For me, it's not whether either game is 'better'. Lets not squabble about which game has better game play.
I am excited cause I started gaming with qw team fortress, and I'll be damned if moments of team fortress wern't downright euphoric. Q3 Rocket Arena is fun enough for me to play daily (I know, its sad), but if this mod delivers as promised, holy mother of god thank the lord, etc. You just can't replace the games you cut your teeth on.
And to meet my/. quota of nerdiness, I imagine 20% of the reason I failed out of university was this game. (The other 80% was just how much I hated elec engineering.)
Intel makes CPUs. Yoga Inside was a yoga organization.
Your comment is the ideal; but it doesn't neccessarily work that way. Intel just wanted to make sure that "[anything] Inside" didn't become public domain slang, at which point even "Intel Inside" could not be defended as a trademark. Same with Spam.
Copyright law, patent law was ALL created to *prevent* people from owning things. (Like the secret guilds, etc where historical scientific processes were lost.)
The very reason we introduced these laws was to ensure that ideas became available to the public at some point.
Some people wish to retain what you call 'property of the universe' (and the process) forever. See any number of monopolies, both capitalist and feudal over the previous centuries. Copyright laws, patent laws, laws that deal with ideas are *always* created in the first place to ensure that the author does NOT own that idea until they die without telling anyone. They are incentives (via short term gain) for people to publish their ideas because they offer a certain amount of proection from the government. Certain. Limited. Key words. Otherwise companies would push to drop the laws altogether if you truely feel that ideas are intrinsicly ownership. We'd have one rule, that said: ideas are yours, and you have the legal basis to create whatever usage contract out of that work that you want to. But this would be bad. Public rules over private interest. Yadda yadda.
The people championing the whole intellectual property thing are simply those that have the most to gain. As a musician (whom many say does pretty cool electronica stuff: http://www.sirsonic.com), yes I love copyright, but I'll take a 20 year ownership and create 50 great songs instead of the current 90 years after the death fiasco that encourages a system that only needs a one hit wonder (helped nicely by advertising, of course.. ) to earn his or her keep. Patents, same. How do you encourage innovation if you reward the current status-quo so heavily?
Hes right on. Original copyright law didn't ALLOW the author to transfer his rights (that happened later).
Just because you recognize that we *can* tranfer the rights that copyright law grants us doens't mean its a good thing or that we should recognize that right.
This is what the original asker is saying: we take cetain things as axioms simply based on the terminology we use. Change the terminology, change what people believe are the axioms of that system.
If its such a narrowly defined legal term (it isn't) why are there no laws dealing with it?
Answer: Becausec copyright, trademark, patent law all try to deal with intellectual 'product' differently based on what the thing is (original work, marketplace differentiator, innovative idea). Intellectual property does not appear in laws because there is no such things. Copyrights are copyrights, trademarks are trademakrs, and patents are patents.
"IP" as a term was invented not so long ago as the Joe Sixpack term to attach to works covered under either of those laws. The fact that you think its a legal term is exactly what companies want; an all-encompassing rally cry to rouse the support (or opposition, of course) of people like you who dont know any better.
Hrm, yearly fee. Access to materials. Maybe the government should have gone for a patent with libraries, although then we'd just be stuck in a "See how evil the public sector is, long live the private sector" flame war. Ah, the irony.
BZZT. Patents are not for recouping R&D costs. In fact, why patent an idea at all if you want to recoup R&D costs? You'll be the only person *able* to make the thing (because you don't publish your methods and R&D results in a patent), and you get 100% protection.
But see how useless capitalism is under a patentless model? Nobody would share ideas, very few people would have access to those innovations (patent holders are generally unable to meet the global demand for a new idea)... and worse yet, those scientific discoveries don't become well documented, opening up the possibility of that innovation not getting passed down and becoming part of the over all technological repretoire of humanity.
Patents are incentives to *share* ideas. They offer a limited term protection against having your idea used by other people, but thats only because to patent something you *have* to share your discovery or innovation. This is why Netflix' patent (and business methods in general) make no sense - just because something is 'new' to you doesn't mean it isn't sufficiently obvious. If lots of people stand up and go, "Hey, I thought of that 2 years ago sitting on the toilet, and just didn't think it'd make any money," then the innovation should be deemed sufficiently obvious. Otherwise you open the door up to everyone patenting *everything* they think of, on the off chance that *somebody* makes money from that idea down the road. And surprise surprise, thanks to the last 30 years of patent madness, thats exactly whats happening (see, Pan IP.)
Patents are supposed to protect implementations, not ideas. You can't patent a lawn mower, but you can patent one of the many ways of cutting grass (say, using a laser?) if it hasn't been patented before. You shouldn't be able to patent a DVD subscription service, but you should be able to patent a new technological method in getting that DVD to that house. The only problem is - there are 0 new innnovations in Netflix' subscription service. It is simply an old idea (libraries, anyone?) applied to a different product, making use of technologies (postal mail, etc) that have existed for decades.
Patents were introduced to encourage scienitists and innovators to share work that wasn't obvious enough for somebody else to duplicate in a clean-room scenario.
Today, patents have become the 20th century equivilent to the hedge wars or the moon race... whoever puts up a hedge (or erects a flag) into the soil we've all been staring at for years becomes the automagical owner! It's practically the opposite of a meritocracy. Although I guess its no surprise since there has always been a strong anti-meritoracy subtext to Western culture.
Windows Professional XP: Full Version 299 Upgrade: 199
1998, Me, 2000, XP.. seems like *something* comes out every 2 years or so that costs 300 bills. They have some different features and support different things, and you don't need to upgrade or crossgrade if you dont want to.
Sounds roughly the same (Apple even a little cheaper), but I find Apple's software to be far more elegant and valuable to me.
Using your logic, why not pretend that Apple doesn't introduce its next OS for another 5 years. Whoops?! Its only 129 bucks? Not bad to me.
Longhorn will be more. I mean, people pay more than 129 bucks a year on coffee.
Re:Very Impressive
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Service packs dont introduce the kind of features Apple's updates do.
Service Packs are 99% bug fixes. Something that should have been fixed before you got the product.
I'm out of the Apple loop these days, but surely Apple produces free patches between OS point releases?
products are cheap to manufacture. like shoes, say. maybe 20 bucks to make. now, think of music as the product. the people who make it dont get paid for it, because today, its product.
the people who grant us access to distributing the art are the ones offering the valuable opportunity. Clearchannel, RIAA,... witness the current middle-man payola going on in the industry now.
IBM is the last company in the world to do things for ideological reasons (okay, maybe second last.)
Its probably a better risk/reward route to fight in court than just to stop shipping AIX. I mean, did anybody really think IBM would just snap its fingers and go, "Drat." like that?
Even if they are in the wrong, its probably a better business decision to fight it given that you cant just shut off a revenue stream like AIX (tho probably smaller than it used to be) at the request of a competitor.
Course they could be in a right as well, in which case taking it to court isn't exactly a display of courage rather than simply doing the logical thing.
I just never thought I'd live to see the day where IBM is getting support from nerds and the like.. and I'm young!
Or, to put it another way, "Just how much of a typical university's operating budget is comprised of funds from corperate sources?"
I wonder if universities are becoming less and less 'able' to help bite the hands that feed them. There've certainly been a number of high profile cases in the past 15 years where students have run afoul of corperate wishes, and the university has sided with the corperation out of contractual neccessity.
barÂraÂtry Audio pronunciation of barratry ( P ) Pronunciation Key (br-tr) n. pl. barÂraÂtries
1. The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones.
2. An unlawful breach of duty on the part of a ship's master or crew resulting in injury to the ship's owner.
3. Sale or purchase of positions in church or state.
Barratry is simply the judicial version of extortion. Ie, "Can't afford to fight? Whew, our accusations were groundless anyhow. That'll be 12,000$ please."
Big Five labels regularly infringe on each others copyrights, most commonly in not clearly all samples on albums (practically all musicians, like Sarah McLaughlan, use samples, usually to beef up the beat.. you rally do need samples today to supply the kind of sound that consumers demand).. there is a silent agreement that theres no need to go after the people *in* the monopoly to begin with. Labels only go after groups not in the monopoly to begin with, for increasinly obscure/nonobvious use of copywritten material. Furthurmore, since the RIAA is the group that goes after copyright infringers, they *do* pool their copyrights in the sense that the RIAA does not differentiate between label A being infringed and label B when they go after groups or individuals.
But the issue about them turning a blind eye to their own infringements and then creating an umbrella group to go after people *not* in the circle is clearly an abuse of power, and does show you how they do pool their IP together. You're simply taking the word pool all too literally to see the bigger picture. Most musicians can see this plain as day.
> but about putting food on their families tables and putting their children through college
Bwuahahahaha. Paramount can do anything it pleases. If it wants to 'risk' releasing the LoTR trilogy under current copyright laws, so be it, but your argument reads like: "They have the right to release something and then claim that no amount of protection is enough." You don't say anything that hasn't been said before, and you nicely sidestep aknolwedging that there IS a point at which the mechnanics of the protection of copyright violate MY right to put food on MY table while still being able to enjoy the fruits of my participation in capitalism.
Furthure more, of course Joe Blow doesn't know who the RIAA is or hate them. But they *do* hate the results of their actions.. everytime somebody says, "Damnit, why wont my CD play in my computer" or "Why wont this imported CVD play on my DVD player".. they're opposing the RIAA or MPAA or whoever. Just because the average person doesn't opposed the RIAA doesn't prove that people are not opposed to the consequences of RIAAs actions.
Your post is yet another 'me too' for the status quo, which is about as hollow and moot a point as one can make.
Maybe you could tell me at which point you would NOT feel sorry for these people who, as you say have to put another BMW in their driveway or put their kids in a good university. The idea that they have to put food on the table is a joke; they could just go work for Walmart. If some guy on the street is robbing people, just to put food on the table, you tell him to go find another way to do it.. you don't sanction ANY effort to put food on the table. You have to balance those needs versus the needs of society.
You clearly feel that current copyright laws (tho they've drastically changed over the past 10 years, I can only assume you're referring to current laws) constitutes a valid amount of legal protection to the copyright holder, and thats all you're saying: "I agree with current laws." Woopdedoo. Obviously many people don't, so sit down and shut up if you havn't anything to say beyond the mindnumblingly obvious.
Re:stealing become acceptable?
on
RIAA vs The Economy
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· Score: 2, Interesting
> Since when has stealing become acceptable?
Hundreds of millions of Napster/Kazaa/etc users seem to find it acceptable. Take into consideration how many people on this 6 billion person planet a) have a computer b) have internet, and then realize that MANY people find it accceptable.
Yes, its illegal. Hey, so is J-walking, but I'll bet you dont do that, right? And that, despite the fact that it'd be too easy to create a study showing how J-walking slows down traffic, which slows transportation, which slows commerce.... you anti-capitalist thief!
I'm sure you're perfect. You *never* do anything against the law!
On our BSA check at work, all our software was being audited... I had some software on my PC for personal non-commercial reasons, but that didn't exempt the software from being checked.
Yeah, but when the BSA comes in, sees you have a copy of MS software, but no license?
Considering they dont consider owning the original CD proof that you own it, I don't think they'll consider an email from an MS rep saying "its okay" proof that you own it.
Just because an MS employee says 'its okay' does not cover your ass in court if MS's *other hand* comes knocking at the door looking for proof that you indeed own licenses for the software you have installed on your computer.
The point is, the software/CD is worth nothing. The license is worth something. And you need the license to use the CD. Anything else could be a little bit of unintentional BSA-enforced entrapment.
I don't think it'd really happen, but the guy has a very very good point. It'd be like a sheet music service giving you photocopies of some sheet music (ie, no proof you own them), and saying "its okay, go ahead".. but it'd be your ass on the line if anybody contacted Leonard Publishing about your supposedly 'legal' pirated sheet music. Of course the owner of the copyright can let you have use of it for free, but if they dont give you legal proof that you own it, they could be responsible for getting you in legal trouble when an entirely seperate entity wants to check on the validity of what you own.
But that was obvious if you didn't feel like being stupidly pedantic. The rest of my point was about letting *some* potential sales go for free in the interest of gaining market share and making consumers feel better about you as a brand.
>That make me think not every company is a money leech.
See, I think that when bad things happen in law, its only because people havn't realized that legislation or law that *sounds* like it will make you more money might actually not.
Imagine if O'Reilly books are free. More people get them. O'Reilly's mindshare in the market increases, and there is more demand since more people have O'Reilly books and everybody sings the praises of the quality of their product (which, fortunately is the case with O'Reilly.) Economically speaking, this *could* make O'Reilly more in the long run. Theres also a collary here; the companys that lobby most heavily often have some of the worst quality products; they simply want to rely on law to make it easier to make money without having to worry about quality. Controlling the law with dollars is much more risk free than depending on the quality of code your employees can produce.
I don't think its about being money leeches. All corperations have to be; its just that the ones with the balls (and confidence in their product) that figure out that sometimes letting some revenue go here and there in the interest of the public is actually *why* you might be able to bolster your bottom line in the long run.
And thats just a round about way of saying that citizens with access to the commons are also customers; and I *think* some companies still hold onto that time honoured truth that if you keep your customers happy, they'll probably be in better shape to make more money of their own, and more likely to hand some of that over to you in the future.
man, if you have to ask that, go back to square one.
I can't give you the answer, but *nothing* happens for no reason. Maybe it was something specific the US did. Maybe it was just cause the US had the biggest buildings (ie, they are the most 'obvious' target for untapped aggression.)
But things happen for a reason, and do go "what did we do to deserve that?" is a surefire way of never learning how to try and avoid it the next time.. even if it means that you build smaller buildings and they just attack another country. (Oh, I forgot, that'd be letting the terrorists win.. nothing at all like how innocent American soldiers are dying fighting a war they probably wouldn't be in had the terrorists not committed that dispictable act.)
>I'm not willing to take that chance with MY family.
I'll ignore the fact that nobody has proven he has them (but Korea does.. who cares, right?) Guilty until proven innocent? Does that mean your neighbours should be able to take you out if they *suspect* you might be up to something? I mean, its only fair, that fathers just lookin out for HIS family.
I'm not adamantly against war; lots of times it is justified. But wondering why you got attacked under what you think are unjust premises, and in the same stroke claiming that you'd support proactive attacks under the *suspicion* that somebody else out there is responsible for your sufferage is as hypocritically zealous as it gets. I can see why you'd think this way, but unfortunately your logic is being marred by passion. You yourself admit that you're not sure if Saddam would *ever* use those nukes, just like I'd imagine there are some people over there who arn't sure *youd* never use your nukes.. and thus better to attack before anybody gets a chance to find out.
I think its childish and immature, but what can I do. It's not my conflict.
I think developers coming from a Unix background would probably look at *all* the choices with free *nixes.. and many would be more interested in developing towards more centrally planned OSes like the BSDs...
Linux gets a ton of media in the mainstream market where wintel developers work. The *BSDs dont get that kind of exposure, so those in the *nix know (ie, Unix developers) are going to look at all available free *nix flavours. I'd be willing to bet that Linux isn't as attractive to those whove been coding on Unix as those who've been coding on wintel.
The hit list for wintel is 3 times as long, and explains a 3rd of those points against Apple.
Apple does these things because the PC/OS world hasnt been an open market since the dawn of time. Therefore, they're forced to run their own monopoly in order to coexist with the wintel monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, it's not whether either game is 'better'. Lets not squabble about which game has better game play.
/. quota of nerdiness, I imagine 20% of the reason I failed out of university was this game. (The other 80% was just how much I hated elec engineering.)
I am excited cause I started gaming with qw team fortress, and I'll be damned if moments of team fortress wern't downright euphoric. Q3 Rocket Arena is fun enough for me to play daily (I know, its sad), but if this mod delivers as promised, holy mother of god thank the lord, etc. You just can't replace the games you cut your teeth on.
And to meet my
Wrong :(
6 03.htm#la wyers
Read:
http://www.accessabc.com/members1/media0
"Yoga Inside" lost to "Intel Inside"
Intel makes CPUs. Yoga Inside was a yoga organization.
Your comment is the ideal; but it doesn't neccessarily work that way. Intel just wanted to make sure that "[anything] Inside" didn't become public domain slang, at which point even "Intel Inside" could not be defended as a trademark. Same with Spam.
No. No no no.
.. ) to earn his or her keep. Patents, same. How do you encourage innovation if you reward the current status-quo so heavily?
Copyright law, patent law was ALL created to *prevent* people from owning things. (Like the secret guilds, etc where historical scientific processes were lost.)
The very reason we introduced these laws was to ensure that ideas became available to the public at some point.
Some people wish to retain what you call 'property of the universe' (and the process) forever. See any number of monopolies, both capitalist and feudal over the previous centuries. Copyright laws, patent laws, laws that deal with ideas are *always* created in the first place to ensure that the author does NOT own that idea until they die without telling anyone. They are incentives (via short term gain) for people to publish their ideas because they offer a certain amount of proection from the government. Certain. Limited. Key words. Otherwise companies would push to drop the laws altogether if you truely feel that ideas are intrinsicly ownership. We'd have one rule, that said: ideas are yours, and you have the legal basis to create whatever usage contract out of that work that you want to. But this would be bad. Public rules over private interest. Yadda yadda.
The people championing the whole intellectual property thing are simply those that have the most to gain. As a musician (whom many say does pretty cool electronica stuff: http://www.sirsonic.com), yes I love copyright, but I'll take a 20 year ownership and create 50 great songs instead of the current 90 years after the death fiasco that encourages a system that only needs a one hit wonder (helped nicely by advertising, of course
Hes right on. Original copyright law didn't ALLOW the author to transfer his rights (that happened later).
Just because you recognize that we *can* tranfer the rights that copyright law grants us doens't mean its a good thing or that we should recognize that right.
This is what the original asker is saying: we take cetain things as axioms simply based on the terminology we use. Change the terminology, change what people believe are the axioms of that system.
If its such a narrowly defined legal term (it isn't) why are there no laws dealing with it?
Answer: Becausec copyright, trademark, patent law all try to deal with intellectual 'product' differently based on what the thing is (original work, marketplace differentiator, innovative idea). Intellectual property does not appear in laws because there is no such things. Copyrights are copyrights, trademarks are trademakrs, and patents are patents.
"IP" as a term was invented not so long ago as the Joe Sixpack term to attach to works covered under either of those laws. The fact that you think its a legal term is exactly what companies want; an all-encompassing rally cry to rouse the support (or opposition, of course) of people like you who dont know any better.
Hrm, yearly fee. Access to materials. Maybe the government should have gone for a patent with libraries, although then we'd just be stuck in a "See how evil the public sector is, long live the private sector" flame war. Ah, the irony.
> That's the whole point of patents
... and worse yet, those scientific discoveries don't become well documented, opening up the possibility of that innovation not getting passed down and becoming part of the over all technological repretoire of humanity.
... whoever puts up a hedge (or erects a flag) into the soil we've all been staring at for years becomes the automagical owner! It's practically the opposite of a meritocracy. Although I guess its no surprise since there has always been a strong anti-meritoracy subtext to Western culture.
BZZT. Patents are not for recouping R&D costs. In fact, why patent an idea at all if you want to recoup R&D costs? You'll be the only person *able* to make the thing (because you don't publish your methods and R&D results in a patent), and you get 100% protection.
But see how useless capitalism is under a patentless model? Nobody would share ideas, very few people would have access to those innovations (patent holders are generally unable to meet the global demand for a new idea)
Patents are incentives to *share* ideas. They offer a limited term protection against having your idea used by other people, but thats only because to patent something you *have* to share your discovery or innovation. This is why Netflix' patent (and business methods in general) make no sense - just because something is 'new' to you doesn't mean it isn't sufficiently obvious. If lots of people stand up and go, "Hey, I thought of that 2 years ago sitting on the toilet, and just didn't think it'd make any money," then the innovation should be deemed sufficiently obvious. Otherwise you open the door up to everyone patenting *everything* they think of, on the off chance that *somebody* makes money from that idea down the road. And surprise surprise, thanks to the last 30 years of patent madness, thats exactly whats happening (see, Pan IP.)
Patents are supposed to protect implementations, not ideas. You can't patent a lawn mower, but you can patent one of the many ways of cutting grass (say, using a laser?) if it hasn't been patented before. You shouldn't be able to patent a DVD subscription service, but you should be able to patent a new technological method in getting that DVD to that house. The only problem is - there are 0 new innnovations in Netflix' subscription service. It is simply an old idea (libraries, anyone?) applied to a different product, making use of technologies (postal mail, etc) that have existed for decades.
Patents were introduced to encourage scienitists and innovators to share work that wasn't obvious enough for somebody else to duplicate in a clean-room scenario.
Today, patents have become the 20th century equivilent to the hedge wars or the moon race
Windows Professional XP: Full Version 299
Upgrade: 199
1998, Me, 2000, XP
Sounds roughly the same (Apple even a little cheaper), but I find Apple's software to be far more elegant and valuable to me.
Using your logic, why not pretend that Apple doesn't introduce its next OS for another 5 years. Whoops?! Its only 129 bucks? Not bad to me.
Longhorn will be more. I mean, people pay more than 129 bucks a year on coffee.
Service packs dont introduce the kind of features Apple's updates do.
Service Packs are 99% bug fixes. Something that should have been fixed before you got the product.
I'm out of the Apple loop these days, but surely Apple produces free patches between OS point releases?
music is a product these days.
... witness the current middle-man payola going on in the industry now.
products are cheap to manufacture. like shoes, say. maybe 20 bucks to make. now, think of music as the product. the people who make it dont get paid for it, because today, its product.
the people who grant us access to distributing the art are the ones offering the valuable opportunity. Clearchannel, RIAA,
IBM is the last company in the world to do things for ideological reasons (okay, maybe second last.)
.. and I'm young!
Its probably a better risk/reward route to fight in court than just to stop shipping AIX. I mean, did anybody really think IBM would just snap its fingers and go, "Drat." like that?
Even if they are in the wrong, its probably a better business decision to fight it given that you cant just shut off a revenue stream like AIX (tho probably smaller than it used to be) at the request of a competitor.
Course they could be in a right as well, in which case taking it to court isn't exactly a display of courage rather than simply doing the logical thing.
I just never thought I'd live to see the day where IBM is getting support from nerds and the like
If you can boot via CDROM, you dont need a floppy.
>Why didn't university help him?
Or, to put it another way, "Just how much of a typical university's operating budget is comprised of funds from corperate sources?"
I wonder if universities are becoming less and less 'able' to help bite the hands that feed them. There've certainly been a number of high profile cases in the past 15 years where students have run afoul of corperate wishes, and the university has sided with the corperation out of contractual neccessity.
or barratry:
barÂraÂtry Audio pronunciation of barratry ( P ) Pronunciation Key (br-tr)
n. pl. barÂraÂtries
1. The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones.
2. An unlawful breach of duty on the part of a ship's master or crew resulting in injury to the ship's owner.
3. Sale or purchase of positions in church or state.
Barratry is simply the judicial version of extortion. Ie, "Can't afford to fight? Whew, our accusations were groundless anyhow. That'll be 12,000$ please."
You dont know what you're talking about.
.. you rally do need samples today to supply the kind of sound that consumers demand) .. there is a silent agreement that theres no need to go after the people *in* the monopoly to begin with. Labels only go after groups not in the monopoly to begin with, for increasinly obscure/nonobvious use of copywritten material. Furthurmore, since the RIAA is the group that goes after copyright infringers, they *do* pool their copyrights in the sense that the RIAA does not differentiate between label A being infringed and label B when they go after groups or individuals.
Disclosure: I produce music.
Big Five labels regularly infringe on each others copyrights, most commonly in not clearly all samples on albums (practically all musicians, like Sarah McLaughlan, use samples, usually to beef up the beat
But the issue about them turning a blind eye to their own infringements and then creating an umbrella group to go after people *not* in the circle is clearly an abuse of power, and does show you how they do pool their IP together. You're simply taking the word pool all too literally to see the bigger picture. Most musicians can see this plain as day.
> but about putting food on their families tables and putting their children through college
.. everytime somebody says, "Damnit, why wont my CD play in my computer" or "Why wont this imported CVD play on my DVD player" .. they're opposing the RIAA or MPAA or whoever. Just because the average person doesn't opposed the RIAA doesn't prove that people are not opposed to the consequences of RIAAs actions.
.. you don't sanction ANY effort to put food on the table. You have to balance those needs versus the needs of society.
Bwuahahahaha. Paramount can do anything it pleases. If it wants to 'risk' releasing the LoTR trilogy under current copyright laws, so be it, but your argument reads like: "They have the right to release something and then claim that no amount of protection is enough." You don't say anything that hasn't been said before, and you nicely sidestep aknolwedging that there IS a point at which the mechnanics of the protection of copyright violate MY right to put food on MY table while still being able to enjoy the fruits of my participation in capitalism.
Furthure more, of course Joe Blow doesn't know who the RIAA is or hate them. But they *do* hate the results of their actions
Your post is yet another 'me too' for the status quo, which is about as hollow and moot a point as one can make.
Maybe you could tell me at which point you would NOT feel sorry for these people who, as you say have to put another BMW in their driveway or put their kids in a good university. The idea that they have to put food on the table is a joke; they could just go work for Walmart. If some guy on the street is robbing people, just to put food on the table, you tell him to go find another way to do it
You clearly feel that current copyright laws (tho they've drastically changed over the past 10 years, I can only assume you're referring to current laws) constitutes a valid amount of legal protection to the copyright holder, and thats all you're saying: "I agree with current laws." Woopdedoo. Obviously many people don't, so sit down and shut up if you havn't anything to say beyond the mindnumblingly obvious.
> Since when has stealing become acceptable?
.... you anti-capitalist thief!
Hundreds of millions of Napster/Kazaa/etc users seem to find it acceptable. Take into consideration how many people on this 6 billion person planet a) have a computer b) have internet, and then realize that MANY people find it accceptable.
Yes, its illegal. Hey, so is J-walking, but I'll bet you dont do that, right? And that, despite the fact that it'd be too easy to create a study showing how J-walking slows down traffic, which slows transportation, which slows commerce
I'm sure you're perfect. You *never* do anything against the law!
One word: underground tunnels.
On our BSA check at work, all our software was being audited ... I had some software on my PC for personal non-commercial reasons, but that didn't exempt the software from being checked.
Yeah, but when the BSA comes in, sees you have a copy of MS software, but no license?
.. but it'd be your ass on the line if anybody contacted Leonard Publishing about your supposedly 'legal' pirated sheet music. Of course the owner of the copyright can let you have use of it for free, but if they dont give you legal proof that you own it, they could be responsible for getting you in legal trouble when an entirely seperate entity wants to check on the validity of what you own.
Considering they dont consider owning the original CD proof that you own it, I don't think they'll consider an email from an MS rep saying "its okay" proof that you own it.
Just because an MS employee says 'its okay' does not cover your ass in court if MS's *other hand* comes knocking at the door looking for proof that you indeed own licenses for the software you have installed on your computer.
The point is, the software/CD is worth nothing. The license is worth something. And you need the license to use the CD. Anything else could be a little bit of unintentional BSA-enforced entrapment.
I don't think it'd really happen, but the guy has a very very good point. It'd be like a sheet music service giving you photocopies of some sheet music (ie, no proof you own them), and saying "its okay, go ahead"
>Imagine if O'Reilly books are free.
Imagine if older O'Reilly books are free.
But that was obvious if you didn't feel like being stupidly pedantic. The rest of my point was about letting *some* potential sales go for free in the interest of gaining market share and making consumers feel better about you as a brand.
>That make me think not every company is a money leech.
See, I think that when bad things happen in law, its only because people havn't realized that legislation or law that *sounds* like it will make you more money might actually not.
Imagine if O'Reilly books are free. More people get them. O'Reilly's mindshare in the market increases, and there is more demand since more people have O'Reilly books and everybody sings the praises of the quality of their product (which, fortunately is the case with O'Reilly.) Economically speaking, this *could* make O'Reilly more in the long run. Theres also a collary here; the companys that lobby most heavily often have some of the worst quality products; they simply want to rely on law to make it easier to make money without having to worry about quality. Controlling the law with dollars is much more risk free than depending on the quality of code your employees can produce.
I don't think its about being money leeches. All corperations have to be; its just that the ones with the balls (and confidence in their product) that figure out that sometimes letting some revenue go here and there in the interest of the public is actually *why* you might be able to bolster your bottom line in the long run.
And thats just a round about way of saying that citizens with access to the commons are also customers; and I *think* some companies still hold onto that time honoured truth that if you keep your customers happy, they'll probably be in better shape to make more money of their own, and more likely to hand some of that over to you in the future.
>what did we do to deserve 9/11
.. even if it means that you build smaller buildings and they just attack another country. (Oh, I forgot, that'd be letting the terrorists win .. nothing at all like how innocent American soldiers are dying fighting a war they probably wouldn't be in had the terrorists not committed that dispictable act.)
.. who cares, right?) Guilty until proven innocent? Does that mean your neighbours should be able to take you out if they *suspect* you might be up to something? I mean, its only fair, that fathers just lookin out for HIS family.
.. and thus better to attack before anybody gets a chance to find out.
man, if you have to ask that, go back to square one.
I can't give you the answer, but *nothing* happens for no reason. Maybe it was something specific the US did. Maybe it was just cause the US had the biggest buildings (ie, they are the most 'obvious' target for untapped aggression.)
But things happen for a reason, and do go "what did we do to deserve that?" is a surefire way of never learning how to try and avoid it the next time
>I'm not willing to take that chance with MY family.
I'll ignore the fact that nobody has proven he has them (but Korea does
I'm not adamantly against war; lots of times it is justified. But wondering why you got attacked under what you think are unjust premises, and in the same stroke claiming that you'd support proactive attacks under the *suspicion* that somebody else out there is responsible for your sufferage is as hypocritically zealous as it gets. I can see why you'd think this way, but unfortunately your logic is being marred by passion. You yourself admit that you're not sure if Saddam would *ever* use those nukes, just like I'd imagine there are some people over there who arn't sure *youd* never use your nukes
I think its childish and immature, but what can I do. It's not my conflict.
Isn't Linux the posterchild OS for *nix arches?
.. and many would be more interested in developing towards more centrally planned OSes like the BSDs ...
I think developers coming from a Unix background would probably look at *all* the choices with free *nixes
Linux gets a ton of media in the mainstream market where wintel developers work. The *BSDs dont get that kind of exposure, so those in the *nix know (ie, Unix developers) are going to look at all available free *nix flavours. I'd be willing to bet that Linux isn't as attractive to those whove been coding on Unix as those who've been coding on wintel.
The hit list for wintel is 3 times as long, and explains a 3rd of those points against Apple.
Apple does these things because the PC/OS world hasnt been an open market since the dawn of time. Therefore, they're forced to run their own monopoly in order to coexist with the wintel monopoly.