Quite true. Of course, this is (apparently) copyright infringement for commercial profit, which one could argue is more serious than downloading MP3s off Kazaa for personal use. Then there's the fraud aspect of falsely claiming that it doesn't use PearPC code.
Poor people spend, they don't save. That creates new demand, which creates new business opportunities, which creates new jobs.
Yeah, saving is bad, everybody max out your credit cards right now! Come on. When you save, you make money available for investing in new businesses and expanding existing ones.
I was fairly miffed that Kerry did so little to explain how increasing the minimum wage spurs the economy.
Because it doesn't. Otherwise we could increase the minimum wage to $50/hour and all be rich.
We hear the supply-side view about the minimum wage killing jobs all the time, even though the same sorts of dire predicitions have been made for 70 years now without coming to pass.
European economies are much more Keynesian than the US, and have much higher unemployment.
For the Jobs of the Future. We don't know what they are yet, but we know they'll require an associates degree, and will be created by the Invisible Hand once taxes are low enough. You must have Faith.
You don't need faith, just a bit of economic and historical understanding. For hundreds of years, technological improvements and productivity increases have caused people to lose their jobs. But we always ultimately end up better off as we're able to produce more with less.
Now, I'd expect a Democrat to propose billions in new spending, but a "fiscal conservative"?
Bush is not a fiscal conservative. Don't even get me started on the "free drugs for Warren Buffett" plan. One of the few benefits to a Kerry presidency would be that assuming Congress stays Republican, gridlock would prevent a lot of these vote-buying programs.
You should pay for your retirement, your Grandparents retirement and your parents retirement. No one should help pay for yours.
And that's pretty much the only honest answer there is. Current and near retirees have been promised SS benefits and they've planned accordingly, so we pretty much have to keep paying them. But the system is a pyramid scheme that can only be sustained by ever-increasing taxes, so it's a choice of our generation getting screwed, or future generations getting even more screwed.
If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.
Haircuts have a marginal cost. Software does not.
This seems to be a popular semantic game on/. whenever this topic comes up; redefine 'theft' narrowly
Redefine? Theft has traditionally been the illegal *taking* of someone's property, such that they no longer have it. Copying data is fundamentally different, despite the special interests that would have you believe that downloading an MP3 is equivalent to shoplifting a CD. This does matter, because the special interests use misleading language and bogus statistics to vastly exaggerate their losses from copyright infringement, and then demand oppressive and unbalanced laws as a response.
Next up: someone will no doubt assure us that it's permissible to pirate stuff because it's 'low quality' or because they want to 'try before they buy' or some such.
If somebody is *really* trying before they buy, I have no ethical problem with it. (Obviously, determining whether this is the case as a matter of law is pretty much impossible).
Like all that stolen IP out there is this big protest against capitalist exploitation and mediocrity.
I'm as pro-capitalist as you're likely to find on Slashdot, and because of that I'm strongly opposed to the increasing amount of government power handed to copyright holders, which I consider a form of corporate welfare.
Assuming this program actually exists and works (which I doubt), Apple can't stop it. Even if the Apple-hardware-only clause of the OS X EULA is enforceable, there would be plenty of non-infringing uses; for starters, running Darwin or LinuxPPC. At most they might have to stop advertising it as a means to run OS X.
Uh huh. Bush thought Saddam had WMDs. So did Kerry, both Clintons, and just about everyone else on both sides. So either this was a giant bipartisan scheme to lie to everyone, or they simply made a mistake. Do you call the weatherman a liar when he predicts rain and it doesn't happen?
Kerry has been telling the hard truth
What truth would that be? That we could have resolved Iraq with diplomacy, when we now know that Saddam was bribing our would-be diplomatic partners? That the recession is Bush's fault, when it was caused by the bubble bursting, corporate fraud that began in the prior administration, and the 9/11 attacks? That only the "richest 1%" benefited from the tax cuts, when in fact they made the tax code more progressive?
into the Patriot Act
I don't like the Patriot Act either, but can you honestly say that Al ("Clipper") Gore wouldn't have done the same thing? Isn't it amazing that this huge bill materialized out of nowhere right after 9/11? It was a wish list of policies law enforcement had always wanted but couldn't get passed through rational debate, including Clinton-supported policies like "know your customer". This is not a Democrat/Republican issue. The party in power is lousy on civil liberties, and the opposition party pretends to care so they can use it to attack the other guys. Here's Kerry on the Patriot Act:
"You can sum up the problems with the Patriot Act in two words: John Ashcroft....The real problem with the Patriot Act is not the law, but the abuse of the law."
In other words, the only problem with excessive government power is that he isn't the one who gets to use it. Kerry will not be an improvement in this regard; in fact he could easily be worse, since liberals won't be as willing to criticize him. (In the same way that many conservatives, not including myself, won't criticize Bush for running up the deficit with huge spending increases).
With Bush, democracy itself is on the outsource list.
Yes, the stormtroopers will be arriving at your door shortly. This is as silly as the wackos on the right who were convinced Clinton was going to use Y2K to cancel the elections and institute a dictatorship.
You can be a hedonist and highly moral, you can be a Muslem or a Communist and highly moral; whether you can be a Christian and highly moral is another question, which I can't answer, since I'm not one.
So we're to understand that you're a hedonistic Muslim communist? And you haven't met a single Christian whom you consider moral? Quite odd.
In my personal opinion the slippery slope arguemnt is nonsense.
Not always; see this paper. What can happen is that once the infrastructure is established for "mild" surveillance or censorship, the cost to implement more invasive control is now lessened, which may cause people to now support it whereas they wouldn't before. (That's not a good explanation, the article is much better).
Now in some cases you can accurately predict peoples motives such as the movie and porn industry want to do whatever it takes to make money at any cost to the consumer just as the cigarette and alcohol companies do.
Gosh, just like the computer, telephone, and ball bearing companies.
Do people have a choice?
Yes.
What do you mean by "consenting"?
Chosen freely when one is in a sound mental state.
Suicide is "consenting" but it is a decision made when your deck isn't full.
Always? What about someone with a terminal disease in a great deal of pain?
How about being in a porn video? How can you ensure that the decision is informed and isn't made under duress?
How do you ensure that anything anybody does isn't being done under duress?
There are whole other sides to the everybody look at porn arguement. It destroys people but do you care?
I care about preserving the freedom to pursue goals that others may disapprove of, provided they don't harm anyone else. I also care about preventing moral busybodies from enforcing their personal beliefs at gunpoint.
Wrong Answer. That answer doesn't make any sense to me!
Be that as it may, it's the truth. See the table of licensing fees here: here. Note that mpeg2 has no cap on fees for encoders and decoders, while mpeg4 has a maximum of $1 million per year. This is why QuickTime can support mpeg4 for free, but not mpeg2.
Then, let us also consider that many of the included applications can output mpeg video.
I don't believe any OS X bundled apps output mpeg2 out of the box. I could be wrong, and if I am that is indeed strange.
Finally, all of OS X's competition offers mpeg2 output for nothing. Windows, Linux, BeOS even did
I don't know what Windows is doing; Linux is using open source tools that are likely technically illegal due to patent violations. (Not that I have any ethical problem with that).
However there is one area that my Mac's a letdown: You cannot watch mpeg2 video in Quicktime without buying an addon.
The reason for that is the silly mpeg2 royalties. If Windows supports mpeg2 out of the box, that just means the licensing cost is hidden in the cost of Windows itself.
CBS said they would never move to digital broadcasts unless the broadcast flag was mandated.
An obvious bluff. What are they going to when analog goes away, not broadcast over the air at all?
Basically, the only way to get rid of the broadcast flag is to (a) convince the broadcasters they should give up their copyright to digital broadcasts
That doesn't follow. I can record non-HD shows today, but that doesn't mean that the producers have to give up their copyright. All they have to give up their fantasy that they should have complete control over how the content is used.
Ashcroft had a great pro-privacy record in the Senate; now that he's AG, a different faction pulls his strings.
Exactly. This really isn't a Democrat/Republican issue. Whichever party is in control wants more power for the government at the expense of civil liberties, because they're the ones that get to wield that power. Kerry on the Patriot Act:
"You can sum up the problems with the Patriot Act in two words: John Ashcroft... The real problem with the Patriot Act is not the law, but the abuse of the law."
No Senator, the problem *is* the law, because I don't trust either Ashcroft or you to not abuse it.
And, from what I hear, the engines SS1 uses absolutely will not scale up that far.
Rutan apparently has a few ideas on overcoming that. From here:
"We are heading to orbit sooner than you think," Burt Rutan, the creator said earlier. "We do not intend to stay in low-earth orbit for decades. The next 25 years will be a wild ride.... One that history will note was done for the benefit of everyone."
Been saying all along you CAN waive rights via agreement of a contract..
Sure, I just reject the claim that a EULA is a contract. There's no consideration; you supposedly give up your rights, in exchange for *nothing*. Yhey're along the same lines as me saying "by replying to this post you agree to pay me $1000".
If u did want to add both Rects and Circles to the List u should be defining List(Shape)
Yes, I think you're right. There's a difference between List<Shape> and List<? extends Shape>, in the first case you can insert a Rectangle, in the second you can't. I've read more on generics, and I still maintain they add unneeded complexity for marginal benefits.
The type safe collections are also very handy--no more class cast exceptions and stuff like that.
I'm reading the PDF for generics now, and they look obnoxious due to the absolute insistence on type safety. If I have a List<? extends Shape>, I can't add a Rectangle because the List *might* be a homogenous collection of some other Shape subclass? That's just silly; if it is, just throw a ClassCastException rather than crippling the developer. (It might be null too, guess the compiler should prevent me from calling *any* method on it, just to be safe). Generics look like a complex non-solution to a simple non-problem to me, but then I've always preferred dynamism to strong typing, and I don't regularly run into the type errors that generics claim to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not theft, it's copyright infringement!
Quite true. Of course, this is (apparently) copyright infringement for commercial profit, which one could argue is more serious than downloading MP3s off Kazaa for personal use. Then there's the fraud aspect of falsely claiming that it doesn't use PearPC code.
Poor people spend, they don't save. That creates new demand, which creates new business opportunities, which creates new jobs.
Yeah, saving is bad, everybody max out your credit cards right now! Come on. When you save, you make money available for investing in new businesses and expanding existing ones.
I was fairly miffed that Kerry did so little to explain how increasing the minimum wage spurs the economy.
Because it doesn't. Otherwise we could increase the minimum wage to $50/hour and all be rich.
We hear the supply-side view about the minimum wage killing jobs all the time, even though the same sorts of dire predicitions have been made for 70 years now without coming to pass.
European economies are much more Keynesian than the US, and have much higher unemployment.
For the Jobs of the Future. We don't know what they are yet, but we know they'll require an associates degree, and will be created by the Invisible Hand once taxes are low enough. You must have Faith.
You don't need faith, just a bit of economic and historical understanding. For hundreds of years, technological improvements and productivity increases have caused people to lose their jobs. But we always ultimately end up better off as we're able to produce more with less.
Now, I'd expect a Democrat to propose billions in new spending, but a "fiscal conservative"?
Bush is not a fiscal conservative. Don't even get me started on the "free drugs for Warren Buffett" plan. One of the few benefits to a Kerry presidency would be that assuming Congress stays Republican, gridlock would prevent a lot of these vote-buying programs.
You should pay for your retirement, your Grandparents retirement and your parents retirement. No one should help pay for yours.
And that's pretty much the only honest answer there is. Current and near retirees have been promised SS benefits and they've planned accordingly, so we pretty much have to keep paying them. But the system is a pyramid scheme that can only be sustained by ever-increasing taxes, so it's a choice of our generation getting screwed, or future generations getting even more screwed.
If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.
/. whenever this topic comes up; redefine 'theft' narrowly
Haircuts have a marginal cost. Software does not.
This seems to be a popular semantic game on
Redefine? Theft has traditionally been the illegal *taking* of someone's property, such that they no longer have it. Copying data is fundamentally different, despite the special interests that would have you believe that downloading an MP3 is equivalent to shoplifting a CD. This does matter, because the special interests use misleading language and bogus statistics to vastly exaggerate their losses from copyright infringement, and then demand oppressive and unbalanced laws as a response.
Next up: someone will no doubt assure us that it's permissible to pirate stuff because it's 'low quality' or because they want to 'try before they buy' or some such.
If somebody is *really* trying before they buy, I have no ethical problem with it. (Obviously, determining whether this is the case as a matter of law is pretty much impossible).
Like all that stolen IP out there is this big protest against capitalist exploitation and mediocrity.
I'm as pro-capitalist as you're likely to find on Slashdot, and because of that I'm strongly opposed to the increasing amount of government power handed to copyright holders, which I consider a form of corporate welfare.
Is there really any software you can't get for PC thats only available on the MAC?
Final Cut Pro, Motion, Shake, Logic, etc. (None of which will run acceptably in emulation for many years).
Assuming this program actually exists and works (which I doubt), Apple can't stop it. Even if the Apple-hardware-only clause of the OS X EULA is enforceable, there would be plenty of non-infringing uses; for starters, running Darwin or LinuxPPC. At most they might have to stop advertising it as a means to run OS X.
Heh. Well, Airburst Extreme is pretty good.
Uh huh. Bush thought Saddam had WMDs. So did Kerry, both Clintons, and just about everyone else on both sides. So either this was a giant bipartisan scheme to lie to everyone, or they simply made a mistake. Do you call the weatherman a liar when he predicts rain and it doesn't happen?
Kerry has been telling the hard truth
What truth would that be? That we could have resolved Iraq with diplomacy, when we now know that Saddam was bribing our would-be diplomatic partners? That the recession is Bush's fault, when it was caused by the bubble bursting, corporate fraud that began in the prior administration, and the 9/11 attacks? That only the "richest 1%" benefited from the tax cuts, when in fact they made the tax code more progressive?
into the Patriot Act
I don't like the Patriot Act either, but can you honestly say that Al ("Clipper") Gore wouldn't have done the same thing? Isn't it amazing that this huge bill materialized out of nowhere right after 9/11? It was a wish list of policies law enforcement had always wanted but couldn't get passed through rational debate, including Clinton-supported policies like "know your customer". This is not a Democrat/Republican issue. The party in power is lousy on civil liberties, and the opposition party pretends to care so they can use it to attack the other guys. Here's Kerry on the Patriot Act:In other words, the only problem with excessive government power is that he isn't the one who gets to use it. Kerry will not be an improvement in this regard; in fact he could easily be worse, since liberals won't be as willing to criticize him. (In the same way that many conservatives, not including myself, won't criticize Bush for running up the deficit with huge spending increases).
With Bush, democracy itself is on the outsource list.
Yes, the stormtroopers will be arriving at your door shortly. This is as silly as the wackos on the right who were convinced Clinton was going to use Y2K to cancel the elections and institute a dictatorship.
You can be a hedonist and highly moral, you can be a Muslem or a Communist and highly moral; whether you can be a Christian and highly moral is another question, which I can't answer, since I'm not one.
So we're to understand that you're a hedonistic Muslim communist? And you haven't met a single Christian whom you consider moral? Quite odd.
To put it otherwise, if child abusers don't have customers, they will not abuse children.
I agree that child porn should be illegal, but I doubt this is true.
In my personal opinion the slippery slope arguemnt is nonsense.
Not always; see this paper. What can happen is that once the infrastructure is established for "mild" surveillance or censorship, the cost to implement more invasive control is now lessened, which may cause people to now support it whereas they wouldn't before. (That's not a good explanation, the article is much better).
Now in some cases you can accurately predict peoples motives such as the movie and porn industry want to do whatever it takes to make money at any cost to the consumer just as the cigarette and alcohol companies do.
Gosh, just like the computer, telephone, and ball bearing companies.
Do people have a choice?
Yes.
What do you mean by "consenting"?
Chosen freely when one is in a sound mental state.
Suicide is "consenting" but it is a decision made when your deck isn't full.
Always? What about someone with a terminal disease in a great deal of pain?
How about being in a porn video? How can you ensure that the decision is informed and isn't made under duress?
How do you ensure that anything anybody does isn't being done under duress?
There are whole other sides to the everybody look at porn arguement. It destroys people but do you care?
I care about preserving the freedom to pursue goals that others may disapprove of, provided they don't harm anyone else. I also care about preventing moral busybodies from enforcing their personal beliefs at gunpoint.
Wrong Answer. That answer doesn't make any sense to me!
Be that as it may, it's the truth. See the table of licensing fees here: here. Note that mpeg2 has no cap on fees for encoders and decoders, while mpeg4 has a maximum of $1 million per year. This is why QuickTime can support mpeg4 for free, but not mpeg2.
Then, let us also consider that many of the included applications can output mpeg video.
I don't believe any OS X bundled apps output mpeg2 out of the box. I could be wrong, and if I am that is indeed strange.
Finally, all of OS X's competition offers mpeg2 output for nothing. Windows, Linux, BeOS even did
I don't know what Windows is doing; Linux is using open source tools that are likely technically illegal due to patent violations. (Not that I have any ethical problem with that).
However there is one area that my Mac's a letdown: You cannot watch mpeg2 video in Quicktime without buying an addon.
The reason for that is the silly mpeg2 royalties. If Windows supports mpeg2 out of the box, that just means the licensing cost is hidden in the cost of Windows itself.
The "top level" in the Finder isn't the / directory.
/foo" and you'll see it in the Finder.
Yes it is. "touch
CBS said they would never move to digital broadcasts unless the broadcast flag was mandated.
An obvious bluff. What are they going to when analog goes away, not broadcast over the air at all?
Basically, the only way to get rid of the broadcast flag is to (a) convince the broadcasters they should give up their copyright to digital broadcasts
That doesn't follow. I can record non-HD shows today, but that doesn't mean that the producers have to give up their copyright. All they have to give up their fantasy that they should have complete control over how the content is used.
Exactly. This really isn't a Democrat/Republican issue. Whichever party is in control wants more power for the government at the expense of civil liberties, because they're the ones that get to wield that power. Kerry on the Patriot Act:
No Senator, the problem *is* the law, because I don't trust either Ashcroft or you to not abuse it.
Rutan apparently has a few ideas on overcoming that. From here:
For the next prize they get NASA to drop a package containing 10 million bucks into orbit. Whoever recovers it ... gets it.
I laughed, but that's actually a great idea.
pdf is icky because it is a cross-platform well defined spec that produces beautifully printed output.
And is obnoxious for reading on-screen.
Been saying all along you CAN waive rights via agreement of a contract..
Sure, I just reject the claim that a EULA is a contract. There's no consideration; you supposedly give up your rights, in exchange for *nothing*. Yhey're along the same lines as me saying "by replying to this post you agree to pay me $1000".
If u did want to add both Rects and Circles to the List u should be defining List(Shape)
Yes, I think you're right. There's a difference between List<Shape> and List<? extends Shape>, in the first case you can insert a Rectangle, in the second you can't. I've read more on generics, and I still maintain they add unneeded complexity for marginal benefits.
And yes, it does work under Linux, and Windows and Solaris (and most likely will under OS X, though that is up to Apple to implement).
OS X has done OpenGL acceleration of Java2D starting with 10.1.
The type safe collections are also very handy--no more class cast exceptions and stuff like that.
I'm reading the PDF for generics now, and they look obnoxious due to the absolute insistence on type safety. If I have a List<? extends Shape>, I can't add a Rectangle because the List *might* be a homogenous collection of some other Shape subclass? That's just silly; if it is, just throw a ClassCastException rather than crippling the developer. (It might be null too, guess the compiler should prevent me from calling *any* method on it, just to be safe). Generics look like a complex non-solution to a simple non-problem to me, but then I've always preferred dynamism to strong typing, and I don't regularly run into the type errors that generics claim to solve.