Yes it does, and my use of mp3 files would never get me a conviction. The preeminence of the constitution (U.S.) means that 'fair use' has trumped all the wankers time after time.
Copying multiple full albums and then offering those same pirated albums up for download by other people is most certainly not covered under "fair use" by any definition of the term. Look up what fair use actually is before you start spouting nonsense.
Intellectual 'property' is not property unless is has a corresponding physical objectivity.
Do you have any backing for that claim? Why should I respect your physical property but not your intellectual property? Keep in mind that there are plenty of people who disagree with you on both sides - on one side a communist would disagree that either sort of property is really a right to have, while many people think both are. Why should I accept your claim that physical property is and intellectual property is not (rather than either of the other two claims)?
Well, it seems that the *majority* of U.S. internet users seem to be voicing their opinion on the issue with each download.
Remember, Napster has more users than George W. Bush got votes.
I do not give a shit what the *majority* of U.S. internet users want - I care what the *majority* of the country wants. If indeed these Napster users form more votes than George W. Bush got, why didn't they vote for someone else? Merely expressing an opinion does not impress me - you need to work within the system to vote representatives in who agree with your causes. If you get outvoted, too bad. For the record, the majority of U.S. citizens support copyright laws (and other intellectual property laws).
Napster is not, nor ever will be, murder. Don't push the arguement to extremes. This is the reason for Godwin's Law.
The argument I was responding to was the "consent of the governed" argument. I was using an extreme case to illustrate the how ludicrous the claim that one may disobey a law one disagrees with is. It is equally invalid reasoning with less extreme cases, but since the author of that claim made a broad claim about "consent," I used one of the cases in which it is easier to understand its error. In effect, the author of that claim had really meant to say "I can break laws only relating to Napster because I disagree with them," but instead attempted to invoke grand (but flawed) principles (which are flawed for the reasons my examination of an extreme case indicates).
And Godwin's law has nothing whatsoever to do with this subject - it involves ad hominem attacks on people calling them Nazis, and it not a "law" so much as a general response to the over-use of such attacks.
No, the government rules with the consent of the majority of the people. Your not consenting to copyright does not make you any more free to violate it than my not consenting to anti-murder laws makes me free to kill you.
On many Windows machine, a file named *.mp3.vbs will show up with an mp3 icon, yet when double-clicked on by an unsuspecting user will run the Visual Basic Script it contains, so actually embedding viruses in mp3s isn't necessary.
The problem is that they are not selling you simply a specified bandwidth. They are selling you a line with the ability to go up to that bandwidth, with pricing on condition that you do not run servers or NAT. If you want to run servers or NAT, they offer pricing plans which allow that. It's rather disingenous to take the no-NAT pricing plan and then complain that no NAT is allowed.
I agree with what you're saying, and an example that popped into my head was Leonardo DaVinci. His extensive research on human anatomy was science, not art. While some of his anatomical drawings and sketches might have been creative or beautiful, they ware still not art. However, his rather famous drawing with a male figure inside a circle and a square is indeed art - its end goal was artistic expression.
I don't see this as being a "blurring of the lines," merely a statement that there are some people who are both artists and programmers (just as there are people who are both doctors and musicians - does this mean that somehow they are blurring the lines between the medical and musical fields?). Map creators are simply people who have technical skills and artistic skills, and can apply both simultaneously.
Then the story evaporated like Helium-II on a hot stove.
That's a rather odd analogy to make, since Helium is gaseous up until very low temperatures. You don't need a hot stove to evaporate it - you could evaporate liquid helium in your freezer.
The strange thing about all this is that Open Source, (and even moreso the GPL's provisions that changes must also be Open Source) is very firmly based in the concept of copyright law and licensing. If Microsoft favors limiting Open Source's legality, they favor limits upon how a copyright holder can license their code, which seems to be antithetical to what they usually favor.
This is an issue that's hotly debated in nearly every commercial field. You could replace this headline with "Extinction of the Mom & Pop Coffee Shops?" or with "Extincting of the Mom & Pop Grocers?" or with any number of other things. In general mom & pop type stores are the first into niche markets, but once the markets become large and mainstream larger corporations become dominant, as they are able to provide service at lower costs. People always complain about this, but the truth is that the people themselves are causing it. Would you go to a family-owned grocery store and pay $1 for a tomato when you could go to the local supermarket and pay $0.70? Would you pay a mom & pop ISP $20/month for service when you can pay earthlink $10? Most people answer "no" to these questions, which is why the mom & pop businesses do not survive.
Of course the problem is that MPEG2 is a rather crappy format, as the low quality of this enourmous 1GB file will show you. An equivalent-quality DivX;-) encoded file would be more in the range of 500MB.
Would you mind reposting the movie in a compressed streaming format that is not platform-specific? Apart from the fact that a 1 GB uncompressed (or at least badly-compressed; you can fit over 3 hours of DivX in that size, and i doubt this is a 3-hour presentation) stream is rather crappy to begin with, having it being only playable on some non-standard player available only on the Slashcode servers and not ported to anything other than Linux is even worse.
Well, lately they've been paying between 30 cents/kWh and $1.00/kWh for spot-market power. I highly doubt you've ever paid close to that on one of your bills.
No, because Helix was a name just as Ximian is - they're both pointers. The data pointed to by Helix is now pointed to by Ximian (Ximian = Helix;) and now the Helix pointer/name is no longer used.
This is what is generally known as "high-level emulation." Yes, WINE does not emulate Windows binaries on a low instruction-by-instruction level, but it emulates the Windows OS functionality through its own implemention of many of the API calls. This is nearly identical to the way in which UltraHLE ("Ultra High Level Emulator") emulates N64 games on the PC.
Well, you can leave the hostnames so people can manually choose "ftp.au.kernel.org" if they so wish, but set it up so the generic ftp.kernel.org load-balances to the nearest mirror (for those who decide not to pick a mirror themselves).
Of course I suppose if they can handle all these requests piling up on the main ftp.kernel.org site then that's their business...
Any particular reason the kernel distribution system still relies exclusively on manual selection of mirrors by hostname? What's wrong with an automated load-balancing setup?
This confuses me. In early versions of Napster (Beta 5 or so) resuming worked fine. It'd even search for files of the same size to resume from if the person you were downloading from got disconnected! At the very least you could resume manually. Then inexplicably the option disappeared, replaced with "overwrite" or "rename" as the only two options.
But anyway I just use FileNavigator now. It has resuming that works, lets you search for more than just mp3s on servers that support other types of files, and lets you connect to multiple servers at once (go to napigator.com and add some of the servers there to your FileNavigator setup and you'll get lots of results in searches).
For Windows, FileNavigator is a full-featured Napster clone that can also share non-mp3 files (movies, music videos, etc.) on servers that support them (i.e. OpenNap servers).
Slashdot Mirror
Copying multiple full albums and then offering those same pirated albums up for download by other people is most certainly not covered under "fair use" by any definition of the term. Look up what fair use actually is before you start spouting nonsense.
Intellectual 'property' is not property unless is has a corresponding physical objectivity.
Do you have any backing for that claim? Why should I respect your physical property but not your intellectual property? Keep in mind that there are plenty of people who disagree with you on both sides - on one side a communist would disagree that either sort of property is really a right to have, while many people think both are. Why should I accept your claim that physical property is and intellectual property is not (rather than either of the other two claims)?
Remember, Napster has more users than George W. Bush got votes.
I do not give a shit what the *majority* of U.S. internet users want - I care what the *majority* of the country wants. If indeed these Napster users form more votes than George W. Bush got, why didn't they vote for someone else? Merely expressing an opinion does not impress me - you need to work within the system to vote representatives in who agree with your causes. If you get outvoted, too bad. For the record, the majority of U.S. citizens support copyright laws (and other intellectual property laws).
Napster is not, nor ever will be, murder. Don't push the arguement to extremes. This is the reason for Godwin's Law.
The argument I was responding to was the "consent of the governed" argument. I was using an extreme case to illustrate the how ludicrous the claim that one may disobey a law one disagrees with is. It is equally invalid reasoning with less extreme cases, but since the author of that claim made a broad claim about "consent," I used one of the cases in which it is easier to understand its error. In effect, the author of that claim had really meant to say "I can break laws only relating to Napster because I disagree with them," but instead attempted to invoke grand (but flawed) principles (which are flawed for the reasons my examination of an extreme case indicates).
And Godwin's law has nothing whatsoever to do with this subject - it involves ad hominem attacks on people calling them Nazis, and it not a "law" so much as a general response to the over-use of such attacks.
No, the government rules with the consent of the majority of the people. Your not consenting to copyright does not make you any more free to violate it than my not consenting to anti-murder laws makes me free to kill you.
On many Windows machine, a file named *.mp3.vbs will show up with an mp3 icon, yet when double-clicked on by an unsuspecting user will run the Visual Basic Script it contains, so actually embedding viruses in mp3s isn't necessary.
The problem is that they are not selling you simply a specified bandwidth. They are selling you a line with the ability to go up to that bandwidth, with pricing on condition that you do not run servers or NAT. If you want to run servers or NAT, they offer pricing plans which allow that. It's rather disingenous to take the no-NAT pricing plan and then complain that no NAT is allowed.
While we're on the subject of BBS nostalgia, check out Remembrance of Things Past, an excellent Cult of the Dead Cow T-File from 1998.
I agree with what you're saying, and an example that popped into my head was Leonardo DaVinci. His extensive research on human anatomy was science, not art. While some of his anatomical drawings and sketches might have been creative or beautiful, they ware still not art. However, his rather famous drawing with a male figure inside a circle and a square is indeed art - its end goal was artistic expression.
I don't see this as being a "blurring of the lines," merely a statement that there are some people who are both artists and programmers (just as there are people who are both doctors and musicians - does this mean that somehow they are blurring the lines between the medical and musical fields?). Map creators are simply people who have technical skills and artistic skills, and can apply both simultaneously.
That's a rather odd analogy to make, since Helium is gaseous up until very low temperatures. You don't need a hot stove to evaporate it - you could evaporate liquid helium in your freezer.
You have no chance to survive make your time!
Yes, but the original DOS defrag was licensed from Symantec.
The strange thing about all this is that Open Source, (and even moreso the GPL's provisions that changes must also be Open Source) is very firmly based in the concept of copyright law and licensing. If Microsoft favors limiting Open Source's legality, they favor limits upon how a copyright holder can license their code, which seems to be antithetical to what they usually favor.
This is an issue that's hotly debated in nearly every commercial field. You could replace this headline with "Extinction of the Mom & Pop Coffee Shops?" or with "Extincting of the Mom & Pop Grocers?" or with any number of other things. In general mom & pop type stores are the first into niche markets, but once the markets become large and mainstream larger corporations become dominant, as they are able to provide service at lower costs. People always complain about this, but the truth is that the people themselves are causing it. Would you go to a family-owned grocery store and pay $1 for a tomato when you could go to the local supermarket and pay $0.70? Would you pay a mom & pop ISP $20/month for service when you can pay earthlink $10? Most people answer "no" to these questions, which is why the mom & pop businesses do not survive.
Of course the problem is that MPEG2 is a rather crappy format, as the low quality of this enourmous 1GB file will show you. An equivalent-quality DivX ;-) encoded file would be more in the range of 500MB.
Would you mind reposting the movie in a compressed streaming format that is not platform-specific? Apart from the fact that a 1 GB uncompressed (or at least badly-compressed; you can fit over 3 hours of DivX in that size, and i doubt this is a 3-hour presentation) stream is rather crappy to begin with, having it being only playable on some non-standard player available only on the Slashcode servers and not ported to anything other than Linux is even worse.
Well, lately they've been paying between 30 cents/kWh and $1.00/kWh for spot-market power. I highly doubt you've ever paid close to that on one of your bills.
Yay for taking metaphors too far...
No, we're assigning Ximian to point to the data formerly known as Helix prior to getting rid of Helix. =P
This is what is generally known as "high-level emulation." Yes, WINE does not emulate Windows binaries on a low instruction-by-instruction level, but it emulates the Windows OS functionality through its own implemention of many of the API calls. This is nearly identical to the way in which UltraHLE ("Ultra High Level Emulator") emulates N64 games on the PC.
Well, you can leave the hostnames so people can manually choose "ftp.au.kernel.org" if they so wish, but set it up so the generic ftp.kernel.org load-balances to the nearest mirror (for those who decide not to pick a mirror themselves).
Of course I suppose if they can handle all these requests piling up on the main ftp.kernel.org site then that's their business...
Any particular reason the kernel distribution system still relies exclusively on manual selection of mirrors by hostname? What's wrong with an automated load-balancing setup?
I think the real versioning system is "anything less than x.x.20 is unstable, and anything with an odd middle version number is even more unstable."
This confuses me. In early versions of Napster (Beta 5 or so) resuming worked fine. It'd even search for files of the same size to resume from if the person you were downloading from got disconnected! At the very least you could resume manually. Then inexplicably the option disappeared, replaced with "overwrite" or "rename" as the only two options.
But anyway I just use FileNavigator now. It has resuming that works, lets you search for more than just mp3s on servers that support other types of files, and lets you connect to multiple servers at once (go to napigator.com and add some of the servers there to your FileNavigator setup and you'll get lots of results in searches).
No.
For Windows, FileNavigator is a full-featured Napster clone that can also share non-mp3 files (movies, music videos, etc.) on servers that support them (i.e. OpenNap servers).