He never said anything about "stealing". He said that the business model wouldn't work.
Okay, well, that's not really right. Because the reason the model wouldn't work was that people would just steal instead. As if that's okay.
This has to do with stuff like iTunes, which would likely do far more business if there wasn't the crippleware DRM
iTunes could do precisely zero business without DRM, because nobody in his right mind would sell content on line without some kind of rights protection mechanism to impede the casual pirates.
again, treating a legitimate customer like a theif without any provocation
That's bullplop, and you know it. Napster was all the provocation the industry needs. In a matter of weeks, millions of people were stealing music. Piracy became an epidemic the instant it became convenient. The obvious solution? Do everything possible to make it inconvenient, of course!
The whining about "don't treat me like a criminal" needs to stop now. That ship has sailed. If the market, collectively, didn't want to be treated like criminals, then the market, collectively, shouldn't have stolen everything that wasn't nailed down.
You are, in fact, mistaken. Motivations and decisions, like all cognitive processes, are something that we have not yet even begun to understand. If there's an organ in which they happen, we haven't found it yet.
Sure, it's easy to say that all cognition happens in the brain, but we know that it's just not that simple. To pick only the most obvious example, behavior is strongly influenced by the presence of corticosteriods and catecholamines in the blood. Change the blood composition of those substances, and behavior will change. These substances aren't produced in the brain. They're produced in the adrenal glands, above the kidneys, and carried to the brain in the bloodstream. Behavior can be drastically altered through trauma to or disease of organs that are related to the brain only by the fact that they're located in the same person's body.
That's how the body works. It's massively complex. Remove or alter one part of it, and what we think of as higher brain functions will change. Have your appendix out, and when you wake up you may find that you don't like broccoli any more. Nobody understands why. Nobody's even close to understanding why.
But what is massively, demonstrably wrong is to ascribe to any portion of the body the properties of the whole body. While this is a perfectly good figurative-language technique --called synecdoche --it should not be taken literally. The brain, lacking consciousness, doesn't decide anything, any more than your liver decides to produce bile or your heart decides to beat. What decides is this thing called you, and the only thing about it that we know for certain is that it's more than any one organ or system in your body, or even the sum total of all the organs and systems put together. It exists, we recognize it, we accommodate it, but we do not understand it.
What happens if Apple goes bankrupt is that you still have the CDs you made sitting on your shelf.
The whole "what happens if they go bankrupt" argument is a giant waste of breath, because nobody in his right mind relies on encoded files. That's just dumb. The first thing everybody who buys music on line does is burn that music to CD. With iTunes, that's free. With Napster, it's an extra per-song fee on top of your $15 monthly charge.
So all this talk about DRM is just a huge waste of energy. The real issue is cost. Napster costs more, period.
You live in an interesting world where you can so easily draw a line between crappy commercial music and good free music.
I wonder, if confronted with one of the thousands of really good commercial records or one of the thousands of incredibly bad free ones, would your head just asplode, or what?
If you ever have the occasion to wonder, this is the point where I decided that you're a dipshit who's not worth even a fraction of a second of my attention.
if Saddam Hussein was so dangerous, why was he such a push-over in the invasion?
Well, the Iraqi Republican Guard was hardly a "push-over." The Battle of the Karbala Gap will be studied in war colleges for the next hundred years, probably. We heard it described in the media as an "operational pause"...which never made any kind of sense, but that's wartime journalism for you. The ten-foot truth is a ten-mile lie.
But the extent to which we were able to defeat the IRG with relative ease can be attributed to the surgical "decapitation strike" we conducted on the first night of the invasion. We effectively destroyed the regime's ability to get orders to their tank, infantry and artillery divisions outside Baghdad.
And why the hell did the US support him for decades, even when he mass-murdered his people?
That's a perfectly valid question. The answer you give is obviously completely stupid. The real answer is something that used to be called realpolitik. Basically realpolitik meant that large-scale strategic goals overrode small-scale strategic goals. We did deals with Saddam because we wanted the region to be stable, and a good way to achieve that stability was by working to create a polar environment. Iraq and Iran were already at each other's throats, and frankly both regimes were horror shows. To the west of the Shat al-Arab you had a Stalinist, and I mean old school Stalinist, regime. To the east, it was a totalitarian theocracy. If they're at each other's throats, they're not bothering anybody else. So we set them against each other in order to achieve our long-term goal of stability in the region.
Of course, we now know that realpolitik, which came to predominance in the wake of the foreign-policy disaster that was the Vietnam war, was a huge mistake. We now know that stable tyrannies are breeding grounds for fundamentalism. The geopolitical picture may look rosy, but underneath there's a festering mass of humanity that's just waiting for an opportunity to kill a whole lot of innocent people. Realpolitik went out the window forever on September 11, 2001.
It always kind of amuses me when opponents of the invasion haul out the old "we supported Saddam" card. The argument just doesn't add up. Yes, we did support Saddam, and that was one of our country's greatest mistakes. In 2002 and 2003, we decided to change that policy, to remove Saddam through whatever means were necessary, and to replace his tyranny with a free, pluralistic democracy. This is called "cleaning up your own mess."
Yet somehow there are people out there who can argue -- straight-faced and everything -- that both of these things are bad. "We supported Saddam and that was bad! Now we're attacking Saddam and that's bad!" I just don't see the logic in that. I don't think anybody else really does either, to be honest with you.
Iraq does not have a presidential system of government; they have no directly elected president. That's not how the transitional government works. Instead, like many countries, they have a parliamentary system.
The Iraqi national assembly is composed of 275 representatives elected with proportional representation. Those 275 representatives were elected in January, and were inaugurated this week. The assembly will elect a person called the President of State through a two-thirds majority vote, along with two deputies who will work like our Vice Presidents work. These three people will comprise a Presidency Council that makes up the executive branch of the Iraqi interim government. The Presidency Council has veto power over the national assembly, but the national assembly can override a Presidency Council veto with a supermajority vote.
The Presidency Council will nominate a prime minister and a cabinet, and these individuals will be confirmed by a simple majority vote of the national assembly.
This stuff is all set into law by the transitional constitution, the "Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period," which was ratified last March by the Iraqi Governing Council and which went into effect last June when the occupation ended. It sounds like you might like to read it.
Is pain the nerve impulse, or is it the brain's interpretation of the nerve impulse?
Neither. It's not a subjective thing. Pain is a biological response that is, like I said, very well understood. When nociceptors are stimulated, they release glutamate, which leads to the simulation of the thalamus. There's nothing subjective about it.
There is no pain unless the brain interprets the signal coming from the neuron as such.
That has what to do with my comment? That guy up there said that pain originates in the brain. He was wrong. Why are you still typing?
So, in theory, if the brain does not want to feel pain (interpret signals from sensory neurons as pain) it does not have to.
Wow. Anthropomorphize much?
Your brain did a risk assessment, knew getting shot in the head was worse than walking with a limp, so it ignored the damage to the foot for a while.
Um. No. A stressful situation results in an adrenal response, which involves the disinhibition of catecholamines like dopamine, which interferes with the sensation of pain.
The mechanisms of pain are very well understood. What you described is nothing but a lot of mumbo jumbo that's totally unrelated to any actual science.
Actually, technically right now Iraqi is a democratic country with a thriving economy and culture. It's not perfect, of course; there are still terrorist attacks on occasion. But if you look at the statistics, Baghdad is a safer city than Chicago. We have to keep a sense of proportion about these things.
The "thriving economy" part of the picture became crystal clear this week when Iraqi citizens spontaneously announced a boycott of Syrian imports in protest of Syria's continued meddling in Lebanon. And Syria responded. Iraq, a country with more people than Australia, is an economic force in the region, and they've begun to realize it.
In this particular case, the "truth" when Wolfowitz planned the anti-Saddam war was that there there were no WMDs.
Sorry, but stockpiles of sarin and mustard gas shells, a massive warehouse filled with uranium oxide awaiting processing, tons -- literally -- of biological growth media, ballistic missiles, UAVs and programs actively working on developing more of the same do not add up to "no WMDs."
Talk about forgetting history. You've let your politics get in the way of that thing between your ears that you're supposed to think with.
("Busheviks" was the first clue. Aside from being deeply and pointlessly offensive, your use of that pejorative shows a stunning ignorance of history.)
Iraq consumed many American lives and lots of American dollars.
What price do you put on freedom for the Iraqis and security for everybody else?
The cost-benefit analysis argument is inherently bogus. I don't think anybody actually believes it, including you. It's just a clever way of shouting "No war for oil!" at the top of your lungs.
It's bogus because either you recognize the value of freedom and security or you don't. If you don't, then the invasion could never have been justified. And if you do, then you would have been willing to pay any price. The idea of trying to weigh costs and benefits without first establishing your own prejudices is nonsense.
even though he wasn't doing much killing lately
I'm pretty sure we can all see your prejudices for ourselves, though. Anybody who can say the words "Saddam wasn't doing much killing lately" with a straight face is clearly disconnected from reality.
You do know what this week is the 17th anniversary of, don't you?
Civil war is still quite likely, but a "freely elected" fanatical Islamic state allied with Iran could be worse. A new Iraqi dictator is also quite plausible.
Wow. You left out "the earth could stop dead in its orbit and fall into the sun." That's technically possible too. Since you're rattling off a list of disaster scenarios that have nothing to do with any actual events, why not be comprehensive about it?
Um. Pain originates in the nerve endings, Quickbrains. The brain itself has no pain receptors, so that's the one place in the body where absolutely no pain originates ever.
Joe Sixpack doesn't burn DVDs right now because of this silliness.
Pardon? Joe Sixpack buys 50-disc spindles of either DVD-R or DVD+R discs at the Best Buy, depending on which one is on sale, and burns them in his $79 all-format Superdrive.
Joe Sixpack couldn't care less about the formats because they all work exactly the same to him. "DVD-R" and "DVD+R" might as well just be brand names.
Wow. First you completely misunderstood the point. Then you delivered a massively condescending little lecture. Then you displayed an utter lack of understanding of the law.
1. We're not talking about HTTP. We're not talking about caching servers. We're talking about the Google cache, which is an entirely different thing, and works in a completely different way.
2. Under the law, copying is prohibited unless permission is given. You're suggesting that a situation in which copying happens unless copyright is explicitly retracted is compatible with the law. This is obviously wrong.
But look, focus on #1, okay? I'm accustomed to the fact that idiots posting to Slashdot don't understand the law. I get that. You guys are arrogant little snots who think you're experts on everything. I get it, I really do.
But I think it's at least reasonable to expect that you people will understand technology.
Not knowing the difference between a caching proxy server and Google's cache? Completely un-fucking-acceptable.
Telltale sign of a straw-man. Never read any comments that begin with "so you're saying." Because the only response to such a comment is, "No, I'm not saying that," and that's just a waste of energy. Why bother?
I don't think you really understand how our legal system works. All you have to do is file a complaint with the court. You don't even have to hire a lawyer if you don't want to. Most people do because they'd rather hire an expert, but it's not required. And it's certainly not required for one party to hire more lawyers than the other party.
Slashdot Mirror
What matters is how well you do in life, not in school.
Isn't that what they call a false dichotomy? How well you do in school is directly linked to how well you do in life.
Iraq does not yet have a freely elected government.
It was elected in January, and it was inaugurated earlier this month. You are completely wrong about this.
It does have a (largely) freely elected national assembly.
"Largely freely elected?" What is that supposed to mean? Are you just trolling?
He never said anything about "stealing". He said that the business model wouldn't work.
Okay, well, that's not really right. Because the reason the model wouldn't work was that people would just steal instead. As if that's okay.
This has to do with stuff like iTunes, which would likely do far more business if there wasn't the crippleware DRM
iTunes could do precisely zero business without DRM, because nobody in his right mind would sell content on line without some kind of rights protection mechanism to impede the casual pirates.
again, treating a legitimate customer like a theif without any provocation
That's bullplop, and you know it. Napster was all the provocation the industry needs. In a matter of weeks, millions of people were stealing music. Piracy became an epidemic the instant it became convenient. The obvious solution? Do everything possible to make it inconvenient, of course!
The whining about "don't treat me like a criminal" needs to stop now. That ship has sailed. If the market, collectively, didn't want to be treated like criminals, then the market, collectively, shouldn't have stolen everything that wasn't nailed down.
You are, in fact, mistaken. Motivations and decisions, like all cognitive processes, are something that we have not yet even begun to understand. If there's an organ in which they happen, we haven't found it yet.
Sure, it's easy to say that all cognition happens in the brain, but we know that it's just not that simple. To pick only the most obvious example, behavior is strongly influenced by the presence of corticosteriods and catecholamines in the blood. Change the blood composition of those substances, and behavior will change. These substances aren't produced in the brain. They're produced in the adrenal glands, above the kidneys, and carried to the brain in the bloodstream. Behavior can be drastically altered through trauma to or disease of organs that are related to the brain only by the fact that they're located in the same person's body.
That's how the body works. It's massively complex. Remove or alter one part of it, and what we think of as higher brain functions will change. Have your appendix out, and when you wake up you may find that you don't like broccoli any more. Nobody understands why. Nobody's even close to understanding why.
But what is massively, demonstrably wrong is to ascribe to any portion of the body the properties of the whole body. While this is a perfectly good figurative-language technique --called synecdoche --it should not be taken literally. The brain, lacking consciousness, doesn't decide anything, any more than your liver decides to produce bile or your heart decides to beat. What decides is this thing called you, and the only thing about it that we know for certain is that it's more than any one organ or system in your body, or even the sum total of all the organs and systems put together. It exists, we recognize it, we accommodate it, but we do not understand it.
What happens if Apple goes bankrupt is that you still have the CDs you made sitting on your shelf.
The whole "what happens if they go bankrupt" argument is a giant waste of breath, because nobody in his right mind relies on encoded files. That's just dumb. The first thing everybody who buys music on line does is burn that music to CD. With iTunes, that's free. With Napster, it's an extra per-song fee on top of your $15 monthly charge.
So all this talk about DRM is just a huge waste of energy. The real issue is cost. Napster costs more, period.
You live in an interesting world where you can so easily draw a line between crappy commercial music and good free music.
I wonder, if confronted with one of the thousands of really good commercial records or one of the thousands of incredibly bad free ones, would your head just asplode, or what?
A business model where "customers" are treated like thieves from the get-go is "stupid" or "obsolete".
I'm all mixed up.
You're upset that, by your estimation, a company's business model treats you "like thieves." Your response to that? Steal their stuff.
What can one possibly say in response to this, other than, "Looks like Napster was right all along?"
I can't tell if you're trying to be funny, or if you're serious.
... uh ... try harder.
No, ascribing motivations and decisions to an organ in the body is not legitimate.
If you were trying to make with the laff-laff
Free elections are overrated.
If you ever have the occasion to wonder, this is the point where I decided that you're a dipshit who's not worth even a fraction of a second of my attention.
Plonk.
if Saddam Hussein was so dangerous, why was he such a push-over in the invasion?
...which never made any kind of sense, but that's wartime journalism for you. The ten-foot truth is a ten-mile lie.
Well, the Iraqi Republican Guard was hardly a "push-over." The Battle of the Karbala Gap will be studied in war colleges for the next hundred years, probably. We heard it described in the media as an "operational pause"
But the extent to which we were able to defeat the IRG with relative ease can be attributed to the surgical "decapitation strike" we conducted on the first night of the invasion. We effectively destroyed the regime's ability to get orders to their tank, infantry and artillery divisions outside Baghdad.
And why the hell did the US support him for decades, even when he mass-murdered his people?
That's a perfectly valid question. The answer you give is obviously completely stupid. The real answer is something that used to be called realpolitik. Basically realpolitik meant that large-scale strategic goals overrode small-scale strategic goals. We did deals with Saddam because we wanted the region to be stable, and a good way to achieve that stability was by working to create a polar environment. Iraq and Iran were already at each other's throats, and frankly both regimes were horror shows. To the west of the Shat al-Arab you had a Stalinist, and I mean old school Stalinist, regime. To the east, it was a totalitarian theocracy. If they're at each other's throats, they're not bothering anybody else. So we set them against each other in order to achieve our long-term goal of stability in the region.
Of course, we now know that realpolitik, which came to predominance in the wake of the foreign-policy disaster that was the Vietnam war, was a huge mistake. We now know that stable tyrannies are breeding grounds for fundamentalism. The geopolitical picture may look rosy, but underneath there's a festering mass of humanity that's just waiting for an opportunity to kill a whole lot of innocent people. Realpolitik went out the window forever on September 11, 2001.
It always kind of amuses me when opponents of the invasion haul out the old "we supported Saddam" card. The argument just doesn't add up. Yes, we did support Saddam, and that was one of our country's greatest mistakes. In 2002 and 2003, we decided to change that policy, to remove Saddam through whatever means were necessary, and to replace his tyranny with a free, pluralistic democracy. This is called "cleaning up your own mess."
Yet somehow there are people out there who can argue -- straight-faced and everything -- that both of these things are bad. "We supported Saddam and that was bad! Now we're attacking Saddam and that's bad!" I just don't see the logic in that. I don't think anybody else really does either, to be honest with you.
If I pour a big jug of glutamate on a table and stimulate a thalamus by poking it with a stick, is that pain?
You're not very smart, are you?
Plonk.
You are ignorant.
Iraq does not have a presidential system of government; they have no directly elected president. That's not how the transitional government works. Instead, like many countries, they have a parliamentary system.
The Iraqi national assembly is composed of 275 representatives elected with proportional representation. Those 275 representatives were elected in January, and were inaugurated this week. The assembly will elect a person called the President of State through a two-thirds majority vote, along with two deputies who will work like our Vice Presidents work. These three people will comprise a Presidency Council that makes up the executive branch of the Iraqi interim government. The Presidency Council has veto power over the national assembly, but the national assembly can override a Presidency Council veto with a supermajority vote.
The Presidency Council will nominate a prime minister and a cabinet, and these individuals will be confirmed by a simple majority vote of the national assembly.
This stuff is all set into law by the transitional constitution, the "Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period," which was ratified last March by the Iraqi Governing Council and which went into effect last June when the occupation ended. It sounds like you might like to read it.
Is pain the nerve impulse, or is it the brain's interpretation of the nerve impulse?
Neither. It's not a subjective thing. Pain is a biological response that is, like I said, very well understood. When nociceptors are stimulated, they release glutamate, which leads to the simulation of the thalamus. There's nothing subjective about it.
There is no pain unless the brain interprets the signal coming from the neuron as such.
That has what to do with my comment? That guy up there said that pain originates in the brain. He was wrong. Why are you still typing?
So, in theory, if the brain does not want to feel pain (interpret signals from sensory neurons as pain) it does not have to.
Wow. Anthropomorphize much?
Your brain did a risk assessment, knew getting shot in the head was worse than walking with a limp, so it ignored the damage to the foot for a while.
Um. No. A stressful situation results in an adrenal response, which involves the disinhibition of catecholamines like dopamine, which interferes with the sensation of pain.
The mechanisms of pain are very well understood. What you described is nothing but a lot of mumbo jumbo that's totally unrelated to any actual science.
Actually, technically right now Iraqi is a democratic country with a thriving economy and culture. It's not perfect, of course; there are still terrorist attacks on occasion. But if you look at the statistics, Baghdad is a safer city than Chicago. We have to keep a sense of proportion about these things.
The "thriving economy" part of the picture became crystal clear this week when Iraqi citizens spontaneously announced a boycott of Syrian imports in protest of Syria's continued meddling in Lebanon. And Syria responded. Iraq, a country with more people than Australia, is an economic force in the region, and they've begun to realize it.
In this particular case, the "truth" when Wolfowitz planned the anti-Saddam war was that there there were no WMDs.
Sorry, but stockpiles of sarin and mustard gas shells, a massive warehouse filled with uranium oxide awaiting processing, tons -- literally -- of biological growth media, ballistic missiles, UAVs and programs actively working on developing more of the same do not add up to "no WMDs."
Talk about forgetting history. You've let your politics get in the way of that thing between your ears that you're supposed to think with.
("Busheviks" was the first clue. Aside from being deeply and pointlessly offensive, your use of that pejorative shows a stunning ignorance of history.)
Iraq consumed many American lives and lots of American dollars.
What price do you put on freedom for the Iraqis and security for everybody else?
The cost-benefit analysis argument is inherently bogus. I don't think anybody actually believes it, including you. It's just a clever way of shouting "No war for oil!" at the top of your lungs.
It's bogus because either you recognize the value of freedom and security or you don't. If you don't, then the invasion could never have been justified. And if you do, then you would have been willing to pay any price. The idea of trying to weigh costs and benefits without first establishing your own prejudices is nonsense.
even though he wasn't doing much killing lately
I'm pretty sure we can all see your prejudices for ourselves, though. Anybody who can say the words "Saddam wasn't doing much killing lately" with a straight face is clearly disconnected from reality.
You do know what this week is the 17th anniversary of, don't you?
Civil war is still quite likely, but a "freely elected" fanatical Islamic state allied with Iran could be worse. A new Iraqi dictator is also quite plausible.
Wow. You left out "the earth could stop dead in its orbit and fall into the sun." That's technically possible too. Since you're rattling off a list of disaster scenarios that have nothing to do with any actual events, why not be comprehensive about it?
Um. Pain originates in the nerve endings, Quickbrains. The brain itself has no pain receptors, so that's the one place in the body where absolutely no pain originates ever.
"Fiasco?" Twenty-five million people establishing their first freely elected government in history is a "fiasco" now?
Joe Sixpack doesn't burn DVDs right now because of this silliness.
Pardon? Joe Sixpack buys 50-disc spindles of either DVD-R or DVD+R discs at the Best Buy, depending on which one is on sale, and burns them in his $79 all-format Superdrive.
Joe Sixpack couldn't care less about the formats because they all work exactly the same to him. "DVD-R" and "DVD+R" might as well just be brand names.
By that logic
Why not just post a sign that says "straw man fallacy begins here?"
If you can get a DA interested, then yes.
You are aware, are you not, that the district attorney only concerns himself with cases in which the state is a party?
Otherwise you need to hire a lawyer.
Need to? That depends entirely on the situation. The question is whether or not you have to, and the answer is no.
In any case, you'll probably need to register your copyright
Copyright law hasn't required registration of works for more than 30 years.
Wow. First you completely misunderstood the point. Then you delivered a massively condescending little lecture. Then you displayed an utter lack of understanding of the law.
1. We're not talking about HTTP. We're not talking about caching servers. We're talking about the Google cache, which is an entirely different thing, and works in a completely different way.
2. Under the law, copying is prohibited unless permission is given. You're suggesting that a situation in which copying happens unless copyright is explicitly retracted is compatible with the law. This is obviously wrong.
But look, focus on #1, okay? I'm accustomed to the fact that idiots posting to Slashdot don't understand the law. I get that. You guys are arrogant little snots who think you're experts on everything. I get it, I really do.
But I think it's at least reasonable to expect that you people will understand technology.
Not knowing the difference between a caching proxy server and Google's cache? Completely un-fucking-acceptable.
so your saying
Telltale sign of a straw-man. Never read any comments that begin with "so you're saying." Because the only response to such a comment is, "No, I'm not saying that," and that's just a waste of energy. Why bother?
Just killfile the offender and move on.
I don't think you really understand how our legal system works. All you have to do is file a complaint with the court. You don't even have to hire a lawyer if you don't want to. Most people do because they'd rather hire an expert, but it's not required. And it's certainly not required for one party to hire more lawyers than the other party.