Still, this will either a) finally put down on paper that file sharing is not theft, or b) put down on paper that the exchange of copyrighted information is, in fact, theft,
The truth, as always, is more nuanced than attempts to simplify it to nothingness can ever be. If you were actually to read the article, you'll see that it puts forward a very good case for refusing to label file copying either as "stealing" -- because it manifestly isn't -- or as "sharing" -- because that is equally loaded.
"Stealing" and "sharing" are both weasel words. The article does go into more depth about how the term "stealing" could be rationalised, without giving the "sharing" side equal treatment, so it's a little bit inequitable. But I am persuaded by its core argument: if you want to think of file copying as "sharing", go ahead, feel free. But if you do, your using loaded language is going to legitimise the **AA using loaded language. Of course the **AAs and their equivalents in every other country are complete bastards, but that's not the point. If you want fairness, it has to start somewhere. It sure ain't going to start with the **AA, so....
For IE7, I have no idea. I doubt it. In Opera, it's built in.
(... BUT in Opera, enabling scripts for a specific site requires navigating through various sub-menus and five to eight mouse-clicks. And if the site uses cross-site scripting, as do most video sites for example, it could take anywhere up to a couple of minutes to investigate which sites you need to enable scripting for.)
The EU could invalidate all intellectual property protections for microsoft products in the EU.
Judicial systems will generally take legal avenues for imposing penalties, rather than changing the rules just because they feel like it. Legal avenues would mean things like imposing fines, and if they're not paid, sending in the bailiffs (i.e. seizing assets).
Basically it works mostly the same way it would work in the US, astonishing though that may seem.
When asked to boot machine tell the officer - honestly - that you cannot, because for security you are travellling with a locked machine that even you can't open. Although this might cost you your laptop in an extreme case, you can't get done for lying or misleading a customs officer, and they can wedge you hard on that charge alone.
Having a laptop confiscated is not the worst that can happen. You are missing the rather important point that when you cross borders, you are completely at the mercy of the officials. I am not referring solely to the US, but to all countries' border controls.
If you are ever silly enough to try to pull something like this at any border crossing, please write back and tell us how many microseconds it took for them to decide to refuse you entry to the country. And remember that depending on local laws, more damaging options may be available to them. (And, in the case of the US, that you will no longer be eligible for the visa waiver scheme as you will not be able truthfully to say that you have never been denied entry to the US.)
How many of us back in 2001 could have imagined the day when we would be fighting to save Windows XP?
To be fair, back in 2001 WinXP was a steaming pile of donkey poo, perhaps almost as bad as Vista is now. With service packs it improved. In a not entirely dissimilar fashion, think back to the difference between Win98 and Win98SE. Basically, for Microsoft new OS releases are downgrades; only the service packs are upgrades. They're very consistent about this.
hmm. there was an instance recently of a legal firm getting a court to agree that publication of their letters was an offense.
The sender of a letter (or e-mail) has copyright on the text, so you can't just reprint a letter verbatim without permission unless you can claim fair use. However, it is only the text that is copyrighted, not the information it conveys. Nothing prevents the recipient making use of the information conveyed by the text.
I presume the document had legal statements included in the front of it - but I assume they are only applicable if they are signed or does journalistic laws cover this as free speech?
Yep, that kind of thing is only binding if the recipient chooses to agree to it. I can think of no obvious reason why a recipient would ever choose to do that.
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
Most of those in IT will probably be using firefox and therefor not be using Silverlight. For MS employees, there's Silverlight. For everyone else, there's blogs.technet.com/hhh_comic/rss.xml.
A heater does this with virtually no losses. Therefore, an electric heater is almost 100% efficient, as long as there's nothing coming out of it that doesn't qualify as waste.
I'm trying, but I can't imagine what might qualify as "waste" when all energy output is by definition the desired output. What are the things that you're thinking of that lead you to insert "virtually" and "almost" into the above?
I shopped a lot at Allofmp3.com and now at their sister site, mp3sparks.com. However, there is no denying that their insane prices were in part due to not giving anything back to the artists/record companies.
On the contrary, they did -- and mp3Sparks do -- pay their dues to ROMS (and those dues are significantly bigger than for radio stations in the US, I might add). It's just that the US record companies decline to collect them from ROMS out of bloodymindedness. It's not like mp3Sparks would suddenly go out of business if US record companies decided to start collecting; they've been paying up all along. (I suppose ROMS might encounter financial difficulties, though...)
That is not an insightful comment. If your comment is indicative of your body of knowledge, you are no more entitled to have any opinion at all about history than a creationist is to have an opinion about palaeobiology.
Your critique applies equally to every individual who lived more than a generation ago. After all, what counts as a "first person" account? Something written by a witness? But how do you know the author was a witness? I presume you will want to exclude the gospels as first-person accounts; but then the same principles you apply there will apply to pretty much every other text ever written. Basically, your model of verifiability only goes one step, and that isn't enough to get anything at all done.
Your position isn't healthy cynicism, it's absolute historical nihilism. The existence of Jesus, and at least some portions of his biography (e.g. that he was the leader of a sect, or that he was executed, even if the charge against him may be uncertain), are considerably better-attested than for most historical figures prior to the Renaissance. He is better attested than that of many Roman emperors, for example, and overwhelmingly better attested than any figure who lived prior to 500 BCE pretty much anywhere in the world.
Now, go forth and never ever utter any opinion about history ever again.
It really sounds like he succumbed to hate and had to disappear at times simply because he knew he couldn't exist in the real world
I don't disagree with your other comments, but the actual reason he had to disappear was he committed the appalling crime of playing a chess game in Montenegro in the 1990s. This violated one of Bush senior's presidential decrees, and as a result, in many parts of the world he was facing extradition to, and prison in, the US (even though violating a US president's decrees isn't a crime outside the US). The Icelandic government gave him political asylum.
but i dont think hes a perfect director. however, since hes done 3 of them already, id rather he continued to do them to keep a similar look and feel to the movies.
Jackson isn't the director for The Hobbit; he's a producer. The summary really ought to have made that clear. According to this morning's news, no director has yet been settled on. I haven't heard anything about a writer or writers. I guess Jackson will have a lot of creative input, but things could still fall through; remember at one point he was going to be the producer for a Halo movie too.
Welcome to Earth. Here, politicians are corrupt -- pretty much all of them. Here, they spin things anyway they can to try to make themselves look good. Are you surprised about this? Do you think this is a new thing? This has been going on since the stone age.
KDE comes with konqueror and that's great. Will opera also send them lawyers???
I must have missed the bit of the story where KDE has been costing the web developing industry millions by refusing to follow standards. Could you point me to that? or maybe you were thinking of the other aspect of the story, about monopoly abuse? Maybe you can explain how KDE is abusing its monopoly on the OS market to leverage Konqueror? I think I missed that bit too.
you can't apply some laws to microsoft, and some others for other company, that's not democracy.
"Monopoly" really is just a four-syllable word to you, isn't it?
Of course it isn't. But I hope you weren't under the impression that Apple is actually against DRM in principle. They're only against DRM some of the time, only when it makes them money, and only because they're one of the few companies that have woken up to the fact that they can make more money by doing away with DRM some of the time.
And that's why Apple opposes Vorbis -- because they're actually on the ball, because they've got the foresight to realise both the pros and the cons of open formats for them, and they know exactly what the consequences would be if open standards were to become dominant.
Actually I still care about efficiency: no compression format is ever going to get my entire CD collection onto a portable device with a 30 GB hard drive with anything like acceptable sound quality. To get my complete collection on there, there are only a few options. It's possible that a 160 GB iPod could hold everything in AIFF format, but it would be very full. Anyway, I think I'm going to be using lossy compression for a few years yet...
Just as literacy did in the oral tradition, and the codex did in the scroll, so may the electronic device do in the book quite soon.
It's possible, but the "quite soon" is overly pessimistic (or optimistic, depending on your point of view). Just remember that each of the transitions you cite took several centuries.
Tangentially, "literacy -- oral tradition" is a false dichotomy: one refers to a skill, the other refers to particular kinds of content. And in any case, last time I looked, people were still communicating orally.
Yes AAC came out in 1997 and it's actually better then MP3 in almost all measures,
AAC is undoubtedly better at low bitrates (e.g. 128 kb/s CBR). But since the advent of LAME 3.97, a lot of listening tests (probably at least half) have been ranking LAME 3.97 MP3s ahead of AACs, at sensible bitrates that is (192 kb/s VBR or better).
Of course that depends on the quality of the AAC encoder too. Just as examples, this test from 2005 ranks an alpha version of LAME 3.97 ahead of Nero AAC, while this one from 2006 ranks Nero AAC ahead of LAME, though LAME is still ahead of iTunes AAC (also it is claimed there that any score above 5 indicates imperfections only "beyond the threshold of human perception").
It is available not only at Amazon but also at every major electronic store.
That may have something to do with the fact that it costs 50% more than in the US. EUR 248.89? Puh-lease. (That's almost as expensive as it is in my country! -- where, unsurprisingly, it is also extremely easy to find a Wii...)
In some respects. In terms of quality, obviously yes (or if you prefer, the competition is very one-sided in Apple's favour).
And yes, in terms of hardware sales, Apple is certainly hard competition -- but competition for the likes of Dell, not Microsoft.
In terms of OS market share, Apple is not remotely near being any sort of serious competition. That by itself is more than sufficient grounds for continued monitoring of the monopolist, I'd say.
Unfortunately for your hyperbole, you haven't the slightest clue what you are talking about. In addition, you were too lazy to read an extremely interesting article. I refer you to footnote 38:
See, e.g., Christopher A. Harkins, Tattoos and Copyright Infringement: Celebrities, Marketers, and Businesses Beware of the Ink, 10 LEWIS & CLARK L. REV. 313 (2006) (using the recent infringement suit involving NBA star Rasheed Wallace's tattoo as the starting point for analyzing the minefield of ink-related copyright issues).
Obviously the point is not very heavily tested, but it sure sounds like there's some leeway for lawsuits there.
(Naturally I avoid quoting your post as I don't want to be guilty of infringing your copyright on it. Oh, hang on -- my quotation from n. 38 above might be defensible under the "fair use" defence in the US, but unfortunately there's no such thing as the fair use defence in my country, so I guess I'm an infringer after all. Dammit!)
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The truth, as always, is more nuanced than attempts to simplify it to nothingness can ever be. If you were actually to read the article, you'll see that it puts forward a very good case for refusing to label file copying either as "stealing" -- because it manifestly isn't -- or as "sharing" -- because that is equally loaded.
"Stealing" and "sharing" are both weasel words. The article does go into more depth about how the term "stealing" could be rationalised, without giving the "sharing" side equal treatment, so it's a little bit inequitable. But I am persuaded by its core argument: if you want to think of file copying as "sharing", go ahead, feel free. But if you do, your using loaded language is going to legitimise the **AA using loaded language. Of course the **AAs and their equivalents in every other country are complete bastards, but that's not the point. If you want fairness, it has to start somewhere. It sure ain't going to start with the **AA, so ....
For IE7, I have no idea. I doubt it. In Opera, it's built in.
(... BUT in Opera, enabling scripts for a specific site requires navigating through various sub-menus and five to eight mouse-clicks. And if the site uses cross-site scripting, as do most video sites for example, it could take anywhere up to a couple of minutes to investigate which sites you need to enable scripting for.)
Judicial systems will generally take legal avenues for imposing penalties, rather than changing the rules just because they feel like it. Legal avenues would mean things like imposing fines, and if they're not paid, sending in the bailiffs (i.e. seizing assets).
Basically it works mostly the same way it would work in the US, astonishing though that may seem.
Having a laptop confiscated is not the worst that can happen. You are missing the rather important point that when you cross borders, you are completely at the mercy of the officials. I am not referring solely to the US, but to all countries' border controls.
If you are ever silly enough to try to pull something like this at any border crossing, please write back and tell us how many microseconds it took for them to decide to refuse you entry to the country. And remember that depending on local laws, more damaging options may be available to them. (And, in the case of the US, that you will no longer be eligible for the visa waiver scheme as you will not be able truthfully to say that you have never been denied entry to the US.)
To be fair, back in 2001 WinXP was a steaming pile of donkey poo, perhaps almost as bad as Vista is now. With service packs it improved. In a not entirely dissimilar fashion, think back to the difference between Win98 and Win98SE. Basically, for Microsoft new OS releases are downgrades; only the service packs are upgrades. They're very consistent about this.
The sender of a letter (or e-mail) has copyright on the text, so you can't just reprint a letter verbatim without permission unless you can claim fair use. However, it is only the text that is copyrighted, not the information it conveys. Nothing prevents the recipient making use of the information conveyed by the text.
I presume the document had legal statements included in the front of it - but I assume they are only applicable if they are signed or does journalistic laws cover this as free speech?Yep, that kind of thing is only binding if the recipient chooses to agree to it. I can think of no obvious reason why a recipient would ever choose to do that.
Not Newton, but Bernard of Chartres (or John of Salisbury, depending on how your citation system works). Newton just recycled the line as a way to make fun of someone else who got annoyed after Newton had plagiarised his work.
Hell's bells, you charge a lot for thoughts in Italy.
(Other than that, thanks for clarifying practically everything about the story)
I'm trying, but I can't imagine what might qualify as "waste" when all energy output is by definition the desired output. What are the things that you're thinking of that lead you to insert "virtually" and "almost" into the above?
On the contrary, they did -- and mp3Sparks do -- pay their dues to ROMS (and those dues are significantly bigger than for radio stations in the US, I might add). It's just that the US record companies decline to collect them from ROMS out of bloodymindedness. It's not like mp3Sparks would suddenly go out of business if US record companies decided to start collecting; they've been paying up all along. (I suppose ROMS might encounter financial difficulties, though ...)
That is not an insightful comment. If your comment is indicative of your body of knowledge, you are no more entitled to have any opinion at all about history than a creationist is to have an opinion about palaeobiology.
Your critique applies equally to every individual who lived more than a generation ago. After all, what counts as a "first person" account? Something written by a witness? But how do you know the author was a witness? I presume you will want to exclude the gospels as first-person accounts; but then the same principles you apply there will apply to pretty much every other text ever written. Basically, your model of verifiability only goes one step, and that isn't enough to get anything at all done.
Your position isn't healthy cynicism, it's absolute historical nihilism. The existence of Jesus, and at least some portions of his biography (e.g. that he was the leader of a sect, or that he was executed, even if the charge against him may be uncertain), are considerably better-attested than for most historical figures prior to the Renaissance. He is better attested than that of many Roman emperors, for example, and overwhelmingly better attested than any figure who lived prior to 500 BCE pretty much anywhere in the world.
Now, go forth and never ever utter any opinion about history ever again.
I don't disagree with your other comments, but the actual reason he had to disappear was he committed the appalling crime of playing a chess game in Montenegro in the 1990s. This violated one of Bush senior's presidential decrees, and as a result, in many parts of the world he was facing extradition to, and prison in, the US (even though violating a US president's decrees isn't a crime outside the US). The Icelandic government gave him political asylum.
Jackson isn't the director for The Hobbit; he's a producer. The summary really ought to have made that clear. According to this morning's news, no director has yet been settled on. I haven't heard anything about a writer or writers. I guess Jackson will have a lot of creative input, but things could still fall through; remember at one point he was going to be the producer for a Halo movie too.
And you are condoning it.
I must have missed the bit of the story where KDE has been costing the web developing industry millions by refusing to follow standards. Could you point me to that? or maybe you were thinking of the other aspect of the story, about monopoly abuse? Maybe you can explain how KDE is abusing its monopoly on the OS market to leverage Konqueror? I think I missed that bit too.
you can't apply some laws to microsoft, and some others for other company, that's not democracy."Monopoly" really is just a four-syllable word to you, isn't it?
Uh, maybe you weren't aware, but that is pretty much exactly what the NYPD have started doing themselves lately.
Of course it isn't. But I hope you weren't under the impression that Apple is actually against DRM in principle. They're only against DRM some of the time, only when it makes them money, and only because they're one of the few companies that have woken up to the fact that they can make more money by doing away with DRM some of the time.
And that's why Apple opposes Vorbis -- because they're actually on the ball, because they've got the foresight to realise both the pros and the cons of open formats for them, and they know exactly what the consequences would be if open standards were to become dominant.
Actually I still care about efficiency: no compression format is ever going to get my entire CD collection onto a portable device with a 30 GB hard drive with anything like acceptable sound quality. To get my complete collection on there, there are only a few options. It's possible that a 160 GB iPod could hold everything in AIFF format, but it would be very full. Anyway, I think I'm going to be using lossy compression for a few years yet ...
It's possible, but the "quite soon" is overly pessimistic (or optimistic, depending on your point of view). Just remember that each of the transitions you cite took several centuries.
Tangentially, "literacy -- oral tradition" is a false dichotomy: one refers to a skill, the other refers to particular kinds of content. And in any case, last time I looked, people were still communicating orally.
AAC is undoubtedly better at low bitrates (e.g. 128 kb/s CBR). But since the advent of LAME 3.97, a lot of listening tests (probably at least half) have been ranking LAME 3.97 MP3s ahead of AACs, at sensible bitrates that is (192 kb/s VBR or better).
Of course that depends on the quality of the AAC encoder too. Just as examples, this test from 2005 ranks an alpha version of LAME 3.97 ahead of Nero AAC, while this one from 2006 ranks Nero AAC ahead of LAME, though LAME is still ahead of iTunes AAC (also it is claimed there that any score above 5 indicates imperfections only "beyond the threshold of human perception").
That may have something to do with the fact that it costs 50% more than in the US. EUR 248.89? Puh-lease. (That's almost as expensive as it is in my country! -- where, unsurprisingly, it is also extremely easy to find a Wii ...)
In some respects. In terms of quality, obviously yes (or if you prefer, the competition is very one-sided in Apple's favour).
And yes, in terms of hardware sales, Apple is certainly hard competition -- but competition for the likes of Dell, not Microsoft.
In terms of OS market share, Apple is not remotely near being any sort of serious competition. That by itself is more than sufficient grounds for continued monitoring of the monopolist, I'd say.
However, in the the void of a government of Iraq, and undefended borders, [...]
Something weird happened between those two sentences. What was it?
Unfortunately for your hyperbole, you haven't the slightest clue what you are talking about. In addition, you were too lazy to read an extremely interesting article. I refer you to footnote 38:
See, e.g., Christopher A. Harkins, Tattoos and Copyright Infringement: Celebrities, Marketers, and Businesses Beware of the Ink, 10 LEWIS & CLARK L. REV. 313 (2006) (using the recent infringement suit involving NBA star Rasheed Wallace's tattoo as the starting point for analyzing the minefield of ink-related copyright issues).Obviously the point is not very heavily tested, but it sure sounds like there's some leeway for lawsuits there.
(Naturally I avoid quoting your post as I don't want to be guilty of infringing your copyright on it. Oh, hang on -- my quotation from n. 38 above might be defensible under the "fair use" defence in the US, but unfortunately there's no such thing as the fair use defence in my country, so I guess I'm an infringer after all. Dammit!)