I'm all for embracing your inner geek...but I would advise you not to let the inner geek ruin your future career prospects by skipping classes. College is an expensive learning experience, and those who profit most from it are the ones who invest their time taking advantage of the opportunities it offers. A Starcraft tournament is about as much of a learning opportunity as a midday kegger.
People still have to dig through all that crap, which can get tedious very quickly. It is essential that MySpace offers an elegant way to guide people to the quality stuff...otherwise it will become the aural equivelant of the video cesspool and copyright-infringing legal hell that is YouTube.
Ah, the dreaded slippery slope argument in reverse. But I think your fears are unfounded: the only people who will block porn are those who are not likely to invest in it, anyway. And the flag could also work in reverse: to enable those seeking porn to locate it more easily. That, to me, looks like a solution designed to improve targeted traffic. How would that cost the industry money?
I've heard the phrase "civil society" bandied around here a lot.
Are we a civil society?
Some people seem to feel it's OK to kill a doctor to save something that looks suspiciously like a cabbage patch doll prototype. Others are willing to kill scientists (and their neighbors, apparently) to save a poop-flinging banana lover. And still others would maim a lumberjack to save a tree.
People will kill other people for all sorts of reasons: they want their money, they want their land, they want their women, they want them off their land, they want them off their women, or they just plain get drunk and pissed off. They are sometimes considered criminals for doing so, but not always. Sometimes its OK to kill other people, because they were killing us, or we suspect they MIGHT kill us, or maybe they just happened to get in the way of people we were trying to kill.
Some people kill other people so they can be in charge of everyone else. If they are really good at it, they get to be. If no one kills them first.
We will kill each other over choices of lifestyles, sexual habits, skin color, religious beliefs or talking about something we don't want to hear. Some people will even kill just for fun.
Sometimes we hire people to kill people, because we have learned that specialists are better at it. Sometime, we have so many people killing eachother that we have to give them uniforms to tell them apart. We spend billions of dollars every year designing and building tools just for killing. We sell them to anyone who wants them.
No, I think we are most decidedly NOT a civil society. I think we are all animals, and the law of the jungle STILL rules. We are just the first animal species in the history of evolution to feel vaguely guilty about it.
It's still a long way from here to Childhood's End.
Ebay may not rape you on shipping charges, but the sellers sure do.
The last item I bought on ebay, I could've bought from Amazon for a few dollars more. But the seller advertised fast shipping, and was a bit cheaper, so I ordered there instead.
A month later, following many unanswered emails, I finally received my item. The seller had ordered it from Amazon themselves and had it shipped to me directly using super-saver shipping. (i.e. media mail)
This was a seller with a 99% rating.
I never even bothered to take it up with Ebay's legendary customer service.
Ebay is a den of thieves, run by thieves. It's got less accountability and a lower barrier to entry than a flea market at a remote Appalachian truck stop. Screw ebay.
I've been working as a freeleance illustrator and designer for twenty years. I appreciate the value of copyright to an artist, but the RIAA and MPAA are behaving more like the Mafia than art lovers. I often permit the free use of my work by others, and while I have suffered minor infringements of my own, the overall cost has been negligable. The fact is, I can always make more art.
The people who get hysterical about infringement are the middlemen...the parasitic suits who are incapable of creating anything of value of there own, and live in morbid fear of losing control of their inventory. Art to them is simply product, and they only get paid because they control access to it. Take away their control, and they are just a bunch of out-of-work salesmen.
Copyright laws need to balance the needs of the creator with the needs of everyone else. Current copyright laws offer far more protection for me than I have ever needed. I have found that such protection is also largely valueless for the small businessman, since even the best laws are only as good as the lawyer you can afford to enforce them.
That's incorrect. The Studio's make much, much more on DVD sales than ticket sales. Theater releases have become widely regarded as sales promotion for the DVD's themselves. IT has been that way since videotape entered the mainstream (amid a flurry of lawsuits not unlike the current round of hysterics)
I think your wrong. The geeks are good at programming precisely because they DON'T leave their basements. If they had a girlfirend, they would find themselves far less interested in learning the nuances of C++.
(I often wonder if there are ANY experts in the field of programming, given that the entire programming landscape changes faster than Madonna's self-image. How can you become an expert at writing your name in the sand?)
Anyway, I don't think non-geeks are better at programming. I just think they do a better job of convincing other people that they are.
I cite as an example the continually growing excellence of Windows...
This doesn't suprise me. There is a long tradition of pilots lying about medical conditions to get or stay airborne. Pilots are also notorious for neglecting medical problems because they don't want to see a doctor and risk being grounded. It's that way in civilian flying, too. (although the FAA will most likely grant a private pilot a waiver for almost anything, and sport pilots don't even need a medical)
I suspect that the risks are exaggerated, though. Part of the reason for such stringent requirements to be a pilot is that there are more qualified applicants than there are planes. You have to sort them out somehow.
If we ever start losing a war, watch how quickly the minimum standards change. You'll start seeing cardboard cutouts of Tom Cruise by the front gate of the airstrip that read "You must be THIS tall to fly"...
I think there is a perfectly legal and legitimate marketplace that is thriving in the digital age: the second-hand market. Secondhand media prices tend to reflect the true market value of the product, rather than the over-optimistic price demanded by retailers.
The problem is, this has morphed into a black market...not because laws have failed...but because the market has performed as predictably as ever. Thanks to the ease of replication of digital media, the supply of entertainment has been raised to nearly infinity, and so the laws of supply and demand have accordingly lowered the street value of entertainment to zero.
Imagine what will happen when the majority of material goods achieve this same ease of distribution and duplication. Don't laugh...you can use a 3-D printer to manufacture real objects now. What happens when you can buy one of THOSE at Costco?
DRM is the unwanted band aid of desperate fat cats stalling for time. Our culture is facing a much more far-reaching problem: the market economy just hit the ground harder than Humpty Dumpty.
As a pilot, I can explain the post-911 weather pattern changes: I had just gotten my license, and it was some sort of sick cosmic irony that there should be nothing but sunny skies for the entire time I was forbidden to fly.
The biggest problem with the superior army that never fights is that peacetime military politics insure that it won't stay superior for long...militaries rapidly lose their battlefield effectiveness during peacetime, as politicians whittle away at their training budgets, contracters fudge tests on unproven weapons and yes men overrun the higher ranks.
The US managed to temporarily reverse this trend in the post Vietnam environment because those who served there had reached the upper echelons, and were resolved not to be repeat that failure. A new emphasis on training, an all volunteer army and a ton of money pumped into it during the Reagan era produced the very capable military machine that cleaned the Iraqi's clock during the first Gulf War.
Now watch the inevitable decline as the current administration repeats the mistakes of Kennedy and Johnson, by employing their war machine in morale-sapping police actions, buying expensive weapons built for a nonexistent cold war and chipping away at the more intangible areas of the budget (like training, pay and VA benefits) that are essential for maintaining an effective fighting force.
I have yet to see a robot dog that can follow my kid down the stairs, eating every single potato chip he drops.
Why spend hundreds of dollars on a anthropomorphic toaster by Sony with a crap warranty when you can own a miracle of millions of years of evolution that will last up to 15 years for next to nothing?
A book author typically makes less than five grand for a GOOD selling book, which can take months or even years to produce and get published. Copyright law helps to insure that he makes royalties above and beyond his advance(sometimes), and makes money from resale rights. You business model would see him lose a lot of that money, and spend valuable writing time touring the country signing books in exchange for his pittance. (Which writers rarely get paid for at all right now, beyond expenses...it is normally part of their contract that the publisher has the discretion to request them for special appearances while promoting their book.)
Most bands working the clubs make a few hundred dollars a night, which is split among the members and their crew and rarely adds up to much. Big name acts make millions, but booking their huge venues is not cheap, either, and a LOT of people get their fingers in the pie. They often make less than you would think.
Commerical artists get paid very little for their work, unless they are (once again) among the top tier of a very competitive industry. Stock art and photography have put increasing pressure on their revenue sources, as most publishers look for low cost solutions to their graphic needs. Art has, and always will, take time to produce, and a single sale rarely justifies the time invested in a work of art. Copyright law enables the artist to offer different rights packages to different clients (first North American serial rights, reprint rights, exclusive rights for s particular sales medium, etc), which can help offset what would otherwise be a clear loss.
It's that, or the galleries.
All of these professions exist because copyright law makes them workable.
Copyright law could stand to be loosened (specifically, it's duration needs to be shortened, and it needs to be less retrictive regarding derivative works), but abolishing it altogether is not such a good idea from the standpoint of most of the truly creative people in this country. It's hard enough to make a living as an artist, musician or writer now. We'd have to put them on welfare if we abolished copyright law altogether.
Everyone here seems to asume that copyright law is just the lapdog of large corporations and overpaid celebrities. In some ways, it is. But for every band of thugs like the RIAA, there are dozens of little guys ekeing out a bit of money from the arts who really need that protection...mainly from parasites like the RIAA. (Most people are too decent to rip you off, but corporations will rob you blind in a heartbeat.)
What you propose is intellectual socialism. I think we've all seen just how well things work out when "the people" collectively own all the property.
Why does everyone get so excited about homosexual marriage? I think the whole idea is rather silly, but in the end (ouch) it utterly fails to concern me. I figure it is self-limiting behavior, from an evolutionary standpoint. (Even if gays adopt, no kid raised by fags is going to survive the fifth grade). So why legislate it at all? It's not like those little pink houses are going to suddenly crowd you out of suburbia unless you hire a decorator named Armand.
Banning gay marriage is like outlawing suicide, only less effective and slightly funnier.
Just a footnote: China's society is largely rural and relatively corrupt, so the degree to which the "one child" edict is enforced is debatable. This is a law that is routinely bent, as well as containing numerous exceptions. (If the first child is a girl, or handicapped, they may try again, for example) In any event, poor access to contraception and lack of education are causing as many abortions as government policy. The adoption of ultrasound equipment means that many abortions are sex selective (favoring the productive males). Despite the new techno wrinkles, these sorts of infanticide have been practiced by many societies for centuries.
It's problematical to build an Orwellian information society when you are struggling to bring electricity to half of your country. Don't blame information for China's problems. Blame medieval attitudes about childbirth.
I just submitted this little gem to both CNN and Wired news tip lines. That will undoubtably light a fire somewhere.
I suggest everyone else do likewise. Hanging out here and complaining about it won't accomplish anything...but when Paypal's offices get a call from CNN, watch how fast that account gets unfrozen...
As a web designer, I don't run dynamic HTML here. It's actually quite nice. Since the Flash plug-in is in use by the vast majority of the non-geek community, it makes my life SO much easier. I don't have to be bothered by annoying backseat designers.
IF someone is stupid enough to remove an important part of their computer's functionality so that many websites are unusable, then that's their problem. I personally avoid designing for people like that.
Clearly, many of you have never registered a copyright before. Almost everything you would ever want to register for copyright requires you to file a HARDCOPY with the US Copyright Office.
SO, the most common (and efficient) way to copyright a work is to fill out a form (available by mail with a simple phone call), take your document (or disk, or whatever), stuff them in an envelope along with your money order, and drop it in the mailbox. I know it all sounds very technical, but it is a tried and true system that has been in place for decades, does not discriminate between various brands of mailboxes and is quite user friendly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for embracing your inner geek...but I would advise you not to let the inner geek ruin your future career prospects by skipping classes. College is an expensive learning experience, and those who profit most from it are the ones who invest their time taking advantage of the opportunities it offers. A Starcraft tournament is about as much of a learning opportunity as a midday kegger.
I live in Cincinnati...everyone here is retired and grossly overweight. It SHOULD be a crime for them to take their shirts off in public.
People still have to dig through all that crap, which can get tedious very quickly. It is essential that MySpace offers an elegant way to guide people to the quality stuff...otherwise it will become the aural equivelant of the video cesspool and copyright-infringing legal hell that is YouTube.
Ah, the dreaded slippery slope argument in reverse. But I think your fears are unfounded: the only people who will block porn are those who are not likely to invest in it, anyway. And the flag could also work in reverse: to enable those seeking porn to locate it more easily. That, to me, looks like a solution designed to improve targeted traffic. How would that cost the industry money?
I've heard the phrase "civil society" bandied around here a lot.
Are we a civil society?
Some people seem to feel it's OK to kill a doctor to save something that looks suspiciously like a cabbage patch doll prototype. Others are willing to kill scientists (and their neighbors, apparently) to save a poop-flinging banana lover. And still others would maim a lumberjack to save a tree.
People will kill other people for all sorts of reasons: they want their money, they want their land, they want their women, they want them off their land, they want them off their women, or they just plain get drunk and pissed off. They are sometimes considered criminals for doing so, but not always. Sometimes its OK to kill other people, because they were killing us, or we suspect they MIGHT kill us, or maybe they just happened to get in the way of people we were trying to kill.
Some people kill other people so they can be in charge of everyone else. If they are really good at it, they get to be. If no one kills them first.
We will kill each other over choices of lifestyles, sexual habits, skin color, religious beliefs or talking about something we don't want to hear. Some people will even kill just for fun.
Sometimes we hire people to kill people, because we have learned that specialists are better at it. Sometime, we have so many people killing eachother that we have to give them uniforms to tell them apart. We spend billions of dollars every year designing and building tools just for killing. We sell them to anyone who wants them.
No, I think we are most decidedly NOT a civil society. I think we are all animals, and the law of the jungle STILL rules. We are just the first animal species in the history of evolution to feel vaguely guilty about it.
It's still a long way from here to Childhood's End.
Ebay may not rape you on shipping charges, but the sellers sure do.
The last item I bought on ebay, I could've bought from Amazon for a few dollars more. But the seller advertised fast shipping, and was a bit cheaper, so I ordered there instead.
A month later, following many unanswered emails, I finally received my item. The seller had ordered it from Amazon themselves and had it shipped to me directly using super-saver shipping. (i.e. media mail)
This was a seller with a 99% rating.
I never even bothered to take it up with Ebay's legendary customer service.
Ebay is a den of thieves, run by thieves. It's got less accountability and a lower barrier to entry than a flea market at a remote Appalachian truck stop. Screw ebay.
I've been working as a freeleance illustrator and designer for twenty years. I appreciate the value of copyright to an artist, but the RIAA and MPAA are behaving more like the Mafia than art lovers. I often permit the free use of my work by others, and while I have suffered minor infringements of my own, the overall cost has been negligable. The fact is, I can always make more art.
The people who get hysterical about infringement are the middlemen...the parasitic suits who are incapable of creating anything of value of there own, and live in morbid fear of losing control of their inventory. Art to them is simply product, and they only get paid because they control access to it. Take away their control, and they are just a bunch of out-of-work salesmen.
Copyright laws need to balance the needs of the creator with the needs of everyone else. Current copyright laws offer far more protection for me than I have ever needed. I have found that such protection is also largely valueless for the small businessman, since even the best laws are only as good as the lawyer you can afford to enforce them.
That's incorrect. The Studio's make much, much more on DVD sales than ticket sales. Theater releases have become widely regarded as sales promotion for the DVD's themselves. IT has been that way since videotape entered the mainstream (amid a flurry of lawsuits not unlike the current round of hysterics)
I think your wrong. The geeks are good at programming precisely because they DON'T leave their basements. If they had a girlfirend, they would find themselves far less interested in learning the nuances of C++.
(I often wonder if there are ANY experts in the field of programming, given that the entire programming landscape changes faster than Madonna's self-image. How can you become an expert at writing your name in the sand?)
Anyway, I don't think non-geeks are better at programming. I just think they do a better job of convincing other people that they are.
I cite as an example the continually growing excellence of Windows...
This doesn't suprise me. There is a long tradition of pilots lying about medical conditions to get or stay airborne. Pilots are also notorious for neglecting medical problems because they don't want to see a doctor and risk being grounded. It's that way in civilian flying, too. (although the FAA will most likely grant a private pilot a waiver for almost anything, and sport pilots don't even need a medical)
I suspect that the risks are exaggerated, though. Part of the reason for such stringent requirements to be a pilot is that there are more qualified applicants than there are planes. You have to sort them out somehow.
If we ever start losing a war, watch how quickly the minimum standards change. You'll start seeing cardboard cutouts of Tom Cruise by the front gate of the airstrip that read "You must be THIS tall to fly"...
Yeah, well, we would travel the world more if they would just let us get onto the airplane...
I think my luggage made it to New Zealand once, though.
I think there is a perfectly legal and legitimate marketplace that is thriving in the digital age: the second-hand market. Secondhand media prices tend to reflect the true market value of the product, rather than the over-optimistic price demanded by retailers.
The problem is, this has morphed into a black market...not because laws have failed...but because the market has performed as predictably as ever. Thanks to the ease of replication of digital media, the supply of entertainment has been raised to nearly infinity, and so the laws of supply and demand have accordingly lowered the street value of entertainment to zero.
Imagine what will happen when the majority of material goods achieve this same ease of distribution and duplication. Don't laugh...you can use a 3-D printer to manufacture real objects now. What happens when you can buy one of THOSE at Costco?
DRM is the unwanted band aid of desperate fat cats stalling for time. Our culture is facing a much more far-reaching problem: the market economy just hit the ground harder than Humpty Dumpty.
As a pilot, I can explain the post-911 weather pattern changes: I had just gotten my license, and it was some sort of sick cosmic irony that there should be nothing but sunny skies for the entire time I was forbidden to fly.
The biggest problem with the superior army that never fights is that peacetime military politics insure that it won't stay superior for long...militaries rapidly lose their battlefield effectiveness during peacetime, as politicians whittle away at their training budgets, contracters fudge tests on unproven weapons and yes men overrun the higher ranks.
The US managed to temporarily reverse this trend in the post Vietnam environment because those who served there had reached the upper echelons, and were resolved not to be repeat that failure. A new emphasis on training, an all volunteer army and a ton of money pumped into it during the Reagan era produced the very capable military machine that cleaned the Iraqi's clock during the first Gulf War.
Now watch the inevitable decline as the current administration repeats the mistakes of Kennedy and Johnson, by employing their war machine in morale-sapping police actions, buying expensive weapons built for a nonexistent cold war and chipping away at the more intangible areas of the budget (like training, pay and VA benefits) that are essential for maintaining an effective fighting force.
Statistically, you are more likely to die at the hands of your own government, than die by the actions of a foreign attacker.
The most secure place to live is a prison, but I'm not sure I want to live in one.
I have yet to see a robot dog that can follow my kid down the stairs, eating every single potato chip he drops.
Why spend hundreds of dollars on a anthropomorphic toaster by Sony with a crap warranty when you can own a miracle of millions of years of evolution that will last up to 15 years for next to nothing?
A book author typically makes less than five grand for a GOOD selling book, which can take months or even years to produce and get published. Copyright law helps to insure that he makes royalties above and beyond his advance(sometimes), and makes money from resale rights. You business model would see him lose a lot of that money, and spend valuable writing time touring the country signing books in exchange for his pittance. (Which writers rarely get paid for at all right now, beyond expenses...it is normally part of their contract that the publisher has the discretion to request them for special appearances while promoting their book.)
Most bands working the clubs make a few hundred dollars a night, which is split among the members and their crew and rarely adds up to much. Big name acts make millions, but booking their huge venues is not cheap, either, and a LOT of people get their fingers in the pie. They often make less than you would think.
Commerical artists get paid very little for their work, unless they are (once again) among the top tier of a very competitive industry. Stock art and photography have put increasing pressure on their revenue sources, as most publishers look for low cost solutions to their graphic needs. Art has, and always will, take time to produce, and a single sale rarely justifies the time invested in a work of art. Copyright law enables the artist to offer different rights packages to different clients (first North American serial rights, reprint rights, exclusive rights for s particular sales medium, etc), which can help offset what would otherwise be a clear loss.
It's that, or the galleries.
All of these professions exist because copyright law makes them workable.
Copyright law could stand to be loosened (specifically, it's duration needs to be shortened, and it needs to be less retrictive regarding derivative works), but abolishing it altogether is not such a good idea from the standpoint of most of the truly creative people in this country. It's hard enough to make a living as an artist, musician or writer now. We'd have to put them on welfare if we abolished copyright law altogether.
Everyone here seems to asume that copyright law is just the lapdog of large corporations and overpaid celebrities. In some ways, it is. But for every band of thugs like the RIAA, there are dozens of little guys ekeing out a bit of money from the arts who really need that protection...mainly from parasites like the RIAA. (Most people are too decent to rip you off, but corporations will rob you blind in a heartbeat.)
What you propose is intellectual socialism. I think we've all seen just how well things work out when "the people" collectively own all the property.
No thanks.
Why does everyone get so excited about homosexual marriage? I think the whole idea is rather silly, but in the end (ouch) it utterly fails to concern me. I figure it is self-limiting behavior, from an evolutionary standpoint. (Even if gays adopt, no kid raised by fags is going to survive the fifth grade). So why legislate it at all? It's not like those little pink houses are going to suddenly crowd you out of suburbia unless you hire a decorator named Armand.
Banning gay marriage is like outlawing suicide, only less effective and slightly funnier.
Oh, great, now I have that song stuck in my head. You know the one
I mean...
I made a portrait of Lovecraft with images and a quote from one of my personal favorite stories, the Dreams in the Witch House. You can view it here:
:-)
http://www.spanishcastle.com/lovecraft.html
It's silent, too
Just a footnote: China's society is largely rural and relatively corrupt, so the degree to which the "one child" edict is enforced is debatable. This is a law that is routinely bent, as well as containing numerous exceptions. (If the first child is a girl, or handicapped, they may try again, for example) In any event, poor access to contraception and lack of education are causing as many abortions as government policy. The adoption of ultrasound equipment means that many abortions are sex selective (favoring the productive males). Despite the new techno wrinkles, these sorts of infanticide have been practiced by many societies for centuries.
It's problematical to build an Orwellian information society when you are struggling to bring electricity to half of your country. Don't blame information for China's problems. Blame medieval attitudes about childbirth.
Has anyone tried Something Awful's site today? It seems to be down...wonder what the story is?
I just submitted this little gem to both CNN and Wired news tip lines. That will undoubtably light a fire somewhere.
I suggest everyone else do likewise. Hanging out here and complaining about it won't accomplish anything...but when Paypal's offices get a call from CNN, watch how fast that account gets unfrozen...
As a web designer, I don't run dynamic HTML here. It's actually quite nice. Since the Flash plug-in is in use by the vast majority of the non-geek community, it makes my life SO much easier. I don't have to be bothered by annoying backseat designers.
IF someone is stupid enough to remove an important part of their computer's functionality so that many websites are unusable, then that's their problem. I personally avoid designing for people like that.
That's just technophobia in my opinion.
Clearly, many of you have never registered a copyright before. Almost everything you would ever want to register for copyright requires you to file a HARDCOPY with the US Copyright Office.
SO, the most common (and efficient) way to copyright a work is to fill out a form (available by mail with a simple phone call), take your document (or disk, or whatever), stuff them in an envelope along with your money order, and drop it in the mailbox. I know it all sounds very technical, but it is a tried and true system that has been in place for decades, does not discriminate between various brands of mailboxes and is quite user friendly.
Really, you should try it.
Get some fresh air.