Personally, I see nothing wrong with the notion that only those who can afford to do so should be professional musicians.
If they can get people to pay to hear them play, all well and good.
If they can persuade people to pay money for recordings og their work, even better.
But for a situation to arise where people are forced to pay where a free alternative is available is totally illiberal and against all rational concepts of a free market.
Before copyright, only the best music survived, because it was worth supporting (in an abstract, not an economic sense).
Now we have a morass of pop-pap and gangsta-rap, thrash metal and tuneless, inane crap thrust down our throats by the marketing fools, and they expect us to part with our money like good little drones.
And I'm not a classical music snob - I merely prefer to listen to properly crafted music played by musicians who have a love of what they do, rather than mechanically generated studio pap.
Patronage - let's go back to it. There was plenty of music around then, all played by real people who ate, payed rent and enjoyed life.
It is a question of whether people are willing to pay for the utility that is more relevant - and 'piracy', copyright infringement, filesharing, etc. are merely a market response to the overpricing of this particular utility.
Morally, you may have a point, but then the market has no morality, nor should it have.
If people wish to distort free markets by making laws, then it is only fair that this should be shouted loudly from the rooftops.
Your Honour, my client was so excited by the prospect of increased penis girth that he inadvertently leant on his 'F5' key while reading the plaintiff's web page.
Not sure whether you make this fine distinction in the US, but in the UK it could be regarded as slander.
Slander applies to the maligning of a person in private communications, libel in published form.
If there is even the slightest evidence for the accusation, slander cases tend to fail.
Re:The Heart of the Matter, right here...
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 1
The real issues are twofold - firstly, the ludicrous extensions to copyright granted by Congress, and secondly, the use of FUD on the part of copyright owners to divert attention from the fact that their products are overpriced and extremely vulnerable to small changes in discrewtionary spending.
I'm not a trader of MP3s, and I strongly disapprove of people depriving others of income they would otherwise have had.
But the decline in sales of CDs is not obviously due to people trading MP3 files, it is more to do with the decline in discretionary spending in economies where public confidence is low.
And the idea that copyright, a principle originally intended to allow people to make a living through writing, should be extended in perpetuity needs a lot more justification before I will believe it.
Add to this the manifest corruption of the political system that produces the bad laws, and although your position has merit, its main asset to the copyright owners is that it allows bad law to be made acceptable to the majority, by a simple appeal to the general idea of property as a 'good thing'.
Leave the UK out of it - we got no help at all for reconstruction after WWII, and it was only a year or so ago that we finally finished paying off the generous loans that the US gave us when we were (with the Russians) the only bastion against Hitler.
We don't owe the US a damn thing - in fact if we'd had the same treatment as the Germans and Japs got, we'd have a much healthier economy than we do.
I'm not saying the US is bad - you're just not as good as you think you are, and you certainly didn't do the UK any favours.
Yeah, they're claiming it is 'derivative work' and therefore covered under their copyright and their interpretation of the AT&T license.
The fact that they are claiming the copyright on the SMP implementation is either worrying (if they pull enough wool over the eyes of the relevant judges) or laughable - personally I can't believe that IBM would sign a contract that assigns copyright on all derivative works to anyone other than IBM, and if they did sign such a contract, they will have been damned sure that it can be shown to be unenforceable.
This current bunch of IP-farmers that run SCO are no better than parasites, and it's time the *nix world was deloused.
In current usage, there are around 30-50,000 words in English.
If you meet an English speaker with a vocabulary of 30,000 words, you have just met somebody with a knowledge of the tongue equal to Shakespeare.
Old French, on the other hand, had two dialects, Langue d'Oc, and Langue d'Oi (based on the words used for 'yes' in each language).
Langue d'Oc, being the preferred poetic language of the day, had a vocabulary of around 80,000 words.
The descendants of this tongue are Catalan and some of the Southern French dialects, which have lost much of the richness of the mother tongue.
It's not easy to read, but if you know some French and Spanish, and have some imagination, Occitan (the old Langue d'Oc) is a wonderful poetic tongue.
Michael Crichton fans may know that the film of TimeLine, which if they've done it properly should have some Occitan in it, is due out this autumn (fall).
There was a lot more richness in old languages than is generally seen now - the average holiday pot-boiler novel has a vocabulary of less than 5,000 words, to allow the masses to consume it.
It is estimated that in Shakespeare's time, more than half the urban population of the UK could read his plays and poems.
We have lost too much to the dumbers-down, and need to revive some of the million lost words and phrases from English.
yep - and 'logiciels' for software, 'donnees' for data, 'base de donnees' for database, etc. etc.
So what's wrong with that?
Hell, most English speaking folks still refer to hard disk space (correctly, if you think about it) as 'memory'.
It's their language, and if you need to learn it, you will.
If not, then you can carry on drinking the six packs and eating burgers until even a Cadillac (named after a Frenchman, in case you were wondering) is too small for your fat American asses.
We got one at work a while back, with a view to using them as a simple way of storing data for prepopulating and entry form for an application.
And yes - the same kit could be used for Satellite TV cards.
The proper course of action is to let them take you to court, then contest it on the basis that they have to prove that you have used the equipment to 'steal' their service.
IMHO. if they can't pay for their service through advertising, they're onto a loser, since it is almost always cheaper to circumvent protection measures than it is to pay exorbitant subscription fees.
In 1989, we didn't have the same expectations of speed out of a PC as we do now.
I used to produce (ca. 1988) the (illustrated) price lists for my employer at the time - data transferred from a Wang onto a Compaq 'portable', imported into 1-2-3, manipulated a bit, and then transferred into Ventura, which produced the pages to send to the printers.
And things took time. Lots of time. Go away and make a cup of tea time.
But we didn't expect any more, so it was OK.
Even in 1990, the acquisition of a PS/2 with a whole 2MB RAM was a godsend, as StatGraphics only took 5 minutes to crunch a typical dataset rather than the previous 20.
No, the Romans were tolerant of other religions so long as they could assimilate them.
Christianity (and Druidism in Britain) were not susceptible to assimilation, with their belief in a single God (or the Trinity, in both cases) being the major obstacle. Several parts of the older British religion(s) were assimilated (Sulis-Minerva, for example), but both Druidism and Christianity were a threat to the Roman mindset, and were ruthlessly persecuted.
Mr Sakamura is, in fact, being very scathing towards Bill Gates - we don't see that, because he is scrupulously polite in doing so.
What he says is: Gates is entitled to be a capitalist (but that course is inherently wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
If they can get people to pay to hear them play, all well and good.
If they can persuade people to pay money for recordings og their work, even better.
But for a situation to arise where people are forced to pay where a free alternative is available is totally illiberal and against all rational concepts of a free market.
Before copyright, only the best music survived, because it was worth supporting (in an abstract, not an economic sense).
Now we have a morass of pop-pap and gangsta-rap, thrash metal and tuneless, inane crap thrust down our throats by the marketing fools, and they expect us to part with our money like good little drones.
And I'm not a classical music snob - I merely prefer to listen to properly crafted music played by musicians who have a love of what they do, rather than mechanically generated studio pap.
Patronage - let's go back to it. There was plenty of music around then, all played by real people who ate, payed rent and enjoyed life.
It is a question of whether people are willing to pay for the utility that is more relevant - and 'piracy', copyright infringement, filesharing, etc. are merely a market response to the overpricing of this particular utility.
Morally, you may have a point, but then the market has no morality, nor should it have.
If people wish to distort free markets by making laws, then it is only fair that this should be shouted loudly from the rooftops.
Your car is still your car - it's just that IBM used SCO's car as a testbed.
Viewed in that light, SCO's claims look even sillier than they did yesterday.
I think the word you're looking for is hypocrisy
7. New supply of potatoes just in. Apply online now for your priority order!
Your Honour, my client was so excited by the prospect of increased penis girth that he inadvertently leant on his 'F5' key while reading the plaintiff's web page.
Slander applies to the maligning of a person in private communications, libel in published form.
If there is even the slightest evidence for the accusation, slander cases tend to fail.
I'm not a trader of MP3s, and I strongly disapprove of people depriving others of income they would otherwise have had.
But the decline in sales of CDs is not obviously due to people trading MP3 files, it is more to do with the decline in discretionary spending in economies where public confidence is low.
And the idea that copyright, a principle originally intended to allow people to make a living through writing, should be extended in perpetuity needs a lot more justification before I will believe it.
Add to this the manifest corruption of the political system that produces the bad laws, and although your position has merit, its main asset to the copyright owners is that it allows bad law to be made acceptable to the majority, by a simple appeal to the general idea of property as a 'good thing'.
We don't owe the US a damn thing - in fact if we'd had the same treatment as the Germans and Japs got, we'd have a much healthier economy than we do.
I'm not saying the US is bad - you're just not as good as you think you are, and you certainly didn't do the UK any favours.
The fact that they are claiming the copyright on the SMP implementation is either worrying (if they pull enough wool over the eyes of the relevant judges) or laughable - personally I can't believe that IBM would sign a contract that assigns copyright on all derivative works to anyone other than IBM, and if they did sign such a contract, they will have been damned sure that it can be shown to be unenforceable.
This current bunch of IP-farmers that run SCO are no better than parasites, and it's time the *nix world was deloused.
might be more true to the original sentiment.
If you meet an English speaker with a vocabulary of 30,000 words, you have just met somebody with a knowledge of the tongue equal to Shakespeare.
Old French, on the other hand, had two dialects, Langue d'Oc, and Langue d'Oi (based on the words used for 'yes' in each language).
Langue d'Oc, being the preferred poetic language of the day, had a vocabulary of around 80,000 words.
The descendants of this tongue are Catalan and some of the Southern French dialects, which have lost much of the richness of the mother tongue.
It's not easy to read, but if you know some French and Spanish, and have some imagination, Occitan (the old Langue d'Oc) is a wonderful poetic tongue.
Michael Crichton fans may know that the film of TimeLine, which if they've done it properly should have some Occitan in it, is due out this autumn (fall).
There was a lot more richness in old languages than is generally seen now - the average holiday pot-boiler novel has a vocabulary of less than 5,000 words, to allow the masses to consume it.
It is estimated that in Shakespeare's time, more than half the urban population of the UK could read his plays and poems.
We have lost too much to the dumbers-down, and need to revive some of the million lost words and phrases from English.
So what's wrong with that?
Hell, most English speaking folks still refer to hard disk space (correctly, if you think about it) as 'memory'.
It's their language, and if you need to learn it, you will.
If not, then you can carry on drinking the six packs and eating burgers until even a Cadillac (named after a Frenchman, in case you were wondering) is too small for your fat American asses.
Motto of the French Navy?
A'l'eau, c'est l'heure!
I wouldn't waste my time for a hairdresser's car
;-).
We got one at work a while back, with a view to using them as a simple way of storing data for prepopulating and entry form for an application.
And yes - the same kit could be used for Satellite TV cards.
The proper course of action is to let them take you to court, then contest it on the basis that they have to prove that you have used the equipment to 'steal' their service.
IMHO. if they can't pay for their service through advertising, they're onto a loser, since it is almost always cheaper to circumvent protection measures than it is to pay exorbitant subscription fees.
Leeches.
Kind of like the missus, really...
I used to produce (ca. 1988) the (illustrated) price lists for my employer at the time - data transferred from a Wang onto a Compaq 'portable', imported into 1-2-3, manipulated a bit, and then transferred into Ventura, which produced the pages to send to the printers.
And things took time. Lots of time. Go away and make a cup of tea time.
But we didn't expect any more, so it was OK.
Even in 1990, the acquisition of a PS/2 with a whole 2MB RAM was a godsend, as StatGraphics only took 5 minutes to crunch a typical dataset rather than the previous 20.
Christianity (and Druidism in Britain) were not susceptible to assimilation, with their belief in a single God (or the Trinity, in both cases) being the major obstacle. Several parts of the older British religion(s) were assimilated (Sulis-Minerva, for example), but both Druidism and Christianity were a threat to the Roman mindset, and were ruthlessly persecuted.
Mr Sakamura is, in fact, being very scathing towards Bill Gates - we don't see that, because he is scrupulously polite in doing so.
What he says is: Gates is entitled to be a capitalist (but that course is inherently wrong).
Is it a sensible strategy to undermine your supplier?
Is it a deliberate strategy, with the aim of picking up the infrastructure on the cheap?
Personally, I can't help thinking that they are shooting themselves in the foot - their VOIP offering appears purely parasitic to me.
(13) Whalemeat sushi
(14) Fugu - like Russian Roulette, but tastier.
And what sort of price do you expect for steak when each bull has his own masseur?
Add cherry blossom, Mt Fuji, and the bullet train, and I think it's a winner, myself.
Over here, at least, it's labour shortage.