If person A makes a copy of a shiny disk in the privacy of his own home that's entirely his business.
Correct
If Person A then gives that disk to Person B, that's entirely their business. The government has no place interfering in a transaction between two consenting people.
Incorrect - unless you have a distribution licence this is illegal since you are infringing the copyright of the CD. I also maintain that it is wrong because it was clear when you bought the CD that this was not allowed. What do you believe gives you the right to acquire content and then completely disregard the wishes of the artist (which are protected by law). If everyone were free to distribute copies of the content, very few people would pay for it and the artists would not be able to make money. If the artists can't make money from their art it means they need to hold down another job which would massively reduce the amount of time they could dedicate to the art.
Sure I do. I have the right to do anything I want that doesn't harm another person. Just because the current government doesn't recognize it doesn't mean it's not a right. That just means we live under an oppressive and corrupt regime.
Why is harming another person excluded from your argument? The only reason you don't have the right to murder people is because the current government has revoked that right.
According to Webster, the definition of a right is "According to the law or will of God" - ignoring the religious angle for a minute, this means that your rights are defined exactly by the current government - there is no such thing as a right that the government doesn't recognise, if the government doesn't recognise it is by definition not a right.
What you seem to be suggesting is that because someone put some effort into something they have a right to control its use.
Within the confines of the law, that is exactly what they have the right to do.
And that is absolutely 100% no question about it wrong! Just because the pharmaceutical industry is evil doesn't make it ok for the recording to be evil too.
So you would prefer they didn't make any profit from the drugs they produce? I can assure you that medicine would take a severe downturn since without any incentive to invest in the research there would be no new drugs. Drugs aren't invented by magic - there is significant investment involved and if there is no return on that investment then it just plain won't happen.
If I had a machine that could create computers, or cars, or anything else out of thin air at no cost it would be reprehensible for anyone to try to stop me from distributing those goods.
Again, this brings us back to the problem that there was investment required in order to produce these goods in the first place. If anyone can clone them at no cost there would be no return on the investment so why would anyone bother to invest in the R&D in the first place?
Free redistribution works only in very specific cases. The software industry is a good example - Free software works because people can charge a significant amount for the services rendered rather than the software itself. If someone wants to buy a web server you can install Apache on a box and sell it to them. And the software is developed because people need a feature that doesn't yet exist and are thus willing to pay a developer to do the work. The work is non-trivial so most people can't do it themselves and therefore pay for it.
This really does not apply to the music industry - what service are you going to charge for? CD duplication? Anyone can do that for pennies.
If there was a machine that can replicate a 500,000 dollar car for 100 dollars....wouldn't you be asking yourself....should I really pay 499,900 dollars just for design?...should cars cost so much?
This is just market forces at work. People will pay (more or less) what they think a product is worth. If the vendor is charging too much, someone will produce a cheaper product and undercut them (possibly in the form of a bootleg, clone, knock-off). The vendor's job is to balance the price they are charging in order to maximise profits and minimise people going for the cheaper products. There is also the added complication that a reduced price may prompt your customers to buy more of the product, thus generating more revenue anyway.
The music and movie industries are in the somewhat unique position that, because of their insistence on stuff like DRM, the "cheap knockoffs" are actually of higher quality than the legitimate product. And they have no one to blame for this but themselves.
If I insert a shiny disk that belongs to me into a CD burner that belongs to me and produce another shiny disk, all I have done is use my property as I see fit (as free people do).
In many jurisdictions this would be considered fair use or fair dealing and not copyright infringement, which rather invalidates your point. If you are going to make examples that claim that copyright infringement isn't wrong, at least pick examples that actually constitute copyright infringement.
When my original post talked about copyright infringement, I was quite clearly talking about copying content which you have not purchased.
Just that they don't deserve compensation for copying. The fact that someone put some effort into making something does not negate my property rights.
You do not have the right to make and distribute copies without a distribution licence. Doing so would be both illegal and wrong. As mentioned above, making copies for your own use is fine and so I'm not sure why you are discussing it here.
I'm talking about economic scarcity. A good is scarce if the supply is limited. Since the marginal cost of producing a copy of a song is 0, supply is infinite and therefor not scarce. If you have to pay in order to get a song, you are limited to how many songs you can afford. The resource has been made artificially scarce.
Firstly, the cost of producing a copy of a CD is not zero once you include the production (of the content) and advertising costs. Just because something is very cheap to reproduce once the original has been made, doesn't mean the average cost per item is low.
Secondly, if they were to just hand it out for free, as you seem to be suggesting they should, what is in it for the vendor? Why should they spend their time producing content that will gain them nothing?
Think about the implications of a resource without scarcity. If someone had a machine that made unlimited food could he morally deny anyone a meal?
Apples and Oranges - you don't need music in order to live. However, you seem to miss the fact that the drug companies already do this - they don't hand out drugs for free because it doesn't make economic sense for them.
You can try and apply your thinking to any product, even things without a zero production cost. Take computers, for example - what gives manufacturers the right to charge any more than the materials cost for computers? Oh yes, it's coz there would be no economic gain for them if they didn't make a profit so why would they bother?
If someone puts resources (time, effort, money, etc.) into something, and then says "I'm happy for people to have a copy of this under these conditions", do you not think it wrong to take a copy and completely ignore those conditions? (Where the conditions may include ideas like handing over some money, not taking the content and passing it off as your own produce, etc.)
I'd say the morally wrong position is that it's OK to artificially impose scarcity on an infinite resource for personal profit.
Where is the scarcity? CDs are pretty abundant, stuff released as downloads aren't really scarce.
(7) Knowingly and without permission accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network.
And I'm sure they will be arresting everyone who accesses arbitrary web sites unless they can prove they had permission from the server owner?
I honestly can't see the difference between using an open access point (which may or may not been intentionally left open to provide public access - there's absolutely no way to know) and using a public web server (which may or may not have been intentionally left unpassworded).
Or I have few hundred vinyl albums in my basement. I could record songs from those to my computer and then encode to MP3. Instead I download them. Is this OK?
Ethically I can't see a problem with this.
In the UK it is illegal to copy music for your own purposes iff you change the format (e.g. ripping CDs into Vorbis format so you can play them on your Vorbis player). In fact, Sony have been banging on recently about this, saying that it's illegal for people to load up their iPods with stuff ripped from their (legally purchased) CDs and that everyone must rebuy their whole music collection in MP3 format (presumably even the stuff that isn't available anymore?). Of course, everyone is ignoring them and the interesting thing is that Sony themselves have made plenty of products that are more or less useless unless people do these illegal conversions - e.g. Minidisc, etc.
The more the content industry bangs on about copyright infringement, the more they look like complete idiots... and greedy idiots at that. Whilst people like sticking within the law, the fact that the content industry seems only to be interested in treating its own customers like crap I think more and more people will find reasons to avoid paying for stuff.
Actually it IS theft in a way. "Theft of service". That's where you make use of something without paying for it and without removing it. Like sneaking onto the subway without dropping your token into the turnstile. You didn't steal the subway. You can be charged with theft of service and go to jail.
That might be the case if music was a service, which it isn't. This is already covered by copyright laws - I don't understand why people seem to feel the need to twist other laws into applying too. Copying music is copyright infringement, it is not theft, burglary, piracy or genocide, no matter what the RIAA may like to claim.
I never understood this idea, so popular on slashdot, that downloading stuff that you didn't pay for is somehow not stealing.
It is wrong, and illegal, but it isn't stealing.
Stealing is where you take something and the owner no longer has it. This is a criminal offense.
Copyright infringement is where you copy something. The owner still has it, but the owner doesn't get paid for the copy (note: this is not the same as the owner "losing money" since the infringer may not necessarilly have bought it anyway). This is a civil offense.
Stealing and copyright infringement are covered by different laws and they have different effects on the victims of the crimes and society in general, they are not the same thing.
That doesn't make copyright infringement right. However, there needs to be some flexibility here.
For example, I generally download an album before I buy it. If I like what I hear I go out and buy the CD, if not, I delete what I downloaded. If I can't hear something before buying it I probably won't buy it because I've bought too many CDs I thought were going to be good and turned out to be complete crap. And what's wrong with this? Consider it promotion for the bands - if their music is good then it makes them more money because I'm more likely to spend my money on CDs I _know_ are good rather than taking a gamble.
Can anybody fill me in as to why downloading music without paying for it is ok?
It isn't. But can you fill me in as to why the following behaviour is ok:
Suing thousands of people who can't afford to defend themselves despite having only circumstantial evidence that they have committed any crime (and thus forcing potentially innocent people to settle at great expense)
Preventing customers from accessing content which they have legitimately purchased, by means of various (potentially illegal) DRM systems (which often the customer is not informed about prior to purchase).
Criminalising people who who want to listen to their legally purchased CDs on their MP3 players.
At the moment, the quality of the official product is frequently substandard compared to the blackmarket product. People generally like paying and staying within the law, but when it starts to become impossible to use the legally purchased product, is it any surprise that people stop buying it?
Long ago I read that dust particles from meteors are important to the atmosphere because they nucleate raindrops. I wonder if the heat dumped into the at atmosphere by particles with this amount of energy has an effect on the energy budget of the stratosphere which would be worth modelling.
ISTR it is believed that cosmic rays may trigger lightning bolts, which are quite important to life.
In the UK, we're used to getting our phones for free. Now, nobody is expecting to get an iPhone for free, however, this contract does show a marked change... Here, when we take out a phone contract, we get a phone for free ( higher the rate of contract, the more expensive phone you can have ).
This is misinformation - In general in the UK, the more expensive your tariff, the cheaper the handset. Whilst this does mean some handsets have no additional cost, the top end ones usually do unless you're on a crazily expensive contract. So you can go on whatever tariff you want and buy whatever phone you want, it just means that if you are on a cheaper tariff you pay a higher upfront cost for the handset.
I bought my P900 about 3 or so years ago at a cost of 120ukp on a reasonably expensive contract. However, my experience of phones tells me that I won't be buying a smartphone with a closed software stack again. Every single phone I've owned in the past 7 years has been an unstable pile of crap - it's a waste of time for me to buy something I can't fix myself, since the manufacturers clearly have no interest in doing so.
And after watching that Al Gore documentary, don't you feel a little guilty not shutting down your box when not using it - think of the glaciers and the penguins
Maybe you'd care to explain why shutting the machine down is going to save the penguins any more than hibernating it...
I'm a bit confused... When I press the power button on my computer, the desktop (and all the apps I had open before I powered off) appears within a couple of seconds. Why would someone want to have another operating system in the BIOS which appears to offer similar (but much less inferior) features?
Rebooting is something you do only after a kernel upgrade...
is this thing available? The website says that I (the consumer) should come back in October. I guess I will check again in 5 days but it is not looking good. My contract is up soon so I might not mind trying Neo but they sure don't look ready for business.
Current estimates suggests the Neo1973 GTA02v4 (the production version) will be shipping at the end of December. But I think all bets are off as to whether the software will be of "production quality" by then (whatever "production quality" means these days - every production phone I've owned in the past 5 years has been an unstable piece of crap anyway).
I understand that you can run Qtopia on the devices though, which is a bit more usable as a phone than OpenMoko at the moment, but from what I've read there are serious battery-life problems when running Qtopia.
it only supported GPRS. Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data.
Errm, I might.
I mean, of course I want UMTS, but at the moment there are no open platforms that support it - the Neo1973 is GPRS and GSM only and I'm seriously considering getting one. To be blunt, I'm sick of crappy closed devices that aren't developer friendly (and in the case of my Symbian UIQ phone and VxWorks phone, totally unstable even when you're using them for what they were _designed_ to do).
To me, having a decent speed connection is secondary to actually being able to do useful stuff on the phone, which the current closed platforms do not let me do.
I wouldn't call either of those 'VOIP' by definition. I want to use the telephone, not PC based chat.
Of course they are VoIP - they carry your Voice over the Internet Protocol, hence VoIP. What you seem to be looking for is a specific type of service - namely VoIP to PSTN gatewaying. If you do a bit of googling you'll see that there are hundreds of SIP <-> PSTN gateways to choose from. For example, here in the UK I use voipuser.org for inbound DDIs.
Digital has blocks, pausing, sound artifacts and all sorts of other things that make viewing uncomfortable.
I call BS. The only channels that have problems with macroblocking are the lower-budget channels that you don't get over analogue anyway. All the major channels are allocated a good bandwidth and have a sensible amount of FEC to you won't get macroblocking except in the worst weather (i.e. the sort of weather that happens once every 3 years). The same with pausing - it just doesn't happen unless you have the aforementioned weather conditions. I've also never noticed any sound artifacts, and since the backhaul is almost exclusively digital these days, all these problems would show up over the analogue transmissions anyway.
If you live in the hilly areas of England, consider getting cable - oh wait, they don't offer that because of the terrain?? Oh well.
In fact, the best way to receive HD broadcasts from the major networks is likely via an antenna, as cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams.
Cable companies may recompress the streams to save bandwidth, but satellite is generally used to distribute the content to the cable head offices and terrestrial transmitters, so you won't usually beat the quality of the DVB-S signal since it's usually the source for all the other distribution methods.
Also, there is a lot more bandwidth available through DVB-S than DVB-T, so the chances are DVB-T streams will get reduced in quality in order to squeeze more channels in.
It can be a PITA to figure out what to back up. Do I really want to go through my hard drives and figure out what I should back up and what I shouldn't? Reasonable file organization helps with this, but doesn't solve the issue.
If your data is that disorganised that you can't relatively quickly identify what stuff needs to be backed up then you probably also have big problems finding data when you need it too.
Even things that are "replaceable", like downloads, program installations, and rips still are a PITA to recover from. Installing and updating Windows takes a couple hours, installing Office takes 30 min, installing Visual Studio takes 30 min, yadda yadda yadda. It'll be a day or to before you're back up and running.
Yeah, but I wouldn't usually want to reinstall those things from backup because unless you only just took the backup the system is going to be massively out of date anyway - far better to do a clean reinstall from scratch. For my workstations I can go from a blank hard drive to a fully functional workstation (with all the development tools I need) in the space of less than an hour with the latest Fedora CD and my backup up a few key configuration files (and most of that time is just waiting for Anaconda to do its thing, so I don't need to even be present). Admittedly servers are some more effort, but I still wouldn't recover the _software_ from backup, only the config.
And now where did I get those videos from?
Presumably they would've been ripped from your DVD collection?
And do I really want to sit there re-ripping 150 CDs?
You don't have to sit there doing it - just return to your computer every so often to swap the CD. You'll have the lot done in a couple of weeks of no effort... The effort of maintaining a backup of them would be more for me than the effort required to re-rip them (also, the chances of me losing the Vorbis files is relatively small since I have them stored on both my server and my notebook).
I filled two DVDs with photos from one "vacation". (Granted, I shoot RAW and this "vacation" was three weeks long, but still.)
If you spend 3 weeks shooting 9 gig of photos in RAW format then you are not a "normal user" so my comments do not apply to you. Normal users shoot in JPEG format which comes to maybe 2-4MB a photo.
I've also got about 250 GB of stuff I've recorded from cable TV. That's not really replaceable if it dies: I'd have to get cable again at $50/mo then wait for them to come around.
Since you're breaking the law anyway by doing long-term storage of videos from cable TV, you may as well go the whole hog and just download them if you need to replace them. They are no doubt available over bit torrent - most broadcast videos are.
I'm curious: what backup method are you guys currently using to store those hundreds of GB? DVDs just don't cut it anymore, and tape drives beyond DDS-4 (20 GB) are quite expensive. What's left? USB hard drives?
Personally, I don't back up hundreds of GB. My important data fits on 2 single layer DVDs and I do a regular(ish) backup of that, the rest of the contents of my hard drives is stuff that can be downloaded, and stuff like my music library (a reasonably large amount of Vorbis data) which, whilst it would be a PITA it can be re-ripped from the original CDs.
It boggles the mind that "normal" users would have hundreds of GB of stuff they need to backup. Maybe with home video editing becoming popular some people might need to backup this much data. Of course businesses have much greater backup needs, but one hopes that such businesses see the sense in spending money to back up the important data (sadly, having supported a number of businesses I can tell you that this is often not the case and losing the contents of the file server certainly can put the business in peril).
In fact, the inaccessable website is even more of a problem, since, as a sighted user, I wouldn't be aware of the problem and need blind people and others to make me aware by the use of lawsuits and other communications.
The Disabilities Discrimination Act, here in the UK, already makes inaccessible commercial websites illegal. Sadly it doesn't seem to deter people from having inaccessible web sites. This is probably down to 2 reasons: 1. This law is only very rarely used against inaccessible sites, so it isn't really much of a threat. 2. The people who would be liable are the end business owners - it would seem to be far better to make the web developer's business liable since the web developer _should_ have a more informed understanding of how this stuff works. It's obvious to techies that having a Flash-only web site is nigh on useless for anyone who hasn't got Flash, but it is less obvious to the technologically clueless business owner who still believes the blue "e" is "The Internet".
And the really stupid thing is that whilst inaccessible (e.g. Flash only) sites seem to becoming more prevalent, it is becoming more and more important to have accessible websites even for the fully able users since people are increasingly using less capable user agents such as those embedded in phones and PDAs and the associated low-bandwidth, high latency GPRS connections.
...get a real RAID card. Unless you do a lot of tape backups...
I sincerely hope you do backups anyway. RAID is simply there to allow you to continue running a service under some specific failure conditions that would otherwise cause the service to be down whilst hardware is replaced and backups restored - it is not a substitute for backups, RAID and backups accomplish different jobs.
Some examples of failure conditions where RAID won't save you but backups will:
- Some monkey does rm -rf / (or some rogue bit of software buggers the file system). - The power supply blows up and sends a power spike to all the hard drives in your array (I've personally seen this happen to a business who didn't take backups because they believed RAID did the same job - they lost everything since all the drives in the array blew up). - The building bursts into flames and guts your server room.
In all these conditions, having a regular off-site backup would save you whereas just using a RAID will not.
Which is why they are doing solar photo voltaic and not solar thermal power generation. No heat gradient required.
The original poster said: "some form of mirror heating, and that present a whole bunch of other problems." to which you replied "such as?". My reply was answering your "such as?" question by stating a problem with the original poster's suggestion.
some form of mirror heating, and that present a whole bunch of other problems.
Such as?
Doing any kind of heat based power generation in space on a large scale is pretty much a complete no-no. Using heat to generate power requires a thermal gradient, which requires that you can throw away a lot of waste heat (that's what the cooling towers do at your local coal/gas/fission power plant). Getting rid of waste heat in space is really hard since you have to radiate it all - there's nothing to conduct it away.
just cheap enough to make it worthwhile.
Unfortunately, all the new power generation technologies suffer from the same problem - they are all much more expensive than fossil fuels, so fossil fuels win every time, even though we are screwing our planet in the process.
my point is what makes you think the solar panel will generate more power with more light? they don't catch all the energy that falls on the earth, so more in space won't make a difference. your 160 watt panel on earth is still only going to be a 160 watt panel in space...
Bzzzt... wrong.
PV panels can only extract electricity at a specific bandgap energy (although I believe recent developments allow multiple bandgaps, improving efficiency). Photons below that energy (i.e. longer wavelength) are not converted to electricity at all and are usually absorbed into the panel as heat, whilst photons above that energy have energy equal to the bandgap converted into electricity and the rest of the energy is deposited as heat(*).
So more light == more photons of the appropriate energy == more electricity.
(* this raises the question, why not mount PV panels on top of thermal panels, allowing you to make use of the heat caused by the energy that didn't get converted into electricity?)
Slashdot Mirror
If person A makes a copy of a shiny disk in the privacy of his own home that's entirely his business.
Correct
If Person A then gives that disk to Person B, that's entirely their business. The government has no place interfering in a transaction between two consenting people.
Incorrect - unless you have a distribution licence this is illegal since you are infringing the copyright of the CD. I also maintain that it is wrong because it was clear when you bought the CD that this was not allowed. What do you believe gives you the right to acquire content and then completely disregard the wishes of the artist (which are protected by law). If everyone were free to distribute copies of the content, very few people would pay for it and the artists would not be able to make money. If the artists can't make money from their art it means they need to hold down another job which would massively reduce the amount of time they could dedicate to the art.
Sure I do. I have the right to do anything I want that doesn't harm another person. Just because the current government doesn't recognize it doesn't mean it's not a right. That just means we live under an oppressive and corrupt regime.
Why is harming another person excluded from your argument? The only reason you don't have the right to murder people is because the current government has revoked that right.
According to Webster, the definition of a right is "According to the law or will of God" - ignoring the religious angle for a minute, this means that your rights are defined exactly by the current government - there is no such thing as a right that the government doesn't recognise, if the government doesn't recognise it is by definition not a right.
What you seem to be suggesting is that because someone put some effort into something they have a right to control its use.
Within the confines of the law, that is exactly what they have the right to do.
And that is absolutely 100% no question about it wrong! Just because the pharmaceutical industry is evil doesn't make it ok for the recording to be evil too.
So you would prefer they didn't make any profit from the drugs they produce? I can assure you that medicine would take a severe downturn since without any incentive to invest in the research there would be no new drugs. Drugs aren't invented by magic - there is significant investment involved and if there is no return on that investment then it just plain won't happen.
If I had a machine that could create computers, or cars, or anything else out of thin air at no cost it would be reprehensible for anyone to try to stop me from distributing those goods.
Again, this brings us back to the problem that there was investment required in order to produce these goods in the first place. If anyone can clone them at no cost there would be no return on the investment so why would anyone bother to invest in the R&D in the first place?
Free redistribution works only in very specific cases. The software industry is a good example - Free software works because people can charge a significant amount for the services rendered rather than the software itself. If someone wants to buy a web server you can install Apache on a box and sell it to them. And the software is developed because people need a feature that doesn't yet exist and are thus willing to pay a developer to do the work. The work is non-trivial so most people can't do it themselves and therefore pay for it.
This really does not apply to the music industry - what service are you going to charge for? CD duplication? Anyone can do that for pennies.
If there was a machine that can replicate a 500,000 dollar car for 100 dollars....wouldn't you be asking yourself....should I really pay 499,900 dollars just for design?...should cars cost so much?
This is just market forces at work. People will pay (more or less) what they think a product is worth. If the vendor is charging too much, someone will produce a cheaper product and undercut them (possibly in the form of a bootleg, clone, knock-off). The vendor's job is to balance the price they are charging in order to maximise profits and minimise people going for the cheaper products. There is also the added complication that a reduced price may prompt your customers to buy more of the product, thus generating more revenue anyway.
The music and movie industries are in the somewhat unique position that, because of their insistence on stuff like DRM, the "cheap knockoffs" are actually of higher quality than the legitimate product. And they have no one to blame for this but themselves.
If I insert a shiny disk that belongs to me into a CD burner that belongs to me and produce another shiny disk, all I have done is use my property as I see fit (as free people do).
In many jurisdictions this would be considered fair use or fair dealing and not copyright infringement, which rather invalidates your point. If you are going to make examples that claim that copyright infringement isn't wrong, at least pick examples that actually constitute copyright infringement.
When my original post talked about copyright infringement, I was quite clearly talking about copying content which you have not purchased.
Just that they don't deserve compensation for copying. The fact that someone put some effort into making something does not negate my property rights.
You do not have the right to make and distribute copies without a distribution licence. Doing so would be both illegal and wrong. As mentioned above, making copies for your own use is fine and so I'm not sure why you are discussing it here.
I'm talking about economic scarcity. A good is scarce if the supply is limited. Since the marginal cost of producing a copy of a song is 0, supply is infinite and therefor not scarce. If you have to pay in order to get a song, you are limited to how many songs you can afford. The resource has been made artificially scarce.
Firstly, the cost of producing a copy of a CD is not zero once you include the production (of the content) and advertising costs. Just because something is very cheap to reproduce once the original has been made, doesn't mean the average cost per item is low.
Secondly, if they were to just hand it out for free, as you seem to be suggesting they should, what is in it for the vendor? Why should they spend their time producing content that will gain them nothing?
Think about the implications of a resource without scarcity. If someone had a machine that made unlimited food could he morally deny anyone a meal?
Apples and Oranges - you don't need music in order to live. However, you seem to miss the fact that the drug companies already do this - they don't hand out drugs for free because it doesn't make economic sense for them.
You can try and apply your thinking to any product, even things without a zero production cost. Take computers, for example - what gives manufacturers the right to charge any more than the materials cost for computers? Oh yes, it's coz there would be no economic gain for them if they didn't make a profit so why would they bother?
It's wrong? Why?
If someone puts resources (time, effort, money, etc.) into something, and then says "I'm happy for people to have a copy of this under these conditions", do you not think it wrong to take a copy and completely ignore those conditions? (Where the conditions may include ideas like handing over some money, not taking the content and passing it off as your own produce, etc.)
I'd say the morally wrong position is that it's OK to artificially impose scarcity on an infinite resource for personal profit.
Where is the scarcity? CDs are pretty abundant, stuff released as downloads aren't really scarce.
Using this law, wouldn't it be illegal to make a mixed tape from your CD collection ?.. after all you would be changing the format.
Correct - it is indeed illegal.
(7) Knowingly and without permission accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network.
And I'm sure they will be arresting everyone who accesses arbitrary web sites unless they can prove they had permission from the server owner?
I honestly can't see the difference between using an open access point (which may or may not been intentionally left open to provide public access - there's absolutely no way to know) and using a public web server (which may or may not have been intentionally left unpassworded).
Or I have few hundred vinyl albums in my basement. I could record songs from those to my computer and then encode to MP3. Instead I download them. Is this OK?
Ethically I can't see a problem with this.
In the UK it is illegal to copy music for your own purposes iff you change the format (e.g. ripping CDs into Vorbis format so you can play them on your Vorbis player). In fact, Sony have been banging on recently about this, saying that it's illegal for people to load up their iPods with stuff ripped from their (legally purchased) CDs and that everyone must rebuy their whole music collection in MP3 format (presumably even the stuff that isn't available anymore?). Of course, everyone is ignoring them and the interesting thing is that Sony themselves have made plenty of products that are more or less useless unless people do these illegal conversions - e.g. Minidisc, etc.
The more the content industry bangs on about copyright infringement, the more they look like complete idiots... and greedy idiots at that. Whilst people like sticking within the law, the fact that the content industry seems only to be interested in treating its own customers like crap I think more and more people will find reasons to avoid paying for stuff.
Actually it IS theft in a way. "Theft of service". That's where you make use of something without
paying for it and without removing it. Like sneaking onto the subway without dropping your token
into the turnstile. You didn't steal the subway. You can be charged with theft of service and go to
jail.
That might be the case if music was a service, which it isn't. This is already covered by copyright laws - I don't understand why people seem to feel the need to twist other laws into applying too. Copying music is copyright infringement, it is not theft, burglary, piracy or genocide, no matter what the RIAA may like to claim.
It is wrong, and illegal, but it isn't stealing.
Stealing and copyright infringement are covered by different laws and they have different effects on the victims of the crimes and society in general, they are not the same thing.
That doesn't make copyright infringement right. However, there needs to be some flexibility here.
For example, I generally download an album before I buy it. If I like what I hear I go out and buy the CD, if not, I delete what I downloaded. If I can't hear something before buying it I probably won't buy it because I've bought too many CDs I thought were going to be good and turned out to be complete crap. And what's wrong with this? Consider it promotion for the bands - if their music is good then it makes them more money because I'm more likely to spend my money on CDs I _know_ are good rather than taking a gamble.
Can anybody fill me in as to why downloading music without paying for it is ok?
It isn't. But can you fill me in as to why the following behaviour is ok:
At the moment, the quality of the official product is frequently substandard compared to the blackmarket product. People generally like paying and staying within the law, but when it starts to become impossible to use the legally purchased product, is it any surprise that people stop buying it?
Long ago I read that dust particles from meteors are important to the atmosphere because they nucleate raindrops. I wonder if the heat dumped into the at atmosphere by particles with this amount of energy has an effect on the energy budget of the stratosphere which would be worth modelling.
ISTR it is believed that cosmic rays may trigger lightning bolts, which are quite important to life.
In the UK, we're used to getting our phones for free. Now, nobody is expecting to get an iPhone for free, however, this contract does show a marked change... Here, when we take out a phone contract, we get a phone for free ( higher the rate of contract, the more expensive phone you can have ).
This is misinformation - In general in the UK, the more expensive your tariff, the cheaper the handset. Whilst this does mean some handsets have no additional cost, the top end ones usually do unless you're on a crazily expensive contract. So you can go on whatever tariff you want and buy whatever phone you want, it just means that if you are on a cheaper tariff you pay a higher upfront cost for the handset.
I bought my P900 about 3 or so years ago at a cost of 120ukp on a reasonably expensive contract. However, my experience of phones tells me that I won't be buying a smartphone with a closed software stack again. Every single phone I've owned in the past 7 years has been an unstable pile of crap - it's a waste of time for me to buy something I can't fix myself, since the manufacturers clearly have no interest in doing so.
And after watching that Al Gore documentary, don't you feel a little guilty not shutting down your box when not using it - think of the glaciers and the penguins
Maybe you'd care to explain why shutting the machine down is going to save the penguins any more than hibernating it...
I'm a bit confused... When I press the power button on my computer, the desktop (and all the apps I had open before I powered off) appears within a couple of seconds. Why would someone want to have another operating system in the BIOS which appears to offer similar (but much less inferior) features?
Rebooting is something you do only after a kernel upgrade...
is this thing available? The website says that I (the consumer) should come back in October. I guess I will check again in 5 days
but it is not looking good. My contract is up soon so I might not mind trying Neo but they sure don't look ready for business.
Current estimates suggests the Neo1973 GTA02v4 (the production version) will be shipping at the end of December. But I think all bets are off as to whether the software will be of "production quality" by then (whatever "production quality" means these days - every production phone I've owned in the past 5 years has been an unstable piece of crap anyway).
I understand that you can run Qtopia on the devices though, which is a bit more usable as a phone than OpenMoko at the moment, but from what I've read there are serious battery-life problems when running Qtopia.
it only supported GPRS. Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data.
Errm, I might.
I mean, of course I want UMTS, but at the moment there are no open platforms that support it - the Neo1973 is GPRS and GSM only and I'm seriously considering getting one. To be blunt, I'm sick of crappy closed devices that aren't developer friendly (and in the case of my Symbian UIQ phone and VxWorks phone, totally unstable even when you're using them for what they were _designed_ to do).
To me, having a decent speed connection is secondary to actually being able to do useful stuff on the phone, which the current closed platforms do not let me do.
I wouldn't call either of those 'VOIP' by definition. I want to use the telephone, not PC based chat.
Of course they are VoIP - they carry your Voice over the Internet Protocol, hence VoIP. What you seem to be looking for is a specific type of service - namely VoIP to PSTN gatewaying. If you do a bit of googling you'll see that there are hundreds of SIP <-> PSTN gateways to choose from. For example, here in the UK I use voipuser.org for inbound DDIs.
Digital has blocks, pausing, sound artifacts and all sorts of other things that make viewing uncomfortable.
I call BS. The only channels that have problems with macroblocking are the lower-budget channels that you don't get over analogue anyway. All the major channels are allocated a good bandwidth and have a sensible amount of FEC to you won't get macroblocking except in the worst weather (i.e. the sort of weather that happens once every 3 years). The same with pausing - it just doesn't happen unless you have the aforementioned weather conditions. I've also never noticed any sound artifacts, and since the backhaul is almost exclusively digital these days, all these problems would show up over the analogue transmissions anyway.
If you live in the hilly areas of England, consider getting cable - oh wait, they don't offer that because of the terrain?? Oh well.
What's wrong with DVB-S?
In fact, the best way to receive HD broadcasts from the major networks is likely via an antenna, as cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams.
Cable companies may recompress the streams to save bandwidth, but satellite is generally used to distribute the content to the cable head offices and terrestrial transmitters, so you won't usually beat the quality of the DVB-S signal since it's usually the source for all the other distribution methods.
Also, there is a lot more bandwidth available through DVB-S than DVB-T, so the chances are DVB-T streams will get reduced in quality in order to squeeze more channels in.
It can be a PITA to figure out what to back up. Do I really want to go through my hard drives and figure out what I should back up and what I shouldn't? Reasonable file organization helps with this, but doesn't solve the issue.
If your data is that disorganised that you can't relatively quickly identify what stuff needs to be backed up then you probably also have big problems finding data when you need it too.
Even things that are "replaceable", like downloads, program installations, and rips still are a PITA to recover from. Installing and updating Windows takes a couple hours, installing Office takes 30 min, installing Visual Studio takes 30 min, yadda yadda yadda. It'll be a day or to before you're back up and running.
Yeah, but I wouldn't usually want to reinstall those things from backup because unless you only just took the backup the system is going to be massively out of date anyway - far better to do a clean reinstall from scratch. For my workstations I can go from a blank hard drive to a fully functional workstation (with all the development tools I need) in the space of less than an hour with the latest Fedora CD and my backup up a few key configuration files (and most of that time is just waiting for Anaconda to do its thing, so I don't need to even be present). Admittedly servers are some more effort, but I still wouldn't recover the _software_ from backup, only the config.
And now where did I get those videos from?
Presumably they would've been ripped from your DVD collection?
And do I really want to sit there re-ripping 150 CDs?
You don't have to sit there doing it - just return to your computer every so often to swap the CD. You'll have the lot done in a couple of weeks of no effort... The effort of maintaining a backup of them would be more for me than the effort required to re-rip them (also, the chances of me losing the Vorbis files is relatively small since I have them stored on both my server and my notebook).
I filled two DVDs with photos from one "vacation". (Granted, I shoot RAW and this "vacation" was three weeks long, but still.)
If you spend 3 weeks shooting 9 gig of photos in RAW format then you are not a "normal user" so my comments do not apply to you. Normal users shoot in JPEG format which comes to maybe 2-4MB a photo.
I've also got about 250 GB of stuff I've recorded from cable TV. That's not really replaceable if it dies: I'd have to get cable again at $50/mo then wait for them to come around.
Since you're breaking the law anyway by doing long-term storage of videos from cable TV, you may as well go the whole hog and just download them if you need to replace them. They are no doubt available over bit torrent - most broadcast videos are.
I'm curious: what backup method are you guys currently using to store those hundreds of GB? DVDs just don't cut it anymore, and tape drives beyond DDS-4 (20 GB) are quite expensive. What's left? USB hard drives?
Personally, I don't back up hundreds of GB. My important data fits on 2 single layer DVDs and I do a regular(ish) backup of that, the rest of the contents of my hard drives is stuff that can be downloaded, and stuff like my music library (a reasonably large amount of Vorbis data) which, whilst it would be a PITA it can be re-ripped from the original CDs.
It boggles the mind that "normal" users would have hundreds of GB of stuff they need to backup. Maybe with home video editing becoming popular some people might need to backup this much data. Of course businesses have much greater backup needs, but one hopes that such businesses see the sense in spending money to back up the important data (sadly, having supported a number of businesses I can tell you that this is often not the case and losing the contents of the file server certainly can put the business in peril).
In fact, the inaccessable website is even more of a problem, since, as a sighted user, I wouldn't be aware of the problem and need blind people and others to make me aware by the use of lawsuits and other communications.
The Disabilities Discrimination Act, here in the UK, already makes inaccessible commercial websites illegal. Sadly it doesn't seem to deter people from having inaccessible web sites. This is probably down to 2 reasons:
1. This law is only very rarely used against inaccessible sites, so it isn't really much of a threat.
2. The people who would be liable are the end business owners - it would seem to be far better to make the web developer's business liable since the web developer _should_ have a more informed understanding of how this stuff works. It's obvious to techies that having a Flash-only web site is nigh on useless for anyone who hasn't got Flash, but it is less obvious to the technologically clueless business owner who still believes the blue "e" is "The Internet".
And the really stupid thing is that whilst inaccessible (e.g. Flash only) sites seem to becoming more prevalent, it is becoming more and more important to have accessible websites even for the fully able users since people are increasingly using less capable user agents such as those embedded in phones and PDAs and the associated low-bandwidth, high latency GPRS connections.
...get a real RAID card. Unless you do a lot of tape backups...
I sincerely hope you do backups anyway. RAID is simply there to allow you to continue running a service under some specific failure conditions that would otherwise cause the service to be down whilst hardware is replaced and backups restored - it is not a substitute for backups, RAID and backups accomplish different jobs.
Some examples of failure conditions where RAID won't save you but backups will:
- Some monkey does rm -rf / (or some rogue bit of software buggers the file system).
- The power supply blows up and sends a power spike to all the hard drives in your array (I've personally seen this happen to a business who didn't take backups because they believed RAID did the same job - they lost everything since all the drives in the array blew up).
- The building bursts into flames and guts your server room.
In all these conditions, having a regular off-site backup would save you whereas just using a RAID will not.
Which is why they are doing solar photo voltaic and not solar thermal power generation. No heat gradient required.
The original poster said: "some form of mirror heating, and that present a whole bunch of other problems." to which you replied "such as?". My reply was answering your "such as?" question by stating a problem with the original poster's suggestion.
some form of mirror heating, and that present a whole bunch of other problems.
Such as?
Doing any kind of heat based power generation in space on a large scale is pretty much a complete no-no. Using heat to generate power requires a thermal gradient, which requires that you can throw away a lot of waste heat (that's what the cooling towers do at your local coal/gas/fission power plant). Getting rid of waste heat in space is really hard since you have to radiate it all - there's nothing to conduct it away.
just cheap enough to make it worthwhile.
Unfortunately, all the new power generation technologies suffer from the same problem - they are all much more expensive than fossil fuels, so fossil fuels win every time, even though we are screwing our planet in the process.
my point is what makes you think the solar panel will generate more power with more light? they don't catch all the energy that falls on the earth, so more in space won't make a difference. your 160 watt panel on earth is still only going to be a 160 watt panel in space...
Bzzzt... wrong.
PV panels can only extract electricity at a specific bandgap energy (although I believe recent developments allow multiple bandgaps, improving efficiency). Photons below that energy (i.e. longer wavelength) are not converted to electricity at all and are usually absorbed into the panel as heat, whilst photons above that energy have energy equal to the bandgap converted into electricity and the rest of the energy is deposited as heat(*).
So more light == more photons of the appropriate energy == more electricity.
(* this raises the question, why not mount PV panels on top of thermal panels, allowing you to make use of the heat caused by the energy that didn't get converted into electricity?)