Exactly correct. More to the point, I would hazard a guess that a large percentage of the people running Vista right now are not IT professionals, but Microsoft enthusiasts (It pains me to think that they're out there), and they're presumably running Vista on high-end systems. I don't think it would be a stretch to assume that these people have fairly large disposable incomes and a greater than average chance of purchasing a Zune.
When you're introducing a new product, you need early adopters to shore up the market share. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot (with an AK-47) by cutting off these early adopters, even for a few weeks. I'm baffled by this news.
Dude, I stopped reading after the first paragraph. Learn to express yourself more concisely and post links instead of long quotes. Copyright exists in order to provide an incentive for people to create new content.
If you were to create something creative, would you not expect people to respect your copyright?
Before criticizing people for being long-winded, please consider not making two English errors in four sentences.
Copyright is a lease. The public, which owns the idea, grants the creator a right, for a reasonable yet limited time, to profit off his/her/its work, subject to fair use conditions. I don't consider copyright terms of a century to be a reasonable amount of time - this harms the public more than it benefits it, because copyright holders can make money selling the same work over and over again in lieu of making new, original work.
I really don't think the metadata is the issue. MusicBrainz actually supports multiple artists and many other features to enable deep metadata about music. We also have standards that support multiple pieces of identical metadata - FLAC and OGG explicitly define it, as do ID3 2.4 and, to a lesser extent, 2.3.
The problem in my view is the tag libraries and the players. UI for handling multiple artists or other information is usually abysmally poor. Winamp kind of supports it - you can search for a secondary artist, but that artist doesn't show up in the interface. I should check iTunes support more thoroughly, but I'm not expecting much better.
Some libraries for reading tags understand multiple values, but others don't. The ones that do invariably get used by lazy programmers who do things like $track->artist[0] instead of a proper for loop.
One elderly Chinese man, next in line to buy a PS3, was in a state of panic. He explained to a Bic Camera employee that his "friend" has his money, but that he is further back in the line. After further investigation, these poor Chinese are not given the 60,000 yen to purchase the PS3 until minutes before their reach the registers, perhaps out of fear that some will run off with the money.
YouTube isn't being spineless. They're doing exactly what the law requires. No more, no less. Takedowns are legally defined in the "safe harbor" portion of DMCA and they work like this:
Somebody sends a takedown request to the ISP. (In this case, that's YouTube.) According to law, they have to include name, address, a signature (physical or electronic), a list of items they claim to be infringing, information to identify them, a statement that the owner has a good faith belief that the use isn't allowed, and a specific statement that activates the law.
The service provider (YouTube) takes down the material. The provider must do this, regardless of whether copyright is infringed or not. If they don't, they can lose legal protection in future disputes.
If the person who originally posted the material objects to the takedown, they can file a counter-notice with a similar form. When the service provider receives a proper counter-notice, they must restore access to the material. Again, no judgment on the part of the service provider is required.
The safe harbor law defines a way for service providers to escape liability from either the copyright owner or the poster of the material. If the takedown notice is invalid (the person/company giving notice is not the copyright holder, the work is obviously licensed, etc.), then the content poster has the right to sue under DMCA.
To summarize, if the person who had the content on YouTube thinks it's fair use, he can easily compel YouTube to restore it. He'd probably be sued by Time Warner shortly after, however.
Someone clue this guy in. The Democrats won this time.
It's not that I'm unhappy about that (I'm absolutely ecstatic) but I really worry that at least some of those races were decided not based on civil unrest, but instead by the Democrats learning to cheat better in the last two years.
The large number of Slashdotters that truly care about the trend our government is following shouldn't let their guard down just because the elections turned out right this time. The past two elections have proved that we have to stay vigilant, even now.
The problem is that many people fail to see that locking WMA files to Microsoft Plays For Sure devices is essentially no different than locking your DVD purchases to a DVD player.
First of all, DVDs aren't locked to a specific DVD player - DRM-infected media is. Beyond that subtle point, I agree with you - that's why I don't buy encrypted DVDs.
So, classified government documents are inherently evil, too?
No, but the privilege of keeping documents secret is abused far too often. I would argue it's abused more often than it's used correctly. Of course, because I don't get to see what's classified, I can't know this for sure.
If you want to own a copy of someone else's intellectual property
Hold on there. The property belongs to the public; we're just renting it to the creators for a limited amount of time to reward them for benefitting the public good.
The intellectual property isn't anything you have a human right to
The Constitution of the United States would seem to disagree with you. It may not be a human right, but it's a granted right nonetheless.
if you don't like the restritions, don't make the purchase. It's that simple.
It's not that simple. The movie in the movie theater, the music on the CD, and the software in my computer? I own it, along with my neighbors. By intentionally making it hard to use, the media companies are stealing my property from me. It's no different than if I borrowed your car and forgot to return it for your entire lifetime.
The rich media companies would like you to believe that they are hounded by criminals every day, but that's simply not the case. They are the guilty party.
Anything in particular you're looking for as far as a music player goes? I was a die-hard Winamp user since right before we were grumbling about version 3;).
I'm using iTunes combined with QuickSilver as a music player right now. I find the combination works well. You can play most common combinations of music (album, artist, genre, etc.) with a few keystrokes, and you can also run playlists if you've set them up beforehand.
For ripping, I use Max. It can simultaneously rip to FLAC, OGG, MP3, and others I'm sure I'm missing. The metadata comes from MusicBrainz. You can also pull metadata from the iTunes Store (for free) with a little AppleScript. I've almost got my particularly picky ripping process completely automated - insert CD, and 10 minutes later, the FLAC files are on my home server and backup drive, and the MP3s are imported into iTunes.
Assuming you're not Daniel Brandt, how do you know that scroogle.org isn't a front for the CIA? In fact, how do you know that the CIA isn't doing traffic analysis based on both ends of the scroogle.org connection?
Mozilla has tended to make decisions that have been extremely controversial among the community. Relevant examples include the removal of Qute and MNG, the use of difference licenses for source and binaries, the creation of Mozilla Corporation, and more recently the trademark/copyright debate that led to Debian's fork of Firefox called IceWeasal. Does Mozilla feel that these decisions and others like these were correct and ultimately important for its users?
instead of purchasing works directly, this could a several magnitudes of an order more free stuff if the guy decides to "purchase" a few key senators and representatives to fix some of that legislation Disney&Co have pushed through over the years
This was modded Funny as I'm posting, but it really should be marked Insightful. It's an excellent idea and one the benefactor should consider. Launching a copyright reform lobby could potentially pay off much more in the long run than liberating a single work would.
I agree with you, but you're targeting the wrong group. Nearly all election systems used today can support instant runoff voting; the problem is that the laws aren't compatible. Blame your legistlature/assembly/whatever.
The network restrictions are not new. XP has them, although it may have higher limits. Transfer restrictions, however, bother me a lot. I believe this is the first time they've appeared in retail versions of Windows.
I said back in 2002 that I would never buy a PC again, and that my next computer would be a Mac. Microsoft is making it easier and easier for me to keep to that promise.
The difference between Google Maps and Google Docs is that there's a finite number of tiles that Maps has to look up, and the tiles are public. This means you can easily duplicate the tiles on several thousand servers which any client can hit when necessary. In contrast, Google Docs stores text from (potentially) millions of Google users. It takes more processing power to mirror the documents because you (and possibly a few others) are the only people who will use the data.
Fascinating. It picks the actions automatically? How does it know, for example, when there's a plane crash? Is it reading the news feeds, CG, or does an operator have to put in the action? I'd be really interested in hearing more about this.
If you really are a professor, you're just a work for hire. It's not your intellectual property. It belongs to the university that pays your salary.
That's not always true. Many universities assign intellectual property rights to the professor under certain circumstances, and some explicitly exclude lecture materials from copyright claims by the university.
If it were me, I'd simply have asked the other professor to share any improvements he made to the powerpoints and encourage others to assist in the development of them as well. That way, you are left with a collaborative effort that transcends any singular person's diminutive knowledge of the subject.
If only the MAFIAA thought like that, the world would be a much better place. If only...;)
I've heard that these discussions can be dangerous...;)
My main complaint about emacs (I tried it for about a month) was the key structure. I didn't like holding down Ctrl whenever I want to do something - I prefer vim's modal command system. I could see how it could annoy some people, however.
I honestly haven't found the need for particularly sophisticated macros while I'm editing. The . (repeat last command) and ! (pipe) keys have always been enough for what I need.
I'm still learning vim, but I like what I've seen so far.
Agreed. I dismissed people who kept suggesting vim as "crazy UNIX people." I still felt that way about a week into playing with it, but soon after, I realized how powerful it is once you've figured out how the keystrokes work. Since then, I've used vim on every computer I've worked with and gvim (the GUI-enhanced version of vim) is my primary editor on my Windows box.
vim has excellent syntax highlighting, predictive typing, line numbers, search and replace (with regular expressions), code folding, spell-check, built-in help, and more.
Give yourself two weeks with an open-mind, and you might be surprised about it. The easiest way to get started is to type vimtutor from almost any shell account.
I've been considering the proposal, and I think the extension could be fairly simple, and address most of your points. Here's how I'd do it:
Unless an article has been protected, editing works as it does today - somebody clicks Edit, makes the change, hits Save Page, and the edit immediately shows up.
If an article is either protected or semi-protected, the appropriate class of users cannot immediately alter the article. In this case, when they click Edit, they'll receive a warning message, something like this:
This article has been protected or semi-protected. Any changes you make will be saved for possible inclusion in a future version of the article.
If the article already has a "future version", rather than the typical edit screen, MediaWiki will take the editor to the Show Changes screen, which will show a diff between the latest version of the article and the protected version (the one displayed by default). When they save, the saved version becomes the protected version, assuming they have sufficient access. Something on the page should also change (perhaps the edit tab's name?) to alert users that future revisions exist.
Future versions can be accessed by anybody (even logged-out users) from the history. As far as the software is concerned, these versions are no different than previous revisions. This is on par with the status of most previous revisions now - if you choose to, you can go see the vandalism. The only difference is now you can also see vandalism that hasn't happened yet.
Here's responses to some of your points:
Obviously the number of anonymous views must be many times larger for them to feel this will help.
I suspect that the vast majority of hits to Wikipedia are users with no account who are there purely for research purposes. Wikipedia comes up first in many Google and Yahoo! searches.
Since user contributions (for protected articles) will have to be specifically flagged as valid, there will be a delay before the contribution is seen by all.
My proposal addresses this by making the edit available, just hidden by default. It also eliminates the separate flagging process by letting anybody who could make an instant edit in the current system make an instant edit to a protected article.
More reversion of vandalism will fall on signed in users, since anonymous users cannot see the vandalism and thus cannot revert it themselves.
In this system, anonymous users can see vandalism - they just have to go looking for it. A logged-in user or admin can trivially "bless" the revert by a null edit, which are sometimes used now for other reasons.
Since regular contributors will know that vandalism cannot be seen by the general public, it may lead to apathy, leaving the vandalism in the article for longer.
It may, but since the next valid editor has to take care of it before saving their edit, I don't think it'd be too much of a problem.
I don't think it's perfect, but I think this proposal could work given sufficient buy-in by editors. It's fairly easy to understand, uses concepts editors are already familiar with, and steers users into the desired behavior (less vandalism, and more attention to articles before they're changed).
The claim is ambiguous. I interpret the author's intent to be that most cars have tires, not that most tires are on cars. Fixing this sentence would be an excellent opportunity for a user to contribute to Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly correct. More to the point, I would hazard a guess that a large percentage of the people running Vista right now are not IT professionals, but Microsoft enthusiasts (It pains me to think that they're out there), and they're presumably running Vista on high-end systems. I don't think it would be a stretch to assume that these people have fairly large disposable incomes and a greater than average chance of purchasing a Zune.
When you're introducing a new product, you need early adopters to shore up the market share. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot (with an AK-47) by cutting off these early adopters, even for a few weeks. I'm baffled by this news.
I really don't think the metadata is the issue. MusicBrainz actually supports multiple artists and many other features to enable deep metadata about music. We also have standards that support multiple pieces of identical metadata - FLAC and OGG explicitly define it, as do ID3 2.4 and, to a lesser extent, 2.3.
The problem in my view is the tag libraries and the players. UI for handling multiple artists or other information is usually abysmally poor. Winamp kind of supports it - you can search for a secondary artist, but that artist doesn't show up in the interface. I should check iTunes support more thoroughly, but I'm not expecting much better.
Some libraries for reading tags understand multiple values, but others don't. The ones that do invariably get used by lazy programmers who do things like $track->artist[0] instead of a proper for loop.
YouTube isn't being spineless. They're doing exactly what the law requires. No more, no less. Takedowns are legally defined in the "safe harbor" portion of DMCA and they work like this:
The safe harbor law defines a way for service providers to escape liability from either the copyright owner or the poster of the material. If the takedown notice is invalid (the person/company giving notice is not the copyright holder, the work is obviously licensed, etc.), then the content poster has the right to sue under DMCA.
To summarize, if the person who had the content on YouTube thinks it's fair use, he can easily compel YouTube to restore it. He'd probably be sued by Time Warner shortly after, however.
IANAL.
The large number of Slashdotters that truly care about the trend our government is following shouldn't let their guard down just because the elections turned out right this time. The past two elections have proved that we have to stay vigilant, even now.
No, but the privilege of keeping documents secret is abused far too often. I would argue it's abused more often than it's used correctly. Of course, because I don't get to see what's classified, I can't know this for sure.
Hold on there. The property belongs to the public; we're just renting it to the creators for a limited amount of time to reward them for benefitting the public good.
The Constitution of the United States would seem to disagree with you. It may not be a human right, but it's a granted right nonetheless.
It's not that simple. The movie in the movie theater, the music on the CD, and the software in my computer? I own it, along with my neighbors. By intentionally making it hard to use, the media companies are stealing my property from me. It's no different than if I borrowed your car and forgot to return it for your entire lifetime.
The rich media companies would like you to believe that they are hounded by criminals every day, but that's simply not the case. They are the guilty party.
And no, I'm not a troll.
exactly that.
Anything in particular you're looking for as far as a music player goes? I was a die-hard Winamp user since right before we were grumbling about version 3 ;).
I'm using iTunes combined with QuickSilver as a music player right now. I find the combination works well. You can play most common combinations of music (album, artist, genre, etc.) with a few keystrokes, and you can also run playlists if you've set them up beforehand.
For ripping, I use Max. It can simultaneously rip to FLAC, OGG, MP3, and others I'm sure I'm missing. The metadata comes from MusicBrainz. You can also pull metadata from the iTunes Store (for free) with a little AppleScript. I've almost got my particularly picky ripping process completely automated - insert CD, and 10 minutes later, the FLAC files are on my home server and backup drive, and the MP3s are imported into iTunes.
Assuming you're not Daniel Brandt, how do you know that scroogle.org isn't a front for the CIA? In fact, how do you know that the CIA isn't doing traffic analysis based on both ends of the scroogle.org connection?
Mozilla has tended to make decisions that have been extremely controversial among the community. Relevant examples include the removal of Qute and MNG, the use of difference licenses for source and binaries, the creation of Mozilla Corporation, and more recently the trademark/copyright debate that led to Debian's fork of Firefox called IceWeasal. Does Mozilla feel that these decisions and others like these were correct and ultimately important for its users?
I agree with you, but you're targeting the wrong group. Nearly all election systems used today can support instant runoff voting; the problem is that the laws aren't compatible. Blame your legistlature/assembly/whatever.
The network restrictions are not new. XP has them, although it may have higher limits. Transfer restrictions, however, bother me a lot. I believe this is the first time they've appeared in retail versions of Windows.
I said back in 2002 that I would never buy a PC again, and that my next computer would be a Mac. Microsoft is making it easier and easier for me to keep to that promise.
The difference between Google Maps and Google Docs is that there's a finite number of tiles that Maps has to look up, and the tiles are public. This means you can easily duplicate the tiles on several thousand servers which any client can hit when necessary. In contrast, Google Docs stores text from (potentially) millions of Google users. It takes more processing power to mirror the documents because you (and possibly a few others) are the only people who will use the data.
Fascinating. It picks the actions automatically? How does it know, for example, when there's a plane crash? Is it reading the news feeds, CG, or does an operator have to put in the action? I'd be really interested in hearing more about this.
That's not always true. Many universities assign intellectual property rights to the professor under certain circumstances, and some explicitly exclude lecture materials from copyright claims by the university.
If only the MAFIAA thought like that, the world would be a much better place. If only...
I've heard that these discussions can be dangerous... ;)
My main complaint about emacs (I tried it for about a month) was the key structure. I didn't like holding down Ctrl whenever I want to do something - I prefer vim's modal command system. I could see how it could annoy some people, however.
I honestly haven't found the need for particularly sophisticated macros while I'm editing. The . (repeat last command) and ! (pipe) keys have always been enough for what I need.
I'm still learning vim, but I like what I've seen so far.
Agreed. I dismissed people who kept suggesting vim as "crazy UNIX people." I still felt that way about a week into playing with it, but soon after, I realized how powerful it is once you've figured out how the keystrokes work. Since then, I've used vim on every computer I've worked with and gvim (the GUI-enhanced version of vim) is my primary editor on my Windows box.
vim has excellent syntax highlighting, predictive typing, line numbers, search and replace (with regular expressions), code folding, spell-check, built-in help, and more.
Give yourself two weeks with an open-mind, and you might be surprised about it. The easiest way to get started is to type vimtutor from almost any shell account.
Do you have Flash Player installed? It has hardware access, as does every other plug-in. There's plenty of ways for a web site to hit the hardware.
Here's responses to some of your points:
I suspect that the vast majority of hits to Wikipedia are users with no account who are there purely for research purposes. Wikipedia comes up first in many Google and Yahoo! searches.
My proposal addresses this by making the edit available, just hidden by default. It also eliminates the separate flagging process by letting anybody who could make an instant edit in the current system make an instant edit to a protected article.
In this system, anonymous users can see vandalism - they just have to go looking for it. A logged-in user or admin can trivially "bless" the revert by a null edit, which are sometimes used now for other reasons.
It may, but since the next valid editor has to take care of it before saving their edit, I don't think it'd be too much of a problem.
I don't think it's perfect, but I think this proposal could work given sufficient buy-in by editors. It's fairly easy to understand, uses concepts editors are already familiar with, and steers users into the desired behavior (less vandalism, and more attention to articles before they're changed).
Hmm - obvious but wrong.
The claim is ambiguous. I interpret the author's intent to be that most cars have tires, not that most tires are on cars. Fixing this sentence would be an excellent opportunity for a user to contribute to Wikipedia.