not *really* aimed at you but I felt it had to be said: you do know that religious tolerance goes both ways, right? I mean, if any religious person were to act like most of these atheists that are being modded +5, comparing science with heroin or evolution with the underpants gnomes, they'd be modded down to -1, Troll and called "bible-thumping fundamentalists" in less than two seconds.
honestly, am I the only atheist in the world that's able to live with religious persons without insulting them and mocking their beliefs?
well, I've met some people who forbid their sons and daughters from marrying people from the opposite political spectrum, and then there's the whole stuff with socio-economical status so it's hardly a problem exclusive to religions, rather it's just good ol' "us vs them" mentality that takes hold of stupid people.
Give it a few decades and who knows, we may even have rock-listening parents forbidding their son to marry a girl who prefers jazz, or perhaps closed-source vs open-source software users =D
well, perhaps they aren't interested in "fixing" it because it's a completely subjective area, like the default desktop wallpaper or whether the trash can icon should be round or square.
personally, I'd take Ubuntu's default font rendering over anything else, with OSX being a close second, Windows in a very, very far third place, and on last place, Windows with ClearType activated which isn't just ugly as sin, but headache-inducing too. And I'm not the only one who thinks so, one of my friends once told me that he wanted to install Linux on one of his PCs specifically because fonts looked "so beautiful" on my Linux machine, specially while reading PDFs.
but then again, I wouldn't call any of the MS-created fonts "nice"...
in the same one where downloading an executable from a random website, running it, reading three pages of legalese crap, selecting which components get installed and where, with default options that require superuser priviledges, and then finally watching a little, useless bar while random ads are shown behind it is considered "user friendly".
no one argues that copyright infringement is illegal, we're only against it being named just like a much more serious crime ("theft" or "piracy") for the sole purpose of turning the ignorant masses' and some judges' opinions towards their position.
in other words, we believe that calling copyright infringement "theft" or "piracy", and worse, being penalized as such by the legal system, is just as stupid as calling George Lucas as a child molester for the Star Wars prequels.
welcome to 2007, where you can be thrown into jail for writing a software to make backups of your own DVDs, or even for failing to write a proper logging software for your webserver.
legalese invaded engineering a fucking long time ago, the FSF and the OSS movement are just fighting fire with fire. If you want to hate somebody, hate the US' government who created this mess in the first place.
and yet, I have an IBM Thinkpad old enough to have a P1 166mhz CPU that still runs happily to this day, no hardware failure of any kind, and was my main desktop PC until a few months ago when I replaced it with another, not-so-ancient Thinkpad too only because I was tired of having to SSH into my desktop to open a frickin' USB stick... guess that's why they say "data isn't the plural of anecdote", isn't it?
well, I'd rather buy music, digital or physical, from labels and musicians that aren't completely batshit crazy and let RIAA-sponsored musicians rot in hell for being a bunch of stupid, short-term thinking, greedy bastards and not even give them the free publicity that'd entail me pirating their music, but that's just me.
besides, I listen mostly to classical music, a genre which is known both for having a nice selection of non-RIAA-approved works, and for needing a much higher quality than you get with your average off-the-internet MP3.
to be honest, until a few minutes ago I could've sworn that the GPL had a clause that said derivative works of a program distributed under the GPL must only retain the same freedoms granted by it, not specifically the GPL itself, but after a quick Google search I discovered that it *does* require it to be under the GPL and GPL only, and that it has been so since v1.
of course, I'd rather blame that on stupidity and short-sightedness of the FSF than on any malice or "us vs them" mentality, so I'm hoping that it'll be fixed by v4 and before 2020 or something...
What's undisputed is that some ripped copies represent lost sales. As long as the quantity of loss is anything greater than zero (or, perhaps, some negligible epsilon), then the "not a lost sale!" response simply fails to address the ethical challenge in the first place.
what's also indisputed is that some ripped copies represent new sales due to the extra marketing and gained mind-share, so you'd have to prove that the difference between lost sales and new sales is higher than zero to even state that there's a problem.
though, if you're wondering, I do think that the difference is positive for videogames and many other software, but negative for most movies, music and some specialized software, though lacking proof for any of them it's still nothing more than an opinion.
ah, the old days, when men killed men over inconsequential tax on teas, and nearly drove the American Bison out to extinction just because they wanted to piss off the native-americans. Kinda like what they're trying to prevent here, btw.
it doesn't compile to.DEBs but ArchLinux does work like you describe, with the source build system making a binary package of the application, which you can install afterwards just as with distro-provided ones, so mixing both source and binary packages is completely seamless.
It's not 100% like FreeBSD, however, since it also has a "rolling-release" system like Gentoo so you can't stay with a given version of the system, not easily at least, but most people that have tried both say that Arch is by far the closest to FreeBSD in the Linux world.
yeah, but what's "reasonable" for a business may not (and in fact, will probably not) be reasonable for individuals, and I think GP's post is that in the age of the internet and open source, that ought to be a very serious consideration for standards bodies, an opinion I'd completely agree with.
free software may not be "free as in I'm sleeping on your couch", but it certainly is "free as in you're free to use, modify and redistribute it without needing an army of lawyers and negotiating thousands of different licensing agreements", a position to which neither the MPEG standard nor OOXML is helping in any way.
I've seen many people just loose their OEM disk (or just never got one). How should those people be handled? Is Piracy still piracy if it's the same version as what was there before?
dunno, but I personally installed a "pirated" version of Win2K along with ArchLinux on my main desktop, figuring that if I paid for the damn thing with my laptop, I'm damn well entitled to use it *somewhere*. Ohh yeah, and all my other systems, said laptop including, run either Linux or FreeBSD.
and yeah, posted under my username and not AC, Microsoft is as free to sue me over my OEM license transfer as I am over giving them one hell of a bad PR if they do. And they're free to sue me over their patents on Linux while they're at it, just more fodder for my anti-PR cannon.
first-born? dude, they're so addicted to videogames they're willing to spend thousands of dollars on top-of-the-line hardware and run Vista just to play Valve and Blizzard's latest cash-cows, they don't *have* children.
written by a soon-to-be totally karma-deprived individual whose favorite games all run on either Linux or a Dreamcast.
there's a huge gap between "not being able to license the photograph to be the cover of a magazine" and "charging for each and every print of the photograph", which was precisely my point, in case you missed it. And while it's true that the fashion and product photographers are still mostly in the old "pay-per-use" model, hence why I said "slowly", other areas are moving away from it which is still better than the movies and recording industries.
ohh, and if you haven't met any professional photographer who still uses film and chemicals, let alone a medium- or large-format camera, I'd say that it's you who doesn't know much of the industry... but hey! good job in not reading the actual post you were responding to, you did a great job there.
no, to wait for the movie and recording industries to figure out a business model that isn't "charging anyone and everyone who watches, listens, quotes, sings or even mentions my work".
the photography industry is slowly moving in that direction too, where 50 years ago almost all photographers charged for shooting the photos and then charged for each print, the "digital revolution" has made that many just charge a bit more for the shoot, and provide a couple of nicely-packaged DVDs with all the RAWs afterwards for the client to make as many prints as he may wish to, no royalties required.
and if *they* can do it, considering they're probably one of the most technophobe industries there are (witness the glass-plate/negative, large-format/small-format, manual/auto-exposure, manual/auto-focus and of course film/digital transitions and the reaction to them), chances are that any other industry can.
The studios, quite rightfully see a source of revenue there. It's not just a bunch of cheap bastards sharing amongst themselves. It's a multibillion dollar company making money off of THEIR content.
so, the studios' next target ought to be ISPs, right? they're also multibillion dollar companies making money off of THEIR content. And everyone else's. Nevermind the fact that neither YouTube nor the internet would've grown to their current sizes if they had been only providers of Hollywood-produced content instead of the "free for all" that they've always been.
what's next, Hollywood suing deviantArt for ilegally profiting from the hundreds of "Pirates of the Caribbean" fanart that get posted daily? suing Flickr for the thousands of underage girls who post the lyrics of their favorite, RIAA-sanctioned songs along with their ego shots?
fuck, that's the way it's always been. Give people a way to freely express themselves, and sooner or later they'll start making derivative works of popular media, legally or not, but that's hardly the service providers' fault. And if the studios would be smart in any way, they'd appreciate the free publicity, and monitor YouTube to see whether the illegal rips of any TV show are more popular than the rest, to start promoting the heck out of the DVDs.
no, capitalism relies on educated, informed consumers to make the right decisions, therefore trademarks are not only beneficial, they're perhaps even a necessity of capitalism, just like laws against false advertising and such.
copyright and patents, on the other hand, are just government-enforced artificial monopolies, and as such something that any pure capitalist (which I'm not, btw) ought to be against.
worst-case scenario, we end up with ancient, unsupported versions on Linux/BSD, and a monopolist controlling the platform's Windows and Mac implementations... how is this different than the situation we have now with Adobe, exactly?
fuck, we may even get lucky and either Microsoft or the Mono developers will offer a cross-platform suite for *creating* Silverlight content, not just reproducing it, before MS decides to "take his ball and go home". And even if it can only create content for that ancient, unsupported version of the player, it'll still be better than what we have now.
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not *really* aimed at you but I felt it had to be said: you do know that religious tolerance goes both ways, right? I mean, if any religious person were to act like most of these atheists that are being modded +5, comparing science with heroin or evolution with the underpants gnomes, they'd be modded down to -1, Troll and called "bible-thumping fundamentalists" in less than two seconds.
honestly, am I the only atheist in the world that's able to live with religious persons without insulting them and mocking their beliefs?
well, I've met some people who forbid their sons and daughters from marrying people from the opposite political spectrum, and then there's the whole stuff with socio-economical status so it's hardly a problem exclusive to religions, rather it's just good ol' "us vs them" mentality that takes hold of stupid people.
Give it a few decades and who knows, we may even have rock-listening parents forbidding their son to marry a girl who prefers jazz, or perhaps closed-source vs open-source software users =D
most normal business activities undertaken by for-profit organizations are illegal for monopolies.
well, perhaps they aren't interested in "fixing" it because it's a completely subjective area, like the default desktop wallpaper or whether the trash can icon should be round or square.
personally, I'd take Ubuntu's default font rendering over anything else, with OSX being a close second, Windows in a very, very far third place, and on last place, Windows with ClearType activated which isn't just ugly as sin, but headache-inducing too. And I'm not the only one who thinks so, one of my friends once told me that he wanted to install Linux on one of his PCs specifically because fonts looked "so beautiful" on my Linux machine, specially while reading PDFs.
but then again, I wouldn't call any of the MS-created fonts "nice"...
in the same one where downloading an executable from a random website, running it, reading three pages of legalese crap, selecting which components get installed and where, with default options that require superuser priviledges, and then finally watching a little, useless bar while random ads are shown behind it is considered "user friendly".
no one argues that copyright infringement is illegal, we're only against it being named just like a much more serious crime ("theft" or "piracy") for the sole purpose of turning the ignorant masses' and some judges' opinions towards their position.
in other words, we believe that calling copyright infringement "theft" or "piracy", and worse, being penalized as such by the legal system, is just as stupid as calling George Lucas as a child molester for the Star Wars prequels.
but nice strawman, either way.
welcome to 2007, where you can be thrown into jail for writing a software to make backups of your own DVDs, or even for failing to write a proper logging software for your webserver.
legalese invaded engineering a fucking long time ago, the FSF and the OSS movement are just fighting fire with fire. If you want to hate somebody, hate the US' government who created this mess in the first place.
and yet, I have an IBM Thinkpad old enough to have a P1 166mhz CPU that still runs happily to this day, no hardware failure of any kind, and was my main desktop PC until a few months ago when I replaced it with another, not-so-ancient Thinkpad too only because I was tired of having to SSH into my desktop to open a frickin' USB stick... guess that's why they say "data isn't the plural of anecdote", isn't it?
well, I'd rather buy music, digital or physical, from labels and musicians that aren't completely batshit crazy and let RIAA-sponsored musicians rot in hell for being a bunch of stupid, short-term thinking, greedy bastards and not even give them the free publicity that'd entail me pirating their music, but that's just me.
besides, I listen mostly to classical music, a genre which is known both for having a nice selection of non-RIAA-approved works, and for needing a much higher quality than you get with your average off-the-internet MP3.
which is another reason to use Sony's sugar-powered batteries. If the thing bursts into flames, at least you'll get a nice dose of caramel =D
to be honest, until a few minutes ago I could've sworn that the GPL had a clause that said derivative works of a program distributed under the GPL must only retain the same freedoms granted by it, not specifically the GPL itself, but after a quick Google search I discovered that it *does* require it to be under the GPL and GPL only, and that it has been so since v1.
of course, I'd rather blame that on stupidity and short-sightedness of the FSF than on any malice or "us vs them" mentality, so I'm hoping that it'll be fixed by v4 and before 2020 or something...
what's also indisputed is that some ripped copies represent new sales due to the extra marketing and gained mind-share, so you'd have to prove that the difference between lost sales and new sales is higher than zero to even state that there's a problem.
though, if you're wondering, I do think that the difference is positive for videogames and many other software, but negative for most movies, music and some specialized software, though lacking proof for any of them it's still nothing more than an opinion.
ah, the old days, when men killed men over inconsequential tax on teas, and nearly drove the American Bison out to extinction just because they wanted to piss off the native-americans. Kinda like what they're trying to prevent here, btw.
Agreed. As my grandma used to say, "only bad products need flashy advertising". Clever woman, she was.
it doesn't compile to .DEBs but ArchLinux does work like you describe, with the source build system making a binary package of the application, which you can install afterwards just as with distro-provided ones, so mixing both source and binary packages is completely seamless.
It's not 100% like FreeBSD, however, since it also has a "rolling-release" system like Gentoo so you can't stay with a given version of the system, not easily at least, but most people that have tried both say that Arch is by far the closest to FreeBSD in the Linux world.
yeah, but what's "reasonable" for a business may not (and in fact, will probably not) be reasonable for individuals, and I think GP's post is that in the age of the internet and open source, that ought to be a very serious consideration for standards bodies, an opinion I'd completely agree with.
free software may not be "free as in I'm sleeping on your couch", but it certainly is "free as in you're free to use, modify and redistribute it without needing an army of lawyers and negotiating thousands of different licensing agreements", a position to which neither the MPEG standard nor OOXML is helping in any way.
well, I don't know about you but I value my privacy *way* more than my time, so Linux still wins.
dunno, but I personally installed a "pirated" version of Win2K along with ArchLinux on my main desktop, figuring that if I paid for the damn thing with my laptop, I'm damn well entitled to use it *somewhere*. Ohh yeah, and all my other systems, said laptop including, run either Linux or FreeBSD.
and yeah, posted under my username and not AC, Microsoft is as free to sue me over my OEM license transfer as I am over giving them one hell of a bad PR if they do. And they're free to sue me over their patents on Linux while they're at it, just more fodder for my anti-PR cannon.
first-born? dude, they're so addicted to videogames they're willing to spend thousands of dollars on top-of-the-line hardware and run Vista just to play Valve and Blizzard's latest cash-cows, they don't *have* children.
written by a soon-to-be totally karma-deprived individual whose favorite games all run on either Linux or a Dreamcast.
there's a huge gap between "not being able to license the photograph to be the cover of a magazine" and "charging for each and every print of the photograph", which was precisely my point, in case you missed it. And while it's true that the fashion and product photographers are still mostly in the old "pay-per-use" model, hence why I said "slowly", other areas are moving away from it which is still better than the movies and recording industries.
ohh, and if you haven't met any professional photographer who still uses film and chemicals, let alone a medium- or large-format camera, I'd say that it's you who doesn't know much of the industry... but hey! good job in not reading the actual post you were responding to, you did a great job there.
no, to wait for the movie and recording industries to figure out a business model that isn't "charging anyone and everyone who watches, listens, quotes, sings or even mentions my work".
the photography industry is slowly moving in that direction too, where 50 years ago almost all photographers charged for shooting the photos and then charged for each print, the "digital revolution" has made that many just charge a bit more for the shoot, and provide a couple of nicely-packaged DVDs with all the RAWs afterwards for the client to make as many prints as he may wish to, no royalties required.
and if *they* can do it, considering they're probably one of the most technophobe industries there are (witness the glass-plate/negative, large-format/small-format, manual/auto-exposure, manual/auto-focus and of course film/digital transitions and the reaction to them), chances are that any other industry can.
so, the studios' next target ought to be ISPs, right? they're also multibillion dollar companies making money off of THEIR content. And everyone else's. Nevermind the fact that neither YouTube nor the internet would've grown to their current sizes if they had been only providers of Hollywood-produced content instead of the "free for all" that they've always been.
what's next, Hollywood suing deviantArt for ilegally profiting from the hundreds of "Pirates of the Caribbean" fanart that get posted daily? suing Flickr for the thousands of underage girls who post the lyrics of their favorite, RIAA-sanctioned songs along with their ego shots?
fuck, that's the way it's always been. Give people a way to freely express themselves, and sooner or later they'll start making derivative works of popular media, legally or not, but that's hardly the service providers' fault. And if the studios would be smart in any way, they'd appreciate the free publicity, and monitor YouTube to see whether the illegal rips of any TV show are more popular than the rest, to start promoting the heck out of the DVDs.
no, capitalism relies on educated, informed consumers to make the right decisions, therefore trademarks are not only beneficial, they're perhaps even a necessity of capitalism, just like laws against false advertising and such.
copyright and patents, on the other hand, are just government-enforced artificial monopolies, and as such something that any pure capitalist (which I'm not, btw) ought to be against.
worst-case scenario, we end up with ancient, unsupported versions on Linux/BSD, and a monopolist controlling the platform's Windows and Mac implementations... how is this different than the situation we have now with Adobe, exactly?
fuck, we may even get lucky and either Microsoft or the Mono developers will offer a cross-platform suite for *creating* Silverlight content, not just reproducing it, before MS decides to "take his ball and go home". And even if it can only create content for that ancient, unsupported version of the player, it'll still be better than what we have now.
but Microsoft products have a tendency to make n00bs of every kind *feel* they've mastered their tools, hence their natural preference.