Did you stop, just for a second to think, "Wait a second, they don't have any such regulations in other places!" ? In Japan, violence in media isn't regulated period (in fact, there is no rating system for games whatsoever). Yet, their violence rate per capita is STILL much lower than ours. (Their suicide rate is much higher, however, but we all know that the catalyst for suicide is very different than that for violence.)
I'm not absolutely positive what drives the violence up, but I have a good idea -- people working for minimum wage trying to support a family, who are then told they're "useless" and "failures" because they never got a chance at a decent way of life. Rejected by all of social existence as far as you can see, wouldn't you feel compelled to destroy it? On a side note, I'd really like to see profiling of violent persons based on IQ.
READ the article, people!
The threat of a three-year prison term kicks in when anyone makes an illicit copy of a movie "available on a computer network accessible to members of the public," when the film "was intended for commercial distribution but had not been so distributed at the time." Once the film is commercially distributed, the felony penalties appear to no longer apply.
In other words, this is for providing jail time when someone distributes a pre-release bootleg of the movie. It's not as serious as it looks.
I also found a loophole:
Peter Jaszi, a professor at American University who teaches copyright law, said he is "deeply troubled" by the wording of the draft legislation, because it does not say any actual copyright infringement must take place--only that the file be available in a shared folder, Web site or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. "It says we don't care if anybody got any of these copies," Jaszi said. "We're going to conclude that at least 10 people did. It relieves the copyright owner of having to prove that any violation of their rights actually happened."
It doesn't mention TDCC (do a specific something and you're automatically sent a specific file) triggers on IRC fserves, or for that matter, XDCC bots (instead of folders, they have a list of files that they share and you tell the bot the number of the file you want). Hell, you could have the file explicitly shared with some P2P clients even if the file isn't in a shared folder (I think pyslsk has this functionality, but I'd have to look to be sure). I will laugh in the face of this bill and share my Matrix 4 bootleg on a TDCC trigger on my deligtful self-written fserve script.
However, I'm still very strongly against this being passed. Why do conservative senators want to inflate the populations of already-overcrowded prisons in the name of helping businesses line their pockets with purified platinum? Seems like worsening two issues with one bill to me. Maybe that's what conservative people are for...
You mean... you haven't heard of ratpoison yet? It's an entirely keyboard-driven (as in, literally the only thing it does with the mouse is preserving cursor positions on a per-window basis) WM based heavily on GNU screen. Combined with XMMS' zxcvb shortcuts and Mozilla's variety of keyboard shortcuts, I may never use my mouse again. (It's still on my desk, though: The red light on the back helps the mood, and you just can't play a FPS without a mouse, it simply can't be done effectively)
IMO, the world shouldn't have mice at all. With TODAY'S TECHNOLOGY and a little ingenuity, we could have fairly inexpensive (albeit somewhat insecure) "gloves" that allow us to use our hands to control our computers.
People just don't get it. They talk and talk and talk about having to stop everyone from ripping protected files for sharing on the Internet, when truth is, it can't be done. Then they throw out this stuff that keeps your average luser from ripping the files, but is nothing that your average geek can circumvent. These people need to seriously get their act together.
This would be funny if it wasn't so true. This is highly offensive to republicans everywhere... wait... that's a good thing.... okay... *goes back to his hole*
I'm SURE the nanobots would find a way to feed him based on particles in the air, probably even find a way to turn oxygen into carbohydrates and literally eat air... Now a vacuum might work, but then the nanobots might somehow give him the ability to ingest the walls of the vacuum chamber. How about we shoot him off into space? He'll probably eat asteroids.
Nanotechnology is the secret to immortality. And that's a bad thing. If we ever develop such machines, there MUST be some sort of override to make them self-destruct. Otherwise, we'll never, NEVER kill Osama bin Laden.
And what if someone hacks into their nanobots and programs them to give him inhuman abilities, like (your favorite X-men character's main ability here), dodging bullets, affecting the flow of electrons from miles away (the ultimate rootkit), or how about being able to psychokill (destroying or murdering another individual purely by psychic means)? Oh, here's my favorite, how about a guy that can take control of ANYONE's mind with the flick of his head? He'd rule the world.
It'd be a shame to simply throw nanotech out the window, though. Here's what I'm thinking. Have mankind be a network. When one person is subdued by a hacker that overtook their brain, the victim's nanobots would contact the nearest innocent person's nanobots and convey to them everything the bots can figure out about the attack and its effects, and the message would be passed to anyone who cares to hear, and so on, while at the same time the nanobots of each person that's recieved the message works together to render themselves immune to the attack. We're talking a race of superhumans that can't successfully commit violent crimes, in a world where the rest of the ecosystem is still being run by the old natural selection and not the new dynamic evolution. The rainforest is doomed. But that's OK. We'll be able to breathe our own CO2.
IANAL, but that's only the same as a few thousand life sentences, isn't it? And face it, you'll probably die in prison with only three or four life sentences, what's a couple thousand more? You'll never serve them...
I'm amazed that in a discussion like this nobody ever brings up the Vorbis codec. Even if it's not perfect, it's pretty damn good, even at ~64kbps. Oh yeah, and what about FLAC? FLAC, being lossless, is ***PERFECT*** in terms of sound quality. A lot of people trade in a lossless codec like FLAC. What the hell happened to talking about them?
It's not about just MP3s. People just tend to use MP3 as a poster child. When we look at the big picture, at FLAC, at Vorbis, throw in MP3 and WMA for good measure, and hell, throw in Shorten too, and we examine each one analytically, based not only on quality but the size of the file and the time it takes to download on a typical residential broadband connection, THEN we'll have a really good idea of just how good online-swappable audio is and just how much of a threat it could be to the record companies.
While I'm ranting, why don't we discuss independent labels? PEOPLE, ORDER CDS FROM INDEPENDENT LABELS. The independents are losing money out the brick walls because the artists' listeners are converting to piracy to get their music fix, which is due to resellers refusing to carry independent labels. The Big Five aren't threatened. The Little Thousand are.
It's people like you that make me wonder if gun control is REALLY that good of an idea. You just simply say "Mozilla sucks. Period." What the hell do you not like about it? Don't just scream "LINUX SUX0RZ!" Tell us WHY it sucks, and somebody, somewhere, will do something about it, and Linux won't suck anymore! And everybody lives happily ever after.
And BTW, there's hundreds, no, thousands of games for Linux, and most of them are free. They're not commercial quality, but do you want to play a game as desktop-intrusive as the typical commercial game or do you want something that can be easily hid from your boss? I'd personally rather have xpuyopuyo than Unreal Tournament 2003 when I'm supposed to be getting something done.
ACK! Please God no! Hard drives are not nearly as fast as we need them! I remember when I could load DooM in 2 seconds on a box that could barely manage 5fps in-game. Today, Unreal Tournament 2003 takes almost a minute to load, yet I regularly top 60fps. If there's one thing in computer technology that isn't growing fast enough, it's hard drive speed. I wanna be able to load UT2k3 in a matter of seconds, not minutes!
It's about control. They want to control you in every way they can, (excuse the Little Red Riding Hood reference) All the Better to Rob You With! Imagine having to pay royalties just to turn on your TV. It probably will happen in the next few years unless we resist. Problem is, that argument holds no ground legally. Thus, we need a reasonable argument. I will soon be writing a paper on destroying the concept of intellectual property in a peaceful in lawful way. Basically it goes like this: create public domain content that anyone can access for free, create massive online social networks devoted to spreading this content, do everything in your power to make public domain and other Free-Speech Media (public domain and GPL-like licensed content) mainstream -- and when the DRM in our boxes block Free-Speech content, sue like there's no tomorrow. As long as you stick strictly to Free-Speech content, you'll win every time, I guarantee it. That, and a highly publicized slip-up of DRM will make the common people see the media companies for what they really are -- white-collar communists that don't give a sh*t about your rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you stop, just for a second to think, "Wait a second, they don't have any such regulations in other places!" ? In Japan, violence in media isn't regulated period (in fact, there is no rating system for games whatsoever). Yet, their violence rate per capita is STILL much lower than ours. (Their suicide rate is much higher, however, but we all know that the catalyst for suicide is very different than that for violence.)
I'm not absolutely positive what drives the violence up, but I have a good idea -- people working for minimum wage trying to support a family, who are then told they're "useless" and "failures" because they never got a chance at a decent way of life. Rejected by all of social existence as far as you can see, wouldn't you feel compelled to destroy it? On a side note, I'd really like to see profiling of violent persons based on IQ.
READ the article, people! The threat of a three-year prison term kicks in when anyone makes an illicit copy of a movie "available on a computer network accessible to members of the public," when the film "was intended for commercial distribution but had not been so distributed at the time." Once the film is commercially distributed, the felony penalties appear to no longer apply. In other words, this is for providing jail time when someone distributes a pre-release bootleg of the movie. It's not as serious as it looks. I also found a loophole: Peter Jaszi, a professor at American University who teaches copyright law, said he is "deeply troubled" by the wording of the draft legislation, because it does not say any actual copyright infringement must take place--only that the file be available in a shared folder, Web site or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. "It says we don't care if anybody got any of these copies," Jaszi said. "We're going to conclude that at least 10 people did. It relieves the copyright owner of having to prove that any violation of their rights actually happened." It doesn't mention TDCC (do a specific something and you're automatically sent a specific file) triggers on IRC fserves, or for that matter, XDCC bots (instead of folders, they have a list of files that they share and you tell the bot the number of the file you want). Hell, you could have the file explicitly shared with some P2P clients even if the file isn't in a shared folder (I think pyslsk has this functionality, but I'd have to look to be sure). I will laugh in the face of this bill and share my Matrix 4 bootleg on a TDCC trigger on my deligtful self-written fserve script. However, I'm still very strongly against this being passed. Why do conservative senators want to inflate the populations of already-overcrowded prisons in the name of helping businesses line their pockets with purified platinum? Seems like worsening two issues with one bill to me. Maybe that's what conservative people are for...
You mean... you haven't heard of ratpoison yet? It's an entirely keyboard-driven (as in, literally the only thing it does with the mouse is preserving cursor positions on a per-window basis) WM based heavily on GNU screen. Combined with XMMS' zxcvb shortcuts and Mozilla's variety of keyboard shortcuts, I may never use my mouse again. (It's still on my desk, though: The red light on the back helps the mood, and you just can't play a FPS without a mouse, it simply can't be done effectively)
IMO, the world shouldn't have mice at all. With TODAY'S TECHNOLOGY and a little ingenuity, we could have fairly inexpensive (albeit somewhat insecure) "gloves" that allow us to use our hands to control our computers.
People just don't get it. They talk and talk and talk about having to stop everyone from ripping protected files for sharing on the Internet, when truth is, it can't be done. Then they throw out this stuff that keeps your average luser from ripping the files, but is nothing that your average geek can circumvent. These people need to seriously get their act together.
Looks like something she did broke the ads...
k wh oops.gif
ftp://andersonfamily.ath.cx/incoming/doubleclic
This would be funny if it wasn't so true. This is highly offensive to republicans everywhere... wait... that's a good thing.... okay... *goes back to his hole*
I'm SURE the nanobots would find a way to feed him based on particles in the air, probably even find a way to turn oxygen into carbohydrates and literally eat air... Now a vacuum might work, but then the nanobots might somehow give him the ability to ingest the walls of the vacuum chamber. How about we shoot him off into space? He'll probably eat asteroids.
Nanotechnology is the secret to immortality. And that's a bad thing. If we ever develop such machines, there MUST be some sort of override to make them self-destruct. Otherwise, we'll never, NEVER kill Osama bin Laden.
And what if someone hacks into their nanobots and programs them to give him inhuman abilities, like (your favorite X-men character's main ability here), dodging bullets, affecting the flow of electrons from miles away (the ultimate rootkit), or how about being able to psychokill (destroying or murdering another individual purely by psychic means)? Oh, here's my favorite, how about a guy that can take control of ANYONE's mind with the flick of his head? He'd rule the world.
It'd be a shame to simply throw nanotech out the window, though. Here's what I'm thinking. Have mankind be a network. When one person is subdued by a hacker that overtook their brain, the victim's nanobots would contact the nearest innocent person's nanobots and convey to them everything the bots can figure out about the attack and its effects, and the message would be passed to anyone who cares to hear, and so on, while at the same time the nanobots of each person that's recieved the message works together to render themselves immune to the attack. We're talking a race of superhumans that can't successfully commit violent crimes, in a world where the rest of the ecosystem is still being run by the old natural selection and not the new dynamic evolution. The rainforest is doomed. But that's OK. We'll be able to breathe our own CO2.
IANAL, but that's only the same as a few thousand life sentences, isn't it? And face it, you'll probably die in prison with only three or four life sentences, what's a couple thousand more? You'll never serve them...
I'm amazed that in a discussion like this nobody ever brings up the Vorbis codec. Even if it's not perfect, it's pretty damn good, even at ~64kbps. Oh yeah, and what about FLAC? FLAC, being lossless, is ***PERFECT*** in terms of sound quality. A lot of people trade in a lossless codec like FLAC. What the hell happened to talking about them?
It's not about just MP3s. People just tend to use MP3 as a poster child. When we look at the big picture, at FLAC, at Vorbis, throw in MP3 and WMA for good measure, and hell, throw in Shorten too, and we examine each one analytically, based not only on quality but the size of the file and the time it takes to download on a typical residential broadband connection, THEN we'll have a really good idea of just how good online-swappable audio is and just how much of a threat it could be to the record companies.
While I'm ranting, why don't we discuss independent labels? PEOPLE, ORDER CDS FROM INDEPENDENT LABELS. The independents are losing money out the brick walls because the artists' listeners are converting to piracy to get their music fix, which is due to resellers refusing to carry independent labels. The Big Five aren't threatened. The Little Thousand are.
ARGH! FU..... *calms self*
It's people like you that make me wonder if gun control is REALLY that good of an idea. You just simply say "Mozilla sucks. Period." What the hell do you not like about it? Don't just scream "LINUX SUX0RZ!" Tell us WHY it sucks, and somebody, somewhere, will do something about it, and Linux won't suck anymore! And everybody lives happily ever after.
And BTW, there's hundreds, no, thousands of games for Linux, and most of them are free. They're not commercial quality, but do you want to play a game as desktop-intrusive as the typical commercial game or do you want something that can be easily hid from your boss? I'd personally rather have xpuyopuyo than Unreal Tournament 2003 when I'm supposed to be getting something done.
ACK! Please God no! Hard drives are not nearly as fast as we need them! I remember when I could load DooM in 2 seconds on a box that could barely manage 5fps in-game. Today, Unreal Tournament 2003 takes almost a minute to load, yet I regularly top 60fps. If there's one thing in computer technology that isn't growing fast enough, it's hard drive speed. I wanna be able to load UT2k3 in a matter of seconds, not minutes!
It's about control. They want to control you in every way they can, (excuse the Little Red Riding Hood reference) All the Better to Rob You With! Imagine having to pay royalties just to turn on your TV. It probably will happen in the next few years unless we resist. Problem is, that argument holds no ground legally. Thus, we need a reasonable argument. I will soon be writing a paper on destroying the concept of intellectual property in a peaceful in lawful way. Basically it goes like this: create public domain content that anyone can access for free, create massive online social networks devoted to spreading this content, do everything in your power to make public domain and other Free-Speech Media (public domain and GPL-like licensed content) mainstream -- and when the DRM in our boxes block Free-Speech content, sue like there's no tomorrow. As long as you stick strictly to Free-Speech content, you'll win every time, I guarantee it. That, and a highly publicized slip-up of DRM will make the common people see the media companies for what they really are -- white-collar communists that don't give a sh*t about your rights.