I wonder how many stories of Republican political crimes I could drag up, if I were to reach back a half century, before practically everyone on Slashdot, or their parents even, were even born.
Um, Clinton? There you go. You don't have to go back a half century. Hell, I thought it was vogue to dig up the Clintons' dirty laundry now that it supports the golden boy, even though it's the same damned laundry the Dems spent 10 years discounting when they were in office.
Hey, Lincoln was a Republican, and he was honest. I guess if that's all you've got, that's all you can run on.
Just like you guys have Kennedy, and he was honest. OK, well actually he wasn't.
Has it? Has Vista made MS money that XP wouldn't have made them? You have to eliminate cannibalistic sales here. If someone's new computer came with Vista, that doesn't count since it would have had XP before.
The hardware companies are benefiting more from Vista than anything. You can hardly find a new machine with XP, which means if you want a new computer it better come with 2GB minimum.
Until now I thought that ouside the real of mathematics (where things can be proven and no further revision is possible, save for attacking the logic of the proof), there is no such thing as "an experiment that removes all doubt"?
Within the defined parameters. If you're sufficiently clever, you can fire a beam of antimatter and observe it. That is a purely empirical matter, unless you want to get into metaphysical crap like what it means to observe, etc. One can argue the causality, come up with alternate hypotheses, but if the beam goes up (or down), that's what it does.
In general, people's risk assessments are completely out to lunch. Back in 2001, my school had its student trip to Greece canceled by parental concern. Apparently, the parents wanted their kids "safe at home"(never mind that we all lived in a certain large city on the American east coast), rather than facing the foreign dangers of a fairly quiet and moderately obscure neutral country.
As a parent, I can tell you that your parents weren't worried about you, they were worried about Greece.;)
It's not that they were afraid of what someone would do to you in a safe-ish foreign country, but what you would be able to do in that country with your parents about 4000 miles away. When you're living at home, they can make sure that you're at least sober at some point during the day.
This mindset generally blows up on them when you go to college, though.
It sounds like BS (and probably is), but it sounds like they have some sort of 3D-meshy material with a very large number of small pores, in order to get a very high surface area to volume ratio. So that makes sense. Palladium makes sense because it absorbs hydrogen very well, and as a result has been used for cold fusion research since the original fraud...er...results.
Well, that was certainly the most interesting etymological post I've seen on slashdot lately! Certainly more interesting than an article on physics posted in an Italian business magazine, which seems to have been the original topic.
But at school? Apart from one teacher science was always a dull subject, it was numbers in a way that made Maths seem exciting and it just never covered where all this science was leading to. Its no wonder that there are a shortage of scientists and engineers out there when the school system turns the most exciting subjects into the dullest ones.
Well, the problem is that doing science requires understanding the basics. There are many different levels of stuff you have to understand before you can understand how they do the really cool things. That said, a good teacher can devise interesting problems that take the requisite skills to solve. This takes an inordinate amount of effort and creativity on the part of the teacher, and there lies the problem.
I'm a scientist, and I really enjoyed my time as a TA in grad school. I tried hard to come up with good ways of explaining very difficult material that the freshmen could pick up. I tried to keep the class interesting, or at least did my best.
So sure some of these presentations are beyond the level of kids at school, but isn't it sometimes worth blowing their minds to make them realise why they are doing what they are doing? Science is a stunning thing, can we please stop making it dull.
Absolutely, sometimes you do have to do the "holy SHIT!" demo. The prof that taught the freshman class I TA'd would always take the kids out and do the "toss the alkali metals in the lake and watch them go BOOM!" demonstration. Kids love watching stuff blow up. You want to tailor it to things they actually can understand, though. Better yet is to come up with a really fun project where they can take what they're learning to build something cool.
I kind of miss teaching. My mother was a teacher, and made history a fantastically fun, participatory subject. She took the kids out to do local archaeology. She had them act out fun stuff from history books to make it more than people and dates. One time a group of her students staged a "coup" - and of course she gently showed them what happens when you stage a coup against a strong dictator.;) As a result, every time I'm in town visiting and we're out in town, invariably a former student of hers from decades past will come up and give her a huge hug. Good teachers mean a lot to kids. I never had a teacher that good (we agreed it was best for me not to take her classes), but then I guess I had a great mom instead.
I would love to be able to bring that kind of excitement to science classes. I wish it was in any way financially viable, but I couldn't pay our mortgage.
Let's say you have cancer, and I kick you in the nuts (assuming you have any). Now, should your doctor stop telling you about chemo because you got kicked in the nuts?
Except you got the priorities backward. It's like you have a hangnail and somebody kicks me in the balls, and you keep complaining about your hangnail. Wouldya shut up for a minute? We'll talk about your hangnail again when I stop writhing on the ground.
Same thing here. I'm not in favor of China's government, but let's stop berating China for their censorship record while we try to save what could be millions of people who need help.
Re:Why is "turn to government" the first solution?
on
Dealing With Dialup
·
· Score: 1
I don't think anyone needs to protect the poor old telecoms from the oppression of providing universal broadband coverage. The telecoms are doing just fine and benefit much more from government assistance then they spend in compliance with their few remaining service obligations.
Screw that. First, this isn't a socialist state, you don't have a God given right to luxuries like a fast data connection. Second, the telecoms don't just say, "wow, it sucked that we spent all that money with no way to recover it". They pass the costs on to other consumers who don't live in the middle of nowhere.
So as a fellow telecom customer, they can either move out of the sticks or put that terribly unsightly sattelite dish up and deal with it.
They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive. I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client; I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps.
(translated) My rich parents can't get broadband in their summer home in Cape Cod because they're too pretentious to use a dish and the mean old phone company doesn't want to spend millions to run DSL out to bumblefuck. Mr. Senator, can you make the taxpayer foot the bill so my parents can have *broadband* in their *summer home*???
Gimme a break. Talk about spoiled. You know, there are people who still use dial-up. Does it suck? A little. But talking about political action so rich people can get broadband in the middle of nowhere where they chose their vacation home? Get out of here.
Now assuming that access to Google increases information, here's where your, and Google, and all the other Western Totalitarian Regime Apologists', argument breaks down: GOOGLE IS FUCKING CENSORED! There's no increase in access to information, because the information that China blocks the information.
Here's where your argument breaks down: NOT ALL THE SEARCHES ARE CENSORED. In fact, the vast majority aren't, because people search for all kinds of things that don't piss off the Commies. Like learning about math, physics, how to rebuild an engine, or whatever.
Also, I very much don't like totalitarian regimes, including China. But I'm not arrogant enough to put politics above learning.
In fact, I'll completely turn that argument. In the end, education will win over politics. I make the case that having access to the maximum amount of information (which is accomplished by Google just barely satisfying the Commie csnsors) will 1) make obvious what is being censored, so it is constantly brought to the citizens' attention, and 2) give them access to a lot of powerful knowledge that isn't censored but will ultimately erode the power of the totalitarian state.
Basically, if you live in China, do you want 99.999% of Google or no Google? I'm betting the average Chinese citizen doesn't care about the political sensitivities of Westerners.
No. They just value the dollar more.
You have absolutely no insight into the meeting, nor the motivation of the voters, so you have absolutely no basis for that statement beyond ignorance.
Or looked at less cynically, they may be realistic enough to see that Google pulling out of China won't change China's policy, but will give the Chinese people even less access to information. In other words, they figured out that maintaining the moral high ground at the expense of the Chinese citizens didn't do anyone any good.
They may fully value human rights, but disagree on the best way to get there.
As someone who researches both those things, I call BS. Any undergrad who's taken introductory graph theory or machine learning can write an algorithm for finding communities in networks, or anomaly detection. That does not mean (a) the algorithm is based on robust statistics and not ad-hoc tomfoolery and (b) the algorithm hits your real-world design criteria (minimize false positives, etc).
I do these things for a living, so I'm talking from something of a position of experience. Point is, anybody who knows what they're doing can write good algorithms, but nobody can herd the cats (databases) together.
Neural networks and the like were thought to be the end-all of classification, until SVMs came along -- any idiot can hack up a neural net, but the SVM is based on some SOLID mathematics.
Now I know you're full of shit, because they're both just multidimensional modeling techniques that are only as strong as the training data you give them. I've seen shitty papers that blindly use SVM techniques just as I've seen idiots feed crap into a neural network, train on the test data, and think they've done a fantastic job.
This guy also doesn't seem to have much knowledge of intel gathering. The idea that forward projection isn't happening is...uh...wrong, and that's all I'll say on the matter (disclaimer: I'm ex-NSA)
If you're ex-NSA, then you also know that the difficulty isn't in writing the algorithms, it's in getting somebody to stitch together all the goddamn databases that are strung out all over creation.
Shit, *I* can write the social networking algorithms, anomaly detection, etc. But it doesn't do any good if you don't have the data integrated, and despite what's happened the last 8 years we still don't have it.
I also don't get the false dichotomy the author uses to rag on sensor-based detection.
What I'm saying is that I don't see anything wrong with the message that you're just not willing to pay for music recordings any more, regardless of what the law says. This is a perfectly valid (if not reasonable - a separate topic) stance to take.
That's fair enough, I suppose. I agree the reasonableness (is that a word?) is a separate topic. But if one wants attention, I do think that message will get lost. And civil disobediance in a vacuum doesn't do much.
My point isn't so much that I want free music as that we all benefit more as a species if all types of media are free.
Don't know if I agree in the entirety, because I think that creators deserve to be compensated. But I respect your opinion. I certainly think that eliminating greedy-assed middlemen who serve no purpose would be fantastic.
Doesn't work towards what goal? If you mean it doesn't work to change the minds of the RIAA dicks, then sure, you're right. If you mean it doesn't work to show just how ridiculous the RIAA's position is, then I think you're at least 100% wrong.
What position is that? That you shouldn't be able to download whatever you want? You need to tailor your civil disobediance to your point such that the message is compelling. Downloading pop music sends the message that you're greedy and just don't want to pay for music. There's no real message there.
On the other hand, if they started seeing a spike in 50 year old music (or however old would be in the PD now had it not been for the Bono act), the message would be very clear. It would indicate that people are exercising rights they would have had under the prior law.
The simple truth is that copyright is not necessary for the stated goal of producing art. In fact, copyright slows the distribution of art and crap alike. Copyright is a right extended by the government. It is an ostensibly limited monopoly on distribution. It is not a natural law and there is nothing inherently "right" about copyright, patent, trademark, or any other form of IP law. In fact, in terms of benefit to the human race, it's at best a wash.
That's entirely debatable, which is fine, but again you want to tailor your message so it isn't lost. Unless, again, your point is you just want free music. I personally disagree with a lot of that, but to each his own. But if that's your message, how do you best send it?
I respect your right to disrespect others' choices when they are shopping for civil disobedience, but I disagree with your assertion that it doesn't accomplish anything.
What "it" are we talking about here? I definitely believe that carefully organized disobediance can accomplish a lot. I say, just plan it so that the message is clear. The point of civil disobediance is to send a message that outsiders "get".
I think it would be cool as hell if there was an enormous, concerted spike in torrents of specific songs the day they should have hit the PD. Or torrent the hell out of Rick Astley. The thing is, it has to stand out from the noise or no one would notice.
People have always been able to "get music for free" without piracy.
Radio and MTV have always made this pretty easy. If you don't want to
pay for 7/8 ths of the album from the one hit wonder band that you
don't want you just stuck to listening to the radio.
Oh come the f*ck on. You can't play your music when you want it by turning on the radio. That's preposterous.
If you were really interested you might have gotten the 45.
I still have a couple of 45's from hair bands of the 80's.
Singles were a dying breed by the time cassettes became popular. Even then, the single cost proportionally a lot more than $.99. And that's without indexing for inflation.
There is only so many willing buyers. Preventing the willing buyers
from engaging in some form of "mooching" won't magically make them
willing to cough up money.
So...what...you're saying 100% of piracy is by people who wouldn't buy music? Because demographic analysis strongly disagrees with you. A large fraction of piracy is by college kids, who historically spent a *lot* of money on music.
Take an ipod, put it on random and insert some commercials and
you wouldn't be able to tell the difference... which is kind of
the point of an ipod to begin with.
You mean except for the commercials part? And the part about how all the music on the iPod is actually music I like? So basically they're totally different?
I'm no lawyer, but even I recognize that what they're talking about is simply a matter of contract law. You have your EULA, enforce it. It's not a matter of copyright law, no matter how convenient that would make things for them thanks to the insane penalties that accompany it.
I didn't say people downloaded because it was crap. I said fewer people are buying entire CD's when 90% of said CD is crap and maybe has one or two good songs.
When was this not true? I recall the 80s fondly, but man that decade spawned some seriously shitty music. Really bad soft rock, appalling synthesized junk, hair metal. Yech. But people bought it because they liked it well enough. Need to come up with a better reason than quality for why people aren't buying.
From what I can tell, there's a couple reasons: 1) people can buy tracks now. That's a fully legal reason why the record companies lose money. 2) There hasn't been a change in the dominant format now for what, 15 years? It's been a while since people bought their music twice. That made the record companies a lot of money. And 3)...piracy. It's really hard to argue that there's not a significant number of people who aren't buying music that they otherwise would have bought because it's now free. Sure, it's easy to rationalize - costs too much, crappy, whatever. But the end result is, if it's that bad then don't listen to it.
Of course that is subjective. Also, I have never downloaded music 'illegally' so I'm not one for making any apologies for that behavior. I want to see Fair Use and Copyright law changed, but in the meantime I respect the current legal framework. I've been *very* vocal with my local Congresscritter on this subject among others.
That, in my eyes, gives you a great amount of credibility. I think too many people use banners like copyright, and so on to justify illegal behavior. Calling the Congressrats is a great way to do it.
I do think there is room for civil disobediance here - go download music that *would* have passed into public domain before the Bono act was passed. But downloading new music while claiming evils of copyright - which many people are doing - doesn't work.
OB and ORF shouldn't be surprised when someone steps on their toes once in awhile. OB acts like it invented the term despite the fact that it's been around for thousands of years.
The trademark is obviously restricted to banking and finance. It's not like they'd get the same judgment against "Orion Tiddlywink Company'. They don't have to invent the name; that is a rather modern contrivance in which companies change their name to make up a vaguely positive sounding fake name, like a cancer merchant changing their name to Altria or a baby Bell changing its name to Verizon. Historically, companies have used existing names or words to denote their company, and trademark law has specific protections for that. The whole point is to provide protection to companies who use a specific name in a certain tradespace without letting them "own" the name.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many stories of Republican political crimes I could drag up, if I were to reach back a half century, before practically everyone on Slashdot, or their parents even, were even born.
Um, Clinton? There you go. You don't have to go back a half century. Hell, I thought it was vogue to dig up the Clintons' dirty laundry now that it supports the golden boy, even though it's the same damned laundry the Dems spent 10 years discounting when they were in office.
Hey, Lincoln was a Republican, and he was honest. I guess if that's all you've got, that's all you can run on.
Just like you guys have Kennedy, and he was honest. OK, well actually he wasn't.
vista has made MS a bunch of money
Has it? Has Vista made MS money that XP wouldn't have made them? You have to eliminate cannibalistic sales here. If someone's new computer came with Vista, that doesn't count since it would have had XP before.
The hardware companies are benefiting more from Vista than anything. You can hardly find a new machine with XP, which means if you want a new computer it better come with 2GB minimum.
He's right. If you pick a single site to interact with, the total number of sites that share that domain doesn't matter. His analogy is spot on.
In effect, he defined Bayes' rule for you.
Until now I thought that ouside the real of mathematics (where things can be proven and no further revision is possible, save for attacking the logic of the proof), there is no such thing as "an experiment that removes all doubt"?
Within the defined parameters. If you're sufficiently clever, you can fire a beam of antimatter and observe it. That is a purely empirical matter, unless you want to get into metaphysical crap like what it means to observe, etc. One can argue the causality, come up with alternate hypotheses, but if the beam goes up (or down), that's what it does.
So when is Slashdot going to change the Bill Gates/Borg image?
And replace it with what, a winged chair?
That works. I'd totally make that logo myself but the GIMP's sleeping, and I don't want to have to wake him up.
In general, people's risk assessments are completely out to lunch. Back in 2001, my school had its student trip to Greece canceled by parental concern. Apparently, the parents wanted their kids "safe at home"(never mind that we all lived in a certain large city on the American east coast), rather than facing the foreign dangers of a fairly quiet and moderately obscure neutral country.
As a parent, I can tell you that your parents weren't worried about you, they were worried about Greece. ;)
It's not that they were afraid of what someone would do to you in a safe-ish foreign country, but what you would be able to do in that country with your parents about 4000 miles away. When you're living at home, they can make sure that you're at least sober at some point during the day.
This mindset generally blows up on them when you go to college, though.
It sounds like BS (and probably is), but it sounds like they have some sort of 3D-meshy material with a very large number of small pores, in order to get a very high surface area to volume ratio. So that makes sense. Palladium makes sense because it absorbs hydrogen very well, and as a result has been used for cold fusion research since the original fraud...er...results.
Dunno about the zirconium.
Well, that was certainly the most interesting etymological post I've seen on slashdot lately! Certainly more interesting than an article on physics posted in an Italian business magazine, which seems to have been the original topic.
But at school? Apart from one teacher science was always a dull subject, it was numbers in a way that made Maths seem exciting and it just never covered where all this science was leading to. Its no wonder that there are a shortage of scientists and engineers out there when the school system turns the most exciting subjects into the dullest ones.
Well, the problem is that doing science requires understanding the basics. There are many different levels of stuff you have to understand before you can understand how they do the really cool things. That said, a good teacher can devise interesting problems that take the requisite skills to solve. This takes an inordinate amount of effort and creativity on the part of the teacher, and there lies the problem.
I'm a scientist, and I really enjoyed my time as a TA in grad school. I tried hard to come up with good ways of explaining very difficult material that the freshmen could pick up. I tried to keep the class interesting, or at least did my best.
So sure some of these presentations are beyond the level of kids at school, but isn't it sometimes worth blowing their minds to make them realise why they are doing what they are doing? Science is a stunning thing, can we please stop making it dull.
Absolutely, sometimes you do have to do the "holy SHIT!" demo. The prof that taught the freshman class I TA'd would always take the kids out and do the "toss the alkali metals in the lake and watch them go BOOM!" demonstration. Kids love watching stuff blow up. You want to tailor it to things they actually can understand, though. Better yet is to come up with a really fun project where they can take what they're learning to build something cool.
I kind of miss teaching. My mother was a teacher, and made history a fantastically fun, participatory subject. She took the kids out to do local archaeology. She had them act out fun stuff from history books to make it more than people and dates. One time a group of her students staged a "coup" - and of course she gently showed them what happens when you stage a coup against a strong dictator. ;) As a result, every time I'm in town visiting and we're out in town, invariably a former student of hers from decades past will come up and give her a huge hug. Good teachers mean a lot to kids. I never had a teacher that good (we agreed it was best for me not to take her classes), but then I guess I had a great mom instead.
I would love to be able to bring that kind of excitement to science classes. I wish it was in any way financially viable, but I couldn't pay our mortgage.
Let's say you have cancer, and I kick you in the nuts (assuming you have any). Now, should your doctor stop telling you about chemo because you got kicked in the nuts?
Except you got the priorities backward. It's like you have a hangnail and somebody kicks me in the balls, and you keep complaining about your hangnail. Wouldya shut up for a minute? We'll talk about your hangnail again when I stop writhing on the ground.
Same thing here. I'm not in favor of China's government, but let's stop berating China for their censorship record while we try to save what could be millions of people who need help.
I don't think anyone needs to protect the poor old telecoms from the oppression of providing universal broadband coverage. The telecoms are doing just fine and benefit much more from government assistance then they spend in compliance with their few remaining service obligations.
Screw that. First, this isn't a socialist state, you don't have a God given right to luxuries like a fast data connection. Second, the telecoms don't just say, "wow, it sucked that we spent all that money with no way to recover it". They pass the costs on to other consumers who don't live in the middle of nowhere.
So as a fellow telecom customer, they can either move out of the sticks or put that terribly unsightly sattelite dish up and deal with it.
They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive. I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client; I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps.
(translated) My rich parents can't get broadband in their summer home in Cape Cod because they're too pretentious to use a dish and the mean old phone company doesn't want to spend millions to run DSL out to bumblefuck. Mr. Senator, can you make the taxpayer foot the bill so my parents can have *broadband* in their *summer home*???
Gimme a break. Talk about spoiled. You know, there are people who still use dial-up. Does it suck? A little. But talking about political action so rich people can get broadband in the middle of nowhere where they chose their vacation home? Get out of here.
Pastafarians are evil?
Dude, you're about to get your soul sucked out by somebody's noodly appendage.
Now assuming that access to Google increases information, here's where your, and Google, and all the other Western Totalitarian Regime Apologists', argument breaks down: GOOGLE IS FUCKING CENSORED! There's no increase in access to information, because the information that China blocks the information.
Here's where your argument breaks down: NOT ALL THE SEARCHES ARE CENSORED. In fact, the vast majority aren't, because people search for all kinds of things that don't piss off the Commies. Like learning about math, physics, how to rebuild an engine, or whatever.
Also, I very much don't like totalitarian regimes, including China. But I'm not arrogant enough to put politics above learning.
In fact, I'll completely turn that argument. In the end, education will win over politics. I make the case that having access to the maximum amount of information (which is accomplished by Google just barely satisfying the Commie csnsors) will 1) make obvious what is being censored, so it is constantly brought to the citizens' attention, and 2) give them access to a lot of powerful knowledge that isn't censored but will ultimately erode the power of the totalitarian state.
Basically, if you live in China, do you want 99.999% of Google or no Google? I'm betting the average Chinese citizen doesn't care about the political sensitivities of Westerners.
No. They just value the dollar more.
You have absolutely no insight into the meeting, nor the motivation of the voters, so you have absolutely no basis for that statement beyond ignorance.
Or looked at less cynically, they may be realistic enough to see that Google pulling out of China won't change China's policy, but will give the Chinese people even less access to information. In other words, they figured out that maintaining the moral high ground at the expense of the Chinese citizens didn't do anyone any good.
They may fully value human rights, but disagree on the best way to get there.
As someone who researches both those things, I call BS. Any undergrad who's taken introductory graph theory or machine learning can write an algorithm for finding communities in networks, or anomaly detection. That does not mean (a) the algorithm is based on robust statistics and not ad-hoc tomfoolery and (b) the algorithm hits your real-world design criteria (minimize false positives, etc).
I do these things for a living, so I'm talking from something of a position of experience. Point is, anybody who knows what they're doing can write good algorithms, but nobody can herd the cats (databases) together.
Neural networks and the like were thought to be the end-all of classification, until SVMs came along -- any idiot can hack up a neural net, but the SVM is based on some SOLID mathematics.
Now I know you're full of shit, because they're both just multidimensional modeling techniques that are only as strong as the training data you give them. I've seen shitty papers that blindly use SVM techniques just as I've seen idiots feed crap into a neural network, train on the test data, and think they've done a fantastic job.
This guy also doesn't seem to have much knowledge of intel gathering. The idea that forward projection isn't happening is...uh...wrong, and that's all I'll say on the matter (disclaimer: I'm ex-NSA)
If you're ex-NSA, then you also know that the difficulty isn't in writing the algorithms, it's in getting somebody to stitch together all the goddamn databases that are strung out all over creation.
Shit, *I* can write the social networking algorithms, anomaly detection, etc. But it doesn't do any good if you don't have the data integrated, and despite what's happened the last 8 years we still don't have it.
I also don't get the false dichotomy the author uses to rag on sensor-based detection.
If I understand this correctly, they may no longer violate the rule because they've been... barred from violating the rule.
That's correct. They're now on double secret probation.
What I'm saying is that I don't see anything wrong with the message that you're just not willing to pay for music recordings any more, regardless of what the law says. This is a perfectly valid (if not reasonable - a separate topic) stance to take.
That's fair enough, I suppose. I agree the reasonableness (is that a word?) is a separate topic. But if one wants attention, I do think that message will get lost. And civil disobediance in a vacuum doesn't do much.
My point isn't so much that I want free music as that we all benefit more as a species if all types of media are free.
Don't know if I agree in the entirety, because I think that creators deserve to be compensated. But I respect your opinion. I certainly think that eliminating greedy-assed middlemen who serve no purpose would be fantastic.
Doesn't work towards what goal? If you mean it doesn't work to change the minds of the RIAA dicks, then sure, you're right. If you mean it doesn't work to show just how ridiculous the RIAA's position is, then I think you're at least 100% wrong.
What position is that? That you shouldn't be able to download whatever you want? You need to tailor your civil disobediance to your point such that the message is compelling. Downloading pop music sends the message that you're greedy and just don't want to pay for music. There's no real message there.
On the other hand, if they started seeing a spike in 50 year old music (or however old would be in the PD now had it not been for the Bono act), the message would be very clear. It would indicate that people are exercising rights they would have had under the prior law.
The simple truth is that copyright is not necessary for the stated goal of producing art. In fact, copyright slows the distribution of art and crap alike. Copyright is a right extended by the government. It is an ostensibly limited monopoly on distribution. It is not a natural law and there is nothing inherently "right" about copyright, patent, trademark, or any other form of IP law. In fact, in terms of benefit to the human race, it's at best a wash.
That's entirely debatable, which is fine, but again you want to tailor your message so it isn't lost. Unless, again, your point is you just want free music. I personally disagree with a lot of that, but to each his own. But if that's your message, how do you best send it?
I respect your right to disrespect others' choices when they are shopping for civil disobedience, but I disagree with your assertion that it doesn't accomplish anything.
What "it" are we talking about here? I definitely believe that carefully organized disobediance can accomplish a lot. I say, just plan it so that the message is clear. The point of civil disobediance is to send a message that outsiders "get".
I think it would be cool as hell if there was an enormous, concerted spike in torrents of specific songs the day they should have hit the PD. Or torrent the hell out of Rick Astley. The thing is, it has to stand out from the noise or no one would notice.
People have always been able to "get music for free" without piracy. Radio and MTV have always made this pretty easy. If you don't want to pay for 7/8 ths of the album from the one hit wonder band that you don't want you just stuck to listening to the radio.
Oh come the f*ck on. You can't play your music when you want it by turning on the radio. That's preposterous.
If you were really interested you might have gotten the 45. I still have a couple of 45's from hair bands of the 80's.
Singles were a dying breed by the time cassettes became popular. Even then, the single cost proportionally a lot more than $.99. And that's without indexing for inflation.
There is only so many willing buyers. Preventing the willing buyers from engaging in some form of "mooching" won't magically make them willing to cough up money.
So...what...you're saying 100% of piracy is by people who wouldn't buy music? Because demographic analysis strongly disagrees with you. A large fraction of piracy is by college kids, who historically spent a *lot* of money on music.
Take an ipod, put it on random and insert some commercials and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference... which is kind of the point of an ipod to begin with.
You mean except for the commercials part? And the part about how all the music on the iPod is actually music I like? So basically they're totally different?
I'm no lawyer, but even I recognize that what they're talking about is simply a matter of contract law. You have your EULA, enforce it. It's not a matter of copyright law, no matter how convenient that would make things for them thanks to the insane penalties that accompany it.
I didn't say people downloaded because it was crap. I said fewer people are buying entire CD's when 90% of said CD is crap and maybe has one or two good songs.
When was this not true? I recall the 80s fondly, but man that decade spawned some seriously shitty music. Really bad soft rock, appalling synthesized junk, hair metal. Yech. But people bought it because they liked it well enough. Need to come up with a better reason than quality for why people aren't buying.
From what I can tell, there's a couple reasons: 1) people can buy tracks now. That's a fully legal reason why the record companies lose money. 2) There hasn't been a change in the dominant format now for what, 15 years? It's been a while since people bought their music twice. That made the record companies a lot of money. And 3)...piracy. It's really hard to argue that there's not a significant number of people who aren't buying music that they otherwise would have bought because it's now free. Sure, it's easy to rationalize - costs too much, crappy, whatever. But the end result is, if it's that bad then don't listen to it.
Of course that is subjective. Also, I have never downloaded music 'illegally' so I'm not one for making any apologies for that behavior. I want to see Fair Use and Copyright law changed, but in the meantime I respect the current legal framework. I've been *very* vocal with my local Congresscritter on this subject among others.
That, in my eyes, gives you a great amount of credibility. I think too many people use banners like copyright, and so on to justify illegal behavior. Calling the Congressrats is a great way to do it.
I do think there is room for civil disobediance here - go download music that *would* have passed into public domain before the Bono act was passed. But downloading new music while claiming evils of copyright - which many people are doing - doesn't work.
OB and ORF shouldn't be surprised when someone steps on their toes once in awhile. OB acts like it invented the term despite the fact that it's been around for thousands of years.
The trademark is obviously restricted to banking and finance. It's not like they'd get the same judgment against "Orion Tiddlywink Company'. They don't have to invent the name; that is a rather modern contrivance in which companies change their name to make up a vaguely positive sounding fake name, like a cancer merchant changing their name to Altria or a baby Bell changing its name to Verizon. Historically, companies have used existing names or words to denote their company, and trademark law has specific protections for that. The whole point is to provide protection to companies who use a specific name in a certain tradespace without letting them "own" the name.
Does a postfixed "K" represent something different within the scientific community that I simply didn't know about?
Google is your friend.