Yeah, actually the whole libertarian on/. thing is probably just a myth too. But hey, as a whole Americans are amazingly ignorant bastards...a lot of them could be dumb-as-fuck libertarians that fail to realize the many ways they are standing on the shoulders of western culture instead of being the individual mavericks they imagine themselves to be in their fantasies. When "Atlas Shrugged" and John Galt quit working the world just moved along without those self-righteous know-nothings. No man is an island and no individual man matters that damn much - sorry to burst your bubble. And I, for one, am not willing to hang myself on the noose libertarianism when a hybrid socio-political-economic model will serve us much better, just as it serves every other western nation. It's amazing how this rugged individualism has basically just put us in the U.S. on the hook to China and Japan. That's some wonderful freedom we have there...owned by the worker nations. Labor is the only real value, and if your aren't performing it in your country you had better get ready for an abrupt end to your ride on the gravy train.
[N.B. Too bad I can't have paragaphs on Slashdot via Opera. What gives...?]
Preposterous!
on
Reading Comics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"...of titles such as The Dark Knight Returns, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, and Watchmen."
Those works are good entertainment, but not the "golden age" of the medium. Saying so just ignores the true giants of the field, people like: Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Schuiten, Bilal, Moebius, Steranko, Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers, etc.
Jack Kirby looms over the whole industry like a colossus. His importance only grows the longer you look at his whole body of work, but esp. the work between 1960-1980.
Scripting word balloons is truly work for hire and not a true act of creation - and that's all I can say about Stan Lee.
If you really want to see what comics can achieve at their best, check out these: * "Detectives Inc." by McGregor and Rogers, the B&W original. * "Jenifer" by Jones and Wrightson, a short story from Vampirella * "The Beguiling" by Barry Smith * "Master Race" by Berni Kreigstein * "Collector's Edition" by Goodwin and Ditko * "At the Stroke of Midnight" by Steranko
The writing is tight and the art is amazing. Text is woven into the art and made a part of it.
This whole argument is only possible because people forget how things really work in the natural world.
In the natural world, you don't even get to keep your own skin - it's taken from you when you die and returns to the earth. In truth, you own absolutely nothing. It's not even possible for you to own anything, not really.
Ownership, and more specifically the notion of individual property ownership of any kind (be it real property or even "intellectual property"), is merely a useful myth created in law so that people have certain kinds of incentives to create and work. To another way of thinking the idea of ownership is a cultural construct - an idea to which certain human societies do not adhere.
So the question is not whether "intellectual property" rights should be the legal equivalent of real property rights - the question is why do have real property rights in the first place.
These foundational questions that form our society and its laws will become increasingly relevant as the world becomes more overpopulated, work more automated, and money less evenly distributed. When people get hungry and the elite want to argue about property rights, they will find that a stone to the head trumps a finely crafted legal argument.
Re:How about some more *durable* flash drives?
on
16GB Flash USB Dongle
·
· Score: 1
My experience is the exact opposite. I have had my Cruzer Titanium for over a year and it works like a charm. I keep it on my keychain so it's being minorly banged around all the time (esp against the dashboard of my car while driving) and making metal to metal contact with all my keys all the time. I've dropped it several times from standing height, a few times on rocky pavement and gravel, and it still looks identical to the way it looked the day I first unpacked it.
It works perfectly and without so much as a scratch.
I don't know what to say about all the negative reviews the product gets. Let's face it, it could be a campaign to discredit a perfectly good product as engineered by a competitor.
Opera is the best of everything. It renders almost everything IE will render, yet is more standards compliant, smaller, and faster than all of its competition. Since it's free (as in beer), I don't care that its not open source.
Firefox has a loooooong way to go yet. It's great to have it on board as it could one day be the browser of choice. But that day has not yet arrived.
You are noting what I think is a "hits" versus "good band" situation. I wouldn't even waste my time listening to much music from one hit wonder type acts - like you, I go for the whole album, or maybe even the whole catalogue of a given band. The best bands are the ones producing the good albums. I find it odd that you don't link the bands to the albums they are creating.
Today I find myself thinking about Joy Division. They did not really produce hits that were significantly better than the rest of their cataloque - all of it is quite brilliant and I personally find it hard to listen to any of it without wanting to hear all of it. I feel this way about a lot of music.
Begging the question does not mean what you think (despite the common misuse). Use "raises the question" in this context.
What annoys a reader about the misuse of this phrase is that it's just as easy to use the more correct "raises the question" - but it's not used because the writer wishes to appear more learned by using a catchy phrase from the study of rhetoric; he instead makes an error in usage and thereby appears even more foolish. Brilliant!
No man is an island. When the people around you get dragged down far enough, you will start to think all kinds of weird things matter to you. Or should have mattered to you before things got so bad.
Westerners do not yet fully understand what it is like to live in a society where someone is willing to cut off your hand in the subway just because they must take your watch or bracelet to feed their family. But the understanding is coming...
The U.S. is determined to make itself obsolete - and sooner rather than later! That's why the looting is so fast and furious these days. Eventually we'll end up just one more population of rioting people demanding economic parity like other third world labor countries are doing right now. Just watch how the U.S. becomes irrelevant during the next century thanks to our inability to innovate thanks to laws that favor the few against the many.
It's all about the price of labor, and driving that price down, down, down...
A lot of technology gets talked about on Slashdot is ultimately pinned to what some shmoe worker at Kwik-E-Mart can afford, and if s/he cannot afford it don't expect that technology to become ubiquitous.
Agreed. People are generally missing the point here, hence all the discussion.
Just to entertain the masses, it must be remembered that the enumeration of the Bill of Rights was not intended to limit or disparage other rights held by the people - and the last two amendments state that explicitly. So all this talk about "papers please" being okay is all crap - it's really not supposed to be like that.
I am going to reply to the Napster question above and to you also.
As Windows is the dominant computer OS on the planet I think it's functions and design are important to understand in light of what most people do and think they should be doing. Why does one use the "Shared Documents" directory? Well, for starters it appears in the "Windows Explorer" interface - it is a shortcut to "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents" and the contents of that directory are more subdirectories as follows: "My Music," "My Videos," and "Shared Pictures." [N.B. this can vary slightly based on what's on the system]. So that's exactly where you put stuff you intend to share on a home network. So how do you share to yourself via a home network and also keep out the hackers and P2P devices if you simply are not someone who knows how to do anything differently than what appears to be strongly suggested by the OS itself? The way these cases run suggests that you now have to become something of a computer expert to make sure you aren't sharing things accidentally - and yet, the OS is specifically designed to suggest that you share that kind of media in that shared location.
And that's where "intent" and the Napster case falls apart as well - the scenario is one in which the average person is doing what is suggested by the OS and going along with what little they understand about home networking. The average person may not well understand the difference between sharing to themselves versus sharing with the whole world. That's exactly why war-driving is possible, all those unsecured wireless connections allowing access to printers, shared directories, etc. There's no intent to do anything but use a series of sophisticated technologies that most people do not know how to secure properly.
But if you think that people do not want to rip MP3s, use their iPods, Zen Nanos, cd-burners, etc via a shared home network connection then you are mistaken. They do very much want to do those things and hence the problem.
>Essentially, what the RIAA is trying to do is eliminate the line between making something available for distribution, and actually distributing it. That is, right now there's a distinction between offering something that's not yours, and actually going through with it and transferring the property-that's-not-yours to somebody else. At least as I understand it, currently no crime is committed until the transfer actually occurs. I could have ten million MP3s on an FTP site, and as long as all anyone does is browse the directories, no harm done. When somebody downloads one, I'm in trouble.
You were thinking pretty clearly right up until the last line there...
I still can't see how you are guilty of anything. Here is my thought experiment: I leave my front door open, someone walks in and steals my MP3 music server - so thousands of copies of songs just went out my door. Am I guilty of any wrong doing? Of course not, the thief is. If there is any positive act that the RIAA should be targeting it would be the specific act of downloading a song. And yes, they would have to prove it was you doing it, at a specific time and place, using certain tools, they would further have to be able to prove the file was genuine (in other words, they couldn't allege what the file was - they'd have to prove precisely what the file was), that they represent the specific copyright holders of that material, etc.
The act of putting something in a shared folder is sort of like putting a pie on a window sill to cool down - there is a potential for theft, but the positive act of theft is committed by the thief and not the victim. Let's just for a moment assume that millions of non-geeks are actually putting files in the default MS Windows "Shared Documents" directory - that's now a positive act of copyright infringement? I think not...
Let's look at it from the other direction: if the supposition were true that the mere act of allowing something to be available in a shared directory were the positive act of copyright infringement itself then by extension everyone would become responsible for the content over which they exert guardianship. Wouldn't you then be burdened with having to make sure that any possibly copyright infringing files were adequately secured against duplication? If not, the RIAA could then sue you for not practicing Due Diligence over the copyrighted materials in your possession. That's basically what they are trying to argue now: that ownership of certain kinds of files is now the equivalent of being some kind of security expert - so if you aren't familiar with the practices of securing your system against intrusions and the routine protocols of P2P software that someone might install on your systems, you are infringing upon their copyrights.
The burden really does have to be that the RIAA must prove upon the preponderance of evidence that you were actually distributing their materials by some kind of positive act.
What they are getting away with is suing people for making copyrighted materials potentially available to others - which is not the same thing at all. By such loose logic the advent of having your computer hacked would become a potential copyright violation - doesn't having your system hacked making all of the files on it potentially vulnerable?
Am I my brother's keeper? No, I am not. If the RIAA is worried about file distribution that's their lookout and not mine. I am not their agent working on their behalf to secure files from possible duplication - I just don't care.
Stop spouting nonsense. This is all you have to understand:
Any intellectual property right is a legal creation. It's not like actually having possession of an apple in your pocket - if you eat the apple it's gone forever in every way that makes owning the apple worthwhile, but it's also in the nature of the apple that it has a point of edible ripeness before it turns to rot. Ideas have a kind of ripeness also - and that's why they get protection by way of copyrights and patent. But just as an apple rots, the moment of ripeness for an idea gives way to a decline in its value. It is at that point that we have decided we would allow ideas previously protected by copyrights and patents to lapse into the public domain where they may be used by one and all.
It is right, just, and fair that previously protected ideas lapse into the public domain - that's quid pro quo, a little protection of a private and exclusive right from society up front becomes a good and a benefit to society as a whole later on.
When you give the private sector in terms of extended rights to intellectual property, you take from the commons. Where is the quid pro quo? You can't extend rights for Disney corp without stealing from society as a whole to do it. We already held up our end of the bargain by protecting Disney's right for quite some time, this 11th hour extended rights bullshit is immoral.
All thing change. All things die. Copyrights and patents should expire.
It's as simple as that. Stop bending over backwards trying to justify Disney's 11th hour theft from the commons.
Yup, and even smarter consumers wait for the players to be in the sub $150 USD range and the non-DRM burners to be in the sub $300 range too.
I have seen HD and said "Feh..." The DVD format has a looooong way to go.
What some people don't understand, and most manufacturers wish were not true, is what could be called "technology fatigue." When DVD became hot people ran out and replaced their VHS libraries with DVD ones - the technology was that impressive. But for now and for a long time to come, they are satisfied. This is the old Betamax v VHS thing - the lesser technology won because it was good enough. Okay fine, DVD is not HD and some technology will eventually come along that is - so what?! Unless the guy that works at the Quickee Mart graveyard shift wants and can afford the technology and lots of it, your new gewgaw will fail in the marketplace.
And seriously, how much definition is really necessary? Does everyone want to see what porn star's cocks and cunts really look like that up close? I think the herpes blisters and genital wart growths might be off-putting...
Re:At least it has one key feature......
on
The USB Wristband
·
· Score: 1
Yup. Those are great key ring fobs to be sure. 1-2 GB is actually enough to have all kinds of goodies on there: working OS, portable software, the installs of all of your favorite security software, personal files, and even many mp3s. Most newer PCs will even boot to your thumb drive in case you want to do work via someone else's system instead of lugging around a laptop. To me this means the laptop is dead. I very much prefer robust desktop systems with power out the wazoo and bigger monitors. A 1-2 GB thumb drive actually puts that in reach in a device the size of your finger. I've had mine for months and I have yet to even detect a scratch on it - those hard shells are very tough!
I think the last time I bought into the audiophile craze was for stuff like "Dark Side of the Moon" or "Twin Sons of Different Mothers" as published by the likes of Mobile Fidelity, CBS and Nautilus (half speed mastered), and Japanese high quality virgin vinyl stuff. But in the end it's hard to imagine the difference in quality was actually worth it. The sound quality bottleneck always remains the fact that your stereo system and room acoustics must also be fantastic or you can forget about it - and I don't happen to live at Carnegie Hall and a lot of the stereo component stuff (aka hi-fi mumbo jumbo) I simply never believed.
So here I am today, I own thousands of vinyl LPs and I own at least another 1000 CDs. All of my CDs have been ripped to a 160 GB hard drive and my music server is still growing by leap and bounds as I add in old vinyl favorites. For vinyl I record from a slightly clunky line-in situation ripping to wav, splitting the tracks, running a pre-tested set of filters that reduce noise, hiss, and pops and clicks, and then finally I use EAC and LAME to make VBR MP3s. Before laughing at my set-up consider that I really do have some vinyl albums and 12" tracks that never saw republication as a CD. For CDs I rip with a Plextor drive, EAC, and LAME to VBR MP3s.
For album songs that segue I additionally rip them as a single track and name them appropriately - so you get a choice, play the album as it actually sounds without interruptions or mix your own playlists with possible segue created gaps. That's pretty much the one drawback to the technology. So far that's 28,669 VBR MP3 files.
I can network the server around the house to locations that I call "dumb but quiet network boxes" with decent sound cards and 7.1 computer speaker systems. The sound is quite sweet. Winamp, Foobar 2000 and Milkdrop rule the day. And there's a use for your old computer and monitor collection if you tweak them up with sound dampening computer cases. Some 5 GB hard drive systems I have down to one Antec power supply fan which can barely be heard, the second exhaust fan kicks on as necessary. You don't need many fans for boxes that do nothing but operate as interfaces for a music server.
And speaking of that music server...
It only makes sense to backup that kind of effort offsite, right? So I gave my brother a backup on a hard drive for the enjoyment of his family. I would have no objection to giving a backup to anyone I know, quite frankly. And I can't be alone in this. I am not handing out free 200-300 GB hard drives, but if someone gives me an empty drive I am cool about it.
Copyright realistically is dead. Even if respected, copyrights have no market justification to last longer than about 4 years, if that.
It's seriously game over for the back catalogue - now and forever. Every future DRM will be cracked. Why? Because people want access to their "licensed" digital stuff. If they think I won't make my own backups and then possibly even share those with friends and family (as I have done for decades now by every other known method going back to reel to reel days) then they are mistaken. If my original copy of my CDs are lost or stolen or even sold, I have no intention of erasing backup copies from my MP3 server.
The music industry has had its day. Now it is near sunset.
Songs are and have always been just commercials for live performers - and they should always have had a nominal price and no protection schemes. That's what the market demands.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, actually the whole libertarian on /. thing is probably just a myth too. But hey, as a whole Americans are amazingly ignorant bastards...a lot of them could be dumb-as-fuck libertarians that fail to realize the many ways they are standing on the shoulders of western culture instead of being the individual mavericks they imagine themselves to be in their fantasies. When "Atlas Shrugged" and John Galt quit working the world just moved along without those self-righteous know-nothings. No man is an island and no individual man matters that damn much - sorry to burst your bubble. And I, for one, am not willing to hang myself on the noose libertarianism when a hybrid socio-political-economic model will serve us much better, just as it serves every other western nation. It's amazing how this rugged individualism has basically just put us in the U.S. on the hook to China and Japan. That's some wonderful freedom we have there...owned by the worker nations. Labor is the only real value, and if your aren't performing it in your country you had better get ready for an abrupt end to your ride on the gravy train.
[N.B. Too bad I can't have paragaphs on Slashdot via Opera. What gives...?]
"...of titles such as The Dark Knight Returns, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, and Watchmen."
Those works are good entertainment, but not the "golden age" of the medium. Saying so just ignores the true giants of the field, people like: Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Schuiten, Bilal, Moebius, Steranko, Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers, etc.
Jack Kirby looms over the whole industry like a colossus. His importance only grows the longer you look at his whole body of work, but esp. the work between 1960-1980.
Scripting word balloons is truly work for hire and not a true act of creation - and that's all I can say about Stan Lee.
If you really want to see what comics can achieve at their best, check out these:
* "Detectives Inc." by McGregor and Rogers, the B&W original.
* "Jenifer" by Jones and Wrightson, a short story from Vampirella
* "The Beguiling" by Barry Smith
* "Master Race" by Berni Kreigstein
* "Collector's Edition" by Goodwin and Ditko
* "At the Stroke of Midnight" by Steranko
The writing is tight and the art is amazing. Text is woven into the art and made a part of it.
That's how to do it.
This whole argument is only possible because people forget how things really work in the natural world.
In the natural world, you don't even get to keep your own skin - it's taken from you when you die and returns to the earth. In truth, you own absolutely nothing. It's not even possible for you to own anything, not really.
Ownership, and more specifically the notion of individual property ownership of any kind (be it real property or even "intellectual property"), is merely a useful myth created in law so that people have certain kinds of incentives to create and work. To another way of thinking the idea of ownership is a cultural construct - an idea to which certain human societies do not adhere.
So the question is not whether "intellectual property" rights should be the legal equivalent of real property rights - the question is why do have real property rights in the first place.
These foundational questions that form our society and its laws will become increasingly relevant as the world becomes more overpopulated, work more automated, and money less evenly distributed. When people get hungry and the elite want to argue about property rights, they will find that a stone to the head trumps a finely crafted legal argument.
My experience is the exact opposite. I have had my Cruzer Titanium for over a year and it works like a charm. I keep it on my keychain so it's being minorly banged around all the time (esp against the dashboard of my car while driving) and making metal to metal contact with all my keys all the time. I've dropped it several times from standing height, a few times on rocky pavement and gravel, and it still looks identical to the way it looked the day I first unpacked it.
It works perfectly and without so much as a scratch.
I don't know what to say about all the negative reviews the product gets. Let's face it, it could be a campaign to discredit a perfectly good product as engineered by a competitor.
Dude! That's a twofer...!
Opera is the best of everything. It renders almost everything IE will render, yet is more standards compliant, smaller, and faster than all of its competition. Since it's free (as in beer), I don't care that its not open source.
Firefox has a loooooong way to go yet. It's great to have it on board as it could one day be the browser of choice. But that day has not yet arrived.
...as pictured on the screen of the laptop at Alienware's site?
TIA.
You are noting what I think is a "hits" versus "good band" situation. I wouldn't even waste my time listening to much music from one hit wonder type acts - like you, I go for the whole album, or maybe even the whole catalogue of a given band. The best bands are the ones producing the good albums. I find it odd that you don't link the bands to the albums they are creating.
Today I find myself thinking about Joy Division. They did not really produce hits that were significantly better than the rest of their cataloque - all of it is quite brilliant and I personally find it hard to listen to any of it without wanting to hear all of it. I feel this way about a lot of music.
Begging the question does not mean what you think (despite the common misuse). Use "raises the question" in this context.
What annoys a reader about the misuse of this phrase is that it's just as easy to use the more correct "raises the question" - but it's not used because the writer wishes to appear more learned by using a catchy phrase from the study of rhetoric; he instead makes an error in usage and thereby appears even more foolish. Brilliant!
First rule: say what you mean.
Second rule: say it simply.
No man is an island. When the people around you get dragged down far enough, you will start to think all kinds of weird things matter to you. Or should have mattered to you before things got so bad.
Westerners do not yet fully understand what it is like to live in a society where someone is willing to cut off your hand in the subway just because they must take your watch or bracelet to feed their family. But the understanding is coming...
Wait.
Do you people even read the news? Trust me, you can put a CEOs in jail - they have no immunity whatever for having committed crimes.
Yup. It should be cheap as hell and everywhere.
The U.S. is determined to make itself obsolete - and sooner rather than later! That's why the looting is so fast and furious these days. Eventually we'll end up just one more population of rioting people demanding economic parity like other third world labor countries are doing right now. Just watch how the U.S. becomes irrelevant during the next century thanks to our inability to innovate thanks to laws that favor the few against the many.
It's all about the price of labor, and driving that price down, down, down...
A lot of technology gets talked about on Slashdot is ultimately pinned to what some shmoe worker at Kwik-E-Mart can afford, and if s/he cannot afford it don't expect that technology to become ubiquitous.
I guess breaking international law can be forgiven with such good end results.
Actually, not so much...
Agreed. People are generally missing the point here, hence all the discussion.
Just to entertain the masses, it must be remembered that the enumeration of the Bill of Rights was not intended to limit or disparage other rights held by the people - and the last two amendments state that explicitly. So all this talk about "papers please" being okay is all crap - it's really not supposed to be like that.
I am going to reply to the Napster question above and to you also.
As Windows is the dominant computer OS on the planet I think it's functions and design are important to understand in light of what most people do and think they should be doing. Why does one use the "Shared Documents" directory? Well, for starters it appears in the "Windows Explorer" interface - it is a shortcut to "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents" and the contents of that directory are more subdirectories as follows: "My Music," "My Videos," and "Shared Pictures." [N.B. this can vary slightly based on what's on the system]. So that's exactly where you put stuff you intend to share on a home network. So how do you share to yourself via a home network and also keep out the hackers and P2P devices if you simply are not someone who knows how to do anything differently than what appears to be strongly suggested by the OS itself? The way these cases run suggests that you now have to become something of a computer expert to make sure you aren't sharing things accidentally - and yet, the OS is specifically designed to suggest that you share that kind of media in that shared location.
And that's where "intent" and the Napster case falls apart as well - the scenario is one in which the average person is doing what is suggested by the OS and going along with what little they understand about home networking. The average person may not well understand the difference between sharing to themselves versus sharing with the whole world. That's exactly why war-driving is possible, all those unsecured wireless connections allowing access to printers, shared directories, etc. There's no intent to do anything but use a series of sophisticated technologies that most people do not know how to secure properly.
But if you think that people do not want to rip MP3s, use their iPods, Zen Nanos, cd-burners, etc via a shared home network connection then you are mistaken. They do very much want to do those things and hence the problem.
>Essentially, what the RIAA is trying to do is eliminate the line between making something available for distribution, and actually distributing it. That is, right now there's a distinction between offering something that's not yours, and actually going through with it and transferring the property-that's-not-yours to somebody else. At least as I understand it, currently no crime is committed until the transfer actually occurs. I could have ten million MP3s on an FTP site, and as long as all anyone does is browse the directories, no harm done. When somebody downloads one, I'm in trouble.
You were thinking pretty clearly right up until the last line there...
I still can't see how you are guilty of anything. Here is my thought experiment: I leave my front door open, someone walks in and steals my MP3 music server - so thousands of copies of songs just went out my door. Am I guilty of any wrong doing? Of course not, the thief is. If there is any positive act that the RIAA should be targeting it would be the specific act of downloading a song. And yes, they would have to prove it was you doing it, at a specific time and place, using certain tools, they would further have to be able to prove the file was genuine (in other words, they couldn't allege what the file was - they'd have to prove precisely what the file was), that they represent the specific copyright holders of that material, etc.
The act of putting something in a shared folder is sort of like putting a pie on a window sill to cool down - there is a potential for theft, but the positive act of theft is committed by the thief and not the victim. Let's just for a moment assume that millions of non-geeks are actually putting files in the default MS Windows "Shared Documents" directory - that's now a positive act of copyright infringement? I think not...
Let's look at it from the other direction: if the supposition were true that the mere act of allowing something to be available in a shared directory were the positive act of copyright infringement itself then by extension everyone would become responsible for the content over which they exert guardianship. Wouldn't you then be burdened with having to make sure that any possibly copyright infringing files were adequately secured against duplication? If not, the RIAA could then sue you for not practicing Due Diligence over the copyrighted materials in your possession. That's basically what they are trying to argue now: that ownership of certain kinds of files is now the equivalent of being some kind of security expert - so if you aren't familiar with the practices of securing your system against intrusions and the routine protocols of P2P software that someone might install on your systems, you are infringing upon their copyrights.
The burden really does have to be that the RIAA must prove upon the preponderance of evidence that you were actually distributing their materials by some kind of positive act.
What they are getting away with is suing people for making copyrighted materials potentially available to others - which is not the same thing at all. By such loose logic the advent of having your computer hacked would become a potential copyright violation - doesn't having your system hacked making all of the files on it potentially vulnerable?
Am I my brother's keeper? No, I am not. If the RIAA is worried about file distribution that's their lookout and not mine. I am not their agent working on their behalf to secure files from possible duplication - I just don't care.
Stop spouting nonsense. This is all you have to understand:
Any intellectual property right is a legal creation. It's not like actually having possession of an apple in your pocket - if you eat the apple it's gone forever in every way that makes owning the apple worthwhile, but it's also in the nature of the apple that it has a point of edible ripeness before it turns to rot. Ideas have a kind of ripeness also - and that's why they get protection by way of copyrights and patent. But just as an apple rots, the moment of ripeness for an idea gives way to a decline in its value. It is at that point that we have decided we would allow ideas previously protected by copyrights and patents to lapse into the public domain where they may be used by one and all.
It is right, just, and fair that previously protected ideas lapse into the public domain - that's quid pro quo, a little protection of a private and exclusive right from society up front becomes a good and a benefit to society as a whole later on.
When you give the private sector in terms of extended rights to intellectual property, you take from the commons. Where is the quid pro quo? You can't extend rights for Disney corp without stealing from society as a whole to do it. We already held up our end of the bargain by protecting Disney's right for quite some time, this 11th hour extended rights bullshit is immoral.
All thing change. All things die. Copyrights and patents should expire.
It's as simple as that. Stop bending over backwards trying to justify Disney's 11th hour theft from the commons.
What a joke. The main reason some of us even make a living at all is the flat out refusal of most people to read a manual.
Good luck with your book, you're going to need it...
Yup, and even smarter consumers wait for the players to be in the sub $150 USD range and the non-DRM burners to be in the sub $300 range too.
I have seen HD and said "Feh..." The DVD format has a looooong way to go.
What some people don't understand, and most manufacturers wish were not true, is what could be called "technology fatigue." When DVD became hot people ran out and replaced their VHS libraries with DVD ones - the technology was that impressive. But for now and for a long time to come, they are satisfied. This is the old Betamax v VHS thing - the lesser technology won because it was good enough. Okay fine, DVD is not HD and some technology will eventually come along that is - so what?! Unless the guy that works at the Quickee Mart graveyard shift wants and can afford the technology and lots of it, your new gewgaw will fail in the marketplace.
And seriously, how much definition is really necessary? Does everyone want to see what porn star's cocks and cunts really look like that up close? I think the herpes blisters and genital wart growths might be off-putting...
Yup. Those are great key ring fobs to be sure. 1-2 GB is actually enough to have all kinds of goodies on there: working OS, portable software, the installs of all of your favorite security software, personal files, and even many mp3s. Most newer PCs will even boot to your thumb drive in case you want to do work via someone else's system instead of lugging around a laptop. To me this means the laptop is dead. I very much prefer robust desktop systems with power out the wazoo and bigger monitors. A 1-2 GB thumb drive actually puts that in reach in a device the size of your finger. I've had mine for months and I have yet to even detect a scratch on it - those hard shells are very tough!
"Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality" by John Kessel
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
Yup and yup.
I think the last time I bought into the audiophile craze was for stuff like "Dark Side of the Moon" or "Twin Sons of Different Mothers" as published by the likes of Mobile Fidelity, CBS and Nautilus (half speed mastered), and Japanese high quality virgin vinyl stuff. But in the end it's hard to imagine the difference in quality was actually worth it. The sound quality bottleneck always remains the fact that your stereo system and room acoustics must also be fantastic or you can forget about it - and I don't happen to live at Carnegie Hall and a lot of the stereo component stuff (aka hi-fi mumbo jumbo) I simply never believed.
So here I am today, I own thousands of vinyl LPs and I own at least another 1000 CDs. All of my CDs have been ripped to a 160 GB hard drive and my music server is still growing by leap and bounds as I add in old vinyl favorites. For vinyl I record from a slightly clunky line-in situation ripping to wav, splitting the tracks, running a pre-tested set of filters that reduce noise, hiss, and pops and clicks, and then finally I use EAC and LAME to make VBR MP3s. Before laughing at my set-up consider that I really do have some vinyl albums and 12" tracks that never saw republication as a CD. For CDs I rip with a Plextor drive, EAC, and LAME to VBR MP3s.
For album songs that segue I additionally rip them as a single track and name them appropriately - so you get a choice, play the album as it actually sounds without interruptions or mix your own playlists with possible segue created gaps. That's pretty much the one drawback to the technology. So far that's 28,669 VBR MP3 files.
I can network the server around the house to locations that I call "dumb but quiet network boxes" with decent sound cards and 7.1 computer speaker systems. The sound is quite sweet. Winamp, Foobar 2000 and Milkdrop rule the day. And there's a use for your old computer and monitor collection if you tweak them up with sound dampening computer cases. Some 5 GB hard drive systems I have down to one Antec power supply fan which can barely be heard, the second exhaust fan kicks on as necessary. You don't need many fans for boxes that do nothing but operate as interfaces for a music server.
And speaking of that music server...
It only makes sense to backup that kind of effort offsite, right? So I gave my brother a backup on a hard drive for the enjoyment of his family. I would have no objection to giving a backup to anyone I know, quite frankly. And I can't be alone in this. I am not handing out free 200-300 GB hard drives, but if someone gives me an empty drive I am cool about it.
Copyright realistically is dead. Even if respected, copyrights have no market justification to last longer than about 4 years, if that.
It's seriously game over for the back catalogue - now and forever. Every future DRM will be cracked. Why? Because people want access to their "licensed" digital stuff. If they think I won't make my own backups and then possibly even share those with friends and family (as I have done for decades now by every other known method going back to reel to reel days) then they are mistaken. If my original copy of my CDs are lost or stolen or even sold, I have no intention of erasing backup copies from my MP3 server.
The music industry has had its day. Now it is near sunset.
Songs are and have always been just commercials for live performers - and they should always have had a nominal price and no protection schemes. That's what the market demands.
Where can somebody get that test image? Frankly, I just like it and think it would make a nice desktop picture. I refer to the image here:
http://lumenlab.com/brainchild/web_test1.jpg
TIA.
Isn't Hollywood betting that people will get that?
You are abslutely on the right track.
When programmers "play" they may just want to do something that has nothing to do with programming or even sitting at a desk for that matter.