You can't go two pages in that book without running across Stross editorializing (negatively) about Jobs' personality or intelligence.
Oh, please. Stross' book has sources to back his "editorializing" -- and let's face it: unless you've got a Lithium Lick in your bedroom, you're going to have to admit that Steve Jobs' management of NeXT was an exercise in Greek-tragedy-scale hubris. (The story of how Steve himself managed to sabotage a port of QuarkXpress to NeXT is particularly enlightening/jaw-dropping.)
Fault Stross for his technical errors, which are numerous (and already well-documented here). But, as the saying goes, rarely should you attribute to malice what ignorance will just as easily explain.
Linux is a bad example...the GPL exists and works BECAUSE of IP Law, the license gets it's strength from the fact that the only leagal way to copy or derive from a GPL'd work is by accepting the license.
I've seen this line multiple times here, and it's not quite right -- the GPL is a wickedly clever legal hack that protects software which is more-or-less public domain from being absorbed/assimilated by corporations like MS, who "extend and embrace" it and turn it into something over which they have exclusive control. The GPL would be unnecessary in an IP-free world.
If it were not for copyright law, you could just ignore the license and take the code anyway.
And someone else could reverse-engineer what you do with the code and make it publically-available, with no fear of legal retribution from you.
how would they feel if the next mass produced plastic pop star made some record company millions by singing one of their songs without permission, accreditation or compensation?
I'm not sure the mass-produced plastic pop star (MPPPS) could exist in an IP-less world -- but the MPPPS would be equally without recourse if the band in question turned around and released a "remix" version of his/her album.
What usually gets lost in this kind of defense of IP law is that revoking copyright law would actually level the playing field, where it's tilted right now toward those who can claim ownership (and pay for lawyers to defend their claim). Check out the other story today about the guy who posted his own Win98 patch -- MS has the resources to squash him if they wanted to, whether or not they have a valid legal claim. The threat of litigation would be enough. Abolish IP law, and you could have Win98 enthusiasts reverse-engineer the whole bloody OS and patch it reeeeeal good. In that situation, everything's up for grabs -- for everyone, not just those with lawyers on the payroll.
I'd say the fact that compressors are still being utilized is indicative that 98dB is simply not enough for the way all music is currently being engineered, not just for orchestral recordings but for rock and other genres as well.
Rock/pop is typically compressed even beyond FM radio's tolerances -- most of the time, it doesn't take advantage of the dynamic range that's already available in 16-bit audio. OTOH, for orchestral recordings, 98dB is already more than enough -- I already have to monitor the volume while I'm listening, in order to hear the quiet parts over room noise (while keeping the loud parts from blowing out my eardrums). Frankly, I'd love to see classical CDs compressed a little more than they usually are (to better reflect the difference between the noise floor of a concert hall and the noise floor of a household living room).
[...]eliminate an audio engineer's need to use compressors except in the case of the extraordinarly inept.
For most rock/pop engineers, it's the sales department/radio that forces them to use compression, whether they like it or not -- they're not compressing to fit the dynamic range of CDs, but to make the music "sound loud" on the radio. Classical recordings, OTOH, would actually benefit from some judicious and skillfully-applied compression, making them more listenable in the less-than-ideal conditions in which they're likely to be played.
In terms of frequency response[...]...you would be talking about sample rates, not sample sizes -- another debate altogether.
Places like Wherehouse screwed the pooch without any help from p2p....the one I used to live near started selling used records at $11 a pop, new CDs for $18, and wouldn't buy my copy of the Velvet Underground's first CD (I'd replaced it with the 2-disc reissue) because "it's not in the computer. Are they a local band or something?" Gahhhhh...
I never said that it was ok to attack him or rape him in prison - I simply meant to state that I would have little or no sympathy for the malicious ignorant bastard. If he had no respect for the rights and properties of others... why should we concern ourselves with his well-being?
Because to ignore prison rape when we all know it's going on *is* to sanction it. And to sanction it is ignorant and malicious.
When someone else forcibly removes the product of your labors, your effort to apprehend happiness in a material form has been retarded. Much like the people who can't seem to understand that property crime is every bit as bad as life and liberty crime.
When someone forcibly removes your life or liberty, your ability to apprehend happiness is rendered nil, or close to it. Much like the IQ of anyone who doesn't understand that murder is worse than theft when it comes to depriving someone of happiness (and the ability to pursue the same).
If he is indeed victimized in prison, the person committing the act will have done something horribly wrong - but he himself, having already victimized others, will have little moral grounds on which to erect a legitimate complaint.
Uh, nope. Clobbering your server for a week does not rob him of any moral grounds to complain about being raped. To say otherwise is to render the whole concept of "moral grounds" meaningless.
Libertarians [believe...] a crime against property is on the same level as a crime against an individual's life or liberty/freedom.
Not the ones who want to be taken seriously. Though I can just see the RIAA incorporating this idea into a new anthem for their anti-P2P ads (apologies to Morrissey...)
The songs that you rip with a smile Are not portable, burnable files They're stolen IP, and stolen IP is MURDER (Do you know how Hilary cries?)
That's a bit of a rush job on the history of Western philosophy since the Renaissance, though the basics aren't too far off.
Postmodernism is an umbrella term for a hodge-podge of methodologies, though the underlying core belief is roughly the same: that there are no solidly-reliable "meta-narratives" (ie. authoritative rules of knowledge) which can lay down absolutes. Religion and science, the two traditional metanarratives, are constantly changing, and sometimes even reversing themselves; sometimes because of new discoveries; other times, because of political pressures.
Political correctness came from the post modern culture, and does indeed seem to hold to the same kind of idea.
Gah. "Political correctness" is, nine times out of ten, a bugaboo that right-wing talk show hosts appropriated from an in-joke on the left (who used the term to describe the more humorless, Maoistic types -- long before Rush Limbaugh used it as a brickbat for bashing anyone to the left of Reagan).
Commonly, it's referring to someone who is so convinced of the rightness of their beliefs that they can only defend them by stigmatizing their critics (Don't think pornography necessarily exploits women, who are paid betten then the men in the industry, etc.? You're a sexist.) And the Left hardly has a corner on such types -- you've got the same kind of people on the Right (Don't think Bush was telling the truth about that Nigerian uranium, even though that's what the evidence says? You're a traitor.), even though they usually get labelled "kooks" or "Ann Coulter", rather than "politically correct."
In other words, "political correctness" is just another name for "ideological extremism" -- which is as old as time, and decidely not postmodern, since the extremist does have a strongly-defined (though ususally not too intellectually-rigorous) morality.
So I guess were both right (how postmodern!)
Actually, you're way off the mark. (Which may be ironic, though I'll leave that to others to debate.)
Re:Scribus file format is fully documented
on
Scribus 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Dude...back away from the Stallman-ade...
If Quark / Adobe/ whoever really cared about their customers, they would take the 5 minutes it took to make a filter to go to/ from the Scribus format, instead of forcing people to waste time trying to reverse engineer their little data vaults.
So if Quark/Adobe cared about their customers, they'd make it easy for them to...stop being customers?
Is Scribus as good as Quark? No, it is better. Simply because your data is not sealed up in an unknown format.
Oh, please. Is an atomic warhead inferior to a flint axe because its specs are classified?
People who really care about doing desktop publishing should start using Scribus, submitting problem reports and wishlist items, and if they have the interest and skill, start doing a little hacking.
People who do desktop publishing for a living will use the tools that allow them to do what they need to do now, and they're not likely to have much time to try out anything that doesn't meet their immediate needs. People who just want something to make CD covers will turn to something that offers a balance of features and convenience.
People who evangelize open source alternatives to Office, etc., need to realize this before they let fly with the hyperbole. If I have to download & install fink, then work out which window manager, package manager and X11 installation I need -- all this before I can even download and install Scribus -- I'll wait for them to get a standard Aqua/Cocoa installation together before I even bother with it (and stick with AppleWorks in the meantime). And if it can't open a 100+ page 4-color magazine layout and get it ready for prepress, the print shop is unlikely to care how open Scribus' format is.
there is a small evil and vindictive side to me that can't help thinking "take _that_ Green party!" every time he pulls some new enviroment destroying stunt.
At the risk of going offtopic: Gore lost more voters to the Republicans than to the Greens -- more Democrats voted for Bush than Nader. Nader's 3% was a margin of error at best, not the "spoiler" the more vindictive Democrats wanted to make it out to be. Of course, if they had been as aggressive in their public rhetoric with Bush as they were with Nader and the Greens, they might not have lost the election (or the recount) in the first place.
If Nader were smart, he would have tryed to hack a Parlimentary System approach to the problem by making a deal with Gore a few weeks before the election, that if Gore would agree to support certain Green positions (in writing of course) then Nader would tell all his party members to vote for Gore in the election, but to tell the exit pollers that they voted for Nader.
Two things:
1) I think you're grossly underestimating the amount of ill-will Democrats had for Nader; I'm only being half-facetious when I say that they hated him even more than they hated Bush. Had the Greens approached Gore's people with the idea you're proposing, they would probably have been laughed out of the building and told to go screw themselves.
2) Telling the exit pollers they'd voted for Nader when they hadn't would have been, at best, a PR victory for the Greens with no concrete political benefits. In order for the Greens to get on the ballot easily in the next election, they had to get (5%? 6%?) of the vote. If they had done that, and kept doing that over the course of several elections, they might they have been able to wield the kind of political power required to make deals like the one you're proposing.
So, there are, in my opinion, far more reasons to prefer an extension of copyright
But the only reason you've given is, essentially, "because Disney can still profit from Mickey Mouse, and because if it became public domain, they'd lose its value as a commercial asset." And truth be told, that's exactly why it should lapse into the public domain. Disney has made plenty of money from its exclusive license on Mickey; that doesn't entitle them to make money on it in perpetuity.
And the public domain would benefit, in more ways than you've imagined. Let's say I wanted to put together an online history of animation, and wanted to stream video of those early cartoons in their entirety. The cost of licensing one of Disney's first cartoons alone would sink me before I'd even begun.
So what if a (gasp! horror!) porn company made "Mickey Moosecock"? The ability of more "legitimate" artists to make use of one of the most recognizeable symbols of American pop culture without having to get Disney's permission outweighs Disney's "right" to make money forever from one of its properties.
It's not like they aren't milking all their current properties for direct-to-video sequel after sequel. Let 'em make 20 fscking Lion King sequels if they want money -- it's time the Mouse belonged to the public.
I'm also surprised to see Radiohead's name mixed up in this as they're supposedly thinking about abandoning the album format altogether in favor of releasing EPs. Don't see how they're going to lose on album sales if they're not releasing any...
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You can't go two pages in that book without running across Stross editorializing (negatively) about Jobs' personality or intelligence.
Oh, please. Stross' book has sources to back his "editorializing" -- and let's face it: unless you've got a Lithium Lick in your bedroom, you're going to have to admit that Steve Jobs' management of NeXT was an exercise in Greek-tragedy-scale hubris. (The story of how Steve himself managed to sabotage a port of QuarkXpress to NeXT is particularly enlightening/jaw-dropping.)
Fault Stross for his technical errors, which are numerous (and already well-documented here). But, as the saying goes, rarely should you attribute to malice what ignorance will just as easily explain.
Linux is a bad example...the GPL exists and works BECAUSE of IP Law, the license gets it's strength from the fact that the only leagal way to copy or derive from a GPL'd work is by accepting the license.
I've seen this line multiple times here, and it's not quite right -- the GPL is a wickedly clever legal hack that protects software which is more-or-less public domain from being absorbed/assimilated by corporations like MS, who "extend and embrace" it and turn it into something over which they have exclusive control. The GPL would be unnecessary in an IP-free world.
If it were not for copyright law, you could just ignore the license and take the code anyway.
And someone else could reverse-engineer what you do with the code and make it publically-available, with no fear of legal retribution from you.
how would they feel if the next mass produced plastic pop star made some record company millions by singing one of their songs without permission, accreditation or compensation?
I'm not sure the mass-produced plastic pop star (MPPPS) could exist in an IP-less world -- but the MPPPS would be equally without recourse if the band in question turned around and released a "remix" version of his/her album.
What usually gets lost in this kind of defense of IP law is that revoking copyright law would actually level the playing field, where it's tilted right now toward those who can claim ownership (and pay for lawyers to defend their claim). Check out the other story today about the guy who posted his own Win98 patch -- MS has the resources to squash him if they wanted to, whether or not they have a valid legal claim. The threat of litigation would be enough. Abolish IP law, and you could have Win98 enthusiasts reverse-engineer the whole bloody OS and patch it reeeeeal good. In that situation, everything's up for grabs -- for everyone, not just those with lawyers on the payroll.
I'd say the fact that compressors are still being utilized is indicative that 98dB is simply not enough for the way all music is currently being engineered, not just for orchestral recordings but for rock and other genres as well.
...you would be talking about sample rates, not sample sizes -- another debate altogether.
Rock/pop is typically compressed even beyond FM radio's tolerances -- most of the time, it doesn't take advantage of the dynamic range that's already available in 16-bit audio. OTOH, for orchestral recordings, 98dB is already more than enough -- I already have to monitor the volume while I'm listening, in order to hear the quiet parts over room noise (while keeping the loud parts from blowing out my eardrums). Frankly, I'd love to see classical CDs compressed a little more than they usually are (to better reflect the difference between the noise floor of a concert hall and the noise floor of a household living room).
[...]eliminate an audio engineer's need to use compressors except in the case of the extraordinarly inept.
For most rock/pop engineers, it's the sales department/radio that forces them to use compression, whether they like it or not -- they're not compressing to fit the dynamic range of CDs, but to make the music "sound loud" on the radio. Classical recordings, OTOH, would actually benefit from some judicious and skillfully-applied compression, making them more listenable in the less-than-ideal conditions in which they're likely to be played.
In terms of frequency response[...]
Places like Wherehouse screwed the pooch without any help from p2p....the one I used to live near started selling used records at $11 a pop, new CDs for $18, and wouldn't buy my copy of the Velvet Underground's first CD (I'd replaced it with the 2-disc reissue) because "it's not in the computer. Are they a local band or something?" Gahhhhh...
I never said that it was ok to attack him or rape him in prison - I simply meant to state that I would have little or no sympathy for the malicious ignorant bastard. If he had no respect for the rights and properties of others... why should we concern ourselves with his well-being?
Because to ignore prison rape when we all know it's going on *is* to sanction it. And to sanction it is ignorant and malicious.
When someone else forcibly removes the product of your labors, your effort to apprehend happiness in a material form has been retarded. Much like the people who can't seem to understand that property crime is every bit as bad as life and liberty crime.
When someone forcibly removes your life or liberty, your ability to apprehend happiness is rendered nil, or close to it. Much like the IQ of anyone who doesn't understand that murder is worse than theft when it comes to depriving someone of happiness (and the ability to pursue the same).
If he is indeed victimized in prison, the person committing the act will have done something horribly wrong - but he himself, having already victimized others, will have little moral grounds on which to erect a legitimate complaint.
...] a crime against property is on the same level as a crime against an individual's life or liberty/freedom.
Uh, nope. Clobbering your server for a week does not rob him of any moral grounds to complain about being raped. To say otherwise is to render the whole concept of "moral grounds" meaningless.
Libertarians [believe
Not the ones who want to be taken seriously. Though I can just see the RIAA incorporating this idea into a new anthem for their anti-P2P ads (apologies to Morrissey...)
The songs that you rip with a smile
Are not portable, burnable files
They're stolen IP, and stolen IP is MURDER
(Do you know how Hilary cries?)
however it might cause the public to demand a more secure OS etc.
I can see the FUD from Microsoft now: "Palladium works with your computer to keep it from being hijacked by hackers -- or child pornographers."
That's a bit of a rush job on the history of Western philosophy since the Renaissance, though the basics aren't too far off.
Postmodernism is an umbrella term for a hodge-podge of methodologies, though the underlying core belief is roughly the same: that there are no solidly-reliable "meta-narratives" (ie. authoritative rules of knowledge) which can lay down absolutes. Religion and science, the two traditional metanarratives, are constantly changing, and sometimes even reversing themselves; sometimes because of new discoveries; other times, because of political pressures.
Political correctness came from the post modern culture, and does indeed seem to hold to the same kind of idea.
Gah. "Political correctness" is, nine times out of ten, a bugaboo that right-wing talk show hosts appropriated from an in-joke on the left (who used the term to describe the more humorless, Maoistic types -- long before Rush Limbaugh used it as a brickbat for bashing anyone to the left of Reagan).
Commonly, it's referring to someone who is so convinced of the rightness of their beliefs that they can only defend them by stigmatizing their critics (Don't think pornography necessarily exploits women, who are paid betten then the men in the industry, etc.? You're a sexist.) And the Left hardly has a corner on such types -- you've got the same kind of people on the Right (Don't think Bush was telling the truth about that Nigerian uranium, even though that's what the evidence says? You're a traitor.), even though they usually get labelled "kooks" or "Ann Coulter", rather than "politically correct."
In other words, "political correctness" is just another name for "ideological extremism" -- which is as old as time, and decidely not postmodern, since the extremist does have a strongly-defined (though ususally not too intellectually-rigorous) morality.
So I guess were both right (how postmodern!)
Actually, you're way off the mark. (Which may be ironic, though I'll leave that to others to debate.)
Dude...back away from the Stallman-ade...
If Quark / Adobe/ whoever really cared about their customers, they would take the 5 minutes it took to make a filter to go to/ from the Scribus format, instead of forcing people to waste time trying to reverse engineer their little data vaults.
So if Quark/Adobe cared about their customers, they'd make it easy for them to...stop being customers?
Is Scribus as good as Quark? No, it is better. Simply because your data is not sealed up in an unknown format.
Oh, please. Is an atomic warhead inferior to a flint axe because its specs are classified?
People who really care about doing desktop publishing should start using Scribus, submitting problem reports and wishlist items, and if they have the interest and skill, start doing a little hacking.
People who do desktop publishing for a living will use the tools that allow them to do what they need to do now, and they're not likely to have much time to try out anything that doesn't meet their immediate needs. People who just want something to make CD covers will turn to something that offers a balance of features and convenience.
People who evangelize open source alternatives to Office, etc., need to realize this before they let fly with the hyperbole. If I have to download & install fink, then work out which window manager, package manager and X11 installation I need -- all this before I can even download and install Scribus -- I'll wait for them to get a standard Aqua/Cocoa installation together before I even bother with it (and stick with AppleWorks in the meantime). And if it can't open a 100+ page 4-color magazine layout and get it ready for prepress, the print shop is unlikely to care how open Scribus' format is.
there is a small evil and vindictive side to me that can't help thinking "take _that_ Green party!" every time he pulls some new enviroment destroying stunt.
At the risk of going offtopic: Gore lost more voters to the Republicans than to the Greens -- more Democrats voted for Bush than Nader. Nader's 3% was a margin of error at best, not the "spoiler" the more vindictive Democrats wanted to make it out to be. Of course, if they had been as aggressive in their public rhetoric with Bush as they were with Nader and the Greens, they might not have lost the election (or the recount) in the first place.
If Nader were smart, he would have tryed to hack a Parlimentary System approach to the problem by making a deal with Gore a few weeks before the election, that if Gore would agree to support certain Green positions (in writing of course) then Nader would tell all his party members to vote for Gore in the election, but to tell the exit pollers that they voted for Nader.
Two things:
1) I think you're grossly underestimating the amount of ill-will Democrats had for Nader; I'm only being half-facetious when I say that they hated him even more than they hated Bush. Had the Greens approached Gore's people with the idea you're proposing, they would probably have been laughed out of the building and told to go screw themselves.
2) Telling the exit pollers they'd voted for Nader when they hadn't would have been, at best, a PR victory for the Greens with no concrete political benefits. In order for the Greens to get on the ballot easily in the next election, they had to get (5%? 6%?) of the vote. If they had done that, and kept doing that over the course of several elections, they might they have been able to wield the kind of political power required to make deals like the one you're proposing.
So, there are, in my opinion, far more reasons to prefer an extension of copyright
But the only reason you've given is, essentially, "because Disney can still profit from Mickey Mouse, and because if it became public domain, they'd lose its value as a commercial asset." And truth be told, that's exactly why it should lapse into the public domain. Disney has made plenty of money from its exclusive license on Mickey; that doesn't entitle them to make money on it in perpetuity.
And the public domain would benefit, in more ways than you've imagined. Let's say I wanted to put together an online history of animation, and wanted to stream video of those early cartoons in their entirety. The cost of licensing one of Disney's first cartoons alone would sink me before I'd even begun.
So what if a (gasp! horror!) porn company made "Mickey Moosecock"? The ability of more "legitimate" artists to make use of one of the most recognizeable symbols of American pop culture without having to get Disney's permission outweighs Disney's "right" to make money forever from one of its properties.
It's not like they aren't milking all their current properties for direct-to-video sequel after sequel. Let 'em make 20 fscking Lion King sequels if they want money -- it's time the Mouse belonged to the public.
I'm also surprised to see Radiohead's name mixed up in this as they're supposedly thinking about abandoning the album format altogether in favor of releasing EPs. Don't see how they're going to lose on album sales if they're not releasing any...