Yeah.. there's nothing more fun than taking something enjoyable and pointing out all the flaws until you can't stand it anymore. Hey, if you're not busy later, maybe you could come over and criticize my wife too.
They say a word to the wise is sufficient. Clearly you are not very wise, else you would have picked up on the fact that I gave exactly that warning when I used the word "dare." Apparently plenty of mods aren't very wise either since they gave you "insightful" instead of "redundant."
I guess its hard to go wrong when you pander to the lowest common denominator.
There is an old Hollywood adage that Joss Whedon would be well-served to memorize for future projects: Never cast with your dick.
Sounds like the same bitching I've heard about Summer Glau. Duh, Dusku is playing alternately a blank-slate or a 1-dimensional character and Glau is playing a fricken robot, of course they are going to be flat and lifeless.
Low quality mp3s sound more like you're listening to music with cotton in your ears.
That is the case for music which has been decimated with a low-pass filter (i.e. the high frequencies are not "passed" through). But there are other artifacts like pre-echo (before a sharp attack like from a cymbal or castanet there is kind of a echo or "smear" added to to the music).
With respect to corporate copyrights, it is date of publication (effectively registration) plus 95 years or date of fixing plus 120 years, whichever is lesser. I misread that as whichever is greater.
If I can just write a new version of Star Wars, without fear of copyright infringement, why would I NOT do that? It has brand recognition, and people already know the back story. But with copyright, I have to actually *SHOCK HORROR* invent a new story and characters.
Lol, what a TERRIBLE example. Star Wars is by-the-book monomyth. Hell, Lucas makes no secret of it. The names have been changed but the story and the characters are pretty much the same.
Would you prefer that the Rolling Stones wrote their own music, or that they just did Beatles cover tunes all their career?
Copyright is completely irrelevant in your example because of mandatory licensing requirements. If that's all they want to do, then copyright does not stand in their way, if they are commercially successful at it, then that will be more than enough to pay the royalties.
Well, tough shit for you. Art and other great creative works are hundreds or thousands of times harder to produce than flipping burgers, or else everyone would be doing it.
Since when does it take years of sweat equity to become a good burger flipper? No one, except you and your strawman is talking about burger flipping.
By the way - there are millions of "artists" out there, if anything there seems to be a pretty high correlation between burger flipping and being an artist.
Life of author + 25 years is very reasonable.
No its not. And unlike yourself, I can back up my claims instead of pulling random numbers out of my ass. Enforcement of copyright in the internet age is financially impossible, its a fools errand. So whether copyright duration is 1 year or a thousand, it doesn't matter. The business requires a new model that isn't a house of cards built atop the impossible.
The parent post hit upon the perfect balance. Really, I could live with 10 years from the date of "public availabilty" of any writing, design. or idea.
You could? Could you live with the cost to effectively enforce such a law?
(a) You're American I assume, modern copyright has varying origins not all of them from the USA
Lawyers for US corps have written all recent amendments to your copyright laws. Hence modern copyright pretty much does originate from the USA, at least in australia.
Now tell me, why is it okay for Steve Wozniak to be a "one-hit wonder" but not okay for an artist to be one? Just because computers sell faster than books?
Lol, computers DO not sell faster than books. They just cost less, because they provide less value. Retail bookstores do roughly 16B in new sales each year, in the USA alone. Assuming an average selling price of $30 per book, that's over 500 million books each year. http://news.bookweb.org/news/4131.html
While only about 250 million PCs were sold during all of the 20 years from 1981 to 2000, long after the Apple II stopped generating any revenue. http://www.c-i-a.com/pr0806.htm
And that's why they need a modicum of protection. "Tough shit, art isn't worth that much to people" isn't an answer.
Gee, "tough shit" is EXACTLY the way the rest of us get along. Most people spend years developing the skills, contacts and reputation to become financially successful at their craft. If they never achieve success, then its tough shit for them too.
Why do we need this behemoth of unenforceable laws to bouy a class of workers in the off chance that they will produce a single-one off masterpiece?
Maybe the reason JD Salinger only produced one good book is because the royalties on that one book were enough of a disincentive to "waste" more time and effort on a second one...
Ohhh! So now YOU are deciding when "they" have made enough money. Gee, what a hypocrite.
No, I am suggesting an amount of time which would give someone a reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work
What you wrote has EXACTLY the same meaning as what I wrote. Quit fooling yourself.
Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book.
Yes I do. Creation only needs to be done once, printing and distribution costs money for every single physical copy printed and distributed. Oh wait, "the calculus of supply and demand" does not apply. I should have remembered...
Let's put that in perspective. I'm writing a sci-fi trilogy. I've written and edited the first part, written (but not edited) the second. If you set the copyright term to five years, the first part and half of the second would be out of copyright. None of it has been published yet.
Doh! Copyright ALREADY starts from the date of registration. And if you aren't registering your copyrights, then you don't care about the commercial value to begin with.
What I like is the implication that you somehow have a right to their work. Why do you get to decide that they have made "enough" money from something?
Isn't that precisely what copyright law does? US deciding when THEY have made "enough" money from something?
I don't agree with endless or ridiculously long copyright, but I think that people who high handedly assert that it should be very short are not thinking it through. Something like 30 years from the date of creation or the lifetime of the creator, whichever is longer, seems reasonable to me.
Ohhh! So now YOU are deciding when "they" have made enough money. Gee, what a hypocrite.
The "boogey man" of large corporations was mentioned in my earlier post because they are precisely the ones who would benefit in tangible financial terms. For instance, people are likely to still buy physical books and other media, so even if they only cost a few bucks the companies with the means to manufacture and distribute those things will still make money.
And do they not provide a valuable service - that of putting the words in a tangible form and then distributing it to you so that you can read it while sitting on the toilet? Are you saying that they do not deserve to profit from such work?
What if, like many creative people, you struggle in obscurity for years before gaining a reputation?
You mean, like everybody else does in life? Start out small and work hard to develop valuable skills, contacts and a reputation?
When you get your big break and your work finally has some real dollar value, should large corporates be entitled to move in and use your work for free?
If your work has value, then make some more and sell it.
Circuit City only went out of business because most consumers already realized Best Buy, Walmart and the Internet offered better deals. In other words, they weren't even competing when they were in business. If they were offering a decent alternative they'd have been able to get enough customers to stay in business.
That is a silly generalization. Pricing is only one component of a succesful business. Even with the cheapest prices, if a company doesn't have enough of a profit margin, they won't survive. For example, two christmases ago, CC had major discounts on HDTVs, they pretty much beat all other retailers, including most online retailers. They sold a ton of HDTVs too. But, their margins were razor thin. Often they sold at a loss. Those were some really good deals for customers. Just not so much for CC themselves.
You'd think any civilian taking pictures of the building would subsequently be subjected to a little chat with the law...
I know this is orthogonal to your point, but FWIW, hassling people who take pictures in public is counter-productive. The result will be that people of any significant threat will just use hidden cameras and so will not be stopped. While regular, non-threat people, will be stopped and annoyed. No significant improvement in security, but plenty of effort wasted...
Information: 1. knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance; news: information concerning a crime. 2. knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction, etc.; factual data: His wealth of general information is amazing. 3. the act or fact of informing.
You need to get a real dictionary. Seriously. Making up simplistic definitions in order to pin your argument on bad semantics is no way to convince any reasonable adult of the validity of your argument.
Here's a real definition of "information" from a real dictionary. You'll note that your half-assed argument that creative works are not encompassed by the definition of information doesn't fly.
information 1: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence 2 a(1): knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction (2): INTELLIGENCE, NEWS (3): FACTS, DATA b: the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects c(1): a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data (2): something (as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct d: a quantitative measure of the content of information ; specifically : a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed 3: the act of informing against a person 4: a formal accusation of a crime made by a prosecuting officer as distinguished from an indictment presented by a grand jury
And apparently TheRaven64, You are so desperate for some way to discredit the fact that potheads can lead normal happy productive lives that you will grasp at any straw to do so.
Sad really.
I didn't realise toking was so bad for your sense of humor!
Bottom line: there is no technological answer to this, it will have to come from principles and laws. Anyone can steal mail from my mailbox, there is no lock. But people don't. Let's see how we can create similar principles for digital information.
It is not going to happen. The reason people don't steal from your mailbox is NOT "principles and laws" it is because generally there isn't anything worth stealing and it is hard to do on a large scale. When it is easy to do on a large scale and there is something of value, then people do steal your mail - for example, new credit cards were routinely stolen in bulk at postal centers until the banks made "activation" from a confirmed phone number a requirement (and even then, the crooks came up with ways around that, changing the phone numbers on file to phone numbers they controlled).
So as long as there is something valuable and it is easy to take with little chance of being punished for it, then no amount of laws or principles will make a bit of difference. (Which, some readers may have noticed applies just as much to the effectiveness of copyright law as it does to any laws regulating the use of digital cameras by the public at large.)
However just because other countries are stupidly keeping their economies from maximum growth by cutting off the ability to hire the best people for the job doesn't mean the US should do so.
Bingo! Brain drain is good for the drainer, not the drainee. If they want to encourage brain-drain with no way to refill their own brain-bucket, then I am 100% down with that.
H1-B wages are not the problem. By law, an employer is required to pay H1-B at least as much or more than the US market average for the given position.
It is only a violation if you get caught. There is, and always has been, exactly $0 in the government budget for enforcement of the wage parity requirements of the H1B program.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah.. there's nothing more fun than taking something enjoyable and pointing out all the flaws until you can't stand it anymore. Hey, if you're not busy later, maybe you could come over and criticize my wife too.
They say a word to the wise is sufficient. Clearly you are not very wise, else you would have picked up on the fact that I gave exactly that warning when I used the word "dare." Apparently plenty of mods aren't very wise either since they gave you "insightful" instead of "redundant."
I guess its hard to go wrong when you pander to the lowest common denominator.
Dr. Dusku's Horrible acting ability
There is an old Hollywood adage that Joss Whedon would be well-served to memorize for future projects: Never cast with your dick.
Sounds like the same bitching I've heard about Summer Glau. Duh, Dusku is playing alternately a blank-slate or a 1-dimensional character and Glau is playing a fricken robot, of course they are going to be flat and lifeless.
Low quality mp3s sound more like you're listening to music with cotton in your ears.
That is the case for music which has been decimated with a low-pass filter (i.e. the high frequencies are not "passed" through). But there are other artifacts like pre-echo (before a sharp attack like from a cymbal or castanet there is kind of a echo or "smear" added to to the music).
If you dare, check out this page in order to train your ears to be more sensitive to lossy compression artifacts:
http://ff123.net/training/training.html
With respect to corporate copyrights, it is date of publication (effectively registration) plus 95 years or date of fixing plus 120 years, whichever is lesser. I misread that as whichever is greater.
If I can just write a new version of Star Wars, without fear of copyright infringement, why would I NOT do that? It has brand recognition, and people already know the back story.
But with copyright, I have to actually *SHOCK HORROR* invent a new story and characters.
Lol, what a TERRIBLE example. Star Wars is by-the-book monomyth. Hell, Lucas makes no secret of it. The names have been changed but the story and the characters are pretty much the same.
Would you prefer that the Rolling Stones wrote their own music, or that they just did Beatles cover tunes all their career?
Copyright is completely irrelevant in your example because of mandatory licensing requirements. If that's all they want to do, then copyright does not stand in their way, if they are commercially successful at it, then that will be more than enough to pay the royalties.
Well, tough shit for you. Art and other great creative works are hundreds or thousands of times harder to produce than flipping burgers, or else everyone would be doing it.
Since when does it take years of sweat equity to become a good burger flipper?
No one, except you and your strawman is talking about burger flipping.
By the way - there are millions of "artists" out there, if anything there seems to be a pretty high correlation between burger flipping and being an artist.
Life of author + 25 years is very reasonable.
No its not. And unlike yourself, I can back up my claims instead of pulling random numbers out of my ass. Enforcement of copyright in the internet age is financially impossible, its a fools errand. So whether copyright duration is 1 year or a thousand, it doesn't matter. The business requires a new model that isn't a house of cards built atop the impossible.
The parent post hit upon the perfect balance. Really, I could live with 10 years from the date of "public availabilty" of any writing, design. or idea.
You could? Could you live with the cost to effectively enforce such a law?
(a) You're American I assume, modern copyright has varying origins not all of them from the USA
Lawyers for US corps have written all recent amendments to your copyright laws. Hence modern copyright pretty much does originate from the USA, at least in australia.
Now tell me, why is it okay for Steve Wozniak to be a "one-hit wonder" but not okay for an artist to be one? Just because computers sell faster than books?
Lol, computers DO not sell faster than books. They just cost less, because they provide less value.
Retail bookstores do roughly 16B in new sales each year, in the USA alone.
Assuming an average selling price of $30 per book, that's over 500 million books each year.
http://news.bookweb.org/news/4131.html
While only about 250 million PCs were sold during all of the 20 years from 1981 to 2000, long after the Apple II stopped generating any revenue.
http://www.c-i-a.com/pr0806.htm
And that's why they need a modicum of protection. "Tough shit, art isn't worth that much to people" isn't an answer.
Gee, "tough shit" is EXACTLY the way the rest of us get along.
Most people spend years developing the skills, contacts and reputation to become financially successful at their craft.
If they never achieve success, then its tough shit for them too.
Why do we need this behemoth of unenforceable laws to bouy a class of workers in the off chance that they will produce a single-one off masterpiece?
Maybe the reason JD Salinger only produced one good book is because the royalties on that one book were enough of a disincentive to "waste" more time and effort on a second one...
Ohhh! So now YOU are deciding when "they" have made enough money. Gee, what a hypocrite.
No, I am suggesting an amount of time which would give someone a reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work
What you wrote has EXACTLY the same meaning as what I wrote. Quit fooling yourself.
Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book.
Yes I do. Creation only needs to be done once, printing and distribution costs money for every single physical copy printed and distributed. Oh wait, "the calculus of supply and demand" does not apply. I should have remembered...
Let's put that in perspective. I'm writing a sci-fi trilogy. I've written and edited the first part, written (but not edited) the second. If you set the copyright term to five years, the first part and half of the second would be out of copyright. None of it has been published yet.
Doh! Copyright ALREADY starts from the date of registration. And if you aren't registering your copyrights, then you don't care about the commercial value to begin with.
What I like is the implication that you somehow have a right to their work. Why do you get to decide that they have made "enough" money from something?
Isn't that precisely what copyright law does? US deciding when THEY have made "enough" money from something?
I don't agree with endless or ridiculously long copyright, but I think that people who high handedly assert that it should be very short are not thinking it through. Something like 30 years from the date of creation or the lifetime of the creator, whichever is longer, seems reasonable to me.
Ohhh! So now YOU are deciding when "they" have made enough money. Gee, what a hypocrite.
The "boogey man" of large corporations was mentioned in my earlier post because they are precisely the ones who would benefit in tangible financial terms. For instance, people are likely to still buy physical books and other media, so even if they only cost a few bucks the companies with the means to manufacture and distribute those things will still make money.
And do they not provide a valuable service - that of putting the words in a tangible form and then distributing it to you so that you can read it while sitting on the toilet? Are you saying that they do not deserve to profit from such work?
Many great artists only had one or two truly great works in them. Some only created one (such as JD Salinger).
Tough shit. No one said life was easy.
Art is not a commodity which can be cranked out like a Model T Ford, and it does not obey the calculus of supply and demand.
Lol. No wonder artists are always starving.
What if, like many creative people, you struggle in obscurity for years before gaining a reputation?
You mean, like everybody else does in life? Start out small and work hard to develop valuable skills, contacts and a reputation?
When you get your big break and your work finally has some real dollar value, should large corporates be entitled to move in and use your work for free?
If your work has value, then make some more and sell it.
FYI, flac is usually 20-30% more space-efficient than TrueHD (for 16-bit audio and roughly parity for 24-bit audio).
Circuit City only went out of business because most consumers already realized Best Buy, Walmart and the Internet offered better deals. In other words, they weren't even competing when they were in business. If they were offering a decent alternative they'd have been able to get enough customers to stay in business.
That is a silly generalization. Pricing is only one component of a succesful business. Even with the cheapest prices, if a company doesn't have enough of a profit margin, they won't survive. For example, two christmases ago, CC had major discounts on HDTVs, they pretty much beat all other retailers, including most online retailers. They sold a ton of HDTVs too. But, their margins were razor thin. Often they sold at a loss. Those were some really good deals for customers. Just not so much for CC themselves.
Ah! Is this an oxymoron contest?
My turn then: "Atheism of the Pope"
The Pope is an atheist, an N-1 atheist.
He disbelieves the existence of every single god and goddess ever invented, except one.
You'd think any civilian taking pictures of the building would subsequently be subjected to a little chat with the law...
I know this is orthogonal to your point, but FWIW, hassling people who take pictures in public is counter-productive. The result will be that people of any significant threat will just use hidden cameras and so will not be stopped. While regular, non-threat people, will be stopped and annoyed. No significant improvement in security, but plenty of effort wasted...
Information:
1. knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance; news: information concerning a crime.
2. knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction, etc.; factual data: His wealth of general information is amazing.
3. the act or fact of informing.
You need to get a real dictionary. Seriously. Making up simplistic definitions in order to pin your argument on bad semantics is no way to convince any reasonable adult of the validity of your argument.
Here's a real definition of "information" from a real dictionary. You'll note that your half-assed argument that creative works are not encompassed by the definition of information doesn't fly.
information
1: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence
2 a (1): knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction (2): INTELLIGENCE, NEWS (3): FACTS, DATA b: the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects c (1): a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data (2): something (as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct d: a quantitative measure of the content of information ; specifically : a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed
3: the act of informing against a person
4: a formal accusation of a crime made by a prosecuting officer as distinguished from an indictment presented by a grand jury
And apparently TheRaven64, You are so desperate for some way to discredit the fact that potheads can lead normal happy productive lives that you will grasp at any straw to do so.
Sad really.
I didn't realise toking was so bad for your sense of humor!
Bottom line: there is no technological answer to this, it will have to come from principles and laws. Anyone can steal mail from my mailbox, there is no lock. But people don't. Let's see how we can create similar principles for digital information.
It is not going to happen. The reason people don't steal from your mailbox is NOT "principles and laws" it is because generally there isn't anything worth stealing and it is hard to do on a large scale. When it is easy to do on a large scale and there is something of value, then people do steal your mail - for example, new credit cards were routinely stolen in bulk at postal centers until the banks made "activation" from a confirmed phone number a requirement (and even then, the crooks came up with ways around that, changing the phone numbers on file to phone numbers they controlled).
So as long as there is something valuable and it is easy to take with little chance of being punished for it, then no amount of laws or principles will make a bit of difference. (Which, some readers may have noticed applies just as much to the effectiveness of copyright law as it does to any laws regulating the use of digital cameras by the public at large.)
The government sure does know the salaries - taxes get paid off them, after all.
However, the government does not know the work being performed. Surely you knew that?
However just because other countries are stupidly keeping their economies from maximum growth by cutting off the ability to hire the best people for the job doesn't mean the US should do so.
Bingo! Brain drain is good for the drainer, not the drainee. If they want to encourage brain-drain with no way to refill their own brain-bucket, then I am 100% down with that.
H1-B wages are not the problem. By law, an employer is required to pay H1-B at least as much or more than the US market average for the given position.
It is only a violation if you get caught. There is, and always has been, exactly $0 in the government budget for enforcement of the wage parity requirements of the H1B program.