I thought that what those biotech companies had patents on was methods for testing for the presence of particular genes. That's markedly different than owning a patent on a gene itself.
Just FYI, Maverick Records is a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Madonna is the titular head of Maverick but you can be damn sure Maverick isn't going to do anything of which Warner disapproves.
In theory, someone with no market power (a new artist/band that has no successes/history yet) will be at a disadvantage when dealing with someone who does have market power (an established label, for example). Now, the label knows that if the artist has talent, the label can use its financial resources to give the artist a chance to get exposure, in exchange for a cut of the profits from the artist's work. As a result, the artist gets more famous, and has more market power. (Assuming they're talented, and don't just suck.)
However, if the label is the only label out there, then they have *all* the power, and can abuse the artists horribly. But if there's other labels that compete with this label, then even the nearly-powerless artists can pick and choose a label who will give him the best chance.
But in our world, most of the labels are in collusion to not compete with each others' terms for new artists. This is the fundamental problem. In a properly free market, the labels would be competing, not colluding, and the artists would have a better deal. The way it is now, the artists have to compete for a spot with a label, but the labels almost never have to compete to get a good artist.
So why hasn't the Justice Department gone after the labels and made them start playing fair yet? Aren't they obviously hurting the music industry by doing this?
That thread's been argued to death (and is unresolvable without hard numbers), so I'll ask another one: if 95% of the citizens of a country ignore one of its laws, should the law continue to exist?
I'm not saying it should or shouldn't, in general, or that this specific kind of copyright infringement should or shouldn't be, but it's certainly something to think about. When everyone's doing it, should we punish everyone, or rethink the law instead? Or is there another option?
If Bob has to spend 6 months to learn proper database techniques so that he can make a small DB for family use, he's not going to bother. There's nothing wrong with small, ad-hoc tools, for small, ad-hoc jobs; not everyone should have to be a full-fledged DBA in order to make something small.
Your argument is equivalent to saying that everyone who's ever going to make dinner for their family should spend six months in chef school first, plus several hundred dollars on the proper tools. Sometimes a small, simple, half-assed tool is perfectly adequate. What does it matter if Bob learns poor database techniques, if he works as a sales rep for an industrial supply company and just happens to dabble in computers for minor family purposes?
MySQL is perfectly adequate for all sorts of jobs. My wife and I used it for our wedding website (guests could RSVP online), and it completely met our needs. I certainly could have implemented my own database using Perl or PHP, but it would have taken longer and had no benefit.
The problem is with mindless open-source advocates who try to pump up MySQL as the be-all, end-all database solution.
You know, the last five or six/. articles about MySQL haven't have a single post, that I've seen, that's claimed that MySQL is an enterprise-level database.
So why is every single +3 or higher post on this thread saying the exact same thing: "MySQL is great for smaller databases, it's not an enterprise level DB like some people claim, etc."? I think we all get it now... and what few people are left in the "mySQL r0xx0rs!!!!!1" camp, certainly aren't getting modded up for saying so.
It seems like Slashcode should be modified to automatically post a copy of the parent under any thread involving technology... would save everyone on/. (trolls, mods, humorists) a lot of time:)
I don't mean this as a troll, but I'm astonished how many people are missing a vastly important distinction here:
There is a difference between what the law should say and what the law currently says. The latter is the issue; the DGA and the directors it represents are claiming that CleanFlicks does not have the right to resell modified versions of copyrighted works. I haven't seen word one that the DGA is in the wrong: You can buy a work, and resell it at will (doctrine of first sale), but not if you modify it.
Now, whether this SHOULD be the law is a totally separate issue, and I can't understand how an entire site's worth of readers can conflate the two accidentally.
Would you be able to provide me with a link to something that might explain, as to a child, what LDAP is? I've been hearing about it for years but have never managed to find out exactly what it *is*, what it's *for*, and so on. I know I probably sound dumb but every time I look, all I find is oblique references that don't actually explain it.
Elaborate. What specifically are you talking about? If you're talking about DoubleClick tracking my browsing via cookies, then no, because DoubleClick is not the government. If you're talking about Carnivore or [INSERT SPY-ON-OUR-OWN-CITIZENS-PROGRAM HERE], then that's potentially another story.
And, yes, we're freaked out about the government monitoring us for no good damn reason, no matter what aspect they're monitoring.
Not that I object, but this seems like an odd thing for the NYT to just come out and say. "...the possibility of invading Iraq. By the way, Linux r0xx0rs. In other news..."
Etymology: Medieval Latin ultimatus last, final, from Late Latin, past participle of ultimare to come to an end, be last, from Latin ultimus farthest, last, final, superlative of (assumed) Latin ulter situated beyond
Damn! I knew I should have bought a burner before the MPAA made 'em illegal...
Because you had to open your mouth all future posts on this thread can only aspire to be penultimate in pedantry.
That should be "the penultimate in pedantry," you dimwit!
No, you useless troll, to follow my logic, someone with "real wisdom" would feel anger and rage, and then wait until they calmed down before acting. Acting from emotions is what causes many of the problems in the world; responding the same way isn't going to make things better.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Plus, it's a good venue for advertising and since each syndicate by definition must represent its home country, a good way to be patriotic as well.
This is probably an unpopular sentiment, but what exactly is good about patriotism? It's nothing more than the belief that your country is the greatest in the world, simply because you were born there. More freedoms have been stolen and lives have been lost due to patriotism than any other factor, except religion.
Brin makes some interesting points in these anti-Lucas screeds of his, but the strongest feeling I get from them is one of bitter resentment. I think Brin has a particular idea of what constitutes "real" SF, and Lucas's success with his paltry "pseudo-SF" is grating. That, I can understand, but it does Brin no good to come up with spurious logic and silly accusations to try and denigrate Lucas... to what purpose, I can't tell.
For example, Brin is fond of pointing out how unhealthy it is to repress your emotions -- something he claims the Jedi faith is based on. The problem is that the Jedi have no problems with the existence of negative emotions -- merely with acting on them. Controlling yourself to the point where you don't even have any negative emotions is nigh-impossible; but recognizing when you are having those emotions, and waiting until you are calm before you act, is where the wisdom lies.
Brin also makes the odd assumption that just because Lucas shows a character doing something in a movie, means that Lucas thinks that real people should act that way in real life. His quote from Orwell is almost apropos, except that a movie is different enough from a gas chamber that the comparison is silly. I'm not saying Brin has to like Lucas's beliefs or philosophy, but to claim that there's some crime being perpetrated against humanity because of the entirely fictional things that happen in a movie, is just dumb. Criticizing a movie for bad writing, bad direction, and bad acting is certainly fine, but why does Brin see such a threat against real adult morality from these films?
That's the trouble with the world today, nobody's building enormous, useless monuments any more.
That's why I'd buy some land out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and build a new pyramid that's twice as big as the Great Pyramid in Egypt! Yeah! Of course, there'd be hidden passages and rooms inside, guarded by fiendish traps... and if you made it past them all, you'd find the prize: Geraldo Rivera!
The other thing I'd do is build a gigantic statue of Bruce Campbell (with chainsaw on one hand, shotgun in the other) standing astride Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor. It'd be the Colossus of Groovy!
I refuse to shell out $60 for a game, only to have to pay $15 a month for the 'privilage' of playing the game that I bought with my hard earned money.
I'll put your absurd response down to naivete, or perhaps drunkenness, and explain why there's a monthly fee for playing online games.
Games like Earth and Beyond and EQ are not single-player, one-shot games like Diablo or Quake. MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are massively multiplayer because the company that develops them also spends large amounts of money running, maintaining, and upgrading the servers that you play on. They're providing a service -- play time on their hardware -- in exchange for money. It's no different than any other service.
The actual hardware costs, the bandwidth costs, the electricity costs, and the salary costs for all the people who keep all this hardware working, add up to a good chunk of change. There are other incoming models they could use (like in-game advertising -- blecch, what faster way is there to ruin any sense of immersiveness in a game? And exactly what kind of ads do you put into a medieval-themed game?), but a subscription fee makes a lot of sense. No different than the phone company charging you for using their service.
The fact that there's usually an up-front fee for the game (E&B is $45 from Amazon, free shipping) is due to two things: one, to offset the development costs of the games (first-tier MMOs cost several million dollars to develop, before they see a single dime from customers), and two, because the software industry (including the game industry) is used to selling copies of software. In the future there may very well be more fluid, adaptable systems, but don't expect it.
If it's not worth it to you, that's fine, but expecting them to provide a free service to you forever just because you put down a finite amount of money to begin with, is absurd.
Tangentially, I find that people who use the phrase "my hard-earned money" usually do so because they don't have any logic to rely on, so they have to rely on pushing emotional buttons, which is what "my hard-earned money" is intended to do -- evoke the image of the American everyman, sweating blood for his money and getting conned out of it by nefarious, mustache-twirling fiends.
Individual contributions are limited to a relatively small amount, so you would need to distribute lots of money to lots of different people. Increasing the number of people in a conspiracy makes it linearly more likely to fail, so the amount of damage that could be done would be smaller than now.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that what those biotech companies had patents on was methods for testing for the presence of particular genes. That's markedly different than owning a patent on a gene itself.
Just FYI, Maverick Records is a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Madonna is the titular head of Maverick but you can be damn sure Maverick isn't going to do anything of which Warner disapproves.
How dare you!
I'll have you know that the ACA (Associated Criminals of America) objects to being characterized as similar to politicians.
I think it can be summed up this way:
In theory, someone with no market power (a new artist/band that has no successes/history yet) will be at a disadvantage when dealing with someone who does have market power (an established label, for example). Now, the label knows that if the artist has talent, the label can use its financial resources to give the artist a chance to get exposure, in exchange for a cut of the profits from the artist's work. As a result, the artist gets more famous, and has more market power. (Assuming they're talented, and don't just suck.)
However, if the label is the only label out there, then they have *all* the power, and can abuse the artists horribly. But if there's other labels that compete with this label, then even the nearly-powerless artists can pick and choose a label who will give him the best chance.
But in our world, most of the labels are in collusion to not compete with each others' terms for new artists. This is the fundamental problem. In a properly free market, the labels would be competing, not colluding, and the artists would have a better deal. The way it is now, the artists have to compete for a spot with a label, but the labels almost never have to compete to get a good artist.
So why hasn't the Justice Department gone after the labels and made them start playing fair yet? Aren't they obviously hurting the music industry by doing this?
I'm not saying it should or shouldn't, in general, or that this specific kind of copyright infringement should or shouldn't be, but it's certainly something to think about. When everyone's doing it, should we punish everyone, or rethink the law instead? Or is there another option?
If Bob has to spend 6 months to learn proper database techniques so that he can make a small DB for family use, he's not going to bother. There's nothing wrong with small, ad-hoc tools, for small, ad-hoc jobs; not everyone should have to be a full-fledged DBA in order to make something small.
Your argument is equivalent to saying that everyone who's ever going to make dinner for their family should spend six months in chef school first, plus several hundred dollars on the proper tools. Sometimes a small, simple, half-assed tool is perfectly adequate. What does it matter if Bob learns poor database techniques, if he works as a sales rep for an industrial supply company and just happens to dabble in computers for minor family purposes?
MySQL is perfectly adequate for all sorts of jobs. My wife and I used it for our wedding website (guests could RSVP online), and it completely met our needs. I certainly could have implemented my own database using Perl or PHP, but it would have taken longer and had no benefit.
So why is every single +3 or higher post on this thread saying the exact same thing: "MySQL is great for smaller databases, it's not an enterprise level DB like some people claim, etc."? I think we all get it now... and what few people are left in the "mySQL r0xx0rs!!!!!1" camp, certainly aren't getting modded up for saying so.
It seems like Slashcode should be modified to automatically post a copy of the parent under any thread involving technology... would save everyone on /. (trolls, mods, humorists) a lot of time :)
A. They post on Slashdot.
I don't mean this as a troll, but I'm astonished how many people are missing a vastly important distinction here:
There is a difference between what the law should say and what the law currently says. The latter is the issue; the DGA and the directors it represents are claiming that CleanFlicks does not have the right to resell modified versions of copyrighted works. I haven't seen word one that the DGA is in the wrong: You can buy a work, and resell it at will (doctrine of first sale), but not if you modify it.
Now, whether this SHOULD be the law is a totally separate issue, and I can't understand how an entire site's worth of readers can conflate the two accidentally.
...but if Kazaa evolves to be radioactive and fire-breathing, I'm leaving the island.
Offtopic:
Would you be able to provide me with a link to something that might explain, as to a child, what LDAP is? I've been hearing about it for years but have never managed to find out exactly what it *is*, what it's *for*, and so on. I know I probably sound dumb but every time I look, all I find is oblique references that don't actually explain it.
Elaborate. What specifically are you talking about? If you're talking about DoubleClick tracking my browsing via cookies, then no, because DoubleClick is not the government. If you're talking about Carnivore or [INSERT SPY-ON-OUR-OWN-CITIZENS-PROGRAM HERE], then that's potentially another story.
And, yes, we're freaked out about the government monitoring us for no good damn reason, no matter what aspect they're monitoring.
Maybe it's just me, but that looks like your cat had an epileptic seizure on your keyboard. Maybe you should take him to the vet.
I'm just sayin'.
Random guess... W9 is a military designation code for Commander?
Ha-... huh?
Not that I object, but this seems like an odd thing for the NYT to just come out and say. "...the possibility of invading Iraq. By the way, Linux r0xx0rs. In other news..."
Speaking of pedantry...
No, you useless troll, to follow my logic, someone with "real wisdom" would feel anger and rage, and then wait until they calmed down before acting. Acting from emotions is what causes many of the problems in the world; responding the same way isn't going to make things better.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Brin makes some interesting points in these anti-Lucas screeds of his, but the strongest feeling I get from them is one of bitter resentment. I think Brin has a particular idea of what constitutes "real" SF, and Lucas's success with his paltry "pseudo-SF" is grating. That, I can understand, but it does Brin no good to come up with spurious logic and silly accusations to try and denigrate Lucas... to what purpose, I can't tell.
For example, Brin is fond of pointing out how unhealthy it is to repress your emotions -- something he claims the Jedi faith is based on. The problem is that the Jedi have no problems with the existence of negative emotions -- merely with acting on them. Controlling yourself to the point where you don't even have any negative emotions is nigh-impossible; but recognizing when you are having those emotions, and waiting until you are calm before you act, is where the wisdom lies.
Brin also makes the odd assumption that just because Lucas shows a character doing something in a movie, means that Lucas thinks that real people should act that way in real life. His quote from Orwell is almost apropos, except that a movie is different enough from a gas chamber that the comparison is silly. I'm not saying Brin has to like Lucas's beliefs or philosophy, but to claim that there's some crime being perpetrated against humanity because of the entirely fictional things that happen in a movie, is just dumb. Criticizing a movie for bad writing, bad direction, and bad acting is certainly fine, but why does Brin see such a threat against real adult morality from these films?
That's the trouble with the world today, nobody's building enormous, useless monuments any more.
That's why I'd buy some land out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and build a new pyramid that's twice as big as the Great Pyramid in Egypt! Yeah! Of course, there'd be hidden passages and rooms inside, guarded by fiendish traps... and if you made it past them all, you'd find the prize: Geraldo Rivera!
The other thing I'd do is build a gigantic statue of Bruce Campbell (with chainsaw on one hand, shotgun in the other) standing astride Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor. It'd be the Colossus of Groovy!
Games like Earth and Beyond and EQ are not single-player, one-shot games like Diablo or Quake. MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are massively multiplayer because the company that develops them also spends large amounts of money running, maintaining, and upgrading the servers that you play on. They're providing a service -- play time on their hardware -- in exchange for money. It's no different than any other service.
The actual hardware costs, the bandwidth costs, the electricity costs, and the salary costs for all the people who keep all this hardware working, add up to a good chunk of change. There are other incoming models they could use (like in-game advertising -- blecch, what faster way is there to ruin any sense of immersiveness in a game? And exactly what kind of ads do you put into a medieval-themed game?), but a subscription fee makes a lot of sense. No different than the phone company charging you for using their service.
The fact that there's usually an up-front fee for the game (E&B is $45 from Amazon, free shipping) is due to two things: one, to offset the development costs of the games (first-tier MMOs cost several million dollars to develop, before they see a single dime from customers), and two, because the software industry (including the game industry) is used to selling copies of software. In the future there may very well be more fluid, adaptable systems, but don't expect it.
If it's not worth it to you, that's fine, but expecting them to provide a free service to you forever just because you put down a finite amount of money to begin with, is absurd.
Tangentially, I find that people who use the phrase "my hard-earned money" usually do so because they don't have any logic to rely on, so they have to rely on pushing emotional buttons, which is what "my hard-earned money" is intended to do -- evoke the image of the American everyman, sweating blood for his money and getting conned out of it by nefarious, mustache-twirling fiends.
Individual contributions are limited to a relatively small amount, so you would need to distribute lots of money to lots of different people. Increasing the number of people in a conspiracy makes it linearly more likely to fail, so the amount of damage that could be done would be smaller than now.