Another point to the affordability issue is that a fair amount of software piracy occurs because "I needed the software but I couldn't afford it". If your students want to do any kind of work at home, they'll want the same software you use in class. You can protect them from a potential run-in with the BSA by using the open-source products.
Reminds me of the old joke about why a shark won't attack a lawyer...In this case, the RIAA is at least being smarter than SCO grp. Anyone who sues IBM over IP either has to have an iron-clad case or be a nutcase. I think this is more strategy on the RIAA's part than cowardice: they're trying to get the legal precedents established against the second-string before taking on the big-leaguers.
Even from the first pic, Star Wars was always about spectacle more than plot or dialog. The characters were always stereotypes and the story line was never profound. The difference is that in 1977, the CGI and modeling detail were something new and had a Wow! factor that had never been seen before in film. Apart from the sheer pace of the action shots, itt was the first time a film successfully communicated the sheer magnitude of space and the structures required to support it. Even Star Trek failed to give you a concrete vision of the size of the Enterprise, simply because they didn't dare shoot such a close-up of the models they were using. But the pan of the battle-cruiser in the Star Wars opening was simply awe-inspiring.
So from a cinematography standpoint, I can't say that it ever jumped the shark. The audience just developed a tolerance for special effects that made us require more of the drug to achieve the same sense of wonder.
From a story-telling standpoint, it was never high art, but I think that Empire and Return add enough backstory to the original that they add value to it. The second trilogy was just milking the cash cow. Kind of like Frank Herbert writing new Dune books 10 years later, or Robert Jordan's series that doesn't end. So episode 1 definitely jumps the shark.
I'm no fan of copyright as it exists today, but just because I don't believe entertainers should necessarily be fabulously wealthy doesn't mean I want them to die broke and penniless, and that did happen a lot more prior to copyright.
You mean like all those blues artists of the 20th century that got so fabulously rich from the royalties the record and music publishing companies paid to them (especially the ones that had their music covered by white artists like Elvis)? The media publishers have never been about rewarding the artist even when copyright terms were more reasonable.
I see two big prongs to attack:
1) The Copyright Alliance initiative is particularly vulnerable to a grass-roots counterattack. Write to the relevant candidates, emphasizing that the sponsors of the copyright alliance are asking them to help the artists, when many of those companies are notorious for not paying royalties to the artists once they lock up the rights. Make note that the government shouldn't be in the business of doing investigations on behalf of private parties, and based on current evidence, copyright owners and their agents have more than enough resources and funding available to protect their interests. The real issue the copyright holders have had is that they have been incompetent in putting together a chain of evidence that meets judicial scrutiny.
2) Reduce their funding by not buying the products of the companies that fund the copyright alliance. There's already one thread at AskSlashdot about sites where indie/non-RIAA music artists are available. Look for similar sites offering video and books. This is like thinking green. You can't eliminate all your greenhouse gas emissions, but you can vastly improve your energy efficiency. Apply the same thinking to your media consumption. Borrow from the local library. Take advantage of the legal alternatives on the internet. Rent instead of buying. If you have to buy, wait until the item is in the discount bin at 4.99.
Re:Simpler...(and Geekier than thou)
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 1
Ever since my daughter emptied most of a bottle of Elmer's glue on the lap desk that I used to use (fortunately, the laptop wasn't on it at the time), I've had to use the box I still have from an old dual Pentium II SuperMicro motherboard as a lap desk. It actually is just as comfortable as the original in terms of positioning and insulates the heat even better than the original thanks to the huge air cavity in the middle.
the sticker shock of $2400 it just drives home the point that the technology isn't ready for prime-time
Back in the day, HP sold scads of laser printers to small businesses in this price range. $2400 isn't in your average hobbyist's pocket book, but it's low enough to open up a "We Make It" store-front in your local strip mall. Of course, there's no guarantee how long such businesses will last. If the price on these things drops into the $1200 range or lower, anyone who really needs the fab service would probably buy their own. That's probably a closer future than nano-tech vats converting garbage to gold.
I see what you mean about the bolded sentence. When you combine that with the fact that you have to go to one of their sales pitches to learn more details, it just screams "high-pressure marketing". Me, I'll just wait till it's on special at normal suppliers.
The only flaw in your logic is that the lawsuits and DMCA and all the other actions the MP/RI/AA have taken were all in reaction to the drop in cashflow that was already occuring. Unless you can cut their cashflow down so far that the distribution companies can't afford to fund the MP/RI/AA, they are likely to just extend their strategy even further.
On the other hand, think of all the money we'll save if we stop spending our money on this crap.
According to The Register the judge's instructions seem to be a bit extreme:
US District Judge Michael Davis ruled the labels did not have to prove the songs were transfered for Thomas to be held liable. The act of making the songs available is enough to constitute copyright infringement, he said.
It sounds like he's saying just the act of storing them on her hard drive constitutes copyright infringement. This could be grounds for an appeal if she has any funding left.
Quantum Vaporware. In fact, isn't vaporware in general a quantum phenomenon? A software maker pre-announces a product, but we are unable to tell if the product actually exists until it is released...
with their efforts to try to get immunity. Based on the way the FBI under ex-AG Gonzalez treated everyone else, they probably threatened to expose something else AT&T had done in the past and shut down their business. So some manager decided to "follow orders" and let the FBI have their way.
Then it turns out (oops), that the FBI themselves get busted for the spying activity and AT&T is left holding the civil liabillity bag. I _almost_ have sympathy for them because there were so many other companies that stood up for their customers that show us how it should have been handled. Their handling of the spying is just another symptom of the monopoly mentality: screw the customer if it can make us some money.
But my choices for high speed internet are pretty much limited to Comcast and AT&T (BellSouth). So it's really a question of which evil empire I'm more "comfortable" with or am locked into by service agreements.
If Reisinger has never seen a more abysmal OS release, he's obviously too young to remember Windows ME. So he must've been born sometime since the millenium. WinME was basically the same kind of mess as Windows Vista: it was bloated and slow compared with its predecessor (Win98), and offered no compelling reason for users to upgrade. From my point of view, ME was worse, because it had the (lack of) stability common to all Windows that were based on the DOS/Win 3.1 heritage.
I think the point is parental restraint vs. self-restraint. If the boy spends his teenage years rebelling against excessive parental restraints, he will continue to act out for a certain number of years after the parental restraints are removed. If the parental restraints are a bit more reasonable, the kid will have some experience exploring his own limits within a safety net and develop at least some of the self-control needed to participate in society.
A paystub is just an aggregation of facts/data about an employee and their pay. Copyright requires some element of originality to give protection.
The only thing I could imagine that remotely approaches copyright would be the layout of the fields on the paystub, so the fact that the NAME is in the upper left and the Gross Pay is below it rather than to the left would be the only element of the work that required some level of originality. Didn't this type of argument already get thrown out in the old "Look and Feel" lawsuits that Lotus filed against developers of 1-2-3 clones?
...if the malware is built into the OS on purpose by the manufacturer?
I can just see my company's local server farm slowing to a crawl because the OS is trying to serve an ad for new SAN hardware from some outfit in Malaysia as a result of an alert sent out by the current hardware.
Of course, that isn't exactly a realistic scenario. The technology will only be used to screw the little guy while the "Enterprise" edition will have the ability to disable the ads.
RIAA and MPAA lobby congress for stricter copyright restrictions. Representatives noted that "studies show that intellectual property thieves have deprived media producers of over $1.6 trillion in revenues through so-called 'fair use' of protected material."
That assumes that the submitter HAS ownership. If he had just reposted the original commercial and put "As seen on VH1!" that would have been OK. But since he doesn't own the rights to the Viacom-blurbage around their airing of his segment, he can't legally grant YouTube the rights listed in their TOS. And any attempt to grant those rights (i.e. by posting the Viacom video) is a copyright violation, since most of the rights granted to YouTube fail to qualify as fair use. For example...you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use...
The only thing I can see wrong is if someone just repackages your work and charges people for it.
Dude, that's what happened in this case. They repacked GPL software inside DLLs and then wrote a GUI that used the GPL software. And then went and charged money, when about 1/2 the code (or more) was written by someone else.
Actually, if you know your galaxies, the answer is "no, we aren't one of them". The Milky Way is a spiral (or possibly hybrid, based on recent studies) galaxy. This study addresses elliptical galaxies.
Actually from a technical standpoint, the judge is almost there. RAM is storage even if it's volatile. The judge isn't requiring a log of all updates to RAM, just the server logs for the processes providing connection information. From a legal standpoint, she seems to be doing OK. The information is available (in RAM) to Torrentspy at a point in time after discovery has commenced, and the judge has rightly decided that the information is relevant to the case. During the litigation, Torrentspy has a legal obligation to preserve the information, and the effort required to collect the information (turning on the server logs) is not onerous to Torrentspy.
The technical issue here is where does it stop? If a court requires more complete logging of RAM changes, or includes even more volatile storage such as cache or CPU registers, then the burden of logging becomes extremely onerous, and the information value is low, because the only way to log such information is as a hex dump. I kind of wish the court had ordered Torrentspy to document all data in RAM. Then the logs would have to be in a format similar to (timestamp) (memory location) (old value in hex) (new value in hex), which would take years for the plaintiffs to sort through. The fact that they didn't indicates that the court DOES have some technical understanding.
Are they just idiots? There is no excuse here. They knew what their software was doing and if they didn't know they should not have been using it.
If it weren't for the fact that there are documented versions of Kazaa that would share your music with the world without asking for confirmation or approval, I would agree. On the other hand, Kazaa is intended to share files over the net, so they definitely intended to share something. Unfortunately there isn't enough info in TFA to tell whether their intention was to only share uncopyrighted works or works that they owned. Depending on the circumstances, a better analogy might be that they hired a guy to put their home videos on a table in their front lawn to share, and while he was doing this he said, "Hey, there's a hundred other videos here! I'll take those out too!" and put the other videos on the table as well.
Also, the briefs in the other related cases are written by lawyers, so they are more likely cover all the bases required for this type of defense that there is no evidence of copyright violation. No need to panic just yet.
I don't see that. The cost of laying the T1 is amortized over the 2 year contract, right? So for cable, you have: 7000 + $45*24 = $8080
For the T1 you have 450*24= 10800
So his total cost is about 25% higher, not 1000%. It's still a lousy price-performance differential given the much lower bandwidth. I suspect the problem for the cable company is that he's in a different jurisdiction, so they don't have the rights to provide Internet outside the city limits.
If he's going down to 1.4 MB/s, he should look at satellite. HughesNet advertises a residential asymmetric service at 1.5 MB/s down 200KB/s up for $80/month with a $300 equipment charge. That's a total cost of $2,220 for 2 years. Business plans start at about $20 more/month and the equipment charge is twice as much, but they also have a 2 MB/s down, 500kB/s up plan for $179/month.
Slashdot Mirror
Another point to the affordability issue is that a fair amount of software piracy occurs because "I needed the software but I couldn't afford it". If your students want to do any kind of work at home, they'll want the same software you use in class. You can protect them from a potential run-in with the BSA by using the open-source products.
Reminds me of the old joke about why a shark won't attack a lawyer...In this case, the RIAA is at least being smarter than SCO grp. Anyone who sues IBM over IP either has to have an iron-clad case or be a nutcase. I think this is more strategy on the RIAA's part than cowardice: they're trying to get the legal precedents established against the second-string before taking on the big-leaguers.
Even from the first pic, Star Wars was always about spectacle more than plot or dialog. The characters were always stereotypes and the story line was never profound. The difference is that in 1977, the CGI and modeling detail were something new and had a Wow! factor that had never been seen before in film. Apart from the sheer pace of the action shots, itt was the first time a film successfully communicated the sheer magnitude of space and the structures required to support it. Even Star Trek failed to give you a concrete vision of the size of the Enterprise, simply because they didn't dare shoot such a close-up of the models they were using. But the pan of the battle-cruiser in the Star Wars opening was simply awe-inspiring.
So from a cinematography standpoint, I can't say that it ever jumped the shark. The audience just developed a tolerance for special effects that made us require more of the drug to achieve the same sense of wonder.
From a story-telling standpoint, it was never high art, but I think that Empire and Return add enough backstory to the original that they add value to it. The second trilogy was just milking the cash cow. Kind of like Frank Herbert writing new Dune books 10 years later, or Robert Jordan's series that doesn't end. So episode 1 definitely jumps the shark.
You mean like all those blues artists of the 20th century that got so fabulously rich from the royalties the record and music publishing companies paid to them (especially the ones that had their music covered by white artists like Elvis)? The media publishers have never been about rewarding the artist even when copyright terms were more reasonable.
I see two big prongs to attack:
1) The Copyright Alliance initiative is particularly vulnerable to a grass-roots counterattack. Write to the relevant candidates, emphasizing that the sponsors of the copyright alliance are asking them to help the artists, when many of those companies are notorious for not paying royalties to the artists once they lock up the rights. Make note that the government shouldn't be in the business of doing investigations on behalf of private parties, and based on current evidence, copyright owners and their agents have more than enough resources and funding available to protect their interests. The real issue the copyright holders have had is that they have been incompetent in putting together a chain of evidence that meets judicial scrutiny.
2) Reduce their funding by not buying the products of the companies that fund the copyright alliance. There's already one thread at AskSlashdot about sites where indie/non-RIAA music artists are available. Look for similar sites offering video and books. This is like thinking green. You can't eliminate all your greenhouse gas emissions, but you can vastly improve your energy efficiency. Apply the same thinking to your media consumption. Borrow from the local library. Take advantage of the legal alternatives on the internet. Rent instead of buying. If you have to buy, wait until the item is in the discount bin at 4.99.
Ever since my daughter emptied most of a bottle of Elmer's glue on the lap desk that I used to use (fortunately, the laptop wasn't on it at the time), I've had to use the box I still have from an old dual Pentium II SuperMicro motherboard as a lap desk. It actually is just as comfortable as the original in terms of positioning and insulates the heat even better than the original thanks to the huge air cavity in the middle.
the sticker shock of $2400 it just drives home the point that the technology isn't ready for prime-time
Back in the day, HP sold scads of laser printers to small businesses in this price range. $2400 isn't in your average hobbyist's pocket book, but it's low enough to open up a "We Make It" store-front in your local strip mall. Of course, there's no guarantee how long such businesses will last. If the price on these things drops into the $1200 range or lower, anyone who really needs the fab service would probably buy their own. That's probably a closer future than nano-tech vats converting garbage to gold.
It's Bio-Dome 2!
Where's Pauly Shore when you need him? The sooner we put him on the moon, the better for movie-goers everywhere.
I see what you mean about the bolded sentence. When you combine that with the fact that you have to go to one of their sales pitches to learn more details, it just screams "high-pressure marketing". Me, I'll just wait till it's on special at normal suppliers.
The only flaw in your logic is that the lawsuits and DMCA and all the other actions the MP/RI/AA have taken were all in reaction to the drop in cashflow that was already occuring. Unless you can cut their cashflow down so far that the distribution companies can't afford to fund the MP/RI/AA, they are likely to just extend their strategy even further.
On the other hand, think of all the money we'll save if we stop spending our money on this crap.
Quantum Vaporware. In fact, isn't vaporware in general a quantum phenomenon? A software maker pre-announces a product, but we are unable to tell if the product actually exists until it is released...
with their efforts to try to get immunity. Based on the way the FBI under ex-AG Gonzalez treated everyone else, they probably threatened to expose something else AT&T had done in the past and shut down their business. So some manager decided to "follow orders" and let the FBI have their way.
Then it turns out (oops), that the FBI themselves get busted for the spying activity and AT&T is left holding the civil liabillity bag. I _almost_ have sympathy for them because there were so many other companies that stood up for their customers that show us how it should have been handled. Their handling of the spying is just another symptom of the monopoly mentality: screw the customer if it can make us some money.
But my choices for high speed internet are pretty much limited to Comcast and AT&T (BellSouth). So it's really a question of which evil empire I'm more "comfortable" with or am locked into by service agreements.
If Reisinger has never seen a more abysmal OS release, he's obviously too young to remember Windows ME. So he must've been born sometime since the millenium. WinME was basically the same kind of mess as Windows Vista: it was bloated and slow compared with its predecessor (Win98), and offered no compelling reason for users to upgrade. From my point of view, ME was worse, because it had the (lack of) stability common to all Windows that were based on the DOS/Win 3.1 heritage.
I think the point is parental restraint vs. self-restraint. If the boy spends his teenage years rebelling against excessive parental restraints, he will continue to act out for a certain number of years after the parental restraints are removed. If the parental restraints are a bit more reasonable, the kid will have some experience exploring his own limits within a safety net and develop at least some of the self-control needed to participate in society.
A paystub is just an aggregation of facts/data about an employee and their pay. Copyright requires some element of originality to give protection.
The only thing I could imagine that remotely approaches copyright would be the layout of the fields on the paystub, so the fact that the NAME is in the upper left and the Gross Pay is below it rather than to the left would be the only element of the work that required some level of originality. Didn't this type of argument already get thrown out in the old "Look and Feel" lawsuits that Lotus filed against developers of 1-2-3 clones?
...if the malware is built into the OS on purpose by the manufacturer? I can just see my company's local server farm slowing to a crawl because the OS is trying to serve an ad for new SAN hardware from some outfit in Malaysia as a result of an alert sent out by the current hardware. Of course, that isn't exactly a realistic scenario. The technology will only be used to screw the little guy while the "Enterprise" edition will have the ability to disable the ads.
RIAA and MPAA lobby congress for stricter copyright restrictions. Representatives noted that "studies show that intellectual property thieves have deprived media producers of over $1.6 trillion in revenues through so-called 'fair use' of protected material."
That assumes that the submitter HAS ownership. If he had just reposted the original commercial and put "As seen on VH1!" that would have been OK. But since he doesn't own the rights to the Viacom-blurbage around their airing of his segment, he can't legally grant YouTube the rights listed in their TOS. And any attempt to grant those rights (i.e. by posting the Viacom video) is a copyright violation, since most of the rights granted to YouTube fail to qualify as fair use. For example ...you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use...
The only thing I can see wrong is if someone just repackages your work and charges people for it.
Dude, that's what happened in this case. They repacked GPL software inside DLLs and then wrote a GUI that used the GPL software. And then went and charged money, when about 1/2 the code (or more) was written by someone else.
Actually, if you know your galaxies, the answer is "no, we aren't one of them". The Milky Way is a spiral (or possibly hybrid, based on recent studies) galaxy. This study addresses elliptical galaxies.
Actually from a technical standpoint, the judge is almost there. RAM is storage even if it's volatile. The judge isn't requiring a log of all updates to RAM, just the server logs for the processes providing connection information. From a legal standpoint, she seems to be doing OK. The information is available (in RAM) to Torrentspy at a point in time after discovery has commenced, and the judge has rightly decided that the information is relevant to the case. During the litigation, Torrentspy has a legal obligation to preserve the information, and the effort required to collect the information (turning on the server logs) is not onerous to Torrentspy.
The technical issue here is where does it stop? If a court requires more complete logging of RAM changes, or includes even more volatile storage such as cache or CPU registers, then the burden of logging becomes extremely onerous, and the information value is low, because the only way to log such information is as a hex dump. I kind of wish the court had ordered Torrentspy to document all data in RAM. Then the logs would have to be in a format similar to (timestamp) (memory location) (old value in hex) (new value in hex), which would take years for the plaintiffs to sort through. The fact that they didn't indicates that the court DOES have some technical understanding.
Are they just idiots? There is no excuse here. They knew what their software was doing and if they didn't know they should not have been using it.
If it weren't for the fact that there are documented versions of Kazaa that would share your music with the world without asking for confirmation or approval, I would agree. On the other hand, Kazaa is intended to share files over the net, so they definitely intended to share something. Unfortunately there isn't enough info in TFA to tell whether their intention was to only share uncopyrighted works or works that they owned. Depending on the circumstances, a better analogy might be that they hired a guy to put their home videos on a table in their front lawn to share, and while he was doing this he said, "Hey, there's a hundred other videos here! I'll take those out too!" and put the other videos on the table as well.
Also, the briefs in the other related cases are written by lawyers, so they are more likely cover all the bases required for this type of defense that there is no evidence of copyright violation. No need to panic just yet.
If it's the customer, they get busted for solicitation, not prostitution.
I don't see that. The cost of laying the T1 is amortized over the 2 year contract, right? So for cable, you have:
7000 + $45*24 = $8080
For the T1 you have
450*24= 10800
So his total cost is about 25% higher, not 1000%. It's still a lousy price-performance differential given the much lower bandwidth. I suspect the problem for the cable company is that he's in a different jurisdiction, so they don't have the rights to provide Internet outside the city limits.
If he's going down to 1.4 MB/s, he should look at satellite. HughesNet advertises a residential asymmetric service at 1.5 MB/s down 200KB/s up for $80/month with a $300 equipment charge. That's a total cost of $2,220 for 2 years. Business plans start at about $20 more/month and the equipment charge is twice as much, but they also have a 2 MB/s down, 500kB/s up plan for $179/month.