It must be wonderful having an entire set of ethics based solely on a code that can be changed at any time by a group of men over whom you have nothing but the most marginal control.
So make smoking in public places illegal; it is already illegal to smoke tobacco in public over here.
and car crashes.
So charge them with DUI/negligent driving/occasioning death, whatever the crime may be, same as is currently done with alchohol.
e have social security, food stamps, welfare, and WIC. We have homeless shelters, Habitat for Humanity, loan help for first-time home buyers, and housing projects. We have public school, subsidized universities, and education grants.
I have no idea how drug use relates to home loan assistance, public schooling, subsidized universities or education grants. It's relationship to food stamps, welfare and homeless shelters is tangential - proportionatly, only a very few users of drugs such as marijuana end up homeless. I have no hard statistics, but I'd guess it's in the same realm as alchoholics unable to keep a job or save any money more than the cost of the next bottle.
Should we get rid of all these social programs? Maybe. I'm not so sure about the unburied corpses though. In any case, we do have these social programs. Thus, we try to keep idiots from making themselves worse.
Which means the government should be able to ensure every citizen does only what is most healthy for them. Anyone eating more than two servings of red meat a week should be imprisoned. Potato crisps, chocolates and candies should all be banned, and possession punished by imprisonment. All citizens should have a mandated period of exercise each day. Failure to exercise results in a fine, unless excused by age or disability. Sky-diving, bunji-jumping, mountaineering and all contact sports are outlawed due to the possibility of injury.
Gee, I wish my government would keep me from making myself worse. It'd be such a fun world.
And this, I think, is why the RIAA is so interested. It's difficult to track down the myriad individuals that download content, but it's relatively easy to track down the people that are sharing or seeding content. By moving the legal burden onto them, rather than on the downloaders, it gives them a much stronger hand.
The legal burden is already on the uploaders, not the downloads. Downloading files is not infringing copyright, because you are not making a copy (you can't make a copy, because you have the original). Uploading is infringing copyright, because an uploader is distributing copyrighted material. All the people the RIAA have sued have been sued for uploading material
The reasons I can see for the RIAA wanting this are two-fold:
Sensationalism. At the moment, they can only bust people for uploads they have proof of. If this were law, they could bust people for every song they have shared, which is generally orders of magnitude larger (reports on these things often mention how many songs the defendant has on their harddrive, instead of how many counts of copyright infringement they are accused of).
Making things easy. It is much easier to just get a listing of people's files, and sue them for copyright infringment for all files, then to go through logs one by one and try to determine which files were uploaded and which weren't.
If she wanted to sue you, she could visit the page, and you would have done something illegal. The fact that you distributed it to the author makes no difference, if you don't yourself have permission to distribute.
After all, the internet is nothing but a whole bunch of shared files. Those files are shared over a number of protocols, like http, ftp, smtp, ntp, smb and bittorrent, and some require authentication to gain access, but the internet is nothing but a whole bunch of files being offered up by various types of servers.
I really want to see America's aggregated stock value the day they pull the plug on every HTTP server in the country.
Well, firstly, all Stargate references would have to be stripped out, as they would still be property of MGM. So you'd be left with a half-finished engine written by a game company gone bust, which might not be the best starting point for developing a game. Even then, it's possible that the gaming studio's creditors have first dibs on their technology, and that the half-done engine doesn't even belong to the studio, now that it's gone bust.
I can sort-of buy your arguments. But I think a great deal of the question rests on what your definition of art is (and there's no universally accepted one). Personally, my definition of art is "an artificial construction that is intended to evoke an emotional response in it's viewers". Something that doesn't evoke an emotional response, even though it tries to, is still art, it's just bad art:P
When it comes to video games, I've found quite a few that evoke emotional responses. Just browse around the net for a bit, and you'll find whole sites dedicated to Aeris' tragedy from Final Fantasy 7. Personally, I felt a bit of a wrench when I played through Starcraft and Kerrigan was turned to the Zerg. I've also felt awe in games like Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, when I see a graphically breath-taking part of the game-world, or hear a particularly compelling piece of in-game music.
I think games contain art, but are not necesarrily art themselves. Games can contain artistic visuals, music, dialogue, characters, plot and a whole bunch of other things. But the game itself, the ruleset, is not art. Strip away all the window-dressing, and a game is simply a mechanism, the same as the rules of bridge or poker. Art can be found in a game, but a game is not art itself.
Let's say you're a business. You're reasonably sure that with $1.5 billion USD and 5 years of time you could have an AIDS vaccine. Most of the cost of these medicines is in the *research*, not the production of the actual serum. Without patent protection, once you have a serum, tens of companies around the world will analyze it and duplicate it in short time.
And with patent protection, a hundred other firms who have no resources but patents will sue you for your production methodology violating one of their thousand or so ambigious, probably invalid patents, that you will have to spend a few years in court getting revoked. Or, you could simply settle and "cross license" your patent for their bogus ones.
Patents don't protect you unless you can patent every, single aspect of your process, because otherwise you are vulnerable to other people's patents.
Then again, businesses often don't take those sort of risks, even with patent protection. From what I understand of medical research, the majority of it is government-sponsored, which means it's not the company taking the risk, it's the tax-payer. And yet, the company still gets the patent.
My main gripe with it is that whoever wrote it couldn't get multiple deletions from a list working properly, which is pretty darn simple. Try selecting three torrents in the list and trying to delete them. ABC will delete the wrong ones, because ABC modifies the array even as it is enumerating through it.
Say you had five torrents, V W X Y Z. You selected the first three, V W X and hit delete. V is deleted, and all the elements move up in the list (ie: their indexes change). ABC now deletes the item with index 1, which is no longer W, but X. Everything moves up, indexs change, and ABS deletes the item with index 2, which is no longer X, but Z. You tried to delete V W X, and ABC deletes V X Z.
So, no, ABC is crap. It's a GUI layer on top of the standard BT core written by someone who can't code.
I'm not talking just about passion for your job. I'm talking about passion and/or competence in your chosen field. If you're not interested at something, and you suck so badly at it that you need to cheat to pass your exams, you're in the wrong field.
I'm not saying if you're not totally in love with your job you should change fields, I'm saying if you can't do your job, you're in the wrong field. In my experience, passion leads to competence (although not all competence is the result of passion), so if you're really interested in your field, you will sooner or later develop the skills necessary for it.
If you aren't passionate, or competant enough to participate in any course offered at a tertiary education institution without cheating - don't go through tertiary education. Try apprenticing in a trade instead. You can get good money as a tradesman, and they don't have the same intellectual focus as a university/college degree.
If you aren't passionate or competant enough in any field offered anywhere, well, you're better served getting started on your french-frying career, because if you can't pull it together enough to get a degree or trade certificate, you're not going to be able to do it for a living.
I replied when people reply to my posts as I generally do.
Meanwhile, what are you doing posting on slashdot? If you spent as much time learning a new programming language as you did browsing slashdot, you could bring in an extra few bucks! Better hop to it, grasshopper.
But they didn't start out that way. Granted, Mozilla started out as on offshoot of netscape, but I think the code has now been pretty much rewriiten. And most people here know about the origins of Linux - IBM definately hasn't been on board from the start.
I can see this as being a sort of business model for open source:
Code something good
Watch as it gets a decent userbase
Get adopted by a larger company who will fund you to make changes they want to your software for a fraction of the cost of developing it in-house.
Or did I miss the part where twitching Up-A-B-Left-A-X-X is useful in adult life (aside from having a rapport with your kids?)
No more useful than spending some time down at the beach, reading a novel, or watching a movie.
Firstly, the grandparent didn't say they could be helping the needy, or making the world a better place, he said they could be earning a bigger salary. He was implying that anything that doesn't directly correlate to in increase in your net worth is a waste of time. Which is a pretty sad philosophy if you ask me.
Secondly, even if you do replace making money with helping the needy, it doesn't change a thing. Take away all the relaxation in your life and replace it with work, no matter how worthy, and you're going to get one thing - burnout.
As for digital cameras... well that was their decision. Unless I, as a consumer, am going to get fined for buying a piece of hardware that was unlicenced I don't care. The patents on FAT were no secret. They were, as are all the other patents, kept in a public place, next to the patents for lenses, CCDs, batteries and jpeg compression. As with any other patent, if you want to use the tech you have to pay the licence... and then pass that cost onto the customer.
Except that these patents weren't around when they were making these decisions. These FAT patents were *rejected*. Why would a company base a decision around patents that were rejected by the UPTO? This is yet another example of the USPTO's stupidity - VFAT was created how long ago? Some where between 92 and 95 IIRC. So at least 10 years ago. VFAT has had 10 years to creep into all corners of the industry, and only now it's going to start costing money? Imagine if 5 years after the motor industry really got going, the patent for internal combustion engines was finally approved. Progress of science and useful arts my ass.
Note that I was responding to, not endorsing, the quote in italics at the top of my post. If you're going to respond to that, rather than to my comment on it, it's better to reply to the grandparent that it is to reply to me.
I was using the troll numbering system, which only has four digits, one, two, many lots. Translating into base-10, what I actually said is that they have 13 contacts.
I can't find a good excuse for the their, apart from this is slashdot, and I was trying to fit in.
SUCH A WASTE of time. If my kids spent half the time that they play games on learning a computer language, then they would be pulling down six figure salaries.
It's actually covered in the interview. His original nickname was Doodirock, pronounced "Dude, I rock", but due to mispronunciation it evolved into "Doodi". Doodirock isn't hugely more mature than Doodi, but many people come up with their handles when they're younger, and by the time their old they have two many contacts with their old handle to try changing it.
Slashdot Mirror
It must be wonderful having an entire set of ethics based solely on a code that can be changed at any time by a group of men over whom you have nothing but the most marginal control.
First there's the obvious: second-hand smoke...
So make smoking in public places illegal; it is already illegal to smoke tobacco in public over here.
and car crashes.
So charge them with DUI/negligent driving/occasioning death, whatever the crime may be, same as is currently done with alchohol.
e have social security, food stamps, welfare, and WIC. We have homeless shelters, Habitat for Humanity, loan help for first-time home buyers, and housing projects. We have public school, subsidized universities, and education grants.
I have no idea how drug use relates to home loan assistance, public schooling, subsidized universities or education grants. It's relationship to food stamps, welfare and homeless shelters is tangential - proportionatly, only a very few users of drugs such as marijuana end up homeless. I have no hard statistics, but I'd guess it's in the same realm as alchoholics unable to keep a job or save any money more than the cost of the next bottle.
Should we get rid of all these social programs? Maybe. I'm not so sure about the unburied corpses though. In any case, we do have these social programs. Thus, we try to keep idiots from making themselves worse.
Which means the government should be able to ensure every citizen does only what is most healthy for them. Anyone eating more than two servings of red meat a week should be imprisoned. Potato crisps, chocolates and candies should all be banned, and possession punished by imprisonment. All citizens should have a mandated period of exercise each day. Failure to exercise results in a fine, unless excused by age or disability. Sky-diving, bunji-jumping, mountaineering and all contact sports are outlawed due to the possibility of injury.
Gee, I wish my government would keep me from making myself worse. It'd be such a fun world.
The legal burden is already on the uploaders, not the downloads. Downloading files is not infringing copyright, because you are not making a copy (you can't make a copy, because you have the original). Uploading is infringing copyright, because an uploader is distributing copyrighted material. All the people the RIAA have sued have been sued for uploading material
The reasons I can see for the RIAA wanting this are two-fold:
If she wanted to sue you, she could visit the page, and you would have done something illegal. The fact that you distributed it to the author makes no difference, if you don't yourself have permission to distribute.
Unless the author has specifically placed it in the public domain, which they can do.
After all, the internet is nothing but a whole bunch of shared files. Those files are shared over a number of protocols, like http, ftp, smtp, ntp, smb and bittorrent, and some require authentication to gain access, but the internet is nothing but a whole bunch of files being offered up by various types of servers.
I really want to see America's aggregated stock value the day they pull the plug on every HTTP server in the country.
Well, firstly, all Stargate references would have to be stripped out, as they would still be property of MGM. So you'd be left with a half-finished engine written by a game company gone bust, which might not be the best starting point for developing a game. Even then, it's possible that the gaming studio's creditors have first dibs on their technology, and that the half-done engine doesn't even belong to the studio, now that it's gone bust.
I can sort-of buy your arguments. But I think a great deal of the question rests on what your definition of art is (and there's no universally accepted one). Personally, my definition of art is "an artificial construction that is intended to evoke an emotional response in it's viewers". Something that doesn't evoke an emotional response, even though it tries to, is still art, it's just bad art :P
When it comes to video games, I've found quite a few that evoke emotional responses. Just browse around the net for a bit, and you'll find whole sites dedicated to Aeris' tragedy from Final Fantasy 7. Personally, I felt a bit of a wrench when I played through Starcraft and Kerrigan was turned to the Zerg. I've also felt awe in games like Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, when I see a graphically breath-taking part of the game-world, or hear a particularly compelling piece of in-game music.
I think games contain art, but are not necesarrily art themselves. Games can contain artistic visuals, music, dialogue, characters, plot and a whole bunch of other things. But the game itself, the ruleset, is not art. Strip away all the window-dressing, and a game is simply a mechanism, the same as the rules of bridge or poker. Art can be found in a game, but a game is not art itself.
Let's say you're a business. You're reasonably sure that with $1.5 billion USD and 5 years of time you could have an AIDS vaccine. Most of the cost of these medicines is in the *research*, not the production of the actual serum. Without patent protection, once you have a serum, tens of companies around the world will analyze it and duplicate it in short time.
And with patent protection, a hundred other firms who have no resources but patents will sue you for your production methodology violating one of their thousand or so ambigious, probably invalid patents, that you will have to spend a few years in court getting revoked. Or, you could simply settle and "cross license" your patent for their bogus ones.
Patents don't protect you unless you can patent every, single aspect of your process, because otherwise you are vulnerable to other people's patents.
Then again, businesses often don't take those sort of risks, even with patent protection. From what I understand of medical research, the majority of it is government-sponsored, which means it's not the company taking the risk, it's the tax-payer. And yet, the company still gets the patent.
ABC is fine, as long as you don't want to delete more than one torrent from the list at a time (see my previous post for a detailed explanation)
I've switched to uTorrent now.
It's fairly shoddy. I used it for a while.
My main gripe with it is that whoever wrote it couldn't get multiple deletions from a list working properly, which is pretty darn simple. Try selecting three torrents in the list and trying to delete them. ABC will delete the wrong ones, because ABC modifies the array even as it is enumerating through it.
Say you had five torrents, V W X Y Z. You selected the first three, V W X and hit delete. V is deleted, and all the elements move up in the list (ie: their indexes change). ABC now deletes the item with index 1, which is no longer W, but X. Everything moves up, indexs change, and ABS deletes the item with index 2, which is no longer X, but Z. You tried to delete V W X, and ABC deletes V X Z.
So, no, ABC is crap. It's a GUI layer on top of the standard BT core written by someone who can't code.
I'm not talking just about passion for your job. I'm talking about passion and/or competence in your chosen field. If you're not interested at something, and you suck so badly at it that you need to cheat to pass your exams, you're in the wrong field.
I'm not saying if you're not totally in love with your job you should change fields, I'm saying if you can't do your job, you're in the wrong field. In my experience, passion leads to competence (although not all competence is the result of passion), so if you're really interested in your field, you will sooner or later develop the skills necessary for it.
If you aren't passionate, or competant enough to participate in any course offered at a tertiary education institution without cheating - don't go through tertiary education. Try apprenticing in a trade instead. You can get good money as a tradesman, and they don't have the same intellectual focus as a university/college degree.
If you aren't passionate or competant enough in any field offered anywhere, well, you're better served getting started on your french-frying career, because if you can't pull it together enough to get a degree or trade certificate, you're not going to be able to do it for a living.
Congratulations!
I do believe that is the most off-topic attempt I've ever seen to redirect an otherwise useful discussion into a religious flamefest.
Well, seeds *are* plant gametes.
I replied when people reply to my posts as I generally do.
Meanwhile, what are you doing posting on slashdot? If you spent as much time learning a new programming language as you did browsing slashdot, you could bring in an extra few bucks! Better hop to it, grasshopper.
I can see this as being a sort of business model for open source:
So now that they've been re-granted, when do they expire? Is their expiry based on the 1996 inception date, or the 2006 one?
Or did I miss the part where twitching Up-A-B-Left-A-X-X is useful in adult life (aside from having a rapport with your kids?)
No more useful than spending some time down at the beach, reading a novel, or watching a movie.
Firstly, the grandparent didn't say they could be helping the needy, or making the world a better place, he said they could be earning a bigger salary. He was implying that anything that doesn't directly correlate to in increase in your net worth is a waste of time. Which is a pretty sad philosophy if you ask me.
Secondly, even if you do replace making money with helping the needy, it doesn't change a thing. Take away all the relaxation in your life and replace it with work, no matter how worthy, and you're going to get one thing - burnout.
As for digital cameras... well that was their decision. Unless I, as a consumer, am going to get fined for buying a piece of hardware that was unlicenced I don't care. The patents on FAT were no secret. They were, as are all the other patents, kept in a public place, next to the patents for lenses, CCDs, batteries and jpeg compression. As with any other patent, if you want to use the tech you have to pay the licence... and then pass that cost onto the customer.
Except that these patents weren't around when they were making these decisions. These FAT patents were *rejected*. Why would a company base a decision around patents that were rejected by the UPTO? This is yet another example of the USPTO's stupidity - VFAT was created how long ago? Some where between 92 and 95 IIRC. So at least 10 years ago. VFAT has had 10 years to creep into all corners of the industry, and only now it's going to start costing money? Imagine if 5 years after the motor industry really got going, the patent for internal combustion engines was finally approved. Progress of science and useful arts my ass.
Would people please stop replying to this post as if I was endorsing that quote? I was replying to the grandparent.
Note that I was responding to, not endorsing, the quote in italics at the top of my post. If you're going to respond to that, rather than to my comment on it, it's better to reply to the grandparent that it is to reply to me.
I was using the troll numbering system, which only has four digits, one, two, many lots. Translating into base-10, what I actually said is that they have 13 contacts.
I can't find a good excuse for the their, apart from this is slashdot, and I was trying to fit in.
SUCH A WASTE of time. If my kids spent half the time that they play games on learning a computer language, then they would be pulling down six figure salaries.
Which is the most important thing, after all.
It's actually covered in the interview. His original nickname was Doodirock, pronounced "Dude, I rock", but due to mispronunciation it evolved into "Doodi". Doodirock isn't hugely more mature than Doodi, but many people come up with their handles when they're younger, and by the time their old they have two many contacts with their old handle to try changing it.