It's interesting to see how differently these things can end. Bridgeport v. Dimension piants a picture where taking even very small samples can cost you your copyright if you didn't do it with permission. On the other hand, when Timbaland sampled part of a chiptune, changing small parts, the case was tossed out.
Of course it's also interesting to see the attitude in the latter case, with Timbaland alleging that sampling is immune from copyright infringement charges.
Most likely the truth is that sampling without permission is perfectly fine if your lawyers are more expensive than those of the original artist.
This is very evident at my university. The CS courses are all free of written tests. You either do homework + oral exam at the end or no homework + longer oral exam at the end (or you have a seminar, which is presentation + essay). The homework, which is usually done in teams, influences the lecturer's grading decision (usually you get a preliminary grade and can deviate up to one grade from there unless you fail) but the oral exam realistically makes up 100% of your grade. If you fail it you get one retry; if you don't get it right then you fail the course.
I've had two courses (Applied CS 1 and 2) where I did all the homework and the other students in my team lazed off. Final result: We all went in at the same time; they got straight fives (Es) and I went out with a 1.7 (B+/A-).
Oh, and we have very simple rules concerning cheating on essays: If significant parts of your essay appear to have been lifted from an existing essay that's considered plagiarism which we don't tolerate. Unless you manage to defend yourself you automatically fail the course and if it happens more than once you better have a good reason not to be exmatriculated.
I have not heard about a single case of plagiarism during my time at the university. Our CS students are either honest or capable of rewording things.
It's not that big a deal. Just don't enter the United States until after you've put them into your unescapable death trap, at which point you'll naturally disclose your evil plan to them anyway.
The difficulty arises if images are shown to provoke and promote illegal behaviour.
I'd like to see them codify a ban of that. Hollywood would spend billions of Dollars in bribes as, quite seriously, even the sweetest romantic comedy is virtually guaranteed to include depictions of illegal acts. Don't even get me started on TV shows like House. Even with the studios being very careful, a ban on depictions of illegal behavior would all but kill the action genre, not to mention heist movies and most dark comedies.
Of course that's unlikely to happen because a picture of Bart Simpson naked will scar you for life while the Saw series is positively wholesome.
Odd, that is not the behavior I've observed (using 2.6.7 currently). ctrl + s always saves normally for me, I even tested it just a moment ago to verify that.
Remember that we're talking about the yet-unreleased version 2.8 where "Save" can only write to XCF variants and everything else is handled by the new "Export" menu item, complete with different shortcut. Thus, in a stock configuration, Ctrl-S will not save as expected unless you were working on an XCF file all along.
Image Manipulation actually. Thus I find it funny when people try to compare it to Photoshop, since Photoshop's goals are entirely different and much closer to say.. Krita.
It's certainly moving away from the concept of being an image manipulation tool. As of 2.8 the default formats to save to are no longer images, they're GIMP project files. You only work with images when exporting to an image format. That's not the behavior of an image editor; it's entirely consistent with how multimedia creation suites work, though.
On the other hand I rarely have an XCF master file as I most often use the GIMP to modify existing files. Having Ctrl-S go to a dialog that insists I save as XCF means to me that the GIMP doen't follow established conventions (Ctrl-S saves) for no apparent reason.
Apparently the developers see the GIMP as a media creation suite. Unfortunately a lot of users want an image editor, which is something different.
Oh well, at least the GIMP allows you to change the shortcuty to I can bind Ctrl-S to "Export", forget they ever changed the name and live with having to jump through hoops to save to XCF.
It still goes against what most other programs are doing and exposes the program's internals to the user: Just because it makes a difference to how the program handles saving internally the user is expected to use two different methods of acquiring the same goal - turning the stuff he worked on into a file on the disk. While meaningful to the developer, this distinction is fairly useless to the user.
Yes, you can lose information by saving in certain formats. That's why they show you a warning dialog if you would. If they're worried about users losing the information anyway, make the dialog friendlier.
A real problem is that the new behavior is completely unintuitive in some regards. Open a PNG file, edit and save it. You get asked where to save your new XCF file because "Save" means "save as XCF", not "save in the current format"; for that you'd go to "Export" (which doesn't allow you to choose your format; that would be "Export As").
It also makes the menu less intuitive. I don't care about what the GIMP does internally, when I want my picture written to the disk I want to save it as a PNG, not export it. "Save as" is the logical place to look for a way to save in various formats.
And they don't have an "Import" menu item for opening files in a non-XCF format. If I can't natively save to non-XCF files, why can I natively read them? File formats tht are alien enough to require export functionality also require import funcationality to be used in most other programs.
We end up with a weird hybrid approach that isn't consistent with itself on whether non-XCF formats are considered native or not. Cue the people who look at the GIMP for a few minutes and conclude that it's no alternative to Paint.NET or Photoshop because it doesn't support PNG and JPG well enough to include them in the save dialog.
It would b more reasonable if they renamed "Save (as)" to "Save as XCF (to)" and "Export (as)" to "Save as other format (to)". Bonus points of the menu item for "Save as other format" repaces "other format" with the name of the current format if applicable.
As soon as 2.8 is out, we can open a bug ticket, noting that the functionality of "File > Export" is unneccessarily duplicated in "File > Save" and the latter should be removed. It is redundant, after all.
They're not going to change the world until they come to Preston Candover, Visselhövede and Cudzynovice. It's a bit like 3G - while it works just fine in the big cities it start being much less useful once you get thirty kilometers out and the infrastructure just isn't there.
That's the advantage of home-charged electric vehicles: The infrastructure is pretty much already in place. You don't have to hope that some corporation will decide to expand to your area sometime within the next twenty years.
By the way, what about "numbers posts"? There are cases of spam posts being made that are very similar in style to the transmissions of numbers stations - just strings of short blocks of numbers. Has anyone ever found out what those are about? My guess is that it's some botnet's C&C channel but that's just a guess.
A few questions remain, though: Are these new bacteria especially hardy? We still need to brush our teeth to avoid calculus buildup and bad breath and auch a replacement therapy isn't very useful if a few brushings kill off enough of them for traditional caries bacteria to take hold again.
I expect the answer to be negative, though - they'll probably see no problem in you having to get a complete mouth disinfection and bacteria placement therapy once a year. Then again, if it's cheap enough (USA)/covered by standard health insurance (everywhere else) I'm fine with it.
The problem is, this doesn't just work against politicians. It also works against countries. The USA claim to have informations about terrorists, which they are unwilling to share with the Eurpean Union unless we hand over the data. Let's see what kind of headlines we can come up with based on that.
Generic newspapers: USA Hold Free World at Gunpoint, Demand Bank Data for Continued Safety USA Withholding Terrorism Data Until Demands are Met
Big, reputable papers: America's Deadly Game - how Uncle Sam trades our safety for his convenience Give Freely or Die - how Washington uses terrorists as leverage against our privacy From the Land of the Free to the land of the spies - a timeline
Sensationalist rags: ARE THE USA PART OF THE AXIS OF EVIL? HOW AMERICA IS PROTECTING THE TERRORISTS OBAMA BIN LADEN WANTS TO MESS WITH YOUR BANK ACCOUNT CAN THE USA SUPPORT TERRORISTS? "YES, WE CAN!"
Yes, there's some horrible spin in there but I can really imagine seeing those headlines. It's really easy to spin this to make the USA look really bad and in a sense it's not even that wrong a viewpoint: The USA, who keep going on about how terrorism is the biggest problem of our generation, willingly keep terrorism-relevant information from others. Either they have been lying about how dangerous the terrorists are or their conduct is seriously unethical. Of course anyone with a bone to pick will have a ball going on from there.
It'll continue with the users. Those, such as yourself, who buy Apple products expecting a useful product will become dismayed, never buy another Apple product, and will suggest to other people that they also avoid Apple.
Except for those Apple users who have actually ever used an Apple product and will probably keep doing so because most Apple products are actually fairly good. As are most Microsoft products, for the record, even if I dislike them.
Yes, my iPod touch doesn't multitask. Doesn't mean it's not still a decent MP3 player with a PDA built in, which I got for a extremely good price (35 EUR through the Back to School rebate offer); multitasking would occasionally be nice but I don't miss it enough to care. Yes, it needs iTunes, which apprently sucks big time on Windows. This doesn't faze me either as iTunes is a pretty good program on Mac OS and I use it anyway.
Yes, Macs are expensive. Until you require a certain feature set (like anything involving FireWire 800) that puts Mac prices on equal footing with those of comparable devices. That might even happen if you're shopping for a decent notebook; the Apple tax is above zero mainly for desktop systems.
It's easy to find things to hate about the company but it's not like they consistently produce useless junk that people pay pay at 500% market value for no reason at all. Most consumers do use their brain when making purchases and they have (often valid) reasons for their decision. Yes, even those who buy products you personally dislike.
Hell, I was in the mall last week and overheard a group of teens making fun of Apple products as being for "queerfags".
Just like Modern Warfare 2, every video game but Modern Warfare 2, Win7, every OS but Win7, rap, every music genre but rap (and especially metal), metal, every music genre but metal (and especially rap), motorcycles, everything but motorcycles... If we assume the failure of everything some teenager has described as "for fags" we are looking at the end of human culture within the next twenty years.
Well, according to one Mr. B.I.G., the amount of problems you have scales with the amount of money in your possession. Therefore, any reduction of Mr. Gates' account balance would only serve to improve his quality of life, which he should greatly appreciate, being among the most troubled people on the planet according to Mr. B.I.G.'s theory.
The terminals saved the game for me. The gameplay isn't the most inspiring but the writing is great. Still didn't pull me all the way through Marathon 2, though.
Very true. From the perspective of a German, this is worryingly similar to the Stasi. Let's hope that we can keep our local censorship jockeys in check; I'd hate to see history repeat itself like that.
Even from the perspective of the state there's a problem with this: If you grow too distrustful of your citizens, they will lose their trust in you. It's very hard to run a country when your own citizens see working against you as noble, especially if you're a control freak.
Take a look at Marathon. It's what Bungie did on the Mac while id released Doom for the IBM. Essentially Doom with fewer weapons, alt-fire and funny monologues. Durandal still ranks high in my list of the best insane AIs. The story is more complex than that of Doom but fairly simple to follow. Well, until you get to the third - pardon - infinitieth part, which is a time travel bonanza full of alternate pasts you never get to see.
The engine used for Marathon 2 and Infinity is available as Aleph One; the first part has been ported as an addon called M1A1. Everything is available straight from Bungie for OS X, Linux and Windows.
I think they should remake The Passion of Christ with lots of 3D camera sweeps and huge explosions specifically to prove your point. Also because I really like bad movies.
However, since Earth isn't infinite it has a nonzero population. This holds true for most of the plural Earths and those other ones don't count. Therefore, the population of Earth (above zero) is bigger than that of the rest of the universe (zero), which makes Sol the single most important station. q.e.d.
On the contrary, they're happy. Hapy to do anything to anyone with anyone. There are pairings of every possible character in the books with every possible character in the books, including themselves, and all of them are Serious Business.
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It's interesting to see how differently these things can end. Bridgeport v. Dimension piants a picture where taking even very small samples can cost you your copyright if you didn't do it with permission. On the other hand, when Timbaland sampled part of a chiptune, changing small parts, the case was tossed out.
Of course it's also interesting to see the attitude in the latter case, with Timbaland alleging that sampling is immune from copyright infringement charges.
Most likely the truth is that sampling without permission is perfectly fine if your lawyers are more expensive than those of the original artist.
Of course it's possible they are unaware of the previous work.
This is very evident at my university. The CS courses are all free of written tests. You either do homework + oral exam at the end or no homework + longer oral exam at the end (or you have a seminar, which is presentation + essay). The homework, which is usually done in teams, influences the lecturer's grading decision (usually you get a preliminary grade and can deviate up to one grade from there unless you fail) but the oral exam realistically makes up 100% of your grade. If you fail it you get one retry; if you don't get it right then you fail the course.
I've had two courses (Applied CS 1 and 2) where I did all the homework and the other students in my team lazed off. Final result: We all went in at the same time; they got straight fives (Es) and I went out with a 1.7 (B+/A-).
Oh, and we have very simple rules concerning cheating on essays: If significant parts of your essay appear to have been lifted from an existing essay that's considered plagiarism which we don't tolerate. Unless you manage to defend yourself you automatically fail the course and if it happens more than once you better have a good reason not to be exmatriculated.
I have not heard about a single case of plagiarism during my time at the university. Our CS students are either honest or capable of rewording things.
And you'll have to write it again so it won't be as good? That's kind of... a bummer.
It's not that big a deal. Just don't enter the United States until after you've put them into your unescapable death trap, at which point you'll naturally disclose your evil plan to them anyway.
I'd like to see them codify a ban of that. Hollywood would spend billions of Dollars in bribes as, quite seriously, even the sweetest romantic comedy is virtually guaranteed to include depictions of illegal acts. Don't even get me started on TV shows like House. Even with the studios being very careful, a ban on depictions of illegal behavior would all but kill the action genre, not to mention heist movies and most dark comedies.
Of course that's unlikely to happen because a picture of Bart Simpson naked will scar you for life while the Saw series is positively wholesome.
Remember that we're talking about the yet-unreleased version 2.8 where "Save" can only write to XCF variants and everything else is handled by the new "Export" menu item, complete with different shortcut. Thus, in a stock configuration, Ctrl-S will not save as expected unless you were working on an XCF file all along.
It's certainly moving away from the concept of being an image manipulation tool. As of 2.8 the default formats to save to are no longer images, they're GIMP project files. You only work with images when exporting to an image format. That's not the behavior of an image editor; it's entirely consistent with how multimedia creation suites work, though.
On the other hand I rarely have an XCF master file as I most often use the GIMP to modify existing files. Having Ctrl-S go to a dialog that insists I save as XCF means to me that the GIMP doen't follow established conventions (Ctrl-S saves) for no apparent reason.
Apparently the developers see the GIMP as a media creation suite. Unfortunately a lot of users want an image editor, which is something different.
Oh well, at least the GIMP allows you to change the shortcuty to I can bind Ctrl-S to "Export", forget they ever changed the name and live with having to jump through hoops to save to XCF.
It still goes against what most other programs are doing and exposes the program's internals to the user: Just because it makes a difference to how the program handles saving internally the user is expected to use two different methods of acquiring the same goal - turning the stuff he worked on into a file on the disk. While meaningful to the developer, this distinction is fairly useless to the user.
Yes, you can lose information by saving in certain formats. That's why they show you a warning dialog if you would. If they're worried about users losing the information anyway, make the dialog friendlier.
A real problem is that the new behavior is completely unintuitive in some regards. Open a PNG file, edit and save it. You get asked where to save your new XCF file because "Save" means "save as XCF", not "save in the current format"; for that you'd go to "Export" (which doesn't allow you to choose your format; that would be "Export As").
It also makes the menu less intuitive. I don't care about what the GIMP does internally, when I want my picture written to the disk I want to save it as a PNG, not export it. "Save as" is the logical place to look for a way to save in various formats.
And they don't have an "Import" menu item for opening files in a non-XCF format. If I can't natively save to non-XCF files, why can I natively read them? File formats tht are alien enough to require export functionality also require import funcationality to be used in most other programs.
We end up with a weird hybrid approach that isn't consistent with itself on whether non-XCF formats are considered native or not. Cue the people who look at the GIMP for a few minutes and conclude that it's no alternative to Paint.NET or Photoshop because it doesn't support PNG and JPG well enough to include them in the save dialog.
It would b more reasonable if they renamed "Save (as)" to "Save as XCF (to)" and "Export (as)" to "Save as other format (to)". Bonus points of the menu item for "Save as other format" repaces "other format" with the name of the current format if applicable.
As soon as 2.8 is out, we can open a bug ticket, noting that the functionality of "File > Export" is unneccessarily duplicated in "File > Save" and the latter should be removed. It is redundant, after all.
They're not going to change the world until they come to Preston Candover, Visselhövede and Cudzynovice. It's a bit like 3G - while it works just fine in the big cities it start being much less useful once you get thirty kilometers out and the infrastructure just isn't there.
That's the advantage of home-charged electric vehicles: The infrastructure is pretty much already in place. You don't have to hope that some corporation will decide to expand to your area sometime within the next twenty years.
By the way, what about "numbers posts"? There are cases of spam posts being made that are very similar in style to the transmissions of numbers stations - just strings of short blocks of numbers. Has anyone ever found out what those are about? My guess is that it's some botnet's C&C channel but that's just a guess.
A few questions remain, though: Are these new bacteria especially hardy? We still need to brush our teeth to avoid calculus buildup and bad breath and auch a replacement therapy isn't very useful if a few brushings kill off enough of them for traditional caries bacteria to take hold again.
I expect the answer to be negative, though - they'll probably see no problem in you having to get a complete mouth disinfection and bacteria placement therapy once a year. Then again, if it's cheap enough (USA)/covered by standard health insurance (everywhere else) I'm fine with it.
The problem is, this doesn't just work against politicians. It also works against countries. The USA claim to have informations about terrorists, which they are unwilling to share with the Eurpean Union unless we hand over the data. Let's see what kind of headlines we can come up with based on that.
Generic newspapers:
USA Hold Free World at Gunpoint, Demand Bank Data for Continued Safety
USA Withholding Terrorism Data Until Demands are Met
Big, reputable papers:
America's Deadly Game - how Uncle Sam trades our safety for his convenience
Give Freely or Die - how Washington uses terrorists as leverage against our privacy
From the Land of the Free to the land of the spies - a timeline
Sensationalist rags:
ARE THE USA PART OF THE AXIS OF EVIL?
HOW AMERICA IS PROTECTING THE TERRORISTS
OBAMA BIN LADEN WANTS TO MESS WITH YOUR BANK ACCOUNT
CAN THE USA SUPPORT TERRORISTS? "YES, WE CAN!"
Yes, there's some horrible spin in there but I can really imagine seeing those headlines. It's really easy to spin this to make the USA look really bad and in a sense it's not even that wrong a viewpoint: The USA, who keep going on about how terrorism is the biggest problem of our generation, willingly keep terrorism-relevant information from others. Either they have been lying about how dangerous the terrorists are or their conduct is seriously unethical. Of course anyone with a bone to pick will have a ball going on from there.
Except for those Apple users who have actually ever used an Apple product and will probably keep doing so because most Apple products are actually fairly good. As are most Microsoft products, for the record, even if I dislike them.
Yes, my iPod touch doesn't multitask. Doesn't mean it's not still a decent MP3 player with a PDA built in, which I got for a extremely good price (35 EUR through the Back to School rebate offer); multitasking would occasionally be nice but I don't miss it enough to care. Yes, it needs iTunes, which apprently sucks big time on Windows. This doesn't faze me either as iTunes is a pretty good program on Mac OS and I use it anyway.
Yes, Macs are expensive. Until you require a certain feature set (like anything involving FireWire 800) that puts Mac prices on equal footing with those of comparable devices. That might even happen if you're shopping for a decent notebook; the Apple tax is above zero mainly for desktop systems.
It's easy to find things to hate about the company but it's not like they consistently produce useless junk that people pay pay at 500% market value for no reason at all. Most consumers do use their brain when making purchases and they have (often valid) reasons for their decision. Yes, even those who buy products you personally dislike.
Just like Modern Warfare 2, every video game but Modern Warfare 2, Win7, every OS but Win7, rap, every music genre but rap (and especially metal), metal, every music genre but metal (and especially rap), motorcycles, everything but motorcycles... If we assume the failure of everything some teenager has described as "for fags" we are looking at the end of human culture within the next twenty years.
Well, according to one Mr. B.I.G., the amount of problems you have scales with the amount of money in your possession. Therefore, any reduction of Mr. Gates' account balance would only serve to improve his quality of life, which he should greatly appreciate, being among the most troubled people on the planet according to Mr. B.I.G.'s theory.
When danger's near
exploit their fear.
The end will justify the means.
- Reefer Madness, the musical
Still the preferred modus operandi for governments everywhere.
The terminals saved the game for me. The gameplay isn't the most inspiring but the writing is great. Still didn't pull me all the way through Marathon 2, though.
Very true. From the perspective of a German, this is worryingly similar to the Stasi. Let's hope that we can keep our local censorship jockeys in check; I'd hate to see history repeat itself like that.
Even from the perspective of the state there's a problem with this: If you grow too distrustful of your citizens, they will lose their trust in you. It's very hard to run a country when your own citizens see working against you as noble, especially if you're a control freak.
Take a look at Marathon. It's what Bungie did on the Mac while id released Doom for the IBM. Essentially Doom with fewer weapons, alt-fire and funny monologues. Durandal still ranks high in my list of the best insane AIs. The story is more complex than that of Doom but fairly simple to follow. Well, until you get to the third - pardon - infinitieth part, which is a time travel bonanza full of alternate pasts you never get to see.
The engine used for Marathon 2 and Infinity is available as Aleph One; the first part has been ported as an addon called M1A1. Everything is available straight from Bungie for OS X, Linux and Windows.
Sure. The desert is hot, Jamaica is kinda hot - fits perfectly. And everybody loves wacky CG sidekicks, right?
I think they should remake The Passion of Christ with lots of 3D camera sweeps and huge explosions specifically to prove your point. Also because I really like bad movies.
They let the guy responsible for Torque do another movie? The man who thought up the oversized car key? Seriously?
I'm just aching to see the awkward shot of Case plugging something in, the plug suddenly being larger then his arm for some incomprehensible reason.
However, since Earth isn't infinite it has a nonzero population. This holds true for most of the plural Earths and those other ones don't count. Therefore, the population of Earth (above zero) is bigger than that of the rest of the universe (zero), which makes Sol the single most important station. q.e.d.
On the contrary, they're happy. Hapy to do anything to anyone with anyone. There are pairings of every possible character in the books with every possible character in the books, including themselves, and all of them are Serious Business.