Actually, based on your never-ending, desperate whining, I must conclude that you are simply a petulant idiot who will cling to his losing argument ever more desperately all the while pretending that if he does not see his errors, no one else will. And, yes, that was an "ad hominem", one which you richly deserve.
Why do I deserve an ad hominem? For disagreeing with you?:) Calling my posts "whining", stating that I'm "losing an argument". These are just attempts - without reference to facts or reasoning - to try and cast me in the position of being defeated by you somehow. An attempt to invalidate my argument by personal attack again. But this is the Internet, not an episode of Big Brother. There isn't a voting audience out there cheering you on and marking you as the winner or me the loser. There's no way to determine that even if I did agree with you that majority opinion = factual accuracy. The only real measure by which we can measure who is losing, who is most emotionally upset in this debate (which is obviously what matters to you, not facts), is the degree to which someone is driven to make personal attacks. By which criteria you are obviously the one that is most upset by this dialogue.;)
Really, if whining is just complaining without the power to change anything then I'm afraid it's you. I am arguing for the sake of refining my points and for the sake of anyone reading who is interested in my argument. You seem to be arguing for the sake of making me feel bad or awarding me some status as 'loser of argument', neither of which you have power to bring about sitting at your keyboard in who cares where. So if you really must bring this down to the level of "whining" and "losing" and "desperate", then it's you who is putting yourself in an unwinnable position. So long as I keep refuting your points with logic, I meet my goals.:)
Now hopefully I'm done with this side of things. You make a lot of snide wisecracks about my ability to read or think, yet you've gone and replied to something I didn't say. I said in my previous post that I gave a company money in exchange for a copy of a file, that I had purchased a copy. I have done so - that copy is mine. I haven't purchased a "limited licence" as you state. No licence agreement comes with the file. UK copyright law places restrictions on what I may do with it. That is something else. If you think that all I have purchased when I buy a track off 7digital.com is a "limited licence", then where does this copy I have on my computer magically come from? Do you not think that I have purchased it? I assure you that receiving that file was a condition of my giving them money. How is that not purchasing? If you buy a gun, is it not yours because the law forbids you to shoot someone with it. If you buy a car, is it not yours because the law forbids you to drive it wherever you like at whatever speeds? If you buy a house, is it not yours because the government takes a property tax on it when you sell it? All the same argument that you are using to say my file isn't "purchased". You try to say that because there are legal restrictions on what may be done with something, that you cannot own it. Nonsense of the meanest sort.
As to all the many accusations of a failure of reading comprehension, I shall highlight a few of your own just to refute them and get them out of the way.
I said:
As regards "demanding my detractors prove me wrong" well, I made a statement and you attacked me with accusations of bias,
And you replied:
No, actually I attacked you for claiming that your opponents engage in "hideous logical contortions"
Do you note the difference in highlighted words. You're trying to refute what I said ("No, actually...") but your point doesn't match up with mine. You resorted immediately in your first post to personal abuse which i
Got to say that while I'm not a big fan of the big music labels, the Funk Brothers may not be the best example. In their time, they consisted of 11 different keyboardists, 18 different guitarists, 14 bassists and well over a dozen other assorted members. They're more like a marketing label than a band. At least so far as I can tell. I'm willing to be corrected, though.
But copyright isn't the problem here, nor terms. If copyright on a song expired after a couple of years or never existed in the first place, it wouldn't mean that they suddenly got money back off the big labels. It might free some of them up to perform their own works if there are any artists so badly bound that their right to do this is affected (I don't know if they are), but they'd lose whatever remaining royalties they got for their music being played various places. The copyright actually allows them to negotiate with the big labels rather than just being ripped off entirely. Or better yet, they can manage the distribution themselves if possible.
I don't know if that relates to the point you were making. I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just of the mind that the solution is one of artists not falling for tricks of the big music labels, rather than changing copyright law. (Maybe reducing terms for other reasons, though).
It is not an "ad hominem" argument if I merely point out that your own words demonstrate that you were swindled, utterly and completely.
An ad hominem is where you attack the person, rather than their argument. You didn't merely anything, you said that my argument was based on my boundless greed in your first post. And when I pointed out that if I were greedy I wouldn't be paying quite a bit of money each year on purchasing movies and music, you then attacked me again by trying to say that I'm only defending the system because I hope to profit by it later. That's a second ad hominem. The part about being swindled, etc. etc. was a minority of your posts and doesn't address what I say anyway since it simply states your opinion that someone who pays for a copy of a film, music or ebook is being swindled. You don't back it up with any reasoning, just repetition in various forms and excessive use of "quote" marks for pseudo-emphasis.
Then in your third post to me, the one I'm replying to now, you again resort to ad hominems implying I am gullible or prone to excessive submissiveness to authority. You waste a lot of words simply accusing me of things and very little deconstructing what I say. As an aside on the excessive submissiveness to authority, I have previously petitioned my local MPs and MEPs on various issues of digital rights, was one of the founder members of the Open Rights Group, backing it with a significant amount of my own money (another counter to your accusations of my "boundless greed", incidentally), financially support WikiLeaks and have been photographed numerous times by the friendly UK police on various protest marches. I don't know what you require of someone to not be excessively submissive to authority - throwing bombs, maybe - but I think the odds are that if I qualify as excessively submissive, then you rank lower still. That's not an ad hominem, btw. That's simple likelihood posted in defence of myself against your accusations. I don't pretend that the personal qualities of either of us are a substitution for argument. So on that note, let's address the one position you have stated that isn't a personal attack on myself:
I only have to point to your own laughable admission that you are under a silly illusion that you are actually "purchasing" music.
I give money to someone. A file downloads in return. In what way have I not just purchased a copy of that file? Why is that a "silly illusion" ? Money given in exchange for them giving me a copy of the file I want. If you have trouble with that, perhaps go and look up the word 'purchase' in a good dictionary.
There are numerous examples of "hideous logical contortions" in the comments on this page. I'm not going to start copying and pasting large amounts of texts from my other posts in order to provide examples. Go and read through my other comments here if you like. But I suspect you're about to provide your own contortion in an attempt to explain how my giving money in exchange for a copy of a file isn't purchasing something.
As regards "demanding my detractors prove me wrong" well, I made a statement and you attacked me with accusations of bias, greed and a slavish addiction to authority. I think you jolly well should have to try and prove me wrong with actual logic if you're going to be like that. If I was as completely incorrect as you say I am, it ought to be pretty easy. But we're several posts in and you haven't done it yet. Just posted personal attacks and unsupported statements that you think buying a copy of a file is an "illusion."
So essentially, you accuse me of boundless greed and when you can't demonstrate why that ad hominem was so, you resort to another ad hominem by saying that my arguments must result from being swindled by outside interests. Or else that I am simply suffering from delayed greed because I hope to become a rich in intellectual property in the future. I do make use of copyright law, but it's only been through GPL'ing my software so far. Nowhere do you demonstrate that anything I have said is incorrect or back up your own arguments with anything other than repetition.
These people you know? I bet they mean malum prohibitum. They do not consider ignoring copyright to be wrong, except insofar as disobeying an arbitrary law is wrong.
No - very definitely the other way around. They are smart enough to realise they are taking something for free whilst others are subsidising them through purchasing. Legality is not what they have in mind. Most people I know don't consider law to equate to write and wrong (and nor does it).
Please point to where I said "all piracy is bad." I was quite explicit in saying that most of the people I know do, and admit to, pirating as an alternative to purchasing. That is a demonstrable impact on profitability of making the media they are pirating. That you list reasons you have pirated for other reasons doesn't contradict what I said. Please read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote or else point to where I said such things, please. I hope you'll understand if I sound a little irritated - you have stated that I said something I did not.
Your boundless greed has eaten your brain and what is left is rotten completely.
In what way have I demonstrated a "boundless greed" ? By purchasing music instead of pirating it, I have given up money, not made it. This is an example of the nonsense I object to. You haven't thought through what you're saying at all.
What - you actually don't believe that it's possible to listen to music before you buy it without torrenting the song? Seriously? Even the little local bands will have a MySpace or a YouTube profile I can listen to a bit of it on. I hear a lot of the new music I want to buy on Internet radio stations. And of course round at friend's places. And for anything remotely larger than local label, there will be a site, or a preview on Amazon or 7digital or someone that I can play some of the song on before I buy it. Often even the entire song in a low-quality version. None of this requires torrenting the artist's music without their consent.
It's not the normal military you have to worry about, it's the ones that are convinced that they are fighting one God's side in the battle of Armageddon and even if both sides are wiped out, they will live forever in the Promised land.
It certainly is. But in case anyone reading interprets your post to be talking about Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East, it's worth highlighting the influential people in the USA who believe that a large war involving Israel is one of the key steps toward Armageddon and thus their ascension to heaven in "The Rapture", and who are actively working toward this end.
Example: Resolutions passed in Texas (see PDF in link) concerning support for Israel occupying Palestine. Why are states in Texas concerning themselves with this? Because it has a large number of Christian Zionists - estimated 8% of US population belongs to Churches that teach war in Middle East with Israel is one of the steps toward Armageddon. Some of these people are very influential, such as Tom DeLay.
Now I'm not actually unconvinced that US support for Israel's actions wont be the start of Armageddon... I just don't see it as leading to many of us being taken up to Heaven (and if I did - I still wouldn't want it to happen for the sake of all those who weren't going to heaven). So yes - we do have to worry about those who want war because they think it will lead to Heaven for them. But to be clear - there are plenty of those in the US and they have influence on policy to help bring that about.
The GP is referring to the film version of "I Am Legend" starring Will Smith. SPOILERS FOLLOW:
At the end of the Will Smith version, he derives a cure for the disease. A cure that actually entirely reverses the effects of the disease on people. He himself is killed by the infected, but passes on a sample of the cure to a fellow survivor and her son who flee to a colony of immune people somewhere in the North. Wil Smith's character rediscovers his faith in God for inexplicable reasons (and I don't use the word 'inexplicable' to mean poorly justified, either) and the colony waves some nice Stars and Stripes banners. I understand that this is different to the book.
You'll find a lot of pro-PostgreSQL posts in my history, it's very good and I think if you go into it prepared to learn you'll like it too. But I'm not an idiot and throwing away a lot of in-house expertise on MySQL requires some real justification. MySQL has indeed come on a lot since the old days. Unless you really need the more sophisticated features that MySQL doesn't provide (or provides badly), it's usually a good basis for things. There are long-term risks with MySQL - it is already starting to fork (a little), but again, unless you're quite sophisticated users of it, I doubt this will become an issue for you for a long time yet.
But still, you sound like someone who considers things from all sides, so maybe you'll find you like PostgreSQL anyway.
MySQL and Oracle (the database, not the company) aren't competitors. MySQL serves people who want cheap / free systems that are fast enough, but fairly simple. Oracle serves people who need real heavy-hitting solutions. What Oracle should be doing is using MySQL to keep customers away from PostgreSQL which also has the cheapness of MySQL but can meet a lot more (though not all) of Oracle's greater sophistication than MySQL.
There's nothing to stop you still using KDE3.x. It's the same principles as KDE2 but much improved. I personally prefer KDE4, now that it's more stable, but there's nothing really wrong with KDE3.x for a little while longer, yet.
Unfortunately a lot of the media seem determined to lead people away from this rational point of view. I have direct experience of this even in the UK when I was approached on the street by someone interviewing for the BBC on the first anniversary of 9/11, gathering public reactions. I was asked (as far as I can remember the exact wording) what my reaction was when I saw the 9/11 attacks. I replied that my first thought was "oh God, there's going to be a war. The US is going to invade somewhere". Nothing special - I read the news, have an interest in international politics and that was my first reaction. The lady interviewing wasn't satisfied and asked me 'but what did I feel?' I tried to re-phrase my answer, but it was more or less the same - "I felt afraid of how the US was going to react." She tried a third time, but I couldn't honestly give her a different answer. I said: "this isn't really what you're after is it?" She said 'not really' and off she went to find someone who would give appropriately vague responses on a purely emotional level (not that my concerns didn't provoke an emotion of dread in me).
That's a tiny instance of media altering how things are viewed. Far larger would be the issue of handling the crimes as an action by some ill-defined force known as "terrorists" which you raise. But I thought I'd just share my example of how the media selects only the desired views of 9/11. Probably people who focused on the crime as a crime similarly didn't get quoted that often.
And football supposedly had a much lower incidence of injuries before the introduction of "pads" (which quickly became an offensive weapon allowing harder hits)
Yep - adding the padding actually made the game more dangerous. Only the Americans could make a game that was both more pussified than rugby and had a higher injury rate.;)
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Firebird can't compete with MySQL. PostgreSQL can. The risk for Oracle just might be that PostgreSQL can compete with Oracle. MySQL can be a good backend, but it can't meet some of the advanced needs that people have of Oracle. Therefore it's not really a competitor. It hoovers up all the small players that either don't care for or can't afford Oracle's almighty solutions. Even the table type that does lend MySQL some of the more advanced technology (InnoDB) is licenced from Oracle and their home-grown version (Falcon) has yet to show signs of being usable.
PostgreSQL can't provide all the features and power that Oracle can either. For the absolute most powerful setup you can ask, you want Oracle. But PostgreSQL can get a lot closer than MySQL. And migrating between PostgreSQL and Oracle is also quite easy a lot of the time. I think from Oracle's point of view, they'd rather MySQL be out there as the go-to database than PostgreSQL. This is all a bit conspiracy theory - I make no suggestion that Oracle actually are looking at things from this point of view and I don't think it would be a factor in purchasing SUN even if they did consider this angle. But I'm just considering the actual implications and it seems to me that while MySQL doesn't compete in the same market as Oracle and wouldn't for quite some time, its main rival PostgreSQL can and sometimes does.
Wait! Do you mean to say that torrent sites can be profitable WITHOUT the user paying!? Holy crap! So why aren't the big media companies running torrent sites, turning a profit and dividing it amongst the content makers
Because pulling in US$30,000 per month from advertising is a fine profit if you don't have any costs to recoup (because it's other people's work), but if you're the companies that spent thousands of millions of dollars on producing all that music and all those movies, then a few tens of thousands of dollars looks like a pretty poor return on investment. That's why. Or you could make the sort of movies that can can be made for less than £30,000 per month.;)
His points make a lot of sense... With no ability to try before you buy, people will play it safe rather than risk losing their money, so they are highly unlikely to buy from a small producer they have not heard of. By contrast, if they are able to obtain media for free there is no risk and people can learn to like an artist they previously wouldn't have considered.
If I want to know if I'll like a piece of music or not before I buy it, I can hear it on Internet radio stations, real radio stations, the previews on the sites I buy music from (such as Amazon and 7digital.com), in clubs, at friends or I can even ask them to play me a track in the local music store on the headphones there. Your "with no ability" is not true for music. For movies? Well you obviously can't "try before you buy" because the value of the movie diminishes by your having seen it. But that's what reviews, friends, trailers and an ability to judge things based on other work are for. The risk that I may have "wasted" £7.00 on a cinema ticket is not sufficient for me to go out and take that movie for free. I don't say to myself (or others), well I might not enjoy this film as much as I think I will so lets not pay for it. Is that really an argument for you?
And record profits are bad when they're unreasonably high... Noone should make millions from doing a small amount of work, payment should be proportional to the level of effort required to do the work and should cease when someone stops working. In most other industries this is already the case.
And here you have set yourself up as arbiter of what is reasonable or not. If you don't feel that someone should earn X amount of money for their work, then don't contribute to their earnings by purchasing their product. But what gives you the right to determine what other people think it is worth? If people are willing to pay £7.99 for a book, then that means it is worth it to them. We're not talking food or water here. If people are choosing to pay the money, then that's their privilege. If you aren't, then you either don't want the product, which is fine, or you are downloading it for free and dressing up your avoiding paying as somehow not your responsibility but the artist's for charging too much.
Now if you want to argue the general state of wealth distribution in the USA and the UK as a cause of higher relative prices to the poor, then we can discuss that as a separate issue (I like economics), but dictating what other people may charge for their work doesn't sound like a free society to me.
If you seriously think this is about money, you've really got your head in the sand.
No. Do you think big media companies responsible for bringing this lawsuit care about anything other than money? The Internet frees artists somewhat to manage their own work, distribution, advertising. It's great for that and you are certainly right that the big companies, or entities like the American Writers Association, hate that. But piracy doesn't help the little people - it hurts across the board and the little players are less able to weather the profit-hits than the big players. TPB did not and does not help subvert the big media companies' control. The Internet combined with copyright law does that. Remember that copyright was originally established to protect authors from big companies. It can still be used for such and increasingly will be if piracy doesn't undermine the entire industry.
Ah, but there are major differences. First of all, Google aren't running a tracker that co-ordinates peers in the downloading of media. That's how a traditional torrent tracker-server works and that's what TPB were running. They were doing more than just pointing people at the location of files as Google and Yahoo do.
Also, intent matters under Swedish law (as it should, else Attempted Murder is no crime). Nobody other than the Slashdot crowd would believe that TPB didn't have intent. Remember that TPB weren't charged with Copyright Infringement, but with being an accessory to it. It was also a large factor that they profited from it so much. I don't think this has the big implications for Google, Yahoo, etc. that you might think.
But those figures aren't for downloading, but for uploading. Nobody got sued $700 for lost profits for downloading a single song. The damages reclaimed from TPB weren't because the TPB had downloaded a single song, but because they had made a lot of money from distributing it to others.
So someone states a "fact" that they then can't support and my request for proof gets "who cares." I care. I care whether people on Slashdot make things up to support their point of view and pass it off as fact. And so should you if you agree with the viewpoint because once they try that outside the echo chamber of Slashdot where there are lots of people ready to agree with them and mod them because "who cares" if its true or not so long as it supports the popular view... as soon as they try it outside that environment they will get called on it and there wont be people saying "who cares" there will be people saying "so you're making stuff up" and then ignore you.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I deserve an ad hominem? For disagreeing with you? :) Calling my posts "whining", stating that I'm "losing an argument". These are just attempts - without reference to facts or reasoning - to try and cast me in the position of being defeated by you somehow. An attempt to invalidate my argument by personal attack again. But this is the Internet, not an episode of Big Brother. There isn't a voting audience out there cheering you on and marking you as the winner or me the loser. There's no way to determine that even if I did agree with you that majority opinion = factual accuracy. The only real measure by which we can measure who is losing, who is most emotionally upset in this debate (which is obviously what matters to you, not facts), is the degree to which someone is driven to make personal attacks. By which criteria you are obviously the one that is most upset by this dialogue. ;)
:)
Really, if whining is just complaining without the power to change anything then I'm afraid it's you. I am arguing for the sake of refining my points and for the sake of anyone reading who is interested in my argument. You seem to be arguing for the sake of making me feel bad or awarding me some status as 'loser of argument', neither of which you have power to bring about sitting at your keyboard in who cares where. So if you really must bring this down to the level of "whining" and "losing" and "desperate", then it's you who is putting yourself in an unwinnable position. So long as I keep refuting your points with logic, I meet my goals.
Now hopefully I'm done with this side of things. You make a lot of snide wisecracks about my ability to read or think, yet you've gone and replied to something I didn't say. I said in my previous post that I gave a company money in exchange for a copy of a file, that I had purchased a copy. I have done so - that copy is mine. I haven't purchased a "limited licence" as you state. No licence agreement comes with the file. UK copyright law places restrictions on what I may do with it. That is something else. If you think that all I have purchased when I buy a track off 7digital.com is a "limited licence", then where does this copy I have on my computer magically come from? Do you not think that I have purchased it? I assure you that receiving that file was a condition of my giving them money. How is that not purchasing? If you buy a gun, is it not yours because the law forbids you to shoot someone with it. If you buy a car, is it not yours because the law forbids you to drive it wherever you like at whatever speeds? If you buy a house, is it not yours because the government takes a property tax on it when you sell it? All the same argument that you are using to say my file isn't "purchased". You try to say that because there are legal restrictions on what may be done with something, that you cannot own it. Nonsense of the meanest sort.
As to all the many accusations of a failure of reading comprehension, I shall highlight a few of your own just to refute them and get them out of the way.
I said:
And you replied:
Do you note the difference in highlighted words. You're trying to refute what I said ("No, actually...") but your point doesn't match up with mine. You resorted immediately in your first post to personal abuse which i
Got to say that while I'm not a big fan of the big music labels, the Funk Brothers may not be the best example. In their time, they consisted of 11 different keyboardists, 18 different guitarists, 14 bassists and well over a dozen other assorted members. They're more like a marketing label than a band. At least so far as I can tell. I'm willing to be corrected, though.
But copyright isn't the problem here, nor terms. If copyright on a song expired after a couple of years or never existed in the first place, it wouldn't mean that they suddenly got money back off the big labels. It might free some of them up to perform their own works if there are any artists so badly bound that their right to do this is affected (I don't know if they are), but they'd lose whatever remaining royalties they got for their music being played various places. The copyright actually allows them to negotiate with the big labels rather than just being ripped off entirely. Or better yet, they can manage the distribution themselves if possible.
I don't know if that relates to the point you were making. I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just of the mind that the solution is one of artists not falling for tricks of the big music labels, rather than changing copyright law. (Maybe reducing terms for other reasons, though).
Going quickly through your post:
An ad hominem is where you attack the person, rather than their argument. You didn't merely anything, you said that my argument was based on my boundless greed in your first post. And when I pointed out that if I were greedy I wouldn't be paying quite a bit of money each year on purchasing movies and music, you then attacked me again by trying to say that I'm only defending the system because I hope to profit by it later. That's a second ad hominem. The part about being swindled, etc. etc. was a minority of your posts and doesn't address what I say anyway since it simply states your opinion that someone who pays for a copy of a film, music or ebook is being swindled. You don't back it up with any reasoning, just repetition in various forms and excessive use of "quote" marks for pseudo-emphasis.
Then in your third post to me, the one I'm replying to now, you again resort to ad hominems implying I am gullible or prone to excessive submissiveness to authority. You waste a lot of words simply accusing me of things and very little deconstructing what I say. As an aside on the excessive submissiveness to authority, I have previously petitioned my local MPs and MEPs on various issues of digital rights, was one of the founder members of the Open Rights Group, backing it with a significant amount of my own money (another counter to your accusations of my "boundless greed", incidentally), financially support WikiLeaks and have been photographed numerous times by the friendly UK police on various protest marches. I don't know what you require of someone to not be excessively submissive to authority - throwing bombs, maybe - but I think the odds are that if I qualify as excessively submissive, then you rank lower still. That's not an ad hominem, btw. That's simple likelihood posted in defence of myself against your accusations. I don't pretend that the personal qualities of either of us are a substitution for argument. So on that note, let's address the one position you have stated that isn't a personal attack on myself:
I give money to someone. A file downloads in return. In what way have I not just purchased a copy of that file? Why is that a "silly illusion" ? Money given in exchange for them giving me a copy of the file I want. If you have trouble with that, perhaps go and look up the word 'purchase' in a good dictionary.
There are numerous examples of "hideous logical contortions" in the comments on this page. I'm not going to start copying and pasting large amounts of texts from my other posts in order to provide examples. Go and read through my other comments here if you like. But I suspect you're about to provide your own contortion in an attempt to explain how my giving money in exchange for a copy of a file isn't purchasing something.
As regards "demanding my detractors prove me wrong" well, I made a statement and you attacked me with accusations of bias, greed and a slavish addiction to authority. I think you jolly well should have to try and prove me wrong with actual logic if you're going to be like that. If I was as completely incorrect as you say I am, it ought to be pretty easy. But we're several posts in and you haven't done it yet. Just posted personal attacks and unsupported statements that you think buying a copy of a file is an "illusion."
Regards,
H.
So essentially, you accuse me of boundless greed and when you can't demonstrate why that ad hominem was so, you resort to another ad hominem by saying that my arguments must result from being swindled by outside interests. Or else that I am simply suffering from delayed greed because I hope to become a rich in intellectual property in the future. I do make use of copyright law, but it's only been through GPL'ing my software so far. Nowhere do you demonstrate that anything I have said is incorrect or back up your own arguments with anything other than repetition.
No - very definitely the other way around. They are smart enough to realise they are taking something for free whilst others are subsidising them through purchasing. Legality is not what they have in mind. Most people I know don't consider law to equate to write and wrong (and nor does it).
Please point to where I said "all piracy is bad." I was quite explicit in saying that most of the people I know do, and admit to, pirating as an alternative to purchasing. That is a demonstrable impact on profitability of making the media they are pirating. That you list reasons you have pirated for other reasons doesn't contradict what I said. Please read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote or else point to where I said such things, please. I hope you'll understand if I sound a little irritated - you have stated that I said something I did not.
In what way have I demonstrated a "boundless greed" ? By purchasing music instead of pirating it, I have given up money, not made it. This is an example of the nonsense I object to. You haven't thought through what you're saying at all.
What - you actually don't believe that it's possible to listen to music before you buy it without torrenting the song? Seriously? Even the little local bands will have a MySpace or a YouTube profile I can listen to a bit of it on. I hear a lot of the new music I want to buy on Internet radio stations. And of course round at friend's places. And for anything remotely larger than local label, there will be a site, or a preview on Amazon or 7digital or someone that I can play some of the song on before I buy it. Often even the entire song in a low-quality version. None of this requires torrenting the artist's music without their consent.
It certainly is. But in case anyone reading interprets your post to be talking about Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East, it's worth highlighting the influential people in the USA who believe that a large war involving Israel is one of the key steps toward Armageddon and thus their ascension to heaven in "The Rapture", and who are actively working toward this end.
Example: Resolutions passed in Texas (see PDF in link) concerning support for Israel occupying Palestine. Why are states in Texas concerning themselves with this? Because it has a large number of Christian Zionists - estimated 8% of US population belongs to Churches that teach war in Middle East with Israel is one of the steps toward Armageddon. Some of these people are very influential, such as Tom DeLay.
Now I'm not actually unconvinced that US support for Israel's actions wont be the start of Armageddon... I just don't see it as leading to many of us being taken up to Heaven (and if I did - I still wouldn't want it to happen for the sake of all those who weren't going to heaven). So yes - we do have to worry about those who want war because they think it will lead to Heaven for them. But to be clear - there are plenty of those in the US and they have influence on policy to help bring that about.
The GP is referring to the film version of "I Am Legend" starring Will Smith. SPOILERS FOLLOW:
At the end of the Will Smith version, he derives a cure for the disease. A cure that actually entirely reverses the effects of the disease on people. He himself is killed by the infected, but passes on a sample of the cure to a fellow survivor and her son who flee to a colony of immune people somewhere in the North. Wil Smith's character rediscovers his faith in God for inexplicable reasons (and I don't use the word 'inexplicable' to mean poorly justified, either) and the colony waves some nice Stars and Stripes banners. I understand that this is different to the book.
On the subject of your sig: I am both amused and convinced. I shall buy more boxer shorts today!
You'll find a lot of pro-PostgreSQL posts in my history, it's very good and I think if you go into it prepared to learn you'll like it too. But I'm not an idiot and throwing away a lot of in-house expertise on MySQL requires some real justification. MySQL has indeed come on a lot since the old days. Unless you really need the more sophisticated features that MySQL doesn't provide (or provides badly), it's usually a good basis for things. There are long-term risks with MySQL - it is already starting to fork (a little), but again, unless you're quite sophisticated users of it, I doubt this will become an issue for you for a long time yet.
But still, you sound like someone who considers things from all sides, so maybe you'll find you like PostgreSQL anyway.
MySQL and Oracle (the database, not the company) aren't competitors. MySQL serves people who want cheap / free systems that are fast enough, but fairly simple. Oracle serves people who need real heavy-hitting solutions. What Oracle should be doing is using MySQL to keep customers away from PostgreSQL which also has the cheapness of MySQL but can meet a lot more (though not all) of Oracle's greater sophistication than MySQL.
There's nothing to stop you still using KDE3.x. It's the same principles as KDE2 but much improved. I personally prefer KDE4, now that it's more stable, but there's nothing really wrong with KDE3.x for a little while longer, yet.
Unfortunately a lot of the media seem determined to lead people away from this rational point of view. I have direct experience of this even in the UK when I was approached on the street by someone interviewing for the BBC on the first anniversary of 9/11, gathering public reactions. I was asked (as far as I can remember the exact wording) what my reaction was when I saw the 9/11 attacks. I replied that my first thought was "oh God, there's going to be a war. The US is going to invade somewhere". Nothing special - I read the news, have an interest in international politics and that was my first reaction. The lady interviewing wasn't satisfied and asked me 'but what did I feel?' I tried to re-phrase my answer, but it was more or less the same - "I felt afraid of how the US was going to react." She tried a third time, but I couldn't honestly give her a different answer. I said: "this isn't really what you're after is it?" She said 'not really' and off she went to find someone who would give appropriately vague responses on a purely emotional level (not that my concerns didn't provoke an emotion of dread in me).
That's a tiny instance of media altering how things are viewed. Far larger would be the issue of handling the crimes as an action by some ill-defined force known as "terrorists" which you raise. But I thought I'd just share my example of how the media selects only the desired views of 9/11. Probably people who focused on the crime as a crime similarly didn't get quoted that often.
Yep - adding the padding actually made the game more dangerous. Only the Americans could make a game that was both more pussified than rugby and had a higher injury rate. ;)
Firebird can't compete with MySQL. PostgreSQL can. The risk for Oracle just might be that PostgreSQL can compete with Oracle. MySQL can be a good backend, but it can't meet some of the advanced needs that people have of Oracle. Therefore it's not really a competitor. It hoovers up all the small players that either don't care for or can't afford Oracle's almighty solutions. Even the table type that does lend MySQL some of the more advanced technology (InnoDB) is licenced from Oracle and their home-grown version (Falcon) has yet to show signs of being usable.
PostgreSQL can't provide all the features and power that Oracle can either. For the absolute most powerful setup you can ask, you want Oracle. But PostgreSQL can get a lot closer than MySQL. And migrating between PostgreSQL and Oracle is also quite easy a lot of the time. I think from Oracle's point of view, they'd rather MySQL be out there as the go-to database than PostgreSQL. This is all a bit conspiracy theory - I make no suggestion that Oracle actually are looking at things from this point of view and I don't think it would be a factor in purchasing SUN even if they did consider this angle. But I'm just considering the actual implications and it seems to me that while MySQL doesn't compete in the same market as Oracle and wouldn't for quite some time, its main rival PostgreSQL can and sometimes does.
Nah. PostgreSQL has won. We just haven't managed to persuade the MySQL users that they've lost yet. ;)
Because pulling in US$30,000 per month from advertising is a fine profit if you don't have any costs to recoup (because it's other people's work), but if you're the companies that spent thousands of millions of dollars on producing all that music and all those movies, then a few tens of thousands of dollars looks like a pretty poor return on investment. That's why. Or you could make the sort of movies that can can be made for less than £30,000 per month. ;)
If I want to know if I'll like a piece of music or not before I buy it, I can hear it on Internet radio stations, real radio stations, the previews on the sites I buy music from (such as Amazon and 7digital.com), in clubs, at friends or I can even ask them to play me a track in the local music store on the headphones there. Your "with no ability" is not true for music. For movies? Well you obviously can't "try before you buy" because the value of the movie diminishes by your having seen it. But that's what reviews, friends, trailers and an ability to judge things based on other work are for. The risk that I may have "wasted" £7.00 on a cinema ticket is not sufficient for me to go out and take that movie for free. I don't say to myself (or others), well I might not enjoy this film as much as I think I will so lets not pay for it. Is that really an argument for you?
And here you have set yourself up as arbiter of what is reasonable or not. If you don't feel that someone should earn X amount of money for their work, then don't contribute to their earnings by purchasing their product. But what gives you the right to determine what other people think it is worth? If people are willing to pay £7.99 for a book, then that means it is worth it to them. We're not talking food or water here. If people are choosing to pay the money, then that's their privilege. If you aren't, then you either don't want the product, which is fine, or you are downloading it for free and dressing up your avoiding paying as somehow not your responsibility but the artist's for charging too much.
Now if you want to argue the general state of wealth distribution in the USA and the UK as a cause of higher relative prices to the poor, then we can discuss that as a separate issue (I like economics), but dictating what other people may charge for their work doesn't sound like a free society to me.
No. Do you think big media companies responsible for bringing this lawsuit care about anything other than money? The Internet frees artists somewhat to manage their own work, distribution, advertising. It's great for that and you are certainly right that the big companies, or entities like the American Writers Association, hate that. But piracy doesn't help the little people - it hurts across the board and the little players are less able to weather the profit-hits than the big players. TPB did not and does not help subvert the big media companies' control. The Internet combined with copyright law does that. Remember that copyright was originally established to protect authors from big companies. It can still be used for such and increasingly will be if piracy doesn't undermine the entire industry.
Ah, but there are major differences. First of all, Google aren't running a tracker that co-ordinates peers in the downloading of media. That's how a traditional torrent tracker-server works and that's what TPB were running. They were doing more than just pointing people at the location of files as Google and Yahoo do.
Also, intent matters under Swedish law (as it should, else Attempted Murder is no crime). Nobody other than the Slashdot crowd would believe that TPB didn't have intent. Remember that TPB weren't charged with Copyright Infringement, but with being an accessory to it. It was also a large factor that they profited from it so much. I don't think this has the big implications for Google, Yahoo, etc. that you might think.
But those figures aren't for downloading, but for uploading. Nobody got sued $700 for lost profits for downloading a single song. The damages reclaimed from TPB weren't because the TPB had downloaded a single song, but because they had made a lot of money from distributing it to others.
Oops. Sorry. US$60,000 was what I meant to type. Though looking it up, it should have been US$65,000.
Thanks for catching it.
H.
So someone states a "fact" that they then can't support and my request for proof gets "who cares." I care. I care whether people on Slashdot make things up to support their point of view and pass it off as fact. And so should you if you agree with the viewpoint because once they try that outside the echo chamber of Slashdot where there are lots of people ready to agree with them and mod them because "who cares" if its true or not so long as it supports the popular view... as soon as they try it outside that environment they will get called on it and there wont be people saying "who cares" there will be people saying "so you're making stuff up" and then ignore you.