Given that we only perceive a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and rely on baryonic matter to map things out, and we're just starting to get good instrumentation, is this any surprise?
I'm regularly frustrated by the subtle hubris of completeness that underlies so many scientific assertions. It's as though we continually forget that science is fundamentally provisional, and that we're just hominids who only recently got refrigeration.
The nice thing about new techniques like this is that it points out that we are always missing something.
It's like the basic flaw in Fermi's paradox: why is it so hard to believe that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for where everyone is, and we just haven't thought of it yet because it isn't obvious to hominids? Ockham's razor suggests for most things that we just don't have the answers, so keep looking, but for Fate's sake look away from the savannah-brain you're using.
I ran the computer club at our little rural school. The district is scattered across various islands so the support staff come to the island once in a blue moon, and there is no budget.
By installing LTSP on most computers, there is nearly zero maintenance. The kids all have a personal account, so they learn the fundamental skills of logging in with a password, and exploring the interface and available apps without risk. They promptly go about customizing their interface; now they have some personal ownership, and are much more engaged. The LTSP install has nice educational software that's good enough for the time allotted.
The ancient donated hardware runs just fine under this setup. The teachers and staff still get to walk around with their mac laptops, and the occasional windows machine is still around for those rare times it's needed. It's a great solution, and it helped me teach the kids in the club about the inner workings of a computer and OS.
I personally do not like homosexuality at all (BTW, where is my freedom of speech to say that without being flamed for it?)
By all means, say what you want as loud as you want in a public forum! But if you, let's say, do something as stupid as complaining about what consensual adults do in their bedrooms, out of some principle, well, you might as well shout 'flames' in the theatre!
IOW, your freedom of speech is right where you left it: in context.
However, there remains a _huge_ fundamental difference: the US was founded on mistrust of ALL government while the Crown is still presumed to have a right to govern.
True - in theory. And yet, we have the institution of Governor General, which in practical terms can provide much more accountability and balance to government. While the prime minister has more centralized authority than, say, the US president, this unelected and generally non-partisan GG who is the representative of the Crown can dissolve the government if it oversteps its bounds. As we have recently seen, it is more than a ceremonial position, it is a kind of sword hanging over the head of the government.
The military is loyal to the Governor General before the Prime Minister; and yet the GG couldn't actually become a tyrant.
In typical mid-atlantic fashion, Canada's government is founded on trust in government but mistrust in officials' ability to be good governors. It's a fine distinction, that mirrors the balance between collective and individual rights that we have in Canada.
So, in actual daily practice, Canadians are better served by this institution than Americans by their right to revolt (good luck with that, eh!).
If you have mice, cats are very effective. Mice will not even approach anywhere they think a cat lives.
I concur. The wife is allergic to most cats, so before we got one that isn't allergenic (to her), we used to borrow the neighbours' cats and make them roam the house rubbing things the way they do... especially inside cupboards under sinks, closets, and the basement. Living in the country without mice is nice.
If you have rats, you will need a larger predator.
Unfortunately, that means a properly trained terrier, which is almost as much hassle as rats, though friendlier. (OK, I like terriers, but their owners are usually in denial about how intense they are.) Cats can't handle the typical urban norwegian wharf rat, they're enormous and fearless. In fact, if you have rats, best just use bloody good traps. Poison, unfortunately, will result in the rats dying in the walls, which does wonders for your mood in hot weather. Rats are also smart; some of them are too smart for your typical clamp trap, or seemingly any trap.
I also agree with the earlier poster to not use steel wool, unless it's the more expensive coarse stainless, or copper. Rust and fire hazard.
Well no, I wasn't calling you a freak for driving the speed limit, I drive like a little old lady myself, but reread, I explicitly cited the case of an unreasonable speed limit with ulterior motives!
And, I think you still haven't read sec. 80 of the Act... if I let a friend copy a cd that I've purchased, or even that I've copied from another friend, that isn't infringement. However, a restaurant playing the radio is infringement... more crap.
Your assessment of harm overlooks network effects, and a host of other economic niceties.
OK, IANAL and this is not court, so if you want to insist on the word theft that's fine.
What is illegal, and what is wrong, do not always overlap. Is it wrong to speed in a 40kph zone on the highway? Yeah, if it's a construction zone. If it's a speed trap meant to filch you of money unreasonably, and you just passed a donut shoppe full of cop cars, the average driver wouldn't have moral qualms about doing a reasonable speed, and justly so. If you yourself wouldn't, then it might be fair to call you a freak.
The law and justice don't overlap very well. Just ask a criminal lawyer.
So, when you say "wrong" do you refer to the law or justice? If copyright beyond reasonable compensation or time period is a speed trap, do you drive at your comfort zone when the cops are busy? The fact that corporations have taken over copyright makes a very real power imbalance between copyright holders and private citizens, and so, according my inquiries on the matter by asking lawyers and officials and copyright abusers, people don't seek retaliation so much as equalization.
I respond the way I do to copyright over my works because of my investigations into common sense: i.e. the sense of justice that people bring to a cultural transaction. Once the artist has been fairly compensated for labour and investment (e.g. performance or material objects), then the works begin moving into the public realm. I actually think there may be something biological about this, stemming from millions of years in tribes. Fighting nature is a losing battle: smart money is on swimming with the tide.
Justice is like the internet; when it's damaged, especially by the law, people just route around it. Whether they are correct or not, most everyday copyright infringement (e.g. taping stuff off the tv) is rational in this sense, rather than sleazy hypocrites. Even before people find out that privately copying music in canada is NOT a copyright infringement, they don't care much, because of complex transactional reasoning that isn't just self-serving rationalization. You, and a few others like you, have an unreasonable respect for the law, conflating it with justice. Most people are more practical, while still operating under defensible ethics.
Wobblies FTW! The business unions were heavily infiltrated in Canada by the early '50s and began organising labour strictly for the purposes of maintaining a standard of living and steady workforce, while entrenching the power of the means of production in the status quo.
The history of the Canadian Auto Workers (well, UAW at the time) is very instructive in this sense, since it was a vanguard union. Just ask the retired old-timers of Local 444. Once the radicals had been weeded out, especially the wobblies and anarchists, it was back to business as usual, with blue-collar elites backing the white-collar agenda, though at least working conditions began improving.
The best archive of Wobbly history is in the Reuther archives at Wayne State U in Detroit, hundreds of boxes of pamphlets, photos and documents. Very interesting!
Well, since you're arguing on a linguistic and syntactical level, you would be well advised to brush up!
1. "real" refers to material objects, in this legalistic sense 2. "rights", while actual and existent, are not "real" objects 3. deprivation of rights is 'theft' only in a colloquial shorthand, and abused in order to muddy the debate
As a copyright holder and producer/distributor of many cultural works (books and magazines, music, audio and video documentaries, film, photography, websites, performances, and even databases), I have an intimate acquaintance with copyright that is first-hand, and I have done some necessary homework over the years, both to protect my rights and those of the artists I support.
So, while I am not denying that infringement is problematic, I am trying to clarify the debate! Copyright infringement that is not misrepresentation of authorship is not theft in legal terms, and your insistence on this flies in the face of legislation, practice, and linguistics.
As you are arguing instead from a moral (or quasi-ethical) point of view, it is incumbent on you to be as precise as possible. You should also be aware that copyright also frequently wrests control over a work from its originator and places it into the hands of the 'distributor' and so the institution itself is fraught with abuse. (As an example: whenever doing a series of oral histories or interviews, we have to explicitly ensure that the storytellers are assigned shared copyright, since in Canada, the rights default to those who commission the project and pay for the medium of storage... what crap!)
Please, read the copyright act. And again, I suggest you read Attali's history of copyright in Europe, and the quandary of transferring control from the crown and patrons to the artists. Control over the reproduction of a work has always been problematic, in ways that compensation for labour aren't.
There is a separate argument that extends from this, but is central to your argument: to what degree should control over the reproduction of a work persist, in a moral sense? You take an absolutist opinion. I don't think you've considered it very thoroughly.
I am happy to let others reproduce my professional creative work, once I have been properly compensated for its original production, and the material costs of its primary reproduction. Culture is collective, by nature. Anything else is a kind of parsimonious (thus immoral) behaviour, verging on the alienation of rights that you base your argument on.
Why are you being so adamant and evasive at the same time? Either you aren't sure of which you speak, or you are embarrassed at your mangling of syntax.
Something is not being deprived, there is no object in question, nor is there a misrepresentation of authorship, in everyday copyright infringement.
There is a loss of control on the part of the author. This is not a thing, it is a quality of relations or condition. Any loss exists in the realm of the imaginary, such as potential income. That is why lawmakers, linguists, and people with a smidgin of common sense call it infringement, and not theft.
So what societal problems would you prefer they focus on? Stuff that endangers lives, or stuff that makes a small dent in corporation's revenue
May I add that market-stall counterfeiting is petty fraud, compared to the crazy big money fraud that is far too common on Bay Street in Toronto. The social costs just don't compare: Counterfeit Al is defrauding Corporation X out of a few bucks, but Con Broker Bruce is defrauding 'widows and orphans' out of billions. Every frakkin day.
creative products are incredibly time consuming to make. Yes, distribution is cheap, but by focusing only on distribution, the entire creative process is ignored.
As Jacques Attali has pointed out, the exchange value placed on music, since the 1500's, has always dealt with this problem. There is simply no way to accurately compensate the labour of composition. Because of this, reproductions (sheet music initially and recordings now) are priced according to their use value to the audience, i.e. what the market will bear. It has been used as a rallying point for capitalism, especially in the early stages.
So, your argument about the creative process is unfortunately deflated by 500 years of european history. The industry has had to use a workaround, controlling distribution of reproductions. Now that that business model has failed due to technological innovation, so have the ethical arguments that shore up that business model.
Performance, on the other hand, can be assessed a fee fairly easily. This is where the artist gets compensated for labour. Commissioned works are included in this.
Copyright infringement most certainly is stealing.
No, it isn't, unless you are legally and grammatically redefining the term (which the corporate propaganda has steadily worked at, successfully in your case). Stealing is when you take real property without returning it, or pass someone's ideas off as your own. Really, consult the dictionary or law. Copyright infringement is closer to libel or fraud than theft.
And, as a canadian, you should read Canada's Copyright Act before expounding publicly on what is right and wrong about copying. Private copying of music for personal use, for instance, has been supported for quite a while (see section 80), and thus is neither illegal nor unethical.
I'm still looking around for that Time magazine feature I stashed in a box somewhere, the one that had three articles covering the three main Fundamentalist movements: Christianity, Islam, and Capitalism. For real! A rare glimpse behind the curtain. It was about 10 years ago.
Our current sitution is the build up from decades worth of neglect, folks. And in most likeliness a lot of the Americans reading this post played some part in it. It sounds ugly because it is ugly. But it's still true.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Time travel stories very very rarely accommodate the notion that an object made independent of the earth's-sol's-milkyway's current position in time/space might fail to match the movements (future or prior) of these systems, and not return to the same spot on earth, never mind even staying in the solar system.
That always bugs me. Isn't it an obvious problem? Wouldn't your 'magical' explanation of a 'magical' tech need some explanation of it?
The only precedent that can directly 1:1 be applied is the one of the "I pay the levy, thus I am not guilty of downloading", and thats not in the law anywhere, which was my point.
And there's nowhere that is -CLEAR- that downloading is ok. Copying for private use is one thing, you'll still have to argue that downloading from a public site is still a private action.
Fair enough, to be nitpicky about it, it hasn't been properly aired in court yet, and there is a probable (but not quoted) legal hair-split between copying off a friend and downloading from a site.
While we're being precise, I should note that the levy has recently increased to $0.29 per CDR.
You did state that "There is a legal precedent about it." but you didn't cite the precedent. Which one did you mean?
I think the OP was responding in a fairly typical lay way to law. In this case, between the Copyright Board's levy and court inaction, the law got out of the way and said tacitly "since you're downloading anyway, and we can't stop you, we'll do this instead of trying to stop you". From a non-lawyer point of view, that's open season.
No, the law isn't "clear". There is a legal precedent about it. The law didn't change, so if you get sued, your lawyer has to quote a precedent, not the law as written in the books.
The Copyright Act is pretty clear about copying music. Methinks you are thinking about the P2P aspect of downloading, which involves redistribution via uploading. That part isn't clear and AFAIK remains in the grey zone since the 2004 supreme court decision that established "fair dealing" (not fair use!) as a user right, even though it was about photocopying.
However, if I download audio via http or ftp or some other conventional means, or borrow a friend's CD and rip it, that is private copying and is unequivocally NOT infringement. In fact, I pay about $0.21 per blank CD for the privilege.
Here's the relevant section from the Act: in short, copy from your friends' music collection all you want, just don't turn around and use it to make money. Unfortunately, that includes innocuous stuff like background music in a restaurant.
Copying for Private Use
80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):
(a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;
(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;
(c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or
(d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
Thanks for that. May I add, as a clue, that where government is appropriate is in places where there is ubiquity (e.g. road networks) or a degree of permanence (e.g. lifelong transactions, like health care/records), or obviously, regulation and law.
I'm not used to OSX so any difference from W32 annoys me, but I think the point stands anyway
Yes, you're definitely having a switcher itch, but expounding on it isn't helping as it's misinformation. Dialogue boxes that are inaccessible in OS X are not the norm, those are usually ported (e.g. Audacity, grrr) or crappy apps. Try this:
esc or cmd-. will get you cancel
for "don't save" type cmd-d (or usually just "d")
for the default, blue throbbing button hit return or enter
full keyboard access is in the --wait for it-- Keyboard & Mouse system preferences (full access turned off by default for little old ladies and technophobic CEO's, eh!)
open and save dialogue boxes are tab-key savvy (as are many option screens, like System Preference Panels)
buttons and fields with pop-up lists: use the arrow keys (this usually works even without full access turned on)
etc.!
As for gui consistency, OS X is marginally better than all the other platforms, despite all the funky freeware; likewise for searching out options and preferences (usually cmd-, BTW).
I feel your pain in the particular instance of free image processing apps, however. There are many gimmicky tools that are odd. However, versiontracker.com and MacUpdate.com have good comment sections: rely on them as a starting point. I found Image Tool.app and Image Tricks.app to be pretty good for simple operations; there are many others too.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that we only perceive a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and rely on baryonic matter to map things out, and we're just starting to get good instrumentation, is this any surprise?
I'm regularly frustrated by the subtle hubris of completeness that underlies so many scientific assertions. It's as though we continually forget that science is fundamentally provisional, and that we're just hominids who only recently got refrigeration.
The nice thing about new techniques like this is that it points out that we are always missing something.
It's like the basic flaw in Fermi's paradox: why is it so hard to believe that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for where everyone is, and we just haven't thought of it yet because it isn't obvious to hominids? Ockham's razor suggests for most things that we just don't have the answers, so keep looking, but for Fate's sake look away from the savannah-brain you're using.
Mod parent up, based on experience.
I ran the computer club at our little rural school. The district is scattered across various islands so the support staff come to the island once in a blue moon, and there is no budget.
By installing LTSP on most computers, there is nearly zero maintenance. The kids all have a personal account, so they learn the fundamental skills of logging in with a password, and exploring the interface and available apps without risk. They promptly go about customizing their interface; now they have some personal ownership, and are much more engaged. The LTSP install has nice educational software that's good enough for the time allotted.
The ancient donated hardware runs just fine under this setup. The teachers and staff still get to walk around with their mac laptops, and the occasional windows machine is still around for those rare times it's needed. It's a great solution, and it helped me teach the kids in the club about the inner workings of a computer and OS.
I personally do not like homosexuality at all (BTW, where is my freedom of speech to say that without being flamed for it?)
By all means, say what you want as loud as you want in a public forum! But if you, let's say, do something as stupid as complaining about what consensual adults do in their bedrooms, out of some principle, well, you might as well shout 'flames' in the theatre!
IOW, your freedom of speech is right where you left it: in context.
However, there remains a _huge_ fundamental difference: the US was founded on mistrust of ALL government while the Crown is still presumed to have a right to govern.
True - in theory. And yet, we have the institution of Governor General, which in practical terms can provide much more accountability and balance to government. While the prime minister has more centralized authority than, say, the US president, this unelected and generally non-partisan GG who is the representative of the Crown can dissolve the government if it oversteps its bounds. As we have recently seen, it is more than a ceremonial position, it is a kind of sword hanging over the head of the government.
The military is loyal to the Governor General before the Prime Minister; and yet the GG couldn't actually become a tyrant.
In typical mid-atlantic fashion, Canada's government is founded on trust in government but mistrust in officials' ability to be good governors. It's a fine distinction, that mirrors the balance between collective and individual rights that we have in Canada.
So, in actual daily practice, Canadians are better served by this institution than Americans by their right to revolt (good luck with that, eh!).
idiot mods, that's the truth, not a comment about exchange rates, beer alcohol content, or penis size! go laugh at some other country you hoser!
If you have mice, cats are very effective. Mice will not even approach anywhere they think a cat lives.
I concur. The wife is allergic to most cats, so before we got one that isn't allergenic (to her), we used to borrow the neighbours' cats and make them roam the house rubbing things the way they do... especially inside cupboards under sinks, closets, and the basement. Living in the country without mice is nice.
If you have rats, you will need a larger predator.
Unfortunately, that means a properly trained terrier, which is almost as much hassle as rats, though friendlier. (OK, I like terriers, but their owners are usually in denial about how intense they are.) Cats can't handle the typical urban norwegian wharf rat, they're enormous and fearless. In fact, if you have rats, best just use bloody good traps. Poison, unfortunately, will result in the rats dying in the walls, which does wonders for your mood in hot weather. Rats are also smart; some of them are too smart for your typical clamp trap, or seemingly any trap.
I also agree with the earlier poster to not use steel wool, unless it's the more expensive coarse stainless, or copper. Rust and fire hazard.
Well no, I wasn't calling you a freak for driving the speed limit, I drive like a little old lady myself, but reread, I explicitly cited the case of an unreasonable speed limit with ulterior motives!
And, I think you still haven't read sec. 80 of the Act... if I let a friend copy a cd that I've purchased, or even that I've copied from another friend, that isn't infringement. However, a restaurant playing the radio is infringement... more crap.
Your assessment of harm overlooks network effects, and a host of other economic niceties.
OK, IANAL and this is not court, so if you want to insist on the word theft that's fine.
What is illegal, and what is wrong, do not always overlap. Is it wrong to speed in a 40kph zone on the highway? Yeah, if it's a construction zone. If it's a speed trap meant to filch you of money unreasonably, and you just passed a donut shoppe full of cop cars, the average driver wouldn't have moral qualms about doing a reasonable speed, and justly so. If you yourself wouldn't, then it might be fair to call you a freak.
The law and justice don't overlap very well. Just ask a criminal lawyer.
So, when you say "wrong" do you refer to the law or justice? If copyright beyond reasonable compensation or time period is a speed trap, do you drive at your comfort zone when the cops are busy? The fact that corporations have taken over copyright makes a very real power imbalance between copyright holders and private citizens, and so, according my inquiries on the matter by asking lawyers and officials and copyright abusers, people don't seek retaliation so much as equalization.
I respond the way I do to copyright over my works because of my investigations into common sense: i.e. the sense of justice that people bring to a cultural transaction. Once the artist has been fairly compensated for labour and investment (e.g. performance or material objects), then the works begin moving into the public realm. I actually think there may be something biological about this, stemming from millions of years in tribes. Fighting nature is a losing battle: smart money is on swimming with the tide.
Justice is like the internet; when it's damaged, especially by the law, people just route around it. Whether they are correct or not, most everyday copyright infringement (e.g. taping stuff off the tv) is rational in this sense, rather than sleazy hypocrites. Even before people find out that privately copying music in canada is NOT a copyright infringement, they don't care much, because of complex transactional reasoning that isn't just self-serving rationalization. You, and a few others like you, have an unreasonable respect for the law, conflating it with justice. Most people are more practical, while still operating under defensible ethics.
Wobblies FTW! The business unions were heavily infiltrated in Canada by the early '50s and began organising labour strictly for the purposes of maintaining a standard of living and steady workforce, while entrenching the power of the means of production in the status quo.
The history of the Canadian Auto Workers (well, UAW at the time) is very instructive in this sense, since it was a vanguard union. Just ask the retired old-timers of Local 444. Once the radicals had been weeded out, especially the wobblies and anarchists, it was back to business as usual, with blue-collar elites backing the white-collar agenda, though at least working conditions began improving.
The best archive of Wobbly history is in the Reuther archives at Wayne State U in Detroit, hundreds of boxes of pamphlets, photos and documents. Very interesting!
Well, since you're arguing on a linguistic and syntactical level, you would be well advised to brush up!
1. "real" refers to material objects, in this legalistic sense
2. "rights", while actual and existent, are not "real" objects
3. deprivation of rights is 'theft' only in a colloquial shorthand, and abused in order to muddy the debate
As a copyright holder and producer/distributor of many cultural works (books and magazines, music, audio and video documentaries, film, photography, websites, performances, and even databases), I have an intimate acquaintance with copyright that is first-hand, and I have done some necessary homework over the years, both to protect my rights and those of the artists I support.
So, while I am not denying that infringement is problematic, I am trying to clarify the debate! Copyright infringement that is not misrepresentation of authorship is not theft in legal terms, and your insistence on this flies in the face of legislation, practice, and linguistics.
As you are arguing instead from a moral (or quasi-ethical) point of view, it is incumbent on you to be as precise as possible. You should also be aware that copyright also frequently wrests control over a work from its originator and places it into the hands of the 'distributor' and so the institution itself is fraught with abuse. (As an example: whenever doing a series of oral histories or interviews, we have to explicitly ensure that the storytellers are assigned shared copyright, since in Canada, the rights default to those who commission the project and pay for the medium of storage... what crap!)
Please, read the copyright act. And again, I suggest you read Attali's history of copyright in Europe, and the quandary of transferring control from the crown and patrons to the artists. Control over the reproduction of a work has always been problematic, in ways that compensation for labour aren't.
There is a separate argument that extends from this, but is central to your argument: to what degree should control over the reproduction of a work persist, in a moral sense? You take an absolutist opinion. I don't think you've considered it very thoroughly.
I am happy to let others reproduce my professional creative work, once I have been properly compensated for its original production, and the material costs of its primary reproduction. Culture is collective, by nature. Anything else is a kind of parsimonious (thus immoral) behaviour, verging on the alienation of rights that you base your argument on.
Why are you being so adamant and evasive at the same time? Either you aren't sure of which you speak, or you are embarrassed at your mangling of syntax.
Something is not being deprived, there is no object in question, nor is there a misrepresentation of authorship, in everyday copyright infringement.
There is a loss of control on the part of the author. This is not a thing, it is a quality of relations or condition. Any loss exists in the realm of the imaginary, such as potential income. That is why lawmakers, linguists, and people with a smidgin of common sense call it infringement, and not theft.
So what societal problems would you prefer they focus on? Stuff that endangers lives, or stuff that makes a small dent in corporation's revenue
May I add that market-stall counterfeiting is petty fraud, compared to the crazy big money fraud that is far too common on Bay Street in Toronto. The social costs just don't compare: Counterfeit Al is defrauding Corporation X out of a few bucks, but Con Broker Bruce is defrauding 'widows and orphans' out of billions. Every frakkin day.
creative products are incredibly time consuming to make. Yes, distribution is cheap, but by focusing only on distribution, the entire creative process is ignored.
As Jacques Attali has pointed out, the exchange value placed on music, since the 1500's, has always dealt with this problem. There is simply no way to accurately compensate the labour of composition. Because of this, reproductions (sheet music initially and recordings now) are priced according to their use value to the audience, i.e. what the market will bear. It has been used as a rallying point for capitalism, especially in the early stages.
So, your argument about the creative process is unfortunately deflated by 500 years of european history. The industry has had to use a workaround, controlling distribution of reproductions. Now that that business model has failed due to technological innovation, so have the ethical arguments that shore up that business model.
Performance, on the other hand, can be assessed a fee fairly easily. This is where the artist gets compensated for labour. Commissioned works are included in this.
Copyright infringement most certainly is stealing.
No, it isn't, unless you are legally and grammatically redefining the term (which the corporate propaganda has steadily worked at, successfully in your case). Stealing is when you take real property without returning it, or pass someone's ideas off as your own. Really, consult the dictionary or law. Copyright infringement is closer to libel or fraud than theft.
And, as a canadian, you should read Canada's Copyright Act before expounding publicly on what is right and wrong about copying. Private copying of music for personal use, for instance, has been supported for quite a while (see section 80), and thus is neither illegal nor unethical.
Um, hello? The founding fathers contained a significant number of Deists. Really, go look it up.
That made them most specifically NOT followers of religion, but independents. Nowadays, they'd probably appear downright heretical to half of the USA.
I'm still looking around for that Time magazine feature I stashed in a box somewhere, the one that had three articles covering the three main Fundamentalist movements: Christianity, Islam, and Capitalism. For real! A rare glimpse behind the curtain. It was about 10 years ago.
Our current sitution is the build up from decades worth of neglect, folks. And in most likeliness a lot of the Americans reading this post played some part in it. It sounds ugly because it is ugly. But it's still true.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Eisenhower, 1961, parting shot.
Time travel stories very very rarely accommodate the notion that an object made independent of the earth's-sol's-milkyway's current position in time/space might fail to match the movements (future or prior) of these systems, and not return to the same spot on earth, never mind even staying in the solar system.
That always bugs me. Isn't it an obvious problem? Wouldn't your 'magical' explanation of a 'magical' tech need some explanation of it?
The only precedent that can directly 1:1 be applied is the one of the "I pay the levy, thus I am not guilty of downloading", and thats not in the law anywhere, which was my point.
And there's nowhere that is -CLEAR- that downloading is ok. Copying for private use is one thing, you'll still have to argue that downloading from a public site is still a private action.
Fair enough, to be nitpicky about it, it hasn't been properly aired in court yet, and there is a probable (but not quoted) legal hair-split between copying off a friend and downloading from a site.
While we're being precise, I should note that the levy has recently increased to $0.29 per CDR.
You did state that "There is a legal precedent about it." but you didn't cite the precedent. Which one did you mean?
I think the OP was responding in a fairly typical lay way to law. In this case, between the Copyright Board's levy and court inaction, the law got out of the way and said tacitly "since you're downloading anyway, and we can't stop you, we'll do this instead of trying to stop you". From a non-lawyer point of view, that's open season.
No, the law isn't "clear". There is a legal precedent about it. The law didn't change, so if you get sued, your lawyer has to quote a precedent, not the law as written in the books.
The Copyright Act is pretty clear about copying music. Methinks you are thinking about the P2P aspect of downloading, which involves redistribution via uploading. That part isn't clear and AFAIK remains in the grey zone since the 2004 supreme court decision that established "fair dealing" (not fair use!) as a user right, even though it was about photocopying.
However, if I download audio via http or ftp or some other conventional means, or borrow a friend's CD and rip it, that is private copying and is unequivocally NOT infringement. In fact, I pay about $0.21 per blank CD for the privilege.
Here's the relevant section from the Act: in short, copy from your friends' music collection all you want, just don't turn around and use it to make money. Unfortunately, that includes innocuous stuff like background music in a restaurant.
Thanks for that. May I add, as a clue, that where government is appropriate is in places where there is ubiquity (e.g. road networks) or a degree of permanence (e.g. lifelong transactions, like health care/records), or obviously, regulation and law.
I'm not used to OSX so any difference from W32 annoys me, but I think the point stands anyway
Yes, you're definitely having a switcher itch, but expounding on it isn't helping as it's misinformation. Dialogue boxes that are inaccessible in OS X are not the norm, those are usually ported (e.g. Audacity, grrr) or crappy apps. Try this:
As for gui consistency, OS X is marginally better than all the other platforms, despite all the funky freeware; likewise for searching out options and preferences (usually cmd-, BTW).
I feel your pain in the particular instance of free image processing apps, however. There are many gimmicky tools that are odd. However, versiontracker.com and MacUpdate.com have good comment sections: rely on them as a starting point. I found Image Tool.app and Image Tricks.app to be pretty good for simple operations; there are many others too.
Wot ridiculous fukan speling, eh! Oh, sorry.
There has NEVER been a vote that permitted succession in Quebec.
I think you meant to type "secession" there.
He meant redneck and xenophobic towards francophones in that particularly virulent and parochial quasi-texan Alberta style, you doofus.