In theory, yes, but in practice, simply renaming a Metallica song to something else does no one any real good, except, perhaps, for Metallica. If no one knows that it is a Metallica song, no one will know to download it. So what's the point?
If I copy "01-Metallica-EnterSandman.mp3" to "BorkBorkFoobar.mp3", yeah, the RIAA, Metallica, Napster, etc. probably won't catch me. But what is the chance that a Metallica fan will stumble on that? Pretty much zero...
So I suppose you could go spread the word that "BorkBork" meant Metallica, but the second you start distributing that information to the public, you open yourself to getting found out by the RIAA, Napster, Metallica, etc. So the only way that would really work is if you keep it a secret and only tell trusted parties. But that's going to slow down the infringment down to the level of tape copying.
Napster could have saved themselves a whole hell of a lot of trouble, and lawsuits, if they had removed all references to music, and during the install process, put up a dialog box that said "Please enter the extension of the files you want to share".
They would have had a rock-solid alibi despite the fact that the software would do exactly the same thing. (And would be a little more flexable to boot.
But Napster has no character. It is not illegal, as you say, but that does not mean it was created with pure goodness at heart. The service was built to facilitating the copying of materials that cannot legally be copied. That is not illegal. Whether or not it is ethical is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Forget archives. Forget T-Shirts. Do you really want to protest this thing? Memorize the DeCSS code. Yeah, it takes time, but think of it as time invested fighting the good fight.
Well, calling it "Client/Server" is very misleading, because the it presumes that there are lots of clients out there using a server for some purpose. But since the purpose of Seti is not really to be a pretty screensaver, but instead to crunch numbers, at best you can call it some sort of wierd-ass client server application where one client uses two-million servers to do processing for it.
Kinda stretching the definition of "Client/server" there.
Whenever I hear things like "Let the AI learn patterns of use" I get nervous, because, IMHO, the biggest problem with user interface design is the increasing habit of second-guessing the user. Most of my frustration with that bad-old monpolist OS is not so much the crashes, but the constant tendency of the OS designers to try to second guess the users. To often, the OS tries to do what it thinks I meant to do rather than what I tell it to do. That makes the OS harder to use.
What makes an OS easy to use is simplicity and obviousness. It is far, far better for an OS to be stupid in an obvious way rather than clever in a non-obvious way. DOS, despite its clunky user interface, was often easier to use than today's Windows boxes, even for the novice users I observed, because when you told it to do something, it did it. And yes, figuring out how to make it do something was often a pain, but once you did, it was all rather simple. Too often, today, the OS makes things difficult because it thinks it knows what you want to do. A classic example on Windows being the behavior of the OS when copying a hard-drive. It tends to move the short-cuts because it thinks you are moving the OS. Mucho-paino when you are really just backing up, or moving hard drives.
An "AI" controlled OS just sounds to me like more of this, and even worse. Suddenly there's this entity out there, deciding what how the resource usage should go. Yeah, perhaps it will often get it right without me intervening. But when it gets it wrong, I get lots of frustrating hours trying to get the damn thing to see it my way. Better to have something simple, stupid and clear that I can easily direct to do what is correct. Just to have an AI that can do quasi-intelligent things in average cases is not enough. Until the AI is smarter than me, I don't want it controlling my OS.
Back in my day, we had no trouble viewing all the pr0n we wanted, under DOS. GUI != Graphics.
Er....or at least so I was told. Never didn't myself...no way. But I did used to view pictures under DOS for serious work purposes...pictures of...uh...buildings and things.
There were plenty of GIF and even JPG viewers for DOS.
What would really be cool is a pair of gloves with position sensors in the fingers. Add a pair of glasses that could project an image of a keyboard anywhere in space. Than you'd have a true virtual keyboard.
Ok, this is almost certainly too sensitive, but what the heh... What does the NSA think of FBI requests to be inserted in the information stream of all e-mail traffic?
Or, perhaps in a more "sensitive" way: What does the NSA see as its responsibilities in protecting the constitutional rights of US citizens, and of protecting similar rights for non-US citizens?
Yes, it is unfair that many adolescents (probably the majority) get tarnished with this image, but you have to understand where it comes from. While the majority of young people are not crackers, or vandals, the majority of vandals, digital and physical, are under twenty-two. It is the nature of humans and maturity. These young punks (and they are almost always young) screw it up for the rest of us. And a very big part of "the rest of us" is young kids like you, who are, like the rest of us, mature and responsible.
If you really want to know where "script-kiddy" comes from, just look this line from your own post: "But I'm sick of all this childish behavior...". That's exactly it. We call them "kiddies" because their behavior is childish. Immaturity below their years.
You, being responsible, are not a kid. You are a young adult. And yeah, it sucks that the you're treated like crap by know-nothing adults because of idiots in your age-group. But unfortunately, what we call those idiots isn't going to change that. The only thing that will change that will be to educate those know-nothings that are unfortunately in charge of the stuff they know nothing about in too many places.
Ok, now I probably shouldn't get myself into this, but aren't you effectively doing the same sort of thing that happened to Kuro5hin? I mean, here we have a poster you don't like. That's fine. Perhaps there's something not to like. But it sounds to me that you're subverting the moderation scheme beyond what it is intend to me to pursue a personal vendetta. Is that really any different from people subverting the internet to pursue personal vendettas?
If a post is overrated, yeah, moderate it overrated. But don't decide that just because you don't like a poster, the rest of us should have to wade through whiny complaints or miss posts moderated purely for dickish motives.
The internet would be a much better place if people would just take a fucking pill and chill out. And that includes both the people with the anti-Kuro5hin vendetta and a lot of Slashdot posters.
All the complaints about karma-whoring are far more annoying than the karma-whoring is in the first place.
The point here is not whether Napster is stealing, but their hypocracy. It would be like the owner of a head shop demanding that the police arrest the dealer who sold his daughter pot.
That's exactly it. I've seen similar non-cheating behavior in Team Fortress, where people will deliberately screw things up for their own team just to be annoying. It isn't cheating per-se, but the behavior is has the same motivation.
Counter-Strike can be even worse if friendly-fire is turned on. I'd prefer to play friendly fire, but teenage idiots will show up, deliberately killing their own team members, just to be obnoxious.
Rumor has it that John Romero is helping with the story line. Apparently, Jar Jar starts out as a member of your party, and if he dies, you lose the game.
You've hilighted one of the biggest conflicts here. While there are certainly a lot of spoiled brats out there who just want to get something for nothing, there are also a lot of people out there acting under a perfectly reasonable moral code. To me, saying "I'll download the mp3 and either delete it within a few weeks or buy the CD" is a perfectly reasonable ethical code. It is also illegal, unfortunately.
There is always trouble in a society when the law loses track of what most people think of as the basic ethical code. Most people would consider the above ok. But it is illegal. Therein lies conflict.
The RIAA refuses to accept what most people consider ethical, and seek to stick to a narrow interpretation of the law, in order that they don't have to change. (Because change scares them.)
This is why some members of congress are so upset about. I think that they really do want the law to mirror people's basic ethics. They want a system where people can "try before you buy" and download music without all that annoying packaging. They want a system where people can share music with their family while musicians still get paid. They want the music industry to build such a system so that most people can do legally what they think they should be able to do ethically. That way, everyone's happy. (Or most everyone, at least.)
The RIAA, not wanting to change, focuses on that subgroup of mp3 users who do things most of the population considers unethical, like copying thousands of hours of music without ever paying the artists, in order to prevent the bulk of the population from doing things that population considers completely ethical, like trying something out before buying. That's a losing proposition in the end, because you can't really fight society. Whether by changes in the law, or by rampant disregard for the law, the RIAA will lose this battle. Hopefully, for the sake of society as a whole, it will be the former, not the latter.
The common sense answer is that when you buy the CD, you buy the rights to listen to the music wherever you want. And if you get an mp3 from the same CD (as opposed to a live version, etc.) than you can listen to it, even if someone you didn't meet did the conversion.
The idea being that artists should get paid and music should be convenient. To say that a you can not own a certain bit pattern if you get it from someone else even if you could legally, yourself, make exactly the same bit pattern seems a little silly.
I'm not saying that this is definitely untrue, but it is important to understand that this is a survey that relies on what people say they do, not what they actually did. Those two different things can be very different.
It is also dangerous to imply causation. Even if you prove that Napster users buy more music, you can't say that Napster causes people to buy more music. Just as likely is that those people attracted to Napster are music enthusiasts who buy lots of music.
(Most of this should be obvious, but it ought to be said.)
Music industry stats are just as shaky. To imply that record sale declines close to universities are due to Napster ignores all sorts of alternate possibilities, such as changing musical tastes, increasing purchase of music from online sources, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory, yes, but in practice, simply renaming a Metallica song to something else does no one any real good, except, perhaps, for Metallica. If no one knows that it is a Metallica song, no one will know to download it. So what's the point?
If I copy "01-Metallica-EnterSandman.mp3" to "BorkBorkFoobar.mp3", yeah, the RIAA, Metallica, Napster, etc. probably won't catch me. But what is the chance that a Metallica fan will stumble on that? Pretty much zero...
So I suppose you could go spread the word that "BorkBork" meant Metallica, but the second you start distributing that information to the public, you open yourself to getting found out by the RIAA, Napster, Metallica, etc. So the only way that would really work is if you keep it a secret and only tell trusted parties. But that's going to slow down the infringment down to the level of tape copying.
Which is pretty much RIAA's goal, IMO.
Napster could have saved themselves a whole hell of a lot of trouble, and lawsuits, if they had removed all references to music, and during the install process, put up a dialog box that said "Please enter the extension of the files you want to share".
They would have had a rock-solid alibi despite the fact that the software would do exactly the same thing. (And would be a little more flexable to boot.
But Napster has no character. It is not illegal, as you say, but that does not mean it was created with pure goodness at heart. The service was built to facilitating the copying of materials that cannot legally be copied. That is not illegal. Whether or not it is ethical is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Forget archives. Forget T-Shirts. Do you really want to protest this thing? Memorize the DeCSS code. Yeah, it takes time, but think of it as time invested fighting the good fight.
Heh heh. Tell that to a malaria victim!
Yeah, I do that all the time, but people I have worked with in past lives haven't.
Often the problem isn't so much what you do, but what the original programmers of stuff your working on did.
Well, calling it "Client/Server" is very misleading, because the it presumes that there are lots of clients out there using a server for some purpose. But since the purpose of Seti is not really to be a pretty screensaver, but instead to crunch numbers, at best you can call it some sort of wierd-ass client server application where one client uses two-million servers to do processing for it.
Kinda stretching the definition of "Client/server" there.
Way offtopic, but:
Yeah, the really reason that C sucks is things like:
if( i = 4 )
DoFoobar;
else
ReportError();
Compile and run perfectly.
Whenever I hear things like "Let the AI learn patterns of use" I get nervous, because, IMHO, the biggest problem with user interface design is the increasing habit of second-guessing the user. Most of my frustration with that bad-old monpolist OS is not so much the crashes, but the constant tendency of the OS designers to try to second guess the users. To often, the OS tries to do what it thinks I meant to do rather than what I tell it to do. That makes the OS harder to use.
What makes an OS easy to use is simplicity and obviousness. It is far, far better for an OS to be stupid in an obvious way rather than clever in a non-obvious way. DOS, despite its clunky user interface, was often easier to use than today's Windows boxes, even for the novice users I observed, because when you told it to do something, it did it. And yes, figuring out how to make it do something was often a pain, but once you did, it was all rather simple. Too often, today, the OS makes things difficult because it thinks it knows what you want to do. A classic example on Windows being the behavior of the OS when copying a hard-drive. It tends to move the short-cuts because it thinks you are moving the OS. Mucho-paino when you are really just backing up, or moving hard drives.
An "AI" controlled OS just sounds to me like more of this, and even worse. Suddenly there's this entity out there, deciding what how the resource usage should go. Yeah, perhaps it will often get it right without me intervening. But when it gets it wrong, I get lots of frustrating hours trying to get the damn thing to see it my way. Better to have something simple, stupid and clear that I can easily direct to do what is correct. Just to have an AI that can do quasi-intelligent things in average cases is not enough. Until the AI is smarter than me, I don't want it controlling my OS.
Damn kids....
Back in my day, we had no trouble viewing all the pr0n we wanted, under DOS. GUI != Graphics.
Er....or at least so I was told. Never didn't myself...no way. But I did used to view pictures under DOS for serious work purposes...pictures of...uh...buildings and things.
There were plenty of GIF and even JPG viewers for DOS.
What would really be cool is a pair of gloves with position sensors in the fingers. Add a pair of glasses that could project an image of a keyboard anywhere in space. Than you'd have a true virtual keyboard.
Ok, this is almost certainly too sensitive, but what the heh... What does the NSA think of FBI requests to be inserted in the information stream of all e-mail traffic?
Or, perhaps in a more "sensitive" way: What does the NSA see as its responsibilities in protecting the constitutional rights of US citizens, and of protecting similar rights for non-US citizens?
Yes, it is unfair that many adolescents (probably the majority) get tarnished with this image, but you have to understand where it comes from. While the majority of young people are not crackers, or vandals, the majority of vandals, digital and physical, are under twenty-two. It is the nature of humans and maturity. These young punks (and they are almost always young) screw it up for the rest of us. And a very big part of "the rest of us" is young kids like you, who are, like the rest of us, mature and responsible.
If you really want to know where "script-kiddy" comes from, just look this line from your own post: "But I'm sick of all this childish behavior...". That's exactly it. We call them "kiddies" because their behavior is childish. Immaturity below their years.
You, being responsible, are not a kid. You are a young adult. And yeah, it sucks that the you're treated like crap by know-nothing adults because of idiots in your age-group. But unfortunately, what we call those idiots isn't going to change that. The only thing that will change that will be to educate those know-nothings that are unfortunately in charge of the stuff they know nothing about in too many places.
Now if only I knew how to do that...
Ok, now I probably shouldn't get myself into this, but aren't you effectively doing the same sort of thing that happened to Kuro5hin? I mean, here we have a poster you don't like. That's fine. Perhaps there's something not to like. But it sounds to me that you're subverting the moderation scheme beyond what it is intend to me to pursue a personal vendetta. Is that really any different from people subverting the internet to pursue personal vendettas?
If a post is overrated, yeah, moderate it overrated. But don't decide that just because you don't like a poster, the rest of us should have to wade through whiny complaints or miss posts moderated purely for dickish motives.
The internet would be a much better place if people would just take a fucking pill and chill out. And that includes both the people with the anti-Kuro5hin vendetta and a lot of Slashdot posters.
All the complaints about karma-whoring are far more annoying than the karma-whoring is in the first place.
The point here is not whether Napster is stealing, but their hypocracy. It would be like the owner of a head shop demanding that the police arrest the dealer who sold his daughter pot.
Half-life is not combat. It is no more combat than chess is. (Chess is itself stylized warfare.)
That's exactly it. I've seen similar non-cheating behavior in Team Fortress, where people will deliberately screw things up for their own team just to be annoying. It isn't cheating per-se, but the behavior is has the same motivation.
Counter-Strike can be even worse if friendly-fire is turned on. I'd prefer to play friendly fire, but teenage idiots will show up, deliberately killing their own team members, just to be obnoxious.
Rumor has it that John Romero is helping with the story line. Apparently, Jar Jar starts out as a member of your party, and if he dies, you lose the game.
Do you think maybe that might have something to do with the fact that when I was in college, a CD cost $10 - $12.
When were you in college!? I was in college right at the introduction of CDs, and they were introduced at $15-$20. (Albums were $10-$12.)
You've hilighted one of the biggest conflicts here. While there are certainly a lot of spoiled brats out there who just want to get something for nothing, there are also a lot of people out there acting under a perfectly reasonable moral code. To me, saying "I'll download the mp3 and either delete it within a few weeks or buy the CD" is a perfectly reasonable ethical code. It is also illegal, unfortunately.
There is always trouble in a society when the law loses track of what most people think of as the basic ethical code. Most people would consider the above ok. But it is illegal. Therein lies conflict.
The RIAA refuses to accept what most people consider ethical, and seek to stick to a narrow interpretation of the law, in order that they don't have to change. (Because change scares them.)
This is why some members of congress are so upset about. I think that they really do want the law to mirror people's basic ethics. They want a system where people can "try before you buy" and download music without all that annoying packaging. They want a system where people can share music with their family while musicians still get paid. They want the music industry to build such a system so that most people can do legally what they think they should be able to do ethically. That way, everyone's happy. (Or most everyone, at least.)
The RIAA, not wanting to change, focuses on that subgroup of mp3 users who do things most of the population considers unethical, like copying thousands of hours of music without ever paying the artists, in order to prevent the bulk of the population from doing things that population considers completely ethical, like trying something out before buying. That's a losing proposition in the end, because you can't really fight society. Whether by changes in the law, or by rampant disregard for the law, the RIAA will lose this battle. Hopefully, for the sake of society as a whole, it will be the former, not the latter.
The common sense answer is that when you buy the CD, you buy the rights to listen to the music wherever you want. And if you get an mp3 from the same CD (as opposed to a live version, etc.) than you can listen to it, even if someone you didn't meet did the conversion.
The idea being that artists should get paid and music should be convenient. To say that a you can not own a certain bit pattern if you get it from someone else even if you could legally, yourself, make exactly the same bit pattern seems a little silly.
You are just like everyone else. The singles market has been dying for decades. Singles were on the way out when CDs took over from vinyl.
I'm not saying that this is definitely untrue, but it is important to understand that this is a survey that relies on what people say they do, not what they actually did. Those two different things can be very different.
It is also dangerous to imply causation. Even if you prove that Napster users buy more music, you can't say that Napster causes people to buy more music. Just as likely is that those people attracted to Napster are music enthusiasts who buy lots of music.
(Most of this should be obvious, but it ought to be said.)
Music industry stats are just as shaky. To imply that record sale declines close to universities are due to Napster ignores all sorts of alternate possibilities, such as changing musical tastes, increasing purchase of music from online sources, etc.
Yeah, but you have to get a SCSI adapter, too.
I've waited for a decade for SCSI to become common on motherboards. Sigh...