Statutorily, the difference is that no one has permission to redistribute the show over BitTorrent, so it's unlawful to do so. What you're doing is getting a copy legitimately (from the broadcast) and then modifying it within your own home, but NOT redistributing it, so that's legal. (As far as I know.)
However, the only functional difference is that neither of us see the commercials, which demonstrates that the laws are, to some degree, faulty.
No different from record labels sending promos to music journalists, or game companies sending software to reviewers.
You're right, it's no different. However, not everyone approves of record labels sending promos to music journalists, or of game companies sending software to reviewers for free.
Pirate that I am, I evilly downloaded the first three episodes of Heroes because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The videos I downloaded had had ALL THE COMMERCIALS REMOVED! No revenue for you, NBC!
Of course, as a result, my wife and I sit down and watch Heroes on NBC every week, including commercials (we don't watch enough TV to need a TiVo). If we hadn't been able to illegally download those videos, we'd likely not be watching the show OR the commercials.
So I ask: Did it benefit or hurt NBC that I illegally downloaded and watched the first three episodes of Heroes?
Even if Blu-ray or HD DVD unexpectedly routs its opponent from the market in the next two or three years, it will still be several more years before the victorious format supplants the DVD.
Which is exactly why I'm going to be waiting "several more years" before I bother getting a "next-gen" DVD player.
Artificial Intelligence is the science of making computers behave like they do in the movies.
You mean become sentient and attempt to eradicate humanity? Um, I'll stick with Windows XP, thanks. If a Microsoft OS ever gained sentience, it would be about as threatening as that hobo on the corner with Tourette's shouting about the Trilateral Commission.
I'm not sure how answering truthfully equates to saying that Santa exists
Santa Claus the character travels around the world giving gifts on Christmas, and that's what we're going to tell our son when he's old enough to comprehend it (which won't be long). Sorry I didn't make it blindingly clear enough for you to comprehend.:)
Which winter holiday is that? Oh, you mean CHRISTMAS? Am I following you correctly, that you are going to instruct you child that some people believe that Christmas is about Jesus, but it's really about the winter solstice???
Early Christians chose to celebrate Jesus's birth on Dec. 25 to co-opt pagan solstice celebrations -- AFTER they'd spent two or three centuries celebrating it on January 6th. God knows where they got that date, but there's no record ANYWHERE of when Jesus was born. At any rate, humans had been celebrating the winter solstice for millennia before Jesus lived, and the practice of gift-giving on the solstice and nearby holidays also predates Jesus. Christmas, as it's widely celebrated in the U.S., has very few Christian elements to it. Unless you go into a church. We don't.:)
Our son will probably be at least 5 or 6 before we can really explain the history of Christianity to him; but the ultimate "reason for the season" is the Earth's axial tilt, not Jesus. "Christmas" per se is about Jesus, obviously, but Christmas owes its position and function and, really, just about all of its commonly-celebrated aspects to the solstice, not Jesus or Christianity. Don't be one of those people who thinks that without Jesus, nobody would be celebrating the solstice.
Good luck with the age of three. Self control needs to be taught. It's not automatic. Children learn it primarily through consequences. Those who don't learn it, suffer from its lack for their entire lives. The age of three is the primary time for this to take place. If it's learned then, it's usually just a matter of very occasional reinforcement.
*snicker* Spoken like someone who has no kids, or has never considered any kind of parenting that didn't involve punishment. Our son routinely says "please" and "thank you" (and has for 6+ months), and we have never once ordered him to or withheld anything until he did. We simply say it to each other and to him when appropriate, and he picked it up. Our son will clean up an entire boxful of Duplos after playing with it for 20 minutes without anyone even mentioning it. Pulls out the box, dumps it out, plays for a while, then decides it's time to clean up and puts everything away. He's been doing THAT for three months.
Punishing kids for things when they don't understand why they shouldn't do it is nothing but harmful; and rewards focus kids on what to do to get the reward, not on why the behavior is desirable in its own right. You talk about "consequences"; but there are plenty of natural consequences that kids suffer from doing things they're not supposed to, without parents adding in artificial consequences that don't have any relationship to the action they're supposedly punishing.
To give an example: Clean up your toys or you get no ice cream. What the heck does cleaning up toys have to do with ice cream? What helps kids learn is to point out that having toys underfoot is painful, and when toys don't get put away they're more likely to get lost. Not having your feet poked (or landing face-first on a Lego; toddlers are clumsy), and being able to find the toys you like is reason enough to clean them up. Adding an artificial punishment (no ice cream if you don't do it!) or reward (ice cream if you do this!) simply makes kids hate putting away their toys, and resent you for withholding ice cream for what seem to them to be (and are) arbitrary reasons.
Heh, here's another example: While I was writing this, my son wandered into the room holding a little
We've taken a different tack on Santa Claus than most parents. It resembles your attitude, minus the bitter hostility and swearing.:)
Our son is almost 2.5 years old, and he can already identify Santa Claus as being the fat guy with the beard in the red suit. We haven't told him what Santa Claus (purportedly) is or does; he's simply got a label for the "fat bearded guy in red suit" image now.
We'll answer any questions he asks, truthfully; at most, we're likely to tell him that Santa Claus is someone who travels around each Christmas leaving presents for children, in order to celebrate the Winter Solstice. We're going to leave out the naughty/nice thing (punishments and rewards for bad/good behavior are, it turns out, not a good idea). We're definitely going to leave Jesus out of it (we're atheists), except maybe to explain that that's what certain people believe the winter holiday is about.
My mother-in-law once said that Santa is like a "practice God" for kids to believe in, and I pretty much agree; but I'm not going to pretend he doesn't exist as an entity in our culture, and our son is going to have questions about him.
I wear a watch (Casio G-Shock, about 4? 5? years old, batteries replaced once). Yes, there are plenty of ways to find out the time, but none are as convenient as looking at my wrist.
- When I'm driving, yes, I glance at the dash clock to tell the time, but I'm not in my car very much. - I spend even less time within sight of the clock on my microwave;) - When at a computer, I glance at the corner of the screen for the time. I'm not always near a computer. - My cellphone has a clock, but it's jammed in my pocket. Hard enough to extract when standing, much harder when I'm sitting down. - I don't have an MP3 player or PDA. - I go to the movies a lot; when I want to know what time it is, it's simpler to hit the backlight button (which stays lit for 3 seconds with a soft green glow that doesn't bother other people; cellphones are invariably much brighter, stay lit much longer, and again, it's a lot harder to get out of my pocket) - I tend to take long showers, and it's nice having a convenient clock in there (few cellphones are waterproof). - None of those other clocks have alarms attached to them that do me any good when I'm out walking around, except my cellphone, on which the alarm is a pain in the ass to set; and it only has one alarm. My watch has five alarms, easy to set and deal with. (One for waking me up in the morning, one for clocking back in from lunch, one for reminding me it's time to watch Heroes, etc.)
Yeah, there's a lot of clocks around, but there's not always one convenient when I want to know what time it is, so I wear a watch to fill in the gaps. (There's no fashion/jewelry element to it, not for me.) The reason I wear G-Shocks in particular (which tend to cost $80-120) is because they last several years, they're EXTREMELY durable, and, to a degree, because I've been wearing them since high school, before cellphones were commonplace, so I got used to glancing at my wrist for the time.
Murder and self-defense are exactly the same if you describe them both only as "using a firearm to cause a person to die". The context is important; and to some of us, suppressing free speech is not equivalent to punishing someone for breaking into a former employer's network in order to damage it.
They just happen to use a computer instead of a tommy gun, but the result is the same.
You'll be sleep()ing with the fishes?
Somehow, I don't think the idea of the "St. Valentine's Day TCP stack exploit" has quite the same impact. (Perhaps the "St. Valentine's Day Blue Screen of Death"?)
All things considered, I'd rather have my computer violated by the Mafia than my body.
Otherwise, as soon as someone is shown to have criminal tendencies you might as well just put a bullet in their head and dump them in a hole somewhere.
This is where you go off track. For one thing, virtually everyone who's not a vegetable has shown, at one point or another, characteristics that could be called "criminal tendencies." (Especially teenagers.) It is not to society's benefit to simply execute anyone who ever shows a slight inclination to thwart authority; we'd end up executing 99% of the population, which would not really help the remaining 1%.
And why would executing someone ever be the best way to handle their vague criminal tendencies, anyway? Wouldn't it be better to, you know, give them therapy, make sure unemployment rates are low, propagate the idea that the rule of law is important, etc.?
If they come from the our bodies and ultimately the universe, then that's determinism.
So what? So determinism wins the day. Hooray! Now, are we going to change our society based on that finding? Nope. Thus, the pressing question: What does it matter beyond the sake of argument?
Since we no longer have a place to assign personal responsibility
The solution:
CRIMINAL: It's not my fault I robbed that store! I have no free will. JUDGE: It's not my fault I'm sentencing you to 5 years upstate! I have no free will either! SOCIETY: It's not our fault we approve of the judge's actions! We have no free will!
Except I've never done that before, and there *is* one bitmap font (Terminus) available. If bitmap fonts are disabled on the distro level, then how come that one shows up?
And I'm sure they could figure out a way to enable bitmap fonts by default and yet prevent everything from being in bitmapped Helvetica:)
Besides, that's my whole point: No matter what version of Windows you use, you never have to fiddle around with low-level font settings like this. The Linux desktop domain *in general* needs to have a simpler font system that doesn't ever require me to run dpkg-reconfigure. It's one of the many little things that make Linux desktop usage less optimal. I'd love to put the time and energy into being the one who makes the font system mo' better, but alas, too many other drains on my time already. What bugs me is that clearly SOMEONE has been spending a great deal of time on this; maybe I can persuade them.
I've been using KDE on Ubuntu for about five months now, on a Dell P3-850 with 512 MB RAM that's about 7 years old. It's got a lot of neat features, stuff I wish Windows had, but there's still a lack of cohesiveness and fluidity that Windows seems to be a little better at still. Mostly it's little things, like the fact that if I lock my desktop, I can't just tell it to use my desktop background; it uses the screen saver instead, and the only "show a static image" screen savers are kinda gimpy. (No, not GIMPy.) Yeah, it's a little minor thing, but there's a lot of such.
Or stuff like fonts. I realize that the whole font issue is a gigantic, historically-fraught quagmire; but after spending a solid week just trying to get KDE to allow me to use certain bitmapped fonts (and failing), and being unable to find any documentation about how KDE's font system works internally in hope of determining what's wrong, it can get frustrating. I miss how relatively easy and "it just works" (I know, I hate that phrase too, but it applies) Windows fonts were.
Like driving around bumpy roads with a hot cup of coffee between your legs?
I assume you're referring to the classic McDonald's coffee case, Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, where a woman had a cup of McDonald's coffee in her lap and got scalded by it when it spilled.
1. The car was sitting still. 2. The cup spilled when she tried to pry off the top while the car was sitting still. 3. She was in the passenger seat; she was not the driver.
Whether or not the case had any merit one way or the other, I really wish people would stop repeating incorrect facts about that case. I'm no fan of frivolous lawsuits either, but can we at least use examples of actually frivolous lawsuits?
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Statutorily, the difference is that no one has permission to redistribute the show over BitTorrent, so it's unlawful to do so. What you're doing is getting a copy legitimately (from the broadcast) and then modifying it within your own home, but NOT redistributing it, so that's legal. (As far as I know.)
However, the only functional difference is that neither of us see the commercials, which demonstrates that the laws are, to some degree, faulty.
You're right, it's no different. However, not everyone approves of record labels sending promos to music journalists, or of game companies sending software to reviewers for free.
Pirate that I am, I evilly downloaded the first three episodes of Heroes because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The videos I downloaded had had ALL THE COMMERCIALS REMOVED! No revenue for you, NBC!
Of course, as a result, my wife and I sit down and watch Heroes on NBC every week, including commercials (we don't watch enough TV to need a TiVo). If we hadn't been able to illegally download those videos, we'd likely not be watching the show OR the commercials.
So I ask: Did it benefit or hurt NBC that I illegally downloaded and watched the first three episodes of Heroes?
Yeah, I guess that explains all the +5 posts complaining that Ubuntu isn't a ready replacement for Windows yet.
Which is exactly why I'm going to be waiting "several more years" before I bother getting a "next-gen" DVD player.
Yeah, 'cause it's California's fault that the federal border with Mexico is so poorly patrolled. *snicker*
"Snake-Robots To Assist Surgeons in Tight Spots"
Like, on a plane?
You mean become sentient and attempt to eradicate humanity? Um, I'll stick with Windows XP, thanks. If a Microsoft OS ever gained sentience, it would be about as threatening as that hobo on the corner with Tourette's shouting about the Trilateral Commission.
Yeah, who needs California's $1.5 trillion economy anyway?
Santa Claus the character travels around the world giving gifts on Christmas, and that's what we're going to tell our son when he's old enough to comprehend it (which won't be long). Sorry I didn't make it blindingly clear enough for you to comprehend. :)
Early Christians chose to celebrate Jesus's birth on Dec. 25 to co-opt pagan solstice celebrations -- AFTER they'd spent two or three centuries celebrating it on January 6th. God knows where they got that date, but there's no record ANYWHERE of when Jesus was born. At any rate, humans had been celebrating the winter solstice for millennia before Jesus lived, and the practice of gift-giving on the solstice and nearby holidays also predates Jesus. Christmas, as it's widely celebrated in the U.S., has very few Christian elements to it. Unless you go into a church. We don't. :)
Our son will probably be at least 5 or 6 before we can really explain the history of Christianity to him; but the ultimate "reason for the season" is the Earth's axial tilt, not Jesus. "Christmas" per se is about Jesus, obviously, but Christmas owes its position and function and, really, just about all of its commonly-celebrated aspects to the solstice, not Jesus or Christianity. Don't be one of those people who thinks that without Jesus, nobody would be celebrating the solstice.
*snicker* Spoken like someone who has no kids, or has never considered any kind of parenting that didn't involve punishment. Our son routinely says "please" and "thank you" (and has for 6+ months), and we have never once ordered him to or withheld anything until he did. We simply say it to each other and to him when appropriate, and he picked it up. Our son will clean up an entire boxful of Duplos after playing with it for 20 minutes without anyone even mentioning it. Pulls out the box, dumps it out, plays for a while, then decides it's time to clean up and puts everything away. He's been doing THAT for three months.
Punishing kids for things when they don't understand why they shouldn't do it is nothing but harmful; and rewards focus kids on what to do to get the reward, not on why the behavior is desirable in its own right. You talk about "consequences"; but there are plenty of natural consequences that kids suffer from doing things they're not supposed to, without parents adding in artificial consequences that don't have any relationship to the action they're supposedly punishing.
To give an example: Clean up your toys or you get no ice cream. What the heck does cleaning up toys have to do with ice cream? What helps kids learn is to point out that having toys underfoot is painful, and when toys don't get put away they're more likely to get lost. Not having your feet poked (or landing face-first on a Lego; toddlers are clumsy), and being able to find the toys you like is reason enough to clean them up. Adding an artificial punishment (no ice cream if you don't do it!) or reward (ice cream if you do this!) simply makes kids hate putting away their toys, and resent you for withholding ice cream for what seem to them to be (and are) arbitrary reasons.
Heh, here's another example: While I was writing this, my son wandered into the room holding a little
I rest your case.
We've taken a different tack on Santa Claus than most parents. It resembles your attitude, minus the bitter hostility and swearing. :)
Our son is almost 2.5 years old, and he can already identify Santa Claus as being the fat guy with the beard in the red suit. We haven't told him what Santa Claus (purportedly) is or does; he's simply got a label for the "fat bearded guy in red suit" image now.
We'll answer any questions he asks, truthfully; at most, we're likely to tell him that Santa Claus is someone who travels around each Christmas leaving presents for children, in order to celebrate the Winter Solstice. We're going to leave out the naughty/nice thing (punishments and rewards for bad/good behavior are, it turns out, not a good idea). We're definitely going to leave Jesus out of it (we're atheists), except maybe to explain that that's what certain people believe the winter holiday is about.
My mother-in-law once said that Santa is like a "practice God" for kids to believe in, and I pretty much agree; but I'm not going to pretend he doesn't exist as an entity in our culture, and our son is going to have questions about him.
The "Santa post" you quote is originally from the January 1990 issue of Spy Magazine.
I wear a watch (Casio G-Shock, about 4? 5? years old, batteries replaced once). Yes, there are plenty of ways to find out the time, but none are as convenient as looking at my wrist.
;)
- When I'm driving, yes, I glance at the dash clock to tell the time, but I'm not in my car very much.
- I spend even less time within sight of the clock on my microwave
- When at a computer, I glance at the corner of the screen for the time. I'm not always near a computer.
- My cellphone has a clock, but it's jammed in my pocket. Hard enough to extract when standing, much harder when I'm sitting down.
- I don't have an MP3 player or PDA.
- I go to the movies a lot; when I want to know what time it is, it's simpler to hit the backlight button (which stays lit for 3 seconds with a soft green glow that doesn't bother other people; cellphones are invariably much brighter, stay lit much longer, and again, it's a lot harder to get out of my pocket)
- I tend to take long showers, and it's nice having a convenient clock in there (few cellphones are waterproof).
- None of those other clocks have alarms attached to them that do me any good when I'm out walking around, except my cellphone, on which the alarm is a pain in the ass to set; and it only has one alarm. My watch has five alarms, easy to set and deal with. (One for waking me up in the morning, one for clocking back in from lunch, one for reminding me it's time to watch Heroes, etc.)
Yeah, there's a lot of clocks around, but there's not always one convenient when I want to know what time it is, so I wear a watch to fill in the gaps. (There's no fashion/jewelry element to it, not for me.) The reason I wear G-Shocks in particular (which tend to cost $80-120) is because they last several years, they're EXTREMELY durable, and, to a degree, because I've been wearing them since high school, before cellphones were commonplace, so I got used to glancing at my wrist for the time.
Murder and self-defense are exactly the same if you describe them both only as "using a firearm to cause a person to die". The context is important; and to some of us, suppressing free speech is not equivalent to punishing someone for breaking into a former employer's network in order to damage it.
You'll be sleep()ing with the fishes?
Somehow, I don't think the idea of the "St. Valentine's Day TCP stack exploit" has quite the same impact. (Perhaps the "St. Valentine's Day Blue Screen of Death"?)
All things considered, I'd rather have my computer violated by the Mafia than my body.
This is where you go off track. For one thing, virtually everyone who's not a vegetable has shown, at one point or another, characteristics that could be called "criminal tendencies." (Especially teenagers.) It is not to society's benefit to simply execute anyone who ever shows a slight inclination to thwart authority; we'd end up executing 99% of the population, which would not really help the remaining 1%.
And why would executing someone ever be the best way to handle their vague criminal tendencies, anyway? Wouldn't it be better to, you know, give them therapy, make sure unemployment rates are low, propagate the idea that the rule of law is important, etc.?
The Christian God is defined as all-powerful, and therefore He can do whatever the hell He feels like.
So what? So determinism wins the day. Hooray! Now, are we going to change our society based on that finding? Nope. Thus, the pressing question: What does it matter beyond the sake of argument?
The solution:
CRIMINAL: It's not my fault I robbed that store! I have no free will.
JUDGE: It's not my fault I'm sentencing you to 5 years upstate! I have no free will either!
SOCIETY: It's not our fault we approve of the judge's actions! We have no free will!
Alas, it doesn't work to say, "Free will must exist, because I think it would suck if it didn't."
Except I've never done that before, and there *is* one bitmap font (Terminus) available. If bitmap fonts are disabled on the distro level, then how come that one shows up?
:)
And I'm sure they could figure out a way to enable bitmap fonts by default and yet prevent everything from being in bitmapped Helvetica
Besides, that's my whole point: No matter what version of Windows you use, you never have to fiddle around with low-level font settings like this. The Linux desktop domain *in general* needs to have a simpler font system that doesn't ever require me to run dpkg-reconfigure. It's one of the many little things that make Linux desktop usage less optimal. I'd love to put the time and energy into being the one who makes the font system mo' better, but alas, too many other drains on my time already. What bugs me is that clearly SOMEONE has been spending a great deal of time on this; maybe I can persuade them.
I've been using KDE on Ubuntu for about five months now, on a Dell P3-850 with 512 MB RAM that's about 7 years old. It's got a lot of neat features, stuff I wish Windows had, but there's still a lack of cohesiveness and fluidity that Windows seems to be a little better at still. Mostly it's little things, like the fact that if I lock my desktop, I can't just tell it to use my desktop background; it uses the screen saver instead, and the only "show a static image" screen savers are kinda gimpy. (No, not GIMPy.) Yeah, it's a little minor thing, but there's a lot of such.
Or stuff like fonts. I realize that the whole font issue is a gigantic, historically-fraught quagmire; but after spending a solid week just trying to get KDE to allow me to use certain bitmapped fonts (and failing), and being unable to find any documentation about how KDE's font system works internally in hope of determining what's wrong, it can get frustrating. I miss how relatively easy and "it just works" (I know, I hate that phrase too, but it applies) Windows fonts were.
I assume you're referring to the classic McDonald's coffee case, Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, where a woman had a cup of McDonald's coffee in her lap and got scalded by it when it spilled.
1. The car was sitting still.
2. The cup spilled when she tried to pry off the top while the car was sitting still.
3. She was in the passenger seat; she was not the driver.
Whether or not the case had any merit one way or the other, I really wish people would stop repeating incorrect facts about that case. I'm no fan of frivolous lawsuits either, but can we at least use examples of actually frivolous lawsuits?
Right, because if there's one thing Microsoft is short on, it's money.