This is what your argument boils down to. You refuse to see the other side of the equation. I have a right to copy and share anything I want.
No, you don't. You don't have the right to copy and share anything you want. If you'd like, I even can link to the Bill of Rights for you to confirm.
You're just another kid into pseudo-anarchy. You'll grow up soon enough.
The only thing that stops me is law.
Not only the law, but ethics and morality. As an artist, you would be making sure I don't get paid, thereby ensuring that only the big-named, "safe" artists ever get signed and put out there, because nobody will want to take risks on artists that don't have guaranteed sales. Independent artists would be too risky. They make such little money as it is. You want to make sure they absolutely never make any.
You have no evidence to suggest that this law is necessary for artists to get paid. Yet you declare it as fact.
It's basic common sense; legalizing free-form copyright infringement would make it so that nobody paid for anything, so that artists would never get compensated. You have zero evidence for your claims. Hell, you still haven't addressed the insanely ridiculous "it's human nature to kill people" claim of yours.
Me being free to use my computer as I see fit! Duh!
You don't have the right to do anything you want, particularly when it infringes on other people's rights. Welcome to the real world, kid. I'll let you in on a revelation--you're just a freeloader who gets bitter when the free ride is taken away, seeking desperately for justifications of your behavior.
I was pointing out that you were making bullshit assumptions that have been shown to be incorrect.
I didn't make bullshit assumptions, you did. You said it was human nature to kill people who took your mate, and then you said laws reflected the will of the people. I pointed out that it is not human nature to kill people, and that the will of the people is outweighed by the need for protecting the greater good of society; case in point, speeding laws. You haven't proven anything.
But if you want my opinion on what would happen if file-sharing was tomorrow declared legal and polluting file-sharing systems with junk files was declared illegal, I'll tell ya.
Why would polluting P2P systems be declared illegal? Isn't that against free will?
First off, all the dinosaurs of the media business would die off. People would start using for-pay file-sharing systems more for the sole reason that they provide a better service.
Uh, why would people magically start using for-pay file-sharing just because P2P infringement was legalized? What does legalizing P2P infringement have to do with the service quality of for-pay systems? People are already flocking to iTunes.
Artists would make more money because there'd be no middleman and customers would feel they are not being forced to pay, that instead it is their choice.
1.) How would artists get paid if P2P infringement was legalized?
2.) How are consumers being "forced to pay" anything in today's system? Nobody's holding a gun to your head. Songs are only.99 on iTunes.
Blatant commercialisation of music would stop
Your subjective judgments have nothing to do with this.
resulting in people forming their tastes from actually listening to a selection of music instead of being spoonfed what is "cool".
Stop with the lame victim mentality.
That's the will of the people.
I already addressed your "will of the people" argument. Laws aren't made based on the will of the people, they're made for the greater good.
The law is standing in the way of it to keep a bunch of fat cat lobbyists giving them money.
No, you're just trying hard to throw in anti-capitalism because you don't have an argument, and you're trying to lean on your own subjective opinions of pop music to portray a lame victim mindset that has no basis. What is the law "standing in the way" of? Free-form piracy so no artists get paid for anything? You don't have a right to someone's music.
Why should I care if your players have a remote or not?
Do you use the volume controls on your TV's remote, or do you get up and use the buttons on the TV?
Having an eject button on the keyboard doesn't mean ejecting the keyboard. The keyboard doesn't have a disc in it, and most people understand this. Only those who refuse to leave the world of Windows can't grasp it.
The RAC Foundation, an independent body established to protect the interests of motorists, believes the naked street concept can work -- but only in certain situations.
It's worried about the safety implications of such a scheme along Exhibition Road, where free museums annually attract millions of visitors, including schoolchildren.
Currently pedestrians in the area are encouraged to elude the street-level turmoil by using a drab underground walkway.
"We have a concern that introducing a scheme which means drivers must make eye contact with pedestrians could backfire if you have a busload of 10-year-olds trying to cross the road," said Edmund King, the RAC Foundation's executive director.
"There are surely other things that can be done to help pedestrians without compromising safety," he said. "It is an interesting idea in completely the wrong place."
I should note--you're arguing that removing traffic signs would make people drive more safely. Are you now saying not enforcing copyright would make people buy the real thing, contradicting your earlier point that it's "the will of the people" to file-share materials?
In other words, distracting traffic signs have nothing to do with the topic of file-sharing. You claim "will of the people," I point out other wills of the people that derail that argument, and you bring up traffic sign distractions and vehicle queue problems. They have nothing to do with each other.
Killing the guy who takes your mate is human nature too.
Speak for yourself; it's not my nature. I don't agree at all that it's human nature to kill someone you're jealous of. Yell at them or even beat them up, perhaps, but it's against the survival of the species to go killing whenever someone crosses us.
What a stupid argument. It's not "human nature" that laws should be aligned with, it's the "will of the people" and on the matter of file sharing the people have spoken: we want to share.
Laws are aligned with the greater good of the people. The will of the people was once to own slaves and conquer Native American lands as our own. It's also the "will of the people" to speed and end up killing people and getting into car accidents, but we keep those speed limit signs firmly in place regardless because we know it's right.
And by your logic anyway, the will of the people is not to share, because Slashdot has previously reported that iTunes is now competing percentage-wise with P2P apps. With the continued dominance of the iPod and the passing of physical media as a format for music (sorry, DVD-A), expect that percentage to grow.
Plus, the music on iTunes just plain sounds better than MP3s ripped from CD. It's hard to beat encoding from master tapes.
I guess the RIAA never saw the study that says that file sharers spent more money buying music online than those who don't share music at all.
The real point is that it doesn't matter, because copyright infringement is still copyright infringement, and a copyright holder has to defend against it. Also consider that people downloading materials, regardless of whether they end up buying them, also:
1.) Tend to have computers with high-speed connections that are on all the time, which means they probably have more disposable income anyway, and...
2.) These people are distributing copyrighted materials to others just by downloading them, since that is how most P2P apps behave--uploading what you're downloading so others can have it too.
I want to echo the double-standard mentioned elsewhere in that some people defend infringing on copyrighted materials via P2P but get upset when the copyright of the GPL is violated. Just something to think about, that's all.
The equivalent of suing Napster then would be suing Bram Cohen now, which isn't happening.
I know that. Maybe you misunderstood me. I'm saying five years ago, a lot of the discussion here advocated going after individual infringers rather than companies like Napster. I think a lot of people were just saying that, however, assuming it would be impossible to enforce. In the past couple of years, individual infringers have now been the targets, and all those lectures about personal responsibility I read on Slashdot have been thrown out the window.
Five years ago when Napster was getting sued, everyone on Slashdot--editors included--rallied behind the idea that they should lay off the companies providing the apps and going after the individual infringers, because that was fair and logical. I think nobody expected they'd actually do that. And now they are, and so the rallying cry has changed.
And for what reasons is it mocked? The fact you have to get up anyway to retrieve the disc? That doesn't matter on a Mac where the disc slot is in reach. Do you adjust the volume using your remote, or do you expect to control everything directly by buttons on the face of the particular device? I still have yet to read a good reason why the eject key shouldn't be on the keyboard along with all the other special keys like brightness, sleep, volume, and so on.
Mac users who are used to having the key on the keyboard are annoyed when they have to reach over and fish for the tiny eject button. For some of us who have our computers beneath the desk, it's even more inconvenient to have to eject that way. I like to just reach down and grab the disc after ejecting it via the keyboard.
Why would you ever want to eject your remote control? And yet I bet you use the eject button on your DVD player's remote control and not the eject button that's on the front of the player. I don't understand the hostility I'm seeing toward having an eject button on the keyboard along with the brightness, volume, and sleep keys. It makes sense to me, and it's just more convenient, especially given OS X's strict mounting rules.
IBecause it's nicer to have everything in one spot so you're not reaching over all the time. Seriously, I could just as easily ask you, what's wrong with having the eject button on the keyboard where all the other buttons on the keyboard are? You know, it being the primary input device of the computer along with the mouse? Brightness, volume, and other controls are already there. You want to throw all buttons all over the place instead of having it in one integrated location.
I don't see what's "ridiculously unintuitive" about it at all--in fact, it's much more intuitive. You're just reacting in a "OMG, it's DIFFERENT!" way and not just thinking about it and saying, "Well, it is nice that it's right there on the keyboard with everything else."
Anyone remember when you used to power on a Mac via the keyboard, too? USB ruined that, though (no power can go over the bus when the computer is off).
Do you get up and walk to your standalone DVD player to press the eject button? Or do you use the button on your remote control?
Final Cut Pro is a widely adopted standard for people not using expensive Avids. Did you watch Cinderella Man by any chance? All done in Final Cut Pro. I don't know of anyone professionally using MainActor on Linux in any feature films.
PDF is a subset of Postscript with extensions like font embedding and compression. It's a description model, which is why it's so cool that it can be used to store documents that appear the same everywhere and have it printed to look just like it is on screen (and that OS X's Quartz is based on the PDF model).
What sucks is Adobe Acrobat. PDF is just fine. Try any lightweight PDF viewer.
Thanks to Quartz, which is based on the PDF drawing model. So PDFs are almost "native" to OS X. Which is why it's so amusing when Adobe Acrobat behaves so slowly on OS X when Preview blasts a PDF onto the screen in less than a second.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. They just don't. In fact the only time I see the word "Ogg" even mentioned is on Slashdot. Ogg and FLAC playback, therefore, just aren't killer features in a player. Everybody uses MP3 (and AAC).
iPod won because it was designed extremely simply with little fluff. While other tech devices have pointless buttons, seams, and lines all over them with long names like "SONY DIGITAL XD450c," iPod was always as simple as a CD player and looked nice. The clickwheel makes it fun to use. I don't know, it just seems really obvious to me why the iPod won and competitors failed. When I go to the local store and see the iPods next to all the bizarre-looking WMA competitors that scream "tech device designed by engineers!" instead of just "music player," there really is no comparison.
As a sidenote, it's amusing how my Wal-mart puts the iPods at the bottom on the floor shelf and hangs all the crappy alternatives above it where people can reach. They have a WMA-based music service to sell, after all.
Record labels are the ones who encode the music and send them to Apple, often using an app called iTunes Producer that automates the process. In many cases, the labels use the master tapes as the encoding source, unlike P2P which uses CD.
I've noticed many albums I own on CD and in MP3 format which sounded "clearer" on iTunes, with the increased high-end you mentioned and a little more oomph in other frequency ranges. Cymbals in a lot of the rock songs are much louder now. You get used to the clearer versions (since that's how it was "supposed" to sound).
It's simple. See Roland's "read more" link in the submission? It doesn't go to the original article. It goes to his blog, which gives him ad revenues. Quite a pointless and self-serving middle-man. Roland never posts on Slashdot. He makes his living here on getting people to click to his blog and give him adviews instead of going directly to the article. It's an obvious ploy.
The other issue is that you know at least 20 other people submitted this story, as well as the previous Roland story. But in every case, Roland's article is chosen above the rest of the submissions. It ticks people off because he has so many accepted submissions that it seems like obvious preferential treatment. And don't bother the editors about it--CmdrTaco calls anti-Roland sentiment a "successful troll meme" and won't talk any more about it.
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Yes, it does. Hence Longhorn's ridiculous recommendations for 3Ghz and 512 MB of RAM to display windows on the screen. What exactly is it doing that requires 3Ghz? It's a ploy to push people to buy new computers. Microsoft is even recommending simply purchasing new computers to run Longhorn instead of upgrading on older machines. Uh-huh.
Linux and OS X, with few exceptions, get faster with each release. It's a nice feeling that OS X Tiger made my iBook 1Ghz faster.
The bigger question is, with all of Longhorn's technologies being backported to XP, in addition to its ludicrous system requirements, what's the point of upgrading to Longhorn at all? A new Direct3D shell that finally got OS X's translucence and window warp effects?
Why don't you ask Bill Gates about that sometime? "640kb outta be enough for anybody" has to be the most-quoted statement of all time on Slashdot.
The funny part is that he never made the quote in the first place.
Hell, anyone remember when Slashdot posted Ballmer's old internal parody ad from the early 90s and claimed it was a real ad? Or when Slashdot posted "Teen Beat" pictures of Bill Gates that weren't from Teen Beat at all and were just promo pics?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they have pulled stories before. Michael used to do it often.
This is what your argument boils down to. You refuse to see the other side of the equation. I have a right to copy and share anything I want.
No, you don't. You don't have the right to copy and share anything you want. If you'd like, I even can link to the Bill of Rights for you to confirm.
You're just another kid into pseudo-anarchy. You'll grow up soon enough.
The only thing that stops me is law.
Not only the law, but ethics and morality. As an artist, you would be making sure I don't get paid, thereby ensuring that only the big-named, "safe" artists ever get signed and put out there, because nobody will want to take risks on artists that don't have guaranteed sales. Independent artists would be too risky. They make such little money as it is. You want to make sure they absolutely never make any.
You have no evidence to suggest that this law is necessary for artists to get paid. Yet you declare it as fact.
It's basic common sense; legalizing free-form copyright infringement would make it so that nobody paid for anything, so that artists would never get compensated. You have zero evidence for your claims. Hell, you still haven't addressed the insanely ridiculous "it's human nature to kill people" claim of yours.
Me being free to use my computer as I see fit! Duh!
You don't have the right to do anything you want, particularly when it infringes on other people's rights. Welcome to the real world, kid. I'll let you in on a revelation--you're just a freeloader who gets bitter when the free ride is taken away, seeking desperately for justifications of your behavior.
"Why would polluting P2P systems be declared illegal? Isn't that against free will?"
And by this I mean that there's nothing wrong or illegal about polluting a P2P system. Nobody's rights are being violated.
I was pointing out that you were making bullshit assumptions that have been shown to be incorrect.
.99 on iTunes.
I didn't make bullshit assumptions, you did. You said it was human nature to kill people who took your mate, and then you said laws reflected the will of the people. I pointed out that it is not human nature to kill people, and that the will of the people is outweighed by the need for protecting the greater good of society; case in point, speeding laws. You haven't proven anything.
But if you want my opinion on what would happen if file-sharing was tomorrow declared legal and polluting file-sharing systems with junk files was declared illegal, I'll tell ya.
Why would polluting P2P systems be declared illegal? Isn't that against free will?
First off, all the dinosaurs of the media business would die off. People would start using for-pay file-sharing systems more for the sole reason that they provide a better service.
Uh, why would people magically start using for-pay file-sharing just because P2P infringement was legalized? What does legalizing P2P infringement have to do with the service quality of for-pay systems? People are already flocking to iTunes.
Artists would make more money because there'd be no middleman and customers would feel they are not being forced to pay, that instead it is their choice.
1.) How would artists get paid if P2P infringement was legalized?
2.) How are consumers being "forced to pay" anything in today's system? Nobody's holding a gun to your head. Songs are only
Blatant commercialisation of music would stop
Your subjective judgments have nothing to do with this.
resulting in people forming their tastes from actually listening to a selection of music instead of being spoonfed what is "cool".
Stop with the lame victim mentality.
That's the will of the people.
I already addressed your "will of the people" argument. Laws aren't made based on the will of the people, they're made for the greater good.
The law is standing in the way of it to keep a bunch of fat cat lobbyists giving them money.
No, you're just trying hard to throw in anti-capitalism because you don't have an argument, and you're trying to lean on your own subjective opinions of pop music to portray a lame victim mindset that has no basis. What is the law "standing in the way" of? Free-form piracy so no artists get paid for anything? You don't have a right to someone's music.
Your arguments are ridiculous.
Why should I care if your players have a remote or not?
Do you use the volume controls on your TV's remote, or do you get up and use the buttons on the TV?
Having an eject button on the keyboard doesn't mean ejecting the keyboard. The keyboard doesn't have a disc in it, and most people understand this. Only those who refuse to leave the world of Windows can't grasp it.
More on those "naked streets":
I should note--you're arguing that removing traffic signs would make people drive more safely. Are you now saying not enforcing copyright would make people buy the real thing, contradicting your earlier point that it's "the will of the people" to file-share materials?
In other words, distracting traffic signs have nothing to do with the topic of file-sharing. You claim "will of the people," I point out other wills of the people that derail that argument, and you bring up traffic sign distractions and vehicle queue problems. They have nothing to do with each other.
Killing the guy who takes your mate is human nature too.
Speak for yourself; it's not my nature. I don't agree at all that it's human nature to kill someone you're jealous of. Yell at them or even beat them up, perhaps, but it's against the survival of the species to go killing whenever someone crosses us.
What a stupid argument. It's not "human nature" that laws should be aligned with, it's the "will of the people" and on the matter of file sharing the people have spoken: we want to share.
Laws are aligned with the greater good of the people. The will of the people was once to own slaves and conquer Native American lands as our own. It's also the "will of the people" to speed and end up killing people and getting into car accidents, but we keep those speed limit signs firmly in place regardless because we know it's right.
And by your logic anyway, the will of the people is not to share, because Slashdot has previously reported that iTunes is now competing percentage-wise with P2P apps. With the continued dominance of the iPod and the passing of physical media as a format for music (sorry, DVD-A), expect that percentage to grow.
Plus, the music on iTunes just plain sounds better than MP3s ripped from CD. It's hard to beat encoding from master tapes.
The submitter says:
I guess the RIAA never saw the study that says that file sharers spent more money buying music online than those who don't share music at all.
The real point is that it doesn't matter, because copyright infringement is still copyright infringement, and a copyright holder has to defend against it. Also consider that people downloading materials, regardless of whether they end up buying them, also:
1.) Tend to have computers with high-speed connections that are on all the time, which means they probably have more disposable income anyway, and...
2.) These people are distributing copyrighted materials to others just by downloading them, since that is how most P2P apps behave--uploading what you're downloading so others can have it too.
I want to echo the double-standard mentioned elsewhere in that some people defend infringing on copyrighted materials via P2P but get upset when the copyright of the GPL is violated. Just something to think about, that's all.
Actually, the majority of Slashdot visitors are Windows users. This was confirmed in the old IRC interview and in recent posts by Taco and others.
The equivalent of suing Napster then would be suing Bram Cohen now, which isn't happening.
I know that. Maybe you misunderstood me. I'm saying five years ago, a lot of the discussion here advocated going after individual infringers rather than companies like Napster. I think a lot of people were just saying that, however, assuming it would be impossible to enforce. In the past couple of years, individual infringers have now been the targets, and all those lectures about personal responsibility I read on Slashdot have been thrown out the window.
going after the individual infringers
Meant to say "go" after the individual infringers.
Five years ago when Napster was getting sued, everyone on Slashdot--editors included--rallied behind the idea that they should lay off the companies providing the apps and going after the individual infringers, because that was fair and logical. I think nobody expected they'd actually do that. And now they are, and so the rallying cry has changed.
And for what reasons is it mocked? The fact you have to get up anyway to retrieve the disc? That doesn't matter on a Mac where the disc slot is in reach. Do you adjust the volume using your remote, or do you expect to control everything directly by buttons on the face of the particular device? I still have yet to read a good reason why the eject key shouldn't be on the keyboard along with all the other special keys like brightness, sleep, volume, and so on.
Mac users who are used to having the key on the keyboard are annoyed when they have to reach over and fish for the tiny eject button. For some of us who have our computers beneath the desk, it's even more inconvenient to have to eject that way. I like to just reach down and grab the disc after ejecting it via the keyboard.
Why would you ever want to eject your remote control? And yet I bet you use the eject button on your DVD player's remote control and not the eject button that's on the front of the player. I don't understand the hostility I'm seeing toward having an eject button on the keyboard along with the brightness, volume, and sleep keys. It makes sense to me, and it's just more convenient, especially given OS X's strict mounting rules.
IBecause it's nicer to have everything in one spot so you're not reaching over all the time. Seriously, I could just as easily ask you, what's wrong with having the eject button on the keyboard where all the other buttons on the keyboard are? You know, it being the primary input device of the computer along with the mouse? Brightness, volume, and other controls are already there. You want to throw all buttons all over the place instead of having it in one integrated location.
I don't see what's "ridiculously unintuitive" about it at all--in fact, it's much more intuitive. You're just reacting in a "OMG, it's DIFFERENT!" way and not just thinking about it and saying, "Well, it is nice that it's right there on the keyboard with everything else."
Anyone remember when you used to power on a Mac via the keyboard, too? USB ruined that, though (no power can go over the bus when the computer is off).
Do you get up and walk to your standalone DVD player to press the eject button? Or do you use the button on your remote control?
Instead, there's an eject button in the more logical place for it--the keyboard.
Final Cut Pro is a widely adopted standard for people not using expensive Avids. Did you watch Cinderella Man by any chance? All done in Final Cut Pro. I don't know of anyone professionally using MainActor on Linux in any feature films.
PDF is a subset of Postscript with extensions like font embedding and compression. It's a description model, which is why it's so cool that it can be used to store documents that appear the same everywhere and have it printed to look just like it is on screen (and that OS X's Quartz is based on the PDF model).
What sucks is Adobe Acrobat. PDF is just fine. Try any lightweight PDF viewer.
Thanks to Quartz, which is based on the PDF drawing model. So PDFs are almost "native" to OS X. Which is why it's so amusing when Adobe Acrobat behaves so slowly on OS X when Preview blasts a PDF onto the screen in less than a second.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. They just don't. In fact the only time I see the word "Ogg" even mentioned is on Slashdot. Ogg and FLAC playback, therefore, just aren't killer features in a player. Everybody uses MP3 (and AAC).
iPod won because it was designed extremely simply with little fluff. While other tech devices have pointless buttons, seams, and lines all over them with long names like "SONY DIGITAL XD450c," iPod was always as simple as a CD player and looked nice. The clickwheel makes it fun to use. I don't know, it just seems really obvious to me why the iPod won and competitors failed. When I go to the local store and see the iPods next to all the bizarre-looking WMA competitors that scream "tech device designed by engineers!" instead of just "music player," there really is no comparison.
As a sidenote, it's amusing how my Wal-mart puts the iPods at the bottom on the floor shelf and hangs all the crappy alternatives above it where people can reach. They have a WMA-based music service to sell, after all.
Record labels are the ones who encode the music and send them to Apple, often using an app called iTunes Producer that automates the process. In many cases, the labels use the master tapes as the encoding source, unlike P2P which uses CD.
I've noticed many albums I own on CD and in MP3 format which sounded "clearer" on iTunes, with the increased high-end you mentioned and a little more oomph in other frequency ranges. Cymbals in a lot of the rock songs are much louder now. You get used to the clearer versions (since that's how it was "supposed" to sound).
It's simple. See Roland's "read more" link in the submission? It doesn't go to the original article. It goes to his blog, which gives him ad revenues. Quite a pointless and self-serving middle-man. Roland never posts on Slashdot. He makes his living here on getting people to click to his blog and give him adviews instead of going directly to the article. It's an obvious ploy.
The other issue is that you know at least 20 other people submitted this story, as well as the previous Roland story. But in every case, Roland's article is chosen above the rest of the submissions. It ticks people off because he has so many accepted submissions that it seems like obvious preferential treatment. And don't bother the editors about it--CmdrTaco calls anti-Roland sentiment a "successful troll meme" and won't talk any more about it.
Anyone remember eBay magically defying its own policies and reversing Microsoft's negative feedback?
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Yes, it does. Hence Longhorn's ridiculous recommendations for 3Ghz and 512 MB of RAM to display windows on the screen. What exactly is it doing that requires 3Ghz? It's a ploy to push people to buy new computers. Microsoft is even recommending simply purchasing new computers to run Longhorn instead of upgrading on older machines. Uh-huh.
Linux and OS X, with few exceptions, get faster with each release. It's a nice feeling that OS X Tiger made my iBook 1Ghz faster.
The bigger question is, with all of Longhorn's technologies being backported to XP, in addition to its ludicrous system requirements, what's the point of upgrading to Longhorn at all? A new Direct3D shell that finally got OS X's translucence and window warp effects?
Why don't you ask Bill Gates about that sometime? "640kb outta be enough for anybody" has to be the most-quoted statement of all time on Slashdot.
The funny part is that he never made the quote in the first place.
Hell, anyone remember when Slashdot posted Ballmer's old internal parody ad from the early 90s and claimed it was a real ad? Or when Slashdot posted "Teen Beat" pictures of Bill Gates that weren't from Teen Beat at all and were just promo pics?
But hey, let's protect the Bittorrent guy.