Last time I checked, German copyright law guaranteed consumers the right to make archival copies of purchased media for their own private use (this is the "Recht auf Privatkopie" that's often mentioned in discussions on IP and copyright in Germany). Downloading MP3 copies of songs you own the CD version of, even via a legally dubious channel, should still be covered by fair use; unfortunately, as far as I know there hasn't yet been a court decision in such a case to establish a precedent.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 1
If Wozniak is (correctly) on the list instead of Jobs, then Paul Allen should be on it instead of Bill Gates. Gates isn't really a tech guy, more of a business type.
All the justifiably frustrated and unemployed IT geeks left high and dry by outsourcing and the dotcom crash can now be re-integrated into productive society, putting their finely-honed profanity skills to good use as phone service facilitators. I see this as the start of a new golden age, personally.
I not only remember B1FF, I remember Shit-Kickin' Jim and pondering whether to buy the C-64 or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I'd write more, but my arthritis is killing me.
Chum, outside the ass-warming gounds of academia where you appear to reside, *food and shelter* aren't even basic rights. Ask your average starving Bangladeshi sometime whether he'd prefer an OC3 line or the guarantee that he and his family will be fed, and see what answer you get.
This is the single most uninformed post I've seen on this site so far, and that is saying a lot. It's only my innate sense of courtesy that's keeping me from suggesting you somehow trained your anus to post to Slashdot.
As a general thing, I'm against a pay-per-page model. As others have said, it's too open to abuse via script fu and layout (want to bet that, if pay-per-page becomes popular, you'll never see a vertical scroll bar on a web site again?).
Besides which, I already pay monthly subscriptions for a number of premium sites. Maybe some months I'd be saving money on a per-page billing system, and other months I'd be spending more. But under a subscription system, there's no way I can accidentally blow my rent money surfing a pay site - there's one single discreet financial hit, and that covers me for the month.
Of course, it's my conviction that most web sites aren't even worth the oxygen their creators consumed while building them, let alone a cash payment. Those less misantrophic may have another opinion.
As far as I know, cdrom.com wasn't receiving anything as compensation, and it's when they stood up and basically requested that FilePlanet start compensating them that the current mandatory registration scheme was instituted. There was quite a stink about it on various gaming community boards too. FilePlanet's latest trick is offering users the chance to pay a yearly fee ($ 20 or thereabouts) for a 'personal' download server with lower wait times and a guaranteed minimum bandwidth; IMO it's a pointless scheme, since the downloads FilePlanet hosts invariably end up being available elsewhere too. I'm not going to go off on my "GameSpy Networks = Satan" soapbox at this point, but this is by far not the worst thing they've done.
I am a German citizen and resident, and from my POV, there are quite a few things wrong with the Personalausweis system.
First of all, there's the Meldepflicht aspect. Basically this requires you to register with the local authorities whenever you move to a new location, even if it's within the same town. Failure to do so within a two-week period results in a cash fine, which you can be jailed for not paying. To me, this is the kind of measure associated with being a convicted felon on parole, not a free citizen.
Second, there's the fact that if your ID is out of date, you will be fined, and can again be jailed for refusal to pay. If you have no valid ID card on you, you will be taken to a police station and held there until somebody else comes along with your ID card. Note that the police do not care in this case how many pieces of secondary ID (drivers' license, medical insurance card, etc.) you are carrying - without the Personalausweis, they can and will arrest and detain you. Before anybody shouts that this doesn't happen, it has happened to me. More than just once.
Third, the entire responsibility for acquiring this document and keeping it up to date rests with the citizen, not the state which requires its citizens to carry one. Not only that, but renewing the ID or having a new one issued (if your appearance has changed, or the old one has been damaged) costs a fairly hefty fee; this to me adds insult to injury - half my income goes on taxes, and then I get to pay for government-imposed dog tags on top of it.
The way I see it, a company that's employing people with no intention of paying them is basically stealing those employees' time and labor. I don't think stealing from thieves is a morally reprehensible act, especially given the fact that most employees these days are disadvantaged when it comes to taking their former employer to court.
...but I posted on September 11 basically suggesting that this is exactly what was going to happen. The only way to effectively protect a nation against terrorist attack, short of major changes in foreign and domestic policy aimed at eliminating inequality, is establishing a police state.
Wave bye-bye to most of your rights if you live in the US. I'm willing to bet money that within a year, you're going to be looking back and calling 2000 and 2001 the glory days of privacy.
Okay, so please tell me how much companies like Sun, IBM, and the other big evil corporations beloved of the open source cabal have donated, and how the sum compares to their overall profits.
Fuck it, people. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft either, but this is clutching at bloody straws here. Slam on them all you like for shoddy tech and unfair marketing practices, but not for the act of donating a 'mere' five million dollars...especially when there's more profitable corporations (such as Walmart, who have been mentioned) that donated less. Making an issue of this is so cynical it makes me ill.
I haven't actually seen any posts advocating that people with birth defects be killed. What most people have said is that the parents in such a situation have the right to be informed beforehand if their child will have such defects. Whether such a child is to be aborted or should be allowed to be born is up to the parents affected, and to them alone. I don't think any one course of action is more moral in a situation like this.
Want to bet it will no longer be available in the short run? Given the CIA and NSA's catastrophic failure to see this coming in any manner, they're going to need something to blame. Even before this happened, the spin was that "only terrorists and criminals use crypto". I'm certain that one of the short-term consequences of these events will be a) far more sanctioned wiretapping and b) the banning of any cryptosystem that doesn't involve either key escrow or backdoors for NSA use.
I can see where your AD&D analogy is coming from, but it's flawed on certain levels. In a pen and paper RPG, player characters have a far greater range of options than they do in a hack-and-slash exercise like Diablo. There's no way to really avoid battle in most CRPGs, for one thing. A puny first-level mage with the gift of the gab might be able to con a tribe of goblins into believing him to be more powerful than Gandalf on crack, thus bypassing them with no combat. In Diablo, that same mage's only option is to do battle, which he is woefully unprepared for unless he loads up on items, via eBay if need be.
Diablo's more like Quake than it is like AD&D. I can't blame people for wanting the big guns if the entire game revolves around killing things.
"Those EU hypocrites" are at least accomplishing something; even though the protocols have not been ratified, pretty much every European government is already complying with it. In many cases, the environmental drive this has entailed has led to entire industries being formed for more advanced filtration systems, photovoltaic cells, etc. (Speaking of which...most Scandinavian states as well as Germany and the Netherlands have already passed environmental legislation that goes farther than the Kyotot protocols demand.)
Mind you, it's always a lot easier to wrap that snotrag you call a flag around one's dick and have a circle-jerk while chanting "USA! USA! USA!" than it is to actually do any thinking or independent research.
Most companies manufacturing product under Europe's stricter environmental laws are more profitable now than they were before they took steps; not because of any fines levied on them, but simply because by decreasing emissions and wastes, they are also lowering their use of energy and water. Working in an environmentally sound manner has tangible financial benefits for the people doing it.
Clean electricity consuming more resources to produce? Not if it's being produced via solar power or water turbines; neither of those processes uses a finite resource.
Americans need to stop assuming that theirs is the only country in the world with an understanding of economics. It's that kind of blind arrogance that causes a lot of your problems.
There were a few albums released by BMG in Europe during 2000 that used this protection scheme (one was by Finnish posers HIM, as I recall; the rest was obscure stuff). I was working in a record store at the time, and we had perhaps an 85% returns rate on that album (ie, 17 of 20 people came in and returned it because they either objected on principle or were having problems playing the CD on regular home equipment). BMG eventually re-released most of these albums without the copy protection, and hasn't made any more attempts in that direction that I'm aware of.
Fact is, Israel's the closest thing to a fascist regime there is in the western world. During the apartheid era, the South African government imposed the same measures (curfews, shoot-to-maim orders, etc.) on black townships, and there was an entirely justified outcry. The government of Israel is on very shaky ground here.
It's interesting how anyone criticising Israeli politics is automatically an anti-Semite, btw. I suppose it's easier to make a straw man attack on the messenger than deal with the message.
Why is this 'flamebait'? I think he's raising a valid point. Civilisation has been cloned to death commercially, and now - years after it was considered cutting edge - it's cloned as an open source effort. I love Civilisation, and I've played FreeCiv and liked it, but this isn't an earth-shattering breakthrough for free software, nor is it a prestige project.
On the open source gaming front, I'd say CrystalSpace is more glamorous, and it'd be a great example of what free software can achieve assuming somebody got around to building a game with it...and of other free software projects, I'd agree that things like Apache or bind are more significant.
If the parent post to this is really considered flamebait by most of the Slashdot readership for raising a valid point, then this is becoming the wrong place to look for serious discussion.
Yeah, enough with the whining already. Enough with the Linux users' whining about how big bad Microsoft has the marketshare. Enough with your bitching that people aren't giving free software a chance. Enough, in short, of Slashdot.
You know why Microsoft has around 95% of all computer users running their software? I'll tell you. It's because microsoft, being run by professionals, realises that the best way to acquire and keep customers is not to suggest that if you are experiencing problems with their product then you must be "a techno moron incapable of counting above ten without taking off your shoes", to quote Restiff the Amazing Talking Rectum up there.
Meanwhile, the Honorable Elitist Opposition here and on sites like this seems to think one acquires allies by making blanket insulting statements. Here's a clue for you: if the man page authors for some utilities label the syntax "needlessly obscure", then the system in general is not quite easy enough for J. Random User to work with. Microsoft understands this, and hence rules the consumer world and is making major inroads in the server market. Your ilk prefers to spend its time alternately whining about how nobody uses Linux or having a circle-jerk over the fact that you're all 1337 because you do, and vehemently resisting any attempts to make the system friendlier because that'd rob you of your hard-earned bragging rights. People like you make me glad to be running win2K and BeOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, German copyright law guaranteed consumers the right to make archival copies of purchased media for their own private use (this is the "Recht auf Privatkopie" that's often mentioned in discussions on IP and copyright in Germany). Downloading MP3 copies of songs you own the CD version of, even via a legally dubious channel, should still be covered by fair use; unfortunately, as far as I know there hasn't yet been a court decision in such a case to establish a precedent.
If Wozniak is (correctly) on the list instead of Jobs, then Paul Allen should be on it instead of Bill Gates. Gates isn't really a tech guy, more of a business type.
All the justifiably frustrated and unemployed IT geeks left high and dry by outsourcing and the dotcom crash can now be re-integrated into productive society, putting their finely-honed profanity skills to good use as phone service facilitators. I see this as the start of a new golden age, personally.
I'm quite fond of cock. I can't say the same about Lucas.
I not only remember B1FF, I remember Shit-Kickin' Jim and pondering whether to buy the C-64 or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I'd write more, but my arthritis is killing me.
Internet access is a basic right?
Chum, outside the ass-warming gounds of academia where you appear to reside, *food and shelter* aren't even basic rights. Ask your average starving Bangladeshi sometime whether he'd prefer an OC3 line or the guarantee that he and his family will be fed, and see what answer you get.
This is the single most uninformed post I've seen on this site so far, and that is saying a lot. It's only my innate sense of courtesy that's keeping me from suggesting you somehow trained your anus to post to Slashdot.
As a general thing, I'm against a pay-per-page model. As others have said, it's too open to abuse via script fu and layout (want to bet that, if pay-per-page becomes popular, you'll never see a vertical scroll bar on a web site again?).
Besides which, I already pay monthly subscriptions for a number of premium sites. Maybe some months I'd be saving money on a per-page billing system, and other months I'd be spending more. But under a subscription system, there's no way I can accidentally blow my rent money surfing a pay site - there's one single discreet financial hit, and that covers me for the month.
Of course, it's my conviction that most web sites aren't even worth the oxygen their creators consumed while building them, let alone a cash payment. Those less misantrophic may have another opinion.
As far as I know, cdrom.com wasn't receiving anything as compensation, and it's when they stood up and basically requested that FilePlanet start compensating them that the current mandatory registration scheme was instituted. There was quite a stink about it on various gaming community boards too. FilePlanet's latest trick is offering users the chance to pay a yearly fee ($ 20 or thereabouts) for a 'personal' download server with lower wait times and a guaranteed minimum bandwidth; IMO it's a pointless scheme, since the downloads FilePlanet hosts invariably end up being available elsewhere too. I'm not going to go off on my "GameSpy Networks = Satan" soapbox at this point, but this is by far not the worst thing they've done.
I am a German citizen and resident, and from my POV, there are quite a few things wrong with the Personalausweis system.
First of all, there's the Meldepflicht aspect. Basically this requires you to register with the local authorities whenever you move to a new location, even if it's within the same town. Failure to do so within a two-week period results in a cash fine, which you can be jailed for not paying. To me, this is the kind of measure associated with being a convicted felon on parole, not a free citizen.
Second, there's the fact that if your ID is out of date, you will be fined, and can again be jailed for refusal to pay. If you have no valid ID card on you, you will be taken to a police station and held there until somebody else comes along with your ID card. Note that the police do not care in this case how many pieces of secondary ID (drivers' license, medical insurance card, etc.) you are carrying - without the Personalausweis, they can and will arrest and detain you. Before anybody shouts that this doesn't happen, it has happened to me. More than just once.
Third, the entire responsibility for acquiring this document and keeping it up to date rests with the citizen, not the state which requires its citizens to carry one. Not only that, but renewing the ID or having a new one issued (if your appearance has changed, or the old one has been damaged) costs a fairly hefty fee; this to me adds insult to injury - half my income goes on taxes, and then I get to pay for government-imposed dog tags on top of it.
The way I see it, a company that's employing people with no intention of paying them is basically stealing those employees' time and labor. I don't think stealing from thieves is a morally reprehensible act, especially given the fact that most employees these days are disadvantaged when it comes to taking their former employer to court.
Since you managed to stretch your creativity far enough to come up with a nickname for me, why are you posting anonymously?
...but I posted on September 11 basically suggesting that this is exactly what was going to happen. The only way to effectively protect a nation against terrorist attack, short of major changes in foreign and domestic policy aimed at eliminating inequality, is establishing a police state.
Wave bye-bye to most of your rights if you live in the US. I'm willing to bet money that within a year, you're going to be looking back and calling 2000 and 2001 the glory days of privacy.
You know what the first ad I saw on Slashdot was when I came to check on the news situation, maybe two hours after things started happening?
A Thinkgeek one. One of the "All your base" ones.
The caption at the precise instant the page finished loading was "Somebody set us up the bomb".
Bit of a poor choice there, what?
Okay, so please tell me how much companies like Sun, IBM, and the other big evil corporations beloved of the open source cabal have donated, and how the sum compares to their overall profits.
Fuck it, people. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft either, but this is clutching at bloody straws here. Slam on them all you like for shoddy tech and unfair marketing practices, but not for the act of donating a 'mere' five million dollars...especially when there's more profitable corporations (such as Walmart, who have been mentioned) that donated less. Making an issue of this is so cynical it makes me ill.
I haven't actually seen any posts advocating that people with birth defects be killed. What most people have said is that the parents in such a situation have the right to be informed beforehand if their child will have such defects. Whether such a child is to be aborted or should be allowed to be born is up to the parents affected, and to them alone. I don't think any one course of action is more moral in a situation like this.
...
Want to bet it will no longer be available in the short run? Given the CIA and NSA's catastrophic failure to see this coming in any manner, they're going to need something to blame. Even before this happened, the spin was that "only terrorists and criminals use crypto". I'm certain that one of the short-term consequences of these events will be a) far more sanctioned wiretapping and b) the banning of any cryptosystem that doesn't involve either key escrow or backdoors for NSA use.
I can see where your AD&D analogy is coming from, but it's flawed on certain levels. In a pen and paper RPG, player characters have a far greater range of options than they do in a hack-and-slash exercise like Diablo. There's no way to really avoid battle in most CRPGs, for one thing. A puny first-level mage with the gift of the gab might be able to con a tribe of goblins into believing him to be more powerful than Gandalf on crack, thus bypassing them with no combat. In Diablo, that same mage's only option is to do battle, which he is woefully unprepared for unless he loads up on items, via eBay if need be.
Diablo's more like Quake than it is like AD&D. I can't blame people for wanting the big guns if the entire game revolves around killing things.
"Those EU hypocrites" are at least accomplishing something; even though the protocols have not been ratified, pretty much every European government is already complying with it. In many cases, the environmental drive this has entailed has led to entire industries being formed for more advanced filtration systems, photovoltaic cells, etc. (Speaking of which...most Scandinavian states as well as Germany and the Netherlands have already passed environmental legislation that goes farther than the Kyotot protocols demand.)
Mind you, it's always a lot easier to wrap that snotrag you call a flag around one's dick and have a circle-jerk while chanting "USA! USA! USA!" than it is to actually do any thinking or independent research.
Most companies manufacturing product under Europe's stricter environmental laws are more profitable now than they were before they took steps; not because of any fines levied on them, but simply because by decreasing emissions and wastes, they are also lowering their use of energy and water. Working in an environmentally sound manner has tangible financial benefits for the people doing it.
Clean electricity consuming more resources to produce? Not if it's being produced via solar power or water turbines; neither of those processes uses a finite resource.
Americans need to stop assuming that theirs is the only country in the world with an understanding of economics. It's that kind of blind arrogance that causes a lot of your problems.
There were a few albums released by BMG in Europe during 2000 that used this protection scheme (one was by Finnish posers HIM, as I recall; the rest was obscure stuff). I was working in a record store at the time, and we had perhaps an 85% returns rate on that album (ie, 17 of 20 people came in and returned it because they either objected on principle or were having problems playing the CD on regular home equipment). BMG eventually re-released most of these albums without the copy protection, and hasn't made any more attempts in that direction that I'm aware of.
Good point. Mind you, Slashdot isn't really the place you go to for examples of how journalism should be done.
Fact is, Israel's the closest thing to a fascist regime there is in the western world. During the apartheid era, the South African government imposed the same measures (curfews, shoot-to-maim orders, etc.) on black townships, and there was an entirely justified outcry. The government of Israel is on very shaky ground here.
It's interesting how anyone criticising Israeli politics is automatically an anti-Semite, btw. I suppose it's easier to make a straw man attack on the messenger than deal with the message.
Why is this 'flamebait'? I think he's raising a valid point. Civilisation has been cloned to death commercially, and now - years after it was considered cutting edge - it's cloned as an open source effort. I love Civilisation, and I've played FreeCiv and liked it, but this isn't an earth-shattering breakthrough for free software, nor is it a prestige project.
On the open source gaming front, I'd say CrystalSpace is more glamorous, and it'd be a great example of what free software can achieve assuming somebody got around to building a game with it...and of other free software projects, I'd agree that things like Apache or bind are more significant.
If the parent post to this is really considered flamebait by most of the Slashdot readership for raising a valid point, then this is becoming the wrong place to look for serious discussion.
Yeah, enough with the whining already. Enough with the Linux users' whining about how big bad Microsoft has the marketshare. Enough with your bitching that people aren't giving free software a chance. Enough, in short, of Slashdot.
You know why Microsoft has around 95% of all computer users running their software? I'll tell you. It's because microsoft, being run by professionals, realises that the best way to acquire and keep customers is not to suggest that if you are experiencing problems with their product then you must be "a techno moron incapable of counting above ten without taking off your shoes", to quote Restiff the Amazing Talking Rectum up there.
Meanwhile, the Honorable Elitist Opposition here and on sites like this seems to think one acquires allies by making blanket insulting statements. Here's a clue for you: if the man page authors for some utilities label the syntax "needlessly obscure", then the system in general is not quite easy enough for J. Random User to work with. Microsoft understands this, and hence rules the consumer world and is making major inroads in the server market. Your ilk prefers to spend its time alternately whining about how nobody uses Linux or having a circle-jerk over the fact that you're all 1337 because you do, and vehemently resisting any attempts to make the system friendlier because that'd rob you of your hard-earned bragging rights. People like you make me glad to be running win2K and BeOS.