[the section 117 exception gives a reason the software might be allowed to be altered.]:
[...] it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make [...] adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or [...]"
So if I can't agree to a EULA, am I allowed to invert the right conditional jump instruction? It's essential that I do so for me to use the software, right?
Okay, probably not. What's the right counterargument?
(I'm especially interested in counterarguments that use the law as written and no case law; why? Because I'm interested in understanding how to interpret the law as written, and I think the answer might enlighten me)
Why should education have a particular return on investment?
For education to have a particular return on investment, the market value of educated people has to be at a particular level. What good comes from that market value being high?
I would like my education to have a high return on investment (oh well, it's free, I'm even making money and saving some, and it's been five+ fun years so far). But I don't think that's a good argument.
So tell me again: why is it good if education has a high ROI? Make sure that you're not arguing why it has a high ROI, or why education is good, but why it should be good.
Denmark has the second most equal distribution of income[1]. It's also the country where people are the most happy about their lives[2].
What does this prove? Well, I'm probably guilty of cherry-picking evidence, and correlation isn't necessarily causation, but I think it suggests that equality doesn't ruin our lives (yes, I'm probably also biased, being a Dane).
That certainly matches my personal experience. Free medical care, free education, well-stocked public libraries, a postal service I was happy to use (and still am, I just use it much less), the state even gives you money while you're studying and you can life off of it if you're a bit frugal. Sure, you get to pay a lot of taxes, but I'm happy to do that, seeing how I'm getting my money's worth for it.
As the supply becomes infinite, what happens to the price? As people have the ability to copy and now distribute data, text, music and movies at virtually zero cost, why is this data worth anything anymore?
I disagree with your terminology here. Not your argument or conclusion (I have yet to take a stand on those), but your terminology.
(maybe that makes me a pedantic, but so be it. If the mods don't like this, oh well; I have karma to burn and I'm willing to have it be burned to say what I want to say.)
Value and price are two differen things. Value is, roughly speaking, how much we like having something and/or how badly we want it. Price is the amount of resources we trade away to get it.
I value much of the software I run. I value listening to JT Bruce's "A skeptic's Hypothesis". I value watching "Big Buck Bunny". But I pay aprice of 0 for all of these. (There's a transaction cost toall of these, sure, but no price).
What will happen to the value as supply rises? Pretty much nothing. The price will likely drop to zero. Also, people might get a closer approximation of their real preferences if there is more competition.
But they'll still like listening to $BAND just as much.
(someone used to call this "value in trade" versus "value in use"; I think it was a greek, but you're armed with the power of Google, so use it if you need.)
Software pirates have an inflated sense of entitlement [...] settling for second-class software versions is not part of their agenda.
I used to not pay for software. That was until I discovered Linux and Free Software, and it dawned on me that I could continue not paying for software, have a cleaner conscience and---as they say---get the job done.
As it happens, not keeping track of key generators is good. Not having to spend an extra 15 minutes on various shady sites is good. If other pirates think like me (I never really know when "[people] think like me" is a good assumption, so judge for yourself), we might have a good target audience to grow the Linux/FOSS user base.
[note that post my Amiga 500 days, I always paid for games. Technology, or the lack thereof, did a lot of preventing me from pirating games, but I continue to buy today even when I have the technology to pirate. Or play free games like Frozen Bubble, Supertux, Wesnoth and Nexuiz.]
Out of 2500 songs downloaded, only 1 album sale is lost.
So if 6*10^9 people download the same song, 2.4*10^6 album sales are lost.
Let me rephrase that. If everybody downloads a song offa' Thriller, Michael Jackson still gets 97.6 million sales. We need everybody to download 42 songs offa' Thriller for MJ to get ~0 sales.
Although... one can argue that a UI is intuitive by virtue of being easily learned, which it is by being similar to a UI you expect your users to already know.
i.e. the Karmic UI will be intuitive (by my new definition) to Jaunty users. And (at least partially) to GNOME users from other distros.
Here's a fun fact from economics: when polled, people will say that they want
lower taxes
a balanced budget
more public goods
The only way I know of to keep giving people what they want is by starting in a situation where the public till is getting fuller and then employing Zeno's paradox;-)
No true Scotsman is a logical fallacy where the meaning of a term is ad hoc redefined to make a desired assertion about it true.
(Also known as Proof by Semantic Shift, according to my fortune.)
Also worth quoting is the non-example:
it is perfectly justified to say, "No true vegetarian eats meat," because not eating meat is the single thing that precisely defines a person as a vegetarian.
What is it you think is being redefined? Kethinov is talking about regulations which interfere with a free market---not all regulations. In other words, he's saying that the meat-eating (market-interfering) copyright is not a true vegetarian (non-interfering regulation).
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
Also
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
I don't think the licenses you talk about are Open Source by what we might want to call the official definition.
That's the different between Open Source Software and Free Open Source Software
I don't know what dictionary you're getting your definition of open source from; but I take it you're not using http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd. It says
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
hey france, history spoke, and you lost, and the british won. now everyone speaks english in the world
I've recently taken up fencing, learning the en garde position, doing a bit of marche and a fleche attack here or there. The French language survives (in niches).
heck, even if you are danish, or belgian: how the hell are you suppose to preserve danish and belgian culture in the face of the english onslaught?
It's not so hard---watch some Danish films and TV shows, listen to some Danish bands, read some Danish literature, make sure that someone is keeping a big archive of Danish media. We can't exclude English* culture, but that was never the goal, was it?
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: That's NOT funny!!
Apologies to all feminists who were offended by... no wait, if you're so up-tight you can't take a joke, screw you. If you just want equal rights for men and women and can take a joke, best of luck realising your ideals:-)
Here's a neat trick that I use to make mpd work better for me:
Use xbindkeys, set ctrl-alt-shift-f to run mpc next and ctrl-alt-shift-d to run mpc pause. Then you can control your music player without switching away from emacs/firefox/pornview/.... (add bindings of 'a' to prev and 's' to stop if you feel like it; I do.). I'm quite amazed that no music player I know of does something like this by default (or makes it easy to do)---and the "Multimedia Keys" are no substitute, as they're a long distance away from your hands when you're typing (even worse when running pornvi... uh, emacs!)
I can also recommend binding a key to xterm -geometry 80x3-32-64 -e 'watch -tn1 mpc'. That'll give you nice "mpd status window" in the lower right of your screen.
(strictly speaking, I'm binding ctrl-alt-shift-[aoeu] because I'm using the dvorak layout, but that's [asdf] on qwerty, so it all makes sense... yes?)
Perhaps PulseAudio is just getting most of the "blame" because it is the most recently changed part of the audio subsystem
It could also be that in a lot of users' eyes, PA is overhyped. Some distros get PA installed and configured right, others don't (yes, I'm looking at you, Ubuntu). From the perspective of the users of the distros that don't get PA right, Pöttering is saying "PulseAudio is the greatness" which conflicts with their experiences. Telling someone that a thing they dislike is good for them and they should want it is not a great way to make friends (see also "eat your vegetables").
Now the problem is the people and the distros installing it by default on a desktop where it is utterly useless.
In fact it's worse than useless (on Ubuntu): whenever I move away from my wireless access point at home (i.e. I'm on my bike on my way to the university), my sound stutters; this is probably PulseAudio spending too much time on making a new map of the network and too little time on actually handling sound waves (but I'm speculating).
Did no one test this? Am I the only person using a "ThinkPod" as a portable music player? Oh, I guess it's not one of those 95% most common use cases, so it's no biggie if it isn't handled properly.
Except that there are twenty disjoint chunks of 5% least common use cases not being fixed because they don't affect that many people, except everyone is affected by one... grr... </hyperbole> <apology/>
Slashdot Mirror
I concur?
[the section 117 exception gives a reason the software might be allowed to be altered.]:
[...] it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make [...] adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or [...]"
So if I can't agree to a EULA, am I allowed to invert the right conditional jump instruction? It's essential that I do so for me to use the software, right?
Okay, probably not. What's the right counterargument?
(I'm especially interested in counterarguments that use the law as written and no case law; why? Because I'm interested in understanding how to interpret the law as written, and I think the answer might enlighten me)
such people should probably be starting [...]
Why?
Why should education have a particular return on investment?
For education to have a particular return on investment, the market value of educated people has to be at a particular level. What good comes from that market value being high?
I would like my education to have a high return on investment (oh well, it's free, I'm even making money and saving some, and it's been five+ fun years so far). But I don't think that's a good argument.
So tell me again: why is it good if education has a high ROI? Make sure that you're not arguing why it has a high ROI, or why education is good, but why it should be good.
Here's an empirical counterpoint:
Denmark has the second most equal distribution of income[1]. It's also the country where people are the most happy about their lives[2].
What does this prove? Well, I'm probably guilty of cherry-picking evidence, and correlation isn't necessarily causation, but I think it suggests that equality doesn't ruin our lives (yes, I'm probably also biased, being a Dane).
That certainly matches my personal experience. Free medical care, free education, well-stocked public libraries, a postal service I was happy to use (and still am, I just use it much less), the state even gives you money while you're studying and you can life off of it if you're a bit frugal. Sure, you get to pay a lot of taxes, but I'm happy to do that, seeing how I'm getting my money's worth for it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality (sort by "CIA Gini").
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index
(note that [2] doesn't say that life satisfaction correlates with income equality, nor that it doesn't. Make of that what you want.)
I got the remedy for that
aptitude install gnome-theme-aqua; gnome-terminal
Then, in gnome-terminal
aptitude install [program...]
As the supply becomes infinite, what happens to the price? As people have the ability to copy and now distribute data, text, music and movies at virtually zero cost, why is this data worth anything anymore?
I disagree with your terminology here. Not your argument or conclusion (I have yet to take a stand on those), but your terminology.
(maybe that makes me a pedantic, but so be it. If the mods don't like this, oh well; I have karma to burn and I'm willing to have it be burned to say what I want to say.)
Value and price are two differen things. Value is, roughly speaking, how much we like having something and/or how badly we want it. Price is the amount of resources we trade away to get it.
I value much of the software I run. I value listening to JT Bruce's "A skeptic's Hypothesis". I value watching "Big Buck Bunny". But I pay aprice of 0 for all of these. (There's a transaction cost toall of these, sure, but no price).
What will happen to the value as supply rises? Pretty much nothing. The price will likely drop to zero. Also, people might get a closer approximation of their real preferences if there is more competition.
But they'll still like listening to $BAND just as much.
(someone used to call this "value in trade" versus "value in use"; I think it was a greek, but you're armed with the power of Google, so use it if you need.)
Software pirates have an inflated sense of entitlement [...] settling for second-class software versions is not part of their agenda.
I used to not pay for software. That was until I discovered Linux and Free Software, and it dawned on me that I could continue not paying for software, have a cleaner conscience and---as they say---get the job done.
As it happens, not keeping track of key generators is good. Not having to spend an extra 15 minutes on various shady sites is good. If other pirates think like me (I never really know when "[people] think like me" is a good assumption, so judge for yourself), we might have a good target audience to grow the Linux/FOSS user base.
[note that post my Amiga 500 days, I always paid for games. Technology, or the lack thereof, did a lot of preventing me from pirating games, but I continue to buy today even when I have the technology to pirate. Or play free games like Frozen Bubble, Supertux, Wesnoth and Nexuiz.]
what is the name for someone who buys a game without playing it?
Ninjas can play computer games without even opening the box!
Out of 2500 songs downloaded, only 1 album sale is lost.
So if 6*10^9 people download the same song, 2.4*10^6 album sales are lost.
Let me rephrase that. If everybody downloads a song offa' Thriller, Michael Jackson still gets 97.6 million sales. We need everybody to download 42 songs offa' Thriller for MJ to get ~0 sales.
Numbers taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_worldwide
I know I'm taking your equation too literally, but I think this is an interesting way to think about it. Plus, numbers are fun ;-)
"Jerk Advertising"
I hear that's already being done by a lot of... adult websites.
security, stability, access to medical care, and clean drinking water.
But apart from that, what have the romans ever done for us?
As we all know (right?), the only intuitive user interface is the nipple; the rest is all learned:
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2002/08/nipple.html
Although... one can argue that a UI is intuitive by virtue of being easily learned, which it is by being similar to a UI you expect your users to already know.
i.e. the Karmic UI will be intuitive (by my new definition) to Jaunty users. And (at least partially) to GNOME users from other distros.
Sun386i-plugs?
I might agree with you, but their trademark is "SPARC", not "Spark".
I guess you're that one person who always pronouces it "spar-see" ;-)
Here's a fun fact from economics: when polled, people will say that they want
The only way I know of to keep giving people what they want is by starting in a situation where the public till is getting fuller and then employing Zeno's paradox ;-)
No *true* Scotsman would enforce copyrights...
I take it you're referring to the No True Scotsman logical fallacy.
The blurb from Wikipedia says:
No true Scotsman is a logical fallacy where the meaning of a term is ad hoc redefined to make a desired assertion about it true.
(Also known as Proof by Semantic Shift, according to my fortune.)
Also worth quoting is the non-example:
it is perfectly justified to say, "No true vegetarian eats meat," because not eating meat is the single thing that precisely defines a person as a vegetarian.
What is it you think is being redefined? Kethinov is talking about regulations which interfere with a free market---not all regulations. In other words, he's saying that the meat-eating (market-interfering) copyright is not a true vegetarian (non-interfering regulation).
Unless there's something I'm missing?
See my other post: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1414861&cid=29842015
From http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd:
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
Also
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
I don't think the licenses you talk about are Open Source by what we might want to call the official definition.
That's the different between Open Source Software and Free Open Source Software
I don't know what dictionary you're getting your definition of open source from; but I take it you're not using http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd. It says
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
hey france, history spoke, and you lost, and the british won. now everyone speaks english in the world
I've recently taken up fencing, learning the en garde position, doing a bit of marche and a fleche attack here or there. The French language survives (in niches).
heck, even if you are danish, or belgian: how the hell are you suppose to preserve danish and belgian culture in the face of the english onslaught?
It's not so hard---watch some Danish films and TV shows, listen to some Danish bands, read some Danish literature, make sure that someone is keeping a big archive of Danish media. We can't exclude English* culture, but that was never the goal, was it?
* language=English, nationality=USA (most often).
I'm aware not all feminists are zealots.
That reminds me of a joke:
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's NOT funny!!
Apologies to all feminists who were offended by... no wait, if you're so up-tight you can't take a joke, screw you. If you just want equal rights for men and women and can take a joke, best of luck realising your ideals :-)
Here's a neat trick that I use to make mpd work better for me:
Use xbindkeys, set ctrl-alt-shift-f to run mpc next and ctrl-alt-shift-d to run mpc pause. Then you can control your music player without switching away from emacs/firefox/pornview/.... (add bindings of 'a' to prev and 's' to stop if you feel like it; I do.). I'm quite amazed that no music player I know of does something like this by default (or makes it easy to do)---and the "Multimedia Keys" are no substitute, as they're a long distance away from your hands when you're typing (even worse when running pornvi... uh, emacs!)
I can also recommend binding a key to xterm -geometry 80x3-32-64 -e 'watch -tn1 mpc'. That'll give you nice "mpd status window" in the lower right of your screen.
(strictly speaking, I'm binding ctrl-alt-shift-[aoeu] because I'm using the dvorak layout, but that's [asdf] on qwerty, so it all makes sense... yes?)
How exactly do you propose to stop a process from doing so when it is running outside the scope of firefox?
Uhmm, chmod, write in ~/.firefox/, then...
Oh, wait, doh! Epic fail.
I don't care whether problems are caused by the kernel, a driver, an application, the phase of the moon, or whatever.
My sentiments exactly: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1409057&cid=29791305
Perhaps PulseAudio is just getting most of the "blame" because it is the most recently changed part of the audio subsystem
It could also be that in a lot of users' eyes, PA is overhyped. Some distros get PA installed and configured right, others don't (yes, I'm looking at you, Ubuntu). From the perspective of the users of the distros that don't get PA right, Pöttering is saying "PulseAudio is the greatness" which conflicts with their experiences. Telling someone that a thing they dislike is good for them and they should want it is not a great way to make friends (see also "eat your vegetables").
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578
TL;DR. Here's a slightly shorter guide to a great pulseaudio setup on Ubuntu:
apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio
In my experience it works flawlessly ;-)
Now the problem is the people and the distros installing it by default on a desktop where it is utterly useless.
In fact it's worse than useless (on Ubuntu): whenever I move away from my wireless access point at home (i.e. I'm on my bike on my way to the university), my sound stutters; this is probably PulseAudio spending too much time on making a new map of the network and too little time on actually handling sound waves (but I'm speculating).
Did no one test this? Am I the only person using a "ThinkPod" as a portable music player? Oh, I guess it's not one of those 95% most common use cases, so it's no biggie if it isn't handled properly.
Except that there are twenty disjoint chunks of 5% least common use cases not being fixed because they don't affect that many people, except everyone is affected by one... grr... </hyperbole> <apology/>