In order for your rant to be correct, one has to accept Nietzsche's definition of morality. Its unlikely that most people here would, so you're rant is pretty meaningless.
The same people who elected Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What, an actor can't be informed? They can't think critically or be well reasoned? Do you think he's only as smart as the character he played in Connan?
Hmm, reading the actual law, it doesn't seem to make any distinction between books, movies, or whatnot.
Here it is: " 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."
I don't see any distinction between digital or not there, do you?
I'm not saying that fair use can't apply to digital media, as certainly the main concern on slashdot, but that legal/judicial precedent is much more valuable in this case than the actual law.
Do you know how our system works? The ACTUAL LAW must be followed; if a judge gets it wrong, that's pretty strong grounds for an appeal.
At any rate, I was only diputing the fact that your lawyer friend says fair use is only an affirmitive defense. Since its clearly defined in law, this is not true. Your friend is wrong, or your are misunderstanding what he said.
i didn't questioned your personal experience, just your misleading general claims.
My general claims are not misleading; there IS cost involved with moving to and staying on Linux. Not necessarly monetary, but there ARE costs, and pretending that you can just toss on Linux and keep going as if nothing happened is not feasible.
i assume you're not referring to me, since i didn't said that. on the other hand you don't seem to have a problem with suggesting that windows is cheaper than linux, which is at the very least misleading (if not just bullshit); even though it's probably true in some scenarios, such as a) when you already own all the windows software (or can get it for free), b) you are already locked-in into the platform (there's plenty to choose from in this category) or c) you only know windows and just refuse to cope with anything else (*).
Then you need to take my posts in context, because the OP to which I responded did claim that "it costs nothing to use linux." I was not only including monetary costs.
what the hell are you talking about? what kind of maintenance do you have to perform on things like openoffice, firefox (or even apache, if the server suits your argument better)? or perhaps you meant administration? (but windows also have those costs) same goes for upgrading... most linux distros nowadays have integral management and update of the software they provide built into them so i don't see the big problem there either (and certainly won't call it hell). i don't know, maybe things really have changed in the last year you've been using windows...
Moving to the latest version of any package on the distro. Kopete was exceptionally annoying to update. This was when the various protocols kept changing; the latest version wasn't an RPM, the latest RPM needed 30 (I'm not exaggerating) new updated RPMs to various libraries. Once those were installed, not only did Kopete still not work, OTHER Kde apps broke. Other apps were as bad, but still not as easy as installing a patch on windows.
I also wanted something similar to group policy on windows (and to use SAMBA for group policy for my windows machines that were still around). I probably could have done it, after buying a few books, searching online for some documentation, etc. This was ultimately what lead me to give up; at work, I can easily with a few clicks figure out how administer settings across a domain. As I said, not typical home user stuff, but stuff I wanted to get done, and which Windows made easier.
(*) yes, surely there are other better and legit cases where using windows is cheaper. in case you missed it, i was making a point; sadly those are probably the real reasons why linux is not regarded as cheaper than windows.
I'm not sure what you mean here; sorry.
Any way, its not a matter of only being able to cope with Windows. I used Unix exclusively for school work during my time in college (Computer Science), and I liked it quite a bit. I have my Linux server for most of that time as well (and years after). I don't hate Linux, its just that it was eating more and more of my time to A) do what i wanted to with my computers and B) fix the issues that were coming up (printing never worked, sound mystrously disappeared, NFS server would suddenly vanish off the network [and boy does Linux NOT handle that well if your/home is an NFS mount], RPM HELL [a very real problem]).
I don't mind tinkering, but I'm at a point now where sometimes I want to implement a change quickly and be done so I can move on to what I'm really interested in, and just USE my computer. It felt like with Linux it was REQUIRING more of my time to simply use my computer.
Maybe Ubuntu fixed this, I don't know; my experiences were with RH and Mandriva.
It happens, but it wasn't your grandfathers fault? You don't think that made his life more difficult? We're not talking about spilling milk here, we're talking about fundamentally changing someone's life for the worse, probably limiting their ability to provide for themselves.
Sorry, saying oh well, sucks you can't walk, have fun paying out of YOUR pocket for a wheelchair ramp, wheelchair, and anything else you'll need that you souldn't if the dr didn't fuck up. THAT's unrealistic.
Sorry, your lawyer friend isn't very good. Perhaps you should have him read this article, especially noting this quote: "Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law."
So yes, fair use is indeed "on the books," and more than just case law.
Um, whats your point? He didn't say there should be no corporations, just that if they no longer benefit The People, they should be immedately disolved. I personally see no problem with that. You can bet the mega corps would fall into line rather quickly.
The added value is enough that I move back to Windows from Linux after over a year of running on the desktop. At the same time, I moved my eight year old linux server to Windows server, for the same reasons.
I never said nobody should be using linux or the like either; get off your defensive horse. But to pretend there are NO costs associated with using linux is absurd. I never said there were no alternatives either. I will say most of them sucked, and maintaining / upgrading them was pure hell, but they are there.
Why? A government-run system is working quite adequately for the UK, why couldn't it work for us? As for taxes --- it's not like people in the UK are paying 60% of their income in taxes. Up to about $70,000, their income tax rate is actually a bit lower than ours, and their top rate of 40% isn't much higher than our top rate of 35%. This doesn't include VAT, but then again, the US statistics also don't include state taxes and sales taxes, or the cost of health insurance.
Perhaps you should look at the estimated costs for America to do this, instead of comparing to another, smaller country.
The latter is substantial --- if you're making ~$100k, and your employer provides a health plan, they're paying about 10% of your salary in premiums. You might not see this cost directly, but it's a tax on you as much as if the government had taken it right out of your paycheck.
Your health premiums are not based on your salary, its the same for everyone. I'd prefer a health screening though, so that those that are unhealthy (obese, smoke, etc) are charged more and those that are healthy less. I also never said that employer paid healthcare is not an issue.
Because France is so full of fatties?
I didn't say socialized healthcare causes obesity, I said that removing all responsibility (and consequences) would magnify a societial problem we already have, namely that most Americans are lazy and eat fast food four or more times a weak. Its our lifestyle that is a problem, and treating the symptoms for free (via a tax, which is even more hidden than what we have now) would worsen this issue.
What you are talking about is ORM, object-relational mapping. Basically, how do you get relation data into objects. The solution is to build objects which ONLY statisfy a single use case. The business object then knows how to get to the data it cares about. There are some problems with OO databases, and reporting out them is hell.
ORM is greatly simplified if you build your business objects correctly, but its hard to discuss without getting more technical.
I agree to some extent; however, would what would you do if you were suddenly unable to walk because someone made a mistake? Would you really say "oh well, it happens?"
Also remember that lawyers are the only defense we have against the corporations.
What we have now needs improvement, sure. Letting the government run it (and taxing everyone to death to fund it) is not the solution. We already have an obesity problem; I can't imagine what would happen if suddenly there were no costs associated with being obese. Right now there are a few, but to have none.. ugh.
The items you've listed are all soft costs, outside of "potentially" support
They are costs none the less.
With respect to the "added support costs", I can tell you as a user who had used only Windows until 2 weeks ago
I can tell you, as someone that ran Linux as a server for eight years, and linux on the desktop for over a year, that you haven't used it long enough.
If all you're doing is email and web surfing, and the occasional game, you'll probably be fine. God help you though if you ever try to update any of those programs; it was nearly imposible to get the latest Kopete, for example. RPMs were slow in the coming, and there of course is RPM hell.
Over time, I was spending more and more time trying to figure out how to get my computer to do exactly what I wanted it to. Admittedly not typical home user stuff, but everyday things were not a cake walk either. Sound regularly crapped out for seemingly no reason. Want to have the monitor actually go to sleep? Good luck, I never had it to anything but blanking. Options were there, sure, but they were not effective.
Want to manage your fianances? If you live in Germany you can get online banking updates right from GNUCash. Otherwise, you're out of luck. I could never figure out how to do something really simple, like get a report of spending by category (account in GNUCash). Not a list mind you, a simple pie chart. Want to move away from GNUCash? Ironically, I had no problem leaving Quicker for GNUCash, but unless I wanted to learn the Xml format GNUCash was using, in addition to the target format for the application I wanted to move to, sorry, out of luck. I don't have days to write something to allow me to move to MS Money, nor would I want to risk screwing it up.
I'm not saying Linux isn't a good choice for some or that you won't be happy. You might. But for me, and others that just want to use their computers, Linux still has a long way to. To say Linux doesn't cost anything is dishonest at best.
I find the ACLU terribly racist (believing people should be grouped together rather than be individuals) and unconcerned with real direction of freedom from force.
You are pretty vague about what data you couldn't handle relationally, but it sounds more to me like a problem with your 'top consultants' not knowing how to do proper entity relation design. If the solution they provided didn't work for your problem domain, they didn't do their job properly.
I'd like to hear more; I'm not saying relational is perfect, but I find it odd that you had to abandon RDBMs all together.
What crack are you smoking? Almost all of the applications that worked on XP work on Vista, the same selection of software is there that was there in XP. I did an inplace upgrade from XP to Ultimate, and there was nothing installed on system that didn't work properly afterwards (with the exception of VS2005, but that was a simple update to make work too).
In linux, you don't have MS money or Quicken as potential financial applications, MS Office is out for document editing, email, etc etc.
I've never had to pay for support from MS; I used them when Money wasn't connecting to my bank properly, and we were able to resolve the issue. The only other time times I've called support were work related. Otherwise, all of my "support" was via google. I've found it orders of magnitude easier to get solutions to problems on Windows this way than I ever did with RH Linux (or Mandriva).
I also don't know where you think you're saving that much money; Windows pre-installed is practically free, and $100 isn't a lot to spend. Considering that will likely be the only OS ever loaded onto that computer, that's quite a value. And with the link I specified, you can move your OS to your next computer, if you so choose.
It costs nothing for a home user to switch to (K|X|Ed)Ubuntu
Um, bullshit. It takes time to switch, and to find comparable applications. Then you need to figure out if you can even keep things like your documents, your finances, etc. There's also added support costs, in time and / or money.
Slashdot Mirror
In order for your rant to be correct, one has to accept Nietzsche's definition of morality. Its unlikely that most people here would, so you're rant is pretty meaningless.
The solution to that is simple; have kids when you can't care for them, you're sterilized.
Good, welfare is a total waste of money and should be shut down. Take the kids and move them to parents that CAN take care of them.
The same people who elected Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What, an actor can't be informed? They can't think critically or be well reasoned? Do you think he's only as smart as the character he played in Connan?
Hmm, reading the actual law, it doesn't seem to make any distinction between books, movies, or whatnot.
Here it is: " 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."
I don't see any distinction between digital or not there, do you?
I'm not saying that fair use can't apply to digital media, as certainly the main concern on slashdot, but that legal/judicial precedent is much more valuable in this case than the actual law.
Do you know how our system works? The ACTUAL LAW must be followed; if a judge gets it wrong, that's pretty strong grounds for an appeal.
At any rate, I was only diputing the fact that your lawyer friend says fair use is only an affirmitive defense. Since its clearly defined in law, this is not true. Your friend is wrong, or your are misunderstanding what he said.
Perhaps people don't value nonsexual friendship enough, and they try to turn everything into sex.
Perhaps if sexual relationships were more common, they wouldn't be valued more than nonsexual ones.
Lip-service isn't what you want to go for in a relation.
I wouldn't dream of a relationship without that!
i didn't questioned your personal experience, just your misleading general claims.
/home is an NFS mount], RPM HELL [a very real problem]).
My general claims are not misleading; there IS cost involved with moving to and staying on Linux. Not necessarly monetary, but there ARE costs, and pretending that you can just toss on Linux and keep going as if nothing happened is not feasible.
i assume you're not referring to me, since i didn't said that. on the other hand you don't seem to have a problem with suggesting that windows is cheaper than linux, which is at the very least misleading (if not just bullshit); even though it's probably true in some scenarios, such as a) when you already own all the windows software (or can get it for free), b) you are already locked-in into the platform (there's plenty to choose from in this category) or c) you only know windows and just refuse to cope with anything else (*).
Then you need to take my posts in context, because the OP to which I responded did claim that "it costs nothing to use linux." I was not only including monetary costs.
what the hell are you talking about? what kind of maintenance do you have to perform on things like openoffice, firefox (or even apache, if the server suits your argument better)? or perhaps you meant administration? (but windows also have those costs) same goes for upgrading... most linux distros nowadays have integral management and update of the software they provide built into them so i don't see the big problem there either (and certainly won't call it hell).
i don't know, maybe things really have changed in the last year you've been using windows...
Moving to the latest version of any package on the distro. Kopete was exceptionally annoying to update. This was when the various protocols kept changing; the latest version wasn't an RPM, the latest RPM needed 30 (I'm not exaggerating) new updated RPMs to various libraries. Once those were installed, not only did Kopete still not work, OTHER Kde apps broke. Other apps were as bad, but still not as easy as installing a patch on windows.
I also wanted something similar to group policy on windows (and to use SAMBA for group policy for my windows machines that were still around). I probably could have done it, after buying a few books, searching online for some documentation, etc. This was ultimately what lead me to give up; at work, I can easily with a few clicks figure out how administer settings across a domain. As I said, not typical home user stuff, but stuff I wanted to get done, and which Windows made easier.
(*) yes, surely there are other better and legit cases where using windows is cheaper. in case you missed it, i was making a point; sadly those are probably the real reasons why linux is not regarded as cheaper than windows.
I'm not sure what you mean here; sorry.
Any way, its not a matter of only being able to cope with Windows. I used Unix exclusively for school work during my time in college (Computer Science), and I liked it quite a bit. I have my Linux server for most of that time as well (and years after). I don't hate Linux, its just that it was eating more and more of my time to A) do what i wanted to with my computers and B) fix the issues that were coming up (printing never worked, sound mystrously disappeared, NFS server would suddenly vanish off the network [and boy does Linux NOT handle that well if your
I don't mind tinkering, but I'm at a point now where sometimes I want to implement a change quickly and be done so I can move on to what I'm really interested in, and just USE my computer. It felt like with Linux it was REQUIRING more of my time to simply use my computer.
Maybe Ubuntu fixed this, I don't know; my experiences were with RH and Mandriva.
It happens, but it wasn't your grandfathers fault? You don't think that made his life more difficult? We're not talking about spilling milk here, we're talking about fundamentally changing someone's life for the worse, probably limiting their ability to provide for themselves.
Sorry, saying oh well, sucks you can't walk, have fun paying out of YOUR pocket for a wheelchair ramp, wheelchair, and anything else you'll need that you souldn't if the dr didn't fuck up. THAT's unrealistic.
Sorry, you still broke the law. How long ago was it that you particpated in fraud?
Sorry, your lawyer friend isn't very good. Perhaps you should have him read this article, especially noting this quote: "Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law."
So yes, fair use is indeed "on the books," and more than just case law.
Um, whats your point? He didn't say there should be no corporations, just that if they no longer benefit The People, they should be immedately disolved. I personally see no problem with that. You can bet the mega corps would fall into line rather quickly.
The added value is enough that I move back to Windows from Linux after over a year of running on the desktop. At the same time, I moved my eight year old linux server to Windows server, for the same reasons.
I never said nobody should be using linux or the like either; get off your defensive horse. But to pretend there are NO costs associated with using linux is absurd. I never said there were no alternatives either. I will say most of them sucked, and maintaining / upgrading them was pure hell, but they are there.
Why? A government-run system is working quite adequately for the UK, why couldn't it work for us? As for taxes --- it's not like people in the UK are paying 60% of their income in taxes. Up to about $70,000, their income tax rate is actually a bit lower than ours, and their top rate of 40% isn't much higher than our top rate of 35%. This doesn't include VAT, but then again, the US statistics also don't include state taxes and sales taxes, or the cost of health insurance.
Perhaps you should look at the estimated costs for America to do this, instead of comparing to another, smaller country.
The latter is substantial --- if you're making ~$100k, and your employer provides a health plan, they're paying about 10% of your salary in premiums. You might not see this cost directly, but it's a tax on you as much as if the government had taken it right out of your paycheck.
Your health premiums are not based on your salary, its the same for everyone. I'd prefer a health screening though, so that those that are unhealthy (obese, smoke, etc) are charged more and those that are healthy less. I also never said that employer paid healthcare is not an issue.
Because France is so full of fatties?
I didn't say socialized healthcare causes obesity, I said that removing all responsibility (and consequences) would magnify a societial problem we already have, namely that most Americans are lazy and eat fast food four or more times a weak. Its our lifestyle that is a problem, and treating the symptoms for free (via a tax, which is even more hidden than what we have now) would worsen this issue.
What you are talking about is ORM, object-relational mapping. Basically, how do you get relation data into objects. The solution is to build objects which ONLY statisfy a single use case. The business object then knows how to get to the data it cares about. There are some problems with OO databases, and reporting out them is hell.
ORM is greatly simplified if you build your business objects correctly, but its hard to discuss without getting more technical.
I agree to some extent; however, would what would you do if you were suddenly unable to walk because someone made a mistake? Would you really say "oh well, it happens?"
Also remember that lawyers are the only defense we have against the corporations.
What we have now needs improvement, sure. Letting the government run it (and taxing everyone to death to fund it) is not the solution. We already have an obesity problem; I can't imagine what would happen if suddenly there were no costs associated with being obese. Right now there are a few, but to have none.. ugh.
The items you've listed are all soft costs, outside of "potentially" support
They are costs none the less.
With respect to the "added support costs", I can tell you as a user who had used only Windows until 2 weeks ago
I can tell you, as someone that ran Linux as a server for eight years, and linux on the desktop for over a year, that you haven't used it long enough.
If all you're doing is email and web surfing, and the occasional game, you'll probably be fine. God help you though if you ever try to update any of those programs; it was nearly imposible to get the latest Kopete, for example. RPMs were slow in the coming, and there of course is RPM hell.
Over time, I was spending more and more time trying to figure out how to get my computer to do exactly what I wanted it to. Admittedly not typical home user stuff, but everyday things were not a cake walk either. Sound regularly crapped out for seemingly no reason. Want to have the monitor actually go to sleep? Good luck, I never had it to anything but blanking. Options were there, sure, but they were not effective.
Want to manage your fianances? If you live in Germany you can get online banking updates right from GNUCash. Otherwise, you're out of luck. I could never figure out how to do something really simple, like get a report of spending by category (account in GNUCash). Not a list mind you, a simple pie chart. Want to move away from GNUCash? Ironically, I had no problem leaving Quicker for GNUCash, but unless I wanted to learn the Xml format GNUCash was using, in addition to the target format for the application I wanted to move to, sorry, out of luck. I don't have days to write something to allow me to move to MS Money, nor would I want to risk screwing it up.
I'm not saying Linux isn't a good choice for some or that you won't be happy. You might. But for me, and others that just want to use their computers, Linux still has a long way to. To say Linux doesn't cost anything is dishonest at best.
I find the ACLU terribly racist (believing people should be grouped together rather than be individuals) and unconcerned with real direction of freedom from force.
Sources, please?
The ACLU spends far more time attacking the general citizenry than defending it.
I assume you have some proof to back up this statement?
I do; its a horrid idea.
You are pretty vague about what data you couldn't handle relationally, but it sounds more to me like a problem with your 'top consultants' not knowing how to do proper entity relation design. If the solution they provided didn't work for your problem domain, they didn't do their job properly.
I'd like to hear more; I'm not saying relational is perfect, but I find it odd that you had to abandon RDBMs all together.
Would you like it better with IronPython and Linq?
What crack are you smoking? Almost all of the applications that worked on XP work on Vista, the same selection of software is there that was there in XP. I did an inplace upgrade from XP to Ultimate, and there was nothing installed on system that didn't work properly afterwards (with the exception of VS2005, but that was a simple update to make work too).
In linux, you don't have MS money or Quicken as potential financial applications, MS Office is out for document editing, email, etc etc.
I've never had to pay for support from MS; I used them when Money wasn't connecting to my bank properly, and we were able to resolve the issue. The only other time times I've called support were work related. Otherwise, all of my "support" was via google. I've found it orders of magnitude easier to get solutions to problems on Windows this way than I ever did with RH Linux (or Mandriva).
I also don't know where you think you're saving that much money; Windows pre-installed is practically free, and $100 isn't a lot to spend. Considering that will likely be the only OS ever loaded onto that computer, that's quite a value. And with the link I specified, you can move your OS to your next computer, if you so choose.
It costs nothing for a home user to switch to (K|X|Ed)Ubuntu
Um, bullshit. It takes time to switch, and to find comparable applications. Then you need to figure out if you can even keep things like your documents, your finances, etc. There's also added support costs, in time and / or money.