You'd think so, but the MAFIAA has also been threatening people without computers, dead people, and small children. There's really no evidence that any of the threats they've sent would stand up in a trial, since so far the cases that have gone to trial are going rather poorly for the MAFIAA.
I would think so...but I also have a problem of thinking in terms of an ideal world and simple logic; I make the mistake of assuming that maybe, possibly, despite the repeated stories on/. about suits with pathetic excuses for evidence, that maybe, just MAYBE, there are a few suits where there is solid evidence that don't make the front page. Those are the cases that I have in mind when I talk about "not violating copyright and you're OK."
I wonder, out of curiosity, how many of the RIAA lawsuits are justified and based on substantial evidence? There's got to be at least a few, doesn't there?
You presuppose that they are guilty, which is not the way the law works. Innocent until proven guilty, and these students have not been proven guilty. In addition, they have a right to defend themselves regardless of whether they are innocent or guilty. As things stand, they don't have the resources to defend themselves. The professor is proposing that they be given the resources to do so.
I didn't read it as such (maybe a function of the early morning hour when I posted); I read the professor's comment as "They shouldn't be taken to court or held responsible for their actions because they are poor and can't defend themselves." THAT'S the part I find objectionable.
CNN announced that it plans to release all debate footage it broadcasts in their upcoming presidential debates under a Creative Commons type license Saturday.
"Due to the historical nature of presidential debates and the significance of these forums to the American public," CNN said in a statement, "CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate."
FTS:
"After calls from several prominent bloggers and a couple of presidential candidates, CNN has agreed to release the footage from its upcoming June presidential debates uncopyrighted.
How does a CC license mean the same as noncopyrighted?
IT DOESN'T! Creative Commons, like the GPL, relies on copyright to license works.
The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate.
To me, that reads "public domain" and not even Creative Commons. What am I missing?
I can't believe I'm about to refute a Harvard Law prof...
One can easily understand why the RIAA wants help from universities in facilitating its enforcement actions against students who download copyrighted music without paying for it. It is easier to litigate against change than to change with it.
The RIAA would not be threatening the students if the students weren't violating copyright. Stop violating copyright, and the RIAA has nothing to go after.
If the RIAA saw a better way to protect its existing business, it would not be threatening our students, forcing our librarians and administrators to be copyright police, and flooding our courts with lawsuits against relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay.
Being "relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay" is not justification for violating copyright. I don't have the an attorney on retainer or the means to pay, but that doesn't mean I can speed or violate traffic laws with impunity. "But judge, I can't afford the ticket so I shouldn't be prosecuted" won't fly very far in court. People in this country need to start taking responsibility for themselves.
We can even understand the attraction of using lawsuits to shore up an aging business model rather than engaging with disruptive technologies and the risks that new business models entail./blockquote) If a software house violates the GPL and the EFF calls them on it, is that considered "shoring up an aging business model?"
Dislike the RIAA's tactics all you want; the trend is to file dubious lawsuits against defendants who seemingly don't have the technical prowess to violate copyright on the alleged scale nor have the prowess to know if their spouse/child/whatever are doing it on their hardware and bring highly questionable evidence. I dislike the tactics as well. However, copyright is copyright, ignorance is no excuse, and if you break it, do so with the knowledge that you may be called to the carpet for it someday.
If you feel that violating copyright is an act of civil disobedience in protest of overbearing, overextended copyright law, then fine--continue with your act of civil disobedience. Remember, though, that one of the responsibilities of civil disobedience is the full acknowledgment and acceptance of the consequences.
Most likely because it IS mentioned, third line, first paragraph...
Dear Chairman Dean: I am writing in strong support of a letter from a bipartisan coalition of academics, bloggers and Internet activists recently addressed to you and the Democratic National Committee. The letter asks that the video from any Democratic Presidential debate be available freely after the debate, by either placing the video in the public domain, or licensing it under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license.
I started NeoOffice after a reboot, and got 28 seconds on a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM...ouch.
Subsequent uses got it usable in 10 seconds.
Now I have both NeoOffice and Openoffice.org 2.2, so I'll use them side-by-side for a while. I have to say that I really don't like OpenOffice via the X11 interface; maybe I'll get used to it in time for the native port to come out:)
On the other hand, I have a legal license of M$ office but for some reason it wont let me enter in my license code because of the trial version pre-installed on my Mac. No matter how many times I install it, it references the hidden preferences file (which I haven't had time to locate) and determines that it's the now-expired trial version. So I guess you can take your pick of the problems.
When you uninstalled the trial version, did you just drag and drop the app to the trash or did you run the Office uninstaller? You have to uninstall by using the "Remove Office" app; drag and drop won't work in this case (which is quite disappointing, really).
You're lucky then. Mine regularly takes a minute or more to start up, and over 30 seconds to save a simple, small document. Not to mention the lags in the spreadsheet - I can easily enter 3-4 cels worth of data before it's finished showing the entry for the first cel. If I get too much futher ahead of it, it starts to lose data.
I must be doing something wrong, since my NeoOffice (2.1 patch 3) takes about 10 seconds to start.
An overreaction is when you lock up someone for life when they stole a loaf of bread. This doesn't even accomplish their stated goal - to protect their school from an unbalanced and violent individual.
That's because the stated goal and actual goal are different--the actual goal was to do SOMETHING so that in the off-chance that trouble erupts form this kid, they can say "we took action and protected the school, how insightful we were!" You are correct though in that the stated problem isn't solved.
From the Houston Chronicle article:
Bhuchar was out of the country. Smelley, the board president, said the special meeting circumvents the normal disciplinary process and that is why he did not attend.
Translation: "Smelley, the board president, didn't want to deal with it, hiding behind 'policy.'"
"Sometimes schools are criticized for overreacting to a situation," Simpson said. "Unfortunately, the days are past when we can just take things lightly and just say, 'Oh well, they were just joking.' "
Translation: "The school board played CYA."
Maybe I'm cynical or just not sensitive enough as I've never been directly affected by anything like this, but I see this as purely political. School boards are elected, and the job of any elected official has morphed from serving the electorate to getting re-elected and covering one's own ass in case of trouble.
I find it interesting that Ballmer is projecting that the iPhone will get a bigger chunk of marketshare (2-3%) than Jobs predicted in the MacWorld keynote...didn't he state that the target for iPhone sales was 1% of the cellular market?
1% of a giant shitload of phones (and there is a GIANT shitload of phones in use today, with over 230 million subscribers; where does Ballmer get the 1.3 billion from, world market?) is still a big number; and sometimes keeping things small and manageable can be more profitable and more fun than being the biggest, baddest company out there.
Success isn't just a matter of the bottom line (too bad too many CEOs don't see that).
The way I read the original post is that the poster would prefer to use Apple hardware but run Vista natively...using Boot Camp, you can do exactly that. I've never used Boot Camp, preferring to do my Windows tasks on a Win2K installation under Parallels, so you might have to have at least a token OS X installation; after you have everything set up the way you want it, use the Vista installation on boot and ignore the OS X installation.
3) Apple risks pissing off the movie studios that offer video on iTunes stores. (AFAIK, only Disney so far.) People expect to be able to rip CDs, so that's OK. But if people aren't expecting to rip DVDs, why let them? It would cannibalise sales from iTunes Video Store.
How would this hurt iTunes sales? If I already own a movie on DVD, I'm not about to buy it again so I can stream it from my server to my living room. I'll bet there are more than a few others who share that sentiment. If they can't rip the DVD, then they'll simply watch the DVD itself.
If iTunes won't rip it, then I'll use MacTheRipper.
Some of these things might have more to do with the OS than the build...I wouldn't mine buying a Macbook and then installing Windows Vista if I could (sorry, OS-X is really really slick, but in some ways I prefer Windows and I have some Windows-only apps).
I'll assume that you know you can do exactlythat so what's stopping you?
"The Macs require a greater density of field associates. Where we have 1-to-150 PC techs to users, we're somewhere down to 1-to-100 for Macs. I think that's due partly to the technology and partly due to the users. The creatives are more demanding and you have to be more responding, because those are the people that clearly create our revenue," says Anschuetz.
That's the direct opposite of my experience (More like one Mac guy for 700-800 Macs, one PC guy for about 100-150 PCs), but I suppose a university environment is a bit different from a creative environment (at least outside the art/music/etc departments).
Here's a thought that popped into my head...maybe the ratios are a bit off due to the low volume of Macs in the installed base?
Here's why I say that: Say you have two PC techs and two Mac techs. Your installed user base is 200 PCs and 100 Macs. The ratios of techs to computers are 1:100 and 1:50, PC and Mac respectively.
In the surface, you have twice as many Mac techs as PC techs for a given user base. Does this mean you have to provide twice the support for the Macs? No. You need two techs as a minimum because there will be times where one is sick, on vacation, etc. You could double, or maybe even triple the installed base, but not need to get more techs, because the workload is still within the capability of your current tech support.
I guess the point I'm making is that you need to have a minimum amount of support regardless of your user base. A realistic comparison can only be made when you have an equal number of PCs and Macs in the user base, or enough of an installed user base to require more than the minimum amount of support personnel.
After all, if the ratio of users to techs turns out mathematically to be 100:1, and you have 46 users, it's hard to hire half a person (unless you contract out for on-call support, but that's getting beyond the scope of my comment.)
Maybe the article points this out and I should read it, but that's the thought that comes to mind.
As for choosing the machines, you have two different sets of people. You have the choosers who are looking at machines from the way they are used and the current procedures that are in place and picking them based on that environment and funding available then you have all the people on the outside who have never helpped at an election and want to have machines that would stand up to the abuses and threats that a ATM filled with money and located in an unlit side street would have to face.
Yes, your damned right it should withstand the abuses that an ATM on the street might have to endure, since the ballot box is used to select government officials whom, in the course of their duties, are going to be spending my tax money. In a sense, this makes the ballot box an ATM filled with taxpayer money, to be spend by our government officials.
If you are in charge of a business's IT department, do you want to go through and thoroughly test new patches every few days, or do one test covering multiple patches? Didn't feedback from big IT shops compel MS to release patches in bigger batches with less frequency (hence the introduction of "Patch Tuesday")?
I don't do IT, so maybe releasing 25 fixes at once can require 25 separate test cycles. Anybody care to enlighten me?
Actually, seeing as how their target customer is printing 20,000 pages per month it makes sense. That kind of volume is going to require preventive maintenance to maintain print quality. You let Xerox maintain your copiers, as they are the specialists; why not let HP maintain your fancy, fast-as-all-getout printer? They have the technical expertise and incentive to get it back up and running fast; a machine that's broken down isn't printing, and if it's not printing, it's not earning money.
DOS->Win95->Win98->Win2k->WinXP is $80 dollars but ditch one, claim $29 for office and use the vouchers to purchase parallels for Mac:-) They should offer a special bundle of desktop and compressor for the $93 settlement.
Why waste MS's money when Desktop comes with Compressor?
I went the opposite direction, from TaxCut to Turbo Tax because there was (at the time) no TaxCut for Mac...now that there is, I'll switch again, depending on who offers what services for the money.
Having used both, they are about equal in usability (for my tax case, anyway) so it comes down to pricing.
I see you're from the UK or somewhere where this is true. However, in the US, downloading is legal; Congress explicitly legalized downloading less than $2k worth of copyrighted material per year with the No Electronic Theift Act which says that it's illegal to download more than that set amount a year. Less than that limit and you're legal. Downloading more than that and you're not breaking copyright law, you're breaking the NET act.
That is incorrect. According to the aforementioned NET Act,
506. Criminal offenses
(a) Criminal Infringement.--Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either--
1. for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
2. by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
That reads to me that if you exceed the threshold, it is a criminal act; less than that, while not a criminal act, is still subject to a civil copyright case.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think so...but I also have a problem of thinking in terms of an ideal world and simple logic; I make the mistake of assuming that maybe, possibly, despite the repeated stories on
I wonder, out of curiosity, how many of the RIAA lawsuits are justified and based on substantial evidence? There's got to be at least a few, doesn't there?
I didn't read it as such (maybe a function of the early morning hour when I posted); I read the professor's comment as "They shouldn't be taken to court or held responsible for their actions because they are poor and can't defend themselves." THAT'S the part I find objectionable.
FTS:
How does a CC license mean the same as noncopyrighted?
IT DOESN'T! Creative Commons, like the GPL, relies on copyright to license works.
Furthermore, according to the CNN website,,
To me, that reads "public domain" and not even Creative Commons. What am I missing?
The RIAA would not be threatening the students if the students weren't violating copyright. Stop violating copyright, and the RIAA has nothing to go after.
Being "relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay" is not justification for violating copyright. I don't have the an attorney on retainer or the means to pay, but that doesn't mean I can speed or violate traffic laws with impunity. "But judge, I can't afford the ticket so I shouldn't be prosecuted" won't fly very far in court. People in this country need to start taking responsibility for themselves.
I started NeoOffice after a reboot, and got 28 seconds on a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM...ouch.
:)
Subsequent uses got it usable in 10 seconds.
Now I have both NeoOffice and Openoffice.org 2.2, so I'll use them side-by-side for a while. I have to say that I really don't like OpenOffice via the X11 interface; maybe I'll get used to it in time for the native port to come out
When you uninstalled the trial version, did you just drag and drop the app to the trash or did you run the Office uninstaller? You have to uninstall by using the "Remove Office" app; drag and drop won't work in this case (which is quite disappointing, really).
I must be doing something wrong, since my NeoOffice (2.1 patch 3) takes about 10 seconds to start.
FYI: Sir Richard Branson is CEO of Virgin Atlantic
That's because the stated goal and actual goal are different--the actual goal was to do SOMETHING so that in the off-chance that trouble erupts form this kid, they can say "we took action and protected the school, how insightful we were!" You are correct though in that the stated problem isn't solved.
From the Houston Chronicle article:Translation: "Smelley, the board president, didn't want to deal with it, hiding behind 'policy.'"Translation: "The school board played CYA."
Maybe I'm cynical or just not sensitive enough as I've never been directly affected by anything like this, but I see this as purely political. School boards are elected, and the job of any elected official has morphed from serving the electorate to getting re-elected and covering one's own ass in case of trouble.
I find it interesting that Ballmer is projecting that the iPhone will get a bigger chunk of marketshare (2-3%) than Jobs predicted in the MacWorld keynote...didn't he state that the target for iPhone sales was 1% of the cellular market?
1% of a giant shitload of phones (and there is a GIANT shitload of phones in use today, with over 230 million subscribers; where does Ballmer get the 1.3 billion from, world market?) is still a big number; and sometimes keeping things small and manageable can be more profitable and more fun than being the biggest, baddest company out there.
Success isn't just a matter of the bottom line (too bad too many CEOs don't see that).
The way I read the original post is that the poster would prefer to use Apple hardware but run Vista natively...using Boot Camp, you can do exactly that. I've never used Boot Camp, preferring to do my Windows tasks on a Win2K installation under Parallels, so you might have to have at least a token OS X installation; after you have everything set up the way you want it, use the Vista installation on boot and ignore the OS X installation.
Or a dupe.
If iTunes won't rip it, then I'll use MacTheRipper.
I'll assume that you know you can do exactly that so what's stopping you?
Here's a thought that popped into my head...maybe the ratios are a bit off due to the low volume of Macs in the installed base?
Here's why I say that: Say you have two PC techs and two Mac techs. Your installed user base is 200 PCs and 100 Macs. The ratios of techs to computers are 1:100 and 1:50, PC and Mac respectively.
In the surface, you have twice as many Mac techs as PC techs for a given user base. Does this mean you have to provide twice the support for the Macs? No. You need two techs as a minimum because there will be times where one is sick, on vacation, etc. You could double, or maybe even triple the installed base, but not need to get more techs, because the workload is still within the capability of your current tech support.
I guess the point I'm making is that you need to have a minimum amount of support regardless of your user base. A realistic comparison can only be made when you have an equal number of PCs and Macs in the user base, or enough of an installed user base to require more than the minimum amount of support personnel.
After all, if the ratio of users to techs turns out mathematically to be 100:1, and you have 46 users, it's hard to hire half a person (unless you contract out for on-call support, but that's getting beyond the scope of my comment.)
Maybe the article points this out and I should read it, but that's the thought that comes to mind.
Yes, your damned right it should withstand the abuses that an ATM on the street might have to endure, since the ballot box is used to select government officials whom, in the course of their duties, are going to be spending my tax money. In a sense, this makes the ballot box an ATM filled with taxpayer money, to be spend by our government officials.
UID of 1? Heck, I want to know who got 1000000.
No. Legislation cannot fix this; that's like making bugs in code illegal.
Legislation can only make mistakes like this painful, but it cannot prevent them.
Along the same line of thought; traffic laws don't prevent accidents, they just assign blame for them.
If you are in charge of a business's IT department, do you want to go through and thoroughly test new patches every few days, or do one test covering multiple patches? Didn't feedback from big IT shops compel MS to release patches in bigger batches with less frequency (hence the introduction of "Patch Tuesday")?
I don't do IT, so maybe releasing 25 fixes at once can require 25 separate test cycles. Anybody care to enlighten me?
Actually, seeing as how their target customer is printing 20,000 pages per month it makes sense. That kind of volume is going to require preventive maintenance to maintain print quality. You let Xerox maintain your copiers, as they are the specialists; why not let HP maintain your fancy, fast-as-all-getout printer? They have the technical expertise and incentive to get it back up and running fast; a machine that's broken down isn't printing, and if it's not printing, it's not earning money.
Why waste MS's money when Desktop comes with Compressor?
On top of that, whomever sent the 1099 info also missed a deadline; isn't that info supposed to be send no later than the end of February?
I went the opposite direction, from TaxCut to Turbo Tax because there was (at the time) no TaxCut for Mac...now that there is, I'll switch again, depending on who offers what services for the money.
Having used both, they are about equal in usability (for my tax case, anyway) so it comes down to pricing.
That is incorrect. According to the aforementioned NET Act,
That reads to me that if you exceed the threshold, it is a criminal act; less than that, while not a criminal act, is still subject to a civil copyright case.