Yeah! It's like they think all of a book's value lies in the words instead of the paper.
Just curious, what would it cost a retailer and publisher to print a 300-page paperback full of random words (no author) and place it in a bookstore shelf for a couple of months? That would be the cost of a book minus author and editor costs.
And who are you to dictate what I should and shouldn't do? I don't think I or the creative people owe you anything.
A few decades is too much. What the Rolling Stones created in their heyday was worth something.
Too much for who? The govt and the savvy businessfolks have gotten together to screw the artists yet again. To add to that, the pseudo-communists have joined the party demanding end of copyrights. There is no rational reason to deprive what once belonged to the creator and distribute it amongst the masses for free. It's just a silly rule (limited time rights). The lawmakers themselves won't give up an ounce of power after a limited amount of time, so why should the artists give up what's rightfully theirs, what came from within?
No. Copyright is absurd. If copyright wasn't such a total clusterfuck, fair use would not be an issue.
"Absurd," based on what? Cuz you said so? Copyright allows only temporary ownership of creative work and gives the owner reproduction rights so that he/she is the gatekeeper between printing and distributing works to the public, usually in exchange for payment. That's right, the sole reason copyright exists is so the author/owners of creative works get paid handsomely. The payment is the inducement to create these works.
What is really absurd is, why is copyright limited to only a few decades? Land ownership can last forever, as can business ownership, so does the right to collect taxes from citizens by govt also lasts infinity. So why are creative people robbed off their work and have it distributed in public after a paltry number of years? IMO, it's daylight robbery. Copyright should also be indefinite. The heirs of Mozart, Beethoven, Da Vinci, etc. should be rightfully able to claim a certain percent of income from the work of their ancestors.
While all three of those parts are necessary, which is most important? IMO, it's the engine. There is little variation or complexity in various tires and fuel tanks. Engines, however, have a big impact on your driving experience and therefore, cars are priced largely on the characteristics of their engines.
Similarly, talent is more important than skill because skill can be developed with practice but no amount of effort will get you talent.
I would almost agree, that any language is as good as any other. With a few exceptions, like "whitespace" which isn't meant to be a practical language anyway.
This is a false statement, they are not as good as the other. Each language is designed to be strong in certain areas while weak/ignoring other areas. As an example, C promotes code close to machine language while Java shields the programmer from manual memory management (GC). There are many such design issues that make a language a natural fit for certain applications while making other languages ill-fitted.
What really sets languages apart is the tooling that's built up around them.
While tools may be important, they are of a secondary importance.
Real job = boss has monopoly on capital and/or some other resource. All companies have some sort of tangible or intangible monopoly. Monopoly is part of the real world. Ignoring or artificially eliminating them does not solve problems.
Start with that Software is already protected under copyright law. This prevents others from simply copying your code and calling it their own.
Copyrights are easy to work around. Imagine this is your copyrighted code (simple code for this example):
void swap(int* a, int *b) { int temp = *a; *a = *b; *b = temp }
I can workaround the copyright protection by changing the variables because copyright protects the exact representation of an idea only, not the idea itself.
My non-infringing code, based on your code (that I obtained from reading your source, or reverse engineering the object code):
void swapInts(int *numA, int* numB) { int t; t = *numA; *numA = *numB; *numB = t; }
To prevent such infringements, swap() can be patented. In which case, swapInts() would infringe on the patent and be illegal.
I get paid hourly, once I have completed an hour of work I will never be paid for that same hour again. Why should it be different for someone who makes something copyrighted?
Because once a copyrighted work is created it generates revenue for a long period. Additionally, the effort and skill to create such a work is a one or more levels higher than creating a derived work or doing a repetitive work.
I am not able to obtain any future royalties on the ethernet cables I install today, and the end customer gets full control of them to do whatever they want.
Why should you obtain royalties for a commodity service? It would be like paying royalty to a grocer for buying his apple, royalty for a taxi ride, etc. Installing cables is not a unique task and serves a small group of people. Creating copyrighted work is creating a unique product that serves thousands or even millions of users. So the compensation should be proportionate.
It is always a bit humorous for me when I think about the arguments that we need copyrights that are 70 years plus the life of the author but for patents, 20 years is adequate.
It's even more humorous that cheapskates like you balk at paying $10 to $50 for copyrighted content and would rather expect the creators to starve while you get free content. You can legally obtain books, music, DVDs at the public library for free.
And be glad the duration is 70+life years instead of hundreds of years. I mean imagine if you bought land or a house and you have rights to it only for 70+life years. After that, your children/descendants would have to vacate the place and it would be public property, perhaps a park. Does that seem okay to you?
Yeah, just abolish all patents, in every field, not just software. Then see how the ensuing chaos, where copycats benefit more than inventors, destroy the market.
This is analogous to banning cars. Tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents every year, so it would be reasonable to ban cars.
Yeah, but unlike most forms of capital sources, crowdfunding is interest free and risk-free (to the builder)
If he invested his own funds, there's a chance the project might fail and he would lose his hard-earned money.
If he tried getting the money from a bank, they would ask for a collateral and charge a big interest rate
Asking $32 mill from angel investors or venture capitalists would require him to sign 10% - 30% (guess) of the company to the investors.
Given the options above, the most profitable and least risky choice of capital is crowdfunding.
As usual, dumb/ignorant people are being taken for a ride. These crowd-funding sites should give control of 2% to 5% of the company to the people who seeded the company.
I don't understand how piracy friendly garbage gets modded up on this site.
So I guess I do have a free speech right to copy works made by other people.
According to wikipedia, this is Free Speech, Article 11:
The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
Freedom of speech is meant to give you freedom to speak your mind, say unpopular things, etc. As noted above, it does not give you permission to abuse the law: abuses such as copyright violation, hate speech, etc. That is, free speech does not give you right to infringe on the rights of others, specifically, authors and publishers' right to profit from their literary works.
Copyrighted works don't fall under freedom of speech because they are already widely available for a very low price -- so it's already virtually free. Copying and distributing copyrighted works has very little to do with freedom of speech -- that copyrighted material is not yours to distribute. So stop coming up with lame excuses to steal property for free.
So if I print up a copy of Oliver Twist or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, without paying Dickens or Twain, you're saying that that would be stealing and that I could not assert a free speech right against the state if they tried to shut me down? News to me.
Those books are public domain because their copyright has expired. You're free to print em, change em, do anything you want. If, however, you try re-printing a more current book, you'd be breaking the law. If you print multiple copies and try to distribute for free or a nominal cost, you'll get shut down.
Copyright is utilitarian through and through, and can be thought of best as a means of exploiting authors for the benefit of the public.
Without copyright, everyone is going to download the book for $0 and the author will go broke wasting years of his/her life for nothing.
Even with moderately selling books, the author benefits using a publisher (ebook) who gives 50-70% of total sales to the author. Traditional book publishers only pay 5-15%, similar to your dairy farmer/cow analogy.
I don't recall voluntarily agreeing to copyright laws. Why, then, should I be obligated to obey them? Especially given that it infringes on my right of free speech to be forbidden to copy a work, regardless of whether it originated with me or not.
Just because you did not voluntarily agree to not murder or rob someone does not give you the right to kill people. Stealing the property of others without payment is not free speech.
The answer of course is that majorities tend to rule, and if a majority has a legitimate power to establish a copyright law, they likely have a legitimate power to establish an antitrust law.
Laws are also formed based on justice and fairness. Copyright ensures payment to the creators of the creative work in exchange for payment from the consumer. The payment encourages and supports the creative class to create more work, and so on.
I also do not understand this statement - "artificially raise prices".
If seller A sells book X for $10 while seller B for $14, then it's very likely seller B will suffer a loss on that particular book because all buyers will choose the cheapest seller for $10.
To ensure neither suffers a loss, they both agree to sell book X for $12 -- this is collusion. While the $10 price will give them a 30% (say) margin of profit, $12 gives them a 40% profit margin, but requires active agreement among all the sellers to cooperate instead of competing against one another.
On the other hand, I agree with you. Why is Amazon's $10 magically okay while Apple's $12.50 illegal? The price of a product is what the market is willing to bear -- that's trading.
Well, gosh darn it all to heck! Price determined by demand? What's next? Sliced bread?
Don't you mean price determined by monopoly power? Amazon has enough market share power to dictate low prices for ebooks that benefit themselves (eg: more kindle reader sales) and the consumers but at the cost of shafting both the publishers and authors.
Collusion or not, the publisher and author are the ones who should set the prices, not the book retailer, consumers or courts.
If Amazon continues forcing authors to sell at low prices, you'll end up with a large quantity of books that are very short and with low quality of writing.
As others have mentioned, Javascript is extremely important for tracking/spying on web users' activities. A typical top news website contains scripts from Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, DoubleClick, etc. Outwardly, these sites sport a "share on twitter", 'post on FB' links on the page, but these links get hardly used. What they do instead is install cookies so they can track all the pages a user is viewing.
And since Google pays Mozilla, it's very likely they wanted this feature implemented to prevent users from stopping web tracking.
It's hidden (in GUI) now, but could be removed in the future in about:config too. Why do they make changes without asking users whether they want it or not? Only expert users are going to disable JavaScript, so it's not going to affect any noob user.
There are many hacked sites that serve malware as Javascript. Noscript and disabling JS is a good way to handle these problems. What idiot decided to remove this feature and why doesn't he ask the community's permission before making such decisions?
It's real to the sufferers. When I started playing games for a long time on my iPod touch, I started getting blurred vision and watery eyes if I stared at the screen for too long. The problem was somewhat less if I looked at the screen for only less than a minute. And I didn't get this problem staring at an older iPod (which was LCD).
When I searched the web for this issue, I found a thread at discussions.apple.com about many Apple fan boys returning their new MacBook Pro because it hurt their eyes. I thought I was crazy until they generally came to the consensus that the eye problems had something to do with LED laptop screen. I'm not sure whether it's only PWM, but one thing's for sure, these LED screens are unpleasant to look at and have worsened my eyesight. LCDs on the other hand have a cool feeling and don't cause any discomfort or harm vision.
I gets worse -- LCD screens are being phased out by manufacturers and are being replaced by LED screens because they have better picture quality.
I hope any company incorporating LED screens into their products fully investigate this issue and offer LCD screens as an alternative to LEDs. LCDs have a duller yellowish hue, but it's better than suffering eyestrain, headaches etc.
It doesn't need to be registered, but it does need to be marked.
Marked with what? All titles of products/services either have TM (officially trademarked at some govt. office) or blank (not trademarked). Is there any unofficial trademark that we're not aware of?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! It's like they think all of a book's value lies in the words instead of the paper.
Just curious, what would it cost a retailer and publisher to print a 300-page paperback full of random words (no author) and place it in a bookstore shelf for a couple of months? That would be the cost of a book minus author and editor costs.
To get you up off your ass so you'll create more.
And who are you to dictate what I should and shouldn't do? I don't think I or the creative people owe you anything.
A few decades is too much. What the Rolling Stones created in their heyday was worth something.
Too much for who? The govt and the savvy businessfolks have gotten together to screw the artists yet again. To add to that, the pseudo-communists have joined the party demanding end of copyrights. There is no rational reason to deprive what once belonged to the creator and distribute it amongst the masses for free. It's just a silly rule (limited time rights). The lawmakers themselves won't give up an ounce of power after a limited amount of time, so why should the artists give up what's rightfully theirs, what came from within?
No. Copyright is absurd. If copyright wasn't such a total clusterfuck, fair use would not be an issue.
"Absurd," based on what? Cuz you said so? Copyright allows only temporary ownership of creative work and gives the owner reproduction rights so that he/she is the gatekeeper between printing and distributing works to the public, usually in exchange for payment. That's right, the sole reason copyright exists is so the author/owners of creative works get paid handsomely. The payment is the inducement to create these works.
What is really absurd is, why is copyright limited to only a few decades? Land ownership can last forever, as can business ownership, so does the right to collect taxes from citizens by govt also lasts infinity. So why are creative people robbed off their work and have it distributed in public after a paltry number of years? IMO, it's daylight robbery. Copyright should also be indefinite. The heirs of Mozart, Beethoven, Da Vinci, etc. should be rightfully able to claim a certain percent of income from the work of their ancestors.
While all three of those parts are necessary, which is most important? IMO, it's the engine. There is little variation or complexity in various tires and fuel tanks. Engines, however, have a big impact on your driving experience and therefore, cars are priced largely on the characteristics of their engines.
Similarly, talent is more important than skill because skill can be developed with practice but no amount of effort will get you talent.
I would almost agree, that any language is as good as any other. With a few exceptions, like "whitespace" which isn't meant to be a practical language anyway.
This is a false statement, they are not as good as the other. Each language is designed to be strong in certain areas while weak/ignoring other areas. As an example, C promotes code close to machine language while Java shields the programmer from manual memory management (GC). There are many such design issues that make a language a natural fit for certain applications while making other languages ill-fitted.
What really sets languages apart is the tooling that's built up around them.
While tools may be important, they are of a secondary importance.
Monopolies suck. Go get a real job.
Real job = boss has monopoly on capital and/or some other resource. All companies have some sort of tangible or intangible monopoly. Monopoly is part of the real world. Ignoring or artificially eliminating them does not solve problems.
Start with that Software is already protected under copyright law. This prevents others from simply copying your code and calling it their own.
Copyrights are easy to work around. Imagine this is your copyrighted code (simple code for this example):
I can workaround the copyright protection by changing the variables because copyright protects the exact representation of an idea only, not the idea itself. My non-infringing code, based on your code (that I obtained from reading your source, or reverse engineering the object code):
To prevent such infringements, swap() can be patented. In which case, swapInts() would infringe on the patent and be illegal.
I get paid hourly, once I have completed an hour of work I will never be paid for that same hour again. Why should it be different for someone who makes something copyrighted?
Because once a copyrighted work is created it generates revenue for a long period. Additionally, the effort and skill to create such a work is a one or more levels higher than creating a derived work or doing a repetitive work.
I am not able to obtain any future royalties on the ethernet cables I install today, and the end customer gets full control of them to do whatever they want.
Why should you obtain royalties for a commodity service? It would be like paying royalty to a grocer for buying his apple, royalty for a taxi ride, etc. Installing cables is not a unique task and serves a small group of people. Creating copyrighted work is creating a unique product that serves thousands or even millions of users. So the compensation should be proportionate.
It is always a bit humorous for me when I think about the arguments that we need copyrights that are 70 years plus the life of the author but for patents, 20 years is adequate.
It's even more humorous that cheapskates like you balk at paying $10 to $50 for copyrighted content and would rather expect the creators to starve while you get free content. You can legally obtain books, music, DVDs at the public library for free.
And be glad the duration is 70+life years instead of hundreds of years. I mean imagine if you bought land or a house and you have rights to it only for 70+life years. After that, your children/descendants would have to vacate the place and it would be public property, perhaps a park. Does that seem okay to you?
Yeah, just abolish all patents, in every field, not just software. Then see how the ensuing chaos, where copycats benefit more than inventors, destroy the market.
This is analogous to banning cars. Tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents every year, so it would be reasonable to ban cars.
Yeah, but unlike most forms of capital sources, crowdfunding is interest free and risk-free (to the builder)
If he invested his own funds, there's a chance the project might fail and he would lose his hard-earned money.
If he tried getting the money from a bank, they would ask for a collateral and charge a big interest rate
Asking $32 mill from angel investors or venture capitalists would require him to sign 10% - 30% (guess) of the company to the investors.
Given the options above, the most profitable and least risky choice of capital is crowdfunding. As usual, dumb/ignorant people are being taken for a ride. These crowd-funding sites should give control of 2% to 5% of the company to the people who seeded the company.
So I guess I do have a free speech right to copy works made by other people.
According to wikipedia, this is Free Speech, Article 11:
The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
Freedom of speech is meant to give you freedom to speak your mind, say unpopular things, etc. As noted above, it does not give you permission to abuse the law: abuses such as copyright violation, hate speech, etc. That is, free speech does not give you right to infringe on the rights of others, specifically, authors and publishers' right to profit from their literary works.
Copyrighted works don't fall under freedom of speech because they are already widely available for a very low price -- so it's already virtually free. Copying and distributing copyrighted works has very little to do with freedom of speech -- that copyrighted material is not yours to distribute. So stop coming up with lame excuses to steal property for free.
Isn't that what business is supposed to be all about - the customer?
As if customers buy stuff to so the vendors don't starve. Customer need is only part of the equation.
So if I print up a copy of Oliver Twist or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, without paying Dickens or Twain, you're saying that that would be stealing and that I could not assert a free speech right against the state if they tried to shut me down? News to me.
Those books are public domain because their copyright has expired. You're free to print em, change em, do anything you want. If, however, you try re-printing a more current book, you'd be breaking the law. If you print multiple copies and try to distribute for free or a nominal cost, you'll get shut down.
Copyright is utilitarian through and through, and can be thought of best as a means of exploiting authors for the benefit of the public.
Without copyright, everyone is going to download the book for $0 and the author will go broke wasting years of his/her life for nothing. Even with moderately selling books, the author benefits using a publisher (ebook) who gives 50-70% of total sales to the author. Traditional book publishers only pay 5-15%, similar to your dairy farmer/cow analogy.
The fans are creating commentary on the original work; they are not creating a derivative.
Really??! The subtitles are derived from the original soundtrack of the movie -- they are a derivative.
By providing subtitles freely, they've cut a good chunk of sales of DVDs in the language of the subtitles.
I don't recall voluntarily agreeing to copyright laws. Why, then, should I be obligated to obey them? Especially given that it infringes on my right of free speech to be forbidden to copy a work, regardless of whether it originated with me or not.
Just because you did not voluntarily agree to not murder or rob someone does not give you the right to kill people. Stealing the property of others without payment is not free speech.
The answer of course is that majorities tend to rule, and if a majority has a legitimate power to establish a copyright law, they likely have a legitimate power to establish an antitrust law.
Laws are also formed based on justice and fairness. Copyright ensures payment to the creators of the creative work in exchange for payment from the consumer. The payment encourages and supports the creative class to create more work, and so on.
I also do not understand this statement - "artificially raise prices".
If seller A sells book X for $10 while seller B for $14, then it's very likely seller B will suffer a loss on that particular book because all buyers will choose the cheapest seller for $10.
To ensure neither suffers a loss, they both agree to sell book X for $12 -- this is collusion. While the $10 price will give them a 30% (say) margin of profit, $12 gives them a 40% profit margin, but requires active agreement among all the sellers to cooperate instead of competing against one another.
On the other hand, I agree with you. Why is Amazon's $10 magically okay while Apple's $12.50 illegal? The price of a product is what the market is willing to bear -- that's trading.
...or code these tools yourself in a week or two. Binary data parsing is orders of magnitude easier than text parsing.
Well, gosh darn it all to heck! Price determined by demand? What's next? Sliced bread?
Don't you mean price determined by monopoly power? Amazon has enough market share power to dictate low prices for ebooks that benefit themselves (eg: more kindle reader sales) and the consumers but at the cost of shafting both the publishers and authors.
Collusion or not, the publisher and author are the ones who should set the prices, not the book retailer, consumers or courts.
If Amazon continues forcing authors to sell at low prices, you'll end up with a large quantity of books that are very short and with low quality of writing.
As others have mentioned, Javascript is extremely important for tracking/spying on web users' activities. A typical top news website contains scripts from Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, DoubleClick, etc. Outwardly, these sites sport a "share on twitter", 'post on FB' links on the page, but these links get hardly used. What they do instead is install cookies so they can track all the pages a user is viewing.
And since Google pays Mozilla, it's very likely they wanted this feature implemented to prevent users from stopping web tracking.
It's hidden (in GUI) now, but could be removed in the future in about:config too. Why do they make changes without asking users whether they want it or not? Only expert users are going to disable JavaScript, so it's not going to affect any noob user.
There are many hacked sites that serve malware as Javascript. Noscript and disabling JS is a good way to handle these problems. What idiot decided to remove this feature and why doesn't he ask the community's permission before making such decisions?
Just in case anyone is interested, this is the Apple thread discussing LED eye strain
It's real to the sufferers. When I started playing games for a long time on my iPod touch, I started getting blurred vision and watery eyes if I stared at the screen for too long. The problem was somewhat less if I looked at the screen for only less than a minute. And I didn't get this problem staring at an older iPod (which was LCD).
When I searched the web for this issue, I found a thread at discussions.apple.com about many Apple fan boys returning their new MacBook Pro because it hurt their eyes. I thought I was crazy until they generally came to the consensus that the eye problems had something to do with LED laptop screen. I'm not sure whether it's only PWM, but one thing's for sure, these LED screens are unpleasant to look at and have worsened my eyesight. LCDs on the other hand have a cool feeling and don't cause any discomfort or harm vision.
I gets worse -- LCD screens are being phased out by manufacturers and are being replaced by LED screens because they have better picture quality. I hope any company incorporating LED screens into their products fully investigate this issue and offer LCD screens as an alternative to LEDs. LCDs have a duller yellowish hue, but it's better than suffering eyestrain, headaches etc.
It doesn't need to be registered, but it does need to be marked.
Marked with what? All titles of products/services either have TM (officially trademarked at some govt. office) or blank (not trademarked). Is there any unofficial trademark that we're not aware of?
Give me a dalla