Woah boy, hold on now. Lets not forget that during the life of Christ it is generally believed that fishermen and others he convinced to do all of this were not mass crowds but a small cult comparable to a dozen similar cults that exist today.
Mass Christianity really didn't happen until the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that the cross made a great banner to rally a crumbling empire behind and that was long after christ.
That's the point though, the account is not the actual account of a real man, its the account of a morally ideal life in which the character is god on earth.
Now certs can finally be about the way they are actually used. Encryption. This should put an end to the argument that verifying encryption without verifying the identity of the third party allows man-in-middle attacks.
'If you want something someone produced, unless they're willing to give it to you, you should have to pay for it. '
I'd almost agree if they produced it in entirety. But since copyright works consist almost entirely of samplings from the public domain I'd say that public has VERY substantial claim to them. Not to mention the fact you carry a mental copy of everything you see and hear whether the person who arranged it likes it or not.
'My main beef with the OP isn't so much a pro highly restrictive copyright stance as it is a rejection of the bullshit quasi-populist idea content creators aren't entitled to continually derive and income from a past work.'
You are ignoring the REASON we grant an ARTIFICIAL monopoly to a content creator in the first place. The purpose is not 'give them their fair share'. Copyright exists only to inspire the creation of new content. If someone is not producing new content then society would be better served by not granting them copyright. Jealousy has nothing to do with it.
In this case the games were 14 years old and prior to the mickey mouse fiasco would be public domain content now.
However, selling for a lower price doesn't make it likely they would have paid the higher price. If all DVD's were $1 I'd have a hell of a collection right now. Instead I have never purchased even one DVD. I doubt I'm the only one in that boat. It isn't like the $20 I'd spend for $1 dvd's is going to be spent on legitimate $20 dvd's, a single dvd isn't worth $20 to me.
The same is typically true where someone is selling pirated content. The content is sold for pennies on the dollar and just because someone is willing to pay that price for that volume of material doesn't mean they would pay retail price for any material.
'It is my personal opinion that unless the copyright owner is actively selling the product(and at a competitive price) they shouldn't be eligble for copyright on that particular product,'
I saw a five year copyright term proposed previously and that sounded very realistic for me. Copyright is something that is there to allow the creator of content to have a chance to make a profit, not to allow them to utilize all the value inherent in the content. Something shouldn't have to no longer be valuable for it to transfer over to its rightful owner, the public.
The games in question are over 14 years old and afaik no longer published. If copyright terms weren't excessive they would be public domain in the first place.
'One could argue though, that if none of his customers had planned to purchase the original work, then not much harm was done. But that's unrealistic and impossible to *prove*...'
In the US justice system the burden of proof is SUPPOSED to be on the one claiming harm, not the one claiming there was no harm. I would argue that it is not unrealistic that the people purchasing from him would not have purchased from the vendor but likely.
Most of the people I know who consume pirated material have thousands of songs, hundreds of movies, dozens of games, etc. Those same people would NOT have bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of content if they had to pay for it. That collection might turn into one game, two movies, a few CD's, if that.
The only way he denied them money was if the person paying him would have purchased the game from the copyright holder instead of the pirate. Unlikely.
Microsoft was fined $20mil in coupons that further entrenched their monopoly for a crime that made and continues to make them hundreds of billions of dollars.
'When I first saw my last doctor she wanted my throat to be tested, it felt like molten lead was being poured down it. So when I left her office an appointment was made right then and there to have the test. I was able to have the test scheduled for the following week. A person can't say it was an emergency and that the test had to be done asap as my throat had bothered me for years. If it had been an emergency then why wasn't it tested sooner?'
What does that have to do with the outpatient hospital procedures referred to in the article? Your except only mentioned GP referrals but the article qualified that to referrals to HOSPITAL care.
'And what do you mean by "REAL developments"? New drugs aren't real?'
A drug is not an advancement in and of itself. The drugs the US companies are releasing are comparable to 'inventing' the tuna sandwich over and over and shaping the bread differently each time. For an example look to the latest anti-depressant which is a minor alteration to the previous anti-depressant and does essentially the same thing. But the drug company gets a fresh patent, charges new drug prices, and of course doctors aren't going to prescribe last years drug. Sure they work, but so did the same drug under another name last year.
'Oh, and the federal government does acknowledge some medical uses for it, the feds used to allow prescription for glycoma for instance.'
Once upon a time marijuana was both legal and used for medical purposes in the United States. There are a handful of people receiving prescription marijuana in the United States legally but the program was shutdown. Currently the FDA and DEA claim that there is NO medical use for marijuana and as a result it has a worse classification than Cocaine!
Really, I'm not US bashing. I'm an American and proud of the ideals here. I'm not as proud of the realities in the current day. Healthcare is a basic public service and I think it is sad that the wealthiest nation on earth has citizens that have to worry about dying from untreated illness or injury.
'(sigh) how about you dispute what I actually said'
Right back at you.
You used people coming here to get procedures done as your basis for claiming our healthcare system is not poor. I countered by demonstrating that countries with notably poor healthcare still manage to draw in outsiders for procedures, knocking the support out from under your conclusion.
Your personal experience in the medical system neither adds credibility nor detracts from the quality of the US medical system so I simply ignored that part. Anecdotal evidence is worthless and even if it weren't you didn't experience what treatment would have been like elsewhere.
Ideology is not what drives most open source development and it is hardly a sustainable force. Selling the content itself is not the only way to fund the development of content.
'As said so frequently on Linux Hater's Blog [blogspot.com]'
Clearly, I should run everything by Linux Hater's Blog from now on.
'WorksForMe(tm) is not an acceptable answer.'
If you say so. Working for an IT consulting firm I install hundreds of Linux and thousands of windows systems each week. While your chances of picking random cheap hardware off the shelf and having it be made to work are better on windows there is broad Linux support now. With windows there generally 4 or 5 drivers to be installed after you've already completed installation. With Linux there are generally zero.
'I'm willing to admit that we still have work to do.'
There is always more work to do, but that doesn't mean the many strengths of Linux should be ignored.
The Ubuntu Desktop has a couple rough spots that could be polished (printing and file-sharing come to mind) but all in all it presents an extremely user friendly and pretty environment.
Out of the box I have 3D effects that are fast and put Vista's eye candy to shame. All my hardware is installed and ready to go. Browser plug-ins are helpfully acquired and installed for me. 3D acceleration is taken care of automatically. If I have a broadcom based wireless card then an alert will come up asking permission to set it up for me. The only thing I might need to do is setup my printer.
'Telling the GNOME and KDE developers feel-good lies like this doesn't help. Echo chambers are bad.'
Yes. Clearly it is better to drag the incredible software they have made through the mud.
'For most people, it seems like the popular open source software is vastly inferior.'
No, its just you who seems to be claiming the popular open source software is vastly inferior.
'People would rather pay for MS Office than use OpenOffice.'
Except for those who wouldn't and don't. I'd venture that informed users who have tried openoffice.org and opt for MS Office because the software is inferior are a VERY tiny minority. Most businesses who have run pilots of OpenOffice.org and end up using office do so because they interchange documents with other organizations that use MS Office.
'People would rather pay for Photoshop than use The GIMP.'
Some would, many wouldn't. There are still things Photoshop does that gimp does not and graphics artists tend to be religious about their applications even if there weren't. There are artists who are finicky to the point of requiring not merely Photoshop but specific version numbers.
'If they were inferior, why would this be so?'
First of all, you are singling out three or four applications. Just because there is someone, somewhere who will pay for a product rather than use the open source application it does not mean the applications are inferior. People choose applications for many reasons and it rarely has anything to do with the best application.
How about Apache, Scribus, Bind, GnuCash, Azureus, MySQL, Firefox, Thunderbird, Lyx, Filezilla, Evolution, etc, etc, etc...
Many of those applications are not merely chosen over the commercial alternatives, they are the most popular application in their field.
'we still have work to do.'
Most of the work that needs to be done is about making Linux a more standard and easier to target platform for developers. The system is already fairly easy to use and the UI is pretty sexy already.
'I for one think $.99 is a bit high for one track but I would pay that one TV show for sure.'
I wouldn't. But I would pay $1/month for a subscription to commercial free divx rips akin to the ones that i can download free off torrents.
That seems pretty reasonable, at about $30/month (an acceptable amount to pay for television programming) I could have a subscription to all the shows I might want to watch. I wouldn't download all the shows all the time and they can distribute it via torrent to make that price possible.
No cable company, no censorship, no taxes, just commercial free programming on demand.
'Like I said above, a five-year copyright will do a lot to kill purchases just because it'll be free pretty soon down the line.'
Perhaps you have that sort of patience but not many people do. If someone wants a book they go buy it within the week, if its not such a great one you might wait a few months to get it from the paperback bin but nobody would wait 5 years!
'With regards to "The ones that are still selling well after this period..." -- well, why the hell should they be prevented from continuing to profit?'
It's not preventing, its allowing. Neither the author nor the publisher own the book or the content. In fact, almost the entire content of the book is likely based upon content owned by the public thus the public owns the content. Copyright is artificial limitation created to allow authors to profit off their ideas for A LIMITED TIME. There is no reason that the material needs to be worthless before the public takes its rights to it back!
The five year copyright limitation will inspire more content creation. There are people who write for love of writing, they will write if they are poor, rich, working in shoe shop, it doesn't matter. Providing these people with a large and rich pool of relevant and valuable content to draw upon in their work will mean better books for all of us to enjoy.
For those who write primarily for profit, there is always plenty of non-book writing to be done where you actually have to keep working on a regular basis and can't live off previously performed work.
'Good God, why is is that no one on/. who opposes IP even understands the issue at hand?'
I understand it well enough.
'reproduction is and always has been effortless'
Exactly which is why we should get rid of the IP racket and force the software industry as we know it to evaporate. Most programmers work for corporations doing inhouse development, large software firms are the leeches of the industry and there is no reason to artificially sustain their business model by pretending they own ideas that by definition can't be owned.
'there's no real economic reason for hardware manufacturers to go out of their way to support Linux because there are so few users'
That is a pretty 5 years ago argument. Almost all major hardware manufacturers support Linux now and Linux currently runs about 5.6% of the desktop (let alone the server and embedded markets). 5.6% may not seem like much but that means there are millions using Linux and the numbers are even higher outside the states.
I shouldn't feed such a blatant troll but what the hell.
'One: Linux is basically unknown. Yes, we as Slashdotters know about it, and it runs on eight bajillion items, but the end user still remains basically ignorant.'
That would depend on the crowd, most of the people I talk to now have heard of linux even if they don't know what it is. However, most of them don't know what windows is either.
'Two: Linux doesn't require upgrades (in fact, it could really be argued that upgrading to the latest and greatest is a really bad thing for a Linux user, what with driver issues and all).'
What driver issues? My last two new system builds loaded without the need for additional drivers. Firmware needed to be downloaded to run my wireless adapter properly but Ubuntu helpfully does that for me.
'Open source software isn't the same as getting commercial software for' free.
your right, for the most part I've found the popular open source software better than commercial offerings.
'(Just look at Windows versus any of the major Linux DEs. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft has UI experts and programmers who are paid to work with them'
Yes, the programmers obviously didn't care about what they were doing and the UI is horrible. It actually gets worse with age. The MacOS UI is better but still fails to measure up to Gnome or KDE.
P.S. Mexican is a nationality not a race. If you failed to catch the blatant scathing sarcasm in my post then you should be referring to me a nationalist, not a racist.
You on the other hand, make become a racist when you refer to American Hispanics as Mexicans or even Mexican-Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
Woah boy, hold on now. Lets not forget that during the life of Christ it is generally believed that fishermen and others he convinced to do all of this were not mass crowds but a small cult comparable to a dozen similar cults that exist today.
Mass Christianity really didn't happen until the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that the cross made a great banner to rally a crumbling empire behind and that was long after christ.
That's the point though, the account is not the actual account of a real man, its the account of a morally ideal life in which the character is god on earth.
'Except you can't store music or movies in a human-readable format on a Rosetta disk any more than you can store them on microfilm.'
Pretty sure they lost that possibility when they encoded it digitally onto a disc. A large stone monument would have made more sense.
Now certs can finally be about the way they are actually used. Encryption. This should put an end to the argument that verifying encryption without verifying the identity of the third party allows man-in-middle attacks.
'If you want something someone produced, unless they're willing to give it to you, you should have to pay for it. '
I'd almost agree if they produced it in entirety. But since copyright works consist almost entirely of samplings from the public domain I'd say that public has VERY substantial claim to them. Not to mention the fact you carry a mental copy of everything you see and hear whether the person who arranged it likes it or not.
'My main beef with the OP isn't so much a pro highly restrictive copyright stance as it is a rejection of the bullshit quasi-populist idea content creators aren't entitled to continually derive and income from a past work.'
You are ignoring the REASON we grant an ARTIFICIAL monopoly to a content creator in the first place. The purpose is not 'give them their fair share'. Copyright exists only to inspire the creation of new content. If someone is not producing new content then society would be better served by not granting them copyright. Jealousy has nothing to do with it.
This is NOT redundant. This man was charged MORE than he made from his business where any large corp would be fined a small portion of their profits.
In this case the games were 14 years old and prior to the mickey mouse fiasco would be public domain content now.
However, selling for a lower price doesn't make it likely they would have paid the higher price. If all DVD's were $1 I'd have a hell of a collection right now. Instead I have never purchased even one DVD. I doubt I'm the only one in that boat. It isn't like the $20 I'd spend for $1 dvd's is going to be spent on legitimate $20 dvd's, a single dvd isn't worth $20 to me.
The same is typically true where someone is selling pirated content. The content is sold for pennies on the dollar and just because someone is willing to pay that price for that volume of material doesn't mean they would pay retail price for any material.
'It is my personal opinion that unless the copyright owner is actively selling the product(and at a competitive price) they shouldn't be eligble for copyright on that particular product,'
I saw a five year copyright term proposed previously and that sounded very realistic for me. Copyright is something that is there to allow the creator of content to have a chance to make a profit, not to allow them to utilize all the value inherent in the content. Something shouldn't have to no longer be valuable for it to transfer over to its rightful owner, the public.
'Why is it unlikely?'
The games in question are over 14 years old and afaik no longer published. If copyright terms weren't excessive they would be public domain in the first place.
'One could argue though, that if none of his customers had planned to purchase the original work, then not much harm was done. But that's unrealistic and impossible to *prove*...'
In the US justice system the burden of proof is SUPPOSED to be on the one claiming harm, not the one claiming there was no harm. I would argue that it is not unrealistic that the people purchasing from him would not have purchased from the vendor but likely.
Most of the people I know who consume pirated material have thousands of songs, hundreds of movies, dozens of games, etc. Those same people would NOT have bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of content if they had to pay for it. That collection might turn into one game, two movies, a few CD's, if that.
'how did he not deny someone the money'
The only way he denied them money was if the person paying him would have purchased the game from the copyright holder instead of the pirate. Unlikely.
Microsoft was fined $20mil in coupons that further entrenched their monopoly for a crime that made and continues to make them hundreds of billions of dollars.
'When I first saw my last doctor she wanted my throat to be tested, it felt like molten lead was being poured down it. So when I left her office an appointment was made right then and there to have the test. I was able to have the test scheduled for the following week. A person can't say it was an emergency and that the test had to be done asap as my throat had bothered me for years. If it had been an emergency then why wasn't it tested sooner?'
What does that have to do with the outpatient hospital procedures referred to in the article? Your except only mentioned GP referrals but the article qualified that to referrals to HOSPITAL care.
'And what do you mean by "REAL developments"? New drugs aren't real?'
A drug is not an advancement in and of itself. The drugs the US companies are releasing are comparable to 'inventing' the tuna sandwich over and over and shaping the bread differently each time. For an example look to the latest anti-depressant which is a minor alteration to the previous anti-depressant and does essentially the same thing. But the drug company gets a fresh patent, charges new drug prices, and of course doctors aren't going to prescribe last years drug. Sure they work, but so did the same drug under another name last year.
'Oh, and the federal government does acknowledge some medical uses for it, the feds used to allow prescription for glycoma for instance.'
Once upon a time marijuana was both legal and used for medical purposes in the United States. There are a handful of people receiving prescription marijuana in the United States legally but the program was shutdown. Currently the FDA and DEA claim that there is NO medical use for marijuana and as a result it has a worse classification than Cocaine!
Really, I'm not US bashing. I'm an American and proud of the ideals here. I'm not as proud of the realities in the current day. Healthcare is a basic public service and I think it is sad that the wealthiest nation on earth has citizens that have to worry about dying from untreated illness or injury.
'(sigh) how about you dispute what I actually said'
Right back at you.
You used people coming here to get procedures done as your basis for claiming our healthcare system is not poor. I countered by demonstrating that countries with notably poor healthcare still manage to draw in outsiders for procedures, knocking the support out from under your conclusion.
Your personal experience in the medical system neither adds credibility nor detracts from the quality of the US medical system so I simply ignored that part. Anecdotal evidence is worthless and even if it weren't you didn't experience what treatment would have been like elsewhere.
Seriously, defy your principles and LOOK at the article, there is a picture of the guy after transplant.
How anyone could call a horribly disfigured result 'successful' in a cosmetic procedure is beyond me.
Ideology is not what drives most open source development and it is hardly a sustainable force. Selling the content itself is not the only way to fund the development of content.
'As said so frequently on Linux Hater's Blog [blogspot.com]'
Clearly, I should run everything by Linux Hater's Blog from now on.
'WorksForMe(tm) is not an acceptable answer.'
If you say so. Working for an IT consulting firm I install hundreds of Linux and thousands of windows systems each week. While your chances of picking random cheap hardware off the shelf and having it be made to work are better on windows there is broad Linux support now. With windows there generally 4 or 5 drivers to be installed after you've already completed installation. With Linux there are generally zero.
'I'm willing to admit that we still have work to do.'
There is always more work to do, but that doesn't mean the many strengths of Linux should be ignored.
The Ubuntu Desktop has a couple rough spots that could be polished (printing and file-sharing come to mind) but all in all it presents an extremely user friendly and pretty environment.
Out of the box I have 3D effects that are fast and put Vista's eye candy to shame. All my hardware is installed and ready to go. Browser plug-ins are helpfully acquired and installed for me. 3D acceleration is taken care of automatically. If I have a broadcom based wireless card then an alert will come up asking permission to set it up for me. The only thing I might need to do is setup my printer.
'Telling the GNOME and KDE developers feel-good lies like this doesn't help. Echo chambers are bad.'
Yes. Clearly it is better to drag the incredible software they have made through the mud.
'For most people, it seems like the popular open source software is vastly inferior.'
No, its just you who seems to be claiming the popular open source software is vastly inferior.
'People would rather pay for MS Office than use OpenOffice.'
Except for those who wouldn't and don't. I'd venture that informed users who have tried openoffice.org and opt for MS Office because the software is inferior are a VERY tiny minority. Most businesses who have run pilots of OpenOffice.org and end up using office do so because they interchange documents with other organizations that use MS Office.
'People would rather pay for Photoshop than use The GIMP.'
Some would, many wouldn't. There are still things Photoshop does that gimp does not and graphics artists tend to be religious about their applications even if there weren't. There are artists who are finicky to the point of requiring not merely Photoshop but specific version numbers.
'If they were inferior, why would this be so?'
First of all, you are singling out three or four applications. Just because there is someone, somewhere who will pay for a product rather than use the open source application it does not mean the applications are inferior. People choose applications for many reasons and it rarely has anything to do with the best application.
How about Apache, Scribus, Bind, GnuCash, Azureus, MySQL, Firefox, Thunderbird, Lyx, Filezilla, Evolution, etc, etc, etc...
Many of those applications are not merely chosen over the commercial alternatives, they are the most popular application in their field.
'we still have work to do.'
Most of the work that needs to be done is about making Linux a more standard and easier to target platform for developers. The system is already fairly easy to use and the UI is pretty sexy already.
Agreed.
P.S. There are some aweful mods on trolling the boards today, parent was NOT flamebait.
'I for one think $.99 is a bit high for one track but I would pay that one TV show for sure.'
I wouldn't. But I would pay $1/month for a subscription to commercial free divx rips akin to the ones that i can download free off torrents.
That seems pretty reasonable, at about $30/month (an acceptable amount to pay for television programming) I could have a subscription to all the shows I might want to watch. I wouldn't download all the shows all the time and they can distribute it via torrent to make that price possible.
No cable company, no censorship, no taxes, just commercial free programming on demand.
'Like I said above, a five-year copyright will do a lot to kill purchases just because it'll be free pretty soon down the line.'
Perhaps you have that sort of patience but not many people do. If someone wants a book they go buy it within the week, if its not such a great one you might wait a few months to get it from the paperback bin but nobody would wait 5 years!
'With regards to "The ones that are still selling well after this period..." -- well, why the hell should they be prevented from continuing to profit?'
It's not preventing, its allowing. Neither the author nor the publisher own the book or the content. In fact, almost the entire content of the book is likely based upon content owned by the public thus the public owns the content. Copyright is artificial limitation created to allow authors to profit off their ideas for A LIMITED TIME. There is no reason that the material needs to be worthless before the public takes its rights to it back!
The five year copyright limitation will inspire more content creation. There are people who write for love of writing, they will write if they are poor, rich, working in shoe shop, it doesn't matter. Providing these people with a large and rich pool of relevant and valuable content to draw upon in their work will mean better books for all of us to enjoy.
For those who write primarily for profit, there is always plenty of non-book writing to be done where you actually have to keep working on a regular basis and can't live off previously performed work.
'Good God, why is is that no one on /. who opposes IP even understands the issue at hand?'
I understand it well enough.
'reproduction is and always has been effortless'
Exactly which is why we should get rid of the IP racket and force the software industry as we know it to evaporate. Most programmers work for corporations doing inhouse development, large software firms are the leeches of the industry and there is no reason to artificially sustain their business model by pretending they own ideas that by definition can't be owned.
'there's no real economic reason for hardware manufacturers to go out of their way to support Linux because there are so few users'
That is a pretty 5 years ago argument. Almost all major hardware manufacturers support Linux now and Linux currently runs about 5.6% of the desktop (let alone the server and embedded markets). 5.6% may not seem like much but that means there are millions using Linux and the numbers are even higher outside the states.
I shouldn't feed such a blatant troll but what the hell.
'One: Linux is basically unknown. Yes, we as Slashdotters know about it, and it runs on eight bajillion items, but the end user still remains basically ignorant.'
That would depend on the crowd, most of the people I talk to now have heard of linux even if they don't know what it is. However, most of them don't know what windows is either.
'Two: Linux doesn't require upgrades (in fact, it could really be argued that upgrading to the latest and greatest is a really bad thing for a Linux user, what with driver issues and all).'
What driver issues? My last two new system builds loaded without the need for additional drivers. Firmware needed to be downloaded to run my wireless adapter properly but Ubuntu helpfully does that for me.
'Open source software isn't the same as getting commercial software for' free.
your right, for the most part I've found the popular open source software better than commercial offerings.
'(Just look at Windows versus any of the major Linux DEs. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft has UI experts and programmers who are paid to work with them'
Yes, the programmers obviously didn't care about what they were doing and the UI is horrible. It actually gets worse with age. The MacOS UI is better but still fails to measure up to Gnome or KDE.
P.S. Mexican is a nationality not a race. If you failed to catch the blatant scathing sarcasm in my post then you should be referring to me a nationalist, not a racist.
You on the other hand, make become a racist when you refer to American Hispanics as Mexicans or even Mexican-Americans.