70+% is illegal trading of warez, music, and movies.
20% is child porn. It's sickening how easy it is to find. You long-time eMule users know what I'm talking about, how they use certain well-known keywords to sneak them into search results.
2% is legal stuff like Linux trading and public domain files.
Not saying eMule itself is illegal, just saying it's really sad how this amazing technology we call P2P mostly gets used to fulfill base desires of entitlement, and few people seem to care about implementing any sort of enforcement (because no matter what, content rights management is evil, right? Slashdot told me so).
Slashdot on Monday: "REAL artists don't go back and change things! Suddenly I have moral qualms and a sense of cultural integrity."
Slashdot on Tuesday: "Return of the King: Extended Edition due out soon! Yay!"
Speaking of Tolkien, it's not like the Hobbit wasn't revised after the fact to fit in with the stories written afterward...
Get over yourselves. It's a sci-fi film series from the 70s. Star Wars is hardly as revolutionary as it's being made out to be. Who cares if there are more creatures in Mos Eisley now? Does it matter that Greedo fires his gun? What relevance does it have to life?
You do realize you don't *have* to have Star Wars, don't you? It's not like it's a necessity of life. Who freaking cares if Jabba the Hutt is now in A New Hope? Is it really that important that you must turn to the "black market" to get the "pure stuff?" You guys talk about Star Wars like it's a drug. Nobody HAS to get the films, much less through piracy.
We give them the sole protected right to charge for their work, on the basis that they will make the work available to the public.
No, we don't give them the "right to charge for their work." Legislation does. And it's not on the basis that they will make the work available to the public, it's on the basis that they own the work and can therefore charge however much they want. I can make a bunch of kick-ass Linux ceramic teacups and decide only to sell them on Thursdays for $50 a piece. That's my right.
Artificially making movies scarce to milk additional profits is the antithesis of the copyright deal.
Nobody's holding a gun to anybody's head to buy these things. I'm so sick of people who pretend like they're victims because they willingly bought something. If you don't like the way someone handles the availability of the product--too bad! Don't buy the product then. It's a free country and nobody's forcing you to do anything.
Stop whining! This sense of entitlement is sickening.
That's quite a risk you're asking people to take with their copyrighted works. Pardon me, but if I were in their shoes, I'd be less than willing to trust in the moral heart of some online pirate, hoping that they will eventually buy what they now already have for free. It's unfair and inethical to force them to do that, effectively taking their work without asking them for permission and distributing it online as though you have the rights to do it.
A lot of people shit on Metallica during the Napster lawsuit, but the truth is that Lars had a point--they wanted to have control over their music. Nobody asked them first before putting it online. For all the cries about consumer rights that happen here on Slashdot, artist and content creator rights are swept under the carpet and ignored.
Firefox is only the browser. Opera comes with a mail client and more, in the same download size. Firefox does not load as fast as Opera. All the Mozilla apps are known for loading slowly and taking up lots of memory with their reimplemented widgets.
Opera's engine is hardly "buggy." Firefox is the one that can't render Slashdot correctly! Get real.
Good riddance to big game publishers. They push early release dates, delay release dates, they're the ones who insist that you stick your CD in when you start up a game...good riddance.
Some of you may not like Steam (you probably haven't even tried it since it was the crappy beta...it kicks ASS now), some of you love it, but fact is, Valve is treading some innovative new game distribution ground here, and we should applaud them for taking a chance and sidestepping publishers all together. Isn't this in the same spirit of P2P music and other trumpeted mindsets?
Bugs or no bugs, Steam is unacceptable IMHO. When I buy a game on physical media, I have a tangible thing that belongs to me. I can install it on a new machine, I can lend it to a friend, I can sell it on eBay, I can keep playing it as long as I want, even after the publisher goes out of business. Steam allows none of that.
Why? Steam supports offline play, so there's no issue there. Can you go to any computer, merely log in, and suddenly have access to every Valve product you've ever bought when you buy the DVD version? Nope, you'd have to cart it around with you. Then you'd have to hunt on the web for the latest patches. I'm sorry, but models like Steam is the future of online game distribution. Hell, it's the model for the future of computing--.NET is going this route, the music industry is going this route, etc. It's all going distributed.
For the record, I have never, EVER had a problem with Steam. I kept hearing about all these problems with it, then I finally tried it out of curiosity. I think Slashdotters--as usual--tried it once during the beta and didn't like it and have never even touched it since, but have subsequently used the experience as the basis for all their Valve complaints.
Sierra goes belly up next week, how long do you think the Steam master server is going to be around? Probably not long.
Maybe you didn't know, but Steam is Valve's baby. Sierra wants nothing to do with it (as this article should have hinted to you).
All the talk in the music industry about online distribution and how none of the record labels really seem interested, and look here, Valve is already taking charge in the games industry--and it looks like it will be a huge success. I already converted my old Half-Life key into Steam, and I LOVE being able to go to any computer I want and play Half-Life just by logging in, and always up to date. There's talk of even storing configuration setups in your account, so your settings are retained no matter where you play.
They've already come out that the code theft pushed them back at least six months as they rewrote major parts of Steam. In fact, Gabe said recently that a book has been in the writing about the making of Half-Life 2, and the code theft issue is discussed.
I honestly don't get the vitriol I see toward Valve on Slashdot. They put out an excellent game out of nowhere in 1998. What have they done to piss people off, anyway?
The code theft was hardly "bullshit reasoning." Some of us have closer sources of information than net rumors on Bluesnews.
I don't see any ads in Opera. Oh, that's right, I actually don't mind paying for commercial software that I enjoy and support!
Seriously, Opera kicks the shit out of Mozilla. Every major innovation Opera has spawned--gestures, tabbed browsing, popup blocking--were all ripped off by Mozilla and are now hailed as Mozilla innovations. Opera's download size is tiny, it's memory footprint is small, and it is FAST. Even changing themes takes less then a second.
Seriously, what demise? Do you have any sources? Any figures? I have a feeling the only thing you can link to are the two past articles posted on...you guessed it, Slashdot. And both were merely the web logs of tech dev sites!
Pardon me for referencing a cliched reference, but wasn't Nazi Germany also pretty harmless for a while? There's something to be said for preemptive removal of dictators. The guy violated UN sanctions for over a decade, and nobody seemed to care. After 9/11, the US government isn't taking chances.
My OCD? I have no OCD. I just think it's a fun game and I play it now and then. I was just making a point that it's cliched to make fun of people for playing The Sims. It's no different than playing any other game, or treating anything else religiously.
This whole "it's disturbing that people get addicted to this game" is silly. People get obsessed about any number of games, and not just games either. People here on Slashdot treat Linux like a religion.
There's a really weird phenomenon that psychologists are studing: With books/movies/TV, people do get emotionally invested, but in a fairly passive and removed way (usually). However, in computer games, some people (actually a fairly large percentage of avid gamers) start to feel like tasks they perform matter. People start to think that, if they don't fend off the aliens, somehow this will have negative consequences.
Uh, maybe that's because when reading books and watching television, you're not actually DOING anything but just sitting there and passively receiving information? Of course you feel like your actions have consequences in a game, because they actually do (in the game). You're actively doing something instead of just sitting there letting the story dictate to you. If that very obvious conclusion requires a "study," I guess I'm smarter than I thought!
As soon as the film went into the whole "the sex-bots have the souls of kidnapped girls in them" thing, I left the theater. Just WAY too geeky and esoteric for me.
The reason I said that is because there's a running joke that Slashdot's developers always respond to feature suggestions by saying "it sounds nice, but it wouldn't scale well." History shows this to be pretty much true.
It had nothing to do with "armchair web developers." Sigh.
"This page is not Valid HTML 3.2!" says the validator.
Converting the static code to CSS WAS a helpful experiment, because it's an illustration of how much you could save by modifying your code to generate it. The bandwidth savings alone are awesome. But, hey, "it doesn't scale well," right? The excuse for any user-submitted feature suggestion (because heaven forbid Taco implement something he didn't think of).
I love how Slashdot reports this. "WINDOWS FAILS 8% OF THE TIME!"
1.) These reports were gathered from companies. They weren't home users at all.
2.) No mention is made of the cause, like poorly programmed applications or drivers. No matter how much you *want* to believe Windows 2000/XP is poorly coded, it's not. I've had Slackware crash several times on me in the past few years. I don't blame Slackware for it.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess:
70+% is illegal trading of warez, music, and movies.
20% is child porn. It's sickening how easy it is to find. You long-time eMule users know what I'm talking about, how they use certain well-known keywords to sneak them into search results.
2% is legal stuff like Linux trading and public domain files.
Not saying eMule itself is illegal, just saying it's really sad how this amazing technology we call P2P mostly gets used to fulfill base desires of entitlement, and few people seem to care about implementing any sort of enforcement (because no matter what, content rights management is evil, right? Slashdot told me so).
Who's really at fault?
According to the headline, looks like Slashdot's already decided.
Slashdot on Monday: "REAL artists don't go back and change things! Suddenly I have moral qualms and a sense of cultural integrity."
Slashdot on Tuesday: "Return of the King: Extended Edition due out soon! Yay!"
Speaking of Tolkien, it's not like the Hobbit wasn't revised after the fact to fit in with the stories written afterward...
Get over yourselves. It's a sci-fi film series from the 70s. Star Wars is hardly as revolutionary as it's being made out to be. Who cares if there are more creatures in Mos Eisley now? Does it matter that Greedo fires his gun? What relevance does it have to life?
You do realize you don't *have* to have Star Wars, don't you? It's not like it's a necessity of life. Who freaking cares if Jabba the Hutt is now in A New Hope? Is it really that important that you must turn to the "black market" to get the "pure stuff?" You guys talk about Star Wars like it's a drug. Nobody HAS to get the films, much less through piracy.
We give them the sole protected right to charge for their work, on the basis that they will make the work available to the public.
No, we don't give them the "right to charge for their work." Legislation does. And it's not on the basis that they will make the work available to the public, it's on the basis that they own the work and can therefore charge however much they want. I can make a bunch of kick-ass Linux ceramic teacups and decide only to sell them on Thursdays for $50 a piece. That's my right.
Artificially making movies scarce to milk additional profits is the antithesis of the copyright deal.
Nobody's holding a gun to anybody's head to buy these things. I'm so sick of people who pretend like they're victims because they willingly bought something. If you don't like the way someone handles the availability of the product--too bad! Don't buy the product then. It's a free country and nobody's forcing you to do anything.
Stop whining! This sense of entitlement is sickening.
That's quite a risk you're asking people to take with their copyrighted works. Pardon me, but if I were in their shoes, I'd be less than willing to trust in the moral heart of some online pirate, hoping that they will eventually buy what they now already have for free. It's unfair and inethical to force them to do that, effectively taking their work without asking them for permission and distributing it online as though you have the rights to do it.
A lot of people shit on Metallica during the Napster lawsuit, but the truth is that Lars had a point--they wanted to have control over their music. Nobody asked them first before putting it online. For all the cries about consumer rights that happen here on Slashdot, artist and content creator rights are swept under the carpet and ignored.
Firefox is only the browser. Opera comes with a mail client and more, in the same download size. Firefox does not load as fast as Opera. All the Mozilla apps are known for loading slowly and taking up lots of memory with their reimplemented widgets.
Opera's engine is hardly "buggy." Firefox is the one that can't render Slashdot correctly! Get real.
Good riddance to big game publishers. They push early release dates, delay release dates, they're the ones who insist that you stick your CD in when you start up a game...good riddance.
Some of you may not like Steam (you probably haven't even tried it since it was the crappy beta...it kicks ASS now), some of you love it, but fact is, Valve is treading some innovative new game distribution ground here, and we should applaud them for taking a chance and sidestepping publishers all together. Isn't this in the same spirit of P2P music and other trumpeted mindsets?
Bugs or no bugs, Steam is unacceptable IMHO. When I buy a game on physical media, I have a tangible thing that belongs to me. I can install it on a new machine, I can lend it to a friend, I can sell it on eBay, I can keep playing it as long as I want, even after the publisher goes out of business. Steam allows none of that.
Why? Steam supports offline play, so there's no issue there. Can you go to any computer, merely log in, and suddenly have access to every Valve product you've ever bought when you buy the DVD version? Nope, you'd have to cart it around with you. Then you'd have to hunt on the web for the latest patches. I'm sorry, but models like Steam is the future of online game distribution. Hell, it's the model for the future of computing--.NET is going this route, the music industry is going this route, etc. It's all going distributed.
For the record, I have never, EVER had a problem with Steam. I kept hearing about all these problems with it, then I finally tried it out of curiosity. I think Slashdotters--as usual--tried it once during the beta and didn't like it and have never even touched it since, but have subsequently used the experience as the basis for all their Valve complaints.
Sierra goes belly up next week, how long do you think the Steam master server is going to be around? Probably not long.
Maybe you didn't know, but Steam is Valve's baby. Sierra wants nothing to do with it (as this article should have hinted to you).
All the talk in the music industry about online distribution and how none of the record labels really seem interested, and look here, Valve is already taking charge in the games industry--and it looks like it will be a huge success. I already converted my old Half-Life key into Steam, and I LOVE being able to go to any computer I want and play Half-Life just by logging in, and always up to date. There's talk of even storing configuration setups in your account, so your settings are retained no matter where you play.
They've already come out that the code theft pushed them back at least six months as they rewrote major parts of Steam. In fact, Gabe said recently that a book has been in the writing about the making of Half-Life 2, and the code theft issue is discussed.
I honestly don't get the vitriol I see toward Valve on Slashdot. They put out an excellent game out of nowhere in 1998. What have they done to piss people off, anyway?
The code theft was hardly "bullshit reasoning." Some of us have closer sources of information than net rumors on Bluesnews.
I don't see any ads in Opera. Oh, that's right, I actually don't mind paying for commercial software that I enjoy and support!
:)
Seriously, Opera kicks the shit out of Mozilla. Every major innovation Opera has spawned--gestures, tabbed browsing, popup blocking--were all ripped off by Mozilla and are now hailed as Mozilla innovations. Opera's download size is tiny, it's memory footprint is small, and it is FAST. Even changing themes takes less then a second.
I'm a very happy Opera user.
Seriously, what demise? Do you have any sources? Any figures? I have a feeling the only thing you can link to are the two past articles posted on...you guessed it, Slashdot. And both were merely the web logs of tech dev sites!
Pardon me for referencing a cliched reference, but wasn't Nazi Germany also pretty harmless for a while? There's something to be said for preemptive removal of dictators. The guy violated UN sanctions for over a decade, and nobody seemed to care. After 9/11, the US government isn't taking chances.
Shut up, stupidhead!
The rest of the world is fascinated by your OCD.
My OCD? I have no OCD. I just think it's a fun game and I play it now and then. I was just making a point that it's cliched to make fun of people for playing The Sims. It's no different than playing any other game, or treating anything else religiously.
This whole "it's disturbing that people get addicted to this game" is silly. People get obsessed about any number of games, and not just games either. People here on Slashdot treat Linux like a religion.
There's a really weird phenomenon that psychologists are studing: With books/movies/TV, people do get emotionally invested, but in a fairly passive and removed way (usually). However, in computer games, some people (actually a fairly large percentage of avid gamers) start to feel like tasks they perform matter. People start to think that, if they don't fend off the aliens, somehow this will have negative consequences.
Uh, maybe that's because when reading books and watching television, you're not actually DOING anything but just sitting there and passively receiving information? Of course you feel like your actions have consequences in a game, because they actually do (in the game). You're actively doing something instead of just sitting there letting the story dictate to you. If that very obvious conclusion requires a "study," I guess I'm smarter than I thought!
...you hate SP2. You hate Windows XP.
Do we need an SP2 article every single day? More Linux news, please!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't this have been done right in the beginning itself?
Why isn't there this sort of criticism against Mozilla/Firefox? From the "Confidential" XUL bug to this, I'm more glad than ever that I use Opera.
As soon as the film went into the whole "the sex-bots have the souls of kidnapped girls in them" thing, I left the theater. Just WAY too geeky and esoteric for me.
The reason I said that is because there's a running joke that Slashdot's developers always respond to feature suggestions by saying "it sounds nice, but it wouldn't scale well." History shows this to be pretty much true.
It had nothing to do with "armchair web developers." Sigh.
If Slashdot's HTML is standard, why do you block the wc3 validator? What possible reason could you have for that?
Since an AC here was so informative in posting it, I'll post it to: Coral Cache link of 189 errors in Slashdot HTML.
"This page is not Valid HTML 3.2!" says the validator.
Converting the static code to CSS WAS a helpful experiment, because it's an illustration of how much you could save by modifying your code to generate it. The bandwidth savings alone are awesome. But, hey, "it doesn't scale well," right? The excuse for any user-submitted feature suggestion (because heaven forbid Taco implement something he didn't think of).
Grr. The editors of Slashdot are frustrating.
I love how Slashdot reports this. "WINDOWS FAILS 8% OF THE TIME!"
1.) These reports were gathered from companies. They weren't home users at all.
2.) No mention is made of the cause, like poorly programmed applications or drivers. No matter how much you *want* to believe Windows 2000/XP is poorly coded, it's not. I've had Slackware crash several times on me in the past few years. I don't blame Slackware for it.
This is just more Slashdot spin.
...I didn't have to download anything because I was already protected due to SP2.
Like that XUL vulnerability that was marked "Confidential" for years? Funny how the uproar over that has mysteriously dwindled.