Trying to use the example of Holland to back up the claim that meth should be legalized is ridiculous. While Holland does indeed try to treat addicts as medical patients and not criminals, it has not legalized and taxed hard drugs. The trend is in fact towards eradicating the presence even of soft drugs, with zoning laws being used to close coffeshops and the law now prohibiting the sale of dried mushrooms.
Mexican drug smugglers are not limited to cannabis. They also move an enormous amount of cocaine and meth. While legalizing cannabis should have been done years ago already, meth is so clearly destroying the heartland of America (and even making inroads into big cities) that legalization and taxation is not an option.
Which church? There are thousands of denominations which reject non-canonical gospels.
The popular media perpetuates this myth that non-canonical gospels reveal truths suppressed by mainstream Christianity. That's just not the case. Even non-Christian historians find most non-canonical gospels less reliable as history than the canonical gospels, being written still decades later and are often by their own admission non-historical.
English translations of many non-canonical gospels have been pretty easily available for a 100 years already. Churches aren't conspiring to keep them in the dark. If they have been little read, it's because they really aren't worth much.
As someone who majored in Classics as an undergraduate, I've long been captivated by the massive papyrus finds finds at the Oxyrhynchus site in Egypt. The site has been well-explored for over a century, and many of the papyri have already been deciphered and published. The Biblical texts there have gotten the most attention, but one shouldn't neglect the important literary finds as well. See Bowman's Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts for a nice introduction. Over the last few years, there's been more work with using new technologies to examine manuscripts that otherwise can't be deciphered. Classics may seem an unsexy and superseded field, but in fact with digital technology the field is living in exciting times.
Let's face it, a torrent site without any "illegal" (under dutch law, downloading music & movies is LEGAL!) content is about as useful as a 3-legged, dead dog. With a nasty case of fleas.
Downloading is in fact legal in many jurisdictions. But the problematic thing with Bittorrent is that it makes you an uploader as well, and that decidedly isn't legal in many jurisdictions.
Old uncompressed formats like WAV has limited support for metadata and more than 2 channels. So if you are building a music library on your computer, better to use something where you can abundantly tag and encode DVD audio to.
Amazon reviews are useless when it comes to getting reliable information. And I say that as the author of 1500 Amazon reviews (generally written for my own pleasure and notetaking). Articles in The Atlantic and, more importantly, the European Parliament's 2001 report on ECHELON suffice to show that Bamford was right more often than he was wrong.
While the rise of Al Qaeda and the need to keep on top of terrorist networks helped put the NSA in the spotlight, the scope of its interception capabilities has expanded regardless of the threat of terrorism. James Bamford's Body of Secrets charts the rise of massive interception in the 1990s and links much of the NSA's activity to economic espionage against foreign businesses, as Clinton wanted to "level the playing field." The NSA was just returning to the happy-go-lucky violation of privacy for the gain of a few that Carter put at bay in the 1970s.
Certainly there's been plenty of ink spilled about how a more serious attempt to stop Al Qaeda would involve greater human intelligence, but the CIA found its clandestine services cut just as the NSA became favoured.
I wouldn't exactly use ancient Rome as an example for anything.
The enormous amount of art produced between the dawn of Man and the institution of copyright about 500 years ago should stand a sufficient response to the industry's argument that disregarding copyright will destroy art.
I hope this is a joke where you are suggesting that the OP was copying Rush lyrics without authorization. FWIW, the phrase goes back quite a ways. From the first site I came upon with a Google search:
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME - "Nothing changes too much. The proverb is of French origin and was used by the French novelist Alphonse Karr (1808-90). It also appears in George Bernard Shaw's 'Revolutionist's Handbook' (1903). Listed in the 1946 'Macmillan (Home) Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases' by Burton Stevenson and in the 1992 'Dictionary of American Proverbs' by Wolfgang Mieder et al." From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996).
While Rush has great musicianship, Neil Peart's lyrics are usually very derivative. He may be a bit more well-read than the average rock drummer, he's doesn't possess any especial insight. It's sad when fans try to hold Peart up as some kind of philosopher of our time. They should be reading more themselves.
In ancient Rome, it was completely ordinary for an audience member to transcribe a poetry recital, hand it over to amanuenses to massively copy, and then sell it in the marketplace with no money going back to the creator. Even poets didn't have a problem with it. The only protest I'm aware of in the literature is Martial's unhappiness that some talentless fellow was putting his own name on the transcription of Martial, and plagiarism is rather separate from copying without authorization.
In spite of this activity, literature still flourished in the ancient work. This is because the market depended on patronism. I wouldn't mind going back to those days, and to some extent we never left them. Indeed, most of the films and music I enjoy now are funded through a great deal of support from state arts ministries and private patrons. Record labels aren't so worried about piracy when the bills are already paid.
So privacy might make it harder for makers of the lowbrow to turn a profit. Boo-hoo. True art will continue to shine regardless of copyright laws.
Was Amiga really a fully-functional desktop? Did it have full Unicode support? In today's global world, support for many languages and scripts displayed simultaneously is vital, but multibyte does tend to add to the size of applications, meaning that a complete system on a floppy can no longer be considered realistic.
Re:How is this news?
on
Bringing Up Bill
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just go watch "Pirates of Silicon Valley".
As entertaining as that made for TV movie was for people who already knew some of the history, I think it would be better to recommend the movie's source material, Paul Freiberger's Fire in the Valley. The movie strips the whole colourful story of 1970s Silicon Valley down to Gates and Jobs, leaving out the many other important personalities involved.
But still, $55 for a book that might otherwise retail for $10-15?
Blackwell is an academic publisher, whose main customer in many fields is university libraries and not the average reader. $55 is a bargain for some of their books. It's not usual to have to pay hundreds for a Blackwell title.
Square Pictures was so proud of Aki Ross in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that they suggested the same digital model could appear in other films. Once the film bombed, that idea was quickly forgotten.
Speaking as a student at the University of Helsinki, nearly all textbooks I need are offered by one of the libraries, who keeps a number of copies of each textbook around so that students can take them out, do the course, and then return them at the end of the semester. Until I read this, I never imagined that university students in this country ever have a hard time getting access to textbooks and would need some kind of outside service like that.
Great, but again that is a vanishingly small proportion of the films most people want to watch. And I bet they don't even show up on the torrent sites.
Actually, art films both classic and contemporary are well represented on torrent sites, even ones as mainstream as The Pirate Bay.
How about software writers give their software for free and make money doing live shows too?
Are you new to Slashdot? One of the most frequent topics of discussion here for almost a decade is how giving software away under the GPL or similar licenses can work quite well, because one can still sell support.
And film makers and writers!
Personally, most films I rate highly were produced through a substantial amount of private patronage or state arts subsidies. Piracy isn't much of a threat when the bills are already paid.
Most of the medical profession believes that adult stem cells are more likely to offer cures than embryonic stem cells, so your complaint will prove a non-issue.
I feel sorry for Larry Niven. Back in the 1960s and 1970s he was writing works of science fiction (e.g. the Gilm 'The Arm' Hamilton stories in Flatlander) that suggested that organ transplants were going to be so widespread as a cure that even the most minor crimes would get the death penalty. Instead, it looks like the human race may realize stem cell cures faster than anyone could have imagined. Oh, and Kurzweil suggests we'll all be in robot bodies before the century's end, so those great hard science fiction writers of half a century ago fall even further behind.
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Trying to use the example of Holland to back up the claim that meth should be legalized is ridiculous. While Holland does indeed try to treat addicts as medical patients and not criminals, it has not legalized and taxed hard drugs. The trend is in fact towards eradicating the presence even of soft drugs, with zoning laws being used to close coffeshops and the law now prohibiting the sale of dried mushrooms.
Mexican drug smugglers are not limited to cannabis. They also move an enormous amount of cocaine and meth. While legalizing cannabis should have been done years ago already, meth is so clearly destroying the heartland of America (and even making inroads into big cities) that legalization and taxation is not an option.
The UN UDHC has no force of law. It's a utopian document that no government in the world would implement fully.
Which church? There are thousands of denominations which reject non-canonical gospels.
The popular media perpetuates this myth that non-canonical gospels reveal truths suppressed by mainstream Christianity. That's just not the case. Even non-Christian historians find most non-canonical gospels less reliable as history than the canonical gospels, being written still decades later and are often by their own admission non-historical.
English translations of many non-canonical gospels have been pretty easily available for a 100 years already. Churches aren't conspiring to keep them in the dark. If they have been little read, it's because they really aren't worth much.
As someone who majored in Classics as an undergraduate, I've long been captivated by the massive papyrus finds finds at the Oxyrhynchus site in Egypt. The site has been well-explored for over a century, and many of the papyri have already been deciphered and published. The Biblical texts there have gotten the most attention, but one shouldn't neglect the important literary finds as well. See Bowman's Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts for a nice introduction. Over the last few years, there's been more work with using new technologies to examine manuscripts that otherwise can't be deciphered. Classics may seem an unsexy and superseded field, but in fact with digital technology the field is living in exciting times.
Downloading is in fact legal in many jurisdictions. But the problematic thing with Bittorrent is that it makes you an uploader as well, and that decidedly isn't legal in many jurisdictions.
Old uncompressed formats like WAV has limited support for metadata and more than 2 channels. So if you are building a music library on your computer, better to use something where you can abundantly tag and encode DVD audio to.
Resale is never going to be allowed. The only reason textbook publishers would sign on to digital technologies is if it would kill the resale market.
Amazon reviews are useless when it comes to getting reliable information. And I say that as the author of 1500 Amazon reviews (generally written for my own pleasure and notetaking). Articles in The Atlantic and, more importantly, the European Parliament's 2001 report on ECHELON suffice to show that Bamford was right more often than he was wrong.
IIRC, the example in Bamford's book is how the NSA helped Boeing beat Airbus in getting a contract.
While the rise of Al Qaeda and the need to keep on top of terrorist networks helped put the NSA in the spotlight, the scope of its interception capabilities has expanded regardless of the threat of terrorism. James Bamford's Body of Secrets charts the rise of massive interception in the 1990s and links much of the NSA's activity to economic espionage against foreign businesses, as Clinton wanted to "level the playing field." The NSA was just returning to the happy-go-lucky violation of privacy for the gain of a few that Carter put at bay in the 1970s.
Certainly there's been plenty of ink spilled about how a more serious attempt to stop Al Qaeda would involve greater human intelligence, but the CIA found its clandestine services cut just as the NSA became favoured.
The enormous amount of art produced between the dawn of Man and the institution of copyright about 500 years ago should stand a sufficient response to the industry's argument that disregarding copyright will destroy art.
I hope this is a joke where you are suggesting that the OP was copying Rush lyrics without authorization. FWIW, the phrase goes back quite a ways. From the first site I came upon with a Google search:
While Rush has great musicianship, Neil Peart's lyrics are usually very derivative. He may be a bit more well-read than the average rock drummer, he's doesn't possess any especial insight. It's sad when fans try to hold Peart up as some kind of philosopher of our time. They should be reading more themselves.
In ancient Rome, it was completely ordinary for an audience member to transcribe a poetry recital, hand it over to amanuenses to massively copy, and then sell it in the marketplace with no money going back to the creator. Even poets didn't have a problem with it. The only protest I'm aware of in the literature is Martial's unhappiness that some talentless fellow was putting his own name on the transcription of Martial, and plagiarism is rather separate from copying without authorization.
In spite of this activity, literature still flourished in the ancient work. This is because the market depended on patronism. I wouldn't mind going back to those days, and to some extent we never left them. Indeed, most of the films and music I enjoy now are funded through a great deal of support from state arts ministries and private patrons. Record labels aren't so worried about piracy when the bills are already paid.
So privacy might make it harder for makers of the lowbrow to turn a profit. Boo-hoo. True art will continue to shine regardless of copyright laws.
Was Amiga really a fully-functional desktop? Did it have full Unicode support? In today's global world, support for many languages and scripts displayed simultaneously is vital, but multibyte does tend to add to the size of applications, meaning that a complete system on a floppy can no longer be considered realistic.
As entertaining as that made for TV movie was for people who already knew some of the history, I think it would be better to recommend the movie's source material, Paul Freiberger's Fire in the Valley . The movie strips the whole colourful story of 1970s Silicon Valley down to Gates and Jobs, leaving out the many other important personalities involved.
Blackwell is an academic publisher, whose main customer in many fields is university libraries and not the average reader. $55 is a bargain for some of their books. It's not usual to have to pay hundreds for a Blackwell title.
Not me. Four years of undergraduate Greek finally pays off!
Square Pictures was so proud of Aki Ross in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that they suggested the same digital model could appear in other films. Once the film bombed, that idea was quickly forgotten.
Speaking as a student at the University of Helsinki, nearly all textbooks I need are offered by one of the libraries, who keeps a number of copies of each textbook around so that students can take them out, do the course, and then return them at the end of the semester. Until I read this, I never imagined that university students in this country ever have a hard time getting access to textbooks and would need some kind of outside service like that.
No kidding. Remember when they took over the Enterprise?
Actually, art films both classic and contemporary are well represented on torrent sites, even ones as mainstream as The Pirate Bay.
Are you new to Slashdot? One of the most frequent topics of discussion here for almost a decade is how giving software away under the GPL or similar licenses can work quite well, because one can still sell support.
Personally, most films I rate highly were produced through a substantial amount of private patronage or state arts subsidies. Piracy isn't much of a threat when the bills are already paid.
Most of the medical profession believes that adult stem cells are more likely to offer cures than embryonic stem cells, so your complaint will prove a non-issue.
I feel sorry for Larry Niven. Back in the 1960s and 1970s he was writing works of science fiction (e.g. the Gilm 'The Arm' Hamilton stories in Flatlander ) that suggested that organ transplants were going to be so widespread as a cure that even the most minor crimes would get the death penalty. Instead, it looks like the human race may realize stem cell cures faster than anyone could have imagined. Oh, and Kurzweil suggests we'll all be in robot bodies before the century's end, so those great hard science fiction writers of half a century ago fall even further behind.