But what if I can't afford to pay for it? What if I buy some of his other paintings with what money I have?
I download music. Call me a pirate if you want, although the only ship I've been on is a cross-channel ferry. But the fact is that as far as I can see the music industry has only benefited. I don't have much spare income, so I could not buy all the music I download. But I have discovered bands I really like and then brought their albums. In fact I've spent more money on music than if I hadn't downloaded anything, because I discovered a band I really liked and spent money that I'd earmarked for a new graphics card on their music. Still only getting ~5fps in UT2003 on my crappy clone TNT2.
Admittedly, some few people will freeload when they could afford to buy things. But there is no extra labour being required. There's no losses anywhere. If they could pay but they don't want to, then I don't think trying to force them to pay by artificially restricting copying - which is all you can do with anything digital - is the right way. But I'm not sure they should even be stopped anyway. You act as if the painter has an entitlement to be paid every time someone gets a copy of his painting. What about every time someone looks at it, should they have to pay? I realise I'm rambling here, so I'll cut to the end. Whether or not I have a copy of the painting or song does not affect the artist/singer unless I could afford to buy it, in which case I would have done so. It only affects me. So I don't think it's wrong of me to copy it.
I honestly believe windows has the potential to be a better OS than linux. The kernel is actually better, and much as I hate the GUI people seem to like it. Add a decent commandline, which you can already do with cygwin. In fact, sponsor cygwin, and make everything compile under it. Then distribute windows with a cd full of all the open source apps people like, compiled to run on windows. That way you have a better OS. In the end though, I think simple money will drive people to Linux. It will be good enough. So people will have to learn to manage with linux. But I hope windows improves and stays in the game. Competition is good.
They take responsibility for their distribution. They will patch their kernel if anything seems wrong with it. From time to time they pay for an audit. Similarly the debian people vouch for their kernel, and so on. The vanilla kernel.org kernel is only accountable to the kernel.org people, true, but most "enterprise" distribution makers will stand up for every package they distribute.
No, they're not going to get smarter. But the problem is not that they're stupid, it's that they're ignorant. They don't need intelligence pills, they just need to be taught. If they used an ISP which you couldn't set up without having read a book about the internet, maybe a few of them wouldn't bother, but I would hope the majority of them would end up on the internet and with much more of a clue.
The problem is that AOL users assume what they have is "the internet", and that they know everything they need to. Internet access should be denied not to the stupid, but to the ignorant. An argument I've often seen said, but never refuted, is that the internet should be like the roads, you're not allowed on it until you've shown you have a level of competence, because otherwise you make it dangerous to others. There's no risk to life or limb out here, but there's still some truth in the analogy.
Back to AOL: they can keep catering to the simple/stupid crowd, but they should try and make it clear that there is more to the internet and you can learn if you want. The internet isn't easy. AOL makes it easy, but it does so by disguising a lot of the complicated stuff, and then pretends the internet really is easy. So people think they know what they are doing because they can understand AOL. It should be made clearer to them: you don't know what you're doing. You don't need to at the moment, because AOL will take care of you. But do try and learn a bit when you have the time.
That's not AOL, that's ordinary usenet. Use whatever client you want. Only the dolts who think "webmail" is the best thing since sliced bread will use google over real NNTP usenet.
Ig Nobel prizes are often given for important studies which are nevertheless funny. A category this certainly falls into. The gorilla study was just as important as this one.
I can't afford the hard drive space for loads of raw tracks, and I don't like the artefacts you get from compressing twice. Multiple hard drive copies are safer than a single copy on CD.
Indeed it was. And at that point they've lost, because once the pirated version is better than the original, which do you think people are going to use?
I like epic, a lot, but I still tend to use the pirated versions of unreal tournament until the patch that removes the cd check comes out. If a game always has a cd check, I'll tend to always use a pirate copy just because it's a hassle to find the cd. And when nice games come out with no copy protection, I do my best to buy them immediately.
Because it's completely unnecessary. If I won't copy it, I won't copy it. If I'm going to copy it and give it to a friend, I'm going to copy it and give it to a friend if I have to write the cracking program myself. So it's pointless from their point of view, but annoys me. So why do I need to accept it?
I see a huge moral difference. Stealing someone's physical property deprives them of it. This is unfair on them and bad. Copying someone's painting does not deprive them of it. It will still look just as good to them, because it's still the same fscking painting. They still get just as much enjoyment out of it. It's just that you now have a copy you can enjoy too. So how are they "exactly the same thing"?
No, in other words real stealing hurts people, wheras online "stealing" probably doesn't. If you're a utilitarian, then that's purely morality - real stealing is immoral, wheras copyright infringement isn't.
Well, typical slashdotter and all I don't really have that point of comparison, but yeah. Perl is great for short programs that I won't use again, or for when I need a program right now. But I've never found it nice to look at. If I'm writing a program I'll need to edit or can do in my own time, I'd far prefer Python or even C.
I don't see the beauty in that. Beauty is all aesthetics, and I don't see any perl that's aesthetically attractive. There are perl programs that make you go "wow", one liners that creatively solve something that I would take two pages of C to do, but to me that's not beauty, it belongs somewhere else. I don't think most Picaso is beautiful either.
I wouldn't say the install was easy. As a slackware user I'm used to partitioning my disk myself, and managed it fine before I knew what ls was, but I couldn't see how to partition for openbsd.
I could never understand how to partition my disk though. I tried it 3 times, tried to read the manual, created a bsd partition, tried to make a disklabel but it kept seeming to want to take over the whole disk, which I didn't want.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no arrow, just a block where text is black-on-white, and it certainly doesn't turn into a hand, you insensitive clod.
I download music. Call me a pirate if you want, although the only ship I've been on is a cross-channel ferry. But the fact is that as far as I can see the music industry has only benefited. I don't have much spare income, so I could not buy all the music I download. But I have discovered bands I really like and then brought their albums. In fact I've spent more money on music than if I hadn't downloaded anything, because I discovered a band I really liked and spent money that I'd earmarked for a new graphics card on their music. Still only getting ~5fps in UT2003 on my crappy clone TNT2.
Admittedly, some few people will freeload when they could afford to buy things. But there is no extra labour being required. There's no losses anywhere. If they could pay but they don't want to, then I don't think trying to force them to pay by artificially restricting copying - which is all you can do with anything digital - is the right way. But I'm not sure they should even be stopped anyway. You act as if the painter has an entitlement to be paid every time someone gets a copy of his painting. What about every time someone looks at it, should they have to pay? I realise I'm rambling here, so I'll cut to the end. Whether or not I have a copy of the painting or song does not affect the artist/singer unless I could afford to buy it, in which case I would have done so. It only affects me. So I don't think it's wrong of me to copy it.
Not being able to play the DRMed AACs from linux
I honestly believe windows has the potential to be a better OS than linux. The kernel is actually better, and much as I hate the GUI people seem to like it. Add a decent commandline, which you can already do with cygwin. In fact, sponsor cygwin, and make everything compile under it. Then distribute windows with a cd full of all the open source apps people like, compiled to run on windows. That way you have a better OS. In the end though, I think simple money will drive people to Linux. It will be good enough. So people will have to learn to manage with linux. But I hope windows improves and stays in the game. Competition is good.
I'm sure there's a joke here about a guy who doesn't know how to use an apostrophe correcting someone's spelling
I use KDevelop and it works fine, thank you very much.
They take responsibility for their distribution. They will patch their kernel if anything seems wrong with it. From time to time they pay for an audit. Similarly the debian people vouch for their kernel, and so on. The vanilla kernel.org kernel is only accountable to the kernel.org people, true, but most "enterprise" distribution makers will stand up for every package they distribute.
If you looked anywhere under alt.os.linux you'd see that's nonsense
Why? Because it's not possible under current DNS/SMTP means it's a bad idea?
No, they're not going to get smarter. But the problem is not that they're stupid, it's that they're ignorant. They don't need intelligence pills, they just need to be taught. If they used an ISP which you couldn't set up without having read a book about the internet, maybe a few of them wouldn't bother, but I would hope the majority of them would end up on the internet and with much more of a clue.
Back to AOL: they can keep catering to the simple/stupid crowd, but they should try and make it clear that there is more to the internet and you can learn if you want. The internet isn't easy. AOL makes it easy, but it does so by disguising a lot of the complicated stuff, and then pretends the internet really is easy. So people think they know what they are doing because they can understand AOL. It should be made clearer to them: you don't know what you're doing. You don't need to at the moment, because AOL will take care of you. But do try and learn a bit when you have the time.
That's not AOL, that's ordinary usenet. Use whatever client you want. Only the dolts who think "webmail" is the best thing since sliced bread will use google over real NNTP usenet.
Ig Nobel prizes are often given for important studies which are nevertheless funny. A category this certainly falls into. The gorilla study was just as important as this one.
I can't afford the hard drive space for loads of raw tracks, and I don't like the artefacts you get from compressing twice. Multiple hard drive copies are safer than a single copy on CD.
Indeed it was. And at that point they've lost, because once the pirated version is better than the original, which do you think people are going to use? I like epic, a lot, but I still tend to use the pirated versions of unreal tournament until the patch that removes the cd check comes out. If a game always has a cd check, I'll tend to always use a pirate copy just because it's a hassle to find the cd. And when nice games come out with no copy protection, I do my best to buy them immediately.
Because it's completely unnecessary. If I won't copy it, I won't copy it. If I'm going to copy it and give it to a friend, I'm going to copy it and give it to a friend if I have to write the cracking program myself. So it's pointless from their point of view, but annoys me. So why do I need to accept it?
I see a huge moral difference. Stealing someone's physical property deprives them of it. This is unfair on them and bad. Copying someone's painting does not deprive them of it. It will still look just as good to them, because it's still the same fscking painting. They still get just as much enjoyment out of it. It's just that you now have a copy you can enjoy too. So how are they "exactly the same thing"?
No, in other words real stealing hurts people, wheras online "stealing" probably doesn't. If you're a utilitarian, then that's purely morality - real stealing is immoral, wheras copyright infringement isn't.
Well, typical slashdotter and all I don't really have that point of comparison, but yeah. Perl is great for short programs that I won't use again, or for when I need a program right now. But I've never found it nice to look at. If I'm writing a program I'll need to edit or can do in my own time, I'd far prefer Python or even C.
I don't see the beauty in that. Beauty is all aesthetics, and I don't see any perl that's aesthetically attractive. There are perl programs that make you go "wow", one liners that creatively solve something that I would take two pages of C to do, but to me that's not beauty, it belongs somewhere else. I don't think most Picaso is beautiful either.
I think people like perl because you can do cool things in a short program with it, not because it's beautiful.
But this link was in the story, which are checked and approved by the editors. So I don't think they're in the clear on this.
Connect the laserdisc player to the digital projector in a japanese cinema, no?
I wouldn't say the install was easy. As a slackware user I'm used to partitioning my disk myself, and managed it fine before I knew what ls was, but I couldn't see how to partition for openbsd.
I could never understand how to partition my disk though. I tried it 3 times, tried to read the manual, created a bsd partition, tried to make a disklabel but it kept seeming to want to take over the whole disk, which I didn't want.