g2 (which many, many people frequent and love) will survive, and never has to make money (i.e. sell-out) to support itself, even in the current dot-com climate. This can only be a good thing.
Disclaimer: I am a (voluntary) sub-editor of the site, so obviously really quite like it.
So, all this time, whilst we all knew they were talking crap for other reasons, when the RIAA were claiming that Napster et al had to be shutdown because otherwise the starving artists wouldn't be able to eat, they weren't/even/ trying to protect the value of recording contracts. We all know that many musicians sign away almost all their rights and are paid in a lump contract sum, but now it turns out that the RIAA really doesn't care in the least about their rights.
Can they really not be done for perjury for talking crap in court all this time? (Answer - nope, they have expensive always!)...
I tried a couple of the pre-releases and it was utterly gorgeous, but hellishly slow (as everyone seemed to agree). Can anyone confirm that the final release is faster than the previews, otherwise it makes nice screen-candy, but not really a usable environment?
Also (the website appears to be slashdotted) can anyone tell me whether it still needs Mozilla 0.7 to install - there's no way I'm going to downgrade, especially with 0.81 due out in a few days?
God, and here was I, in my ignorance, unaware that gun ownership was a 'personal freedom'. I suppose you object to our rights to own plastic explosives / cocaine / child porn / slaves being trampled on too.
Question: if I make a 10 minute recording of myself crooning into a microphone, and get all my friends to download it from the new paying-service napster, will I get paid (as an artist whose work is being traded) for this?
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is exactly my point. Saying that legislative imperialism is bad is a good attack on this legislation. But (perhaps incorrectly) the way I read many of these attacks are 'This convention is bad, because the French are wrong to ban nazi memorabilia', or 'The rest of the world doesn't understand the importance of free speech, so we shouldn't follow their rules'. The point is that there are different ways of dealing with things. The xenophobia kicks in when people decide that the French (who probably have quite a large right to be very cautious about nazi's, etc.) should simply follow someone else's lead. Consider the Yahoo case, where a US judge is apparently going to rule whether a French court has juristiction - I very much hope he rules that they *do*, because to rule that the French have no right to deal with Nazi memorabilia in the way they feel they should really would be to claim that the US knows best, and everyone else should just tow the (Dubya) line...
In the UK, the internationalisation war is basically being fought about the country's place in the EU. Unfortunately, much of the debate is drowned in Xenophobic rhetoric, and I'm not convinced this sort of article (or at least parts of it) are going to do anyone any favours. Whilst of course different people hold different viewpoints, many people go on record as saying this is going to be terrible for the US because the US (with their obviously perfect legal system) will have to follow other countries rules. In the context of a debate about coming under international juristriction, such US-centric moans are absurd, just as the UK-centric ones about the EU are absurd. Nobody is suggesting that the convention is trying to lump the bad bits of other countries laws onto the whole world - the problem with the convention is that people disagree about which parts /are/ bad (most legislators think their own country's laws are the way to go). I'm as much terrified of what I see as insane and dangerous laws about freedom of speech, bearing arms, etc. being forced upon the UK (/EU) as I am of having to obey the DMCA.
So basically, xenophobically claiming that this convention is going to hurt *MY* country doesn't engage with the debate, and if these people, even RMS, want to make a serious defence against it, they're going to have to do so on the basis that legislative imperialism is bad, not simply on the basis that US law or UK law is perfect and we don't want other countries screwing it all up for us. Accept that different countries do things different ways and you might show that this is bad - it's only those that think there's a perfect universal law that would support such legislation.
And it isn't even this innocent. Why should I have to insert non-standard meta tags into my webpages to get standard functionality. We'll have a bizarre situation where to get your page to display like the w3c says it should, you have to add in a tag that isn't part of the w3c standard. That's mad! What it means is that effectively everyone that wants to opt out of Microsoft's new scheme will have to learn to program Microsoft What's the difference between this and something like if Microsoft made it so that any program that runs on Windows has to add an extra command at the beginning telling it that you want it to come up with a random number when you use a randomiser, rather thanthe new added functionality where it always comes up with 0.5.
/not/ to happen?
Can anyone think of any other examples where you have to program something extra to get something
No, Mozilla doesn't 'try to do everything IE5 does' - it tries to do a LOT more. And it's getting to the stage where it can do this. All I'm saying is that on pure technical achievement Moz is impressive, not that it's super-stable IN ITS PRE-RELEASE STATE.
And no, IE *ISN'T* portable. A browser called 'IE' has been written for a number of different platforms. The Unix version is basically no longer being developed, and the Mac version, which is much nicer than the Windows version (but slower, according to some sources), but very different, has basically only just arrived. There is a very big difference between someone writing an application for a number of different platforms, and actually creating it almost totally cross-platform. The most important evidence you'll see of this is that when Moz 2.0 come out, it will be quickly ported to about 20 platforms. Why? Because the foundations will already be there, and you have to do very little to get it to work on one platform if it already works on another. The same is NOT true of IE.
What does Mozilla do that IE can't? Let's see. *FULL* standards compliance. It is a full email client. It has a nice WYSIWYG / HTML editor. It has an IRC chat client. It should soon have crash protection, which will resurrect what you were doing in case of a crash. It has very easily customised and created versatile sidebars. It will apparently soon have stop and resume buttons for downloads. It is very easily themeable, and there is a theming engine built upon it. There is an entire perl / python development environment built on it. Etc. Etc.
Fine, some of these may sound tiny, but many are only possible because of the way it has been written. And that is what I mean by technical accomplishment - to build something so versatile and powerful is very impressive, IMHO...
Whether it is execute as well is simply a different question, but it certainly is an IE5 level product - i.e. they're the same generation.
It's a little rich to argue that Netscape abandoned the users that they had built up by practically inventing the popular, easy browser. It's a lot easier for someone to jump on the bandwagon than to invent a whole new paradigm.
How is Mozilla more of a technical accomplishment? It'll have full standards support, it is cross-platform and very portable, and this is down to the fact that it is an entire platform (like it or loathe it), rather than just a browser, it is very modular, e.g. the rendering engine can be embedded into tiny devices, showing things just as on any other, and I personally think it's very intelligently designed, from the ground up. Regardless of whether you like it or not, most criticism is that Mozilla isn't just doing what IE does, but doing a great deal more - and I'm not convinced you can deny that this ambitious foray won't produce somehting more technically accomplished than IE...
I find this really bizarre - Microsoft took *more* than three years to produce IE5, and considering mozilla will be more of a technical accomplishment than IE6, I think the speed of development is really quite impressive.
/won't/ use Netscape, and they won't use Mozilla - they'll embed Gecko (which has been working very nicely for over a year) into their own client.
Secondly, AOL
Erm. You're half right. The Netscape code was a complete and utter mess...
...which is why they abandoned the 4.7 codebase and started from scratch, so it doesn't actually share any code. Mozilla has actually been written from the ground up.
I just don't get why people think that Mozilla is taking so long. Everyone says 'Look at IE5.5, it's really good now'. But Microsoft have been developing IE for what, 4 / 5 years? Which basically means if by Q4 Mozilla is as good (and I honestly believe it will be better - and certainly technically more impressive, which will translate to future improvability) then mozilla.org has done what Microsoft did in a year less.
/surely/ what free software is about?
Mozilla appears chronologically after MSIE. So what? I know all the arguments about the browser war being lost, but I'm not so convinced, especially will the emergence of all the new platforms. Fact is, come 1.0, anyone will have the tools available to zap their new improved browser / internet suite / revolutionary cutting edge killer app into being in a very short time. Perhaps people won't adopt Mozilla, but the opportunity to do so and not reinvent the wheel is
As much as people might disagree with this book (and agree with the critical review) - many people do seem to be taking a very narrow view of art. Art is defined as meaning what the artist intended it to - for it to be good art it must have meaning of its own, and must be open to interpretation.
/means/ than you or I do. I don't care how many people involved in the writing of 2001 say it's nothing to do with any metaphor - that doesn't stop it having meaning and connotation against the backdrop of the whole of literature.
/ever/ be a bad writer / director / actor. One mark of a good artist is, presumably, the ability to express what they're trying to express. If the metaphors in 2001 sink or swim at Kubrick's say-so, without any reference to what is /actually/ in the text / painting / film then directors needn't bother taking time to actually make the film well - after all, if Kubrick says HAL is really a human, that means he is, regardless of the fact that he failed utterly to show that in the film (this is an example - he didn't actually say that) - and regardless of the fact that HAL was acted really rather computationally, even if on the AI side of things.
This reminds me of the responses to the article about the director of Blade Runner saying that Deckard wasn't a replicant - and everyone saying 'Oh, that's spoilt it, how could he?' - as if that ended the debate. It's ART. The director doesn't get any more right to an opinion as to what it
To assert otherwise is to blithly claim that nobody could
Come on those who just dismiss interpretations - try to take a slightly more interesting / sophisticated / deep view of art, and actually let it live for itself, rather than being a fairly dull slave to (a random person chosen from) its creators!
...so is he going to reply to Wednesday Thursday?
Because of course we all want to be running random commands that could actually produce absolutely anything (since they're not even stored locally) that some Slashdot poster put in a comment. Oh, and you even have to run that as root!
Though, to be fair, that is the right command...
The article claims that IBM obviously couldn't use the current open source projects to produce their own DVD player, but my question is why not. Sure, they'd probably have to licence the DVD spec from the DVD-CCA, for the sake of looking legitimate, but once they've done that they'll basically want to be producing the functionality of DeCSS - after all, all that program is for is decoding DVDs, just like any DVD player has to, which is what IBM have to do if they want to produce their own solution.
If they're worried that IBM couldn't open source their own work, sure they could. Nobody in their right mind would use IBM's alterations, but they could certainly publish the changes (presuably without altering the main part, and thus without having to republish that).
Erm, I think you're mistaken. What most people have 'always done' is to install packages provided from gnome.org. It's great that now there's Ximian there should be value added packages, but what aobut those that want plain gnome and don't want to have to compile it. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, and evidently (from other posts) there is a movement to get such packages...
The big problem with this is that gnome.org is telling people to go to Ximian for binaries if they want them. So we either have a choice of compiling the source of Gnome 1.4 (which, easy as it may be, simply isn't really an option quite a lot of people want to consider), or waiting for Ximian to realease Ximian Gnome 1.4. But if there is going to be such a significant difference between Ximian Gnome and just plain Gnome that it takes 2.5+ weeks to get it ready, what about the people that want just plain Gnome as binaries? It's all very well for gnome.org telling people to go to Ximian to get 1.4 binaries, but if they do users can reasonably expect the binaries Ximian provides to be those of the same product - as it is that seems unlikely to be the case, even if the differences are mainly aesthetic.
It was out in England AGES ago (pre-Christmas, I think) and got quite a bit of hype and a reasonably wide release.
Why is there a second America-only tld? Why isn't this .ac.us (in the uk we use .ac.uk for educational institutions). I always thought the main tlds were supposed to be international, with only the country codes being restricted by country... Evidently not, though...
Sorry, I really don't mean this as flamebait, though some may take it as such: do we really need to preface this article in such a negative way? Your blurb makes it sound like the only reason getting a man into space was good was because it meant that the Americans decided to put a man on the moon. What ever happened to getting a man into space (and back safely) being an amazing, incredible feat in itself? I for one think of this as the anniversary of the start of manned space travel, not however many years before the anniversary of the first man on the moon / the launch of the ISS / the first trip to Mars.
I believe it's called the DMCA... (at least in America!)
This really doesn't affect the issue at all. The point is when your data is edited and stored on someone else's computer, you already cede many rights. Fine, for now they're making the terms and conditions a little better - but we still have to face the fact that companies will be able to update such licences (as they inevitably will do), and whilst there will no doubt be screams of complaint if they try to do this retroactively, people /will/ end up having to abandon their usual tools because the policy for use has changed. This is absolutely why you want to /own/ the software (or at least the licence) to use it, so that it continues to work as it always has (c.f. the Tivo article a couple of days ago) that way the worst that can happen is you start to lag behind - you're never going to find things that used to work don't anymore. Unfortunately, for Americans, is seems that the DMCA gives publishers the right to retroactively change how things work, or the licence you have for it, retroactively, whether you 'own' it or not!
Am I really the only one that finds suggestions that legislation might be coming from (the American) congress to force this sort of protection really offensive? It's the sort of arrogant narrow-mindedness that leads to Norwegians being arrested because the US doesn't like something they've done, regardless of whether other countries are being really rather more enlightened. It won't need legislation from Congress, but by a (non-existent) world government, because as long as it's legal anywhere, products should hopefully be around to support it, at least outside the US.
Whilst there have been a small number of people on the site moaning, the general atmosphere over at h2g2 seems to be jubilant, and glad that it is back. The moderation is really very much in the background, with things being post-moderated, so you can write whatever you want, but it may be edited - mostly starring out most of the letters of swear words - if anyone complains. As anyone who's regularly used the site knows, in general it's a respective, kind, family-friendly place, and the only people who generally come out blazing with offensive material tend to be those stirring up trouble, and trying to prevent others enjoying the site.
There has *always* been some degree of protection on the site, with the editors stepping in when things get nasty, and basically all that is new reflects the fact that they can now afford to be more efficient in this.
The biggest effect this will have is just now, with people being asked to read their entries, make any changes if they don't think they're acceptable to the new terms and conditions, and resubmit them. This basically allows the moderators to read through entries as and when they're resubmitted, rather than have the enormous target of the entire guide.
Overall, though, everyone seems aware that this means that h2g2 (which many, many people frequent and love) will survive, and never has to make money (i.e. sell-out) to support itself, even in the current dot-com climate. This can only be a good thing.
Disclaimer: I am a (voluntary) sub-editor of the site, so obviously really quite like it.
So, all this time, whilst we all knew they were talking crap for other reasons, when the RIAA were claiming that Napster et al had to be shutdown because otherwise the starving artists wouldn't be able to eat, they weren't /even/ trying to protect the value of recording contracts. We all know that many musicians sign away almost all their rights and are paid in a lump contract sum, but now it turns out that the RIAA really doesn't care in the least about their rights.
Can they really not be done for perjury for talking crap in court all this time? (Answer - nope, they have expensive always!)...
I tried a couple of the pre-releases and it was utterly gorgeous, but hellishly slow (as everyone seemed to agree). Can anyone confirm that the final release is faster than the previews, otherwise it makes nice screen-candy, but not really a usable environment?
Also (the website appears to be slashdotted) can anyone tell me whether it still needs Mozilla 0.7 to install - there's no way I'm going to downgrade, especially with 0.81 due out in a few days?
God, and here was I, in my ignorance, unaware that gun ownership was a 'personal freedom'. I suppose you object to our rights to own plastic explosives / cocaine / child porn / slaves being trampled on too.
Question: if I make a 10 minute recording of myself crooning into a microphone, and get all my friends to download it from the new paying-service napster, will I get paid (as an artist whose work is being traded) for this?