It is pretty firmly established in fair use doctrine that you can make copies for your own personal use.
Do you have a source for that statement? The copyright law is pretty clear that unauthorized copying is illegal. The reality is that if you copy a book you bought, no one is ever going to find out, which is why you get away with it. But that doesn't mean it is legal.
I don't see how people posting lyrics online hurts the MPAA in anyway.
Here's how it hurts: it means less sales for song books.
For example, let's say you are a guitarist and want to learn a Jimi Hendrix song off of his first album. You can either pay $18 for a book containing the lyrics and chords, or you could go online and find the guitar tabs for free. By getting the tabs and lyrics for free, the publishers have lost a sale of the tab book.
There's a huge difference between autocomplete based on site you personally visited before and autocomplete based on what every single user ever visited before, sorted by frequency.
Isn't IE's autocomplete based on sites you've entered before? If you've visited slashdot.org before, it will come up after typing "sl" but not if you've never visited before it won't come up.
Re:Is Amazon Profitable?
on
Mighty Amazon
·
· Score: 1
Amazon is not profitable. It's pretty easy to find information like this from Yahoo! Their net income last quarter was -$10 M according to this page.
If you choose OSS because you don't approve of MS's business practices, that's fine. If you choose AMD over Intel because it's cheaper or because you don't approve of Intel's practices, that's also good. (Personally, my home computer runs a 1 GHz Athlon). But to say that Intel is inferior because of a design choice IS silly. Sure, at the same clock rate, AMD is faster. But that misses a very important point: Intel runs at a faster clock rate. One could very easily say the failure of AMD to run processors at 2.5+ GHz, which Intel has been doing for nearly a year, makes AMD "inferior". Or the fact that AMD chips require more cooling makes AMD "inferior".
You could say you are choosing AMD over Intel because it is better engineered. Or you could simply say you are choosing AMD because it's cheaper or because you hate Intel. I think the latter two choices are more honest reasons.
I'm not just saying this because most of us are out of work right now and barely getting by financially, but I honestly don't see why someone would need a three Gigahertz processor to run today's popular software.
An unemployment rate of 6% means "most of us" are out of work?
A few posts here complain about the $8000 each price of the speakers. That isn't even close to being the most expensive available. Wilson Audio used to sell a set of speakers that cost $125,000 a pair. I don't see it on their web page anymore, but I did see the X-1 which cost $75,900 per pair according to this review. Thing is, the review was almost 4 years ago, they probably cost more by now.
1) buying an album without hearing the songs on it is really foolish
From the time the LP was invented in the 50s until the advent of peer to peer in the late 90s, people bought albums without hearing all the songs on it. I can't tell you how many times I bought an album on the basis of a review from a friend or a magazine, without having any idea what the band sounded like, or on the basis of one song I heard on the radio. What has changed, besides the available technology?
John Atkinson's measurements (which were done incorrectly) show these speakers to be superior in every measurable way to the others described above and a proper set of measurements would make them look even better. They extend to nearly 20Hz (-10dB) in the bass and are essentially flat to 20kHz. (They are indeed flat within ±1.5dB from 35Hz to 20kHz when measured correctly.) They produce near-perfect impulse response and step response plots.
If you read the article you would have realized it's a $2000 professional recording device. It's not easier, cheaper, or higher quality than any currently available hard drive recorder.
Have you listened to the "samples" at issue here (Fatback Band and Dr. Dre)? Once you hear both, you can definitely hear the original song. Dre's song is just the bass line from the Fatback Band song with a beat and rapping. If you were familiar with the Fatback Band, you'd definitely recognize the bass line.
Not really. It should be a serious concern. The RIAA probably will be over all of this like it has been all over DRM, protected cd's, mp3's cdwriters and the likes.
Why would the RIAA give a damn about this? It is a portable recording device. A simple search turns up these Roland recording devices. It's far from the first hard disk recorder and is far from the best option to do what the RIAA cares about: pirating CDs. (Not to mention that portable DAT recorders have been around for 10 years). The RIAA doesn't care about professional recording devices, only consumer-level.
Support:
Windows: Support costs you hell a lot of money
RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you.
And there is absolutely no one on the Net who can help with Windows.
Documentation:
Windows: None
RedHat: It's Linux, damn it. RTFM:P
And there are no O'reilly or Que, etc. books out there for Windows.
$0.18? Why that number? Do you remember any of the justification for it? If not, it sounds just as impotent as the argument that music should be free.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the justification for it. It was something about royalties being fairly low (12 cents maybe?) and the extra giving enough of a profit to labels and Apple. I'll try to dig up the article at my library. I am positive that it was Friday's USA Today or Washington Post, because those were the only newspapers I read during my trip.
It seems inevitable to me that the WWW will eventually decay into a collection of corporate sites, a big shopping mall. It's getting to expensive for a non-profit motivated voice to be heard.
Maybe I'm just too optomistic, but I think that the "Internet = Profit" idea went up in smoke with the dot.com bubble burst. There are still plenty of free sites available and most of my daily browsing is through independent sites, though, of course, I also buy things over the Internet.
Do you really need all of those tapes? Maybe you do. But if it's just stuff you taped from TV or dubbed from rentals, it's probably not worth the effort needed to copy all 650 hours. I kept all of my VHS tapes when I moved 7 years ago. When I was ready to move again 2 years ago, I realized that I had not even touched most of the tapes and probably never would. I trashed about half of those tapes.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a source for that statement? The copyright law is pretty clear that unauthorized copying is illegal. The reality is that if you copy a book you bought, no one is ever going to find out, which is why you get away with it. But that doesn't mean it is legal.
Here's how it hurts: it means less sales for song books.
For example, let's say you are a guitarist and want to learn a Jimi Hendrix song off of his first album. You can either pay $18 for a book containing the lyrics and chords, or you could go online and find the guitar tabs for free. By getting the tabs and lyrics for free, the publishers have lost a sale of the tab book.
There's a huge difference between autocomplete based on site you personally visited before and autocomplete based on what every single user ever visited before, sorted by frequency.
Isn't IE's autocomplete based on sites you've entered before? If you've visited slashdot.org before, it will come up after typing "sl" but not if you've never visited before it won't come up.
Amazon is not profitable. It's pretty easy to find information like this from Yahoo! Their net income last quarter was -$10 M according to this page.
No, they went that way because nobody used them.
And nobody used them because they kept printing singles.
You could say you are choosing AMD over Intel because it is better engineered. Or you could simply say you are choosing AMD because it's cheaper or because you hate Intel. I think the latter two choices are more honest reasons.
An unemployment rate of 6% means "most of us" are out of work?
That's silly reasoning. You could also rationalize this by saying that AMD is incapable of making a chip that runs at 3 GHz and is therefore inferior.
A few posts here complain about the $8000 each price of the speakers. That isn't even close to being the most expensive available. Wilson Audio used to sell a set of speakers that cost $125,000 a pair. I don't see it on their web page anymore, but I did see the X-1 which cost $75,900 per pair according to this review. Thing is, the review was almost 4 years ago, they probably cost more by now.
From the time the LP was invented in the 50s until the advent of peer to peer in the late 90s, people bought albums without hearing all the songs on it. I can't tell you how many times I bought an album on the basis of a review from a friend or a magazine, without having any idea what the band sounded like, or on the basis of one song I heard on the radio. What has changed, besides the available technology?
MBL makes 360 degree speakers also. But they are probably even more expensive.
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!!!!!!
If you read the article you would have realized it's a $2000 professional recording device. It's not easier, cheaper, or higher quality than any currently available hard drive recorder.
Have you listened to the "samples" at issue here (Fatback Band and Dr. Dre)? Once you hear both, you can definitely hear the original song. Dre's song is just the bass line from the Fatback Band song with a beat and rapping. If you were familiar with the Fatback Band, you'd definitely recognize the bass line.
Here is an interesting site about some of the legal issues regarding sampling.
Why would the RIAA give a damn about this? It is a portable recording device. A simple search turns up these Roland recording devices. It's far from the first hard disk recorder and is far from the best option to do what the RIAA cares about: pirating CDs. (Not to mention that portable DAT recorders have been around for 10 years). The RIAA doesn't care about professional recording devices, only consumer-level.
Windows: Support costs you hell a lot of money
RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you.
And there is absolutely no one on the Net who can help with Windows.
Documentation: Windows: None
RedHat: It's Linux, damn it. RTFM :P
And there are no O'reilly or Que, etc. books out there for Windows.
You may be right. I watched Bourne Identity and XXX on the same day. One of them was double sided. I don't remember which.
I may be thinking of another movie though.
Isn't Longhorn just an internal name that will not necessarily be the name of the released product?
Unfortunately, I don't remember the justification for it. It was something about royalties being fairly low (12 cents maybe?) and the extra giving enough of a profit to labels and Apple. I'll try to dig up the article at my library. I am positive that it was Friday's USA Today or Washington Post, because those were the only newspapers I read during my trip.
Maybe I'm just too optomistic, but I think that the "Internet = Profit" idea went up in smoke with the dot.com bubble burst. There are still plenty of free sites available and most of my daily browsing is through independent sites, though, of course, I also buy things over the Internet.
Do you really need all of those tapes? Maybe you do. But if it's just stuff you taped from TV or dubbed from rentals, it's probably not worth the effort needed to copy all 650 hours. I kept all of my VHS tapes when I moved 7 years ago. When I was ready to move again 2 years ago, I realized that I had not even touched most of the tapes and probably never would. I trashed about half of those tapes.