Since MS, it seems, will be writing the Pros and Cons for their competitors, I'm sure some marketing research company is just salivating thinking about the money MS will pay them to find texts which pass MS's legal department's vetting, yet cause the vast majority of users to choose IE.
> You know that someone would sue them over support or losses due to FF or Chrome.
Right. Just like all those famous lawsuits over the (how many?) disastrous worm botnets caused by vulnerablities in the underlying OS or their default browser. I'm sure MS is quaking in its boots. Yes, I think I feel the aftershocks, now!
It seems that there are alternatives, but not that many (one or two). See TenDRA, for example. There are many more for C, and less for more exotic languages like Ada. (Found via Wikipedia.)
IIRC, it is also possible to preprocess C++ and output C (but perhaps those preprocessors don't support the modern C++ standard, they were developed ages ago, before gcc could compile C++).
Since there is no "default" C/C++ compiler on Linux (or at least, in my experience, almost no one accesses the compiler via the vanilla "cc"/"c++" names) there would be little, if any, uproar if a distro would bundle an arbitrary number of competing compilers (all with their own executable names).
> "hey, let me help direct you to the correct information - which will save > you time and effort and allow you to make an informed decision".
Look, neither you nor I were there. Yes, it could have been nettdata who reacted to the lawyer's ignorance in a way that caused the problem described, but it could just as well have been that nettdata said exactly what you just said, and the lawyer replied with something like "Let me deal with the law stuff, I'm the expert in law here, there's no way that you could help me!."
I find it interesting that you, upon hearing nettdata's side of the story, instead of siding with him, which would be the natural thing to do (since like most people, he believes he was on the right side of the conflict), you sided with the lawyer. Seems to be based in a (possibly unconscious, even) character judgment of nettdata based on the language of his post --- now that I analyze this intellectually, I can understand your position.
If you read the post you replied to carefully, IMO it says that the lawyer wanted all those details before the project even had an initial design. Which is a silly request, and my impression is that the lawyer was very stubborn about this, even after nettdata explained why it was silly.
In other words, the lawyer wasn't being a team player. He was "worked around", and paid for it, dearly.
Even if they added that many users every day for a full year, it wouldn't be a particularly significant portion of Facebook users (based on usage info from Wikipedia).
> If you can't afford to pay $1 for a track, you're a poor, broke, worthless > sponge who sucks off of society
And I should go off somewhere and die, right? Get a grip, man. The real worth of people is unconnected with the amount of money they have. Or do you think that winning a lottery somehow makes a person less "worthless"? Do you believe that murdering a poor person is somehow less heinous than murdering a multimillionaire? I pity you if you actually do believe that.
Also, that dude could very well work 10x as hard as you, but live in China, for example. Or he might be a 10 year old child.
You're also being silly if you don't understand that what you think is worth $1 is not necessarily worth even $0.01 to someone else. But I don't think this is the problem with your argument, actually. I have the distinct impression that you are certain that the other person, who didn't think that the song was worth $1, copied it for free, and this makes you angry. This is not necessarily the case. Personally, I just don't buy, and look for my entertainment elsewhere.
> Go ahead and find a local band......
If you're stupid enough to do all that work when you expect to sell exactly 1 song (which is what your silly strawman argument suggests: "and tell them to fight over $1"), you deserve what you get. You totally ignore the fact that people are going out and competing with the record labels. This process is just starting, so don't bother to tell me that the competition "doesn't cut it", yet. Look at Magnatunes, Jamendo. (Yes, they do not compete with the labels using the labels' broken business model, which is actually based on things you've totally forgotten in your example: advertising, promotion and their control of these.)
> The argument that copyright law is messed up and that undeserving people are > making too much profit is a big, fat, load of fucking shit.
You mix two different issues here. Copyright law is "messed up" if it is a net detriment to society, and this has very, very little to do with "undeserving people making too much profit".
The "undeserving people" problem has more to do with the immense power that rich corporations have to control the media that Joe Sixpack is exposed to. In the case of the labels, this is about their practically absolute control of broadcast radio. I wouldn't be surprised if they also have bought (or otherwise negotiated) at least some control over the advertising on iTunes.
The "copyright law is messed up" problem is much more complicated, because it involves things which are not quantifiable, like the worth of the public domain, the ramifications of having draconian penalties which can only be enforced for a very small number of violations, and a lot of other things. It's clear that a lot of what's wrong with copyright law isn't particularly connected with the profits of the labels, because lowering the term of copyright even to 30 years and lowering statutory damages wouldn't change the labels profits significantly.
> Sony is legally required to follow it's shareholders wishes
And barring a shareholders' meeting actually deciding something to the contrary, IMO most courts would assume that those wishes are to earn as much money as possible, without doing anything illegal or morally repugnant. Meaning, morally repugnant to Joe Sixpack, not to your average Slashdotter. Or do you have some kind of precedent you could post as evidence to the contrary?
> Apparently the prospect of a quick buck is all it takes for a corporation to sell your data.
The irony is that Sony is legally required to do that if it seems that that would increase its profits. The only thing which would justifiably prevent it would be a reasonable fear of bad publicity causing a decrease of revenue, instead. Hmm, how many Slashdotters play Sony MMOs? And exactly how many fewer will play Sony's games because of this?
> Why did you think you have any reasonable claim to privacy in an MMO?
While I admit that not all speech is protected and some of your examples might have a bit of validity, your sense of proportions is way out of line.
> If you "sent some tells about sometimes wanting to kill your classmates or > co-workers" not only would I not expect you to retain your privacy and anonymity, > but I would expect Sony -- and anyone who read your tells -- to feel an obligation > to notify the law.
Sony, maybe. From Sony's point of view, the tradeoff is relatively simple: what is the risk that this user will actually murder someone, and what kind of monetary damage could it cause Sony if that happened and Sony didn't report anything to the police beforehand, versus the cost of constantly policing the chats of that online game. But if you think your average police station is interested in investigating what might be tens of thousands of such reports (remember, you wanted every single user who heard this to report it), versus patrolling the streets and other more usual police duties, you're just being stupid. (I could understand your supporting users snitching to Sony, however, especially if the ToS encouraged or required it.)
> Talk "about sex to someone who, as it turns out, is 8 years old"? You should spend > a night in jail just to cure you of your stupidity. Don't they teach you in school > specifically *not* to make any assumptions about the age and gender of someone you > "meet" online?
If this was in one of Disney's MMOs, well, OK, then jail is reasonable. If this was in a setting where the ToS explicitly forbids minors, then again, you're just over-the-top. It is unlikely in the extreme that any court would find you guilty of anything, unless you really have good cause to suspect that the person in question was a minor.
> Do not write anything in any online forum anyplace, even under a pseudonym, that > you would not be comfortable having viewed by your teacher/boss/wife/husband/neighbor.
Again, fearmongering. You are correct that there is a risk of everything you post being connected with you, even if you use Tor or whatever, but, depending on circumstances, this risk could be very, very small. Like with everything else, you have to balance the risk of the post being connected with you versus the benefit of posting what you want to say. Just like when you decide to get in your car and drive to work.
> You do not have any right to privacy online (somehow this slipped past > the Founding Fathers) and you are a fool if you expect any.
The legal system has a lot of inertia, and only just now starts to address this issue. So even if there is no recognized legal right to anonymity online right now, there very well could be one in another 20-50 years.
I'm not sure this is really a troll post. IMO it costs $$ to get certification from the FDA so that your software can be used for medical purposes. At least, for medical equipment and for diagnosis. And I don't think a lot of open-source projects shell out for this certification, especially since (it seems to me) they'd have to pay for every version they want certified.
I agree that once we've semi-reverse-engineered the gameplay paradigm from the KVM streams, all we will need to do is add AI's; but I think the hard problem is the reverse engineering itself.
This is cute, but just think about the problem of trying to preserve the gameplay of various MMO games, without the servers. I'm not thinking of a real preservation, but of how you might attempt to reconstruct the graphics and the movement and battle models from captured screen video + synchronized keyboard + mouse inputs.
To be more concrete, say we have as many players as we want playing WoW using a real time KVM-over-IP setup and we record the IP streams. How could we use the information to produce a single-user "game" which would give a cursory impression of what WoW was like, minus all the social interaction?
Now this is a real research-level problem, I think.
> I tried to say that there is no circular citation
Ah, I think you should have been more explicit for us slower-on-the-uptake and/or telepathically-challenged Slashdotters. Or us just being used to have random posters make mistakes. You are correct, the original post was off-topic, actually, for it not being a circular fact-laundering. (Sorry you can't get the karma back, if it mattered to you).
The DMCA makes it illegal to help someone else break the encryption. There's a big difference.
Simply put, the maker of the software you use to rip your DVDs is/was in violation of the DMCA; your use of this illegal software is perfectly legal because of court decisions defending space-shifting rights in the US.
Think this is stupid? That helping someone do something which is legal shouldn't be illegal? Don't look at me, I didn't invent that law!
Yes, I understood that all this is possible now (although I was thinking of open-licensed mapping info and I don't think we've gotten there yet). But it's not considered commonplace, at least with respect to Wikipedia snapshots. And don't forget it would just be a snapshot, those of us who use the edit histories to try to check dubious parts of articles would be out of luck.
We'll have to wait a bit before everyone takes it for granted that they mirror Wikipedia.
> Really, the Internet is just needed for updates, interaction with other humans > (or at least their avatars/slashdot personalities), shopping, and porn.
I agree with all of that, except that (1) you forgot "access to current media content" and (2) it might be possible that most users wouldn't need a constant influx of new porn, they'd have enough in their static cache.
If technology continues to progress at current exponential rates, eventually we will get to the point where most queries for factual information which doesn't change rapidly, like maps, routing, language and jargon definitions, encyclopedia articles, etc., will be able to be answered by a stored information cache which will be small compared to the technological capabilities which will then be current.
Barring industries which would be threatened managing to somehow block progress in this direction via legislation.
I see your point, and what you say could very well be true, but it all comes down to what their legal department defines as proper "due diligence" with respect to their contract terms.
They might very well think instead that there are so few proxy users that the extra ad views are insignificant compared with the legal exposure.
I admit that I don't understand your post at all. Especially if you meant it as a reply to mine. It just makes no sense whatsoever.
> And when the price for pirated music becomes too much
How is this connected with my post? My post claims that even if P2P as we know it now would stop dead in its tracks, the media companies would need draconian laws to prevent every one of their sales from being distributed to more than one person.
> As the free alternative dies
How could this possibly happen? Non-cartel music will be outlawed? It's not even reasonable to think that free illegal music would disappear, since the cartels use free distribution (e.g., via radio broadcasting) widely as marketing tools. You think that copying music from the radio will be so illegal that people won't do it? I think that long before we get to that point, something in society is going to break --- either the appetite for cartel music or society's swallowing the cartel's gaming of the legal system.
> it will open up the door for I-tunes and the other various online music stores to > raise prices as they see fit
The cartel can do this now, except for one thing. They always have competition, even if it's just from other cartel entertainment (free broadcast TV, cable TV, movies, computer games). And if they raise prices too high, then things like eating and paying the electric bill start to be competitors!
Slashdot Mirror
Since MS, it seems, will be writing the Pros and Cons for their competitors, I'm sure some marketing research company is just salivating thinking about the money MS will pay them to find texts which pass MS's legal department's vetting, yet cause the vast majority of users to choose IE.
> You know that someone would sue them over support or losses due to FF or Chrome.
Right. Just like all those famous lawsuits over the (how many?) disastrous worm botnets caused by vulnerablities in the underlying OS or their default browser. I'm sure MS is quaking in its boots. Yes, I think I feel the aftershocks, now!
Note to mods: Yes, that was sarcasm....
It seems that there are alternatives, but not that many (one or two). See TenDRA, for example. There are many more for C, and less for more exotic languages like Ada. (Found via Wikipedia.)
IIRC, it is also possible to preprocess C++ and output C (but perhaps those preprocessors don't support the modern C++ standard, they were developed ages ago, before gcc could compile C++).
Since there is no "default" C/C++ compiler on Linux (or at least, in my experience, almost no one accesses the compiler via the vanilla "cc"/"c++" names) there would be little, if any, uproar if a distro would bundle an arbitrary number of competing compilers (all with their own executable names).
Berkeley, not Kant.
> "hey, let me help direct you to the correct information - which will save
> you time and effort and allow you to make an informed decision".
Look, neither you nor I were there. Yes, it could have been nettdata who reacted to the lawyer's ignorance in a way that caused the problem described, but it could just as well have been that nettdata said exactly what you just said, and the lawyer replied with something like "Let me deal with the law stuff, I'm the expert in law here, there's no way that you could help me!."
I find it interesting that you, upon hearing nettdata's side of the story, instead of siding with him, which would be the natural thing to do (since like most people, he believes he was on the right side of the conflict), you sided with the lawyer. Seems to be based in a (possibly unconscious, even) character judgment of nettdata based on the language of his post --- now that I analyze this intellectually, I can understand your position.
If you read the post you replied to carefully, IMO it says that the lawyer wanted all those details before the project even had an initial design. Which is a silly request, and my impression is that the lawyer was very stubborn about this, even after nettdata explained why it was silly.
In other words, the lawyer wasn't being a team player. He was "worked around", and paid for it, dearly.
10000 / 175x10^6 = 1/2 of 1% of 1%
Even if they added that many users every day for a full year, it wouldn't be a particularly significant portion of Facebook users (based on usage info from Wikipedia).
> If you can't afford to pay $1 for a track, you're a poor, broke, worthless
> sponge who sucks off of society
And I should go off somewhere and die, right? Get a grip, man. The real worth of people is unconnected with the amount of money they have. Or do you think that winning a lottery somehow makes a person less "worthless"? Do you believe that murdering a poor person is somehow less heinous than murdering a multimillionaire? I pity you if you actually do believe that.
Also, that dude could very well work 10x as hard as you, but live in China, for example. Or he might be a 10 year old child.
You're also being silly if you don't understand that what you think is worth $1 is not necessarily worth even $0.01 to someone else. But I don't think this is the problem with your argument, actually. I have the distinct impression that you are certain that the other person, who didn't think that the song was worth $1, copied it for free, and this makes you angry. This is not necessarily the case. Personally, I just don't buy, and look for my entertainment elsewhere.
> Go ahead and find a local band. .....
If you're stupid enough to do all that work when you expect to sell exactly 1 song (which is what your silly strawman argument suggests: "and tell them to fight over $1"), you deserve what you get. You totally ignore the fact that people are going out and competing with the record labels. This process is just starting, so don't bother to tell me that the competition "doesn't cut it", yet. Look at Magnatunes, Jamendo. (Yes, they do not compete with the labels using the labels' broken business model, which is actually based on things you've totally forgotten in your example: advertising, promotion and their control of these.)
> The argument that copyright law is messed up and that undeserving people are
> making too much profit is a big, fat, load of fucking shit.
You mix two different issues here. Copyright law is "messed up" if it is a net detriment to society, and this has very, very little to do with "undeserving people making too much profit".
The "undeserving people" problem has more to do with the immense power that rich corporations have to control the media that Joe Sixpack is exposed to. In the case of the labels, this is about their practically absolute control of broadcast radio. I wouldn't be surprised if they also have bought (or otherwise negotiated) at least some control over the advertising on iTunes.
The "copyright law is messed up" problem is much more complicated, because it involves things which are not quantifiable, like the worth of the public domain, the ramifications of having draconian penalties which can only be enforced for a very small number of violations, and a lot of other things. It's clear that a lot of what's wrong with copyright law isn't particularly connected with the profits of the labels, because lowering the term of copyright even to 30 years and lowering statutory damages wouldn't change the labels profits significantly.
> Sony is legally required to follow it's shareholders wishes
And barring a shareholders' meeting actually deciding something to the contrary, IMO most courts would assume that those wishes are to earn as much money as possible, without doing anything illegal or morally repugnant. Meaning, morally repugnant to Joe Sixpack, not to your average Slashdotter. Or do you have some kind of precedent you could post as evidence to the contrary?
> Apparently the prospect of a quick buck is all it takes for a corporation to sell your data.
The irony is that Sony is legally required to do that if it seems that that would increase its profits. The only thing which would justifiably prevent it would be a reasonable fear of bad publicity causing a decrease of revenue, instead. Hmm, how many Slashdotters play Sony MMOs? And exactly how many fewer will play Sony's games because of this?
> Why did you think you have any reasonable claim to privacy in an MMO?
While I admit that not all speech is protected and some of your examples might have a bit of validity, your sense of proportions is way out of line.
> If you "sent some tells about sometimes wanting to kill your classmates or
> co-workers" not only would I not expect you to retain your privacy and anonymity,
> but I would expect Sony -- and anyone who read your tells -- to feel an obligation
> to notify the law.
Sony, maybe. From Sony's point of view, the tradeoff is relatively simple: what is the risk that this user will actually murder someone, and what kind of monetary damage could it cause Sony if that happened and Sony didn't report anything to the police beforehand, versus the cost of constantly policing the chats of that online game. But if you think your average police station is interested in investigating what might be tens of thousands of such reports (remember, you wanted every single user who heard this to report it), versus patrolling the streets and other more usual police duties, you're just being stupid. (I could understand your supporting users snitching to Sony, however, especially if the ToS encouraged or required it.)
> Talk "about sex to someone who, as it turns out, is 8 years old"? You should spend
> a night in jail just to cure you of your stupidity. Don't they teach you in school
> specifically *not* to make any assumptions about the age and gender of someone you
> "meet" online?
If this was in one of Disney's MMOs, well, OK, then jail is reasonable. If this was in a setting where the ToS explicitly forbids minors, then again, you're just over-the-top. It is unlikely in the extreme that any court would find you guilty of anything, unless you really have good cause to suspect that the person in question was a minor.
> Do not write anything in any online forum anyplace, even under a pseudonym, that
> you would not be comfortable having viewed by your teacher/boss/wife/husband/neighbor.
Again, fearmongering. You are correct that there is a risk of everything you post being connected with you, even if you use Tor or whatever, but, depending on circumstances, this risk could be very, very small. Like with everything else, you have to balance the risk of the post being connected with you versus the benefit of posting what you want to say. Just like when you decide to get in your car and drive to work.
> You do not have any right to privacy online (somehow this slipped past
> the Founding Fathers) and you are a fool if you expect any.
The legal system has a lot of inertia, and only just now starts to address this issue. So even if there is no recognized legal right to anonymity online right now, there very well could be one in another 20-50 years.
It'll be brutal for a while, but think of how much you'll get when you sell the movie rights!
I'm not sure this is really a troll post. IMO it costs $$ to get certification from the FDA so that your software can be used for medical purposes. At least, for medical equipment and for diagnosis. And I don't think a lot of open-source projects shell out for this certification, especially since (it seems to me) they'd have to pay for every version they want certified.
I agree that once we've semi-reverse-engineered the gameplay paradigm from the KVM streams, all we will need to do is add AI's; but I think the hard problem is the reverse engineering itself.
This is cute, but just think about the problem of trying to preserve the gameplay of various MMO games, without the servers. I'm not thinking of a real preservation, but of how you might attempt to reconstruct the graphics and the movement and battle models from captured screen video + synchronized keyboard + mouse inputs.
To be more concrete, say we have as many players as we want playing WoW using a real time KVM-over-IP setup and we record the IP streams. How could we use the information to produce a single-user "game" which would give a cursory impression of what WoW was like, minus all the social interaction?
Now this is a real research-level problem, I think.
> I tried to say that there is no circular citation
Ah, I think you should have been more explicit for us slower-on-the-uptake and/or telepathically-challenged Slashdotters. Or us just being used to have random posters make mistakes. You are correct, the original post was off-topic, actually, for it not being a circular fact-laundering. (Sorry you can't get the karma back, if it mattered to you).
> Cable TV/High-Speed Internet is not really a "critical service".
> We would all survive just fine without them.
Your grandfather would have said the same about the telephone.
Would you agree with him (now)? Your call...
The DMCA makes it illegal to help someone else break the encryption. There's a big difference.
Simply put, the maker of the software you use to rip your DVDs is/was in violation of the DMCA; your use of this illegal software is perfectly legal because of court decisions defending space-shifting rights in the US.
Think this is stupid? That helping someone do something which is legal shouldn't be illegal? Don't look at me, I didn't invent that law!
The post you critique claims that Josephus quoted the Tanach, not the other way around.
Yes, I understood that all this is possible now (although I was thinking of open-licensed mapping info and I don't think we've gotten there yet). But it's not considered commonplace, at least with respect to Wikipedia snapshots. And don't forget it would just be a snapshot, those of us who use the edit histories to try to check dubious parts of articles would be out of luck.
We'll have to wait a bit before everyone takes it for granted that they mirror Wikipedia.
> Really, the Internet is just needed for updates, interaction with other humans
> (or at least their avatars/slashdot personalities), shopping, and porn.
I agree with all of that, except that (1) you forgot "access to current media content" and (2) it might be possible that most users wouldn't need a constant influx of new porn, they'd have enough in their static cache.
If technology continues to progress at current exponential rates, eventually we will get to the point where most queries for factual information which doesn't change rapidly, like maps, routing, language and jargon definitions, encyclopedia articles, etc., will be able to be answered by a stored information cache which will be small compared to the technological capabilities which will then be current.
Barring industries which would be threatened managing to somehow block progress in this direction via legislation.
I see your point, and what you say could very well be true, but it all comes down to what their legal department defines as proper "due diligence" with respect to their contract terms.
They might very well think instead that there are so few proxy users that the extra ad views are insignificant compared with the legal exposure.
Using Megaproxy I went to whatismyipaddress.com and it directly warned of "Suspected proxy server or network sharing device".
So, YMMV + Caveat Emptor. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the more professional proxies are blocked by CBS's site.
I admit that I don't understand your post at all. Especially if you meant it as a reply to mine. It just makes no sense whatsoever.
> And when the price for pirated music becomes too much
How is this connected with my post? My post claims that even if P2P as we know it now would stop dead in its tracks, the media companies would need draconian laws to prevent every one of their sales from being distributed to more than one person.
> As the free alternative dies
How could this possibly happen? Non-cartel music will be outlawed? It's not even reasonable to think that free illegal music would disappear, since the cartels use free distribution (e.g., via radio broadcasting) widely as marketing tools. You think that copying music from the radio will be so illegal that people won't do it? I think that long before we get to that point, something in society is going to break --- either the appetite for cartel music or society's swallowing the cartel's gaming of the legal system.
> it will open up the door for I-tunes and the other various online music stores to
> raise prices as they see fit
The cartel can do this now, except for one thing. They always have competition, even if it's just from other cartel entertainment (free broadcast TV, cable TV, movies, computer games). And if they raise prices too high, then things like eating and paying the electric bill start to be competitors!
Somehow, I don't think that's going to do anything except discourage industry from touching open-source with even a thousand-foot pole...
And I wonder who's going to end up in jail? It wouldn't be the embedded software engineer who did what his boss told him, eh?
Ugh.