Again, same reason we have laws against receiving stolen goods. Basically, your "right" to be a profiteer of fraud does not outweight the authors right to be protected from fraud.
The contract is a private agreement between two people. It's simply ridiculous to expect third parties to be bound by contracts they didn't sign.
And frankly, I'd say it's unreasonable to punish a receiver of stolen goods any further than by having him return the goods, unless he was somehow involved with committing or arranging the theft. If my neighbor sells me a TV for $100 and I later find out it was stolen, it makes sense for the rightful owner to be able to reclaim it from me, as long as I can also reclaim my $100 from my neighbor (the only person who did anything immoral).
But how did that someone else obtain the software ?
Perhaps they signed a contract and then violated it. They should certainly be held liable for that, but should I? I didn't sign the contract; I may not even have known there was a contract at all.
Or perhaps I find it posted anonymously on Freenet. Why should the burden be on me to track down whoever wrote it, find out if a contract was involved, and then make sure no one broke the contract in posting it?
And with an accuracy of 40 meters, how does it even know what street you're actually on? There are plenty of places where there are streets inside of 40m from each other.
GPS systems suffer from the same problem too (just not to the same extent). Often, the navigation system can figure out what street you're on, if you were on it before you came near another street, and apply a sanity filter so it doesn't show you popping back and forth across the block. But that would be harder in the city.
Could you tell me which part of the follow argument, previously posted, that you disagree with ?
(1) he is entitled to restrict access to his software. Or should he be forced to give it away/release it ?
I disagree with this part. He isn't entitled to restrict access to the software; software is information and cannot be owned. He is, however, entitled to restrict access to his computer and any physical media he owns that contains copies of the software.
Also, your follow-up question ignores the middle ground between forcing him to release it and giving him the right to dictate who can use it. I wouldn't require him to lift a finger to make it any easier for anyone else to get a copy of his software, but I wouldn't allow him to force others to stop using or redistributing it either. If he wants to control how it's used, he should keep it to himself.
(2) He is entitled to impose a contract that requires that users do not leak copies of his software.
Sounds good to me. Of course, such a contract can only apply to someone who agrees to be bound by it. If you say "sign this contract before I give you a copy of my program", I might look elsewhere to find someone who'll give me a copy without requiring me to sign a contract.
(3) He is also entitled to have the law back him up to prevent third parties from benefiting from egregious cases of theft or fraud (e.g. authorised users leaking software or unauthorised users breaking into computers and making unauthorised copies)
He's entitled to have legal protection against people breaking into his system, and to enforce contracts against users who sign them, sure. But there's no "theft" in either situation.
Or do you support fraud ? What do you think of laws against receiving stolen goods, for example ?
No, I don't support fraud. I support trademark law for that reason, and I'd support a law that required you to give proper credit for any copies or derivative works (but didn't limit your right to make or distribute them).
I don't really see the connection between fraud and receiving stolen goods. Can you explain further?
A human being may not need GPS to figure out where he is in a city(*), but it's definitely useful for automated navigation systems. It's nice to be able to press a button and have a friendly voice guide you back to the freeway.
(* though that's debatable - what if you're in an unfamiliar area, and it's the middle of the night so you can't find anyone to ask?)
And on a side note cameraphones seem to be much less durable than older phones. Newer phones feel so much lighter and more plasticky than older ones.
Check out the LG VX7000. It has all those whiz-bang features like photos, video, games, mobile web, MP3 ringers, but it definitely has a solid feel to it, and pretty good battery life as well.
Given the level of integration between something like iTunes and my iPod, it is much easier (for me) to browse, pay, and download, music, rather than search for and obtain an uncontrolled copy.
That's because you own an iPod. For someone like me, who only owns MP3 players and doesn't want to take part in Apple's vendor lock-in scheme, iTMS is quite a bit more hassle.
How many users of a program like Microsoft word can afford to fund its development ?
Well, how many people use it? A few million? If they each paid a few dollars, they could fund its development together.
The author is entitled to ask for compensation from those who use the fruits of his labor.
Nope, sorry, I don't buy that argument. Just because you put time into something doesn't mean anyone owes you money. If I spend six hours combing my hair into a certain style, I don't get to demand money from everyone who looks at it, nor do I get to tell everyone else that they have to pay me if they want to use that hairstyle on their own heads - why should it be any different if I spend those hours sitting at a keyboard instead of standing in front of a mirror?
I write software for a living. The time it takes to put out a software product is scarce. The money I am payed or which I must invest for creating that intangible and "0-cost reproducible" stream of bits is scarce. Reproduction costs are irrelevant; there must be something to be reproduced to begin with, and that something is scarce.
You're making a classic mistake here. You're entirely correct, of course, that the time it takes to make a program, a song, or a movie is a limited resource, but once that time has already been put into making it, the program/song/movie itself is not scarce.
I also write software for a living, so I know as well as you do that programming time and talent is scarce. But there's a difference between programming and programs. Just like a mechanic or a barber, I don't worry about what someone else wants to do with the fruits of my labor, since I've already been paid for it. The only way someone could "steal" my labor as a programmer would be to sit me in front of a computer and force me to write code.
When you distribute works (books, music, movies, software, whatever) without the copyright owner's permission you are stealing something: the compensation to which the author is entitled for creating it.
If you don't own something, no one can steal it from you - and you don't own potential revenue.
Moreover, the author isn't entitled to get paid just because he made something. If Universal Studios spends $200 million and two years making a terrible movie, and it gets such bad reviews that no one ever buys a ticket, have the reviewers "stolen" something from them? Of course not.
And more importantly, even if everyone who reads those bad reviews decides to download the movie instead of buying a ticket, the studio still isn't entitled to anything. They're in exactly the same situation whether those people download the movie or just sit at home doing nothing; the only difference is that in one scenario, those people get to watch the movie anyway, which harms no one (except themselves, if it really is that bad).
But you must know this already. Otherwise, I must presume you have nothing against taking GPL code and selling it as closed binaries.
Actually, in a world where everyone was free to reverse engineer, decompile, change, and redistribute software, I wouldn't have much of a problem with that. Thing is, we don't live in that world, we live in one where misusing GPL'd code creates an unfair advantage.
But the UNfair use that so many are trying to justify with the above "argument", and which is practiced on a massive scale, makes elected representatives easier to convince that these laws are necessary.
One man's "fair" is apparently another man's "UNfair". Take the trading of TV shows, for instance: last night, due to a TiVo scheduling mishap, I missed the new episode of a popular show. Luckily, I was able to download it via BT a couple hours later. Nothing wrong with that, right? Whether I watch it on TiVo or on my PC, the result's the same: I have a recording and I watch it hours after the show airs.
Now what if I didn't have TiVo, and I just downloaded the show every week? Still fair? After all, whether I pay $13 to TiVo every month shouldn't affect my ability to watch this show; TiVo has nothing to do with the show. Same argument applies if I don't own a TV.
And yet the studios are still up in arms about TV shows being traded, and every pro-copyright argument applies just as well to free-to-air TV shows as it does to songs and movies. Copyright isn't about getting paid, it's about dictating the terms under which someone can reproduce a chunk of information.
I don't think any of my elected officials even have copyright/IP issues on their platform. [...] There are so few candidates that it's impossible to find one that I agree with on all issues.
This is the real problem. Thanks to the polarization caused by our electoral system ("first past the post" elections virtually guarantee a two-party state), your only real choice at the ballot box is to vote for one set of positions, or another set of opposing positions. You can't vote for someone without supporting his positions on every issue, and you can't vote against him without opposing his positions on every issue.
A system of proportional representation would allow smaller parties to focus on niche issues like copyright, and it'd make sure that they get seats if they have some support, even if they can't beat the major party candidates on every issue with most voters.
To me, stealing is taking a tangible object. Stealing a CD from a music store has taken something of value that cost money to produce. A download by a person who would have never bought the song, or can't buy the song -- and many versions of older songs aren't yet even for sale as singles -- hasn't cost the industry a cent, yet they claim losses of billions.
Exactly. The reason theft is wrong isn't that you get something for nothing; it's that you deprive the owner of the use of what you stole. If I take your car, you can't drive; if I take your CD, you can't listen to it. But if I make a copy of a song on your CD, we can both listen to it; I gain something, but you lose nothing. It makes no sense to speak of stealing something that isn't scarce.
Furthermore, even in cases where downloading a song causes someone not to buy it, it still isn't stealing. No one owns their expected revenue, and no one has the right to demand money from everyone who enjoys something they worked on. Negative reviews are responsible for more loss of expected revenue than any illegal copying - should we lock up Roger Ebert for preventing movie studios from getting the profit that's rightfully theirs?
Even only 20 and 30 years ago, take away the toys and kids went down to the park.
Are you saying that doesn't happen today? I see kids playing in parks and lawns all the time. I don't doubt you've met some who refuse to go outside, but I think you're ignoring the fact that people like that have been around for ages. Today's insulated gamer is an updated version of yesterday's bookworm.
Books -are- better, they exercise a different part of the mind. Video games produce an intellectual 'tunnel-vision' (so does the average classroom today, unfortunately). Kids learn to move along very limited paths and solve artificially simple problems.
I assume you have some kind of evidence to back up this claim? Seems to me that there's plenty of complex problem solving in today's video games, and plotlines at least as complex as most books these kids would be reading otherwise.
It takes a fundamentally more rounded mindset to pick up a stick and -make- a toy; make your own entertainment, than to pick up a video game and demand to -be entertained-.
I see no evidence that the desire to be entertained is replacing the desire to make one's own toys. They can and do coexist.
I'm concerned that kids today are too dependant on technology. Take away the cell phones, iPods, and game consoles, and what are kids left doing? Nothing.
But couldn't you have said the same thing 50 years ago about different technologies? "Take away the bicycles, radios, BB guns, baseball bats, and mass-produced comic books, and what are kids left doing? Nothing."
Kids have always used objects to entertain themselves - they're usually called toys. Sitting around reading comics or novels wasn't any better than sitting around playing Halo, but even video games today can exercise your body as well as your mind (see Dance Dance Revolution).
But I think the premise here is flawed to begin with. We don't have to worry about what kids might have if we took away all their modern technology, because they do have modern technology. Feel free to point out problems with their use of it, but at least stay focused on the world we live in. Even if we're going to posit a situation where a kid who's used to playing Xbox all day is forced to do without--to go live on a desert island or something--entertainment should be the least of our concerns. We might as well ask how he's going to keep warm without all those new-fangled jeans and T-shirts.
I loved the days when all I cared about was running around outside in the woods.
Nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood is what an adult feels when he contrasts his present life with his memories (which have often been filtered over the years anyway), not what kids feel at the time. You didn't suddenly become less happy as a kid when you discovered Nintendo, did you?
I have a younger brother who loves TV, PlayStation, and horrible RPGs on his computer. He also loves archery and baseball. I say you should try to give your kids the chance to enjoy as many activities as possible, but at the end of the day, you have to leave it up to them to decide which ones they like - don't try to impose your own idea of well-rounded on them.
I don't understand why people are faulting Microsoft for cooperating with a government that could keep them out of a huge market. It is not Microsoft that is deciding that these things should be censored, it is China. Microsoft is just trying to make more money, just like every other American corporation would do.
Oh, really? What I hear is that there isn't even a law in China that would require MS to censor those pages - the word "democracy" is not illegal. This implies that MS is going above and beyond complying with the government; they're not just blocking things that are illegal, they're blocking things they suspect the government might not like. Do you have reason to believe otherwise?
Well, why shouldn't the Disney Corporation retain those rights? They developed and nurtured the character over decades. Why should people who had no stake in the character, who did not create it or make it grow, have the right to use it in, say, advertisements for some widget company?
Turn it around. Why should the people who drew a mouse when my grandparents were kids have the right to tell me what to do with that mouse today?
The concept of a talking mouse, even a very specific talking mouse, is not property. At best, it's an attribute of an existing piece of property, like the arrangement of ink on a page. You can't own a character any more than you can own an arrangement, or a size, or a color, no matter how much effort you put into it or how much you think you deserve to own it.
Moreover, that talking mouse was designed in a specific historical context, one in which copyright terms were much shorter than they are today. Regardless of the merits of copyright in general, if those terms were good enough to entice Disney to develop Mickey Mouse and the works he appeared in, the copyright has already done its job, and the only explanation for extending it further is to put more money in Disney's pockets - to reward them even further today for something they did before most of us were born.
After watching the first DVD, I gotta say, I came to the same conclusion. I'm sure it's the best space western around, but personally, I haven't liked space westerns since I stopped watching Silverhawks as a kid.
He also dropped acid in his younger days. That a good thing too??
Frankly, we'd all be better off if more people were willing to broaden their mental horizons.
I'm not saying that acid (or any other drug) makes you smarter or gives you better ideas, but it does let you look at old things in a new way, and it changes your thought process temporarily so that you'll come up with different ideas and connections than you would've otherwise. Especially on subjects like your own life, personality flaws, and future - things that most people are normally too blinded by ego to think about critically.
Nobody automatically deserves to get paid just because they put time and effort into something. They have to convince their audience that what they made is worth paying for.
For example, if I spend six hours combing and gelling my hair into a very specific style, that's a lot of time and effort... but it doesn't give me the right to demand money from people who pass me on the sidewalk, or to demand that they not look at my hair unless they're willing to pay, or even to claim that I own that hairstyle and no one else may use it. They can choose to look or not look, and they can choose to pay or not pay.
Musicians, writers, artists, programmers, and everyone else who creates copyrightable material is really performing a service, not selling a good. Anyone with a CD burner can make copies of a CD, but the real talent (and thus the real scarcity) is in making the original recording - writing music and lyrics, playing the instruments, mixing the tracks, and so on. Anyone who hopes to get paid for performing a service would be wise to arrange that payment before he does the work, not after.
If I do not protect him, you or someone else can create alternate storylines for him that have him behaving terribly or way off course. You could kill him, ressurect him (if I kill him), or turn him into a drag queen.
I think someone needs to be reminded that fictional characters aren't real people. A third party can't change your character; he can only write a story depicting your character in a different light. Your original stories are still exactly as you left them, and if your audience likes your stories better than the third party's, you have nothing to worry about. You only have to worry when the third party is able to create more interesting stories than you.
No, no. He's mine, all mine.
Heh. Smeagol/Gollum wasn't supposed to be a role model, but so many copyright advocates seem to mimic him...
If "exclusive distribution" means no eMusic, it also means no iTunes and no Napster.
Re:Suspicious until...
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 1
And when was the last time you found a site that just had plain HTML - no JavaScript, no Flash, no CSS, no nothing but hand-written (in NotePad) HTML?
The nice thing about CSS is your page still works fine without a style sheet (if you've properly separated your layout from your content). That's true in many cases with JavaScript and Flash too.
Ajax frameworks will have to do the same if they want to make themselves useful to sites with mobile clients.
...a single hash algorithm. Calculate multiple hashes of the same document: MD5, SHA-1, CRC-32, and whatever else you can think of. Then sign all of them at once.
Now the attacker doesn't just have to generate a new document with the same MD5 sum, he has to generate a new document that has the same sum under all those hashes simultaneously. If someone manages to figure that out within the next 5 years, I won't just eat my hat, I'll switch on the Infinite Improbability Drive and turn into a hat.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, same reason we have laws against receiving stolen goods. Basically, your "right" to be a profiteer of fraud does not outweight the authors right to be protected from fraud.
The contract is a private agreement between two people. It's simply ridiculous to expect third parties to be bound by contracts they didn't sign.
And frankly, I'd say it's unreasonable to punish a receiver of stolen goods any further than by having him return the goods, unless he was somehow involved with committing or arranging the theft. If my neighbor sells me a TV for $100 and I later find out it was stolen, it makes sense for the rightful owner to be able to reclaim it from me, as long as I can also reclaim my $100 from my neighbor (the only person who did anything immoral).
But how did that someone else obtain the software ?
Perhaps they signed a contract and then violated it. They should certainly be held liable for that, but should I? I didn't sign the contract; I may not even have known there was a contract at all.
Or perhaps I find it posted anonymously on Freenet. Why should the burden be on me to track down whoever wrote it, find out if a contract was involved, and then make sure no one broke the contract in posting it?
I know music stores will never consider selling music using a lossless codec without DRM
AllOfMP3 already does.
And with an accuracy of 40 meters, how does it even know what street you're actually on? There are plenty of places where there are streets inside of 40m from each other.
GPS systems suffer from the same problem too (just not to the same extent). Often, the navigation system can figure out what street you're on, if you were on it before you came near another street, and apply a sanity filter so it doesn't show you popping back and forth across the block. But that would be harder in the city.
Could you tell me which part of the follow argument, previously posted, that you disagree with ?
(1) he is entitled to restrict access to his software. Or should he be forced to give it away/release it ?
I disagree with this part. He isn't entitled to restrict access to the software; software is information and cannot be owned. He is, however, entitled to restrict access to his computer and any physical media he owns that contains copies of the software.
Also, your follow-up question ignores the middle ground between forcing him to release it and giving him the right to dictate who can use it. I wouldn't require him to lift a finger to make it any easier for anyone else to get a copy of his software, but I wouldn't allow him to force others to stop using or redistributing it either. If he wants to control how it's used, he should keep it to himself.
(2) He is entitled to impose a contract that requires that users do not leak copies of his software.
Sounds good to me. Of course, such a contract can only apply to someone who agrees to be bound by it. If you say "sign this contract before I give you a copy of my program", I might look elsewhere to find someone who'll give me a copy without requiring me to sign a contract.
(3) He is also entitled to have the law back him up to prevent third parties from benefiting from egregious cases of theft or fraud (e.g. authorised users leaking software or unauthorised users breaking into computers and making unauthorised copies)
He's entitled to have legal protection against people breaking into his system, and to enforce contracts against users who sign them, sure. But there's no "theft" in either situation.
Or do you support fraud ? What do you think of laws against receiving stolen goods, for example ?
No, I don't support fraud. I support trademark law for that reason, and I'd support a law that required you to give proper credit for any copies or derivative works (but didn't limit your right to make or distribute them).
I don't really see the connection between fraud and receiving stolen goods. Can you explain further?
A human being may not need GPS to figure out where he is in a city(*), but it's definitely useful for automated navigation systems. It's nice to be able to press a button and have a friendly voice guide you back to the freeway.
(* though that's debatable - what if you're in an unfamiliar area, and it's the middle of the night so you can't find anyone to ask?)
And on a side note cameraphones seem to be much less durable than older phones. Newer phones feel so much lighter and more plasticky than older ones.
Check out the LG VX7000. It has all those whiz-bang features like photos, video, games, mobile web, MP3 ringers, but it definitely has a solid feel to it, and pretty good battery life as well.
Given the level of integration between something like iTunes and my iPod, it is much easier (for me) to browse, pay, and download, music, rather than search for and obtain an uncontrolled copy.
That's because you own an iPod. For someone like me, who only owns MP3 players and doesn't want to take part in Apple's vendor lock-in scheme, iTMS is quite a bit more hassle.
How many users of a program like Microsoft word can afford to fund its development ?
Well, how many people use it? A few million? If they each paid a few dollars, they could fund its development together.
The author is entitled to ask for compensation from those who use the fruits of his labor.
Nope, sorry, I don't buy that argument. Just because you put time into something doesn't mean anyone owes you money. If I spend six hours combing my hair into a certain style, I don't get to demand money from everyone who looks at it, nor do I get to tell everyone else that they have to pay me if they want to use that hairstyle on their own heads - why should it be any different if I spend those hours sitting at a keyboard instead of standing in front of a mirror?
I write software for a living. The time it takes to put out a software product is scarce. The money I am payed or which I must invest for creating that intangible and "0-cost reproducible" stream of bits is scarce. Reproduction costs are irrelevant; there must be something to be reproduced to begin with, and that something is scarce.
You're making a classic mistake here. You're entirely correct, of course, that the time it takes to make a program, a song, or a movie is a limited resource, but once that time has already been put into making it, the program/song/movie itself is not scarce.
I also write software for a living, so I know as well as you do that programming time and talent is scarce. But there's a difference between programming and programs. Just like a mechanic or a barber, I don't worry about what someone else wants to do with the fruits of my labor, since I've already been paid for it. The only way someone could "steal" my labor as a programmer would be to sit me in front of a computer and force me to write code.
When you distribute works (books, music, movies, software, whatever) without the copyright owner's permission you are stealing something: the compensation to which the author is entitled for creating it.
If you don't own something, no one can steal it from you - and you don't own potential revenue.
Moreover, the author isn't entitled to get paid just because he made something. If Universal Studios spends $200 million and two years making a terrible movie, and it gets such bad reviews that no one ever buys a ticket, have the reviewers "stolen" something from them? Of course not.
And more importantly, even if everyone who reads those bad reviews decides to download the movie instead of buying a ticket, the studio still isn't entitled to anything. They're in exactly the same situation whether those people download the movie or just sit at home doing nothing; the only difference is that in one scenario, those people get to watch the movie anyway, which harms no one (except themselves, if it really is that bad).
But you must know this already. Otherwise, I must presume you have nothing against taking GPL code and selling it as closed binaries.
Actually, in a world where everyone was free to reverse engineer, decompile, change, and redistribute software, I wouldn't have much of a problem with that. Thing is, we don't live in that world, we live in one where misusing GPL'd code creates an unfair advantage.
But the UNfair use that so many are trying to justify with the above "argument", and which is practiced on a massive scale, makes elected representatives easier to convince that these laws are necessary.
One man's "fair" is apparently another man's "UNfair". Take the trading of TV shows, for instance: last night, due to a TiVo scheduling mishap, I missed the new episode of a popular show. Luckily, I was able to download it via BT a couple hours later. Nothing wrong with that, right? Whether I watch it on TiVo or on my PC, the result's the same: I have a recording and I watch it hours after the show airs.
Now what if I didn't have TiVo, and I just downloaded the show every week? Still fair? After all, whether I pay $13 to TiVo every month shouldn't affect my ability to watch this show; TiVo has nothing to do with the show. Same argument applies if I don't own a TV.
And yet the studios are still up in arms about TV shows being traded, and every pro-copyright argument applies just as well to free-to-air TV shows as it does to songs and movies. Copyright isn't about getting paid, it's about dictating the terms under which someone can reproduce a chunk of information.
I don't think any of my elected officials even have copyright/IP issues on their platform. [...] There are so few candidates that it's impossible to find one that I agree with on all issues.
This is the real problem. Thanks to the polarization caused by our electoral system ("first past the post" elections virtually guarantee a two-party state), your only real choice at the ballot box is to vote for one set of positions, or another set of opposing positions. You can't vote for someone without supporting his positions on every issue, and you can't vote against him without opposing his positions on every issue.
A system of proportional representation would allow smaller parties to focus on niche issues like copyright, and it'd make sure that they get seats if they have some support, even if they can't beat the major party candidates on every issue with most voters.
To me, stealing is taking a tangible object. Stealing a CD from a music store has taken something of value that cost money to produce. A download by a person who would have never bought the song, or can't buy the song -- and many versions of older songs aren't yet even for sale as singles -- hasn't cost the industry a cent, yet they claim losses of billions.
Exactly. The reason theft is wrong isn't that you get something for nothing; it's that you deprive the owner of the use of what you stole. If I take your car, you can't drive; if I take your CD, you can't listen to it. But if I make a copy of a song on your CD, we can both listen to it; I gain something, but you lose nothing. It makes no sense to speak of stealing something that isn't scarce.
Furthermore, even in cases where downloading a song causes someone not to buy it, it still isn't stealing. No one owns their expected revenue, and no one has the right to demand money from everyone who enjoys something they worked on. Negative reviews are responsible for more loss of expected revenue than any illegal copying - should we lock up Roger Ebert for preventing movie studios from getting the profit that's rightfully theirs?
Even only 20 and 30 years ago, take away the toys and kids went down to the park.
Are you saying that doesn't happen today? I see kids playing in parks and lawns all the time. I don't doubt you've met some who refuse to go outside, but I think you're ignoring the fact that people like that have been around for ages. Today's insulated gamer is an updated version of yesterday's bookworm.
Books -are- better, they exercise a different part of the mind. Video games produce an intellectual 'tunnel-vision' (so does the average classroom today, unfortunately). Kids learn to move along very limited paths and solve artificially simple problems.
I assume you have some kind of evidence to back up this claim? Seems to me that there's plenty of complex problem solving in today's video games, and plotlines at least as complex as most books these kids would be reading otherwise.
It takes a fundamentally more rounded mindset to pick up a stick and -make- a toy; make your own entertainment, than to pick up a video game and demand to -be entertained-.
I see no evidence that the desire to be entertained is replacing the desire to make one's own toys. They can and do coexist.
I'm concerned that kids today are too dependant on technology. Take away the cell phones, iPods, and game consoles, and what are kids left doing? Nothing.
But couldn't you have said the same thing 50 years ago about different technologies? "Take away the bicycles, radios, BB guns, baseball bats, and mass-produced comic books, and what are kids left doing? Nothing."
Kids have always used objects to entertain themselves - they're usually called toys. Sitting around reading comics or novels wasn't any better than sitting around playing Halo, but even video games today can exercise your body as well as your mind (see Dance Dance Revolution).
But I think the premise here is flawed to begin with. We don't have to worry about what kids might have if we took away all their modern technology, because they do have modern technology. Feel free to point out problems with their use of it, but at least stay focused on the world we live in. Even if we're going to posit a situation where a kid who's used to playing Xbox all day is forced to do without--to go live on a desert island or something--entertainment should be the least of our concerns. We might as well ask how he's going to keep warm without all those new-fangled jeans and T-shirts.
I loved the days when all I cared about was running around outside in the woods.
Nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood is what an adult feels when he contrasts his present life with his memories (which have often been filtered over the years anyway), not what kids feel at the time. You didn't suddenly become less happy as a kid when you discovered Nintendo, did you?
I have a younger brother who loves TV, PlayStation, and horrible RPGs on his computer. He also loves archery and baseball. I say you should try to give your kids the chance to enjoy as many activities as possible, but at the end of the day, you have to leave it up to them to decide which ones they like - don't try to impose your own idea of well-rounded on them.
I don't understand why people are faulting Microsoft for cooperating with a government that could keep them out of a huge market. It is not Microsoft that is deciding that these things should be censored, it is China. Microsoft is just trying to make more money, just like every other American corporation would do.
Oh, really? What I hear is that there isn't even a law in China that would require MS to censor those pages - the word "democracy" is not illegal. This implies that MS is going above and beyond complying with the government; they're not just blocking things that are illegal, they're blocking things they suspect the government might not like. Do you have reason to believe otherwise?
Well, why shouldn't the Disney Corporation retain those rights? They developed and nurtured the character over decades. Why should people who had no stake in the character, who did not create it or make it grow, have the right to use it in, say, advertisements for some widget company?
Turn it around. Why should the people who drew a mouse when my grandparents were kids have the right to tell me what to do with that mouse today?
The concept of a talking mouse, even a very specific talking mouse, is not property. At best, it's an attribute of an existing piece of property, like the arrangement of ink on a page. You can't own a character any more than you can own an arrangement, or a size, or a color, no matter how much effort you put into it or how much you think you deserve to own it.
Moreover, that talking mouse was designed in a specific historical context, one in which copyright terms were much shorter than they are today. Regardless of the merits of copyright in general, if those terms were good enough to entice Disney to develop Mickey Mouse and the works he appeared in, the copyright has already done its job, and the only explanation for extending it further is to put more money in Disney's pockets - to reward them even further today for something they did before most of us were born.
After watching the first DVD, I gotta say, I came to the same conclusion. I'm sure it's the best space western around, but personally, I haven't liked space westerns since I stopped watching Silverhawks as a kid.
He also dropped acid in his younger days. That a good thing too??
Frankly, we'd all be better off if more people were willing to broaden their mental horizons.
I'm not saying that acid (or any other drug) makes you smarter or gives you better ideas, but it does let you look at old things in a new way, and it changes your thought process temporarily so that you'll come up with different ideas and connections than you would've otherwise. Especially on subjects like your own life, personality flaws, and future - things that most people are normally too blinded by ego to think about critically.
Nobody automatically deserves to get paid just because they put time and effort into something. They have to convince their audience that what they made is worth paying for.
For example, if I spend six hours combing and gelling my hair into a very specific style, that's a lot of time and effort... but it doesn't give me the right to demand money from people who pass me on the sidewalk, or to demand that they not look at my hair unless they're willing to pay, or even to claim that I own that hairstyle and no one else may use it. They can choose to look or not look, and they can choose to pay or not pay.
Musicians, writers, artists, programmers, and everyone else who creates copyrightable material is really performing a service, not selling a good. Anyone with a CD burner can make copies of a CD, but the real talent (and thus the real scarcity) is in making the original recording - writing music and lyrics, playing the instruments, mixing the tracks, and so on. Anyone who hopes to get paid for performing a service would be wise to arrange that payment before he does the work, not after.
If I do not protect him, you or someone else can create alternate storylines for him that have him behaving terribly or way off course. You could kill him, ressurect him (if I kill him), or turn him into a drag queen.
I think someone needs to be reminded that fictional characters aren't real people. A third party can't change your character; he can only write a story depicting your character in a different light. Your original stories are still exactly as you left them, and if your audience likes your stories better than the third party's, you have nothing to worry about. You only have to worry when the third party is able to create more interesting stories than you.
No, no. He's mine, all mine.
Heh. Smeagol/Gollum wasn't supposed to be a role model, but so many copyright advocates seem to mimic him...
If "exclusive distribution" means no eMusic, it also means no iTunes and no Napster.
And when was the last time you found a site that just had plain HTML - no JavaScript, no Flash, no CSS, no nothing but hand-written (in NotePad) HTML?
The nice thing about CSS is your page still works fine without a style sheet (if you've properly separated your layout from your content). That's true in many cases with JavaScript and Flash too.
Ajax frameworks will have to do the same if they want to make themselves useful to sites with mobile clients.
There is a recent paper by George Danezis and Steven Murdoch about attacks on Tor. (IEEE Security and Privacy)
I think you're referring to "Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor" (PDF).
...a single hash algorithm. Calculate multiple hashes of the same document: MD5, SHA-1, CRC-32, and whatever else you can think of. Then sign all of them at once.
Now the attacker doesn't just have to generate a new document with the same MD5 sum, he has to generate a new document that has the same sum under all those hashes simultaneously. If someone manages to figure that out within the next 5 years, I won't just eat my hat, I'll switch on the Infinite Improbability Drive and turn into a hat.