Offline readers. Plus, a lot of people just like to be shown stuff while they are offline (eg, not yet fully woken up, having a quick catch up on news while eating breakfast). Following links to the web has more of an essence of interaction.
"If the case were clearer, maybe the EFF would take it up"
Huh? They're not saying it'll process the closed word format, not the open html format, just that it'll use the word engine to render html, which puts it on par with any other reader than can display html. The 'greater effect' it can have is that people don't use newer standards/features in emails because outlook won't understand them, NOT that people won't use other readers because only outlook can understand them, because that will be less true than if they used IE as the rendering engine with its additional nonstandardised features.
Erm, if you're asked to do something, and you don't do it, you haven't done your job. Not doing your job doesn't work out very well. Try getting a job and not doing it, you'll see what I mean.
"When you open a postal mail and look at the flyer, it does not report to an anonymous sender that you've read it"
Surely that's an implementation issue. The "done thing(tm)" now is to only show inline images, and only show external images pending user request, if your mail client doesn't do that, change your mail client, or quit complaining, it's not like you have no choice in the matter.
"The poorly framed pictures on a postcard do not overflow a buffer in your brain"
Surely that's a useage issue. Technology should not be restricted to allow only what those who don't know it can do with it. If someone screws up an image size, that's their fault, not the technologies. You could always implement a default maximum image size in the viewer, which shows full size pending user request.
"In short, yes, If I were designing email today, I would allow attachments but require messages be entirely text"
Thank god other people are designing the stuff then, not you, otherwise we'd have all sorts of best-case restrictions on technology to reduce the chance of being annoyed by a worse case.
But that majority of non-spam emails (ie, those you actually want to keep) aren't gonna have all these graphics are they? Also, this problems so easy to mitigate. I'm writing an email system that stores attachments indexed by their checksum. If there are 10,000 emails (in one box, multiple boxes, it makes no difference with this system) all different, but contain a common graphic for example, a company logo or whatever, that graphic is only stored once (compressed where it's useful to be). Emails are reconstructed if collected by POP3 for backward compatibility. I came up with that, just while writing the system as it seemed like the only sensible way to do it, and I'm not exactly anything special. If your system doesn't do something like this, suggest it to its creators, or implement it yourself, and share the patch. There's plenty of free/open mime parsing libraries out there, the rest is simple (I store larger files on the FS named by its checksum code, split into multiple directories based on the first characters of the code, for quicker lookup than a single dir with thousands of files in, and small files in a database)
Yeah, cuz everyone's like you, and nothing exists outside the tiny world you can imagine. Yes, spam is the most annoying and morally corrupt form of marketing, but if that's really the only use you can imagine, I'd start asking questions about why you can't think of anything else, what effect that's likely to have on you and the decisions you make, and the limitations on your personality it's likely to have.
you really cannot think of any other reason for anything other than plain text technology in emails other than cold spamming? Wow... I have to say, I'd rather be a cunt than an idiot.
Absolutely. No shops should be allowed to display signs advertising what they're selling. Billboards should be outlawed. TV adverts should be banned, and only people who can afford increased subscription fees should be allowed to watch shows. People should only be aware of the existence of something if they have gone looking for it (ya know, without knowing it exists).
Wow, how melodramatic. You do realise that if people didn't respond to marketing, there wouldn't be a market for marketers, right? Blame the demand, not the supply.
Well a record label equivalent would be to get people to give you their land by convincing them that you'll do a better job of managing it than they will, making it better for them to live in, in return for agreeing to only live in a tiny section of it.
"what's the IP equivalent of obtaining land by conquest?"
Forcing someone to give you information/ideas/etc through fear of violence and death.
"They gave most of those rights away when they shared their creation with the world"
No, they GAIN those rights when the share their creations with the world. It's an exchange, "give us your ideas, and we'll give you rights over them for a period of time".
"for the sole purpose of benefiting the originator of some information"
Are you really so narrow minded that you cannot think of any other benefits than the immediately obvious? Perhaps you should think instead of just saying what you see.
The act of buying it gives you rights, including the right to give it away (but giving it away must be full, and does not allow for keeping a copy). Lending to someone is effectively giving it away, and after a period of time, they give it back, so is covered by purchaser rights. Above a certain level however, I would consider taking the piss, even if law allows it.
"what is it that inherently gives a person the right to control an idea?"... "I like to give money to people who produce things that I enjoy under the informal notion that if I do, that person will continue to make things that I like"
You've kind of answered your own question there, although I guess without realising. People are given the rights to control their creations to GET them to create and to release their creations. It's a trade that works, if it didn't, you wouldn't pay for something under the belief that it'll make any difference to whether they keep creating or not.
That, however, doesn't mean the system isn't being abused, one only has to look at the patents that've been granted (such as a GUI with "windows that can overlap") to know that it is. A balance has to be found that will maximise progression.
"For example, if you somehow conned them into signing the rights to you for free"
But this is what happens if illegal copying is allowed to happen. People have released their ideas/creations so that society can share in the benefits of them, in exchange for the promise that they're to be given control over who they share it with for a limited amount of time. That's the deal. If piracy occures, then the society has not stuck to its end of the deal, it's taken the creation under false pretenses. This is as much stealing as walking into a shop, saying "I'd like to buy x, please", then once given it, walking out without paying.
"So you believe culture and progress only occurs when people are being paid for their ideas?"
No of cause not, which is why drug companies charge the bare minimum to break even, as do software houses, R&D labs. It's why all patents and arts end up in the public domain as soon as costs have been recovered by their creators, because all those people to create and invent, aren't doing it for the money.
No of cause it doesn't only occur when people are being paid, but jesus, being paid makes one HELL of a difference.
Sure, get rid of laws granting protection of IP, and get rid of everything that'll be created BECAUSE this protection exists. Lets go back to the days when secrets were taken to the grave because people could recreate your work cheaper without your development costs, and so there was no incentive to share them. That's forward thinking.
"On the same note, all recorded music should be free!"
This is not your decision to make! People should be free to do whatever they want with their creations, whether that's to share them with others for free (as I have done with mine) or to share it only with those who purchase it. If you disagree with people who create music for money, then the only justifiable action you can take is to have nothing to do with them. Taking their music and refusing to pay is nothing short of ignorance and fascism, it's saying "my ideas on what you should do with your music are right, your ideas are wrong, I disagree with your right to decide, and think you should be forced into doing things my way", which through ALL arguments about concerts, labels, business models, CANNOT be justified!
Artists sign over their rights to record labels and more often that not, get screwed. I would encourage anything that stops this happening (educating the dangers of signing away rights, developing viable alternatives) and returns the power to the creators themselves. But at the end of the day, it is the artists that sign away their rights (in return for dreams of money/fame/glory/etc), and they have the right to do that. You may disagree with them having this freedom to be exploited, think they should be protected by the state, but it doesn't change the fact that it is their decision to make.
I don't really have a huge moral issue with pirating music that you can't afford; I don't think music should only be for the rich; I don't think people should be deprived of it because they are poor. I do have an issue with pirating music because you don't like who would be getting the money if you were to pay for it, because you don't like the artists decision to sign over rights to a greedy label. Just because one party is screwing another, does not make it okay to join in. It's that whole "two wrongs" issue.
I spent a few years writing music, have never once considered charging money for listening to it, it goes against every reason I created the music I did.
"Software, given freely, can enhance other software for the benefit of everyone. Music, given freely, can not do this"
Music cannot enhance other software? No probably not really... can it inspire others with their music though? Yes, it can, and it has done, and the sharing of my music source files has helped other people to understand how to create certain sounds, other ways of structuring sound and music, knowledge they can use when creating music themselves.
"PLEASE consider switching to selling your music and giving your software away for free"
Please consider that my priorities and passions for music and software may actually lie other way round to yours. I created music because it was something I had to do. I teamed up with other artists who share web development backgrounds to create a website for other musicians share music and ideas, that a community could build upon, because it was something I believed in.
I code for businesses who need software to perform tasks. I wouldn't be doing it unless they needed it (I would be coding still, I enjoy it, but direction would be different), and couldn't afford the time to do it unless they paid. There's no point me sharing the entire project, it's so built around the actual businesses using it that it's not highly portable, there's zero documentation, and I don't have the time to explain enough for other people to make sense of it. I'm not a team programmer, I'm a "get in, do the job, get out, move to next" hacker. The codebase has evolved to do things it was never meant to do, which means a high level of ugly hacks etc, that I wouldn't recommend basing any new project on, and would ditch them as soon as I have the time or it becomes necessary to do so.
As much as open source is a good idea, open sourcing everything would drastically decrease the signal to noise ratio, and my code, while very functional and "does its job", would add more to noise than to signal. I'm always happy to share my knowledge, in the best way possible, and in my good judgement, this involves answering questions, providing code snipplets as examples, sharing functionality and implementation ideas, rather than opening up the very messy codebase.
Not everything works the way you'd think it does, and some 'constants' turn out to actually be 'variables', which when changed, can make huge differences to the right/best actions to take.
"Copyright laws remove chunks of ideas from the public domain where they are free to be exchanged and modified, and fence them off for individual exploitation"
In an ideal world, of cause you're right. But in the world we actually live in, people DO want to protect their ideas and creations - whether you think they should just share them with the world for nothing or not - and will keep them secret until they can. Without offering the protection that IP laws do, so many ideas and creations would never have reached the public at all, which is even worse than having them out there, but "fenced off" for a limited period of time.
Wrong. The creator exchanged the creation with the public in return for a time limited control over that creation. That is why we need IP laws, as in incentive for people to release their ideas and creations so that the greater society can share in the benefits of them. If you copy their creation without their permission, then they no longer have the control over who gets to use their creation. The society has not managed to protect their control over their creation, and so the deal has not been kept. Their creation is out, and they have not been given what they were promised for it. This can take away their desire to trust the society with their creations in the future, which takes their future creations away from the rest of the society. With all this taking going on, and the creator not being given what was promised how is this not stealing again?
No, because you are forgetting about the initial transaction - the exchange of the idea or creation, into the public, so that the greater society can share the benefits from it, in return for allowing a time limited control over it. If the greater society does not protect the creators right to control their creation, as it promised it would for that period of time, in return for being shared the creation with, then it has not kept its end of the bargain, it has not gave the creator what was promised, it has not paid the price.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't know why, but they do"
Offline readers. Plus, a lot of people just like to be shown stuff while they are offline (eg, not yet fully woken up, having a quick catch up on news while eating breakfast). Following links to the web has more of an essence of interaction.
The appearance of the post you just made is more important than anything you said in it.
"No one needs html-mail because anyone can send a url in their text email"
...that you can think of.
"If the case were clearer, maybe the EFF would take it up"
Huh? They're not saying it'll process the closed word format, not the open html format, just that it'll use the word engine to render html, which puts it on par with any other reader than can display html. The 'greater effect' it can have is that people don't use newer standards/features in emails because outlook won't understand them, NOT that people won't use other readers because only outlook can understand them, because that will be less true than if they used IE as the rendering engine with its additional nonstandardised features.
Erm, if you're asked to do something, and you don't do it, you haven't done your job. Not doing your job doesn't work out very well. Try getting a job and not doing it, you'll see what I mean.
"When you open a postal mail and look at the flyer, it does not report to an anonymous sender that you've read it"
Surely that's an implementation issue. The "done thing(tm)" now is to only show inline images, and only show external images pending user request, if your mail client doesn't do that, change your mail client, or quit complaining, it's not like you have no choice in the matter.
"The poorly framed pictures on a postcard do not overflow a buffer in your brain"
Surely that's a useage issue. Technology should not be restricted to allow only what those who don't know it can do with it. If someone screws up an image size, that's their fault, not the technologies. You could always implement a default maximum image size in the viewer, which shows full size pending user request.
"In short, yes, If I were designing email today, I would allow attachments but require messages be entirely text"
Thank god other people are designing the stuff then, not you, otherwise we'd have all sorts of best-case restrictions on technology to reduce the chance of being annoyed by a worse case.
But that majority of non-spam emails (ie, those you actually want to keep) aren't gonna have all these graphics are they? Also, this problems so easy to mitigate. I'm writing an email system that stores attachments indexed by their checksum. If there are 10,000 emails (in one box, multiple boxes, it makes no difference with this system) all different, but contain a common graphic for example, a company logo or whatever, that graphic is only stored once (compressed where it's useful to be). Emails are reconstructed if collected by POP3 for backward compatibility. I came up with that, just while writing the system as it seemed like the only sensible way to do it, and I'm not exactly anything special. If your system doesn't do something like this, suggest it to its creators, or implement it yourself, and share the patch. There's plenty of free/open mime parsing libraries out there, the rest is simple (I store larger files on the FS named by its checksum code, split into multiple directories based on the first characters of the code, for quicker lookup than a single dir with thousands of files in, and small files in a database)
Yeah, cuz everyone's like you, and nothing exists outside the tiny world you can imagine. Yes, spam is the most annoying and morally corrupt form of marketing, but if that's really the only use you can imagine, I'd start asking questions about why you can't think of anything else, what effect that's likely to have on you and the decisions you make, and the limitations on your personality it's likely to have.
you really cannot think of any other reason for anything other than plain text technology in emails other than cold spamming? Wow... I have to say, I'd rather be a cunt than an idiot.
Absolutely. No shops should be allowed to display signs advertising what they're selling. Billboards should be outlawed. TV adverts should be banned, and only people who can afford increased subscription fees should be allowed to watch shows. People should only be aware of the existence of something if they have gone looking for it (ya know, without knowing it exists).
Wow, how melodramatic. You do realise that if people didn't respond to marketing, there wouldn't be a market for marketers, right? Blame the demand, not the supply.
Well a record label equivalent would be to get people to give you their land by convincing them that you'll do a better job of managing it than they will, making it better for them to live in, in return for agreeing to only live in a tiny section of it.
"what's the IP equivalent of obtaining land by conquest?"
Forcing someone to give you information/ideas/etc through fear of violence and death.
"They gave most of those rights away when they shared their creation with the world"
No, they GAIN those rights when the share their creations with the world. It's an exchange, "give us your ideas, and we'll give you rights over them for a period of time".
"for the sole purpose of benefiting the originator of some information"
Are you really so narrow minded that you cannot think of any other benefits than the immediately obvious? Perhaps you should think instead of just saying what you see.
The act of buying it gives you rights, including the right to give it away (but giving it away must be full, and does not allow for keeping a copy). Lending to someone is effectively giving it away, and after a period of time, they give it back, so is covered by purchaser rights. Above a certain level however, I would consider taking the piss, even if law allows it.
"what is it that inherently gives a person the right to control an idea?" ... "I like to give money to people who produce things that I enjoy under the informal notion that if I do, that person will continue to make things that I like"
You've kind of answered your own question there, although I guess without realising. People are given the rights to control their creations to GET them to create and to release their creations. It's a trade that works, if it didn't, you wouldn't pay for something under the belief that it'll make any difference to whether they keep creating or not.
That, however, doesn't mean the system isn't being abused, one only has to look at the patents that've been granted (such as a GUI with "windows that can overlap") to know that it is. A balance has to be found that will maximise progression.
"For example, if you somehow conned them into signing the rights to you for free"
But this is what happens if illegal copying is allowed to happen. People have released their ideas/creations so that society can share in the benefits of them, in exchange for the promise that they're to be given control over who they share it with for a limited amount of time. That's the deal. If piracy occures, then the society has not stuck to its end of the deal, it's taken the creation under false pretenses. This is as much stealing as walking into a shop, saying "I'd like to buy x, please", then once given it, walking out without paying.
"So you believe culture and progress only occurs when people are being paid for their ideas?"
No of cause not, which is why drug companies charge the bare minimum to break even, as do software houses, R&D labs. It's why all patents and arts end up in the public domain as soon as costs have been recovered by their creators, because all those people to create and invent, aren't doing it for the money.
No of cause it doesn't only occur when people are being paid, but jesus, being paid makes one HELL of a difference.
Sure, get rid of laws granting protection of IP, and get rid of everything that'll be created BECAUSE this protection exists. Lets go back to the days when secrets were taken to the grave because people could recreate your work cheaper without your development costs, and so there was no incentive to share them. That's forward thinking.
"On the same note, all recorded music should be free!"
This is not your decision to make! People should be free to do whatever they want with their creations, whether that's to share them with others for free (as I have done with mine) or to share it only with those who purchase it. If you disagree with people who create music for money, then the only justifiable action you can take is to have nothing to do with them. Taking their music and refusing to pay is nothing short of ignorance and fascism, it's saying "my ideas on what you should do with your music are right, your ideas are wrong, I disagree with your right to decide, and think you should be forced into doing things my way", which through ALL arguments about concerts, labels, business models, CANNOT be justified!
Artists sign over their rights to record labels and more often that not, get screwed. I would encourage anything that stops this happening (educating the dangers of signing away rights, developing viable alternatives) and returns the power to the creators themselves. But at the end of the day, it is the artists that sign away their rights (in return for dreams of money/fame/glory/etc), and they have the right to do that. You may disagree with them having this freedom to be exploited, think they should be protected by the state, but it doesn't change the fact that it is their decision to make.
I don't really have a huge moral issue with pirating music that you can't afford; I don't think music should only be for the rich; I don't think people should be deprived of it because they are poor. I do have an issue with pirating music because you don't like who would be getting the money if you were to pay for it, because you don't like the artists decision to sign over rights to a greedy label. Just because one party is screwing another, does not make it okay to join in. It's that whole "two wrongs" issue.
I spent a few years writing music, have never once considered charging money for listening to it, it goes against every reason I created the music I did.
"Software, given freely, can enhance other software for the benefit of everyone. Music, given freely, can not do this"
Music cannot enhance other software? No probably not really... can it inspire others with their music though? Yes, it can, and it has done, and the sharing of my music source files has helped other people to understand how to create certain sounds, other ways of structuring sound and music, knowledge they can use when creating music themselves.
"PLEASE consider switching to selling your music and giving your software away for free"
Please consider that my priorities and passions for music and software may actually lie other way round to yours. I created music because it was something I had to do. I teamed up with other artists who share web development backgrounds to create a website for other musicians share music and ideas, that a community could build upon, because it was something I believed in.
I code for businesses who need software to perform tasks. I wouldn't be doing it unless they needed it (I would be coding still, I enjoy it, but direction would be different), and couldn't afford the time to do it unless they paid. There's no point me sharing the entire project, it's so built around the actual businesses using it that it's not highly portable, there's zero documentation, and I don't have the time to explain enough for other people to make sense of it. I'm not a team programmer, I'm a "get in, do the job, get out, move to next" hacker. The codebase has evolved to do things it was never meant to do, which means a high level of ugly hacks etc, that I wouldn't recommend basing any new project on, and would ditch them as soon as I have the time or it becomes necessary to do so.
As much as open source is a good idea, open sourcing everything would drastically decrease the signal to noise ratio, and my code, while very functional and "does its job", would add more to noise than to signal. I'm always happy to share my knowledge, in the best way possible, and in my good judgement, this involves answering questions, providing code snipplets as examples, sharing functionality and implementation ideas, rather than opening up the very messy codebase.
Not everything works the way you'd think it does, and some 'constants' turn out to actually be 'variables', which when changed, can make huge differences to the right/best actions to take.
"Copyright laws remove chunks of ideas from the public domain where they are free to be exchanged and modified, and fence them off for individual exploitation"
In an ideal world, of cause you're right. But in the world we actually live in, people DO want to protect their ideas and creations - whether you think they should just share them with the world for nothing or not - and will keep them secret until they can. Without offering the protection that IP laws do, so many ideas and creations would never have reached the public at all, which is even worse than having them out there, but "fenced off" for a limited period of time.
Wrong. The creator exchanged the creation with the public in return for a time limited control over that creation. That is why we need IP laws, as in incentive for people to release their ideas and creations so that the greater society can share in the benefits of them. If you copy their creation without their permission, then they no longer have the control over who gets to use their creation. The society has not managed to protect their control over their creation, and so the deal has not been kept. Their creation is out, and they have not been given what they were promised for it. This can take away their desire to trust the society with their creations in the future, which takes their future creations away from the rest of the society. With all this taking going on, and the creator not being given what was promised how is this not stealing again?
Wow, and I thought I was uncultured
No, because you are forgetting about the initial transaction - the exchange of the idea or creation, into the public, so that the greater society can share the benefits from it, in return for allowing a time limited control over it. If the greater society does not protect the creators right to control their creation, as it promised it would for that period of time, in return for being shared the creation with, then it has not kept its end of the bargain, it has not gave the creator what was promised, it has not paid the price.