He's the Bad Analogy Guy. Even then, the analogy you read is too bad even for him. He was equating initiating the second Gulf War with spreading nuclear secrets. His point is that the war itself caused harm to the USA, not the protests.
Which is why I said it was good enough for further investigation, rather than solid evidence of infringement in and of itself. Besides using an over-broad definition of playlist. For instance, static playlists in iTunes would count, and m3u file would count (both reasonably imply intention to reuse, and, therefore, reasonably easy access to the referred media). iTunes "times played" counter wouldn't, as per your argument.
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
Forgive me for impersonating you, but this is almost like truck drivers complaining that toll roads charge more for big semis than they do for lighter vehicles. Or, to further impinge on your territory, Doctorow's arguments in the article amounted to "it's unfair for tolls to vary depending on distance run and vehicle class when I can't accurately predict my vehicle's weight and the distance I'm travelling in that particular road". I mean, really, the whole "it's hard to predict bandwidth usage" shtick really got on my nerves. How low does your cap have to be before even very heavy browsing and reasonably heavy downloading of random apps will make you hit your cap?
Incidentally, and completely off-topic, from looking up toll roads in the US to verify that tolls are indeed variable as they are here in Portugal, I was surprised to find that i-Zoom, E-ZPass and similar systems are a reasonably novel thing there. We've had a nation-wide deployment for every single toll road since 1995 (With the Green Lane system).
Here's what I don't get: Videos, and, well, anything not directly related to RIAA's case, should be off-limits, obviously. But I'd certainly allow playlists. I mean, from my point of view play lists shouldn't have nearly the same weight as the actual music files, but they certainly constitute circumstantial evidence that the referred music files were available at some point in time.
As a more concrete (but hypothetical) example, if the guy being sued by the RIAA were the sort who kept a huge folder of recorded CDs/DVDs with "questionable" media, I'd certainly allow those to be searched when I said "Ok, search his hard drive". If the guy had a handful of burned DVDs lying about at home, I wouldn't allow the search to extend to those right off the bat (it would amount to a fishing expedition), but would allow the RIAA to argue "Hey, we found some playlists that point to his DVD drive, so we'd like to examine his DVDs to look for it".
I believe the poster who replied to me was pre-empting the "Laches only applies to trademarks" posts and suggesting they read up on the concept more thoroughly. Or, in simpler terms, we're all agreeing here.
I was going to say that, for what it does, TeX is easier to use than Word, period not just for mathematicians. Then I remembered I spent 4 years as a maths major, using TeX...
Even with all the added CGI (yeah, that's the version), the effects are well below the new trilogy's. But that's my point exactly: Even if we had special effects parity, where the new ones merely entertain me for a bit, the old ones actually captivate me.
Incidentally, I think that Episode 1 got seriously screwed by coming out so soon after the Matrix. The Matrix had a novel plot, versus a new bit of story we already sort of knew about, and featured much better special effects -- including the then-new bullet time, but the trick was that special effects actually mattered and were used to do stuff that pushed the plot forwards, which is what TFA also says Star Trek does well. By the time Star Wars came out, we expected nothing less than the Matrix, because Star Wars was the fantasy sci-fi film, and it simply couldn't compete.
On the other other hand, Memorex and Imation-branded DVDs have been around for ages, are reasonably popular, and Toshiba chose to wait it out. IANAL, but I remember reading something about asking for retroactive damages when you know full well that infringement is happening, and how that's a bad idea.
There is a limit, it is called the mbps of the connection you pay for. If ISPs didn't want to you consume more than 4gb/day then they should only provide you with the bandwidth to consume 4gb/day. Simple.
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong. 4 GiB/day = 2^35 bits / day = 2^35/(3600 * 24) bits/second = just under 400 kbps. Guess what? There are plenty of applications that need more than that (like VoIP), or that profit immensely from more than that (eg, YouTube), without needing to run 24/7. Even for biggish downloads, I rather enjoy being able to get OpenOffice downloaded in a few minutes rather than a few hours.
All in all, I'd rather ISPs provide me with a service that's capable of al of those, while being capped in downloads, than being offered an "all you can eat" service at a fraction of the speed so that the bandwidth acts as a natural limitation on total consumption.
You brought up an idea that I think could conceivably already fall under present law: where such a concept exists, work for hire might conceivably mark the copyright of anything produced by government officials as owned by the government and, indirectly, by all citizens.
In my book both "lawyers rig it to their own benefit" and "all it takes is self interest and a lack of regulation preventing that self interest from corrupting the system" imply subverting the system, which is, in and of itself, malicious. Perhaps you're working with a narrower meaning of malice in mind.
Either way, I now realize we're bickering over comparatively unimportant stuff: we agree that many laws are broken, and, in many ways, the very legal systems are broken, and should be fixed. I also fully agree that positions of responsibility entail higher standards than simpler jobs. What I meant by holding people to different standards was strictly in the sense of not jumping the gun on the malice card when you'd assume anyone else was just incompetent -- and I read into your comments the implication of malicious intent. (not that I think self-serving malice and corruption don't exist, I just don't believe they're the norm)
It doesn't have anything to do with a "conspiracy theory", it's a basic fact that barring specific restrictions in place to prevent it from occurring, people will act in what they see as their own best interests.
You seem to feel that this would be a bizarre circumstance completely outside the normal realm of human experience. Given that this obviosuly isn't true, what would lead you to a conclusion so utterly divorced from reality?
What I believe is that you're seeing malice in what can simply be ascribed to incompetence. I don't think a single/. regular can possibly not be familiar with the "Job insurance" anecdote, where some engineer comes up with a piece of machinery so obtuse that nobody else can figure out, yet so crucial that you can't afford to fire him. Yet I haven't actually heard of such a system in concrete terms. I've seen plenty of piss poor code, bass-ackwards architectures, you name it. But all of those are easily rationalized as inexperienced (or plain bad) coders, lack of forethought, etc. I fail to see why people involved in law are held to a different standard, whereby any failure to produce something that makes sense to you has to be the product of self-interest and malice, rather than plain old incompetence, blind acceptance of procedure and tradition, or many other such issues.
There is also a bigger point at hand: Like you said, we're talking about a freaking legal system. The US legal system is based on a constitution over 200 years old, with 27 amendments, and you use a common law system, where rules are set by precedent. You have several systems that came into being separately, and were eventually merged (like equity and law). Of course it takes an expert to navigate these hurdles. It's not me who's being specious for assuming that a complex system that evolved over centuries was designed specifically to screw people over
There's a fine, but important, distinction between the typical GPL violation and book piracy: claim of authorship. End-users rarely, if ever, claim ownership over the pirated goods. If anything, they'll show it off to (hopefully more scrupulous) friends who might go and purchase the actual thing.
There's another point about the GPL though that doesn't make it completely incompatible with saying piracy is ok: the GPL is partly a reaction to excessive protection of copyright, and is designed to play the copyright system against itself, after a fashion. Since copyright allows me to keep my code closed, you use copyright to "force" me to open it up if I want to use your (open) code. So whining about GPL infractions is a case of "hey, either you play by our rules, or you play by your rules. But you gotta play by some rules".
What do you expect in a system designed by lawyers? The only way to redress a wrong is through lawyers, so the lawyers will always win.
And if you want to argue in court that an engineer fucked up designing your house (and that's why it fell), you'll need another engineer to argue that the design was broken. And if you want to sue a doctor for malpractice, you need some other doctor to state that the defendant was in the wrong. And (...).
You need an expert to do expert work for you. Oh noes! It's a conspiracy created to promote [expert's class]'s own interests.
Problem with jail sentences is... who do you jail? I'd wager that you can't actually pinpoint responsibility in something like this, and sending your best guess to jail is Bad News for democracy.
All those companies which accepted Intel's bribes? Make them use AMD chips for the next five years.
Yes, that would be quite satisfying, wouldn't it? Justice, however, isn't based on what's a satisfying punishment to dole out, but what works out best for society. Such a course of action might very well leave us in a situation where AMD is uncomfortably dominant 5 years down the road.
The fine is 4.5% of Intel's total revenue. Hardly meaningless. That said, since you seem to think a fine isn't the answer, suggest an alternative. Really. Give us some other way to make sure Intel doesn't fsck the market again.
From what I understand, the way it was done was subtler than that. "We estimate you need 100k pens, so if you buy 90k+, you buy at discount". "Oh, you need 50k pens? We'll offer a discount starting at 45k purchases". Essentially, they never explicitly say "you can't have more than 10% of your stock in AMD products", but, by tailoring their bulk prices on a per-client base, they effectively achieve the same effect.
Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?
Yeah, and they sync an unknown (but often quite large) amount of "cores" (ie, the shaders, etc in the GPU) quite easily too.
Of course, the only reason it's so easy for video game programmers is that raster graphics are one of the easiest things ever to parallelize (since pixels rarely depends on other pixels), and APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D make the parallelism completely transparent. If they had to program each individual pixel pipeline by hand, we'd still be stuck with CPU rendering. The purpose of Grand Central is to, hopefully, make CPU parallelism as painless a process as GPU parallelism (which is hyperbole on my part, since CPU parallelism will typically hit resource contention a lot more often).
I reckon that functional languages as a whole are pretty good for parallel programming provided they're purely functional (ie, no side-effects). Even a naive "first come first serve" policy to assign free cores to function calls would keep all those cores reasonably balanced. In practical terms, I don't know exactly how that goes, though (but Erlang reportedly has brilliant parallelism support).
As for the rest - many of these break Google's insidious revenue model, which is the moral equivalent of sifting through your phone bills, credit card statements, GPS data and personal correspondence - then selling the results repeatedly to all bidders.
Subtly wrong. The trick is that they don't actually sell your info, but rather sell services that use that info in a black box. Obviously, you still have to trust that Google themselves won't misuse the information, but nevermind privacy laws, they just can't afford to sell your raw info: the moment they do that, they lose the value-add their services (ie, advertising) have.
Slashdot Mirror
Article? Even the summary would've sufficed.
He's the Bad Analogy Guy. Even then, the analogy you read is too bad even for him. He was equating initiating the second Gulf War with spreading nuclear secrets. His point is that the war itself caused harm to the USA, not the protests.
Which is why I said it was good enough for further investigation, rather than solid evidence of infringement in and of itself. Besides using an over-broad definition of playlist. For instance, static playlists in iTunes would count, and m3u file would count (both reasonably imply intention to reuse, and, therefore, reasonably easy access to the referred media). iTunes "times played" counter wouldn't, as per your argument.
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
Forgive me for impersonating you, but this is almost like truck drivers complaining that toll roads charge more for big semis than they do for lighter vehicles. Or, to further impinge on your territory, Doctorow's arguments in the article amounted to "it's unfair for tolls to vary depending on distance run and vehicle class when I can't accurately predict my vehicle's weight and the distance I'm travelling in that particular road". I mean, really, the whole "it's hard to predict bandwidth usage" shtick really got on my nerves. How low does your cap have to be before even very heavy browsing and reasonably heavy downloading of random apps will make you hit your cap?
Incidentally, and completely off-topic, from looking up toll roads in the US to verify that tolls are indeed variable as they are here in Portugal, I was surprised to find that i-Zoom, E-ZPass and similar systems are a reasonably novel thing there. We've had a nation-wide deployment for every single toll road since 1995 (With the Green Lane system).
Here's what I don't get: Videos, and, well, anything not directly related to RIAA's case, should be off-limits, obviously. But I'd certainly allow playlists. I mean, from my point of view play lists shouldn't have nearly the same weight as the actual music files, but they certainly constitute circumstantial evidence that the referred music files were available at some point in time.
As a more concrete (but hypothetical) example, if the guy being sued by the RIAA were the sort who kept a huge folder of recorded CDs/DVDs with "questionable" media, I'd certainly allow those to be searched when I said "Ok, search his hard drive". If the guy had a handful of burned DVDs lying about at home, I wouldn't allow the search to extend to those right off the bat (it would amount to a fishing expedition), but would allow the RIAA to argue "Hey, we found some playlists that point to his DVD drive, so we'd like to examine his DVDs to look for it".
I believe the poster who replied to me was pre-empting the "Laches only applies to trademarks" posts and suggesting they read up on the concept more thoroughly. Or, in simpler terms, we're all agreeing here.
I was going to say that, for what it does, TeX is easier to use than Word, period not just for mathematicians. Then I remembered I spent 4 years as a maths major, using TeX...
Even with all the added CGI (yeah, that's the version), the effects are well below the new trilogy's. But that's my point exactly: Even if we had special effects parity, where the new ones merely entertain me for a bit, the old ones actually captivate me.
Incidentally, I think that Episode 1 got seriously screwed by coming out so soon after the Matrix. The Matrix had a novel plot, versus a new bit of story we already sort of knew about, and featured much better special effects -- including the then-new bullet time, but the trick was that special effects actually mattered and were used to do stuff that pushed the plot forwards, which is what TFA also says Star Trek does well. By the time Star Wars came out, we expected nothing less than the Matrix, because Star Wars was the fantasy sci-fi film, and it simply couldn't compete.
On the other other hand, Memorex and Imation-branded DVDs have been around for ages, are reasonably popular, and Toshiba chose to wait it out. IANAL, but I remember reading something about asking for retroactive damages when you know full well that infringement is happening, and how that's a bad idea.
I might be risking my geek-card here, but none of the new Star Wars were actually that boring due to all the big-budget CGI/effects.
Boring? No. But I haven't watched any of them a second time, whereas I still watch the original trilogy every once in a while.
There is a limit, it is called the mbps of the connection you pay for. If ISPs didn't want to you consume more than 4gb/day then they should only provide you with the bandwidth to consume 4gb/day. Simple.
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong. 4 GiB/day = 2^35 bits / day = 2^35 /(3600 * 24) bits/second = just under 400 kbps. Guess what? There are plenty of applications that need more than that (like VoIP), or that profit immensely from more than that (eg, YouTube), without needing to run 24/7. Even for biggish downloads, I rather enjoy being able to get OpenOffice downloaded in a few minutes rather than a few hours.
All in all, I'd rather ISPs provide me with a service that's capable of al of those, while being capped in downloads, than being offered an "all you can eat" service at a fraction of the speed so that the bandwidth acts as a natural limitation on total consumption.
You brought up an idea that I think could conceivably already fall under present law: where such a concept exists, work for hire might conceivably mark the copyright of anything produced by government officials as owned by the government and, indirectly, by all citizens.
In my book both "lawyers rig it to their own benefit" and "all it takes is self interest and a lack of regulation preventing that self interest from corrupting the system" imply subverting the system, which is, in and of itself, malicious. Perhaps you're working with a narrower meaning of malice in mind.
Either way, I now realize we're bickering over comparatively unimportant stuff: we agree that many laws are broken, and, in many ways, the very legal systems are broken, and should be fixed. I also fully agree that positions of responsibility entail higher standards than simpler jobs. What I meant by holding people to different standards was strictly in the sense of not jumping the gun on the malice card when you'd assume anyone else was just incompetent -- and I read into your comments the implication of malicious intent. (not that I think self-serving malice and corruption don't exist, I just don't believe they're the norm)
It doesn't have anything to do with a "conspiracy theory", it's a basic fact that barring specific restrictions in place to prevent it from occurring, people will act in what they see as their own best interests. You seem to feel that this would be a bizarre circumstance completely outside the normal realm of human experience. Given that this obviosuly isn't true, what would lead you to a conclusion so utterly divorced from reality?
What I believe is that you're seeing malice in what can simply be ascribed to incompetence. I don't think a single /. regular can possibly not be familiar with the "Job insurance" anecdote, where some engineer comes up with a piece of machinery so obtuse that nobody else can figure out, yet so crucial that you can't afford to fire him. Yet I haven't actually heard of such a system in concrete terms. I've seen plenty of piss poor code, bass-ackwards architectures, you name it. But all of those are easily rationalized as inexperienced (or plain bad) coders, lack of forethought, etc. I fail to see why people involved in law are held to a different standard, whereby any failure to produce something that makes sense to you has to be the product of self-interest and malice, rather than plain old incompetence, blind acceptance of procedure and tradition, or many other such issues.
There is also a bigger point at hand: Like you said, we're talking about a freaking legal system. The US legal system is based on a constitution over 200 years old, with 27 amendments, and you use a common law system, where rules are set by precedent. You have several systems that came into being separately, and were eventually merged (like equity and law). Of course it takes an expert to navigate these hurdles. It's not me who's being specious for assuming that a complex system that evolved over centuries was designed specifically to screw people over
There's a fine, but important, distinction between the typical GPL violation and book piracy: claim of authorship. End-users rarely, if ever, claim ownership over the pirated goods. If anything, they'll show it off to (hopefully more scrupulous) friends who might go and purchase the actual thing.
There's another point about the GPL though that doesn't make it completely incompatible with saying piracy is ok: the GPL is partly a reaction to excessive protection of copyright, and is designed to play the copyright system against itself, after a fashion. Since copyright allows me to keep my code closed, you use copyright to "force" me to open it up if I want to use your (open) code. So whining about GPL infractions is a case of "hey, either you play by our rules, or you play by your rules. But you gotta play by some rules".
What do you expect in a system designed by lawyers? The only way to redress a wrong is through lawyers, so the lawyers will always win.
And if you want to argue in court that an engineer fucked up designing your house (and that's why it fell), you'll need another engineer to argue that the design was broken. And if you want to sue a doctor for malpractice, you need some other doctor to state that the defendant was in the wrong. And (...).
You need an expert to do expert work for you. Oh noes! It's a conspiracy created to promote [expert's class]'s own interests.
Dunno about where you live, but I've seen recycling points in some towns in Portugal that have a specialized container for domestic grease.
Problem with jail sentences is... who do you jail? I'd wager that you can't actually pinpoint responsibility in something like this, and sending your best guess to jail is Bad News for democracy.
All those companies which accepted Intel's bribes? Make them use AMD chips for the next five years.
Yes, that would be quite satisfying, wouldn't it? Justice, however, isn't based on what's a satisfying punishment to dole out, but what works out best for society. Such a course of action might very well leave us in a situation where AMD is uncomfortably dominant 5 years down the road.
The fine is 4.5% of Intel's total revenue. Hardly meaningless. That said, since you seem to think a fine isn't the answer, suggest an alternative. Really. Give us some other way to make sure Intel doesn't fsck the market again.
From what I understand, the way it was done was subtler than that. "We estimate you need 100k pens, so if you buy 90k+, you buy at discount". "Oh, you need 50k pens? We'll offer a discount starting at 45k purchases". Essentially, they never explicitly say "you can't have more than 10% of your stock in AMD products", but, by tailoring their bulk prices on a per-client base, they effectively achieve the same effect.
Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?
Yeah, and they sync an unknown (but often quite large) amount of "cores" (ie, the shaders, etc in the GPU) quite easily too.
Of course, the only reason it's so easy for video game programmers is that raster graphics are one of the easiest things ever to parallelize (since pixels rarely depends on other pixels), and APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D make the parallelism completely transparent. If they had to program each individual pixel pipeline by hand, we'd still be stuck with CPU rendering. The purpose of Grand Central is to, hopefully, make CPU parallelism as painless a process as GPU parallelism (which is hyperbole on my part, since CPU parallelism will typically hit resource contention a lot more often).
I reckon that functional languages as a whole are pretty good for parallel programming provided they're purely functional (ie, no side-effects). Even a naive "first come first serve" policy to assign free cores to function calls would keep all those cores reasonably balanced. In practical terms, I don't know exactly how that goes, though (but Erlang reportedly has brilliant parallelism support).
I knew the Athlon and Celeron. But the Ansowon processor is new to me. Who makes it?
previously known as Maestro and based on the actor model
Somebody has their performance arts mixed up
As for the rest - many of these break Google's insidious revenue model, which is the moral equivalent of sifting through your phone bills, credit card statements, GPS data and personal correspondence - then selling the results repeatedly to all bidders.
Subtly wrong. The trick is that they don't actually sell your info, but rather sell services that use that info in a black box. Obviously, you still have to trust that Google themselves won't misuse the information, but nevermind privacy laws, they just can't afford to sell your raw info: the moment they do that, they lose the value-add their services (ie, advertising) have.