30 seconds breaks were perfectly tolerable and kind of funny to read. But after a while they started actively fighting AdBlock, and there is no cure for that.
AdBlock is a great technology, and it won't be long before we have trainable (Bayesian?) filters, I think. But Hulu has an upper hand in this fight: they can always default to gluing ads into the video stream, which would put us back to square one. But hey, whatever. I can write a script that detects new torrents and downloads them automagically. Eat that, Hulu.
The first two are very decent, I use them all the time. Hulu, however, is at war with AdBlock, and is utterly unwatchable. I would rather do micro-payments than watch a single ad, and until providers get it through their thick skulls, the free version will remain a superior product.
No to make someone feel better but yes, to give someone a financial reason to release their creations to the public. By having a limited monopoly pizza bakers are able to make and sell an item for a limited period before they have to compete with others. This period gives an incentive to create pizza. What is so hard to understand about that?
Would you argue that pizza bakers need limited monopoly? If not, then what makes art so fundamentally different? Why should anyone deserve more than a right to make profit by selling original effort and original copies of their work, just like all of us do?
As I have repeatedly said not everyone is willing to express their idea if they are unable to enjoy a limited monopoly on that idea so they can try to sale it thereby enriching their life. For this very reason copyrights were authorized by the USA Constitution.
No, the reason for that was to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", not to make someone feel better. No evidence was ever shown that copyright accomplishes this goal, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary: namely, that commercial art is more expensive (you need a lawyer!) and improving on others' ideas (remixing) is next to impossible.
If anything because the cost of duplication is so low now compared to, forget 200 years ago, just 25 years ago copyrights are needed more now than back them. The cost of generating ideas has gone up but duplicating them has dropped dramatically.
So if the price of making the second pizza suddenly falls to near zero, then we need better pizzaright laws, which prohibit duplication of pizza without a license, and which give authorized producers a monopoly? By your logic, otherwise no one would make pizza for sale, which is bad. Since you accept that there is no intrinsic right to ideas, you are trying to justify giving authors monopoly in economic terms, but then your argument works just as well for pizzas and cars. Moreover, we know that monopoly works really badly for everyone except for the monopolist. Why do you think it is different in the idea world? If anything, we are worse off!
Quite simply just because people don't like spending $10 to watch a movie in the theatre or buy the DVD for $20 that does not give them the right to copy someone else's DVD. Nor does it give someone else the right to copy and mass produce the movie then hawk it on the street corner for a few dollars.
We already have that rihght, it's called "private property". We have a right to do whatever we want with things we own. If you and me make copies of files using our computers and our paid-for Internet connection, that's our business. Copyright takes away our private property rights, supposedly to "promote arts". If you cannot show that it promotes arts, then we should have our property rights back.
Who's going to be the first buyer when they can wait until they can get a copy for free, well at a low cost?
Fans.
Do you really think many of the movies made today would ever had been made if there was no copyright?
Yes. Monumental works of architecture were built and enjoyed by all, without copyright. Symphonies were written, murals painted. I just put Karmic on my friend's computer, checked out Rhythmbox, and there are like thousands of tracks of kick-ass electronic music, free. People are publishing their novels on the Internet for free and selling paper copies for profit. Some media is successfully ad supported. Some websites thrive behind a paywall. Free software is ahead of the competition in innovation. This is today, while free art has to compete in an unfair marketplace against companies that will use copyright to crush the competition, to conceal decades of creativity in their inaccessible vaults, to censor whatever they don't like.
Are assuming that monopoly on ideas is in itself fair? Or are you saying that it is the only way to make sure that artists get paid? Or that it is the best way, in some sense? I don't understand your difficulty.
Why cannot artists make a living by selling just the first copies, when it comes to digital? Why cannot they make even more money by selling even more copies at a price which reflects the cost of running an ftp server?
The cost of duplication is not zero. You pay for your Internet connection, right? The cost is very small, but it is not zero. And the role of what they call the first mover advantage in this argument is very important too.
Short version: Copyright is the intellectual monopoly. Multiple studies failed to produce even as much as a shred of evidence that copyright increases creativity. On the contrary, it is routinely being used as an anti-competitive device, as the means to forbid an improved version of an idea, as a censorship tool. If the market was truly free and competitive, the price of those copies would be orders of magnitude smaller, while recouping the cost of producing the first copy would still be quite possible. These are compelling economic and moral reasons to resist the intellectual monopoly, which basically means (1) boycotting their outlets and (2) ignoring an unjust and largely unenforceable law.
You are relying heavily on the assumption that politicians are allowed to get campaign funds from corporations. This is, basically, a legalized bribery, and so you are absolutely correct.
I am not a politician, but it seems to me that there are 2 major money sinks during a campaign: travel and advertising in mass media. Travel expenses can be easily capped and financed fairly out of taxes. The media exposure used to be a much more difficult problem, but it is no longer. IMHO, paying for ads should be illegal. Instead, the government should provide every qualified candidate with a Web server. The candidate is then free to use it as a personal media outlet. This system is not only drastically more fair, but also provides more effective means to express an opinion. Instead of a 5 minute ad which is almost invariably a sappy story devoid of content, every candidate will be able to publicize their platform and their opinions, as well as to have a public discussion forum. And they can still play clips with troubled music where their opponents are shaking hands with terrorists! Not 5, not 50 minutes a day, but 24-7 on demand.
DVD's should be released much later after a film's release, and so move people to get back into the cinema.
You had the right stance with music, why change it for movies? Film makers should also stop wanking around and
start making movies on sensible budgets. Actors should be paid a lot less and work some more. Just like musicians,
actors should be happy that they basically get to show off for a living. I want to laugh at an actor who thinks that
their effort is somehow intrinsically deserving of more than a few dozen bucks per hour.
With sensible budgets, one can charge a very small fraction of the current price for a download of a free-as-in-freedom digital
copy and people will happily pay it. If the price is low enough, no one will bother pirating it.
There simply won't be enough incentive to do so. What would be a point of seeding a release if an identical one can be downloaded
somewhat faster for $1 ?
This, I believe, is the future of content. We know it, they know it, but they are shrewdly extracting every last penny out of the current model.
May be it will work out fine. Suppose that the treaty will pass and that the law enforcement and the courts will
start enforcing these laws in earnest. I suspect that it will make all proprietary material simply too expensive to
handle. Copying digital data is very, very cheap. If the laws become effective, copying proprietary content will
become risky, and therefore expensive. But copying properly licensed content (e.g. CC-SA) will not be risky or expensive.
Guess what will happen next.
Again: imagine that you are in a world where joining an illegal torrent will likely result in you being banned from
the Internet, fined, or thrown in jail. The most obvious prediction I can make about art is that CC-SA content will be all over
the Internet, while the proprietary content will become a tiny niche. Since the "goodness" of art is subjective,
this transition is painless for us as a society.
The picture is even better in the commodity software department. We all know that that running
proprietary software brings about licensing problems. But, even more importantly, people begin to recognize that non-free software
is utterly untrustworthy, i.e. no one knows what it really does. There is only one way left to prop up the proprietary
commodity software, and that is to outlaw free-as-in-freedom computing. But that will not happen, since copyleft is already
entrenched in the industry which is orders of magnitude bigger (read: has more cash) than the content industry.
Jokes aside, we all know this is the year of GNU/Linux on desktop, folks. If you disagree, I suggest you start short-selling Dell asap.
The government is actually pretty slick, if you think about it. They are taking the lobbyists' cash and making copyright stronger, just as they are
transitioning away from the proprietary software.
None of the mentioned things affected my setup: Dell XPS with AMD64 and nVidia, but I had other various issues.
The wired card ceased to be "managed". The fix was easy, but the reason will remain a mystery.
"Popping" sounds could be heard. This is a very minor bug with a very easy fix.
Quake Live became a terrible dog for FPS, and the problem was traced to its interference with compiz. Since QL is still in beta, it is hard to say whose fault it is. The workaround (by me:) is OK.
Where is the Services wizard? It got nuked! To be sure, it's not a bug, but a serious usability issue. Users have to either grok System V scripts (so I am OK) or use Synaptic when they want to, say, disable/enable sshd.
Altogether, this was a rather painless experience for me, but if you hate ironing out bugs, I would recommend waiting for a few weeks before upgrading from stable. On the other hand, if you are doing a new installation, 9.10 is probably a better choice, as it basically works.
P.S.: God, I hate it when I press a wrong button and Firefox navigates away, which causes me
to loose my notes.Slashdot should open the input form on a separate page.
When I have a kid, it's gonna learn to play a computer game before talking. Probably on the Internet. Hmm... MMO for toddlers? Something with bouncing rainbows and cute animal sidekicks.
I personally use Emacs. (works in Windows too!). Its TeX mode is OK for readability, with syntax highlighting and all, and it's easy to create shortcuts for inserting blocks of text. xdvi is great for preview on GNU/Linux.
My point is, no amount of encryption adds to your physical security.
If they bug your ceiling, they can see you entering the password and doing
all the other things you do with your computer. Hence the encryption does not
make spying impossible, only a lot more expensive, geographically isolated,
and more subject to the due process, as Znork (31774) points out nearby.
IMHO, all the more reasons to use the end-to-end encryption as much as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
The GP is the current pope.
30 seconds breaks were perfectly tolerable and kind of funny to read. But after a while they started actively fighting AdBlock, and there is no cure for that.
https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2456&start=45
AdBlock is a great technology, and it won't be long before we have trainable (Bayesian?) filters, I think. But Hulu has an upper hand in this fight: they can always default to gluing ads into the video stream, which would put us back to square one. But hey, whatever. I can write a script that detects new torrents and downloads them automagically. Eat that, Hulu.
The first two are very decent, I use them all the time. Hulu, however, is at war with AdBlock, and is utterly unwatchable. I would rather do micro-payments than watch a single ad, and until providers get it through their thick skulls, the free version will remain a superior product.
Where's the black hole in this picture?
It's great that SOMEONE is trying to stop these MURDEROUS solar panels in SPACE!!
No, really, your argument applies to pizza, look:
No to make someone feel better but yes, to give someone a financial reason to release their creations to the public. By having a limited monopoly pizza bakers are able to make and sell an item for a limited period before they have to compete with others. This period gives an incentive to create pizza. What is so hard to understand about that?
Would you argue that pizza bakers need limited monopoly? If not, then what makes art so fundamentally different? Why should anyone deserve more than a right to make profit by selling original effort and original copies of their work, just like all of us do?
As I have repeatedly said not everyone is willing to express their idea if they are unable to enjoy a limited monopoly on that idea so they can try to sale it thereby enriching their life. For this very reason copyrights were authorized by the USA Constitution.
No, the reason for that was to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", not to make someone feel better. No evidence was ever shown that copyright accomplishes this goal, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary: namely, that commercial art is more expensive (you need a lawyer!) and improving on others' ideas (remixing) is next to impossible.
If anything because the cost of duplication is so low now compared to, forget 200 years ago, just 25 years ago copyrights are needed more now than back them. The cost of generating ideas has gone up but duplicating them has dropped dramatically.
So if the price of making the second pizza suddenly falls to near zero, then we need better pizzaright laws, which prohibit duplication of pizza without a license, and which give authorized producers a monopoly? By your logic, otherwise no one would make pizza for sale, which is bad. Since you accept that there is no intrinsic right to ideas, you are trying to justify giving authors monopoly in economic terms, but then your argument works just as well for pizzas and cars. Moreover, we know that monopoly works really badly for everyone except for the monopolist. Why do you think it is different in the idea world? If anything, we are worse off!
Quite simply just because people don't like spending $10 to watch a movie in the theatre or buy the DVD for $20 that does not give them the right to copy someone else's DVD. Nor does it give someone else the right to copy and mass produce the movie then hawk it on the street corner for a few dollars.
We already have that rihght, it's called "private property". We have a right to do whatever we want with things we own. If you and me make copies of files using our computers and our paid-for Internet connection, that's our business. Copyright takes away our private property rights, supposedly to "promote arts". If you cannot show that it promotes arts, then we should have our property rights back.
Who's going to be the first buyer when they can wait until they can get a copy for free, well at a low cost?
Fans.
Do you really think many of the movies made today would ever had been made if there was no copyright?
Yes. Monumental works of architecture were built and enjoyed by all, without copyright. Symphonies were written, murals painted. I just put Karmic on my friend's computer, checked out Rhythmbox, and there are like thousands of tracks of kick-ass electronic music, free. People are publishing their novels on the Internet for free and selling paper copies for profit. Some media is successfully ad supported. Some websites thrive behind a paywall. Free software is ahead of the competition in innovation. This is today, while free art has to compete in an unfair marketplace against companies that will use copyright to crush the competition, to conceal decades of creativity in their inaccessible vaults, to censor whatever they don't like.
Are assuming that monopoly on ideas is in itself fair? Or are you saying that it is the only way to make sure that artists get paid? Or that it is the best way, in some sense? I don't understand your difficulty.
Why cannot artists make a living by selling just the first copies, when it comes to digital? Why cannot they make even more money by selling even more copies at a price which reflects the cost of running an ftp server?
The cost of duplication is not zero. You pay for your Internet connection, right? The cost is very small, but it is not zero. And the role of what they call the first mover advantage in this argument is very important too.
Look, everyone here can make up plenty of reasons for why they deserve free content, but in a capitalist economy I have yet to hear a single good one.
Here.
Short version: Copyright is the intellectual monopoly. Multiple studies failed to produce even as much as a shred of evidence that copyright increases creativity. On the contrary, it is routinely being used as an anti-competitive device, as the means to forbid an improved version of an idea, as a censorship tool. If the market was truly free and competitive, the price of those copies would be orders of magnitude smaller, while recouping the cost of producing the first copy would still be quite possible. These are compelling economic and moral reasons to resist the intellectual monopoly, which basically means (1) boycotting their outlets and (2) ignoring an unjust and largely unenforceable law.
Microsoft released a product that does not suck. Unfortunately, it is a vacuum cleaner.
You are relying heavily on the assumption that politicians are allowed to get campaign funds from corporations. This is, basically, a legalized bribery, and so you are absolutely correct.
I am not a politician, but it seems to me that there are 2 major money sinks during a campaign: travel and advertising in mass media. Travel expenses can be easily capped and financed fairly out of taxes. The media exposure used to be a much more difficult problem, but it is no longer. IMHO, paying for ads should be illegal. Instead, the government should provide every qualified candidate with a Web server. The candidate is then free to use it as a personal media outlet. This system is not only drastically more fair, but also provides more effective means to express an opinion. Instead of a 5 minute ad which is almost invariably a sappy story devoid of content, every candidate will be able to publicize their platform and their opinions, as well as to have a public discussion forum. And they can still play clips with troubled music where their opponents are shaking hands with terrorists! Not 5, not 50 minutes a day, but 24-7 on demand.
DVD's should be released much later after a film's release, and so move people to get back into the cinema.
You had the right stance with music, why change it for movies? Film makers should also stop wanking around and start making movies on sensible budgets. Actors should be paid a lot less and work some more. Just like musicians, actors should be happy that they basically get to show off for a living. I want to laugh at an actor who thinks that their effort is somehow intrinsically deserving of more than a few dozen bucks per hour.
With sensible budgets, one can charge a very small fraction of the current price for a download of a free-as-in-freedom digital copy and people will happily pay it. If the price is low enough, no one will bother pirating it. There simply won't be enough incentive to do so. What would be a point of seeding a release if an identical one can be downloaded somewhat faster for $1 ?
This, I believe, is the future of content. We know it, they know it, but they are shrewdly extracting every last penny out of the current model.
Above all, will it even work?
May be it will work out fine. Suppose that the treaty will pass and that the law enforcement and the courts will start enforcing these laws in earnest. I suspect that it will make all proprietary material simply too expensive to handle. Copying digital data is very, very cheap. If the laws become effective, copying proprietary content will become risky, and therefore expensive. But copying properly licensed content (e.g. CC-SA) will not be risky or expensive. Guess what will happen next.
Again: imagine that you are in a world where joining an illegal torrent will likely result in you being banned from the Internet, fined, or thrown in jail. The most obvious prediction I can make about art is that CC-SA content will be all over the Internet, while the proprietary content will become a tiny niche. Since the "goodness" of art is subjective, this transition is painless for us as a society.
The picture is even better in the commodity software department. We all know that that running proprietary software brings about licensing problems. But, even more importantly, people begin to recognize that non-free software is utterly untrustworthy, i.e. no one knows what it really does. There is only one way left to prop up the proprietary commodity software, and that is to outlaw free-as-in-freedom computing. But that will not happen, since copyleft is already entrenched in the industry which is orders of magnitude bigger (read: has more cash) than the content industry. Jokes aside, we all know this is the year of GNU/Linux on desktop, folks. If you disagree, I suggest you start short-selling Dell asap.
The government is actually pretty slick, if you think about it. They are taking the lobbyists' cash and making copyright stronger, just as they are transitioning away from the proprietary software.
Occasional pop sounds from the speakers, but audio is working fine.
In
comment out
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
(last line).
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1311262&highlight=popping+sounds
None of the mentioned things affected my setup: Dell XPS with AMD64 and nVidia, but I had other various issues.
Altogether, this was a rather painless experience for me, but if you hate ironing out bugs, I would recommend waiting for a few weeks before upgrading from stable. On the other hand, if you are doing a new installation, 9.10 is probably a better choice, as it basically works.
P.S.: God, I hate it when I press a wrong button and Firefox navigates away, which causes me to loose my notes.Slashdot should open the input form on a separate page.
It can't be both.
Why not? "Great" does not mean "100%", and neither does "better than Windows".
When I have a kid, it's gonna learn to play a computer game before talking. Probably on the Internet. Hmm... MMO for toddlers? Something with bouncing rainbows and cute animal sidekicks.
I personally use Emacs. (works in Windows too!). Its TeX mode is OK for readability, with syntax highlighting and all, and it's easy to create shortcuts for inserting blocks of text. xdvi is great for preview on GNU/Linux.
Say, you are doing probability and have to write a bunch of integrals over the real line. Then you can prepare this:
\newcommand{\fX}{f_X(x)}
\newcommand{\intii}{\mathop{\int_{-\infty}^\infty}}
or
\newcommand{\intR}{\mathop{\int_{\mathbb R}}}
and later use
\[ \fX = \intii f(x,y)dy \]
It's true. I know a guy who had sex with a walrus.
My point is, no amount of encryption adds to your physical security. If they bug your ceiling, they can see you entering the password and doing all the other things you do with your computer. Hence the encryption does not make spying impossible, only a lot more expensive, geographically isolated, and more subject to the due process, as Znork (31774) points out nearby. IMHO, all the more reasons to use the end-to-end encryption as much as possible.
Encryption simply forces them to tap your keyboard, and the costs of that are much higher than the costs of running Wireshark on a router somewhere.
May be it was a girl?
This is an impressive list of features :) Thanks.