there is only one person providing the "plumbing" in an example where copyright applies, and that person will only install it if you have the camera.
That is for the one specific work. I can certainly live without every copyrighted work on the planet, thank you.
After all, what is encryption and DRM except the invention of a new and intentionally undocumented format for computers/electronics to read?
Back to my original comment: If. People. Do. Not. Buy. DRM. Crap. Then. Companies. Will. Make. Non. DRM. Products. If they don't, then you can. Create a new competing optical media format that is not crippled with DRM. Start a music company and sell to all these thousands of people who care.
Nobody has a patent on "music" yet. Sure, Britney Spears "music" may be locked into DRM format, but that was her choice when she signed with her music company, and it is your choice to buy someone else's music that your computer can read.
Nobody being deprived of DRM media has been injured. "First, do no harm." You would upset my freedom to enter into contracts I choose to enter into, to cure exactly what malady? A false one, I protest. You can let up on the straw man, I am over here.
We might be able to argue that a "monopoly" operating system with DRM that gouges its customers on price is doing harm. After all, in today's world, it is _virtually_ a necessity to have a computer to work. But in _reality_ it is not either a necessity or a monopoly. Patent law complicates things, but there are alternative operating systems, and you can start your own operating system company any time you like. You might not be able to play Windows Media DRM files or run Microsoft Office 2008, but that's the point after all. People who care about playing Windows DRM media files or running Microsoft Office would not be your target audience.
It is when a Word document, for example, is necessary to be free (in the real sense, not a software sense) that we should be afraid. For example if electronic voting required a Microsoft-certified Internet Explorer 9 (for example) browser, then I would be in the front of the line with a shotgun and a harsh word for my representative. Well, maybe just the harsh words.
Disagree. Such a contract (hidden shrink-wrap) itself is already not valid because there has not been any consideration for the contract. If it says on the box "there is a license inside you must accept" (advertised shrink-wrap) and you don't want to do it, don't buy the product. There are many thousands of people who will accept an advertised shrink-wrap contract, even without knowing the detailed terms, to get the product they want at the price they want.
Do not limit the freedom of people to enter into the contracts they choose, please. Argue for better contracts and better terms, and educate people on why they should care.
Whether you like it or not, music or more importantly, entertainment, has become what I call a "virtual" necessity for the average standard of living in our culture.
Whoa.
The average person would probably feel some amount of pity for someone with absolutely no access to entertainment (i.e. They would feel this person is not experiencing as full of a life as they could).
I feel some amount of pity for someone who feels this. "Oh god, little Johnny can't listen to the latest Britney Spears album!! Won't someone think of the children!!!!!!!!1111oneone"
That is why we are supposed to have rights (I dunno, I read in some ancient texts people used to have them?); so that your plumbing company can't install a camera in your bathroom to make sure no one but you is using the toilet they installed for you (they should buy their own!!). Oh but I forgot, you could just go shit in a hole out back.
If the plumbing company has in their contract that they will install a camera in your bathroom and you sign the contract, what exact right of yours have they broken? Don't like it, buy from a plumber who doesn't install a camera. If no plumbers sell without the camera, start an incredibly popular new plumbing company that sells without cameras and make a killing. The point of government enforcement of rights protection is simply to prevent the situtation where no plumber can provide the no-camera toilet.
There is absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing, stopping you from starting an optical media player company that has built-in copying in every single box you sell.
Sorry to be argumentative or confrontational, this is hurried and off the cuff.
It _should_ be illegal or at least invalid as a contract.
Why? Why limit the contracts under which a company can sell its product? It is not like we need DVD players to eat or breathe, or that there is only one provider of DVD players. Some people will trade not being able to copy a DVD for a lower price or higher quality.
Buy the products whose contracts you like if you care about contracts. Joe Consumer should not be legally protected from ignorance when purchasing a non-essential item such as a DVD player.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is both a good literary work and science fiction. There are, admittedly, few that are both. One of the reasons "scifi" fans praise many other books is because if they stuck to strictly literary science fiction they could read it all in a month.
Why?
Because writing good literary science fiction is hard. The people who are brilliant enough scientifically, creative enough in imagination, and able to pen a good story are few enough to begin with, and many of those that might fit the bill are busy being actual scientists. Carl Sagan wrote a decent piece of science fiction called Contact. I have a reasonably high belief that Stephen Hawking could write blisteringly good science fiction if he decided to pursue it.
I have high hopes for a book on my buy list called Building Harlequin's Moon by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper. Not that I haven't heard that there are flaws.
Of course, this may need to be tempered by the notion that I do like Mortal Passage quite a bit.
Pushing the issue will just force people back onto p2p networks, and with the RIAA/MPAA crusade to have them shut down - its only going to spawn the next-generation of p2p networks sooner.
Using the word "force" here I disagree with. Nobody forces anyone to listen to any music -- well, outside of the whole Noriega siege. What I mean is, people would still have the choice of copyright infringement downloads, legal downloads, and/or no downloads.
if "the worst" happens what in the hell makes you think you'll have nice USB-capable computers with which to read the stupid pen drive? is this some kind of joke? sure, have it on USB if you want, however I would go with inscribed metal for important data -- like, oh, I don't know... dog tags.
that's it. keep your USB pen drives. I'll keep my dog tags. lot of good either will really do us if "the worst" happens to NYC.
of giant businesses who seem to have no idea just how good they've got it.
this is 2005.
the fact that people are still paying for downloads at all (including me, I have well over 200 iTunes songs) in 2005, YEARS after Napster started the easy-as-pie method of music aquisition... do the music companies really want to go ahead with this? do they want to return to the days of talking about free tunes on Napster instead of paying for iTunes?
currently, copying a house or car costs about the same amount of money as building the original house or car. houses and cars are not digital media. neither are the vast majority of books currently sold.
that said, perhaps the game companies have some "business model" work to do, such as licensing vs. selling the games, implementing even more draconian copy restrictions, etc, etc. the reason that booksellers generally aren't getting "fleeced" by used book sales is because there isn't vast book piracy going on at this time. there is vast video game piracy going on, everyone knows it, everyone even acknowledges it.
I like the idea of using the controller to control sword fights. However with only the inertia of a few ounces of plastic weighted entirely in your hand instead of a few pounds of steel weighted out a few feet, it can only be -so- realistic. Maybe lightsabers, they appear to have very low inertia or mass other than the handle, but I think it is easy to imagine being able to move the controller faster than can be recognized by the receiver, particularly in a LAN environment.
how about a domain name registrar that takes all profits and sends them to charities like UNICEF and the EFF, instead of funding superbowl advertisements?
You have to pay someone for your domain name registration. It might as well be someone who donates all proceeds instead of superbowl ads sporting big-breasted women appearing before a mock congress.
For now I'm all by myself, and just a reseller, but the goal is to have a board, complete transparency, and full ICANN accreditation. I'm working on the $10K funding for the last part, I need some board members and some help. So for now, domain registration is $8.99, giving net margin of $2.00 from the upstream reseller for charity. With ICANN accreditation, plan is for $5.25 domain names, leaving $5.00 margin for charity.
While having more than "zero" character customization, certainly at least one major problem exists with WoW character customization.
Every character of the same gender and race is the same size and build.
Yes, there are limited and not particularly distinguishing "face" choices, "hair" choices, and "facial hair" choices -- but there are some, and certainly 90% of the people do not look the same. But put a helmet on, armor covering most of the exposed skin, and you cannot tell people apart other than their equipment.
It would be nice if you could slide two sliders, "height" and "build" to move from short to tall, skinny to fat. Those two changes alone would go a long way into customization. Adding more distinguishing facial features would be a huge improvement as well -- being able to pick your nose, mouth, chin, and eye shape seperately for example, even with a minimum of 6 choices for each you go from 6 different faces to 6^4 difference faces immediately.
(Disclaimer: the following is intended mostly as a joke.) Damn. If I could pay a nickel an hour to play I would only be racking up a dime a day, or $3 a month. I'm getting ripped for my other $12!! Where is my pay per hour plan!
On a more serious note, never, ever before has my sig been so truly on topic:
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but there is no guarantee the person you are fighting is similarly weighted.
there is only one person providing the "plumbing" in an example where copyright applies, and that person will only install it if you have the camera.
That is for the one specific work. I can certainly live without every copyrighted work on the planet, thank you.
After all, what is encryption and DRM except the invention of a new and intentionally undocumented format for computers/electronics to read?
Back to my original comment: If. People. Do. Not. Buy. DRM. Crap. Then. Companies. Will. Make. Non. DRM. Products. If they don't, then you can. Create a new competing optical media format that is not crippled with DRM. Start a music company and sell to all these thousands of people who care.
Nobody has a patent on "music" yet. Sure, Britney Spears "music" may be locked into DRM format, but that was her choice when she signed with her music company, and it is your choice to buy someone else's music that your computer can read.
Nobody being deprived of DRM media has been injured. "First, do no harm." You would upset my freedom to enter into contracts I choose to enter into, to cure exactly what malady? A false one, I protest. You can let up on the straw man, I am over here.
We might be able to argue that a "monopoly" operating system with DRM that gouges its customers on price is doing harm. After all, in today's world, it is _virtually_ a necessity to have a computer to work. But in _reality_ it is not either a necessity or a monopoly. Patent law complicates things, but there are alternative operating systems, and you can start your own operating system company any time you like. You might not be able to play Windows Media DRM files or run Microsoft Office 2008, but that's the point after all. People who care about playing Windows DRM media files or running Microsoft Office would not be your target audience.
It is when a Word document, for example, is necessary to be free (in the real sense, not a software sense) that we should be afraid. For example if electronic voting required a Microsoft-certified Internet Explorer 9 (for example) browser, then I would be in the front of the line with a shotgun and a harsh word for my representative. Well, maybe just the harsh words.
null does not always equal zero, idiot.
I am well aware of this fact. There is a difference between trying to make a point and writing a program.
Disagree. Such a contract (hidden shrink-wrap) itself is already not valid because there has not been any consideration for the contract. If it says on the box "there is a license inside you must accept" (advertised shrink-wrap) and you don't want to do it, don't buy the product. There are many thousands of people who will accept an advertised shrink-wrap contract, even without knowing the detailed terms, to get the product they want at the price they want.
Do not limit the freedom of people to enter into the contracts they choose, please. Argue for better contracts and better terms, and educate people on why they should care.
so make a different optical format that is not DVD.
Whoa....
Whether you like it or not, music or more importantly, entertainment, has become what I call a "virtual" necessity for the average standard of living in our culture.
Whoa.
The average person would probably feel some amount of pity for someone with absolutely no access to entertainment (i.e. They would feel this person is not experiencing as full of a life as they could).
I feel some amount of pity for someone who feels this. "Oh god, little Johnny can't listen to the latest Britney Spears album!! Won't someone think of the children!!!!!!!!1111oneone"
That is why we are supposed to have rights (I dunno, I read in some ancient texts people used to have them?); so that your plumbing company can't install a camera in your bathroom to make sure no one but you is using the toilet they installed for you (they should buy their own!!). Oh but I forgot, you could just go shit in a hole out back.
If the plumbing company has in their contract that they will install a camera in your bathroom and you sign the contract, what exact right of yours have they broken? Don't like it, buy from a plumber who doesn't install a camera. If no plumbers sell without the camera, start an incredibly popular new plumbing company that sells without cameras and make a killing. The point of government enforcement of rights protection is simply to prevent the situtation where no plumber can provide the no-camera toilet.
There is absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing, stopping you from starting an optical media player company that has built-in copying in every single box you sell.
Sorry to be argumentative or confrontational, this is hurried and off the cuff.
It _should_ be illegal or at least invalid as a contract.
Why? Why limit the contracts under which a company can sell its product? It is not like we need DVD players to eat or breathe, or that there is only one provider of DVD players. Some people will trade not being able to copy a DVD for a lower price or higher quality.
Buy the products whose contracts you like if you care about contracts. Joe Consumer should not be legally protected from ignorance when purchasing a non-essential item such as a DVD player.
then don't buy DRM.
it really, really is that simple.
if people don't buy DRM, companies will make products without it and lobby to remove laws stopping them from selling the products people will buy.
however the chance of Joe Consumer giving a shit == null.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is both a good literary work and science fiction. There are, admittedly, few that are both. One of the reasons "scifi" fans praise many other books is because if they stuck to strictly literary science fiction they could read it all in a month.
Why?
Because writing good literary science fiction is hard. The people who are brilliant enough scientifically, creative enough in imagination, and able to pen a good story are few enough to begin with, and many of those that might fit the bill are busy being actual scientists. Carl Sagan wrote a decent piece of science fiction called Contact. I have a reasonably high belief that Stephen Hawking could write blisteringly good science fiction if he decided to pursue it.
I have high hopes for a book on my buy list called Building Harlequin's Moon by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper. Not that I haven't heard that there are flaws.
Of course, this may need to be tempered by the notion that I do like Mortal Passage quite a bit.
Pushing the issue will just force people back onto p2p networks, and with the RIAA/MPAA crusade to have them shut down - its only going to spawn the next-generation of p2p networks sooner.
Using the word "force" here I disagree with. Nobody forces anyone to listen to any music -- well, outside of the whole Noriega siege. What I mean is, people would still have the choice of copyright infringement downloads, legal downloads, and/or no downloads.
Yeah, pretty much just Sharpie the SSN on the forearm and wait for the inevitable.
Finally, a sane response.
if "the worst" happens what in the hell makes you think you'll have nice USB-capable computers with which to read the stupid pen drive? is this some kind of joke? sure, have it on USB if you want, however I would go with inscribed metal for important data -- like, oh, I don't know... dog tags.
that's it. keep your USB pen drives. I'll keep my dog tags. lot of good either will really do us if "the worst" happens to NYC.
and the "swim for it" addendum? come on.
of giant businesses who seem to have no idea just how good they've got it.
this is 2005.
the fact that people are still paying for downloads at all (including me, I have well over 200 iTunes songs) in 2005, YEARS after Napster started the easy-as-pie method of music aquisition... do the music companies really want to go ahead with this? do they want to return to the days of talking about free tunes on Napster instead of paying for iTunes?
currently, copying a house or car costs about the same amount of money as building the original house or car. houses and cars are not digital media. neither are the vast majority of books currently sold.
that said, perhaps the game companies have some "business model" work to do, such as licensing vs. selling the games, implementing even more draconian copy restrictions, etc, etc. the reason that booksellers generally aren't getting "fleeced" by used book sales is because there isn't vast book piracy going on at this time. there is vast video game piracy going on, everyone knows it, everyone even acknowledges it.
I like the idea of using the controller to control sword fights. However with only the inertia of a few ounces of plastic weighted entirely in your hand instead of a few pounds of steel weighted out a few feet, it can only be -so- realistic. Maybe lightsabers, they appear to have very low inertia or mass other than the handle, but I think it is easy to imagine being able to move the controller faster than can be recognized by the receiver, particularly in a LAN environment.
calm down. if you don't like a comment then *skin over it*.
don't have either system, don't care about any reviews for games on either system.
"Is 'frags per round' going to be the batting average of the 21st century?"
No. It's really not. Really.
so should I wait to buy the iPod nano or not?
how about a domain name registrar that takes all profits and sends them to charities like UNICEF and the EFF, instead of funding superbowl advertisements?
http://paycan.net/
You have to pay someone for your domain name registration. It might as well be someone who donates all proceeds instead of superbowl ads sporting big-breasted women appearing before a mock congress.
For now I'm all by myself, and just a reseller, but the goal is to have a board, complete transparency, and full ICANN accreditation. I'm working on the $10K funding for the last part, I need some board members and some help. So for now, domain registration is $8.99, giving net margin of $2.00 from the upstream reseller for charity. With ICANN accreditation, plan is for $5.25 domain names, leaving $5.00 margin for charity.
it's the marriage's children (i.e. us) who are left to suffer the most.
While having more than "zero" character customization, certainly at least one major problem exists with WoW character customization.
Every character of the same gender and race is the same size and build.
Yes, there are limited and not particularly distinguishing "face" choices, "hair" choices, and "facial hair" choices -- but there are some, and certainly 90% of the people do not look the same. But put a helmet on, armor covering most of the exposed skin, and you cannot tell people apart other than their equipment.
It would be nice if you could slide two sliders, "height" and "build" to move from short to tall, skinny to fat. Those two changes alone would go a long way into customization. Adding more distinguishing facial features would be a huge improvement as well -- being able to pick your nose, mouth, chin, and eye shape seperately for example, even with a minimum of 6 choices for each you go from 6 different faces to 6^4 difference faces immediately.
(Disclaimer: the following is intended mostly as a joke.) Damn. If I could pay a nickel an hour to play I would only be racking up a dime a day, or $3 a month. I'm getting ripped for my other $12!! Where is my pay per hour plan!
On a more serious note, never, ever before has my sig been so truly on topic:
That's what I get for trying to make slashdot's "URL" tag into well-formed HTML. I should have known better.
I actually much prefer Stewart's reconstruction of the 50's art exhibit which led to his "galaxy of elements" thing:
1 22917/2122918/2122942/Longman.jpg/
http://img.slate.msn.com/media/1/123125/2093564/2
But above it all I prefer the current table by far.