A little while ago I wrote an HCI-HOWTO. I've been meaning to rewrite it some to focus on the more casual developer reader, but haven't gotten to it yet. Please feel free to leave me feedback.
In the interests of clarity, I'm on the side of freedom. You're right, this is a propanda game, as evidenced by how we identify "our side". The reason I play this side is because it's the little guy's side. *AA can afford to put the other side on posters and billboards. In order to get our side of the propaganda heard, individuals need to do the legwork (like the sibling post).
I can understand larceny as theft, and I can understand theft-of-service as theft. The definition for steal you cite uses the word "take", but uses it in conjunction with the word "appropriate", which dictionary.com defines as "To take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself, often without permission." I think this is more the sense of the word "take" being used here, although this is certainly up for debate. The definition you use of "take" (#30, but in the OED this doesn't mean much) is more like "I took that bit from Beethoven's 5th". Putting the definitions you cite together, you get something like "stealing music means to borrow, adopt or copy it dishonestly", which is a little different from "copyright infringement", which is a specific violation of certain privileges granted by a certain set of statutes.
Although I never read Dowling v. United States, I took the chance to look it up now. Wikipedia says: "The Court saw it Dowling's way, saying "18 U.S.C. 2314 [transport of stolen property in interstate commerce] does not apply to this case because the rights of a copyright holder are 'different' from the rights of owners of other kinds of property." This amounted to a declaration that copyright infringement was not theft." And from findlaw: "interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud." Which doesn't mean people aren't playing the propaganda game, of course.
I've posted my solution to the RIAA problem before, but I like it, so I'm going to post it again. First, get rid of all the RIAA-published music on your computer, because otherwise you're a hypocrite, as others in this thread have noted. Second, never buy a RIAA album again -- you're funding lawsuits against little guys. Third, to listen to music without committing copyright infringement, use sites like http://www.webjay.org/. You'll also have the side benefit of hearing about a bunch of great indie bands who you otherwise wouldn't have.
The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary cites the first use of "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement" in 1771, by a man named Luckombe, to wit: "They...would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition." The word "pirate", used to mean "someone who infringes copyright", is first cited in 1668, by a J. Hancock: "Some dishonest Book-sellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies." 400 years is a stretch, but even 350 years is a lot longer than I expected. Thanks for that!
I do not refer to copyright infringement as "theft" because it distorts the real consequences of the crime. The word "piracy", to a lesser extent, invokes the same feelings of "loss of property" that really don't apply when you're talking about copyright infringement. In order to defend fair use, I feel the need to use unemotional language to make clear the things the *AA are really defending themselves against -- among which theft cannot be found. Yes, it's a crime, and yes, it may be immoral, but no, it is not theft.
For someone not "in the know", could you explain what's ironic about the G?
Most people that I've seen on Slashdot accept that GIMP has features and quality comparable to Photoshop but a less user-friendly interface. For my part, I only used Photoshop once, back before I was quite as skilled with computers as I am now, couldn't figure it out, and hated it, and I basically had the same reaction to my first experience with the GIMP.:) Eventually I got over that reaction and really dug in -- there are good manuals available online, so learning to use it is not an expensive proposition (but it is time-consuming). Every task I have wanted to do in the GIMP, I have been able to do -- shift all the colors a certain amount but maintain the same shades, draw something that looked like it was shiny metal, draw a picture that could tesselate -- but the trick in both programs was always finding out how. (I suspect I don't "think like an artist".)
GIMP is a free-as-in-beer download, so why not try it and see what you think?
Disagree. A novice needs things to be discoverable; this is activated by a mouse gesture that will probably be triggered by accident more often than not.
A novice needs things to be consistent; this is not only prone to surprise triggering, above, but also, this is a very unusual effect for two-dimensional windows.
A novice needs things to be repeatable; until you understand that it is back-and-forth across the border of the window, it is a mystical mouse gesture. I feel this way about most mouse gestures. After years and years of playing Street Fighter, I've come to the belief that these are not things you want to entrust to serious work.
I think this is a neat idea, and I might like to use it myself, but I agree with another poster, who suggests that his novice users have enough problems with computer use. My mother cannot keep single- and double-click straight. What makes you think she'll get the hang of this?
Clearly you'd have to be a genius to think of putting MP3s on the 'web.
Ethan
Re:Foreign Language Instruction for Grammar
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 1
I agree. I think most Americans that have bad grammar probably only speak English, and poorly. I think furthermore that foreign languages instill a deeper understanding about different "the way we do things" and an appreciation of cultural diversity, but it could just be wishful thinking.
Ethan
Re:You don't drill them, you test them.
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It used to be that in the real world, sometimes you'd have to interact with people who were different from you. This is changing a lot due to globalization and the Internet, but I think kids still need to be exposed to situations where there are people different from them, and the classroom is a good place for that to happen. What drove you crazy about this is that everyone is held to the same standard even when they are obviously different. I don't think this problem has been solved in an equitable, just way.
This release was planned for last weekend and was delayed by another week. This was public knowledge to anyone who reads Planet Debian, or even debian-devel-announce.
Check out http://www.webjay.org/, decentralized taste for a digital age, or something like that.
Most of the songs I've downloaded recently weren't songs I've heard on the radio, but songs I've heard my girlfriend sing/play on her laptop. Even so, the concept of only pushing a few artists' songs to make "buzz" around them, while ignoring a large number of other artists' recordings, seems a little inefficient to me.
If you click "next" a couple of times, it states that they go to the Treasury of the United States. That's a good and important catch. This isn't a "pirate tax", this is just another sales tax -- equivalent with "taxes on blank media shall be 3%".
Right on. Alternately, I was hoping this episode would make everyone realize, "Hey, we've got a whole bunch of money.. why don't we just pay the cast to make another season?" Something like that, community-sponsored media, would be quite cool as well (because let's face it, Straczynski's never going to make fan films).
I really hate this kind of reasoning because it makes the reasoner unwilling to accept anything open source as innovation. A similar argument is often used in AI -- since many people define intelligence as "that which sets humans apart", if a computer can do it using simple math, it's not intelligence. AI is defined as making computers do that which computers can't do, so nothing remains AI for long.
I've collected a list of Open Source projects that display innovation for situations like this. Here's the best ones:
Piper for a while was trying to implement an entire new Unix desktop based on GUI-based command-line scripting, but never quite got off the ground, and eventually abandoned the idea.
Knoppix and other liveCDs are innovative -- an entire operating system on a CD-ROM! -- though you might quibble with "prior art" in the form of boot disks that you'd use to play your DOS games. They didn't have entire filesystems on them, though, so I'd maintain that this was innovation. A Windows liveCD exists in a primitive form somewhere, I think, but I don't know anything about it.
gaim and other pluggable communication programs -- Firefox and xchat spring to mind -- are very useful, and you can probably find a plugin on one of those programs that does what you want. To my knowledge, the furthest the proprietary world got in this direction was skinning, but I could be wrong.
Also in this vein is KDE, specifically the use of DCOP to help automate GUI tasks. DCOP isn't very well known and you have to discover it, but it can be very useful.
GNU Screen, to my knowledge, is one-of-a-kind software, though you might cite inspiration in terms of VNC programs, which I don't know much about.
I believe the concept of numerous virtual terminals on the same physical terminal (ie. Alt-F1, Alt-F2) is not only unique to OSS, but unique to Linux.
This is a perfect opportunity to pimp http://www.webjay.org/. It's a collection of user-submitted deep links to MP3s around the Internet. If a link is to a copyrighted work that the creator doesn't want distributed, Webjay admins remove the link. Which is really neat, because I'm sick of providing RIAA people with free advertising which they're only going to sue me for providing.
It's decentralized taste in a digital age. Some of the stuff you get from Webjay is crap, but a lot of it is really good.
The thing about Linux is that, being a volunteer-driven entity, it can pursue many different development paths at once. That's even if I take the false dilemma at face value (is Wine a statement that Windows is a standard, or junk to be ignored? How about mingw32?).
Just out of curiousity -- you allow for a number of "sad sacks" who are compelled to commit crime because of violent video games, though obviously not the rest of us. Let's say that annually 3% more murders happen because of violent video games. Is that not enough reason to try to limit the number of violent video games?
(I think that if you do a serious survey of the psychological literature, you'll find that the consensus is that yes, there is an effect. I'm a huge Max Payne fan, but I'd be lying if I said that mass culture didn't affect how I think.)
"Every career mistake I ever made was to do something sensible rather than something I enjoyed."
As you can see from other comments in this forum, not everyone shares my (borrowed) opinion. My conclusion: Depending on how it turns out, it could have turned out to be a really good idea, or a terrible mistake. Best of luck!
The characters and races are well enough defined that you get some idea from the get-go. (Although I will admit that I was confused as to who G'Kar was supposed to be... I had him pegged as a generic warrior-type. It wasn't until much later that I realized the poet and prophet bits)
This was all part of JMS's Master Plan (tm). G'Kar developed those aspects of personality in the later seasons, for reasons explained in the show. This kind of thing is why I have an altar to JMS built in my heart..
Why can't we just give JMS a bunch of money and let him make something of his own, so that the suits don't screw it up? I loved B5, but a JMS-induced Star Trek gives me nightmares.
Slashdot Mirror
I respectfully submit that if you intend to criticize someone else's spelling, your own should be correct.
The word is spelled "prove".
Ethan
A little while ago I wrote an HCI-HOWTO. I've been meaning to rewrite it some to focus on the more casual developer reader, but haven't gotten to it yet. Please feel free to leave me feedback.
Ethan
My bet for this is DCOP.
Ethan
Has nobody heard of the Artemis Project? It's not doing so well these days, but: http://www.asi.org/
Ethan
In the interests of clarity, I'm on the side of freedom. You're right, this is a propanda game, as evidenced by how we identify "our side". The reason I play this side is because it's the little guy's side. *AA can afford to put the other side on posters and billboards. In order to get our side of the propaganda heard, individuals need to do the legwork (like the sibling post).
I can understand larceny as theft, and I can understand theft-of-service as theft. The definition for steal you cite uses the word "take", but uses it in conjunction with the word "appropriate", which dictionary.com defines as "To take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself, often without permission." I think this is more the sense of the word "take" being used here, although this is certainly up for debate. The definition you use of "take" (#30, but in the OED this doesn't mean much) is more like "I took that bit from Beethoven's 5th". Putting the definitions you cite together, you get something like "stealing music means to borrow, adopt or copy it dishonestly", which is a little different from "copyright infringement", which is a specific violation of certain privileges granted by a certain set of statutes.
Although I never read Dowling v. United States, I took the chance to look it up now. Wikipedia says: "The Court saw it Dowling's way, saying "18 U.S.C. 2314 [transport of stolen property in interstate commerce] does not apply to this case because the rights of a copyright holder are 'different' from the rights of owners of other kinds of property." This amounted to a declaration that copyright infringement was not theft." And from findlaw: "interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud." Which doesn't mean people aren't playing the propaganda game, of course.
I've posted my solution to the RIAA problem before, but I like it, so I'm going to post it again. First, get rid of all the RIAA-published music on your computer, because otherwise you're a hypocrite, as others in this thread have noted. Second, never buy a RIAA album again -- you're funding lawsuits against little guys. Third, to listen to music without committing copyright infringement, use sites like http://www.webjay.org/. You'll also have the side benefit of hearing about a bunch of great indie bands who you otherwise wouldn't have.
Ethan
The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary cites the first use of "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement" in 1771, by a man named Luckombe, to wit: "They...would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition." The word "pirate", used to mean "someone who infringes copyright", is first cited in 1668, by a J. Hancock: "Some dishonest Book-sellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies." 400 years is a stretch, but even 350 years is a lot longer than I expected. Thanks for that!
I do not refer to copyright infringement as "theft" because it distorts the real consequences of the crime. The word "piracy", to a lesser extent, invokes the same feelings of "loss of property" that really don't apply when you're talking about copyright infringement. In order to defend fair use, I feel the need to use unemotional language to make clear the things the *AA are really defending themselves against -- among which theft cannot be found. Yes, it's a crime, and yes, it may be immoral, but no, it is not theft.
Ethan
For someone not "in the know", could you explain what's ironic about the G?
:) Eventually I got over that reaction and really dug in -- there are good manuals available online, so learning to use it is not an expensive proposition (but it is time-consuming). Every task I have wanted to do in the GIMP, I have been able to do -- shift all the colors a certain amount but maintain the same shades, draw something that looked like it was shiny metal, draw a picture that could tesselate -- but the trick in both programs was always finding out how. (I suspect I don't "think like an artist".)
Most people that I've seen on Slashdot accept that GIMP has features and quality comparable to Photoshop but a less user-friendly interface. For my part, I only used Photoshop once, back before I was quite as skilled with computers as I am now, couldn't figure it out, and hated it, and I basically had the same reaction to my first experience with the GIMP.
GIMP is a free-as-in-beer download, so why not try it and see what you think?
Ethan
P.S. Layer->Colors->Hue-Saturation, http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Golden_Text/, and http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Tileable_Textures/.
Just start downloading music legally -- see http://webjay.org/.
Ethan
Disagree. A novice needs things to be discoverable; this is activated by a mouse gesture that will probably be triggered by accident more often than not.
A novice needs things to be consistent; this is not only prone to surprise triggering, above, but also, this is a very unusual effect for two-dimensional windows.
A novice needs things to be repeatable; until you understand that it is back-and-forth across the border of the window, it is a mystical mouse gesture. I feel this way about most mouse gestures. After years and years of playing Street Fighter, I've come to the belief that these are not things you want to entrust to serious work.
I think this is a neat idea, and I might like to use it myself, but I agree with another poster, who suggests that his novice users have enough problems with computer use. My mother cannot keep single- and double-click straight. What makes you think she'll get the hang of this?
Ethan
Clearly you'd have to be a genius to think of putting MP3s on the 'web.
Ethan
I agree. I think most Americans that have bad grammar probably only speak English, and poorly. I think furthermore that foreign languages instill a deeper understanding about different "the way we do things" and an appreciation of cultural diversity, but it could just be wishful thinking.
Ethan
It used to be that in the real world, sometimes you'd have to interact with people who were different from you. This is changing a lot due to globalization and the Internet, but I think kids still need to be exposed to situations where there are people different from them, and the classroom is a good place for that to happen. What drove you crazy about this is that everyone is held to the same standard even when they are obviously different. I don't think this problem has been solved in an equitable, just way.
Ethan
This release was planned for last weekend and was delayed by another week. This was public knowledge to anyone who reads Planet Debian, or even debian-devel-announce.
Ethan
Check out http://www.webjay.org/, decentralized taste for a digital age, or something like that.
Most of the songs I've downloaded recently weren't songs I've heard on the radio, but songs I've heard my girlfriend sing/play on her laptop. Even so, the concept of only pushing a few artists' songs to make "buzz" around them, while ignoring a large number of other artists' recordings, seems a little inefficient to me.
Ethan
If you click "next" a couple of times, it states that they go to the Treasury of the United States. That's a good and important catch. This isn't a "pirate tax", this is just another sales tax -- equivalent with "taxes on blank media shall be 3%".
Ethan
Right on. Alternately, I was hoping this episode would make everyone realize, "Hey, we've got a whole bunch of money.. why don't we just pay the cast to make another season?" Something like that, community-sponsored media, would be quite cool as well (because let's face it, Straczynski's never going to make fan films).
Ethan
I've collected a list of Open Source projects that display innovation for situations like this. Here's the best ones:
Ethan
This is a perfect opportunity to pimp http://www.webjay.org/. It's a collection of user-submitted deep links to MP3s around the Internet. If a link is to a copyrighted work that the creator doesn't want distributed, Webjay admins remove the link. Which is really neat, because I'm sick of providing RIAA people with free advertising which they're only going to sue me for providing.
It's decentralized taste in a digital age. Some of the stuff you get from Webjay is crap, but a lot of it is really good.
Ethan
The thing about Linux is that, being a volunteer-driven entity, it can pursue many different development paths at once. That's even if I take the false dilemma at face value (is Wine a statement that Windows is a standard, or junk to be ignored? How about mingw32?).
Ethan
Just out of curiousity -- you allow for a number of "sad sacks" who are compelled to commit crime because of violent video games, though obviously not the rest of us. Let's say that annually 3% more murders happen because of violent video games. Is that not enough reason to try to limit the number of violent video games?
(I think that if you do a serious survey of the psychological literature, you'll find that the consensus is that yes, there is an effect. I'm a huge Max Payne fan, but I'd be lying if I said that mass culture didn't affect how I think.)
Ethan
"Every career mistake I ever made was to do something sensible rather than something I enjoyed."
As you can see from other comments in this forum, not everyone shares my (borrowed) opinion. My conclusion: Depending on how it turns out, it could have turned out to be a really good idea, or a terrible mistake. Best of luck!
Ethan
Googled for "firefox autocomplete". Found it at #6 down.
e _Dropdown_Autocomplete
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_Disabl
Why would you want to do that, though?
Ethan
The characters and races are well enough defined that you get some idea from the get-go. (Although I will admit that I was confused as to who G'Kar was supposed to be... I had him pegged as a generic warrior-type. It wasn't until much later that I realized the poet and prophet bits)
This was all part of JMS's Master Plan (tm). G'Kar developed those aspects of personality in the later seasons, for reasons explained in the show. This kind of thing is why I have an altar to JMS built in my heart..
Ethan
Why can't we just give JMS a bunch of money and let him make something of his own, so that the suits don't screw it up? I loved B5, but a JMS-induced Star Trek gives me nightmares.
Ethan
That's not so bad. Whenever I go in for brain surgery, I offer the doctor a snort of coke.
Ethan