If the system of imposing morality on corporations by activism actually worked, then nobody would buy diamonds or Microsoft products. The corporations are just too powerful.
"I have half a million subscribers who would love to use an iPod with my service," says Napster's Gorog.
What he doesn't say is "But we've encrypted our files, to stop our subscribers from doing that."
"You have this device consumers love, but they're being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple. People are bored with that."
Which is a lie. You can play any normal mp3 or AAC file on an iPod, as well as rip CDs etc. The only thing which can make it impossible to use your music with an iPod is if you deliberately make it impossible, by encrypting it so people can't get at it.
Maybe your customers are starting to see the pitfalls in paying for encrypted files which they can't decrypt.
Of-course I prefer not to be on the phone while driving, but you can't do much about it.
Erm, yes you can. You can not use your mobile phone whilst driving. I don't know anyone who isn't capable of this. If you find this difficult, then maybe you've got an unhealthy dependence on constant connectivity or something. Thinking that everyone has the same problem that you do is often a warning sign.
On one hand, the reason they can do this is because their location in Russia means they don't have to pay the RIAA and the like. But on the other hand, only a tiny amount of the money you pay in mainstream stores gets back to the musicians anyway.
I don't run a monolithic operating system on which software from a variety of sources gets installed, I run a collection of packages from a trustworthy organisation which go together to produce an operating system with software.
When played properly, roleplaying games are the best way to practice empathy that I know of. Pretending to be a variety of different people means that in real life, you consider how other people might feel about something you do far more naturally. The people in the RPG society at university I went to were some of the nicest people one could hope to meet. As well as being generally very intelligent and imaginative, of course.
You choosing to use some also-ran player and/or format as a way to justify your theivery (yeah, I said it),
And so demonstrated that you're either trying to mislead people, or you've been misled yourself.
It's instructive to note how the copyright authoritarians always seem to feel the need to use deceitful terminology when making their case. If their case was worth listening to, they would be able to put it forward honestly.
I could demolish most of the rest of the post, but once you've established that the speaker is trying to deceive you, there's really no point.
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You make it sound so simple. Truth is that there's a lot more to the way your brain works than just whether you're smart or not, and so you can't deduce that someone will be able to do something just because they're smart. I've been trying to learn "social skills" for a few years now, without much headway, largely because I don't think it is a question of skills, in my case. It's more like the "average person" being far away in a place which I don't want to go anywhere near. But you're clearly a very different person to me, what you describe as your accomplishments sound to me more like some sort of horrible trap.
To socialise with someone, you need to be able to connect, and that means being a pair of "person-types" which are in some way compatible. I think the "person-type" which I am and which I want to be is one that isn't compatible with that many others.
I can answer that in broad generality, but as soon as you start to get in the least bit specific, it starts depending very heavily on the details of the particular field you're thinking of.
The problem you have is that the group of people X want an idea developed, and organisation Y won't develop it unless they get payed.
The copyright/patent solution to this problem is that organisation Y develops it anyway, because they can rely on government to restrict the freedom of the group of people X, in such a way that they can take money from everyone in group X by threatening to withhold the idea.
But the more obvious way of doing it is simply that group X pays organisation Y to develop it.
Of course, this is not exactly problem-free either. Group X may be insufficiently organised, or it might consist mostly of people who don't actually join in and do this, but sit around hoping that the rest of the group will do it for them and they won't have to pay. (And this is where it depends entirely on what field you're thinking of.) But given how big the problems caused by the freedom-restriction approach are, often big enough to obviously outweigh any benefits in the first place, (and the way they just get bigger at time passes, as more and more power accumulates, and causes ever harsher restrictions), I certainly don't know of any field in which the problems of this other approach are anywhere near as big, and I very much doubt that such a field of any significance exists.
Of course, there's another solution to the situation, of "organisation Y does it anyway, because they can persuade enough people in group X to give them money by means other than threats enforced by government", which is a system which is already effectively being implemented in certain areas where copyright isn't really very effective any more. (You can even combine the two. And there are several other possibilities, like the culture of patronage (suppressed by copyright) coming back and the like, if you employ a little more imagination.)
A good example is drug research. A large chunk of this is already funded directly by the people, through the medium of government and taxes, (in universities and the like), and most of the rest of this funding also comes from government through state healthcare services paying for drugs. But large amounts of this is second stream of funding is wasted due to other nonessential-to-research activities of drug companies such as marketing, and the roundabout way it is done means that the use of drugs gets carefully rationed as they naturally try to avoid paying the drug company more than they need to. Not to mention that people in poorer countries don't get to use the drug at all. If it was all funded directly, it would actually cost the taxpayer less in the long term since the process no longer involves paying for and sustaining the destructive competition of the drug companies, and you get an end result that everyone (or at least far more people) can use.
The property system was devised to solve a very simple and fundamental problem: many items, such as loaves of bread, or chairs, cannot be used by large numbers of people without problems, such as finding someone else has already eaten the bread or is sitting in the chair. Therefore there will arise times when more than one person wants to eat the bread or sit in the chair, and conflicts will arise.
Hence we need a system for dealing with those conflicts, by deciding who gets to sit in the chair or eat the bread. And the system we use is the property system. We assign control over such things to individual people, and call those items "their property".
With ideas, the sort of things which are covered by patents and copyright, these conflicts do not exist. When you have an idea, everyone can make use of it without limiting its functionality. Hence there is no such problem to solve. No reason for such notions of property to exist. The notion of "intellectual property" is therefore an absurdity.
The purpose of copyrights and patents is completely different to the purpose of property. Deliberately implying otherwise is deception.
And if anyone needs to make use of deception when putting their case forward, it's a good sign that their case isn't strong enough to stand on its own merits.
(Also, copyrights and patents are a really stupid way of trying to get people to create ideas. Giving up your freedom is very seldom a good plan, and the limitations on freedom imposed by copyrights and patents have two obvious effects; they create more power, which by its nature centralises and then corrupts those who hold too much of it, thereby creating entities which hinder the growth of the very thing which we're supposed to be encouraging, and they cripple the end result, meaning for example that your new drugs are only of limited use, because only the relatively wealthy can use them. I can't immediately think of a field in which we wouldn't be better off in the final analysis if we used other non-freedom-removing means of paying the people who we need to pay to keep things moving, and in many fields we'd be better off with no such system at all over the current system.)
Idiot box!?? Television is the greatest storytelling medium ever invented, and can be seen as such if you know where to find the right programmes, instead of leaving it on one channel like a lemon.
Most "calm down, it's only a joke" posts don't involve the creation of strawmen. Or indeed insults. (Is introducing insults whilst describing a post as "rage-filled" another example of your sense of humour?)
If indeed you did know that audio drama still had its uses and were "bending reality" to get your joke in, then it probably wasn't the best plan, since the joke worked on the basis of an assumed superiority and being non-factual tends to dent that image, but I would need to apologise. But since you responded not by pointing that out, (as would be the natural response in that case), but with vitriol, I don't think I'd believe you if you did say that now.
Sorry, but in what possible way is radio drama "obsolete"? Are you sure you don't mean something like "not made in America, because American broadcasting always runs along the same worn-out lines"? It's massively cheaper to make good quality audio drama, and in dialogue-heavy stories, the visuals have a tendency to approach irrelevancy. Moreover, if the visuals are sufficiently difficult to realise or if one particular image of a scene is never going to satisfy anybody, radio can have "better" visuals by harnessing the power of imagination. Plus you can listen to it whilst doing something else. Try comparing the radio and TV versions of the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, looking at the Radio 4 schedules, or examining what was happening to Doctor Who between TV series sometime (generalising the medium) if you find it difficult to grasp.
And I don't see much point in HDTV either. The resolutions we use at the moment are more than sufficient for conveying all the visual information that anyone could possibly process. All it's going to deliver is a brief period of "ooh, look how sharp the visuals are!" Then once people are used to it, television will continue to perform in the exact same way it did before. To suggest that the difference between it and regular TV is in any way remotely comparable to the difference between TV and radio is really quite daft.
The real problem is the establishment which keeps pushing on children works which are almost written in a foreign language, because they have this weird idea that literature is somehow like some sort of refined spirit which needs to be left to mature in oaken casks for a couple of centuries before it's any good.
Shakespeare was a good writer, but he was pretty derivative, he was hardly one of the greatest writers of the last millennium or anything special like that. Give the kids some modern literature, then they can spend their time understanding it as literature, instead of struggling to overcome the barriers caused by the differences between the modern world and the old world, and their respective languages, barriers which are neither necessary nor helpful.
In case anyone doesn't quite understand this - KDE is 10 times more expensive to develop for than Microsoft Windows!
No. Everything in KDE is available under the GPL. That means KDE is free to develop for. You only have to pay if you want to make your software proprietary.
When I see that someone is being dishonest like this, I immediately assume that they are trying to trick me, and discount what they are saying. A bit like using the word "steal" in a copyright infringement argument. If your point has merit, then it should be able to stand on its own, without being supported by deception.
Copyright (copyrestriction) and patents do not "protect" works and ideas. That's just silly, what danger are these works and ideas supposed to be threatened with again? If anything, they should actually be described as harming those ideas, since the purpose of an idea is to be used, and they restrict the freedom for people to do that. An idea which is patented is an idea which is in one sense, crippled. For example, (medical) drugs could help a lot more people if their development was funded by a means other than patents*, because poorer people could use them. You're using language which has been devised to distort by those who have a vested interest in less freedom of idea usage.
The idea behind patents is to encourage the creation of more works and ideas. However, software patents have the opposite effect. Allowing software patents takes away our freedom for absolutely zero benefit to society. The only people they benefit are the rich and powerful.
*(In addition, most of the research is actually done by others, and a large part of the "patent income" is used for marketing.)
That's not quite the right question. You need to figure out why exactly we treat the killing of humans in a different way to the killing of (other) animals. Once you've done that, all you need to do is see whether it applies to foetuses. Trying to decide whether something is "human" without knowing what you want your definition of "human" to do is a recipe for confusion.
(It's difficult to come up with a reason which puts unwanted foetuses in the same group as "conventional" humans without either suggesting Earth has too few people on it, or treating some sort of mythology as factual.)
Thus, I hope people will understand that making sure that our games are purchased instead of stolen is very important to us. Frankly, I do not agree that requiring the CD to be in the drive "does not prevent copyright infringement," even though I understand that this is almost always true for the technically adept. This is a sensitive issue, but the future of game development depends on preventing piracy, so I hope people will have patience with the basic safety measures we have used.
You know, I can't help but wonder if the current problems with copy-prevention* software actually stem from the idea that copyright infringement is stealing, which the RIAA have been creating, (for entirely different reasons of course, they need to make sure middlemen still exist). Understanding that copyright infringement and stealing are very different things is very similar to understanding that the problem isn't how to stop "piracy", but how to encourage purchasing. And once you understand that, not just intellectually but naturally as well, then it becomes increasingly obvious that pissing off your customers more and more isn't the cleverest way to go about it.
*"Copy-protection" is of course another example of inaccurate terminology designed to make people think about something in a distorted way that can be found within this field, going all the way back to the time a concept was named "copyright" rather than "copyrestriction".
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is a theory, and it's the only theory we have. Intelligent design is a mere hypothesis.
If the system of imposing morality on corporations by activism actually worked, then nobody would buy diamonds or Microsoft products. The corporations are just too powerful.
What he doesn't say is "But we've encrypted our files, to stop our subscribers from doing that."
"You have this device consumers love, but they're being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple. People are bored with that."
Which is a lie. You can play any normal mp3 or AAC file on an iPod, as well as rip CDs etc. The only thing which can make it impossible to use your music with an iPod is if you deliberately make it impossible, by encrypting it so people can't get at it.
Maybe your customers are starting to see the pitfalls in paying for encrypted files which they can't decrypt.
Erm, yes you can. You can not use your mobile phone whilst driving. I don't know anyone who isn't capable of this. If you find this difficult, then maybe you've got an unhealthy dependence on constant connectivity or something. Thinking that everyone has the same problem that you do is often a warning sign.
They're missing the most important type of security; a browser which is not Internet Explorer.
On one hand, the reason they can do this is because their location in Russia means they don't have to pay the RIAA and the like. But on the other hand, only a tiny amount of the money you pay in mainstream stores gets back to the musicians anyway.
aptitude install
I don't run a monolithic operating system on which software from a variety of sources gets installed, I run a collection of packages from a trustworthy organisation which go together to produce an operating system with software.
Wouldn't browsers like Opera and KHTML be safe due to not being based in America?
When played properly, roleplaying games are the best way to practice empathy that I know of. Pretending to be a variety of different people means that in real life, you consider how other people might feel about something you do far more naturally. The people in the RPG society at university I went to were some of the nicest people one could hope to meet. As well as being generally very intelligent and imaginative, of course.
And so demonstrated that you're either trying to mislead people, or you've been misled yourself.
It's instructive to note how the copyright authoritarians always seem to feel the need to use deceitful terminology when making their case. If their case was worth listening to, they would be able to put it forward honestly.
I could demolish most of the rest of the post, but once you've established that the speaker is trying to deceive you, there's really no point.
You make it sound so simple. Truth is that there's a lot more to the way your brain works than just whether you're smart or not, and so you can't deduce that someone will be able to do something just because they're smart. I've been trying to learn "social skills" for a few years now, without much headway, largely because I don't think it is a question of skills, in my case. It's more like the "average person" being far away in a place which I don't want to go anywhere near. But you're clearly a very different person to me, what you describe as your accomplishments sound to me more like some sort of horrible trap. To socialise with someone, you need to be able to connect, and that means being a pair of "person-types" which are in some way compatible. I think the "person-type" which I am and which I want to be is one that isn't compatible with that many others.
I can answer that in broad generality, but as soon as you start to get in the least bit specific, it starts depending very heavily on the details of the particular field you're thinking of.
The problem you have is that the group of people X want an idea developed, and organisation Y won't develop it unless they get payed.
The copyright/patent solution to this problem is that organisation Y develops it anyway, because they can rely on government to restrict the freedom of the group of people X, in such a way that they can take money from everyone in group X by threatening to withhold the idea.
But the more obvious way of doing it is simply that group X pays organisation Y to develop it.
Of course, this is not exactly problem-free either. Group X may be insufficiently organised, or it might consist mostly of people who don't actually join in and do this, but sit around hoping that the rest of the group will do it for them and they won't have to pay. (And this is where it depends entirely on what field you're thinking of.) But given how big the problems caused by the freedom-restriction approach are, often big enough to obviously outweigh any benefits in the first place, (and the way they just get bigger at time passes, as more and more power accumulates, and causes ever harsher restrictions), I certainly don't know of any field in which the problems of this other approach are anywhere near as big, and I very much doubt that such a field of any significance exists.
Of course, there's another solution to the situation, of "organisation Y does it anyway, because they can persuade enough people in group X to give them money by means other than threats enforced by government", which is a system which is already effectively being implemented in certain areas where copyright isn't really very effective any more. (You can even combine the two. And there are several other possibilities, like the culture of patronage (suppressed by copyright) coming back and the like, if you employ a little more imagination.)
A good example is drug research. A large chunk of this is already funded directly by the people, through the medium of government and taxes, (in universities and the like), and most of the rest of this funding also comes from government through state healthcare services paying for drugs. But large amounts of this is second stream of funding is wasted due to other nonessential-to-research activities of drug companies such as marketing, and the roundabout way it is done means that the use of drugs gets carefully rationed as they naturally try to avoid paying the drug company more than they need to. Not to mention that people in poorer countries don't get to use the drug at all. If it was all funded directly, it would actually cost the taxpayer less in the long term since the process no longer involves paying for and sustaining the destructive competition of the drug companies, and you get an end result that everyone (or at least far more people) can use.
Hence we need a system for dealing with those conflicts, by deciding who gets to sit in the chair or eat the bread. And the system we use is the property system. We assign control over such things to individual people, and call those items "their property".
With ideas, the sort of things which are covered by patents and copyright, these conflicts do not exist. When you have an idea, everyone can make use of it without limiting its functionality. Hence there is no such problem to solve. No reason for such notions of property to exist. The notion of "intellectual property" is therefore an absurdity.
The purpose of copyrights and patents is completely different to the purpose of property. Deliberately implying otherwise is deception.
And if anyone needs to make use of deception when putting their case forward, it's a good sign that their case isn't strong enough to stand on its own merits.
(Also, copyrights and patents are a really stupid way of trying to get people to create ideas. Giving up your freedom is very seldom a good plan, and the limitations on freedom imposed by copyrights and patents have two obvious effects; they create more power, which by its nature centralises and then corrupts those who hold too much of it, thereby creating entities which hinder the growth of the very thing which we're supposed to be encouraging, and they cripple the end result, meaning for example that your new drugs are only of limited use, because only the relatively wealthy can use them. I can't immediately think of a field in which we wouldn't be better off in the final analysis if we used other non-freedom-removing means of paying the people who we need to pay to keep things moving, and in many fields we'd be better off with no such system at all over the current system.)
Idiot box!?? Television is the greatest storytelling medium ever invented, and can be seen as such if you know where to find the right programmes, instead of leaving it on one channel like a lemon.
Most "calm down, it's only a joke" posts don't involve the creation of strawmen. Or indeed insults. (Is introducing insults whilst describing a post as "rage-filled" another example of your sense of humour?)
If indeed you did know that audio drama still had its uses and were "bending reality" to get your joke in, then it probably wasn't the best plan, since the joke worked on the basis of an assumed superiority and being non-factual tends to dent that image, but I would need to apologise. But since you responded not by pointing that out, (as would be the natural response in that case), but with vitriol, I don't think I'd believe you if you did say that now.
Looks like my post may have been of some use.
Sorry, but in what possible way is radio drama "obsolete"? Are you sure you don't mean something like "not made in America, because American broadcasting always runs along the same worn-out lines"? It's massively cheaper to make good quality audio drama, and in dialogue-heavy stories, the visuals have a tendency to approach irrelevancy. Moreover, if the visuals are sufficiently difficult to realise or if one particular image of a scene is never going to satisfy anybody, radio can have "better" visuals by harnessing the power of imagination. Plus you can listen to it whilst doing something else. Try comparing the radio and TV versions of the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, looking at the Radio 4 schedules, or examining what was happening to Doctor Who between TV series sometime (generalising the medium) if you find it difficult to grasp.
And I don't see much point in HDTV either. The resolutions we use at the moment are more than sufficient for conveying all the visual information that anyone could possibly process. All it's going to deliver is a brief period of "ooh, look how sharp the visuals are!" Then once people are used to it, television will continue to perform in the exact same way it did before. To suggest that the difference between it and regular TV is in any way remotely comparable to the difference between TV and radio is really quite daft.
The real problem is the establishment which keeps pushing on children works which are almost written in a foreign language, because they have this weird idea that literature is somehow like some sort of refined spirit which needs to be left to mature in oaken casks for a couple of centuries before it's any good.
Shakespeare was a good writer, but he was pretty derivative, he was hardly one of the greatest writers of the last millennium or anything special like that. Give the kids some modern literature, then they can spend their time understanding it as literature, instead of struggling to overcome the barriers caused by the differences between the modern world and the old world, and their respective languages, barriers which are neither necessary nor helpful.
No. Everything in KDE is available under the GPL. That means KDE is free to develop for. You only have to pay if you want to make your software proprietary.
When I see that someone is being dishonest like this, I immediately assume that they are trying to trick me, and discount what they are saying. A bit like using the word "steal" in a copyright infringement argument. If your point has merit, then it should be able to stand on its own, without being supported by deception.
Not in a democracy. That word implies that power rests with the people.
More accurate would be "if no one can abolish any laws when there is a rich lobby that depends on them, then it's not really a democracy."
America is of course a plutocracy.
The idea behind patents is to encourage the creation of more works and ideas. However, software patents have the opposite effect. Allowing software patents takes away our freedom for absolutely zero benefit to society. The only people they benefit are the rich and powerful.
*(In addition, most of the research is actually done by others, and a large part of the "patent income" is used for marketing.)
(It's difficult to come up with a reason which puts unwanted foetuses in the same group as "conventional" humans without either suggesting Earth has too few people on it, or treating some sort of mythology as factual.)
You know, I can't help but wonder if the current problems with copy-prevention* software actually stem from the idea that copyright infringement is stealing, which the RIAA have been creating, (for entirely different reasons of course, they need to make sure middlemen still exist). Understanding that copyright infringement and stealing are very different things is very similar to understanding that the problem isn't how to stop "piracy", but how to encourage purchasing. And once you understand that, not just intellectually but naturally as well, then it becomes increasingly obvious that pissing off your customers more and more isn't the cleverest way to go about it.
*"Copy-protection" is of course another example of inaccurate terminology designed to make people think about something in a distorted way that can be found within this field, going all the way back to the time a concept was named "copyright" rather than "copyrestriction".