Let's assume for the moment that by "your data" you mean a song you have downloaded from a music site. Now, you did not record this music. You did not write it. You did not commission it to be written or recorded by other people. So what makes it "your" data?
The fact that I paid for it. I gave them money and in return, they gave me this data. The program (let's call it iTunes) clearly understands that the data is for me, because it will play the song whenever I want. It just refuses to do certain things such as transcoding the song to MP3, not because of any technological limitations (it has a FairPlay decrypter and all the right codecs), but because Apple's corporate policy calls for me not to be allowed to transcode this data.
Or, to put it in layman's terms -- know what you're buying and don't buy something that doesn't give you what you want.
If only it were that simple. Ever tried figuring out whether a CD is copy protected before you buy it? Ever tried returning an opened CD to the store? Ever tried finding a music site hosted in a country other than Russia that sells unencrypted versions of popular new songs?
Restraining the development of science and technology because of ideology is bad. I thought most of us agreed on that? So why is DRM the exception?
It's an "exception" for the same reason viruses and spyware are also exceptions. The whole point of DRM is to turn people's computers against them. There's nothing wrong with researching a rootkit or a DRM system on your own, but once you start deploying it against other people who don't want it (e.g. anyone who wants to do something that the DRM prevents them from doing), you've crossed the line.
(And just in case you were going to use this argument: No, the fact that DRM is bundled with music sites that people voluntarily choose to use doesn't excuse the DRM, just like the fact that spyware is bundled with fun animated cursors doesn't excuse the spyware.)
Should the government step in to enforce mandatory DRM on media? No.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where the government already has stepped in to enforce it.
Yes. The same option is in Win2K, but there it's called "Run as different user". All it does is make "Run as" the default double-click action for that shortcut instead of "Open".
If you don't want to be prompted for a username every time, you can change the shortcut's action to "runas/user:administrator program.exe", while leaving the "start in" directory the same, and then you'll just have to type a password.
So you're not opposed to encryption per se, but you are opposed to software that enforces rules about when you're allowed to decrypt the ciphertext?
I'm opposed to my equipment enforcing rules about when I'm allowed to decrypt my own ciphertext: the ciphertext that comes on a DVD I buy from the store, the ciphertext my next-gen DVD player transmits to my HDTV over my HDMI cables, the ciphertext I get from buying a song at an online music store, etc.
If so, and anyone is allowed to decrypt anytime they feel like it, then why support the encryption in the first place?
Because non-DRM encryption doesn't rely on the device choosing whether to "allow" decryption; it relies on the mathematical fact that you can't decrypt something without the proper key, and the common sense that your private key should stay private. DRM, on the other hand, gives you both the ciphertext and the key, and relies on the device to enforce a policy about when it will combine them and when it will refuse, as well as laws making it illegal to modify your own device to alter that policy.
There's nothing wrong with using encryption to keep other people from accessing my data, but there is something gravely wrong with using encryption (or any other technology) to keep me from accessing my data.
So people were able to get "paid, and often paid quite well..." before there was copyright, and before there was any digital distribution of copies. Far from being evidence of how the point that great art will be created regardless of whether people are paid for production/distribution of copies is tough to prove, it actually proves it.
Indeed. It's funny how so many people who otherwise champion the free market's power (i.e. Ayn Rand types) suddenly think government intervention is necessary for the market to apply to information. It isn't; as long as you have people who value original works and other people who are able to produce original works, there will be a way for the former to give money to the latter. You don't need monopolies on copying for that to work - you just need to treat writing/performing like any other service.
I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on/. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.
Congratulations, and good luck - I hope your hard drives keep working as well as you say they have been.
But they don't always. I've had two hard drives die in my home PC within six months, and a couple weeks ago, two identical drives died at work on the very same day. (All four of them were Maxtors.)
Sure, I also have hard drives that have been running for many years, but so what? The only CDs and DVDs I've ever seen die have been bargain-bin recordables. Nearly all my old CD-Rs, and all of my old mass-produced CDs, still work fine. I trust optical backups far, far more than magnetic ones.
DRM isn't dangerous... DRM is simply encryption, and encryption isn't bad.
Er, no. DRM is a consumer device preventing its owner from accessing or using some information stored inside it, in order to enforce corporate policy (or laws, contracts, etc.).
The fact that DRM systems use encryption is just an implementation detail, and opposition to DRM does not imply opposition to encryption.
The problem I see/have in Win2k that not every application adds itself to PATH.
So, you must know where each app lives, or create a monstrously huge PATH. Very aggrivating.
Only for those apps that you need to run from the command line. Command line apps tend to add themselves to the PATH.
For graphical apps, which are typically started from a shortcut, you can either use the "Run as..." context menu item (which also works for start menu items), or check the "Run with alternate credentials" box in the shortcut's properties.
Now you may, from looking at the finished product, be able to deduce some or even most of how the car was made. But that's just reverse-engineering, which you can do with software too (well, less and less these days). All those books you see at your local auto parts store, like the Haynes manuals? They're the result of reverse-engineering the car.
"Less and less" is the key. If reverse engineering of software were as legal (and practical) as reverse engineering a car, we wouldn't need people like RMS pushing for source code to be made available.
Don't you want to do the right thing? Even if the party you vote for looses, doing the right thing is surely better than actually voting for the Democrats/Republicans?
But is it really the "right thing" at all? It feels good to vote your conscience, sure, but if the effect of voting for a third party is that the greater of two evils wins the election instead of the lesser, I'd say it's the wrong choice.
The purpose of elections is to decide who will run the country, not just to give voters a place to speak their minds. Any proponent of third parties should be focusing first on reforming our electoral system, not just getting votes for his party, because thanks to the way out elections are run, voting for a third party instead of the lesser-evil major party is counterproductive unless a majority of voters are with you.
Basically, the only way it isn't counterproductive is if you honestly don't care which major party gets to control the government. But if you really see no difference between them, then either you haven't looked closely enough at the parties' policies or behavior, or you're only interested in fringe issues that neither party is doing anything about.
You had to request them one at a time, huh? I did it the easy way.
Back in junior high, I called AOL and claimed to be a teacher who wanted to teach my students about the internet by showing them AOL. They sent me two huge UPS envelopes stuffed full of disks in a variety of sizes. That's how I learned 5.25" floppies make much better frisbees than CD-ROMs do.
So, a "magical age" was created where it was decided that most people would in fact be able to understand complex relationships. Yes, some people over this age don't really comprehend the issue, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.
Congratulations, you missed the GP's point completely. This is what he wrote (emphasis added):
"I can understand there needing to be a set agelevel as far as the law goes, because measuring maturity-level is pretty much impossible.. But we don't *need* to be as stupid when it comes what we deem moral."
I installed Vista beta 2 on a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce4 MX.
No drivers for my onboard sound, so all I can hear is beeps. No drivers for the video card, so dragging windows is painfully slow. I managed to install NVIDIA's XP drivers using compatibility mode, and it got a little faster, but not much, and there's still no glass.
Vista's system performance tester gives my reasonably fast system a 1 out of 5. It claims I don't have any "gaming graphics", but apparently they don't realize that every GeForce is a gaming card (the 4 MX isn't much of one, but still). The machine runs Win2K at blazing speed, but it's dog slow at running Vista, and I can only hope that by the time Vista comes out, a computer that meets its specs will cost less than $2000.
And BTW, the darkened screen popup boxes that appear every time you try to change a system setting, or click a button or icon with the little Windows shield next to it, are just as annoying as you've heard.
MySpace suffers from some horrible design decisions at many levels.
For example, to post a comment, read a friend's private blog, change your options, etc., you need to be signed in. When you're signed out, clicking a link that leads to one of these pages will take you to a login form instead. But after you log in, you're redirected back to your homepage, not to the restricted page you were originally trying to load! Every other site seems to get this right, but MySpace drops the ball.
And thanks to the multiple clicks it takes to get *anywhere* on that site, you're better off hitting back, back, reload to get to the page you wanted, rather than trying to navigate there from your homepage.
Online poker can not be regulated in any reasable means. It is protecting the consumer.
Er, if that's the motivation, why doesn't the law have any provision for setting up regulated online casinos? I'm sure there are plenty of companies here in Washington who would be glad to set up an online casino, register it with the state, pay taxes, verify players' ages, etc... if they were allowed to.
But this law isn't about protecting people from predatory online casinos. Most of the online casinos have excellent records, despite the fact that they aren't regulated by US law. More importantly, online poker rooms let you play with such trifling amounts of money that they're hardly anything to worry about. Which is more potentially harmful to citizens of this state: an online casino where you make 10 and 25 cent bets, the house takes 5%, and it takes hours or days to add money to your account? Or a brick and mortar casino where you make $2 and $4 bets, the house takes 10%, and buying more chips is as easy as reaching into your wallet or swiping your card through the price-gouging ATM?
It's a great letter, but it seems a little dishonest to use this as an example of "why we must break the Democratic monopoly in Olympia."
The bill was passed almost unanimously by members of both parties. In the Senate, 91% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats voted for the bill. In the House, it was 90% of Republicans and 98% of Democrats. My state senator, Brad Benson, and my representatives, John Serben and John Ahern, all voted in favor of this ban--and all three of them are Republicans.
The essential part of Jefferson's reasoning is that property is a social invention, for preventing conflict over possession of things that are naturally scarce (like houses).
If it is possible to copy/share an idea, so that everyone can fully possess and enjoy a copy, there is no inherent conflict. And there is no need for the Government to invent an idea of property to resolve a conflict that doesn't exist.
This reasoning applies every bit as much to expressions and copyrights, as it does to ideas and patents. It's just that the letter to which Jefferson was replying was about patents.
Thank you, this is exactly my reasoning too. There's simply no need to deem one person the "owner" of a thing that many people can use simultaneously without conflict, and since deeming one person the owner needlessly dimishes everyone else's freedom, I believe it shouldn't be done.
[Jefferson's] analogy basically gets it wrong, regardless of how poetic and insightful it may initially seem. Ideas are free to use and take as you like. Copyright doesn't stop this, never has, never will. What copyright protects is the expression of an idea in a tangible medium.
But that "expression of an idea in a tangible medium" is, in fact, an intangible sequence of words. It's information and it exists apart from any medium it might be written on. Drawing a distinction between one type of information and another, saying that this information is "an idea" while that information is "an expression", seems pretty pedantic and irrelevant to me. I think copyright apologists tend to use the word "idea" to mean the subject or plot of a work, but the word's meaning isn't so limited in regular conversation.
For example, take this short poem: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
Here it is in an alternate format: "Start with the word 'time'. Now write 'flies'. Now write 'like'. Now write 'an arrow'. That's one clause. The next clause, separated by a semicolon, is the same, except the first word is 'fruit' and the last two are 'a banana'."
And in a third format: "Write a compound sentence that uses parallel structure to compare the arrow-like motion of time to the preference of fruit flies for bananas. Your result should be 10 words long."
The latter two are clearly ideas, just like a recipe or a patented process. They're sets of instructions for reproducing the poem--descriptions of the components of the poem and how they fit together--and they convey the idea of writing the sequence of words that make up the poem. But they're also equivalent to the poem itself, since you can easily transform one into the other. The first form is no less an "idea" than the second or third forms.
Dude, go look in last weekend's Fry's ad in the Sports page. They are selling Toshiba 54 inch DLP TVs with true 1080p display for $2499.
Hmm. Buy a giant DRM-riddled TV, or pay rent for 5 months? Decisions, decisions...
Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
You are so completely fucking wrong. If I get a resume from someone who was in the Military, I put them at the top of the list. They are more organized and get er done than most can hope for.
All right, but who's gonna take advice from a guy who uses the phrase "get er done"?
But white people did not fly planes into the WTC and Pentagon. You can be sure that if they had, the ACLU wouldn't be standing up for the white people getting profiled at airports.
Oh, please.. this stereotyping of the ACLU is so tired. They came to Rush Limbaugh's defense. They've defended Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and general white Christians who want to distribute religious material in school. The ACLU stands up for civil liberties, no matter whose are at stake.
[GP: "In the beginning, they both had their use, but as timee have changed, copyright laws, like unions have not adapted to suit current conditions."]
I click on Amazon.com and find hundreds of thousands of books in print. 1,000 Penquin Classics in modern English translations. 183 titles in The Library of Ammerica series, including a superb new edition of H.P. Lovecraft. $22 in hardcover. Ribbon marker, Smythe binding, acid-neutral stock. Shelf life 200-400 years.
You will excuse me, perhapd, if I don't feel noticeably deprived by the current, extended, copyright regime.
What a straw man. No one's saying that copyright is making it impossible for people to buy books. You could buy books a hundred years ago, but copyright hasn't kept up with changing times. Technology has made it impractical to enforce monopolies on information.
Well, I don't see the big advantage of CDMA phones for most consumers. CDMA might offer higher bandwidth (which few people actually care about).
CDMA is able to support more customers with fewer base stations and less radio spectrum, because there's no need for each station to use different frequencies from its neighbors, as in GSM. It can switch to lower-bitrate codecs dynamically, allowing more simultaneous calls; doing the same in GSM would require constantly changing the size of each customer's timeslice. Also, the lack of timeslices means CDMA can support larger cells (since it doesn't matter if propagation lag makes one transmission overlap with another), requiring less equipment than GSM to cover large rural areas.
In theory, though probably not in practice, that all leads to lower prices for consumers. Also, soft handoffs (the handset's ability to contact multiple towers at once) should theoretically mean fewer dropped calls when moving between areas, and the fact that all communications appear as background noise without the proper code makes eavesdropping much harder than with GSM. Of course, the real concern over here is wiretapping, not eavesdropping.;)
The system itself isn't wonderful (at a technological level, CDMA is superior to GSM in almost every way); what's wonderful is the fact that it's been implemented so widely.
Your justifications are rather alarming. It is part of the Slashdot groupthink mentality, however, so I guess you can't be blamed. If it's out there it's free for the taking right?
If taking it doesn't harm anyone (which includes depriving someone of it or limiting the ways in which they can enjoy it), then yes.
The whole purpose of ownership, IMO, is to avoid conflicts arising when property can't be used two different ways at once. If I could drive my car to Chicago, while at the same time, you stored it in your garage and a third person dismantled it for parts, there'd be no need to deem the car "mine" - we'd all able to enjoy it simultaneously without conflict, and the question "who owns that car?" would therefore be irrelevant.
Of course, physical property doesn't work that way (except in science fiction), but information does.
How would you feel if you spent large amounts of your time producing something - a book, music, whatever - and try to sell it only to have the first person who buys it just start churning out their own duplicates?
I'd feel stupid for sinking all that time into such a shaky plan, and hopefully I'd learn enough not to get myself into that situation again.
Why would I spend large amounts of my time producing something, hoping to make it back by selling copies, when I know full well that everyone else can make their own copies just as easily as I can? Better to find someone who'll pay me directly for the time I spend making it, then release the final product to the world; I'd still get paid and I wouldn't have to worry about competing with every kid who owns a CD burner.
I'm a programmer and, while I've participated in open source projects, I make my living off of software - if people started stealing that, I'd have to stop writing.
I make my living as a programmer too, but I don't have to rely on copyright to do it.
I find their distribution methods archaic and their legal strategies draconian. But that doesn't give me or anybody the right to acquire the materials they distribute by theft.
Correct - that isn't what gives you the right. You have that right anyway, by virtue of the fact that you aren't harming anyone by doing so.
("theft: a criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent.")
"Taking" in that context means taking something away from its owner, and information is hardly "property" anyway. (The Supreme Court has also found that copyright infringement is not equivalent to theft in any legal sense.)
You can still protest by not buying or otherwise consuming their content.
Uh huh. That's a lose-lose situation: they don't get my money and I don't listen to their songs. Why not go for the lose-win situation? Why should I deprive myself just to spite the RIAA? The point of protesting, if I were interested in protesting, would be to avoid rewarding the cartels, not to live in silence.
The artist doesn't have to use his/her time to produce content ("IP"). The label doesn't have to use their time and money to promote that content. They decide to do those things because they intend to charge other people to listen to/view that content.
Correct. Their intent, however, doesn't create an obligation for anyone else.
If you believe it does, then I should probably tell you that I'm writing this post with the intent of charging you $1000 to read it. (PayPal link is on my web site.)
For you to circumvent the channels they have set up to distribute the content just because you don't feel like reimbursing them for their time is wrong.
Nope. I never agreed to pay them for their time. I never even asked them to spend that time in the first place. I'm not obligated to pay them anything; my only obligation is not to incur any extra costs for them.
Maybe you don't feel like paying for tickets to a concert or a sports event. Just sneak in! There's nothing wrong with that, right?
Of course there is - every seat you take up is a seat someone else can't sit in, or hang their sweater on, or remove for cleaning, or simply admire in its pristine emptiness. Your use of that seat (or any other space inside the venue that you take up) reduces the possibilities for someone else to use it. The same is not true of an MP3 file. Come back when you understand the difference between physical property and information, OK?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume for the moment that by "your data" you mean a song you have downloaded from a music site. Now, you did not record this music. You did not write it. You did not commission it to be written or recorded by other people. So what makes it "your" data?
The fact that I paid for it. I gave them money and in return, they gave me this data. The program (let's call it iTunes) clearly understands that the data is for me, because it will play the song whenever I want. It just refuses to do certain things such as transcoding the song to MP3, not because of any technological limitations (it has a FairPlay decrypter and all the right codecs), but because Apple's corporate policy calls for me not to be allowed to transcode this data.
Or, to put it in layman's terms -- know what you're buying and don't buy something that doesn't give you what you want.
If only it were that simple. Ever tried figuring out whether a CD is copy protected before you buy it? Ever tried returning an opened CD to the store? Ever tried finding a music site hosted in a country other than Russia that sells unencrypted versions of popular new songs?
Restraining the development of science and technology because of ideology is bad. I thought most of us agreed on that? So why is DRM the exception?
It's an "exception" for the same reason viruses and spyware are also exceptions. The whole point of DRM is to turn people's computers against them. There's nothing wrong with researching a rootkit or a DRM system on your own, but once you start deploying it against other people who don't want it (e.g. anyone who wants to do something that the DRM prevents them from doing), you've crossed the line.
(And just in case you were going to use this argument: No, the fact that DRM is bundled with music sites that people voluntarily choose to use doesn't excuse the DRM, just like the fact that spyware is bundled with fun animated cursors doesn't excuse the spyware.)
Should the government step in to enforce mandatory DRM on media? No.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where the government already has stepped in to enforce it.
Yes. The same option is in Win2K, but there it's called "Run as different user". All it does is make "Run as" the default double-click action for that shortcut instead of "Open".
/user:administrator program.exe", while leaving the "start in" directory the same, and then you'll just have to type a password.
If you don't want to be prompted for a username every time, you can change the shortcut's action to "runas
I'm opposed to my equipment enforcing rules about when I'm allowed to decrypt my own ciphertext: the ciphertext that comes on a DVD I buy from the store, the ciphertext my next-gen DVD player transmits to my HDTV over my HDMI cables, the ciphertext I get from buying a song at an online music store, etc.
Because non-DRM encryption doesn't rely on the device choosing whether to "allow" decryption; it relies on the mathematical fact that you can't decrypt something without the proper key, and the common sense that your private key should stay private. DRM, on the other hand, gives you both the ciphertext and the key, and relies on the device to enforce a policy about when it will combine them and when it will refuse, as well as laws making it illegal to modify your own device to alter that policy.
There's nothing wrong with using encryption to keep other people from accessing my data, but there is something gravely wrong with using encryption (or any other technology) to keep me from accessing my data.
So people were able to get "paid, and often paid quite well..." before there was copyright, and before there was any digital distribution of copies. Far from being evidence of how the point that great art will be created regardless of whether people are paid for production/distribution of copies is tough to prove, it actually proves it.
Indeed. It's funny how so many people who otherwise champion the free market's power (i.e. Ayn Rand types) suddenly think government intervention is necessary for the market to apply to information. It isn't; as long as you have people who value original works and other people who are able to produce original works, there will be a way for the former to give money to the latter. You don't need monopolies on copying for that to work - you just need to treat writing/performing like any other service.
I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on /. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.
Congratulations, and good luck - I hope your hard drives keep working as well as you say they have been.
But they don't always. I've had two hard drives die in my home PC within six months, and a couple weeks ago, two identical drives died at work on the very same day. (All four of them were Maxtors.)
Sure, I also have hard drives that have been running for many years, but so what? The only CDs and DVDs I've ever seen die have been bargain-bin recordables. Nearly all my old CD-Rs, and all of my old mass-produced CDs, still work fine. I trust optical backups far, far more than magnetic ones.
DRM isn't dangerous... DRM is simply encryption, and encryption isn't bad.
Er, no. DRM is a consumer device preventing its owner from accessing or using some information stored inside it, in order to enforce corporate policy (or laws, contracts, etc.).
The fact that DRM systems use encryption is just an implementation detail, and opposition to DRM does not imply opposition to encryption.
The problem I see/have in Win2k that not every application adds itself to PATH.
So, you must know where each app lives, or create a monstrously huge PATH. Very aggrivating.
Only for those apps that you need to run from the command line. Command line apps tend to add themselves to the PATH.
For graphical apps, which are typically started from a shortcut, you can either use the "Run as..." context menu item (which also works for start menu items), or check the "Run with alternate credentials" box in the shortcut's properties.
Now you may, from looking at the finished product, be able to deduce some or even most of how the car was made. But that's just reverse-engineering, which you can do with software too (well, less and less these days). All those books you see at your local auto parts store, like the Haynes manuals? They're the result of reverse-engineering the car.
"Less and less" is the key. If reverse engineering of software were as legal (and practical) as reverse engineering a car, we wouldn't need people like RMS pushing for source code to be made available.
Don't you want to do the right thing? Even if the party you vote for looses, doing the right thing is surely better than actually voting for the Democrats/Republicans?
But is it really the "right thing" at all? It feels good to vote your conscience, sure, but if the effect of voting for a third party is that the greater of two evils wins the election instead of the lesser, I'd say it's the wrong choice.
The purpose of elections is to decide who will run the country, not just to give voters a place to speak their minds. Any proponent of third parties should be focusing first on reforming our electoral system, not just getting votes for his party, because thanks to the way out elections are run, voting for a third party instead of the lesser-evil major party is counterproductive unless a majority of voters are with you.
Basically, the only way it isn't counterproductive is if you honestly don't care which major party gets to control the government. But if you really see no difference between them, then either you haven't looked closely enough at the parties' policies or behavior, or you're only interested in fringe issues that neither party is doing anything about.
You had to request them one at a time, huh? I did it the easy way.
Back in junior high, I called AOL and claimed to be a teacher who wanted to teach my students about the internet by showing them AOL. They sent me two huge UPS envelopes stuffed full of disks in a variety of sizes. That's how I learned 5.25" floppies make much better frisbees than CD-ROMs do.
So, a "magical age" was created where it was decided that most people would in fact be able to understand complex relationships. Yes, some people over this age don't really comprehend the issue, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.
Congratulations, you missed the GP's point completely. This is what he wrote (emphasis added):
"I can understand there needing to be a set agelevel as far as the law goes, because measuring maturity-level is pretty much impossible.. But we don't *need* to be as stupid when it comes what we deem moral."
I installed Vista beta 2 on a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce4 MX.
No drivers for my onboard sound, so all I can hear is beeps. No drivers for the video card, so dragging windows is painfully slow. I managed to install NVIDIA's XP drivers using compatibility mode, and it got a little faster, but not much, and there's still no glass.
Vista's system performance tester gives my reasonably fast system a 1 out of 5. It claims I don't have any "gaming graphics", but apparently they don't realize that every GeForce is a gaming card (the 4 MX isn't much of one, but still). The machine runs Win2K at blazing speed, but it's dog slow at running Vista, and I can only hope that by the time Vista comes out, a computer that meets its specs will cost less than $2000.
And BTW, the darkened screen popup boxes that appear every time you try to change a system setting, or click a button or icon with the little Windows shield next to it, are just as annoying as you've heard.
MySpace suffers from some horrible design decisions at many levels.
For example, to post a comment, read a friend's private blog, change your options, etc., you need to be signed in. When you're signed out, clicking a link that leads to one of these pages will take you to a login form instead. But after you log in, you're redirected back to your homepage, not to the restricted page you were originally trying to load! Every other site seems to get this right, but MySpace drops the ball.
And thanks to the multiple clicks it takes to get *anywhere* on that site, you're better off hitting back, back, reload to get to the page you wanted, rather than trying to navigate there from your homepage.
Online poker can not be regulated in any reasable means.
It is protecting the consumer.
Er, if that's the motivation, why doesn't the law have any provision for setting up regulated online casinos? I'm sure there are plenty of companies here in Washington who would be glad to set up an online casino, register it with the state, pay taxes, verify players' ages, etc... if they were allowed to.
But this law isn't about protecting people from predatory online casinos. Most of the online casinos have excellent records, despite the fact that they aren't regulated by US law. More importantly, online poker rooms let you play with such trifling amounts of money that they're hardly anything to worry about. Which is more potentially harmful to citizens of this state: an online casino where you make 10 and 25 cent bets, the house takes 5%, and it takes hours or days to add money to your account? Or a brick and mortar casino where you make $2 and $4 bets, the house takes 10%, and buying more chips is as easy as reaching into your wallet or swiping your card through the price-gouging ATM?
It's a great letter, but it seems a little dishonest to use this as an example of "why we must break the Democratic monopoly in Olympia."
The bill was passed almost unanimously by members of both parties. In the Senate, 91% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats voted for the bill. In the House, it was 90% of Republicans and 98% of Democrats. My state senator, Brad Benson, and my representatives, John Serben and John Ahern, all voted in favor of this ban--and all three of them are Republicans.
The essential part of Jefferson's reasoning is that property is a social invention, for preventing conflict over possession of things that are naturally scarce (like houses).
If it is possible to copy/share an idea, so that everyone can fully possess and enjoy a copy, there is no inherent conflict. And there is no need for the Government to invent an idea of property to resolve a conflict that doesn't exist.
This reasoning applies every bit as much to expressions and copyrights, as it does to ideas and patents. It's just that the letter to which Jefferson was replying was about patents.
Thank you, this is exactly my reasoning too. There's simply no need to deem one person the "owner" of a thing that many people can use simultaneously without conflict, and since deeming one person the owner needlessly dimishes everyone else's freedom, I believe it shouldn't be done.
[Jefferson's] analogy basically gets it wrong, regardless of how poetic and insightful it may initially seem. Ideas are free to use and take as you like. Copyright doesn't stop this, never has, never will. What copyright protects is the expression of an idea in a tangible medium.
But that "expression of an idea in a tangible medium" is, in fact, an intangible sequence of words. It's information and it exists apart from any medium it might be written on. Drawing a distinction between one type of information and another, saying that this information is "an idea" while that information is "an expression", seems pretty pedantic and irrelevant to me. I think copyright apologists tend to use the word "idea" to mean the subject or plot of a work, but the word's meaning isn't so limited in regular conversation.
For example, take this short poem: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
Here it is in an alternate format: "Start with the word 'time'. Now write 'flies'. Now write 'like'. Now write 'an arrow'. That's one clause. The next clause, separated by a semicolon, is the same, except the first word is 'fruit' and the last two are 'a banana'."
And in a third format: "Write a compound sentence that uses parallel structure to compare the arrow-like motion of time to the preference of fruit flies for bananas. Your result should be 10 words long."
The latter two are clearly ideas, just like a recipe or a patented process. They're sets of instructions for reproducing the poem--descriptions of the components of the poem and how they fit together--and they convey the idea of writing the sequence of words that make up the poem. But they're also equivalent to the poem itself, since you can easily transform one into the other. The first form is no less an "idea" than the second or third forms.
Dude, go look in last weekend's Fry's ad in the Sports page. They are selling Toshiba 54 inch DLP TVs with true 1080p display for $2499.
Hmm. Buy a giant DRM-riddled TV, or pay rent for 5 months? Decisions, decisions...
You are so completely fucking wrong. If I get a resume from someone who was in the Military, I put them at the top of the list. They are more organized and get er done than most can hope for.
All right, but who's gonna take advice from a guy who uses the phrase "get er done"?
But white people did not fly planes into the WTC and Pentagon. You can be sure that if they had, the ACLU wouldn't be standing up for the white people getting profiled at airports.
Oh, please.. this stereotyping of the ACLU is so tired. They came to Rush Limbaugh's defense. They've defended Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and general white Christians who want to distribute religious material in school. The ACLU stands up for civil liberties, no matter whose are at stake.
[GP: "In the beginning, they both had their use, but as timee have changed, copyright laws, like unions have not adapted to suit current conditions."]
I click on Amazon.com and find hundreds of thousands of books in print. 1,000 Penquin Classics in modern English translations. 183 titles in The Library of Ammerica series, including a superb new edition of H.P. Lovecraft. $22 in hardcover. Ribbon marker, Smythe binding, acid-neutral stock. Shelf life 200-400 years.
You will excuse me, perhapd, if I don't feel noticeably deprived by the current, extended, copyright regime.
What a straw man. No one's saying that copyright is making it impossible for people to buy books. You could buy books a hundred years ago, but copyright hasn't kept up with changing times. Technology has made it impractical to enforce monopolies on information.
Well, I don't see the big advantage of CDMA phones for most consumers. CDMA might offer higher bandwidth (which few people actually care about).
;)
CDMA is able to support more customers with fewer base stations and less radio spectrum, because there's no need for each station to use different frequencies from its neighbors, as in GSM. It can switch to lower-bitrate codecs dynamically, allowing more simultaneous calls; doing the same in GSM would require constantly changing the size of each customer's timeslice. Also, the lack of timeslices means CDMA can support larger cells (since it doesn't matter if propagation lag makes one transmission overlap with another), requiring less equipment than GSM to cover large rural areas.
In theory, though probably not in practice, that all leads to lower prices for consumers. Also, soft handoffs (the handset's ability to contact multiple towers at once) should theoretically mean fewer dropped calls when moving between areas, and the fact that all communications appear as background noise without the proper code makes eavesdropping much harder than with GSM. Of course, the real concern over here is wiretapping, not eavesdropping.
The system itself isn't wonderful (at a technological level, CDMA is superior to GSM in almost every way); what's wonderful is the fact that it's been implemented so widely.
Your justifications are rather alarming. It is part of the Slashdot groupthink mentality, however, so I guess you can't be blamed. If it's out there it's free for the taking right?
If taking it doesn't harm anyone (which includes depriving someone of it or limiting the ways in which they can enjoy it), then yes.
The whole purpose of ownership, IMO, is to avoid conflicts arising when property can't be used two different ways at once. If I could drive my car to Chicago, while at the same time, you stored it in your garage and a third person dismantled it for parts, there'd be no need to deem the car "mine" - we'd all able to enjoy it simultaneously without conflict, and the question "who owns that car?" would therefore be irrelevant.
Of course, physical property doesn't work that way (except in science fiction), but information does.
How would you feel if you spent large amounts of your time producing something - a book, music, whatever - and try to sell it only to have the first person who buys it just start churning out their own duplicates?
I'd feel stupid for sinking all that time into such a shaky plan, and hopefully I'd learn enough not to get myself into that situation again.
Why would I spend large amounts of my time producing something, hoping to make it back by selling copies, when I know full well that everyone else can make their own copies just as easily as I can? Better to find someone who'll pay me directly for the time I spend making it, then release the final product to the world; I'd still get paid and I wouldn't have to worry about competing with every kid who owns a CD burner.
I'm a programmer and, while I've participated in open source projects, I make my living off of software - if people started stealing that, I'd have to stop writing.
I make my living as a programmer too, but I don't have to rely on copyright to do it.
I find their distribution methods archaic and their legal strategies draconian. But that doesn't give me or anybody the right to acquire the materials they distribute by theft.
Correct - that isn't what gives you the right. You have that right anyway, by virtue of the fact that you aren't harming anyone by doing so.
("theft: a criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent.")
"Taking" in that context means taking something away from its owner, and information is hardly "property" anyway. (The Supreme Court has also found that copyright infringement is not equivalent to theft in any legal sense.)
You can still protest by not buying or otherwise consuming their content.
Uh huh. That's a lose-lose situation: they don't get my money and I don't listen to their songs. Why not go for the lose-win situation? Why should I deprive myself just to spite the RIAA? The point of protesting, if I were interested in protesting, would be to avoid rewarding the cartels, not to live in silence.
The artist doesn't have to use his/her time to produce content ("IP"). The label doesn't have to use their time and money to promote that content. They decide to do those things because they intend to charge other people to listen to/view that content.
Correct. Their intent, however, doesn't create an obligation for anyone else.
If you believe it does, then I should probably tell you that I'm writing this post with the intent of charging you $1000 to read it. (PayPal link is on my web site.)
For you to circumvent the channels they have set up to distribute the content just because you don't feel like reimbursing them for their time is wrong.
Nope. I never agreed to pay them for their time. I never even asked them to spend that time in the first place. I'm not obligated to pay them anything; my only obligation is not to incur any extra costs for them.
Maybe you don't feel like paying for tickets to a concert or a sports event. Just sneak in! There's nothing wrong with that, right?
Of course there is - every seat you take up is a seat someone else can't sit in, or hang their sweater on, or remove for cleaning, or simply admire in its pristine emptiness. Your use of that seat (or any other space inside the venue that you take up) reduces the possibilities for someone else to use it. The same is not true of an MP3 file. Come back when you understand the difference between physical property and information, OK?