Reminds me of this bit from H2G2 (Mostly Harmless):
"`You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?' `Really?' said Arthur. `No I didn't. For what offence?' Trillian frowned. `What do you mean, offence?' `I see.'"
for possibly allowing someone to see a movie before the studios intended.
What the hell does this have to do with groupthink? It's not about whether copying is wrong or right (it's wrong). This has to do with excessive penalties!
I don't agree with the groupthing that says jay walking is okay; it's illegal and for a good reason. Therefore, the law I propose that calls for mandatory life sentences for jay walking isn't draconian.
My problem was that you linked to BlackBox with the text saying it was the home of the enemies of democracy, when it's Diebold and others who are the real enemies.
I didn't say BlackBox was the home of the enemies of Democracy, I said the enemies of Democracy are here at home, with a link to BlackBox for elaboration. I assume that anyone actually interested would follow the link and learn more.
I'm sorry if this isn't clear enough for you, but like I said it would serve no purpose to link to Diebold because they don't explain how they are the enemy of democracy. In fact, they might tell you the opposite! And it isn't just Diebold, anyway...
Would it make you happy if Democracy were the linked word instead? To avoid any negative connotations that five seconds of reading the linked page would indicate don't exist? I'm not sure it matters; we've all been screwed, nobody cares, and maybe I should find a new issue to cram in my.sig.
Of course supporters of the DMCA told the legislators that nobody would ever stoop that low.
Whenever someone says "sure this obvious method of exploitation exists, but nobody would ever use it!" then you know you are listening to either a moron or a liar. Who cares which one they are; you shouldn't be listening to them. Of course that can be hard when the moron/liar is waving a big sack of cash in your face.
Exactly. If we had a "Dell still Intel only" every time a rumor of Dell using AMD turned out to be just Dell playing wth Intel for pricing concessions, people around here would have screamed themselves hoarse crying "Dupe!" before we ever saw the opposite "Dell embraces AMD" story.
why would the absence of copyright law make the GPL unnecessary?
Well, because the primary thing the GPL wants you as the user to be able to have is the ability to modify and share. Without copyright, you would always be able to modify any software you had a copy of, and you would be free to share that software -- with or without your modifications -- with anyone you chose. So without copyright the primary rights the GPL grants to you would be available all the time. The case we have here of a company taking free code and making it proprietary (i.e. taking away your rights) simply could not happen.
In this sense the statement that without copyright the GPL would not be needed is true.
Now, just because you would have the right to modify and distribute, say, Photoshop, doesn't mean you would have the source code to Photoshop. it would be perfectly legal to disassemble/decompile Photoshop and distribute the result, but that's not exactly the same thing. This is a big benefit of the GPL that you wouldn't get automatically without copyright. On the other hand, in the current situation we don't have the right to modify Photoshop at all.;)
Now, not having copyright may not mean that we wouldn't have source code. First off, the whole proprietary model of selling individual copies that must therefore be protected would die overnight. Since decompiling, disassembly, and outright copying of blocks of code would be legal, there would be very little reason to try to prevent it by hiding your source code. In fact I think it wouldn't take long in a copyright-free world for people to expect source code so that they could more easily perform their completely legal modifications/redistributions.
That's just speculation, though. I'm in favor of copyright in its original limited form, and the GPL requirements for source work well with that. I think it's a positive thing. But on the other hand, if copyright went away entirely I don't think it would be that bad either, even (especially) from a free software perspective.
I suppose I didn't notice the way that the OP was written, because at first I agreed completely. But I guess I don't know anything about the quality of Hauppage drivers.
What I know (and care) about are the linux drivers for Hauppage cards. I've tried several different cards that use the bttv.o chipset driver and several with the Connexant (can't remember module name, cx8800.o or something) driver, and the former provided superior image quality. I could never get the contrast/brightness settings to provide a picture that showed detail in dark areas but wasn't washed out in light areas. I thought it might have been my LCD monitor, but after trying out two cx*.o cards and then going back to the faithful WinTV card I saw that it was a chipset/driver problem.
As it has been and will be for the future (but always getting better), with Linux it's always about finding out what hardware is best supported and buying that. The bt* based cards of Hauppage fall in that category.
Now that I look at it, it seems the Hauppage card in the article uses a Conexant-based chipset. I'm thinking that makes this review much less useful from the standpoint of creating a PVR in linux.
It's not racism to make fun of someone who thinks they can write documents in a language they aren't fluent in without getting someone fluent (native, preferably) in that language to proofread them.
This is no more racist than a Chinese person making fun of some document written buy an American with two years of Mandarin. I bet there are some real gems there.
If you're too cheap to hire someone to make your documents not sound idiotic, you deserve to be made fun of. If you really can't afford to hire someone, then that sucks for you, but you have to accept sounding idiotic as the cost.
I guess freedom is actually way more important than function now isn't it....
While I may argue that this is true... The real issue here is that too often engineers forget that freedom is an aspect of function, and a very powerful one. It's not just what the tool can do now, but also what you are allowed to do and how that will affect you in the future.
This is why I get so annoyed by people who say "I don't care what license it uses; I just want to use the best tool for the job!" Well guess what: the license is going to affect the suitability for the job whether you care about it or not. So by not caring about the license you are neglecting your job. This is just another example.
The real question is, if they are able to, will it be worth it for these companies to move off of BitKeeper now? I am guessing for a large enough percentage, the answer is no - and THAT is how BitMover wins. That is how business works for the most part, like it or not.
Everything you say is true, and in that sense this means little for BitMover. Yet also consider that this may make it harder for BitMover to get any new contracts. Even Microsoft has trouble maintaining their profits without getting new customers. Trying to grow your business by squeezing more money out of your existing customers is like being a leech that sucks too much blood -- eventually the host gets tired of you and scrapes you off, even if it hurts.
I can't say I see this as a great move for BitMover.
The logic is simple: If a company hasn't set up a city-wide WiFi network, it has to be presumed there's no profit in it.
Presuming something can't be profitable because no one has done it before may be simple logic, but it is also falacious. If that logic held, one would wonder how anyone would start anything at all. Fortunately, it doesn't hold. That aside...
If there's no profit in it, why should the government provide it?
Umm... because the people, who the government allegedly serves, want it?
Why should profit matter? The people decide that they want their city to provide wifi, and the city spends tax dollars to do so. Where does profit enter into it? I would certainly hope the city is not making a profit off the services it provides!
Now, if we assume hypothetically that a given city would not be a profitable market for a commercial venture, that sounds like exactly the case where there should be no objection at all to the city providing it.
I'm all in favour of people voluntarily banding together to do this on a non-profit basis, but this is other people's money being used here, and I'm sure they'd know how to spend it better themselves...
So, would the constituents of a local municipality voting to have their town provide wifi at cost count as voluntarily banding together?
FlashBlock + Prefbar is a great combo. By default, all flash appears as an icon you have to click to see anything. Great so far. Then let's say you decide to give a flash app a try (or accidentally click the icon), but it turns out to be annoying crap like 90% of all flash is. Then you hit the "kill flash" button.
What planet do you come from? Profits come from the difference between prices and costs.
I think he meant businesses never cut costs to their customers. Which is true, unless they are forced to by competitive pressure. Like you said, it's income minus costs, so why would they want to reduce income? If it won't get them more sales, it's counter-productive.
You make a good point, but "lower costs than any business could" seems a red herring to me. It's the same red herring that all the opponents of this bill use -- the idea that the government is going to be competing with businesses and have an unfair advantage over them.
While implementations may vary, I highly doubt that the government is going to be in the business of building wi-fi equipment, routers, etc. They are going to hire other companies to do this. They are going to hire other companies to do maintenance when necessary, and they are eventually going to have to pay an ISP to connect their wi-fi service to the Internet.
What this means is that there is going to be plenty of opportunity for businesses to make money providing wi-fi service to a city.
Of course they might not make as much money as they would charging monthly service fees to individuals in the city, because the city has collective bargaining power. Boo hoo. They know that the government is not going to be competing with them per se, but rather limiting their ability to gouge customers. They're just using the "competition" argument to invoke the name of Capitalism in the same cynical way that patriotism is invoked to get us to agree with things that have nothing to do with patriotism.
Always be wary of a large corporate/government entity that says that you should not be able to pool your resources with others and thus enjoy the same benefits as they do. Always be wary of anyone whose definition of a level playing field is the status quo with them holding all the advantages.
Granted I don't use Blockbuster and only saw their TV adds a couple times, but I did pay attention to the adds (since I was interested in what is clearly inspired by NetFlix competition) and that this wasn't actually "no late fees" wasn't clear to me at all.
Maybe I didn't see the asterisk on the huge text saying "No Late Fees", but also maybe you are full of shit.
So, if the Error Correction Mechanism's copying system is much better than RNA, and at least close to as good as DNA, maybe even better, why isn't it being used as the main Genetic code?
Because evolutionary pressure hasn't forced this to be the case? We don't know what the mechanism is; it might just be redundant backups of certain genes, in which case it would be better than a single gene, but require a multiplicative increase in the total amount of genetic code to use in every case. Perhaps it was this one gene that was subject to negative mutations that caused this correction mechanism to arise. Certainly not all mutations are bad, and thus it doesn't make sense to try to entirely eliminate them in the entire genetic code -- in fact, species which lacked the ability to propagate mutations would be at a disadvantage.
There is still no fundamental conundrum. it's just a correction method we don't yet understand. "Why aren't all genes like this?" is a red herring.
Nice explanation. This kind of thing, while unexpected, seems perfectly natural to me. Evolution doesn't just occur on the traits expressed by DNA. Evolution also occurs on the mechanism for mutating/retaining DNA. It's not just about finding the ideal size/feature for an environment, but also the ideal mutation rate and bad mutation elimination mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of this bit from H2G2 (Mostly Harmless):
"`You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for
insurance company directors?'
`Really?' said Arthur. `No I didn't. For what offence?'
Trillian frowned.
`What do you mean, offence?'
`I see.'"
for possibly allowing someone to see a movie before the studios intended.
What the hell does this have to do with groupthink? It's not about whether copying is wrong or right (it's wrong). This has to do with excessive penalties!
I don't agree with the groupthing that says jay walking is okay; it's illegal and for a good reason. Therefore, the law I propose that calls for mandatory life sentences for jay walking isn't draconian.
Mars needs geeks to insure the survival of our species, and our women are HOT!
Oh, no. I'm not falling for that one again.
That's true. I didn't think the choice would make much difference, so I made it so that the added url text wouldn't disrupt the sentence. I was wrong.
My problem was that you linked to BlackBox with the text saying it was the home of the enemies of democracy, when it's Diebold and others who are the real enemies.
.sig.
I didn't say BlackBox was the home of the enemies of Democracy, I said the enemies of Democracy are here at home, with a link to BlackBox for elaboration. I assume that anyone actually interested would follow the link and learn more.
I'm sorry if this isn't clear enough for you, but like I said it would serve no purpose to link to Diebold because they don't explain how they are the enemy of democracy. In fact, they might tell you the opposite! And it isn't just Diebold, anyway...
Would it make you happy if Democracy were the linked word instead? To avoid any negative connotations that five seconds of reading the linked page would indicate don't exist? I'm not sure it matters; we've all been screwed, nobody cares, and maybe I should find a new issue to cram in my
No, I don't.
The link is to provide information. What good would it do to link to diebold.com?
Of course supporters of the DMCA told the legislators that nobody would ever stoop that low.
Whenever someone says "sure this obvious method of exploitation exists, but nobody would ever use it!" then you know you are listening to either a moron or a liar. Who cares which one they are; you shouldn't be listening to them. Of course that can be hard when the moron/liar is waving a big sack of cash in your face.
Hello? Tech support? Does your product support NotAFuckingFormatRAW format?
Dyslexia, or just reasonable expectations?
Isn't it, perhaps, more plausible that they canceled the shows because no one was watching them but you?
Oh, but that's just another level of the conspiracy!
Exactly. If we had a "Dell still Intel only" every time a rumor of Dell using AMD turned out to be just Dell playing wth Intel for pricing concessions, people around here would have screamed themselves hoarse crying "Dupe!" before we ever saw the opposite "Dell embraces AMD" story.
It's as if he has a sense of civic duty. Maybe it's possible, even today.
For politics, that's a healthy positive you have there. "The glass is somewhat damp" as opposed to "The glass is almost completely barren".
why would the absence of copyright law make the GPL unnecessary?
;)
Well, because the primary thing the GPL wants you as the user to be able to have is the ability to modify and share. Without copyright, you would always be able to modify any software you had a copy of, and you would be free to share that software -- with or without your modifications -- with anyone you chose. So without copyright the primary rights the GPL grants to you would be available all the time. The case we have here of a company taking free code and making it proprietary (i.e. taking away your rights) simply could not happen.
In this sense the statement that without copyright the GPL would not be needed is true.
Now, just because you would have the right to modify and distribute, say, Photoshop, doesn't mean you would have the source code to Photoshop. it would be perfectly legal to disassemble/decompile Photoshop and distribute the result, but that's not exactly the same thing. This is a big benefit of the GPL that you wouldn't get automatically without copyright. On the other hand, in the current situation we don't have the right to modify Photoshop at all.
Now, not having copyright may not mean that we wouldn't have source code. First off, the whole proprietary model of selling individual copies that must therefore be protected would die overnight. Since decompiling, disassembly, and outright copying of blocks of code would be legal, there would be very little reason to try to prevent it by hiding your source code. In fact I think it wouldn't take long in a copyright-free world for people to expect source code so that they could more easily perform their completely legal modifications/redistributions.
That's just speculation, though. I'm in favor of copyright in its original limited form, and the GPL requirements for source work well with that. I think it's a positive thing. But on the other hand, if copyright went away entirely I don't think it would be that bad either, even (especially) from a free software perspective.
I suppose I didn't notice the way that the OP was written, because at first I agreed completely. But I guess I don't know anything about the quality of Hauppage drivers.
What I know (and care) about are the linux drivers for Hauppage cards. I've tried several different cards that use the bttv.o chipset driver and several with the Connexant (can't remember module name, cx8800.o or something) driver, and the former provided superior image quality. I could never get the contrast/brightness settings to provide a picture that showed detail in dark areas but wasn't washed out in light areas. I thought it might have been my LCD monitor, but after trying out two cx*.o cards and then going back to the faithful WinTV card I saw that it was a chipset/driver problem.
As it has been and will be for the future (but always getting better), with Linux it's always about finding out what hardware is best supported and buying that. The bt* based cards of Hauppage fall in that category.
Now that I look at it, it seems the Hauppage card in the article uses a Conexant-based chipset. I'm thinking that makes this review much less useful from the standpoint of creating a PVR in linux.
It's not racism to make fun of someone who thinks they can write documents in a language they aren't fluent in without getting someone fluent (native, preferably) in that language to proofread them.
This is no more racist than a Chinese person making fun of some document written buy an American with two years of Mandarin. I bet there are some real gems there.
If you're too cheap to hire someone to make your documents not sound idiotic, you deserve to be made fun of. If you really can't afford to hire someone, then that sucks for you, but you have to accept sounding idiotic as the cost.
I guess freedom is actually way more important than function now isn't it....
While I may argue that this is true... The real issue here is that too often engineers forget that freedom is an aspect of function, and a very powerful one. It's not just what the tool can do now, but also what you are allowed to do and how that will affect you in the future.
This is why I get so annoyed by people who say "I don't care what license it uses; I just want to use the best tool for the job!" Well guess what: the license is going to affect the suitability for the job whether you care about it or not. So by not caring about the license you are neglecting your job. This is just another example.
The real question is, if they are able to, will it be worth it for these companies to move off of BitKeeper now? I am guessing for a large enough percentage, the answer is no - and THAT is how BitMover wins. That is how business works for the most part, like it or not.
Everything you say is true, and in that sense this means little for BitMover. Yet also consider that this may make it harder for BitMover to get any new contracts. Even Microsoft has trouble maintaining their profits without getting new customers. Trying to grow your business by squeezing more money out of your existing customers is like being a leech that sucks too much blood -- eventually the host gets tired of you and scrapes you off, even if it hurts.
I can't say I see this as a great move for BitMover.
The logic is simple: If a company hasn't set up a city-wide WiFi network, it has to be presumed there's no profit in it.
Presuming something can't be profitable because no one has done it before may be simple logic, but it is also falacious. If that logic held, one would wonder how anyone would start anything at all. Fortunately, it doesn't hold. That aside...
If there's no profit in it, why should the government provide it?
Umm... because the people, who the government allegedly serves, want it?
Why should profit matter? The people decide that they want their city to provide wifi, and the city spends tax dollars to do so. Where does profit enter into it? I would certainly hope the city is not making a profit off the services it provides!
Now, if we assume hypothetically that a given city would not be a profitable market for a commercial venture, that sounds like exactly the case where there should be no objection at all to the city providing it.
I'm all in favour of people voluntarily banding together to do this on a non-profit basis, but this is other people's money being used here, and I'm sure they'd know how to spend it better themselves...
So, would the constituents of a local municipality voting to have their town provide wifi at cost count as voluntarily banding together?
FlashBlock + Prefbar is a great combo. By default, all flash appears as an icon you have to click to see anything. Great so far. Then let's say you decide to give a flash app a try (or accidentally click the icon), but it turns out to be annoying crap like 90% of all flash is. Then you hit the "kill flash" button.
Firefox makes the web not suck.
"Buisnesses" (sic) never cut costs.
What planet do you come from? Profits come from the difference between prices and costs.
I think he meant businesses never cut costs to their customers. Which is true, unless they are forced to by competitive pressure. Like you said, it's income minus costs, so why would they want to reduce income? If it won't get them more sales, it's counter-productive.
You make a good point, but "lower costs than any business could" seems a red herring to me. It's the same red herring that all the opponents of this bill use -- the idea that the government is going to be competing with businesses and have an unfair advantage over them.
While implementations may vary, I highly doubt that the government is going to be in the business of building wi-fi equipment, routers, etc. They are going to hire other companies to do this. They are going to hire other companies to do maintenance when necessary, and they are eventually going to have to pay an ISP to connect their wi-fi service to the Internet.
What this means is that there is going to be plenty of opportunity for businesses to make money providing wi-fi service to a city.
Of course they might not make as much money as they would charging monthly service fees to individuals in the city, because the city has collective bargaining power. Boo hoo. They know that the government is not going to be competing with them per se, but rather limiting their ability to gouge customers. They're just using the "competition" argument to invoke the name of Capitalism in the same cynical way that patriotism is invoked to get us to agree with things that have nothing to do with patriotism.
Always be wary of a large corporate/government entity that says that you should not be able to pool your resources with others and thus enjoy the same benefits as they do. Always be wary of anyone whose definition of a level playing field is the status quo with them holding all the advantages.
Granted I don't use Blockbuster and only saw their TV adds a couple times, but I did pay attention to the adds (since I was interested in what is clearly inspired by NetFlix competition) and that this wasn't actually "no late fees" wasn't clear to me at all.
Maybe I didn't see the asterisk on the huge text saying "No Late Fees", but also maybe you are full of shit.
So, if the Error Correction Mechanism's copying system is much better than RNA, and at least close to as good as DNA, maybe even better, why isn't it being used as the main Genetic code?
Because evolutionary pressure hasn't forced this to be the case? We don't know what the mechanism is; it might just be redundant backups of certain genes, in which case it would be better than a single gene, but require a multiplicative increase in the total amount of genetic code to use in every case. Perhaps it was this one gene that was subject to negative mutations that caused this correction mechanism to arise. Certainly not all mutations are bad, and thus it doesn't make sense to try to entirely eliminate them in the entire genetic code -- in fact, species which lacked the ability to propagate mutations would be at a disadvantage.
There is still no fundamental conundrum. it's just a correction method we don't yet understand. "Why aren't all genes like this?" is a red herring.
If a spaceship from another world is mac-compatible, what are the odds that a tyranosaur isn't?
Nice explanation. This kind of thing, while unexpected, seems perfectly natural to me. Evolution doesn't just occur on the traits expressed by DNA. Evolution also occurs on the mechanism for mutating/retaining DNA. It's not just about finding the ideal size/feature for an environment, but also the ideal mutation rate and bad mutation elimination mechanism.