> The fines per song really should be calculated based on production cost, plus promotion expenses
You forgot to divide by the total projected sales. So it's lucky that the media industry has done that for you: those costs are factored into the price on the legal market, which are less than or equal to $1 per song.
> $25k is not an enormous life ruining debt. Yes, it is not trivial, but it is surmountable.
Judging from quite a few posts from experience here, even personal bankruptcy is neither life ruining nor insurmountable. Especially for the two defendents in these cases. One is a young unmarried man, and the second doesn't seem to have so much money that going bankrupt would be a riches-to-rags trauma.
BTW, Jammie Thomas filed a motion to reduce the damages to $18K, so if RIAA had offered that instead of $25K I think the judge might even have forced Thomas to settle, to flush this cr*p out of the court system (if that is at all possible, IANAL).
Ah, thanks for this interesting example. Of both this side of Canadian law (of which I was unfamiliar), and of how sometimes these laws criminalize people who are of no practical danger to society (although the guy was a jerk for writing it on a computer belonging to his work).
I'm a firm believer that -actions- are what matter. If we go... sorry, CONTINUE to go around making up laws based entirely on the -possibility- that something --might-- be more likely, then eventually everything will be illegal.
And I'm a firm believer that public policy should ideally be based on objective risk analysis, i.e., on the real probabilities that X will happen. Unfortunately, government really, really, doesn't work like that.
And so, e.g., we get to be "entertained" by security theater.
This "aww poor them, they were ADDICTED, so they HAD to beat their grandma to death" is a load of crap.
True, but totally unconnected to what I meant to say. What I meant was, in the context of your analogy, that a possible argument against drugs is "if we legalize them, Grandma will have a slightly higher probability of being beaten to death", not that we shouldn't punish addicts for their crimes.
One might be able to make a stronger case against drug use. If the drug is strongly addictive and at the same time destroys one's ability to legally earn a living, it makes it likely for the user will do other criminal acts to obtain the drugs. OTOH, if they were legal, they'd probably be cheap.
A second argument against drugs is that the person will end up wasting precious health care resources after they ruin their health with drug use. Many people who I know who are for legalizing drug use make this a condition --- anyone who does drugs voluntarily gives up society's obligation to give him health care. Even with that, one could make the argument that not treating these people leads to a devaluation of human life.
The weird thing is that in the case of (not totally realistic) simulated child porn, I have the gut feeling that consuming it (for the purposes of masturbation) might even lessen the probability of someone actually attacking a real child. But then, I'm just shooting off my mouth, here. I'm no expert in pathological psychology. And for such a "hot" topic, I'm not sure that anyone who claims to be an expert is actually going to provide me with anything close to "objective truth".
When I think about this issue, I come to the conclusion that the real reason for simulated depictions of sexual child abuse being criminal is something which no judge would ever admit to: society wants to criminalize people who are sexually attracted to children, even if they have never committed any such crime, and because of their psychological makeup are even unlikely to ever commit such a crime in the future, because society is afraid of such people.
All this "slippery slope" BS is just beating around the bush. My guess is that simulated child pornography will continue to be illegal even in the far future when it will be trivial to produce, so trivial that only the very, very stupid would consider producing it using real children (assuming, of course, that the only goal involved is the production of the pornography; I'm not talking about the case where a pedophile wants to film his illegal acts).
BTW, your argument that he's a horrible poster child seems weak. His first offense was for actual child pornography, rather than simulated child pornography. If anything, he seems to be slowly climbing up that slippery slope.
> What's wrong with sexual titillation from a drawn image of imaginary characters?
You're asking the wrong question, IMO. You should have asked:
"Why is it any worse than pure textual depictions of fictional children having sex?" (which AFAIK is not considered child pornography in most jurisdictions)
Would ASCII art depictions of child-like figures having sex, which are simultaneously textual erotic fiction about children having sex, be considered child pornography?
You could, of course, go in a different tangent and come up with the question:
"Why is a simulated depiction of the sexual abuse of children any worse than simulated depictions of other heinous crimes?" (AFAIK there are no other crimes for which possessing a depiction of them is also a crime. No, wait! Under the DMCA, a depiction of copyright protection circumvention which is sufficiently detailed to aid in circumvention itself could be criminal. Oops, no. Even there, mere possession is not criminal, distribution might be.)
IMO, it will eventually stabilize at a the point where competition from other types of entertainment is making the game maker lose money. I hope it won't take them too long to figure this out (as opposed to approaching Congress to get some kind of kick-backs because of "revenues lost to piracy").
If technological progress will make it less capital intensive to produce professional games, one can hope that there will be rogue game production companies who produce games with less onerous DRM.
> the oort cloud has more than enough that the cost to weight of getting the minuscule amount we have here on earth just isn't worth the energy
WP gives two references to an estimate that the total mass of the Oort Cloud is only 5 times that of the Earth. The previous estimates were on the order of 400 times the mass of the Earth. And even if you add the Hills Cloud, you're only talking 10**4 times the mass of the Earth (being very, very generous).
If you consider the volumes of the clouds (at least 8 orders of magnitude greater than the volume of the Earth, and almost certainly several orders of magnitude greater), you can see that your argument isn't very convincing, unless the aliens have a super-efficient tech for finding small cold objects in the middle of outer space. Which, of course, they might have. But they also might have a super-efficient way to lift things out of gravity wells.
I would be more inclined to believe you, except for the fact that I've been seeing more and more anti-DRM comments popping up on non-geek Internet sites. For example, I was recently really happy to see that the majority of people who commented on a news anouncement about Disney's latest DRM dream, KeyChest, knew what DRM was and those who talked about DRM were unanimously skeptical about it.
How often do 99% of consumers realise they're watching encrypted DVD? Consumers won't care if it's not intrusive.....
Yeah, they didn't care when the only devices they had which played video were televisions which were connected with DVD players. Nowadays, every other cell phone/music player can play video. You can safely bet that the unstoppable progression of technology will soon make it quite obvious to the consumer that they are being asked to pay over and over again for playing the same content on ever increasing numbers of portable devices. And they won't like it.
That is what lead us to non-DRM music; it will also eventually happen to video.
It would be rather morbid, in my opinion, for detectives in murder mysteries to use the frequency probability interpretation as opposed to the Bayesian interpretation.
You might have already thought of this, but do you ever use passwords which start or end in whitespace? Or perhaps include non-printing Unicode characters?
OTOH, I recommend using vendors who are less clueless, rather than more. Thanks for sharing your experience.
So the guy I replied to isn't a chemical-knowledge-pinhead, he's a can't-remember-one-digit-number-pinhead? Thanks, that really cleared things up for me!
> And if you looked up "Hominy" you'd see that it's true.
Interesting. Yes, you are correct that treating corn with alkali generates Vitamin B3. However, it's true for reasons unconnected with the reaction of protein with the alkali. From LAGUNA J, CARPENTER KJ (September 1951). "Raw versus processed corn in niacin-deficient diets". J. Nutr. 45 (1): 21–8. PMID 14880960. http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=14880960.:
It seems more likely that the present results can be explained by the findings of Kodicek (Chanduri and Kodicek, '50; Kodicek, '51), reported during the course of these experiments. He demonstrated the presence in corn and other cereals of a "precursor" of niacinamide which is normally unavailable to the rat. It is liberated by alkaline but not acid hydrolysis, as shown by biological assay with rats.
I am, of course, assuming the poster I replied to was using the word "protein" to mean "generic polypeptide" and was not talking about a particular protein after post-translational modification (since such modification could theoretically produce the kind of niacin precursor which Kodicek talks about).
> I'm not actually a lawyer, I'm just THAT pedantic.
I am a mathematician, I get paid to be pedantic.:-)
> Is this one usable, unlike the other ones for linux?
Ah, if I answer "Yes", you want me to imply the (unspecified) "other ones" aren't usable? And if I answer "No", what does that mean? Your question appears to be obvious flamebait, if you didn't mean it to be, you should work harder in the future to enable real discourse. A good start would be to actually list the names of the programs in question and for each one explain why you didn't think they were usable.
> That's one thing I never liked about linux, the tools are all either extremely dumbed down and > featureless or incredibly hard to start using. I like power, but I like being able to jump right in.
Is this your standard "I am fishing for mod points" commentary on Linux? You didn't find even one tool which was both powerful and easy enough to use that you could just "jump in"? People here are posting that their grandmothers practically don't notice when they switch them over to Firefox from IE. I guess that means that you don't believe it's "a tool", or you don't think it is "powerful"?
A pity, since I would have classified "video editing" as really one niche where Linux, up until recently, was quite deficient compared to (what I've heard about) proprietary solutions on Windows and OS X. It happened by chance that LiVES reached 1.0 exactly when I needed a video editor to edit a short home video clip (less than 10 minutes long) and it was exactly what I needed (in terms of functionality).
> Additionally, is this 1.0 as good as the competition's 1.0?
No, ours goes to 1.1!
This question is even more idiotic. First of all, what program or programs are "the competition's"? Secondly, version numbers are arbitrary in that each vendor/OSS project defines totally different criteria as to what reaching the v. 1.0 goal means. One project might define it as "we have a rock-stable program which is useful for editing 98% of all home video" and another project might define it as "we feel our program is useful for simple editing tasks for production cinema".
> Now, it will just result in backlash as people will refuse to buy anything from Dick now.
I think the influence of this on buying decisions on most of PKD's works will be minimal.
> The estate has no real legal ground to stand on, and has now shot itself in the foot.
Having "no real legal ground to stand on" is often a viable route to "getting some cash to enable the other side to avoid exorbitant legal costs". Unfortunately.
At least US Robotics isn't attacking all business models in media industries. Google's attitude of a.) f*** the publishers and b.) f*** the authors is a curious one for an advertising company. They have no good will or benefit of the doubt in a case like this one.
Can you elaborate a bit as to why you think Google doesn't care about the publishers and authors? (Wow, now I sound like a bot. OTOH, your post sounds like a flame).
I never understood why people play soccer games anyways. Why people watch soccer is already mysterious enough to me, but remotely understandable; but why the hell would you play a game which imitates something you could easily do with a bunch of friends (or even strangers) somewhere outside, for cheap? I'm not a big soccer player, but I sure know that regardless of how bad I am, I'm gonna have more fun playing *actual* soccer than some strange video game copy of it.
Wow, where do you live? Terrific weather year-round, eh? And the days are always long enough that after you get home from work there's still plenty of daylight left for your soccer game! And all those strangers you pick up for your soccer games are really friendly and never care when you dork out and let the other team win.
Even forgetting the fact that it sometimes isn't (for most people) more fun to play soccer in the real than to play a computer game, I'd just guess that the answer to your question is "A lot of people are quite different than you, and by the time you become an adult this shouldn't surprise you in the least".
Slashdot Mirror
I know I shouldn't feed you, but really:
> The fines per song really should be calculated based on production cost, plus promotion expenses
You forgot to divide by the total projected sales. So it's lucky that the media industry has done that for you: those costs are factored into the price on the legal market, which are less than or equal to $1 per song.
> $25k is not an enormous life ruining debt. Yes, it is not trivial, but it is surmountable.
Judging from quite a few posts from experience here, even personal bankruptcy is neither life ruining nor insurmountable. Especially for the two defendents in these cases. One is a young unmarried man, and the second doesn't seem to have so much money that going bankrupt would be a riches-to-rags trauma.
BTW, Jammie Thomas filed a motion to reduce the damages to $18K, so if RIAA had offered that instead of $25K I think the judge might even have forced Thomas to settle, to flush this cr*p out of the court system (if that is at all possible, IANAL).
Ah, thanks for this interesting example. Of both this side of Canadian law (of which I was unfamiliar), and of how sometimes these laws criminalize people who are of no practical danger to society (although the guy was a jerk for writing it on a computer belonging to his work).
I'm a firm believer that -actions- are what matter. If we go... sorry, CONTINUE to go around making up laws based entirely on the -possibility- that something --might-- be more likely, then eventually everything will be illegal.
And I'm a firm believer that public policy should ideally be based on objective risk analysis, i.e., on the real probabilities that X will happen. Unfortunately, government really, really, doesn't work like that.
And so, e.g., we get to be "entertained" by security theater.
This "aww poor them, they were ADDICTED, so they HAD to beat their grandma to death" is a load of crap.
True, but totally unconnected to what I meant to say. What I meant was, in the context of your analogy, that a possible argument against drugs is "if we legalize them, Grandma will have a slightly higher probability of being beaten to death", not that we shouldn't punish addicts for their crimes.
One might be able to make a stronger case against drug use. If the drug is strongly addictive and at the same time destroys one's ability to legally earn a living, it makes it likely for the user will do other criminal acts to obtain the drugs. OTOH, if they were legal, they'd probably be cheap.
A second argument against drugs is that the person will end up wasting precious health care resources after they ruin their health with drug use. Many people who I know who are for legalizing drug use make this a condition --- anyone who does drugs voluntarily gives up society's obligation to give him health care. Even with that, one could make the argument that not treating these people leads to a devaluation of human life.
The weird thing is that in the case of (not totally realistic) simulated child porn, I have the gut feeling that consuming it (for the purposes of masturbation) might even lessen the probability of someone actually attacking a real child. But then, I'm just shooting off my mouth, here. I'm no expert in pathological psychology. And for such a "hot" topic, I'm not sure that anyone who claims to be an expert is actually going to provide me with anything close to "objective truth".
It's even worse. Using steganography, any content whatsoever which you save might contain child porn. Including text (if it's long enough).
When I think about this issue, I come to the conclusion that the real reason for simulated depictions of sexual child abuse being criminal is something which no judge would ever admit to: society wants to criminalize people who are sexually attracted to children, even if they have never committed any such crime, and because of their psychological makeup are even unlikely to ever commit such a crime in the future, because society is afraid of such people.
All this "slippery slope" BS is just beating around the bush. My guess is that simulated child pornography will continue to be illegal even in the far future when it will be trivial to produce, so trivial that only the very, very stupid would consider producing it using real children (assuming, of course, that the only goal involved is the production of the pornography; I'm not talking about the case where a pedophile wants to film his illegal acts).
BTW, your argument that he's a horrible poster child seems weak. His first offense was for actual child pornography, rather than simulated child pornography. If anything, he seems to be slowly climbing up that slippery slope.
> What's wrong with sexual titillation from a drawn image of imaginary characters?
You're asking the wrong question, IMO. You should have asked:
"Why is it any worse than pure textual depictions of fictional children having sex?" (which AFAIK is not considered child pornography in most jurisdictions)
Would ASCII art depictions of child-like figures having sex, which are simultaneously textual erotic fiction about children having sex, be considered child pornography?
You could, of course, go in a different tangent and come up with the question:
"Why is a simulated depiction of the sexual abuse of children any worse than simulated depictions of other heinous crimes?" (AFAIK there are no other crimes for which possessing a depiction of them is also a crime. No, wait! Under the DMCA, a depiction of copyright protection circumvention which is sufficiently detailed to aid in circumvention itself could be criminal. Oops, no. Even there, mere possession is not criminal, distribution might be.)
> and It's only going to get worse.
IMO, it will eventually stabilize at a the point where competition from other types of entertainment is making the game maker lose money. I hope it won't take them too long to figure this out (as opposed to approaching Congress to get some kind of kick-backs because of "revenues lost to piracy").
If technological progress will make it less capital intensive to produce professional games, one can hope that there will be rogue game production companies who produce games with less onerous DRM.
> the oort cloud has more than enough that the cost to weight of getting the minuscule amount we have here on earth just isn't worth the energy
WP gives two references to an estimate that the total mass of the Oort Cloud is only 5 times that of the Earth. The previous estimates were on the order of 400 times the mass of the Earth. And even if you add the Hills Cloud, you're only talking 10**4 times the mass of the Earth (being very, very generous).
If you consider the volumes of the clouds (at least 8 orders of magnitude greater than the volume of the Earth, and almost certainly several orders of magnitude greater), you can see that your argument isn't very convincing, unless the aliens have a super-efficient tech for finding small cold objects in the middle of outer space. Which, of course, they might have. But they also might have a super-efficient way to lift things out of gravity wells.
I would be more inclined to believe you, except for the fact that I've been seeing more and more anti-DRM comments popping up on non-geek Internet sites. For example, I was recently really happy to see that the majority of people who commented on a news anouncement about Disney's latest DRM dream, KeyChest, knew what DRM was and those who talked about DRM were unanimously skeptical about it.
How often do 99% of consumers realise they're watching encrypted DVD? Consumers won't care if it's not intrusive. ....
Yeah, they didn't care when the only devices they had which played video were televisions which were connected with DVD players. Nowadays, every other cell phone/music player can play video. You can safely bet that the unstoppable progression of technology will soon make it quite obvious to the consumer that they are being asked to pay over and over again for playing the same content on ever increasing numbers of portable devices. And they won't like it.
That is what lead us to non-DRM music; it will also eventually happen to video.
I haven't looked at the paper yet, but this isn't all that surprising. From WP: Bayesian probability is the name given to several related interpretations of probability, which have in common the notion of probability as something like a partial belief, rather than a frequency.
It would be rather morbid, in my opinion, for detectives in murder mysteries to use the frequency probability interpretation as opposed to the Bayesian interpretation.
You might have already thought of this, but do you ever use passwords which start or end in whitespace? Or perhaps include non-printing Unicode characters?
OTOH, I recommend using vendors who are less clueless, rather than more. Thanks for sharing your experience.
> I am the poster you responded to.
Ooooops. We pedantic mathematicians are not well-known for our social skills, sorry.
I'm sorry if I flamed you a bit badly, there. I guess I was having a hard day....
Anyway, thanks for the pointer to interesting info. "Nixtamalization" has such a nice woody sound!
> It's not B12, it's B3 as stated by others.
So the guy I replied to isn't a chemical-knowledge-pinhead, he's a can't-remember-one-digit-number-pinhead? Thanks, that really cleared things up for me!
> And if you looked up "Hominy" you'd see that it's true.
Interesting. Yes, you are correct that treating corn with alkali generates Vitamin B3. However, it's true for reasons unconnected with the reaction of protein with the alkali. From LAGUNA J, CARPENTER KJ (September 1951). "Raw versus processed corn in niacin-deficient diets". J. Nutr. 45 (1): 21–8. PMID 14880960. http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=14880960. :
It seems more likely that the present results can be explained by the findings of Kodicek (Chanduri and Kodicek, '50; Kodicek, '51), reported during the course of these experiments. He demonstrated the presence in corn and other cereals of a "precursor" of niacinamide which is normally unavailable to the rat. It is liberated by alkaline but not acid hydrolysis, as shown by biological assay with rats.
I am, of course, assuming the poster I replied to was using the word "protein" to mean "generic polypeptide" and was not talking about a particular protein after post-translational modification (since such modification could theoretically produce the kind of niacin precursor which Kodicek talks about).
> I'm not actually a lawyer, I'm just THAT pedantic.
I am a mathematician, I get paid to be pedantic. :-)
> lime is what's mostly used to break up the proteins on the kernel to produce vitamin B12.
Only bacteria have the biochemical apparatus to produce B12. I call bullshit.
It's not even anything which would be produced by the reaction of a base with protein. You'd just get amino acids...
Epic funny...
You're up there in the running with http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=981505&cid=25217393 and http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=981353&cid=25214739 (warning: all comments need to be read in the context of the corresponding OP's and their particular threads.)
Of course there's also http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1130061&cid=26877133 but he utilized vulgarity to enhance his humor.
> Is this one usable, unlike the other ones for linux?
Ah, if I answer "Yes", you want me to imply the (unspecified) "other ones" aren't usable? And if I answer "No", what does that mean? Your question appears to be obvious flamebait, if you didn't mean it to be, you should work harder in the future to enable real discourse. A good start would be to actually list the names of the programs in question and for each one explain why you didn't think they were usable.
> That's one thing I never liked about linux, the tools are all either extremely dumbed down and
> featureless or incredibly hard to start using. I like power, but I like being able to jump right in.
Is this your standard "I am fishing for mod points" commentary on Linux? You didn't find even one tool which was both powerful and easy enough to use that you could just "jump in"? People here are posting that their grandmothers practically don't notice when they switch them over to Firefox from IE. I guess that means that you don't believe it's "a tool", or you don't think it is "powerful"?
A pity, since I would have classified "video editing" as really one niche where Linux, up until recently, was quite deficient compared to (what I've heard about) proprietary solutions on Windows and OS X. It happened by chance that LiVES reached 1.0 exactly when I needed a video editor to edit a short home video clip (less than 10 minutes long) and it was exactly what I needed (in terms of functionality).
> Additionally, is this 1.0 as good as the competition's 1.0?
No, ours goes to 1.1!
This question is even more idiotic. First of all, what program or programs are "the competition's"? Secondly, version numbers are arbitrary in that each vendor/OSS project defines totally different criteria as to what reaching the v. 1.0 goal means. One project might define it as "we have a rock-stable program which is useful for editing 98% of all home video" and another project might define it as "we feel our program is useful for simple editing tasks for production cinema".
> will be laughed out of court.
Or be settled out of court for a relatively small sum of money...
> OTOH, courtroom rulings often defy belief.
There, fixed that for you.
> So anything could happen.
Yup. Which is why most people (and even corporations) prefer to pay extorti.., er, settlement money up front, rather than take a chance on bankruptcy.
> Now, it will just result in backlash as people will refuse to buy anything from Dick now.
I think the influence of this on buying decisions on most of PKD's works will be minimal.
> The estate has no real legal ground to stand on, and has now shot itself in the foot.
Having "no real legal ground to stand on" is often a viable route to "getting some cash to enable the other side to avoid exorbitant legal costs". Unfortunately.
At least US Robotics isn't attacking all business models in media industries. Google's attitude of a.) f*** the publishers and b.) f*** the authors is a curious one for an advertising company. They have no good will or benefit of the doubt in a case like this one.
But they do have the benefit of having as their Senior Copyright Counsel one of the leading experts on US copyright law. And he's not exactly an "info wants to be free" flag waver.
Can you elaborate a bit as to why you think Google doesn't care about the publishers and authors? (Wow, now I sound like a bot. OTOH, your post sounds like a flame).
I never understood why people play soccer games anyways. Why people watch soccer is already mysterious enough to me, but remotely understandable; but why the hell would you play a game which imitates something you could easily do with a bunch of friends (or even strangers) somewhere outside, for cheap? I'm not a big soccer player, but I sure know that regardless of how bad I am, I'm gonna have more fun playing *actual* soccer than some strange video game copy of it.
Wow, where do you live? Terrific weather year-round, eh? And the days are always long enough that after you get home from work there's still plenty of daylight left for your soccer game! And all those strangers you pick up for your soccer games are really friendly and never care when you dork out and let the other team win.
Even forgetting the fact that it sometimes isn't (for most people) more fun to play soccer in the real than to play a computer game, I'd just guess that the answer to your question is "A lot of people are quite different than you, and by the time you become an adult this shouldn't surprise you in the least".