So, he can be relicensed by simply connecting to the internet while playing the songs. What if they weren't legit in the first place? Would he get a new license? How would WMP know that there was a valid license? Does it transmit a license to MS when you copy the songs originally?
Although the parent was moderated as "flamebait" due to the tone of the post, ka9dgx does make a valid point: "intellectual property" is a societally-created fiction, just like a "corporate person" is.
The only thing that really bugs me about this is that intellectual property rights are being asserted over a collection of information from multiple sources, all public. This would indicate, if it stands and sets a precedent, that public information is only public in its original format. If I make every third cell of a table of radio frequency assignments bold to highlight an interesting trend, am I now guilty of infringing the intellectual property "rights" of the users of the associated spectra?
Science is a method of discovery and verification of things. It is imperfect at best. Even discarding the "social sciences", which is to my thinking a prerequisite of discussing what science really is, there is a limit to what science can reveal. Science can "prove" almost nothing. What science can do is give good working approximations. Eventually, we tend to run into a hole in our theory, and we then either refine it or throw it out and start over.
Given that there are places science cannot go, there is plenty of room for belief. Everyone has some cosmology - a theory of how the universe works. This cosmology informs both religion and intuition. A good underlying cosmology allowed Einstein to make the intuitive leap that lead to Special Relativity.
As long as a religion doesn't contradict what is demonstrable, I don't see where the problem lies. Similarly, if someone believes that magnets make them feel better, at least they feel better. Can it be reproduced en masse as a treatment for all? Not apparently, but so what? No harm has been done, and occasionally some good will come of it. Wouldn't it be a shame if we all thought the same way? It would certainly make science much more difficult, by removing any possibility of intuitive leaps.
For the desktop, it installs on whatever the disk was formatted as already, if you are not reformatting. If you reformat, it's a pop-up selection, and I think that the default is HFS+.
(It's been a while since I formatted a disk under OS X - since I installed it the first time, in fact - so I am not positive about the defaults.)
Actually, OS X per se is not this way. The HFS+ filesystem used by OS X is this way. Using UFS on OS X (built-in and easily used if you want to) uses a case-sensitive, rather than simply case-preserving, filesystem.)
"The Internet" is a connected network of networks using IP. If the "European Internet" uses IP, and if people put up gateways to "the Internet", then the "European Internet" is part of "the Internet".
I use P2P (LimeWire) every once in a while. Specifically, I recently got Boney M's "Rasputin" and a couple of Tom Lehrer songs. In each case, these were to show my brother some songs that were, well, different, but which I don't have in my collection (at least, not in a usable form).
Would I have bought them for $0.25/song from an industry website? Yes. In a minute. In fact, I would have bought the entire Tom Lehrer catalogue at that price, just because I was thinking about it. But I couldn't do so, because they aren't avaiable. And I couldn't go down to a local record store (and I'm in Dallas, which has a lot of record stores) because none of them would carry this anymore, except maybe Bill's, and probably not even them. In fact, I doubt (hope against?) that Boney M has ever had anything put out on CD, and I am not sure where to find Tom Lehrer's stuff except maybe from Rhino.
Anyway, the point is, I went and got songs from P2P that I would have paid for if I could. During this same time period, I've bought Rush's new CD, and would have bought Def Leppard's if I'd been able to find it in Target. (I'll probably pick it up next time I'm in Best Buy, assuming they have it.)
My point is only that the service Ms. Ian proposes makes sense for a lot of P2P users. It probably wouldn't be used by the hardcore music traders, but I suspect that they are not really in it for the music, anyway.
Theft is theft. It deprives you of your natural right to use your property, by depriving you of possession of your property.
Copyright violation is not theft. It arguably deprives you of your ability to collect revenues from your property (or reduces your potential revenues), but it does not deprive you of the actual property, which you can still use since you still possess it.
The rhetoric of "copyright violation *is* theft" is simply wrong, and ignores the fact that the score-keeper here is not revenues generated from a given property, but the property itself.
I do not understand the difficulty that some people have defining terrorism. Terrorism is the deliberate killing or injuring (or attempted killing or injuring) of non-combatants in order to further a political goal. (Note that all military goals are political.)
Bombing Dresden was an attempt to cow the German population into surrender. Bombing a bus in the West Bank is an attempt to cow the Israeli population into surrender.
Killing a German soldier or an Israeli policeman (or for that matter a Palestinian militant) is not terrorism. Killing civilians accidentally while trying to kill soldiers or government agents is not terrorism.
Levelling a city sheltering Palestinian militants, rather than trying to kill militants and in the action destroying some property and killing some innocents, would be terrorism. Killing school kids on a bus, or families driving to their homes, or even 1-year olds *in* their homes, in an attempt to make the Israelis tired of occupation is terrorism.
Attacking Afghanistan to destroy a regime sheltering our enemies is not terrorism, even if in the process some civilians die. Attacking civilians because you want them to change their government rather than die would be terrorism. Attacking US civilians in an attempt to change US foreign policy (support of Saudi monarchy, one presumes) is terrorism. Attacking a US warship in an attempt to change US foreign policy is not terrorism.
These problems are solvable though. For example, make a set of types (rich text, vector graphic, bitmap graphic, plain text, table, etc) and include tools for each of these with the OS. Require that to register a new type with the system, a free (beer) viewer must be available, and an editor (whether or not it's free) should be available. Then the type registry would point to the default viewer, if you don't already have one set up for that type. Of course, you could change the type viewer at any time.
Of course, you are correct that this is not a big incentive to the developers of the monolithic apps. Even packaging a set of type editors into a salable package would not be as easy as generating a monolithic app (at least, not until the programmers were retrained and forgot all that they used to know about discrete applications) nor as profitable, and you would lose the ability to lock in users with your unique and obfuscated file formats. This would, however, be a great use of the open source paradigm.
Really, I think that the key thing missing at the time Apple tried to do this, from a technical standpoint, was a loosely-typed run-time extensible object-oriented language built into the core system APIs. Kind of like Objective-C, built into Cocoa...
As to modality, that is a non-issue. We have modes today, but they are called Photoshop, Word and Excel instead of bitmap graphic, rich text with outlining and table, and they don't integrate very well together in a single document.
This is basically true of all the large consulting firms (PWC, KPMG, E&Y, etc). The methodology, from my dealings with them, seems to be:
1. get the CIO well-fed and well-laid, and if possible the CFO and the CEO or COO (whomever has responsibility for the CIO and CFO) 2. now that the contract is yours, hire a bunch of people off the street - they should have good college degrees and no practical experience. These monkeys must be able to speak and write effectively, and must have no ability to think critically at all. They are just there for documentation 3. get the monkeys to ask the client's IT guys what problems they are facing, and how they would solve them if they didn't have to do what upper management told them to do 4. without doing any fact checking, error checking or even prima facie review (these are critical to the program - not doing them, that is), edit the interviews into a single document. It doesn't matter if the document is not internally consistent (and it won't be, coming from many sources), as long as it's what the CIO has already heard from his people (and it will be, because it came from his people to the consultants). This validates the CIO's excellent hiring and promotion strategies, six-sigma ho-shin plans and whatever. 5. after making sure that step 4 takes as long as the client will tolerate, charge $200 per consultant per hour 6. brag in ads and so forth about how you helped a $6bn/yr company fix all its IT problems, but you can't say who they are because it would violate the non-disclosure you insisted on in step 1
Basically, the big 6 (or 4 or whatever they are today) are worthless piles of crap. On the other hand, independent consultants and IT services companies tend to be pretty good. IBM was odd in that they charged $400 per hour for good people, but they could actually get good people (who they paid $70 per hour at most). Maybe they ran out of good people to get, and decided to hire the monkeys.
Actually, it's not so much monopoly as the divine right of kings. Monopolies were originally granted by monarchs to exploit a given opportunity to the profit of the monopoly and the monarch without that pesky competition getting in the way. What now seems to be the case is that corporations in many cases want to grant themselves monopoly powers, by buying legislators to get the law amended in their favor. The amazing thing is that with all that is going on, we are not marching in the streets and exacting mob justice on the legislators and the corporations that buy them. Note that I am a fairly free-market capitalist, which is one of the reasons I am so angered when companies trash the system for their own short-term profit. True capitalism benefits everyone, not just the heads of corporations.
I was under the understanding that all of the LaGrange points for all of the planets and large moons were well populated, but particularly L4 and L5. Fair point, though, that it's not just a pretty picture.
Re:Might he be onto something?
on
GUIs for Everyone
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Apple came up with what I believe to be the best human-computer interface idea in a long time during the late mid-90s. It was called OpenDoc, and the idea is that what matters to people using a computer is the data, rather than the applications. A document was a collection of elements of different types, and there were tools for editing different types of data.
For example, you might be putting together a presentation with some textual information, some graphical images, a chart and some sound clips. When you click on the text, your menus and commands change to those of the text tool you've chosen. When you click on a chart, your menus and commands change to those of the chart tool you've chosen. Word would be the equivalent of a text tool that does outlining and such, combined with some other small tools that work with graphics and such. Say you didn't like the graphics tool that came bundled with Word? No sweat, just tell the computer to use a different one instead.
This would have maximized competition, as well as making computers much more sensible, in my opinion. It got killed, and I'm not sure why, but I'd sure like to see it get revived.
The plot is pretty, but not very informative beyond, "Hey, there are a lot of minor planets in the inner Solar System," which I think most people probably realize anyway.
You're trolling, but I'll bite anyway. I bought MacOS X as soon as it was available. I got the 10.1 upgrade for free by going to the (reasonably) local Apple Store. 10.0.x was truly a poor performer, particularly in the GUI. The 10.1 release has been fast and stable for me, but in reality wasn't much more than tightening up the code and adding some device support.
10.2, on the other hand, is a pretty big change. The networking feature additions, graphics acceleration in the GUI, useful changes to included apps like Sherlock and iTunes and so on make this more of an upgrade than a bugfix. I don't have a problem with Apple charging for it, and I will buy it. I am going to wait a bit, though, and see if they give a large discount to upgraders, because I suspect that they will do so, and I'd rather not pay $129 for the OS, when I'm functional on the one I have now.
Used as a complement to other weapons (bombs, guns, missiles), it could be very practical. In a ground attack run, for instance, two four-second bursts is more time than you would get over most targets. Then you have to climb out and turn around, which takes enough time for the laser to cool back down to an operating range. For AA use, presumably this thing would have a steerable beam, so you could get good off-angle shots that the gun couldn't make, if you have a snap-shot opportunity in a dogfight. Will it replace the gun or the bomb? Not soon. Eventually, maybe, but not soon.
We're building a multi-billion dollar aircraft with a weapon that should substantially increase precision over bombing whilst simultaneously reducing collateral damage - that is fairly impressive.
We are not seeking a loophole in the treaty. The treaty specifically excludes as a fundamental part of its text weapons which blind as an incidental function. The only weapons covered are those whose purpose is to blind. This same language is what allows us to use laser designators (which can blind) to guide a bomb to its target.
Slashdot Mirror
Each new iPod, in fact, is emblazoned with a sticker that warns, "Don't Steal Music."
Apple's approach is slightly different from Microsoft's.
So, he can be relicensed by simply connecting to the internet while playing the songs. What if they weren't legit in the first place? Would he get a new license? How would WMP know that there was a valid license? Does it transmit a license to MS when you copy the songs originally?
Although the parent was moderated as "flamebait" due to the tone of the post, ka9dgx does make a valid point: "intellectual property" is a societally-created fiction, just like a "corporate person" is.
The only thing that really bugs me about this is that intellectual property rights are being asserted over a collection of information from multiple sources, all public. This would indicate, if it stands and sets a precedent, that public information is only public in its original format. If I make every third cell of a table of radio frequency assignments bold to highlight an interesting trend, am I now guilty of infringing the intellectual property "rights" of the users of the associated spectra?
Science is a method of discovery and verification of things. It is imperfect at best. Even discarding the "social sciences", which is to my thinking a prerequisite of discussing what science really is, there is a limit to what science can reveal. Science can "prove" almost nothing. What science can do is give good working approximations. Eventually, we tend to run into a hole in our theory, and we then either refine it or throw it out and start over.
Given that there are places science cannot go, there is plenty of room for belief. Everyone has some cosmology - a theory of how the universe works. This cosmology informs both religion and intuition. A good underlying cosmology allowed Einstein to make the intuitive leap that lead to Special Relativity.
As long as a religion doesn't contradict what is demonstrable, I don't see where the problem lies. Similarly, if someone believes that magnets make them feel better, at least they feel better. Can it be reproduced en masse as a treatment for all? Not apparently, but so what? No harm has been done, and occasionally some good will come of it. Wouldn't it be a shame if we all thought the same way? It would certainly make science much more difficult, by removing any possibility of intuitive leaps.
For OS X server, I think it default to UFS.
For the desktop, it installs on whatever the disk was formatted as already, if you are not reformatting. If you reformat, it's a pop-up selection, and I think that the default is HFS+.
(It's been a while since I formatted a disk under OS X - since I installed it the first time, in fact - so I am not positive about the defaults.)
Actually, OS X per se is not this way. The HFS+ filesystem used by OS X is this way. Using UFS on OS X (built-in and easily used if you want to) uses a case-sensitive, rather than simply case-preserving, filesystem.)
"The Internet" is a connected network of networks using IP. If the "European Internet" uses IP, and if people put up gateways to "the Internet", then the "European Internet" is part of "the Internet".
Hidalgo and Sancho? Is anyone else humming "Mouse of La Mancha"?
I use P2P (LimeWire) every once in a while. Specifically, I recently got Boney M's "Rasputin" and a couple of Tom Lehrer songs. In each case, these were to show my brother some songs that were, well, different, but which I don't have in my collection (at least, not in a usable form).
Would I have bought them for $0.25/song from an industry website? Yes. In a minute. In fact, I would have bought the entire Tom Lehrer catalogue at that price, just because I was thinking about it. But I couldn't do so, because they aren't avaiable. And I couldn't go down to a local record store (and I'm in Dallas, which has a lot of record stores) because none of them would carry this anymore, except maybe Bill's, and probably not even them. In fact, I doubt (hope against?) that Boney M has ever had anything put out on CD, and I am not sure where to find Tom Lehrer's stuff except maybe from Rhino.
Anyway, the point is, I went and got songs from P2P that I would have paid for if I could. During this same time period, I've bought Rush's new CD, and would have bought Def Leppard's if I'd been able to find it in Target. (I'll probably pick it up next time I'm in Best Buy, assuming they have it.)
My point is only that the service Ms. Ian proposes makes sense for a lot of P2P users. It probably wouldn't be used by the hardcore music traders, but I suspect that they are not really in it for the music, anyway.
Theft is theft. It deprives you of your natural right to use your property, by depriving you of possession of your property.
Copyright violation is not theft. It arguably deprives you of your ability to collect revenues from your property (or reduces your potential revenues), but it does not deprive you of the actual property, which you can still use since you still possess it.
The rhetoric of "copyright violation *is* theft" is simply wrong, and ignores the fact that the score-keeper here is not revenues generated from a given property, but the property itself.
I belive that you mean @"Intel". Ah, debugging.
I do not understand the difficulty that some people have defining terrorism. Terrorism is the deliberate killing or injuring (or attempted killing or injuring) of non-combatants in order to further a political goal. (Note that all military goals are political.)
Bombing Dresden was an attempt to cow the German population into surrender. Bombing a bus in the West Bank is an attempt to cow the Israeli population into surrender.
Killing a German soldier or an Israeli policeman (or for that matter a Palestinian militant) is not terrorism. Killing civilians accidentally while trying to kill soldiers or government agents is not terrorism.
Levelling a city sheltering Palestinian militants, rather than trying to kill militants and in the action destroying some property and killing some innocents, would be terrorism. Killing school kids on a bus, or families driving to their homes, or even 1-year olds *in* their homes, in an attempt to make the Israelis tired of occupation is terrorism.
Attacking Afghanistan to destroy a regime sheltering our enemies is not terrorism, even if in the process some civilians die. Attacking civilians because you want them to change their government rather than die would be terrorism. Attacking US civilians in an attempt to change US foreign policy (support of Saudi monarchy, one presumes) is terrorism. Attacking a US warship in an attempt to change US foreign policy is not terrorism.
That is the highest signal to noise ratio I've ever seen on USENET - and it was crossposted to net.flame!
Surely, the factory is stationary?
I'm sure he'll burn that bridge when he comes to it.
These problems are solvable though. For example, make a set of types (rich text, vector graphic, bitmap graphic, plain text, table, etc) and include tools for each of these with the OS. Require that to register a new type with the system, a free (beer) viewer must be available, and an editor (whether or not it's free) should be available. Then the type registry would point to the default viewer, if you don't already have one set up for that type. Of course, you could change the type viewer at any time.
Of course, you are correct that this is not a big incentive to the developers of the monolithic apps. Even packaging a set of type editors into a salable package would not be as easy as generating a monolithic app (at least, not until the programmers were retrained and forgot all that they used to know about discrete applications) nor as profitable, and you would lose the ability to lock in users with your unique and obfuscated file formats. This would, however, be a great use of the open source paradigm.
Really, I think that the key thing missing at the time Apple tried to do this, from a technical standpoint, was a loosely-typed run-time extensible object-oriented language built into the core system APIs. Kind of like Objective-C, built into Cocoa...
As to modality, that is a non-issue. We have modes today, but they are called Photoshop, Word and Excel instead of bitmap graphic, rich text with outlining and table, and they don't integrate very well together in a single document.
This is basically true of all the large consulting firms (PWC, KPMG, E&Y, etc). The methodology, from my dealings with them, seems to be:
1. get the CIO well-fed and well-laid, and if possible the CFO and the CEO or COO (whomever has responsibility for the CIO and CFO)
2. now that the contract is yours, hire a bunch of people off the street - they should have good college degrees and no practical experience. These monkeys must be able to speak and write effectively, and must have no ability to think critically at all. They are just there for documentation
3. get the monkeys to ask the client's IT guys what problems they are facing, and how they would solve them if they didn't have to do what upper management told them to do
4. without doing any fact checking, error checking or even prima facie review (these are critical to the program - not doing them, that is), edit the interviews into a single document. It doesn't matter if the document is not internally consistent (and it won't be, coming from many sources), as long as it's what the CIO has already heard from his people (and it will be, because it came from his people to the consultants). This validates the CIO's excellent hiring and promotion strategies, six-sigma ho-shin plans and whatever.
5. after making sure that step 4 takes as long as the client will tolerate, charge $200 per consultant per hour
6. brag in ads and so forth about how you helped a $6bn/yr company fix all its IT problems, but you can't say who they are because it would violate the non-disclosure you insisted on in step 1
Basically, the big 6 (or 4 or whatever they are today) are worthless piles of crap. On the other hand, independent consultants and IT services companies tend to be pretty good. IBM was odd in that they charged $400 per hour for good people, but they could actually get good people (who they paid $70 per hour at most). Maybe they ran out of good people to get, and decided to hire the monkeys.
Actually, it's not so much monopoly as the divine right of kings. Monopolies were originally granted by monarchs to exploit a given opportunity to the profit of the monopoly and the monarch without that pesky competition getting in the way. What now seems to be the case is that corporations in many cases want to grant themselves monopoly powers, by buying legislators to get the law amended in their favor. The amazing thing is that with all that is going on, we are not marching in the streets and exacting mob justice on the legislators and the corporations that buy them. Note that I am a fairly free-market capitalist, which is one of the reasons I am so angered when companies trash the system for their own short-term profit. True capitalism benefits everyone, not just the heads of corporations.
I was under the understanding that all of the LaGrange points for all of the planets and large moons were well populated, but particularly L4 and L5. Fair point, though, that it's not just a pretty picture.
Apple came up with what I believe to be the best human-computer interface idea in a long time during the late mid-90s. It was called OpenDoc, and the idea is that what matters to people using a computer is the data, rather than the applications. A document was a collection of elements of different types, and there were tools for editing different types of data.
For example, you might be putting together a presentation with some textual information, some graphical images, a chart and some sound clips. When you click on the text, your menus and commands change to those of the text tool you've chosen. When you click on a chart, your menus and commands change to those of the chart tool you've chosen. Word would be the equivalent of a text tool that does outlining and such, combined with some other small tools that work with graphics and such. Say you didn't like the graphics tool that came bundled with Word? No sweat, just tell the computer to use a different one instead.
This would have maximized competition, as well as making computers much more sensible, in my opinion. It got killed, and I'm not sure why, but I'd sure like to see it get revived.
The plot is pretty, but not very informative beyond, "Hey, there are a lot of minor planets in the inner Solar System," which I think most people probably realize anyway.
You're trolling, but I'll bite anyway. I bought MacOS X as soon as it was available. I got the 10.1 upgrade for free by going to the (reasonably) local Apple Store. 10.0.x was truly a poor performer, particularly in the GUI. The 10.1 release has been fast and stable for me, but in reality wasn't much more than tightening up the code and adding some device support.
10.2, on the other hand, is a pretty big change. The networking feature additions, graphics acceleration in the GUI, useful changes to included apps like Sherlock and iTunes and so on make this more of an upgrade than a bugfix. I don't have a problem with Apple charging for it, and I will buy it. I am going to wait a bit, though, and see if they give a large discount to upgraders, because I suspect that they will do so, and I'd rather not pay $129 for the OS, when I'm functional on the one I have now.
Used as a complement to other weapons (bombs, guns, missiles), it could be very practical. In a ground attack run, for instance, two four-second bursts is more time than you would get over most targets. Then you have to climb out and turn around, which takes enough time for the laser to cool back down to an operating range. For AA use, presumably this thing would have a steerable beam, so you could get good off-angle shots that the gun couldn't make, if you have a snap-shot opportunity in a dogfight. Will it replace the gun or the bomb? Not soon. Eventually, maybe, but not soon.
We're building a multi-billion dollar aircraft with a weapon that should substantially increase precision over bombing whilst simultaneously reducing collateral damage - that is fairly impressive.
We are not seeking a loophole in the treaty. The treaty specifically excludes as a fundamental part of its text weapons which blind as an incidental function. The only weapons covered are those whose purpose is to blind. This same language is what allows us to use laser designators (which can blind) to guide a bomb to its target.