In regards games, I evaluate Monopoly or Risk played on a Friday night at home as being equivalent to a few hours in front of your favorite console. Which is more stimulating to the thought process? Which prepares you for a work environment better? The answer is obvious to me.
It's not so obvious an answer as you think. Games in general, even console games, have a range of thought stimulation. I have little doubt that your average twitch game stimulates a person little more than a reality TV show or talk show, but there are most certainly games that will stimulate you at least as much as your example board games.
How 'bout putting an adative in your watercooling water that under blacklights or ultraviolet lights glows a bright color.
Highlighter ink works great for this, and you can get it in just about any color you want. I would suggest testing it under a blacklight before dumping it in the water, though - some highlighters work great and others are let-downs.
A college roommate and I had a nice setup of liquor bottles filled with highlighter ink in water (1 marker per bottle). When the blacklight was on, the bottle glow would almost light up the room.
Well, if you can save up enough money you can live off the interest indefinitely. About a million bucks is in the ballpark.
Given the current economy, my bank gives out somewhere around 0.25% interest. With simple interest, that leaves me with around $2500 a year. Figuring for continuously compounding interest doesn't give you much more for the year. Care to share how one may live off of that?
The cost of delivering any arbitrary number of spam messages is less than the cost of blocking one single legitimate message.
Given the current rate of spam increase we've seen thus far, how long do you think it will be before the above statement is no longer true? It seems to me that within a matter of a few years, spam will make email useless to anyone who doesn't use a good filter.
I think you do this so you can justify getting copies of music without paying for it.
No, we do this because copyright infringement and theft are vastly different things.
Explain what copyright infringment is and why it's bad without using any concept of stealing or theft. I can't do it. I don't think you can, either.You cannot use the concept of paying people for their hard work if you enjoy the fruits of their labor, since not doing that is stealing.
Copyright infringement is bad because it devalues whatever intellectual property you are copying. By making millions of copies (at perhaps no cost to yourself), you can drastically reduce the value of those copies that the rightful distributers are trying to sell. If you steal a car, there's nothing holding the car company back from making another car and selling it at normal price. If you saturate a market with millions of free copies of a particular piece of IP, you can eliminate the distributer's ability to continue selling their product at its desired price. I suppose you could still argue that this is a theft by proxy, where you are enjoying the fruits of someone's labor, while denying them the ability to make money from it, but this is a rather shaky argument.
Of course, this is all large-scale. In a broader scope, it should be noted that infringement is a completely different beast than theft in that a single instance of infringement does virtually no damage to anyone, whereas a single instance of theft can be quite damaging. However, large-scale infringement can potentially be far more damaging than any theft would be, and it's just as easy to distribute a million copies online as it is to simply download one.
The morality of infringing upon a particular copyright, however, is largely dependent upon the item being infringed and the morality of current copyright law. I'd just assume avoid the ethical debate for now.
Oh, and BTW. If you support filesharing, you support Microsoft adding whatever they want from Linux into Windows while keeping Windows proprietary. It's the same thing.
Of course, if you supported this, you would be forced to support anyone who happened upon the Windows source and decided to share it with the world;)
Every person faced with a lawsuit I've read about thus far has been forced to settle, whether they thought they were innocent or not. Piracy may be a problem, but giving the RIAA the ability to easily extort money from people at will seems worse than the problem it tries to solve, especially if you consider that the RIAA has gone after people not only for piracy, but for writing simple search engines and posting their own self-made mp3s on p2p networks.
For example, my brother has his own band and writes his own music. He's already gotten cease and desist letters for putting some of his band's music up on Kazaa. Were he to have kept the music on Kazaa, and the RIAA to follow-through with their threat, he would be forced to settle, even through he has every right to distribute those mp3s.
The big problem I see is that the RIAA's lawsuits are less about going after pirates than they are about getting as much money out of those people that probably won't fight back. The new battlecry is "We know you can't afford a legal battle with us. Fork over or perish."
On a side note, yes attorneys have a large voice in DC, but that's because they hire a ton of folks to do lobbying for them. It's not what you say, it's how many voices you say it with.
With this line, you effectively made the guy's point for him. Your say in Washington is directly proportional to the number of lobbyists you can hire (i.e. how much money you throw around).
Maybe I should just pick them up for 11.95 US$ here?
Re:How is are they supposed to track the glasses!
on
Another Beer Please
·
· Score: 1
How are you supposed to track which glasses are actually in use.
Put the RFID receivers in the tables? You could rig a system that the waiter has a room layout on a PDA where tables with empty glasses light up. RFIDs are relatively short-range, so you could make any glasses not on tables invisible to the system.
Of course, they have to do this. Think about it, if 100 million people vote in elections, it only takes 50 million people voting together to elect the people they want. There are 50million+ file sharing people, so if they got their shit together, they could take over the system and make file sharing legal.
That presumes that there are candidates for political office that support the dissolution of copyright law. Arguably, your group of file sharers could put up their own candidates, but remember that campaigns cost money, and these candidates would have a snowball's chance in hell of getting corporate money. This hypothetical group would have to fund itself entirely. The candidates would NEVER get sponsored by a major party, so you'd automatically lose the votes of 99%+ of the other 50 million voters in the country.
You would have much better success trying to set up a few PACs with this 50 million person group.
Nowhere did he justify copyright infringement. He merely pointed out that there is a fundamental difference between infringement and actual theft. Stealing a CD from a store is different from downloading all the tracks of a CD and distrubuting them online.
In the case of the bank account hacking, you have been deprived of something tangible. You have been deprived of the cash you had stored in the bank. Before your account was hacked, you had X dollars. After it was hacked, you have 0. The fact that someone else was holding the money for you, or that the theft was done electronically is irrelevant.
See U.S. Code Title 17, Chapter 5, Sec. 506 for the offenses and Title 18, Chapter 113, Sec 2319 for the penalties.
Sec. 506. - Criminal offenses
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
In other words, most people on p2p networks, excepting the biggest distributers, are in the clear as far as criminal offenses go. A retail value of $1k covers you for 50-100 albums worth of downloading in that 180-day period, although it's worth noting that this is only for the criminal offense. The point being... for the vast majority of copyright infringements, it is not a criminal offense.
The corporations paying for copyright extensions in Congress are the very same corporations that have been built and/or made billions on the use of public domain works. Were it not for the public domain, these corporations likely wouldn't exist.
Just patent the case where all bits are 0, and sue blank CD manufacturers - you'd only need one patent, and you'd get a fair share of the total money you would get in patenting all possibilities.
And even worse, what about those who have filenames that are similar but not exactly the same as commerical music?
The RIAA isn't even looking for names corresponding to commercial music. My brother has already gotten cease and desist letters for sharing his band's music. I have doubts the RIAA does anything but a simple search for *.mp3
I haven't seen T3, so I'm making a bit of a prediction: that the nudity of the Terminatrix was filmed in a far, far different way than the nudity of male terminators was.
Nope, not really. As per the rules of time travel given by the first Terminator, both machines were sent naked. From there, the first mission for both was to find clothes - the female found them on a woman across the street, and Arnold found his on a male stripper in a nude bar near where he appeared.
Both were nude for only as long as it took to find a matching set of clothes and take them from whoever was wearing them.
To be an effective translator for IM's, proper spelling and grammar cann't be a requirement. Honestly, when was the last time you received an IM that had perfect grammar/spelling? I can't say I've ever gotten one like that in the 7 years I've used IM programs.
The days of the "quiet introduction" are probably numbered
How do you figure? As corporations, particularly media conglomerates, become larger and larger, I suspect we'll see markedly less information leak out about legislation that affects industry interests like this.
It's akin to having a backdoor track to violating the 5th amendment.
I wondered about that myself. How could the EDR data make it into court at all? I would have hoped the guy's lawyer would have jumped on the 5th Amendmend problems with this from the very beginning. Did the judge rule that the 5th Amendment didn't apply? I didn't see anything about that in the article...
Slashdot Mirror
In regards games, I evaluate Monopoly or Risk played on a Friday night at home as being equivalent to a few hours in front of your favorite console. Which is more stimulating to the thought process? Which prepares you for a work environment better? The answer is obvious to me.
It's not so obvious an answer as you think. Games in general, even console games, have a range of thought stimulation. I have little doubt that your average twitch game stimulates a person little more than a reality TV show or talk show, but there are most certainly games that will stimulate you at least as much as your example board games.
How 'bout putting an adative in your watercooling water that under blacklights or ultraviolet lights glows a bright color.
Highlighter ink works great for this, and you can get it in just about any color you want. I would suggest testing it under a blacklight before dumping it in the water, though - some highlighters work great and others are let-downs.
A college roommate and I had a nice setup of liquor bottles filled with highlighter ink in water (1 marker per bottle). When the blacklight was on, the bottle glow would almost light up the room.
No. Game AI has already far surpassed the average 1337 g4m3r's intelligence level.
Well, if you can save up enough money you can live off the interest indefinitely. About a million bucks is in the ballpark.
Given the current economy, my bank gives out somewhere around 0.25% interest. With simple interest, that leaves me with around $2500 a year. Figuring for continuously compounding interest doesn't give you much more for the year. Care to share how one may live off of that?
The cost of delivering any arbitrary number of spam messages is less than the cost of blocking one single legitimate message.
Given the current rate of spam increase we've seen thus far, how long do you think it will be before the above statement is no longer true? It seems to me that within a matter of a few years, spam will make email useless to anyone who doesn't use a good filter.
I think you do this so you can justify getting copies of music without paying for it.
;)
No, we do this because copyright infringement and theft are vastly different things.
Explain what copyright infringment is and why it's bad without using any concept of stealing or theft. I can't do it. I don't think you can, either.You cannot use the concept of paying people for their hard work if you enjoy the fruits of their labor, since not doing that is stealing.
Copyright infringement is bad because it devalues whatever intellectual property you are copying. By making millions of copies (at perhaps no cost to yourself), you can drastically reduce the value of those copies that the rightful distributers are trying to sell. If you steal a car, there's nothing holding the car company back from making another car and selling it at normal price. If you saturate a market with millions of free copies of a particular piece of IP, you can eliminate the distributer's ability to continue selling their product at its desired price. I suppose you could still argue that this is a theft by proxy, where you are enjoying the fruits of someone's labor, while denying them the ability to make money from it, but this is a rather shaky argument.
Of course, this is all large-scale. In a broader scope, it should be noted that infringement is a completely different beast than theft in that a single instance of infringement does virtually no damage to anyone, whereas a single instance of theft can be quite damaging. However, large-scale infringement can potentially be far more damaging than any theft would be, and it's just as easy to distribute a million copies online as it is to simply download one.
The morality of infringing upon a particular copyright, however, is largely dependent upon the item being infringed and the morality of current copyright law. I'd just assume avoid the ethical debate for now.
Oh, and BTW. If you support filesharing, you support Microsoft adding whatever they want from Linux into Windows while keeping Windows proprietary. It's the same thing.
Of course, if you supported this, you would be forced to support anyone who happened upon the Windows source and decided to share it with the world
Every person faced with a lawsuit I've read about thus far has been forced to settle, whether they thought they were innocent or not. Piracy may be a problem, but giving the RIAA the ability to easily extort money from people at will seems worse than the problem it tries to solve, especially if you consider that the RIAA has gone after people not only for piracy, but for writing simple search engines and posting their own self-made mp3s on p2p networks.
For example, my brother has his own band and writes his own music. He's already gotten cease and desist letters for putting some of his band's music up on Kazaa. Were he to have kept the music on Kazaa, and the RIAA to follow-through with their threat, he would be forced to settle, even through he has every right to distribute those mp3s.
The big problem I see is that the RIAA's lawsuits are less about going after pirates than they are about getting as much money out of those people that probably won't fight back. The new battlecry is "We know you can't afford a legal battle with us. Fork over or perish."
On a side note, yes attorneys have a large voice in DC, but that's because they hire a ton of folks to do lobbying for them. It's not what you say, it's how many voices you say it with.
With this line, you effectively made the guy's point for him. Your say in Washington is directly proportional to the number of lobbyists you can hire (i.e. how much money you throw around).
Shouldn't it be: I mean, after all, they're only out there chasing the truth [away], right?
Moles and trolls, moles and trolls...
A more on-topic line from that movie would be "Now, if we can only keep it from exploding!"
For the life of me, I can't remember white collar workers ever striking.
Tell that to Boeing.
Maybe I should just pick them up for 11.95 US$ here?
How are you supposed to track which glasses are actually in use.
Put the RFID receivers in the tables? You could rig a system that the waiter has a room layout on a PDA where tables with empty glasses light up. RFIDs are relatively short-range, so you could make any glasses not on tables invisible to the system.
Of course, they have to do this. Think about it, if 100 million people vote in elections, it only takes 50 million people voting together to elect the people they want. There are 50million+ file sharing people, so if they got their shit together, they could take over the system and make file sharing legal.
That presumes that there are candidates for political office that support the dissolution of copyright law. Arguably, your group of file sharers could put up their own candidates, but remember that campaigns cost money, and these candidates would have a snowball's chance in hell of getting corporate money. This hypothetical group would have to fund itself entirely. The candidates would NEVER get sponsored by a major party, so you'd automatically lose the votes of 99%+ of the other 50 million voters in the country.
You would have much better success trying to set up a few PACs with this 50 million person group.
Nowhere did he justify copyright infringement. He merely pointed out that there is a fundamental difference between infringement and actual theft. Stealing a CD from a store is different from downloading all the tracks of a CD and distrubuting them online.
In the case of the bank account hacking, you have been deprived of something tangible. You have been deprived of the cash you had stored in the bank. Before your account was hacked, you had X dollars. After it was hacked, you have 0. The fact that someone else was holding the money for you, or that the theft was done electronically is irrelevant.
See U.S. Code Title 17, Chapter 5, Sec. 506 for the offenses and Title 18, Chapter 113, Sec 2319 for the penalties.
Sec. 506. - Criminal offenses
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
In other words, most people on p2p networks, excepting the biggest distributers, are in the clear as far as criminal offenses go. A retail value of $1k covers you for 50-100 albums worth of downloading in that 180-day period, although it's worth noting that this is only for the criminal offense. The point being... for the vast majority of copyright infringements, it is not a criminal offense.
What's the other edge?
The corporations paying for copyright extensions in Congress are the very same corporations that have been built and/or made billions on the use of public domain works. Were it not for the public domain, these corporations likely wouldn't exist.
Just patent the case where all bits are 0, and sue blank CD manufacturers - you'd only need one patent, and you'd get a fair share of the total money you would get in patenting all possibilities.
And even worse, what about those who have filenames that are similar but not exactly the same as commerical music?
The RIAA isn't even looking for names corresponding to commercial music. My brother has already gotten cease and desist letters for sharing his band's music. I have doubts the RIAA does anything but a simple search for *.mp3
I haven't seen T3, so I'm making a bit of a prediction: that the nudity of the Terminatrix was filmed in a far, far different way than the nudity of male terminators was.
Nope, not really. As per the rules of time travel given by the first Terminator, both machines were sent naked. From there, the first mission for both was to find clothes - the female found them on a woman across the street, and Arnold found his on a male stripper in a nude bar near where he appeared.
Both were nude for only as long as it took to find a matching set of clothes and take them from whoever was wearing them.
To be an effective translator for IM's, proper spelling and grammar cann't be a requirement. Honestly, when was the last time you received an IM that had perfect grammar/spelling? I can't say I've ever gotten one like that in the 7 years I've used IM programs.
I'll trade you a pack of victory cigarettes for some of your freedom fries :)
The days of the "quiet introduction" are probably numbered
How do you figure? As corporations, particularly media conglomerates, become larger and larger, I suspect we'll see markedly less information leak out about legislation that affects industry interests like this.
I'd rather have a "None of the people above are remotely qualified, please put a bucket or other inanimate object in charge" option.
Missouri had the right idea - they elected a dead guy.
...but what happens why Goliath goes after the little guy and the little guy is right?
...a $12,000 settlement.
It's akin to having a backdoor track to violating the 5th amendment.
I wondered about that myself. How could the EDR data make it into court at all? I would have hoped the guy's lawyer would have jumped on the 5th Amendmend problems with this from the very beginning. Did the judge rule that the 5th Amendment didn't apply? I didn't see anything about that in the article...