Surely the issue isn't whether his ideas can't stand up to the curiosity of a six year old? It's whether his ideas can stand up to a six year old's ability to click the "save page" button on Wikipedia's "Editing [page name]" screen.
"people who download music are people who love music"
Obviously you can prove this? What makes you so sure that people who download music aren't simply people who like music to a fairly average degree, but are too cheap to pay for it and therefore just take it for free?
If copyright was non-transferable, artists would undoubtedly employ agents to handle the day-to-day administration which they would create. After all, the alternative would be that artists would have to spend all their time trawling the internet looking for illicit p2p copies of their work.
In essence, this is the same position as we have now. Artists could distribute their work themselves, could earn all their money from live appearances and sell their CDs at gigs, could cut out the middleman altogether, in fact. They make a choice not to. In Slashbot-land, this happens only because evil RIAA whores have stitched up radio airplay outlets and tricked naive, fawn-like artists into pernicious contracts. In real-world-land, though, it has more to do with the fact that artists are perfectly happy to have this sort of ancilliary activity done for them by a third party, just as we might pay an accountant to do our tax return.
Apart from that one point, yours seems like an eminently sensible, fair-minded post; so you'll probably get buried by the mods.
This gets raised all of the time, and it is totally irrelevant. The quality (or lack of it) of a work is neither here nor there in a discussion about copyright. Raising it just muddies the waters (which, I dare say, is often the writer's intention).
It doesn't matter that most songs that get radio airplay are rubbish. It doesn't matter that all but two songs on every album are worthless filler. Artists have a right to release bad products, just as you have the right not to buy them. What you don't have the right to do, though, is to determine how the artist's work should be distributed, even where your desires clearly run contrary to the artist's wishes (and indeed financial interests, since you're not paying).
Slander is a civil offence. You, as the slanderee (possibly not a real word) would have to sue the perpetrator of the alleged slander. Then you'd have to prove, on the balance of probabilities (because it's a civil, not a criminal, case), that the alleged slander had damaged your reputation.
I suspect that the defendant would use the defence of "fair comment": that while your reputation may have been damaged, the allegation was accurate. Lawsuits are notoriously difficult to predict, but I suspect that a jury comprised of real people, as opposed to slashbots, would find in favour of the defendant. They won't be impressed by your: "it's not theft, I just got it without paying by copying it off the net. Information wants to be free, sheeple" bullshit. They'll look at the end of result of your activities and conclude that you didn't have the music before, you've got the music now, you don't seem to have paid for it in-between, end of story.
So sue away, and good luck to you; because you're going to need it.
"Have you even considered the notion that GUI is more a matter of taste than anything else"
True, but Microsoft invests large amounts of time, effort and money into UI research, usability testing etc. You may find Windows "clunky and inelegant", but it seems reasonable to suppose that the GUI design reflects what all that testing and research has taught them. Maybe it's you that's out of step.
Do KDE, Gnome etc. have the benefit of the same research base? Are they subjected to the same scale of testing that Microsoft can afford to carry out? I don't know, but I'd be surprised if they are.
I certainly agree that my version doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but I think that it is grammatically sound. And in the end, is that not what grammar nazis strive for above all else? (Note to self: don't start a sentence with "and")
When Winston Churchill's publisher amended one of his sentences so that it wouldn't end in a preposition (another grammatical transgression which is nonetheless widespread), Churchill ridiculed the revised version as "the sort of English up with which I will not put", which highlights the pitfalls of too-slavish adherence to rules of this kind. It just goes to show that rules are made to be broken, I suppose.
I'm ambivalent about the use of "disappear" as a transitive verb. If it was purely a result of the same kind of media/management newspeak bollocks that turned "verb" into a verb, I'd be dead against it. As far I know, though, it has its roots in the use of the term "The Disappeared" for the victims of government oppression in Latin America. Clearly, this should have the sense "the people who have disappeared", but there is something rather compelling about the sense "the people who have been disappeared", even if that sense doesn't flow logically from the term and certainly isn't needed to convey the desired meaning. It's a tough one.
No, it's like exactly what happened. The police have to investigate a crime. They went to a person that they thought might have information which help to identify the criminal and asked that person to give them the information. The person refused, so they went to a judge and secured a warrant permitting them to search for it. End of story.
Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some of us, not all criminal investigation is a savage assault on civil liberties.
"it's more modern, standards compliant and secure" really isn't going to cut it with the kind of decision makers that the GP is talking about. Well, the "more secure" bit might, but the rest certainly won't.
Modernity and standards compliance aren't reasons for action in themselves. There has to be a pay-off, and if a system works with a non-compliant browser then what is the pay-off in reworking it to comply with these "web standards" of which some whiny tech-guy speaks?
A small part of my job involves intranet development in an organisation where roughly 30% of the staff use IE6 and the rest use IE5.5. There are complicated contractual reasons for this, but the fact is that our intranet has to be designed around those restrictions and the powers-that-be don't care so long as the system works within its own borders.
"These weapons were also never utilized by Germany"
This is just factually incorrect. Incendiary bombs were widely used during the blitz in 1940-41. They were also used by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War, most famously in the bombing of Guernica in 1937.
Something akin to this already exists in the UK. In the Neil Hamilton / Mohamed Al-Fayed libel case in 1999, Al-Fayed was able to claim his legal costs from the people who had funded Hamilton's defence. There's a brief reference to it here. This is only one small part of the BBC's archived coverage of one of those cases which you really wished that both sides could lose, but it includes the actual legal citations for anyone who wants to explore further.
As straw men go, though, it does have the virtue that, in positing the existence of a technology which allows cheap, simple and exact replication of a product, it exactly describes the situation today as regards digital media. If all - or even some - Slashdot analogies were that sound, there'd be less scope for karma-whoring question avoidance like yours. Still, that's a price that I, for one, would be willing to pay.
"And what about my fair use rights? Do they get trumped by a business protecting their investments"
IANAL, and I'm not trying to be funny about this, but my understanding is that the answer to this is "yes".
Based entirely on my readings of Slashdot posts by people who appear to be sensible adults with a certain amount of factual knowledge about copyright law (able to recognise that there are several perfectly good reasons for IP law; don't pretend that 90% of p2p users are only d/l-ing non-copyright Latvian folk songs; can actually quote legal references: that sort of thing) my impression is that fair use describes what you are allowed to do without infringing on copyright. It doesn't mandate that the copyright holder makes it easy, or even possible, for you actually to do those things.
Like I say, IANAL and even if I was I wouldn't be an American one (although this specific case was in the UK, I assume that your more general point relates to the USA). I could easily be wrong about this, but I suspect that I'm not.
"what about the bit before the trailer, you know "buy the latest BBC book by the presenter of the previous show"
This was an issue several years ago, with commercial magazine publishers complaining that the BBC was effectively advertising the Radio Times on its TV channels in opposition to the publishers' own listings mags (RT is a BBC-published listings magazine. As its name suggests, it pre-dates television; and for many years it was virtually the only listings magazine available in the UK).
These and other similar complaints are the reason that when an ad for RT appears nowadays, the words: "other listings magazines (or "cookery books", or whatever as appropriate) are also available" appear in tiny letters at the bottom of the screen.
Oh, and revenues from the BBC's commercial activities do go back into funding production, I believe.
And Jonathan Ross's show is an arse-licking extravaganza, which is a shame because Ross himself can be a funny and edgy presenter and he also hosts an excellent film review show in which he is regularly a great deal less flattering about some of the very same films whose stars he fawns over on his talk show.
Also, like several other shows which mine the same seam, his non-Hollywood guests are drawn from a very small pool. So you can pretty much guarantee that e.g. Johnny Vegas, Eddie Izzard, Peter Kay and Ricky Gervais are all going to get the gig at least once per series. Nothing against any of those guys, but they might as well come on wearing tee-shirts emblazoned "New Comedy Establishment" on the front and "Friend of Jonathan" on the back.
The fact that the Nazis had the word "Socialist" in their name doesn't make them socialists, any more than the fact that the official name of communist East Germany was the German Democratic Republic made it a democracy.
It is a fact that Hitler came to power initially through democratic means, just as it a fact that his party had absolutely nothing at all to do with socialism.
"the nazis were socialist as are most Democrats"
One of the things that I find most mystifying about the American political landscape is the routine suggestion that the speaker's political opponents actively hate their own country. I'll be voting in the UK elections next week and I won't be voting for Michael Howard, but I don't think that he wants to destroy the nation or anything like that. He just has a different vision of how it should be administered to mine. Believe me, the US Democratic Party is not socialist by any sensible measure. It's just a different bunch of millionaire lawyers with different special interests.
My father-in-law has a set-top box (not sure what model: a £40 one from a supermarket, I think) and the sound is well out of synch with the picture all the time. It's far enough out to be quite disorientating to watch.
Is this a characteristic of digital transmission, or is it characteristic of cheapo hardware?
So you're saying that the stories are factually incorrect?
Here are some other news sources with a famously "one-sided view of the US in general". They seem to think that these things happened, too, but that'll probably just be their liberal media bias at work.
These rants somehow never seem to work as well when the denunciation of most of humanity as "stupid" contains a crass factual error itself.
What, exactly, is your "National Security Number"? Is it similar to your National Insurance Number? Is someone who can't distinguish between the two more or less stupid than someone whose knowledge of their computer is less than the Slashdot community would like?
It's at times like that that your boozed-up Englishman (Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish have different rules) resorts to chanting the name of the Swedish whore: Inga Lund, Inga Lund, Inga Lund!
Interestingly, you used to hear of many left-wing political figures who said that they relied on the Financial Times for their political news precisely because of the paper's position that the business of making money was far too serious to allow their news coverage to be tainted by political bias.
"If giving away words printed on paper is a viable business model, there's no way you can argue that giving away words on a computer screen isn't"
Only if you want to argue that all those words are of equal worth. Were these free papers sustaining international news-gathering operations? Were they paying leading commentators for their expertise and analysis? Or were they regurgitated agency copy bought in as a wrapper for ad content?
Free newspapers means one of two things: short-term promotional campaign (often just a single day and in a limited area); or minimal news content wrapped around a slew of ads for small local businesses, recipe features and reminiscence columns.
The first is obviously a promotional expense which is budgetted for and presumably costed into the paper's usual selling price. The second is fine in its place, and the apparent success (or at least survival) of so many publications of this type suggests that they occupy a genuine niche in the market. To suggest, as you appear to, that the existence of any free hard copy newspapers proves that all newspapers could be free on the web is just ridiculous.
I don't know about actual rocket engineers, but one guy who did this was Polish: Rudolph Mate, the director of "When Worlds Collide" (1951). Check out theseimageshere. Worked for him.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the issue isn't whether his ideas can't stand up to the curiosity of a six year old? It's whether his ideas can stand up to a six year old's ability to click the "save page" button on Wikipedia's "Editing [page name]" screen.
Obviously you can prove this? What makes you so sure that people who download music aren't simply people who like music to a fairly average degree, but are too cheap to pay for it and therefore just take it for free?
In essence, this is the same position as we have now. Artists could distribute their work themselves, could earn all their money from live appearances and sell their CDs at gigs, could cut out the middleman altogether, in fact. They make a choice not to. In Slashbot-land, this happens only because evil RIAA whores have stitched up radio airplay outlets and tricked naive, fawn-like artists into pernicious contracts. In real-world-land, though, it has more to do with the fact that artists are perfectly happy to have this sort of ancilliary activity done for them by a third party, just as we might pay an accountant to do our tax return.
Apart from that one point, yours seems like an eminently sensible, fair-minded post; so you'll probably get buried by the mods.
This gets raised all of the time, and it is totally irrelevant. The quality (or lack of it) of a work is neither here nor there in a discussion about copyright. Raising it just muddies the waters (which, I dare say, is often the writer's intention).
It doesn't matter that most songs that get radio airplay are rubbish. It doesn't matter that all but two songs on every album are worthless filler. Artists have a right to release bad products, just as you have the right not to buy them. What you don't have the right to do, though, is to determine how the artist's work should be distributed, even where your desires clearly run contrary to the artist's wishes (and indeed financial interests, since you're not paying).
I suspect that the defendant would use the defence of "fair comment": that while your reputation may have been damaged, the allegation was accurate. Lawsuits are notoriously difficult to predict, but I suspect that a jury comprised of real people, as opposed to slashbots, would find in favour of the defendant. They won't be impressed by your: "it's not theft, I just got it without paying by copying it off the net. Information wants to be free, sheeple" bullshit. They'll look at the end of result of your activities and conclude that you didn't have the music before, you've got the music now, you don't seem to have paid for it in-between, end of story.
So sue away, and good luck to you; because you're going to need it.
True, but Microsoft invests large amounts of time, effort and money into UI research, usability testing etc. You may find Windows "clunky and inelegant", but it seems reasonable to suppose that the GUI design reflects what all that testing and research has taught them. Maybe it's you that's out of step.
Do KDE, Gnome etc. have the benefit of the same research base? Are they subjected to the same scale of testing that Microsoft can afford to carry out? I don't know, but I'd be surprised if they are.
When Winston Churchill's publisher amended one of his sentences so that it wouldn't end in a preposition (another grammatical transgression which is nonetheless widespread), Churchill ridiculed the revised version as "the sort of English up with which I will not put", which highlights the pitfalls of too-slavish adherence to rules of this kind. It just goes to show that rules are made to be broken, I suppose.
I'm ambivalent about the use of "disappear" as a transitive verb. If it was purely a result of the same kind of media/management newspeak bollocks that turned "verb" into a verb, I'd be dead against it. As far I know, though, it has its roots in the use of the term "The Disappeared" for the victims of government oppression in Latin America. Clearly, this should have the sense "the people who have disappeared", but there is something rather compelling about the sense "the people who have been disappeared", even if that sense doesn't flow logically from the term and certainly isn't needed to convey the desired meaning. It's a tough one.
I'm assuming that you're not in favour of split infinitives.
Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some of us, not all criminal investigation is a savage assault on civil liberties.
Modernity and standards compliance aren't reasons for action in themselves. There has to be a pay-off, and if a system works with a non-compliant browser then what is the pay-off in reworking it to comply with these "web standards" of which some whiny tech-guy speaks?
A small part of my job involves intranet development in an organisation where roughly 30% of the staff use IE6 and the rest use IE5.5. There are complicated contractual reasons for this, but the fact is that our intranet has to be designed around those restrictions and the powers-that-be don't care so long as the system works within its own borders.
This is just factually incorrect. Incendiary bombs were widely used during the blitz in 1940-41. They were also used by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War, most famously in the bombing of Guernica in 1937.
Something akin to this already exists in the UK. In the Neil Hamilton / Mohamed Al-Fayed libel case in 1999, Al-Fayed was able to claim his legal costs from the people who had funded Hamilton's defence. There's a brief reference to it here. This is only one small part of the BBC's archived coverage of one of those cases which you really wished that both sides could lose, but it includes the actual legal citations for anyone who wants to explore further.
As straw men go, though, it does have the virtue that, in positing the existence of a technology which allows cheap, simple and exact replication of a product, it exactly describes the situation today as regards digital media. If all - or even some - Slashdot analogies were that sound, there'd be less scope for karma-whoring question avoidance like yours. Still, that's a price that I, for one, would be willing to pay.
IANAL, and I'm not trying to be funny about this, but my understanding is that the answer to this is "yes".
Based entirely on my readings of Slashdot posts by people who appear to be sensible adults with a certain amount of factual knowledge about copyright law (able to recognise that there are several perfectly good reasons for IP law; don't pretend that 90% of p2p users are only d/l-ing non-copyright Latvian folk songs; can actually quote legal references: that sort of thing) my impression is that fair use describes what you are allowed to do without infringing on copyright. It doesn't mandate that the copyright holder makes it easy, or even possible, for you actually to do those things.
Like I say, IANAL and even if I was I wouldn't be an American one (although this specific case was in the UK, I assume that your more general point relates to the USA). I could easily be wrong about this, but I suspect that I'm not.
I think you'll find it was Al Gore.
This was an issue several years ago, with commercial magazine publishers complaining that the BBC was effectively advertising the Radio Times on its TV channels in opposition to the publishers' own listings mags (RT is a BBC-published listings magazine. As its name suggests, it pre-dates television; and for many years it was virtually the only listings magazine available in the UK).
These and other similar complaints are the reason that when an ad for RT appears nowadays, the words: "other listings magazines (or "cookery books", or whatever as appropriate) are also available" appear in tiny letters at the bottom of the screen.
Oh, and revenues from the BBC's commercial activities do go back into funding production, I believe.
And Jonathan Ross's show is an arse-licking extravaganza, which is a shame because Ross himself can be a funny and edgy presenter and he also hosts an excellent film review show in which he is regularly a great deal less flattering about some of the very same films whose stars he fawns over on his talk show.
Also, like several other shows which mine the same seam, his non-Hollywood guests are drawn from a very small pool. So you can pretty much guarantee that e.g. Johnny Vegas, Eddie Izzard, Peter Kay and Ricky Gervais are all going to get the gig at least once per series. Nothing against any of those guys, but they might as well come on wearing tee-shirts emblazoned "New Comedy Establishment" on the front and "Friend of Jonathan" on the back.
It is a fact that Hitler came to power initially through democratic means, just as it a fact that his party had absolutely nothing at all to do with socialism.
"the nazis were socialist as are most Democrats"
One of the things that I find most mystifying about the American political landscape is the routine suggestion that the speaker's political opponents actively hate their own country. I'll be voting in the UK elections next week and I won't be voting for Michael Howard, but I don't think that he wants to destroy the nation or anything like that. He just has a different vision of how it should be administered to mine. Believe me, the US Democratic Party is not socialist by any sensible measure. It's just a different bunch of millionaire lawyers with different special interests.
My father-in-law has a set-top box (not sure what model: a £40 one from a supermarket, I think) and the sound is well out of synch with the picture all the time. It's far enough out to be quite disorientating to watch.
Is this a characteristic of digital transmission, or is it characteristic of cheapo hardware?
Here are some other news sources with a famously "one-sided view of the US in general". They seem to think that these things happened, too, but that'll probably just be their liberal media bias at work.
Hmmm... Yes, there's no way that the USA would ever do anything like that, is there?
What, exactly, is your "National Security Number"? Is it similar to your National Insurance Number? Is someone who can't distinguish between the two more or less stupid than someone whose knowledge of their computer is less than the Slashdot community would like?
It's at times like that that your boozed-up Englishman (Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish have different rules) resorts to chanting the name of the Swedish whore: Inga Lund, Inga Lund, Inga Lund!
Interestingly, you used to hear of many left-wing political figures who said that they relied on the Financial Times for their political news precisely because of the paper's position that the business of making money was far too serious to allow their news coverage to be tainted by political bias.
Only if you want to argue that all those words are of equal worth. Were these free papers sustaining international news-gathering operations? Were they paying leading commentators for their expertise and analysis? Or were they regurgitated agency copy bought in as a wrapper for ad content?
Free newspapers means one of two things: short-term promotional campaign (often just a single day and in a limited area); or minimal news content wrapped around a slew of ads for small local businesses, recipe features and reminiscence columns.
The first is obviously a promotional expense which is budgetted for and presumably costed into the paper's usual selling price. The second is fine in its place, and the apparent success (or at least survival) of so many publications of this type suggests that they occupy a genuine niche in the market. To suggest, as you appear to, that the existence of any free hard copy newspapers proves that all newspapers could be free on the web is just ridiculous.
I don't know about actual rocket engineers, but one guy who did this was Polish: Rudolph Mate, the director of "When Worlds Collide" (1951). Check out these images here. Worked for him.