Osama bin Laden, international terrorist leader, was aprehended this morning when he arrived to purchase his permit to engage in subversive activities. bin Laden had ignored the advice of his fellow henchmen to register in Delaware where insurgency laws are considerably more insurgent-friendly.
Yeah, "open source" isn't a single homogenous blob. There's clearly a difference between OpenOffice and some obscure open source tool than vanishes when the author loses interest. Anyone making a buying decision needs to scrutinise the open source project in the same way that they'd do some research before investing in a closed source product.
That is a good point. Herd immunity provides protection for those who choose to not vaccinate, but herd immunity only kicks in at certain level of coverage.
When making a decision we have to consider those who cannot be vaccinated. We can't just pump vaccines willy-nilly in to newborn children, so until we vaccinate them their protection comes from those around them being vaccinated, thus reducing the chances of them coming in to contact with pathogens. Also, there are people with compromised immune systems, and they too rely on herd immunity for their protection.
I'm fine with people rejecting medical treatment on rational grounds, but I consider vaccination to be one of those things we do if we want to live within a modern society. It's like locking doors. Someone living in shack in the middle of nowhere can happily light fires around their house without harming anyone but themselves, but someone living in a city doesn't have the same luxury.
There is some truth there, but I don't think it's their only reason for doing it. DRM can work to a certain extent, in that it makes it awkward for end-users to copy content. Torrenting is far more mainstream than it used to be, but it's still not entirely intuitive. DRM, like all security, is not implemented with the understanding that it'll never be broken. It's more a case of increasing the amount of hassle required to break the system. Your house serves a similar purpose. You keep all your stuff in there, and that deters most thieves from stealing it. It's better than leaving your wallet lying on the pavement outside your house.
DRM is a useful way to "obsolete" the content of the user and force them to buy multiple copies for their devices, but if this was their motivation they've done a pretty bad job of it. At best we could argue that they only want their content viewed on DVD/Blueray players, but not on portable players or computers with no optical drives. That doesn't make much sense to me, since offering more ways of enjoying the content would seem to increase the probability of a purchase. In reality they have been trying to lock us in, but they've done a piss poor job of offering alternatives to piracy.
There are some clever exceptions, such as the Family Guy movie "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side". The DVD version of this includes a code that can be used on the iTunes Store to obtain a version for iPods/iPhones. That's clever, and removes my need to rip my own copy. I bought a copy because I like the show, but also in support of this interesting approach.
The main problem I see is that the content producers have been too slow to respond to the changing needs of their customers, and technology and social changes have left them behind. I want legal download options, and would have bought a show last night if it was iTunes Store. Instead I ended up finding a torrent. Given a choice between difficult to obtain content and something that can just be sucked down through a torrent, it's not difficult to understand why so many people chose the latter.
I had pretty much the same experience as Sycraft-fu. I was a long-term Netscape user (graduating from Mosaic), and when Netscape stalled at 4.7x I hung-on for a while, but eventually ended up moving to iCab and IE. Navigator had fallen too far behind, and IE and Outlook Express were pretty decent replacements for Communicator. Netscape 6 was a bit too late to regain the momentum they'd lost during the intervening years.
Blizzard, since the launch of the Armory, has a pretty iffy track-record when it comes to revealing data. They seem to assume that everyone is happy to have the information shared, but this is a pretty big assumption. Their revealing gold-related statistics causing a bit of a storm. Although it was never possible to determine how much gold someone would have, the statistics made it possible to get a rough idea of how rich someone was likely to be.
The Armory is a great tool, but they really do need to allow players to decide how they want their information shared. I'd be happy if they just had a series of tick boxes along the lines of:
Share achievements Share current gear Share statistics
RPGOutfitter is a site that was doing something similar to the Armory long before the armory appeared, and they did a far better job in allowing users to filter their information.
The rogue port uses a gestures system which personally I find very odd to get to grips with. Might be worth taking a look though.
I'm wondering with transparent buttons would work? Perhaps include the basic directional commands, but add a few more short-but buttons that the player can map to the most commonly used functions. The spell system in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is along the lines I'm thinking.
Although Angband has a theoretically complicated series of controls, I'd suspect that plays for the most part will be using a small subset of the possible abilities.
It kind of depends on the complexity of the shooter. UT2K would be tricky due to it's large selection of weapons and abilities, but the older-style shooters translate pretty nicely. Wolf3D is entertaining, and I've played some nice top-down shooters as well. It's just about developers understanding the platform and then developing games appropriate to it. I can't imagine WoW working terrible well on a simple console controller, since there are too may abilities to map to keys. Even if you present them as buttons, you'd struggle to reach them in time.
I've been fairly impressed by the controls that some developers have devised. Simcity is working pretty well for me, and Wolf3D and some other shooting games are quite easy to control. The screen definitely limits certain types of games though.
Rogue has been ported. I'm not sure how Nethack would do, since the GPL doesn't appear to work very well with the app store terms. I'm hoping that Angband gets ported, but that may have the same licence issues.
The so-called losses are definitely over-stated, but it's pretty hard to determine whether or not someone would truly have purchased the product if they'd not received it for free. The question would be, how do you differentiate between lossless copying and the type that would actually have cost you a sale? Sales are certainly lost, so it'd be silly to totally dismiss that reality purely because record companies exaggerate the figures.
Personally I like the idea that I could write things and chose a licence that others can be compelled by law to honour. Current copyright law is in need of some rewriting, particularly the insane durations allowed.
The question of the amount of money artists receive is a separate issue. There are other outlets for their work, and unfortunately many artists are just doing the same thing that most workers do. Anyone could be making things on a daily basis that a company sells for thousands, but the worker is likely to measure their pay in hundreds. If they don't like the deal, they need to try to change it or strike out on their own.
You'd think that a more reasonable method for handling this kind of thing would be a mechanism in place by which ISPs are required to forward a warning from the copyright holder to the alleged downloader. At least that way the owner of the machine, if honest, could get their system checked out. Even if they're not being entirely honest, it's a chance for them to step back from the abyss. I'd imagine a formal warning with no immediate action would benefit everyone. If the user in question continues to show-up as a file sharer then it's off to court.
I think that they're quite aware that they probably won't get the money. It's more about the deterrent effect it'll have on others. Nothing quite like financial armageddon to dissuade some people from downloading.
The penalty is clearly out of proportion to what she allegedly did, but I can't imagine there being a line of lawyers queuing up to help people who are downloading copyrighted music for free. This is particularly true if a warning was sent but dismissed.
Copyright needs to be reformed, particularly with regards the insane durations now allowed. Trying to justify fairly blatant copyright violation isn't the way to do this.
Linux is a nuisance to them, since their life would be easier if everyone would stop whining and use the OS from the company that the BBC seems to love so much.
Someone needs to take a hammer to the BBC, and get it focussed on doing something useful. Too many parts seem to just ape what the commercial broadcasters are doing. i.e. do we need a tax funded broadcaster to air Beverly Hills Cop II? I reckon there are commercial broadcasters who are just as capable of showing us that masterpiece of world cinema.
Now, of course, the argument is that a business owner would be an idiot to write off 10% of their customer base.
Which is made worse by the fact that the BBC receives pretty heavy funding from the tax payer. The BBC should be providing services that commercial entities don't. Every time they make a decision like this, they're just providing another reason why they should no longer exist. EastEnders was a pretty decent argument in itself.
Don't go giving Christians any ideas. If they're willing to accost people in the street or knock on doors, rolling characters in online games isn't much of a stretch. One of them just gave me a leaflet with a drawing of Christ that's so bloody it'd give Mel Gibson a three day erection.
Yep, in the same way that an act of god is quite literally a verifiable intervention on the part of a deity. Words and phrases don't always have a literal meaning. I've been called a bastard by mates, but it was never meant to imply that I was born out of wedlock.
Piracy has been used to describe copyright infringement since the 19th century.
It depends on the country, but copyright law covers far more than distribution; it also covers your consumption of the material.
The following are illegal under Irish copyright law.
Bringing a stereo to play in a public area where it can be heard by people outside my domestic or family circle. Playing my iPod loud enough for people to hear the music I walk down the street Watching a DVD on a plane (or any other public place) where strangers may be able to see the screen
Obviously the circumstances would be taken in to account by the court, but the law is there.
You would quite rightfully be sent to prison for 55 years. I'd like to see you telnet to port 80 while Bubba is trying to send packets up your rear port.
It's no different to the bogus cease and desist letters that lawyers throw around, knowing themselves that their is no legal basis in their demands.
It's understandable when a layman makes a mistake when asserting their legal rights, but there should be a law against law firms doing this. As far as I know, RICO can only kick-in if plaintif actually files a suit.
Their claim is backed up by the DMCA. The ability to view the source in a browser is clearly an insidious way to circumvent their DRM and reverse engineer their fine web site. I was so impressed by the code, I couldn't resist reading the whole thing.
I'm going to turn myself in to the authorities, and use my phone call to ask my browser vendor to explain why they provided me with such a dangerous hacking tool? Honestly, this is like giving away a revolver with every McDonalds Happy Meal!
Phone is only reliable if used correctly. People dial wrong numbers and leave a voice mail message for a total stranger, without even listening to the recorded message. This happens on my office number, even though I have a very clear recorded message identifying myself and the company I work for.
Letters get lost, and only become moderately reliable when you use a registered post system. Even then, you're only guaranteeing that the item has arrived at the address. You don't know if it'll be received or read by the intended recipient.
Faxes are subject to plenty of reliability issues. Wrong numbers, or poor print quality.
Email can be reliable so long as you use it correctly. If you require confirmation, ask for it in your mail. If you don't receive a reply within the time specified, email again or use an alternate contact method.
It's only going to work if you can prove that the letter was never tampered with. Poor man's copyright is relatively trivial to fake, so it's not going to have a great deal of authority in court.
If you're really worried about something, it's worth getting it notarised. It's relatively cheap, and at least then you'll have legal confirmation that the document existed at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
Osama bin Laden, international terrorist leader, was aprehended this morning when he arrived to purchase his permit to engage in subversive activities. bin Laden had ignored the advice of his fellow henchmen to register in Delaware where insurgency laws are considerably more insurgent-friendly.
(c) AP
Yeah, "open source" isn't a single homogenous blob. There's clearly a difference between OpenOffice and some obscure open source tool than vanishes when the author loses interest. Anyone making a buying decision needs to scrutinise the open source project in the same way that they'd do some research before investing in a closed source product.
In the 1970s it was nigh on impossible to go in to a house without seeing an Alto sitting there next to the TV.
That is a good point. Herd immunity provides protection for those who choose to not vaccinate, but herd immunity only kicks in at certain level of coverage.
When making a decision we have to consider those who cannot be vaccinated. We can't just pump vaccines willy-nilly in to newborn children, so until we vaccinate them their protection comes from those around them being vaccinated, thus reducing the chances of them coming in to contact with pathogens. Also, there are people with compromised immune systems, and they too rely on herd immunity for their protection.
I'm fine with people rejecting medical treatment on rational grounds, but I consider vaccination to be one of those things we do if we want to live within a modern society. It's like locking doors. Someone living in shack in the middle of nowhere can happily light fires around their house without harming anyone but themselves, but someone living in a city doesn't have the same luxury.
There is some truth there, but I don't think it's their only reason for doing it. DRM can work to a certain extent, in that it makes it awkward for end-users to copy content. Torrenting is far more mainstream than it used to be, but it's still not entirely intuitive. DRM, like all security, is not implemented with the understanding that it'll never be broken. It's more a case of increasing the amount of hassle required to break the system. Your house serves a similar purpose. You keep all your stuff in there, and that deters most thieves from stealing it. It's better than leaving your wallet lying on the pavement outside your house.
DRM is a useful way to "obsolete" the content of the user and force them to buy multiple copies for their devices, but if this was their motivation they've done a pretty bad job of it. At best we could argue that they only want their content viewed on DVD/Blueray players, but not on portable players or computers with no optical drives. That doesn't make much sense to me, since offering more ways of enjoying the content would seem to increase the probability of a purchase. In reality they have been trying to lock us in, but they've done a piss poor job of offering alternatives to piracy.
There are some clever exceptions, such as the Family Guy movie "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side". The DVD version of this includes a code that can be used on the iTunes Store to obtain a version for iPods/iPhones. That's clever, and removes my need to rip my own copy. I bought a copy because I like the show, but also in support of this interesting approach.
The main problem I see is that the content producers have been too slow to respond to the changing needs of their customers, and technology and social changes have left them behind. I want legal download options, and would have bought a show last night if it was iTunes Store. Instead I ended up finding a torrent. Given a choice between difficult to obtain content and something that can just be sucked down through a torrent, it's not difficult to understand why so many people chose the latter.
I had pretty much the same experience as Sycraft-fu. I was a long-term Netscape user (graduating from Mosaic), and when Netscape stalled at 4.7x I hung-on for a while, but eventually ended up moving to iCab and IE. Navigator had fallen too far behind, and IE and Outlook Express were pretty decent replacements for Communicator. Netscape 6 was a bit too late to regain the momentum they'd lost during the intervening years.
Blizzard, since the launch of the Armory, has a pretty iffy track-record when it comes to revealing data. They seem to assume that everyone is happy to have the information shared, but this is a pretty big assumption. Their revealing gold-related statistics causing a bit of a storm. Although it was never possible to determine how much gold someone would have, the statistics made it possible to get a rough idea of how rich someone was likely to be.
The Armory is a great tool, but they really do need to allow players to decide how they want their information shared. I'd be happy if they just had a series of tick boxes along the lines of:
Share achievements
Share current gear
Share statistics
RPGOutfitter is a site that was doing something similar to the Armory long before the armory appeared, and they did a far better job in allowing users to filter their information.
The rogue port uses a gestures system which personally I find very odd to get to grips with. Might be worth taking a look though.
I'm wondering with transparent buttons would work? Perhaps include the basic directional commands, but add a few more short-but buttons that the player can map to the most commonly used functions. The spell system in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is along the lines I'm thinking.
Although Angband has a theoretically complicated series of controls, I'd suspect that plays for the most part will be using a small subset of the possible abilities.
It kind of depends on the complexity of the shooter. UT2K would be tricky due to it's large selection of weapons and abilities, but the older-style shooters translate pretty nicely. Wolf3D is entertaining, and I've played some nice top-down shooters as well. It's just about developers understanding the platform and then developing games appropriate to it. I can't imagine WoW working terrible well on a simple console controller, since there are too may abilities to map to keys. Even if you present them as buttons, you'd struggle to reach them in time.
I've been fairly impressed by the controls that some developers have devised. Simcity is working pretty well for me, and Wolf3D and some other shooting games are quite easy to control. The screen definitely limits certain types of games though.
Rogue has been ported. I'm not sure how Nethack would do, since the GPL doesn't appear to work very well with the app store terms. I'm hoping that Angband gets ported, but that may have the same licence issues.
The so-called losses are definitely over-stated, but it's pretty hard to determine whether or not someone would truly have purchased the product if they'd not received it for free. The question would be, how do you differentiate between lossless copying and the type that would actually have cost you a sale? Sales are certainly lost, so it'd be silly to totally dismiss that reality purely because record companies exaggerate the figures.
Personally I like the idea that I could write things and chose a licence that others can be compelled by law to honour. Current copyright law is in need of some rewriting, particularly the insane durations allowed.
The question of the amount of money artists receive is a separate issue. There are other outlets for their work, and unfortunately many artists are just doing the same thing that most workers do. Anyone could be making things on a daily basis that a company sells for thousands, but the worker is likely to measure their pay in hundreds. If they don't like the deal, they need to try to change it or strike out on their own.
You'd think that a more reasonable method for handling this kind of thing would be a mechanism in place by which ISPs are required to forward a warning from the copyright holder to the alleged downloader. At least that way the owner of the machine, if honest, could get their system checked out. Even if they're not being entirely honest, it's a chance for them to step back from the abyss. I'd imagine a formal warning with no immediate action would benefit everyone. If the user in question continues to show-up as a file sharer then it's off to court.
I think that they're quite aware that they probably won't get the money. It's more about the deterrent effect it'll have on others. Nothing quite like financial armageddon to dissuade some people from downloading.
The penalty is clearly out of proportion to what she allegedly did, but I can't imagine there being a line of lawyers queuing up to help people who are downloading copyrighted music for free. This is particularly true if a warning was sent but dismissed.
Copyright needs to be reformed, particularly with regards the insane durations now allowed. Trying to justify fairly blatant copyright violation isn't the way to do this.
Linux is a nuisance to them, since their life would be easier if everyone would stop whining and use the OS from the company that the BBC seems to love so much.
Someone needs to take a hammer to the BBC, and get it focussed on doing something useful. Too many parts seem to just ape what the commercial broadcasters are doing. i.e. do we need a tax funded broadcaster to air Beverly Hills Cop II? I reckon there are commercial broadcasters who are just as capable of showing us that masterpiece of world cinema.
Now, of course, the argument is that a business owner would be an idiot to write off 10% of their customer base.
Which is made worse by the fact that the BBC receives pretty heavy funding from the tax payer. The BBC should be providing services that commercial entities don't. Every time they make a decision like this, they're just providing another reason why they should no longer exist. EastEnders was a pretty decent argument in itself.
Don't go giving Christians any ideas. If they're willing to accost people in the street or knock on doors, rolling characters in online games isn't much of a stretch. One of them just gave me a leaflet with a drawing of Christ that's so bloody it'd give Mel Gibson a three day erection.
Yep, in the same way that an act of god is quite literally a verifiable intervention on the part of a deity. Words and phrases don't always have a literal meaning. I've been called a bastard by mates, but it was never meant to imply that I was born out of wedlock.
Piracy has been used to describe copyright infringement since the 19th century.
It depends on the country, but copyright law covers far more than distribution; it also covers your consumption of the material.
The following are illegal under Irish copyright law.
Bringing a stereo to play in a public area where it can be heard by people outside my domestic or family circle.
Playing my iPod loud enough for people to hear the music I walk down the street
Watching a DVD on a plane (or any other public place) where strangers may be able to see the screen
Obviously the circumstances would be taken in to account by the court, but the law is there.
You would quite rightfully be sent to prison for 55 years. I'd like to see you telnet to port 80 while Bubba is trying to send packets up your rear port.
Yours sincerely.
A concerned reader.
That company are damned good. They must be, since they even have an exclamation at the end of the page title!
It's no different to the bogus cease and desist letters that lawyers throw around, knowing themselves that their is no legal basis in their demands.
It's understandable when a layman makes a mistake when asserting their legal rights, but there should be a law against law firms doing this. As far as I know, RICO can only kick-in if plaintif actually files a suit.
Their claim is backed up by the DMCA. The ability to view the source in a browser is clearly an insidious way to circumvent their DRM and reverse engineer their fine web site. I was so impressed by the code, I couldn't resist reading the whole thing.
I'm going to turn myself in to the authorities, and use my phone call to ask my browser vendor to explain why they provided me with such a dangerous hacking tool? Honestly, this is like giving away a revolver with every McDonalds Happy Meal!
Phone is only reliable if used correctly. People dial wrong numbers and leave a voice mail message for a total stranger, without even listening to the recorded message. This happens on my office number, even though I have a very clear recorded message identifying myself and the company I work for.
Letters get lost, and only become moderately reliable when you use a registered post system. Even then, you're only guaranteeing that the item has arrived at the address. You don't know if it'll be received or read by the intended recipient.
Faxes are subject to plenty of reliability issues. Wrong numbers, or poor print quality.
Email can be reliable so long as you use it correctly. If you require confirmation, ask for it in your mail. If you don't receive a reply within the time specified, email again or use an alternate contact method.
It's only going to work if you can prove that the letter was never tampered with. Poor man's copyright is relatively trivial to fake, so it's not going to have a great deal of authority in court.
If you're really worried about something, it's worth getting it notarised. It's relatively cheap, and at least then you'll have legal confirmation that the document existed at that time.