If you make a recording of something which has cost millions to make, against the express wishes of their owners, they you are a criminal.
It is clear that you have fallen for the newspeak and brainwash of the music biz. Making a copy of something is _not_ a criminal act. Making a profit of selling illegally copied content might be (in some countries), but criminalizing making 1 copy in a movie theatre is absurd. Also, have you forgotten fair use rights?
I personally believe that it is wrong for people to try to force their morality on others if they are doing something that does not affect others.
The please explain the difference between
1) me going to see a movie (and paying for it)
2) me going to see a movie, paying for it, and making a recording so I can see it at home again
3) me going to see a movie, paying for it, and 2 years later make a video-recording from that same movie that is broadcasted on TV
Both 2 and 3 do no harm to anyone, yet 2 makes me a criminal.
You seem to classify a 'criminal' as someone who breaks criminal law. I do not agree. Is someone who steals a bread from a wealthy comglomerate of bakeries to prevent his family from starvation really a criminal?
And what would happen if you normally do X and a criminal law against X was created? This makes you a criminal. In some US states there are laws against oral or anal sex between consenting adults; this means these consenting adults are criminals in one state, but would be perfectly innocent in another.
Drugs like cocaine, marihuana, heroin were once free to use for all. Now if you smoke a joint you are a criminal? 100 years ago you most certainly were not, why are you a criminal now? Drinking alcohol once was a criminal offence in the US, yet a lot of people drank alcohol in that time. All criminals?
In biblical times, if you simply killed someone, you were a criminal. Still stands today, more or less. Same goes for rape. Those are most definitively crimes, and the people who commit them are criminals.
Someone who makes a recording of a movie IMHO simply cannot be called a criminal (even if you put a 'minor' label in front of it) just because a group of politicians says so while under campaign contribution influence from the movie biz.
All the 'examples' are on purpose bullshit to point out that the verb 'to steal' can be easily misused. The examples ware modeled to the grand-parent's examples.
On your last remark: I am not a US citizen, I am from the Netherlands.;-)
'Yes, he certainly is an unperson'. NOT. You are falling for the big brotherian newspeak. Someone who makes a copy of a (probably crappy) movie is to be considered a criminal, and put on the same level as murderers and rapists? This is insane.
'Managers' do not care about what is under the hood, they simply want a shiny application. Technicians do care about the lack of css etc. support, but without it you can still get the same looking website, although the html code is shitty. The manager wants the application working _now_ and cannot afford to wait for Microsoft, especially when there is a perfectly (in his eyes) working workaround.
And do you really think that with 90+% of the market under their control, Microsoft will actually listen to their customer base? They will listen all right, but anything that does not suit the goals of Microsoft will _not_ be implemented. Just like in communism, there is no need for a monopolist to make their products better. The only need there is is to hold on to the monopoly.
US government has laws to prevent these sort of things, but we all know what happened.
The 'deluded parent' tried to make clear that laws are man-made and should therefor be questioned. There were already laws in place agains illegal copying; adding another (to criminal law no less) is highly questionable.
Is "theft" involved? Beats the fuck out of me(...)
Well, you were the one that came up with the whole 'stealing' argument. Now you suddenly state that you have no idea if it is actually stealing.
No one is breaking in; one must pay to enter a cinema theatre. If you want to come into my house, pay me for that, and make a copy of my TV, then you are welcome.
For once and for all: (illegal) COPYING IS NOT STEALING
To go with your parent:
Whitches aided the devil in stealing souls.
Galileo wanted to steal faith from 'true believers'.
'Blacks' wanted to steal the 'obvious superiority' away from the 'whites'.
Americans wanted to steal about half of the British Empire.
All bullshit. Do NOT follow the newspeak and misuse of the word 'stealing' when something else is meant.
But objectType="technology" is still meta-data, because it does nothing more than putting a label on 'radar'. There is no way a machine understands what we mean with 'radar', the semantics of 'radar' are out of reach for a machine. A machine can however 'understand' that 'radar' has a label named 'objectType' with a value of 'technology', because it knows the semantics of tags. That's it, that's the best a machine can do with the current state of AI.
Look at it this way: XML can be verified through a DTD/Schema/whatever. The only verification that takes place (without writing code yourself) is if all meta-data is correct. And that is the only thing a parser can do, because a parser semantically knows how to parse XML. If you change a DTD (and the XML stream) then the XML stream will still parse correctly, but you need to change your code in order to cope with the changed semantics of the actual data itself.
An XML stream is a combination of both data and meta-data.
XML is all about programmers being able to understand the data!
No. XML is all about storing meta-data alongside the data. And you are implying that programmers will not understand data that is not easy readable, like XML; this implication is an oversimplification.
(...) reverse engineer another proprietary data format (...)
XML is certainly not the only well-documented interchange format.
(...) dig into a horsepile of documentation.
Is is fairly easy to create XML documents that require horsepiles of documentation, just like any other format. Just look at the XML output of Microsoft Office; XML is no magic bullet. (...) (like user preferences) (...)
No, one should use an API for that and be independent of storage meganism.
However anybody using XML for long term data storage is a genius since other "more efficent" formats will be obsolete ten years from now and the software that can read it can be extreamly difficult to obtain
I would not like to retrieve all information from abovementioned Office XML files right now, let alone in ten years time.
So yes XML is self describing only to humans and that's the whole point of it.
Ehhm, no. Human readability is a side effect that probably led to its widespread adoption. Work is underway to make certain XML far less 'readable' to humans, but smaller and faster to process.
Formalizing data semantics is not the goal of XML (...)
No, because that would require AI, but formalizing meta-data semantics most certainly was a target set for XML to achieve the goal of better data interchange.
If you do something like this, semantics ARE included in the tags.
The question is: semantics to what? The answer is: the semantics of the meta-data; the semantics of the data itself still stays unclear. Take for instance:
<x><y type="string">radar</y></x>
The only thing we know about 'radar' is that it is a string. And more importantly, a machine 'knows' what a string is and how to handle it. What a machine does not know is the meaning of the string itself. We do not know either; the 'y' tag could stand for 'MASHCharacter' or 'MilitaryTechnology', which impacts the semantics in quite a drastic way.
(...)is not data, but meaningless random noise that carries no information.
A snit crassly dismisses several millenia of literature because it is unstructured.
He was not talking about 'data for human consumption', but rather 'data for machine consumption'. As far as a machine is concerned, all literature carries no information, because a machine cannot extrapolate meaning from it like humans can.
There is a little problem with your role-playing game: there is no TCP; these are actually divided into 3 groups. I like to call those groups '0: incompatible and ignorant', '1: compatible, but what slower' and '2:incompatible, but faster' (speed here stands for execution speed).
Group 0 is IMHO the worst, the SimCity example falls under group 0: using memory after it has been deallocated is pretty sloppy programming. That it worked under DOS is no excuse, it is simply wrong. Microsoft should IMHO have put _no effort_ whatsoever in 'fixing' windows to run simcity. Instead they should have pointed out where simcity went wrong, and offered to help the sc authors to fix their bug. Fixing it for them is bad, since then you are rewarding bad programming habits ("Oh, we can do whatever we want, MS will fix it if it does not work.").
Group 2 will become very very small once every member of that group realises that that 1% extra performance will lead to no performance at all in a next version of an OS.
Group 1 will have no problems whatsoever.
No take these 3 groups and place a number after each TCP: I come to 1, 1, 1, 0|2.
On a similar law-related forum site, a lawyer writes:
I am so glad IANASD (s/w developer). Can you imagine reading that stuff all day? I started nodding off around the 'for(i=0;i<MX_LEN;i++)' stuff, and was hitting PageDn pretty quickly even before that.
Law is in one way similar to software: in Dutch law for instance some words mean different things in different sections of the law system, like '{' has multiple meanings in different languages. There are of course differences as well...
What I want to say is that every occupation has its own lingua franca. Sciences like mathmatics and computer sciences have more formalized and less ambiguous notations than law.
Most here on/. prefer computer languages over 'legalese'.
About 2 years ago I send an email to Erik Meijer, number 1 on the list for the SP (Socialistische Partij), which stated (amongst others) that I would never vote for the SP, but I had some worries and would like to know what he thought about these worries. I got a polite answer and he shared my worries and told me what he was doing about it. He even sent me updates.
Erik Meijer has consequently voted against s/w patents. The SP also makes the most fuss about 'zakkenvullerij' (stuffing one's pockets) like for instance EU parliament members who receive the maximum price for an airplane ticket, while they travel on the cheapest tickets available.
Normally I vote D66 (in the political middle, 'intellectual' party). Minister Bronkhorst (from the D66 ironically) recently voted 'yes' on dropping all restriction amendements on s/w patentablility, basically giving the green light for patenting about everything. Given the undemocratic behaviour of the current european lawmaking process, combined with the ridiculous idea of patenting s/w, I will today do what I would have never thought: I will vote SP.
I stand corrected and humbly bow to this lesson in history. And I will beat up the friend who studied at the VU and told me what I thought was the truth. Should have known though, he did dutch and not history;-)
Little fact (mostly off-topic): the 'Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam' aka 'de VU' is called 'vrij' (free) because it has no religious roots, unlike the 'Universiteit van Amsterdam' aka 'de UvA' which has catholic roots. Dutch society used to be divided into groups like catholics, protestants, socialists. Every group had its own schools, sport clubs etc. ('verzuiling').
So the 'free' has basically nothing to do with 'gratis' or 'freedom'.
With all this as background information, that makes the "flase transition" theory indeed improbable. I did not know this, since I am not that much into history, let alone Plato cum suis.;-)
Back to the original post: the 'Atlantis seekers' and other pseudo-scientist like no-men-on-the-moon Hoagland and 'Mr 10,500 BC' Duval indeed seem to leave out 'facts' or even make them up as it suits them. Merely replying to their non-scientific works with "that's a bunch of baloney" would make 'us' no better than 'them', whatever the/. moderators think.
That is why I responded. You came back with a well build argument that takes away an important pillar of the article's theory; for this I thank you.
Further down the article mentions that 'island' may have been a false translation. If we take another piece of text from a long time ago, we can clearly point out how translating can be very difficult. Even using another tense (4th par.) can cause problems.
You are right; my remark was a little short of the truth. I should have said that from a.net point of view it does not matter if only parts of the whole thing are standardized.
I was not trolling though, but I do admit I get a little agitated with 'X is great and Y and the rest of the world 5ukk0rz' type of postings, and that sometimes leads to 'unbalanced' replies.
(...) change your entire platform as you do for Java (...)
If you have a Sun shop, you can use java on your existing platform. Idem for AIX, HP-UX, Microsoft, linux. If you have a Sun shop, you cannot use.net on your current platform. Idem for AIX, HP-UX. Bottom line: there is more need for changing your entire platform when you use.net.
Also, ironically with the ECMA standards for.NET (...)
Wake up: the ECMA standard covers c# only. The.net framework is by no means covered under that standard. It is Microsoft proprietary stuff. When Microsoft uses that load of patents agains mono you are once again locked in by your vendor.
Slashdot Mirror
If you make a recording of something which has cost millions to make, against the express wishes of their owners, they you are a criminal.
It is clear that you have fallen for the newspeak and brainwash of the music biz. Making a copy of something is _not_ a criminal act. Making a profit of selling illegally copied content might be (in some countries), but criminalizing making 1 copy in a movie theatre is absurd. Also, have you forgotten fair use rights?
I personally believe that it is wrong for people to try to force their morality on others if they are doing something that does not affect others.
The please explain the difference between
1) me going to see a movie (and paying for it)
2) me going to see a movie, paying for it, and making a recording so I can see it at home again
3) me going to see a movie, paying for it, and 2 years later make a video-recording from that same movie that is broadcasted on TV
Both 2 and 3 do no harm to anyone, yet 2 makes me a criminal.
You seem to classify a 'criminal' as someone who breaks criminal law. I do not agree. Is someone who steals a bread from a wealthy comglomerate of bakeries to prevent his family from starvation really a criminal?
And what would happen if you normally do X and a criminal law against X was created? This makes you a criminal. In some US states there are laws against oral or anal sex between consenting adults; this means these consenting adults are criminals in one state, but would be perfectly innocent in another.
Drugs like cocaine, marihuana, heroin were once free to use for all. Now if you smoke a joint you are a criminal? 100 years ago you most certainly were not, why are you a criminal now? Drinking alcohol once was a criminal offence in the US, yet a lot of people drank alcohol in that time. All criminals?
In biblical times, if you simply killed someone, you were a criminal. Still stands today, more or less. Same goes for rape. Those are most definitively crimes, and the people who commit them are criminals.
Someone who makes a recording of a movie IMHO simply cannot be called a criminal (even if you put a 'minor' label in front of it) just because a group of politicians says so while under campaign contribution influence from the movie biz.
You missed one line from my post:
;-)
All bullshit.
All the 'examples' are on purpose bullshit to point out that the verb 'to steal' can be easily misused. The examples ware modeled to the grand-parent's examples.
On your last remark: I am not a US citizen, I am from the Netherlands.
This boy was a criminal.
'Yes, he certainly is an unperson'. NOT. You are falling for the big brotherian newspeak. Someone who makes a copy of a (probably crappy) movie is to be considered a criminal, and put on the same level as murderers and rapists? This is insane.
'Managers' do not care about what is under the hood, they simply want a shiny application. Technicians do care about the lack of css etc. support, but without it you can still get the same looking website, although the html code is shitty. The manager wants the application working _now_ and cannot afford to wait for Microsoft, especially when there is a perfectly (in his eyes) working workaround.
And do you really think that with 90+% of the market under their control, Microsoft will actually listen to their customer base? They will listen all right, but anything that does not suit the goals of Microsoft will _not_ be implemented. Just like in communism, there is no need for a monopolist to make their products better. The only need there is is to hold on to the monopoly.
US government has laws to prevent these sort of things, but we all know what happened.
The 'deluded parent' tried to make clear that laws are man-made and should therefor be questioned. There were already laws in place agains illegal copying; adding another (to criminal law no less) is highly questionable.
Is "theft" involved? Beats the fuck out of me(...)
Well, you were the one that came up with the whole 'stealing' argument. Now you suddenly state that you have no idea if it is actually stealing.
No one is breaking in; one must pay to enter a cinema theatre. If you want to come into my house, pay me for that, and make a copy of my TV, then you are welcome.
For once and for all: (illegal) COPYING IS NOT STEALING
To go with your parent:
Whitches aided the devil in stealing souls.
Galileo wanted to steal faith from 'true believers'.
'Blacks' wanted to steal the 'obvious superiority' away from the 'whites'.
Americans wanted to steal about half of the British Empire.
All bullshit. Do NOT follow the newspeak and misuse of the word 'stealing' when something else is meant.
But objectType="technology" is still meta-data, because it does nothing more than putting a label on 'radar'. There is no way a machine understands what we mean with 'radar', the semantics of 'radar' are out of reach for a machine. A machine can however 'understand' that 'radar' has a label named 'objectType' with a value of 'technology', because it knows the semantics of tags. That's it, that's the best a machine can do with the current state of AI.
Look at it this way: XML can be verified through a DTD/Schema/whatever. The only verification that takes place (without writing code yourself) is if all meta-data is correct. And that is the only thing a parser can do, because a parser semantically knows how to parse XML. If you change a DTD (and the XML stream) then the XML stream will still parse correctly, but you need to change your code in order to cope with the changed semantics of the actual data itself.
An XML stream is a combination of both data and meta-data.
XML is all about programmers being able to understand the data!
No. XML is all about storing meta-data alongside the data. And you are implying that programmers will not understand data that is not easy readable, like XML; this implication is an oversimplification.
(...) reverse engineer another proprietary data format (...)
XML is certainly not the only well-documented interchange format.
(...) dig into a horsepile of documentation.
Is is fairly easy to create XML documents that require horsepiles of documentation, just like any other format. Just look at the XML output of Microsoft Office; XML is no magic bullet.
(...) (like user preferences) (...)
No, one should use an API for that and be independent of storage meganism.
However anybody using XML for long term data storage is a genius since other "more efficent" formats will be obsolete ten years from now and the software that can read it can be extreamly difficult to obtain
I would not like to retrieve all information from abovementioned Office XML files right now, let alone in ten years time.
So yes XML is self describing only to humans and that's the whole point of it.
Ehhm, no. Human readability is a side effect that probably led to its widespread adoption. Work is underway to make certain XML far less 'readable' to humans, but smaller and faster to process.
Formalizing data semantics is not the goal of XML (...)
No, because that would require AI, but formalizing meta-data semantics most certainly was a target set for XML to achieve the goal of better data interchange.
The question is: semantics to what? The answer is: the semantics of the meta-data; the semantics of the data itself still stays unclear. Take for instance: The only thing we know about 'radar' is that it is a string. And more importantly, a machine 'knows' what a string is and how to handle it. What a machine does not know is the meaning of the string itself. We do not know either; the 'y' tag could stand for 'MASHCharacter' or 'MilitaryTechnology', which impacts the semantics in quite a drastic way.
He was not talking about 'data for human consumption', but rather 'data for machine consumption'. As far as a machine is concerned, all literature carries no information, because a machine cannot extrapolate meaning from it like humans can.
I would have liked to make the "You must be new here!" joke, but since you already objected on stale jokes, I will try not to...
Hmmmpf Rmmmhh
Grhmmblhhh
YOU MUST BE NEW HERE!
Sorry for that, it was stronger than me.
Just above that picture there is a 'next' link. DO NOT FOLLOW THAT LINK!
I told not to follow that link... That blonde does seem to have a certain fascination for that 'artifact'.
For those using bash, that would probably be something like:
while true ; do `wget -k -p -m http://www.send-safe.com/ --delete-after` ; done
There is a little problem with your role-playing game: there is no TCP; these are actually divided into 3 groups. I like to call those groups '0: incompatible and ignorant', '1: compatible, but what slower' and '2:incompatible, but faster' (speed here stands for execution speed).
Group 0 is IMHO the worst, the SimCity example falls under group 0: using memory after it has been deallocated is pretty sloppy programming. That it worked under DOS is no excuse, it is simply wrong. Microsoft should IMHO have put _no effort_ whatsoever in 'fixing' windows to run simcity. Instead they should have pointed out where simcity went wrong, and offered to help the sc authors to fix their bug. Fixing it for them is bad, since then you are rewarding bad programming habits ("Oh, we can do whatever we want, MS will fix it if it does not work.").
Group 2 will become very very small once every member of that group realises that that 1% extra performance will lead to no performance at all in a next version of an OS.
Group 1 will have no problems whatsoever.
No take these 3 groups and place a number after each TCP: I come to 1, 1, 1, 0|2.
On a similar law-related forum site, a lawyer writes:
/. prefer computer languages over 'legalese'.
I am so glad IANASD (s/w developer). Can you imagine reading that stuff all day? I started nodding off around the 'for(i=0;i<MX_LEN;i++)' stuff, and was hitting PageDn pretty quickly even before that.
Law is in one way similar to software: in Dutch law for instance some words mean different things in different sections of the law system, like '{' has multiple meanings in different languages. There are of course differences as well...
What I want to say is that every occupation has its own lingua franca. Sciences like mathmatics and computer sciences have more formalized and less ambiguous notations than law.
Most here on
About 2 years ago I send an email to Erik Meijer, number 1 on the list for the SP (Socialistische Partij), which stated (amongst others) that I would never vote for the SP, but I had some worries and would like to know what he thought about these worries. I got a polite answer and he shared my worries and told me what he was doing about it. He even sent me updates.
Erik Meijer has consequently voted against s/w patents. The SP also makes the most fuss about 'zakkenvullerij' (stuffing one's pockets) like for instance EU parliament members who receive the maximum price for an airplane ticket, while they travel on the cheapest tickets available.
Normally I vote D66 (in the political middle, 'intellectual' party). Minister Bronkhorst (from the D66 ironically) recently voted 'yes' on dropping all restriction amendements on s/w patentablility, basically giving the green light for patenting about everything. Given the undemocratic behaviour of the current european lawmaking process, combined with the ridiculous idea of patenting s/w, I will today do what I would have never thought: I will vote SP.
I stand corrected and humbly bow to this lesson in history. And I will beat up the friend who studied at the VU and told me what I thought was the truth. Should have known though, he did dutch and not history ;-)
Little fact (mostly off-topic): the 'Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam' aka 'de VU' is called 'vrij' (free) because it has no religious roots, unlike the 'Universiteit van Amsterdam' aka 'de UvA' which has catholic roots. Dutch society used to be divided into groups like catholics, protestants, socialists. Every group had its own schools, sport clubs etc. ('verzuiling').
So the 'free' has basically nothing to do with 'gratis' or 'freedom'.
With all this as background information, that makes the "flase transition" theory indeed improbable. I did not know this, since I am not that much into history, let alone Plato cum suis. ;-)
/. moderators think.
Back to the original post: the 'Atlantis seekers' and other pseudo-scientist like no-men-on-the-moon Hoagland and 'Mr 10,500 BC' Duval indeed seem to leave out 'facts' or even make them up as it suits them. Merely replying to their non-scientific works with "that's a bunch of baloney" would make 'us' no better than 'them', whatever the
That is why I responded. You came back with a well build argument that takes away an important pillar of the article's theory; for this I thank you.
Further down the article mentions that 'island' may have been a false translation. If we take another piece of text from a long time ago, we can clearly point out how translating can be very difficult. Even using another tense (4th par.) can cause problems.
Infocom? Now were did I hear that name before?
Stealth ship, my ass. I'll believe it when I see it.
Oh, wait...
You are right; my remark was a little short of the truth. I should have said that from a .net point of view it does not matter if only parts of the whole thing are standardized.
I was not trolling though, but I do admit I get a little agitated with 'X is great and Y and the rest of the world 5ukk0rz' type of postings, and that sometimes leads to 'unbalanced' replies.
You're trolling, right? I'll bite.
.net on your current platform. Idem for AIX, HP-UX. Bottom line: there is more need for changing your entire platform when you use .net.
.NET (...)
.net framework is by no means covered under that standard. It is Microsoft proprietary stuff. When Microsoft uses that load of patents agains mono you are once again locked in by your vendor.
(...) change your entire platform as you do for Java (...)
If you have a Sun shop, you can use java on your existing platform. Idem for AIX, HP-UX, Microsoft, linux. If you have a Sun shop, you cannot use
Also, ironically with the ECMA standards for
Wake up: the ECMA standard covers c# only. The