"The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months."
The ONLY reasonable interpretation is that after that it will not be. full stop.
"It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that."
Did anyone anywhere ever think the the former communicates the latter?
"And â" okay, we've got it â" it's not ready."
So stop redirecting 25% of us until you've had a another good run at fixing it. And then, maybe put it out there and invite people to check it out instead of redirecting 1/4 of us while threatening us that its just months away from being the only site. You do realize a lot of us would have checked it out, given you feedback, and probably without having a nuclear meltdown over it.
"We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; "
So... The new logo design was good then!
" the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process."
If only this site had had a mechanism by which you could communicate with us and get feedback, perhaps in the form of comments! And if that mechanism itself had a mechanism with which to bubble the more interesting comments to the surface... why you'd really have something there!
But quite frankly, the "F*ck Beta" post are much more annoying than the new interface./. is nothing without the comments. You want the new interface without the fuck beta comments? Start an original website somewhere else. Otherwise, they have to deal with the community.
Really, this is slashdot, we complain about everything.
Nothing has ever brought the signal to noise ratio anywhere near this. This meets the threshold of protest unprecedented here and indeed anywhere else I've seen.
but once it's done, its done and you can't go back.
Says nobody who has ever worked with software, ever. Of course they can go back.
Based on what people are saying though, it seems like Dice didn't kill the slashdot community, it was already collapsing under it's own weight.
-shrug-, it was contracting. That's not the same as collapsing under its own weight.
So, in the end, maybe its best to go away, new interface or not.
Or they could just leave it alone. A text only web forum that moderates itself.../. is not exactly a high maintenance project. I'm willing to bet if Dice wants to wash its hands of the whole affair we could take over/. and self host classic/. for a pittance.
I wouldn't know I don't use it, and of the people I do know that use it most are using it increasingly less.
Facebook has also made an about face on some policies that the users got up in arms about.
Finally, as bad as you or I might think facebook is, when has it done anything so monumentally disliked that the facebook user community impoded on the scale that/. just has. Where every single page is complaining about it. Every update posted on any company page is responded to with complaint about the facebook change. Its Never happened, nor anything close to it.
Its always been sporadic grumbling here or there, occasionally loud but never anything at all like this./. has always had its flare ups of complaints during redesigns, people displiking april fools, bennet haselton making it his personal blog, idiotic editing, lousy summaries... etc... but that just noise compared to THIS.
The beta is far more useable than classic mode is with all of these posts,
And with no beta, these posts go away, and classic is more useful again.
f I'm going to go to war over slashdot it will be with the people messing it up -- and that isn't Dice.
The/. community didn't stir up this hornets nest. Dice did.
Their stubborn silence with respect to addressing the communities perceived shortcomings with the new site is what escalated this to where it is now.
In the end Dice can do what they want with the site. Whether it has any value to anyone once they've finished remains an open question.
Managing a community is hard. If this was anywhere but/. the insightful comments here watching the "other" site implode would put the blame squarely on the sites management for failing utterly to meet the needs of the community and audience; failing to maintain communicatation about what the community wants and needs.. And then maintaining stoic silence and apparent determination to just keep on doing what they are doing in the face of rising outrage just stems to further fuel that outrage.
You just don't get this level of outrage from the people who use a site unless you REALLY botch it good.
This event will be a great case study in managing (or failing to manage) an online community one day.
No its shit. The first 3 stores are in that idiotic banner. With no summary... so if you want to read the first 3 summaries you have to click on each story.
Then there is the decision to jam usually irrelevant stock photography in with each story. So every story about a network has a picture of a network cable or switch or something... and it takes up 30% of the summary space, making the section longer, driving the comments further down... which is the only reason anyone comes here... the comments. Nobody is lamenting the lack of shitty editorial stock photos.
If an individual subscriber wants to prioritize VoIP over torrents they can do that on their own equipment (or have the ISP do it for them). But that should affect only the traffic for that subscriber, and should have ZERO impact on any other subscriber's traffic.
You apparently have no idea how the internet actually works.
Even if your ISP actually did something that idiotic and kept every subscribers data in its own bucket, as soon as the traffic moves up to a peer its all in one bucket and the peer doesn't know or care which data is yours and which is someone elses.
No! If I dedicate all my bandwidth to torrents and you dedicate all yours to VoIP why should you get preferential treatment?
Because you aren't buying a fixed bandwidth allocation from your ISP unless you are leasing a T1 or something.
And again, even if you do have a leased T1 with fixed dedicated bandwidth that you can allocate however you like... that's only yours up to the ISP. As soon as the data reaches a peer, its "mixed up" with everyone elses data, and your ISP has no control over how the peer prioritizes its data.
Net Neutrality states that all data must be treated equally.
No it doesn't. And nobody wants that. Do you really want your voip call to break up because the line is slammed with my linux ISO download?
Net Neutrality more accurately states that all destinations be treated equally.
The ISP cannot make a deal with google to throttle my traffic to microsoft and yahoo but give me fast access to google.
The ISP cannot throttle my connection to netflix because it made a deal with amazon. Nor can it host its own video streaming service and throttle my connection to 3rd party services.
In other words, proper net neutrality prevents ISPs from ACTIVELY using throttlling to advance the relative functionality of a service it would prefer you to use over an equivalent service from somewhere else.
ISPs can still throttle torrents to ensure voip traffic moves through. ISPs can also still have deals to have netflix servers onsite if they wish, which are lower latency and faster than accessing apple or amazon servers which are not onsite; however they make reasonable best effort for that offsite traffic. They can't deliberately cripple or throttle that connection.
Finally, net neutrality also effectively prevents ISPs from turning around BILLING amazon and other 3rd party content providers for the "privilege" of having unthrottled access to the ISPs customers -- this is something the ISPs would LOVE to do.
I know Shakespeare is not alive. That's why I said IF he was. Not sure why you felt it necessary to attack a strawman.
Because the living or dead status of the author is an important consideration in what I proposed. If you want to use Shakespeare, then the 'dead' status applies. If you want to postulate a case invoking the 'living' status, choose a living author... its not like they are hard to find.
Why? Competition is good. If people like the original, go with the original. If people like a derivative, let that succeed...maybe he will take ideas from it and work it in.
Lots of reasons. The most obvious one is that a highly derivative work is much easier to produce. Just as patents grant monopoly on production for the invention, so too does copyright. Creating a compelling and interesting setting, that catches mass market appeal is hard. Hitching your wagon to it is easy. Copyright should reward the hard part. That is the contribution to our culture. Theres no reason to go out of the way to skew benefit towards the low hanging fruit of highly derivative work.
You can make a derivative work, set in the Star Trek universe, about Captain Kirk J. Aimes of the Starship Columbia, who boldly ventures forth to fight the Romulan Empire - the last of which, is used in a nominative fair use way, particularly with a disclaimer that this is a work of fiction based on Roddenberry's original creation.
So I guess your previous suggestions still die on the vine then?
"Star Wars: The Musical, or Star Wars: The Han Solo Story"
I'm curious what Star Wars: The Musical would be about without the characters or places in the film it was ostensibly an adaptation of.
And "Star Wars: The Han Solo Story" without a "Han Solo" also isn't going to be much of a story.
You can make a derivative work, set in the Star Trek universe, about Captain Kirk J. Aimes of the Starship Columbia, who boldly ventures forth to fight the Romulan Empire - the last of which, is used in a nominative fair use way, particularly with a disclaimer that this is a work of fiction based on Roddenberry's original creation.
At this point why make a Star Trek work? If I must avoid everything trademarked* except some minor name dropping? What is the point of setting it against the Romulan Empire if I can't use established culture, heraldry, main settings, main characters, or any other recognizable elements of it?
* - big if. I submit that your Kirk is too close to the trademarked Kirk, and your ship Columbia is to confusing with the ship Columbia from the Star Trek series with Captain quantum leap Archer...
Go back to my earlier example of sampling and remixing - why do electronic artists HAVE to use samples from known songs? Because that's part of the art.
That's a rather exceptional case. And even there my sympathies tend to lie with the original artists, although a balace with fair use also exists... 3 second samples don't bug me. Rapping over top of someone elses instrumental is fine too, but I don't object to the original artist having a say in the matter.
Are you arguing that fiction shouldn't be subject to copyright? Or art that's not realism, for that matter?
No. I'm suggesting that rationalizing the social copyright contract doesn't really apply to fiction as "knowledge".
The copyright rationalization for fiction is to "promote culture and the arts", which is fine. But in that context, the promotion of CULTURE does have some strings attached to it. Quality over Quantity. Is there more cultural value to letting Rowling have her Muggles, and Roddenberry have his Starfleet and so forth... or is there more cultural value in letting it all be jumbled together by anyone who can mash their hand to a keyboard.
A valid argument can be made for either case. But the point stands that: a valid argument can be made for either case. One is not automatically better than the other.
Whereas strictly from a knowledge standpoint, more is always better.
No I wouldn't. Trademark law would also HAVE to be scaled back massively to eliminate the trademarking of characters, places, events, catch phrases etc.
Look it up, that's the trend. Every single character and place in Harry Potter is trademarked. "Ron Weasley", the name, is trademarked in dozens of countries... even if the book went into the public domain today, nearly anyone or thing in it is trademarked and would still be off limits. Surely that's not the vision you have?
Otherwise how am I supposed to make a Star Trek(tm) movie about Captain James Kirk (tm) on the Starship Enterprise (tm) where they Boldly go where no one has gone before (tm) to fight the Romulan Empire(tm)?
No one could imply that their Star Trek was from Gene Roddenberry
So it would just be "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy High, The New Adventures of Wesley Crusher"... and I'd know it wasn't a "Roddenberry one" how exactly?
The original authors would still be able to rise above the crowd, provided their product was better. And if it's not, if one of those new follow-ons actually was better, doesn't it deserve the chance to be recognized?
If they can write better stories, why can't they create their own settings and characters too? Why exactly do they HAVE to write "Star Wars" stories?
Remember, this is a discussion of copyright and adding to the storehouse of public knowledge
And how exactly are tales about an imaginary people living a long time ago in a galaxy far far away contributing to the "storehouse of public knowledge" anyway?
That seems pretty tangential to anything I'd call "knowledge".
If Shakespeare were alive he might have hated Baz Lurhmans take on Romeo and Juliet, but I think it's better that we have it, even if not everyone likes it.
But Shakespeare is not alive. And if you read my original post I suggested derivative works be wide open shortly after the authors death.
So under my proposed copyright regime it still doesn't matter what dead people want.
Why? He can still make his official versions/movies how he likes, but why bar versions he won't like?
a) He really shouldn't have to compete with his own creations.
b) Art is... art. I have no objection letting the artist control it for a while for the aesthetic properties of the art. If the artist doesn't want a song in a compilation CD or cleanser jingle; or his movie edited into an orange juice commercial I'll give him that until he's dead. Its not just about the money... its about the principle driver to create art.
Current system: Good books made into movies. Meh books never made into movies. 20-year copyright system: Good books made into movies when they're fresh. Meh books made into movies twenty years later.
Why are "meh" books not being made into movies now?
Is it really the cost of optioning a 20 year old "meh" book? Really?? That seems doubtful.
By comparison, direct copying and redistribution is at worst plagiarism, and at best, piracy. The moral justification for allowing someone to copy and sell DVDs of Star Wars is significantly lower than the justification for allowing someone to make Star Wars: The Musical, or Star Wars: The Han Solo Story.
Interesting take.
No consistency, no canon, nothing. Just everyone attaching their suckers to the franchise to try and make a buck off it in a race to the bottom. Star Trek, Dr. Who, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Warhammer 40K, Harry Potter, Hunger Games all more than 5 years old... any franchise worth anything would be obliterated under a tsunami of shit.
[...] for allowing someone to make Star Wars: The Musical, or Star Wars: The Han Solo Story.
The original is barely 5 years old; say for Star Wars... suppose its 1982, Return of the Jedi hasn't even been made yet.. is it really time to open the flood gates and let anyone anywhere make their own star wars direct to DVD sequels?
The first Harry Potter book came out in 1997, and the movie came out in 2001 and grossed almost a billion dollars. Why in the hell would you sit, waiting until 2017 to get that billion?
You completely missed the point.
I said right in the very post you replied to that runaway successes like Harry Potter would be made into movies right away. For the very reasons you stated.
However, then I said, books that DON'T get turned into movies in the first 5 years. Will get strip mined when they come out of copyright.
Its not just going to be the top grossing HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTERS, its also going to be low budget TV-movie-of-the-week movie-mills doing the stripmining, the also-rans, indie producers on a shoe string budgets, 4 idiots with a camera and youtube, etc, etc.
Paying the author for exclusivity now and reaping those billions sounds way better than waiting 20 years to compete for whatever scraps you can make off a story two decades stale.
Like Enders Game? Yeah, nobody wants to watch a movie about a 2 decade old book. How much do you think Card's take was? Do you think he deserves zilch because it didn't go blockbuster in 1985? (Ok... I actually think Card's a complete asshat but that's beside the point; its still a timely example of a 20ish year old book worth a lot of movie money. And of course that's setting aside the 50ish year old Hobbit/LotR)
Clearly not every movie worth making out of a book happens in the first 3-5 years.
Is that because they can't? Because how many 1914 books were made? Its hard to say.
I concede your point that book rights are usually just a line item in the overall cost of a movie. But that's just one example of a derivative work. There are countless other examples.
With 20 year expirations on copyright, Nintendo loses control over Pokemon in 2 years. And any jackass could start printing Pokemon cards, making Pokemon movies, releasing Pokemon games and books.
Meanwhile copyright on Magic the Gathering would already be up. Not the new cards of course, but some chinese outfit could now legally distribute Black Lotus in original Alpha style. That somehow seems wrong to me. And the "Magic the Gathering" movies would be heading straight to video near you. Seems odd that WotC (Hasbro) wouldn't have any control over it.
Trademark law would come into play since everybody is trademarking everything related to IP these days.. but if we're going to do copyright reform to limit terms to 20 years I'm assuming we aren't going to let Warner Brothers own the trademark on the name "Ron Weasley" in perpetuity either...
Certainly well, well under a million dollars for ordinary books.
Its not JUST about the money. Maybe the author doesn't want some shitty Hollywood hack job done to his book directed by McG starring Justin Bieber. Or a no budget straight to DVD release put out by one of those crappy TV movie-mills. I'm willing to give the author the right not to see that done to his work while he's alive, if that's what he wants.
I'm sure that some serious lovers of opera dislike the idea of having
Since when have the FANS ever had any say in how a work is used?
The AUTHOR however I think deserves not to have to live through seeing his artistic expression co-opted like that if he doesn't want to.
I mostly agree with you 100% with respect to the original work.
The main issue I see though is its short enough that derivative works become an issue.
Take books to movies. Runaway success like Hunger Games and Harry Potter will get made into movies within the 20 year copyright and the author will get some reward.
But any book that didn't get made into a movie in the first 3-5 years would probably languish for the next 15, and then get strip-mined by the film industry.
For some reason the idea of Hollywood sitting around strip mining books from the 90s without compensating the authors rubs me the wrong way. Especially knowing that they are literally waiting like vultures for them to roll over into the public domain precisely so they can deprive authors of any royalty or payment.
Likewise, I dislike the idea of musicians having their music co-opted without their consent into jingles to peddle stain removers and political parties in commercials.
So I propose that the copyright be broken up a bit. a) The rights to basic broadcast and redistribution expire after 20 years. So you can make a copy of a movie, or a book or whatever after 20 years for free. You can show it in a theatre or school, etc.
b) However the rights over derivative works (book to movie, etc) and commercial re-purposing (e.g. advertising etc) are "75 years or life of the author + 5 years*, whichever is longer" or something, and requires active renewal for a nominal fee. (So that abandoned works automatically roll into the public domain quickly.)
(* + 5 years to prevent the inevitable strip mining of an authors estate right after they die, capitalizing on the news of their death as free marketing for whatever they produce by strip mining. So the estate can benefit a bit from that.)
And I am sure that the prosecutor are completely innocent and in no way complicit whit this system that make their work so easier and boost their political carrier.
Apparently some do have ethics; hence the agents apparent need to lie to them.
"That's not fair!!! I don't want or need a Halliburton morality detector!"
Bad analogy. If it follows the ACA model, you'll be able to choose who you buy your morality detector from.
Don't support totalitarianism. You won't like it, even though you claim we need it "for the children".
So vote for socialized universal health care like a civilized person. Nobody actually wanted the ACA, its terrible. But its still better than what was in place previously.
Oh, and universal health care isn't totalitarianism either, not even the the bodged together sort of health care the ACA is.
THIS JUST IN: Prosecutors sometimes lie and cheat to get convictions, regardless of the legality or even sometimes the truth.
THIS JUST IN: commenter on slashdot posts without even reading the summary.
The prosecutors aren't lying and cheating. Its the agents supplying the prosecutors the facts of the case who are lying to the prosecutors about where the evidence came from.
But what can they bring to the table that old winamp and mp3s can't do better?
In game control of volume and play list management via the steam overlay.
Integrated mixer to easily manage volume levels, via the steam overlay; separate game audio, music volume, and voice (as well as setting different audio devices for each...)
Runs everywhere steam os runs. (winamp doesn't run on mac or linux...)
"Big picture mode" support - means being able to control everything easily with a game controller.
Telephony has gone from "You can hear a pin drop" to "Can you hear me now?".
On the flipside, I now pay 0$ per month instead of $25/mo for my voip "landline", and can make free calls to any major city in the country, and calls to anywhere else at a fraction of the price. And I can take the ATA with me, and use it from nearly anywhere at no charge, as well as use an app on my laptop or phone with it. It comes with voicemail and caller id...
On top of all that, where the landline used to be my "primary" number, it has long since been demoted into distant 2nd behind my cell phone.
I'm not happy with the relative voice quality or reliabity but the features and price make it worth it.
Rather than prop up the POTS system, I'd prefer we move to enforce minimum uptime and disaster/emergency robustness of the internet.
Go ahead and eat peanuts or food containing peanuts (such as peanut butter) during pregnancy, unless you are allergic to them or a health professional advises you not to.
You may have heard that peanuts should be avoided during pregnancy. This is because the government previously advised women that they may want to avoid eating peanuts if there was a history of allergy (such as asthma, eczema, hay fever, food allergy or other types of allergy) in their child's immediate family.
This advice has now been changed because the latest research has shown that there is no clear evidence showing that eating peanuts during pregnancy affects the chances of your baby developing a peanut allergy.
Nobody ever mentioned there was an age "too young" to expose them to it,
No idea how old your son is, but there was a decade or so where "No peanuts" to babies, and even to pregnant / breastfeeding mothers was a real thing.
It was going on full volume when our kids were born 10 years ago, and we get notices every year about there being kids with major severe peanut allergies in their classes.
Slashdot Mirror
"And Ã" okay, we've got it Ã" it's not ready."
-- and be sure to add utf support to that bug list.
"The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months."
The ONLY reasonable interpretation is that after that it will not be. full stop.
"It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that."
Did anyone anywhere ever think the the former communicates the latter?
"And â" okay, we've got it â" it's not ready."
So stop redirecting 25% of us until you've had a another good run at fixing it. And then, maybe put it out there and invite people to check it out instead of redirecting 1/4 of us while threatening us that its just months away from being the only site. You do realize a lot of us would have checked it out, given you feedback, and probably without having a nuclear meltdown over it.
"We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; "
So... The new logo design was good then!
" the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process."
If only this site had had a mechanism by which you could communicate with us and get feedback, perhaps in the form of comments! And if that mechanism itself had a mechanism with which to bubble the more interesting comments to the surface... why you'd really have something there!
Are you just trolling us? :p
But quite frankly, the "F*ck Beta" post are much more annoying than the new interface. /. is nothing without the comments. You want the new interface without the fuck beta comments? Start an original website somewhere else. Otherwise, they have to deal with the community.
Really, this is slashdot, we complain about everything.
Nothing has ever brought the signal to noise ratio anywhere near this. This meets the threshold of protest unprecedented here and indeed anywhere else I've seen.
but once it's done, its done and you can't go back.
Says nobody who has ever worked with software, ever.
Of course they can go back.
Based on what people are saying though, it seems like Dice didn't kill the slashdot community, it was already collapsing under it's own weight.
-shrug-, it was contracting. That's not the same as collapsing under its own weight.
So, in the end, maybe its best to go away, new interface or not.
Or they could just leave it alone. A text only web forum that moderates itself ... /. is not exactly a high maintenance project. I'm willing to bet if Dice wants to wash its hands of the whole affair we could take over /. and self host classic /. for a pittance.
I can disprove you in one word: Facebook.
I wouldn't know I don't use it, and of the people I do know that use it most are using it increasingly less.
Facebook has also made an about face on some policies that the users got up in arms about.
Finally, as bad as you or I might think facebook is, when has it done anything so monumentally disliked that the facebook user community impoded on the scale that /. just has. Where every single page is complaining about it. Every update posted on any company page is responded to with complaint about the facebook change. Its Never happened, nor anything close to it.
Its always been sporadic grumbling here or there, occasionally loud but never anything at all like this. /. has always had its flare ups of complaints during redesigns, people displiking april fools, bennet haselton making it his personal blog, idiotic editing, lousy summaries... etc... but that just noise compared to THIS.
This is something entirely different.
So I'm not sure what "facebook" proves.
The beta is far more useable than classic mode is with all of these posts,
And with no beta, these posts go away, and classic is more useful again.
f I'm going to go to war over slashdot it will be with the people messing it up -- and that isn't Dice.
The /. community didn't stir up this hornets nest. Dice did.
Their stubborn silence with respect to addressing the communities perceived shortcomings with the new site is what escalated this to where it is now.
In the end Dice can do what they want with the site. Whether it has any value to anyone once they've finished remains an open question.
Managing a community is hard. If this was anywhere but /. the insightful comments here watching the "other" site implode would put the blame squarely on the sites management for failing utterly to meet the needs of the community and audience; failing to maintain communicatation about what the community wants and needs.. And then maintaining stoic silence and apparent determination to just keep on doing what they are doing in the face of rising outrage just stems to further fuel that outrage.
You just don't get this level of outrage from the people who use a site unless you REALLY botch it good.
This event will be a great case study in managing (or failing to manage) an online community one day.
No its shit. The first 3 stores are in that idiotic banner. With no summary... so if you want to read the first 3 summaries you have to click on each story.
Then there is the decision to jam usually irrelevant stock photography in with each story. So every story about a network has a picture of a network cable or switch or something... and it takes up 30% of the summary space, making the section longer, driving the comments further down... which is the only reason anyone comes here... the comments. Nobody is lamenting the lack of shitty editorial stock photos.
And that's just the very tip of the iceberg.
Get rid of beta. It sucks.
If an individual subscriber wants to prioritize VoIP over torrents they can do that on their own equipment (or have the ISP do it for them). But that should affect only the traffic for that subscriber, and should have ZERO impact on any other subscriber's traffic.
You apparently have no idea how the internet actually works.
Even if your ISP actually did something that idiotic and kept every subscribers data in its own bucket, as soon as the traffic moves up to a peer its all in one bucket and the peer doesn't know or care which data is yours and which is someone elses.
No! If I dedicate all my bandwidth to torrents and you dedicate all yours to VoIP why should you get preferential treatment?
Because you aren't buying a fixed bandwidth allocation from your ISP unless you are leasing a T1 or something.
And again, even if you do have a leased T1 with fixed dedicated bandwidth that you can allocate however you like... that's only yours up to the ISP. As soon as the data reaches a peer, its "mixed up" with everyone elses data, and your ISP has no control over how the peer prioritizes its data.
-------
Beta Sucks. Cancel it.
I'm not sure pointing out a hack they used on their own website invalidates their desire not to see it running on their TV platform.
Next you'll be saying Nintendo should allow flash apps onto their virtual console/app store because they use flash on their website.
The latter doesn't build the case for the former at all.
Net Neutrality states that all data must be treated equally.
No it doesn't. And nobody wants that. Do you really want your voip call to break up because the line is slammed with my linux ISO download?
Net Neutrality more accurately states that all destinations be treated equally.
The ISP cannot make a deal with google to throttle my traffic to microsoft and yahoo but give me fast access to google.
The ISP cannot throttle my connection to netflix because it made a deal with amazon. Nor can it host its own video streaming service and throttle my connection to 3rd party services.
In other words, proper net neutrality prevents ISPs from ACTIVELY using throttlling to advance the relative functionality of a service it would prefer you to use over an equivalent service from somewhere else.
ISPs can still throttle torrents to ensure voip traffic moves through. ISPs can also still have deals to have netflix servers onsite if they wish, which are lower latency and faster than accessing apple or amazon servers which are not onsite; however they make reasonable best effort for that offsite traffic. They can't deliberately cripple or throttle that connection.
Finally, net neutrality also effectively prevents ISPs from turning around BILLING amazon and other 3rd party content providers for the "privilege" of having unthrottled access to the ISPs customers -- this is something the ISPs would LOVE to do.
I know Shakespeare is not alive. That's why I said IF he was. Not sure why you felt it necessary to attack a strawman.
Because the living or dead status of the author is an important consideration in what I proposed. If you want to use Shakespeare, then the 'dead' status applies. If you want to postulate a case invoking the 'living' status, choose a living author... its not like they are hard to find.
Why? Competition is good. If people like the original, go with the original. If people like a derivative, let that succeed...maybe he will take ideas from it and work it in.
Lots of reasons. The most obvious one is that a highly derivative work is much easier to produce. Just as patents grant monopoly on production for the invention, so too does copyright. Creating a compelling and interesting setting, that catches mass market appeal is hard. Hitching your wagon to it is easy. Copyright should reward the hard part. That is the contribution to our culture. Theres no reason to go out of the way to skew benefit towards the low hanging fruit of highly derivative work.
Doesn't Cisco do this too? Its a royal piss off.
You can make a derivative work, set in the Star Trek universe, about Captain Kirk J. Aimes of the Starship Columbia, who boldly ventures forth to fight the Romulan Empire - the last of which, is used in a nominative fair use way, particularly with a disclaimer that this is a work of fiction based on Roddenberry's original creation.
So I guess your previous suggestions still die on the vine then?
"Star Wars: The Musical, or Star Wars: The Han Solo Story"
I'm curious what Star Wars: The Musical would be about without the characters or places in the film it was ostensibly an adaptation of.
And "Star Wars: The Han Solo Story" without a "Han Solo" also isn't going to be much of a story.
You can make a derivative work, set in the Star Trek universe, about Captain Kirk J. Aimes of the Starship Columbia, who boldly ventures forth to fight the Romulan Empire - the last of which, is used in a nominative fair use way, particularly with a disclaimer that this is a work of fiction based on Roddenberry's original creation.
At this point why make a Star Trek work? If I must avoid everything trademarked* except some minor name dropping? What is the point of setting it against the Romulan Empire if I can't use established culture, heraldry, main settings, main characters, or any other recognizable elements of it?
* - big if. I submit that your Kirk is too close to the trademarked Kirk, and your ship Columbia is to confusing with the ship Columbia from the Star Trek series with Captain quantum leap Archer...
Go back to my earlier example of sampling and remixing - why do electronic artists HAVE to use samples from known songs? Because that's part of the art.
That's a rather exceptional case. And even there my sympathies tend to lie with the original artists, although a balace with fair use also exists... 3 second samples don't bug me. Rapping over top of someone elses instrumental is fine too, but I don't object to the original artist having a say in the matter.
Are you arguing that fiction shouldn't be subject to copyright? Or art that's not realism, for that matter?
No. I'm suggesting that rationalizing the social copyright contract doesn't really apply to fiction as "knowledge".
The copyright rationalization for fiction is to "promote culture and the arts", which is fine. But in that context, the promotion of CULTURE does have some strings attached to it. Quality over Quantity. Is there more cultural value to letting Rowling have her Muggles, and Roddenberry have his Starfleet and so forth... or is there more cultural value in letting it all be jumbled together by anyone who can mash their hand to a keyboard.
A valid argument can be made for either case. But the point stands that: a valid argument can be made for either case. One is not automatically better than the other.
Whereas strictly from a knowledge standpoint, more is always better.
... except that you'd still have trademark rights
No I wouldn't. Trademark law would also HAVE to be scaled back massively to eliminate the trademarking of characters, places, events, catch phrases etc.
Look it up, that's the trend. Every single character and place in Harry Potter is trademarked. "Ron Weasley", the name, is trademarked in dozens of countries... even if the book went into the public domain today, nearly anyone or thing in it is trademarked and would still be off limits. Surely that's not the vision you have?
Otherwise how am I supposed to make a Star Trek(tm) movie about Captain James Kirk (tm) on the Starship Enterprise (tm) where they Boldly go where no one has gone before (tm) to fight the Romulan Empire(tm)?
No one could imply that their Star Trek was from Gene Roddenberry
So it would just be "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy High, The New Adventures of Wesley Crusher" ... and I'd know it wasn't a "Roddenberry one" how exactly?
The original authors would still be able to rise above the crowd, provided their product was better. And if it's not, if one of those new follow-ons actually was better, doesn't it deserve the chance to be recognized?
If they can write better stories, why can't they create their own settings and characters too? Why exactly do they HAVE to write "Star Wars" stories?
Remember, this is a discussion of copyright and adding to the storehouse of public knowledge
And how exactly are tales about an imaginary people living a long time ago in a galaxy far far away contributing to the "storehouse of public knowledge" anyway?
That seems pretty tangential to anything I'd call "knowledge".
If Shakespeare were alive he might have hated Baz Lurhmans take on Romeo and Juliet, but I think it's better that we have it, even if not everyone likes it.
But Shakespeare is not alive. And if you read my original post I suggested derivative works be wide open shortly after the authors death.
So under my proposed copyright regime it still doesn't matter what dead people want.
Why? He can still make his official versions/movies how he likes, but why bar versions he won't like?
a) He really shouldn't have to compete with his own creations.
b) Art is ... art. I have no objection letting the artist control it for a while for the aesthetic properties of the art. If the artist doesn't want a song in a compilation CD or cleanser jingle; or his movie edited into an orange juice commercial I'll give him that until he's dead. Its not just about the money... its about the principle driver to create art.
Current system: Good books made into movies. Meh books never made into movies.
20-year copyright system: Good books made into movies when they're fresh. Meh books made into movies twenty years later.
Why are "meh" books not being made into movies now?
Is it really the cost of optioning a 20 year old "meh" book? Really?? That seems doubtful.
By comparison, direct copying and redistribution is at worst plagiarism, and at best, piracy. The moral justification for allowing someone to copy and sell DVDs of Star Wars is significantly lower than the justification for allowing someone to make Star Wars: The Musical, or Star Wars: The Han Solo Story.
Interesting take.
No consistency, no canon, nothing. Just everyone attaching their suckers to the franchise to try and make a buck off it in a race to the bottom. Star Trek, Dr. Who, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Warhammer 40K, Harry Potter, Hunger Games all more than 5 years old... any franchise worth anything would be obliterated under a tsunami of shit.
[...] for allowing someone to make Star Wars: The Musical, or Star Wars: The Han Solo Story.
The original is barely 5 years old; say for Star Wars... suppose its 1982, Return of the Jedi hasn't even been made yet.. is it really time to open the flood gates and let anyone anywhere make their own star wars direct to DVD sequels?
The first Harry Potter book came out in 1997, and the movie came out in 2001 and grossed almost a billion dollars. Why in the hell would you sit, waiting until 2017 to get that billion?
You completely missed the point.
I said right in the very post you replied to that runaway successes like Harry Potter would be made into movies right away. For the very reasons you stated.
However, then I said, books that DON'T get turned into movies in the first 5 years. Will get strip mined when they come out of copyright.
Its not just going to be the top grossing HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTERS, its also going to be low budget TV-movie-of-the-week movie-mills doing the stripmining, the also-rans, indie producers on a shoe string budgets, 4 idiots with a camera and youtube, etc, etc.
Paying the author for exclusivity now and reaping those billions sounds way better than waiting 20 years to compete for whatever scraps you can make off a story two decades stale.
Like Enders Game? Yeah, nobody wants to watch a movie about a 2 decade old book. How much do you think Card's take was? Do you think he deserves zilch because it didn't go blockbuster in 1985? (Ok... I actually think Card's a complete asshat but that's beside the point; its still a timely example of a 20ish year old book worth a lot of movie money. And of course that's setting aside the 50ish year old Hobbit/LotR)
Clearly not every movie worth making out of a book happens in the first 3-5 years.
They're not.
Is that because they can't? Because how many 1914 books were made? Its hard to say.
I concede your point that book rights are usually just a line item in the overall cost of a movie. But that's just one example of a derivative work. There are countless other examples.
With 20 year expirations on copyright, Nintendo loses control over Pokemon in 2 years. And any jackass could start printing Pokemon cards, making Pokemon movies, releasing Pokemon games and books.
Meanwhile copyright on Magic the Gathering would already be up. Not the new cards of course, but some chinese outfit could now legally distribute Black Lotus in original Alpha style. That somehow seems wrong to me. And the "Magic the Gathering" movies would be heading straight to video near you. Seems odd that WotC (Hasbro) wouldn't have any control over it.
Trademark law would come into play since everybody is trademarking everything related to IP these days.. but if we're going to do copyright reform to limit terms to 20 years I'm assuming we aren't going to let Warner Brothers own the trademark on the name "Ron Weasley" in perpetuity either...
Certainly well, well under a million dollars for ordinary books.
Its not JUST about the money. Maybe the author doesn't want some shitty Hollywood hack job done to his book directed by McG starring Justin Bieber. Or a no budget straight to DVD release put out by one of those crappy TV movie-mills. I'm willing to give the author the right not to see that done to his work while he's alive, if that's what he wants.
I'm sure that some serious lovers of opera dislike the idea of having
Since when have the FANS ever had any say in how a work is used?
The AUTHOR however I think deserves not to have to live through seeing his artistic expression co-opted like that if he doesn't want to.
I mostly agree with you 100% with respect to the original work.
The main issue I see though is its short enough that derivative works become an issue.
Take books to movies. Runaway success like Hunger Games and Harry Potter will get made into movies within the 20 year copyright and the author will get some reward.
But any book that didn't get made into a movie in the first 3-5 years would probably languish for the next 15, and then get strip-mined by the film industry.
For some reason the idea of Hollywood sitting around strip mining books from the 90s without compensating the authors rubs me the wrong way. Especially knowing that they are literally waiting like vultures for them to roll over into the public domain precisely so they can deprive authors of any royalty or payment.
Likewise, I dislike the idea of musicians having their music co-opted without their consent into jingles to peddle stain removers and political parties in commercials.
So I propose that the copyright be broken up a bit.
a) The rights to basic broadcast and redistribution expire after 20 years. So you can make a copy of a movie, or a book or whatever after 20 years for free. You can show it in a theatre or school, etc.
b) However the rights over derivative works (book to movie, etc) and commercial re-purposing (e.g. advertising etc) are "75 years or life of the author + 5 years*, whichever is longer" or something, and requires active renewal for a nominal fee. (So that abandoned works automatically roll into the public domain quickly.)
(* + 5 years to prevent the inevitable strip mining of an authors estate right after they die, capitalizing on the news of their death as free marketing for whatever they produce by strip mining. So the estate can benefit a bit from that.)
And I am sure that the prosecutor are completely innocent and in no way complicit whit this system that make their work so easier and boost their political carrier.
Apparently some do have ethics; hence the agents apparent need to lie to them.
"That's not fair!!! I don't want or need a Halliburton morality detector!"
Bad analogy. If it follows the ACA model, you'll be able to choose who you buy your morality detector from.
Don't support totalitarianism. You won't like it, even though you claim we need it "for the children".
So vote for socialized universal health care like a civilized person. Nobody actually wanted the ACA, its terrible. But its still better than what was in place previously.
Oh, and universal health care isn't totalitarianism either, not even the the bodged together sort of health care the ACA is.
THIS JUST IN: Prosecutors sometimes lie and cheat to get convictions, regardless of the legality or even sometimes the truth.
THIS JUST IN: commenter on slashdot posts without even reading the summary.
The prosecutors aren't lying and cheating. Its the agents supplying the prosecutors the facts of the case who are lying to the prosecutors about where the evidence came from.
But what can they bring to the table that old winamp and mp3s can't do better?
In game control of volume and play list management via the steam overlay.
Integrated mixer to easily manage volume levels, via the steam overlay; separate game audio, music volume, and voice (as well as setting different audio devices for each...)
Runs everywhere steam os runs. (winamp doesn't run on mac or linux ...)
"Big picture mode" support - means being able to control everything easily with a game controller.
I can see it being useful. Potentially.
Telephony has gone from "You can hear a pin drop" to "Can you hear me now?".
On the flipside, I now pay 0$ per month instead of $25/mo for my voip "landline", and can make free calls to any major city in the country, and calls to anywhere else at a fraction of the price. And I can take the ATA with me, and use it from nearly anywhere at no charge, as well as use an app on my laptop or phone with it. It comes with voicemail and caller id...
On top of all that, where the landline used to be my "primary" number, it has long since been demoted into distant 2nd behind my cell phone.
I'm not happy with the relative voice quality or reliabity but the features and price make it worth it.
Rather than prop up the POTS system, I'd prefer we move to enforce minimum uptime and disaster/emergency robustness of the internet.
How does that work?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...
The government has already turned the corner, due to the previous recommendation against peanuts apparently "backfiring".
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/p...
Peanuts are safe in pregnancy
Go ahead and eat peanuts or food containing peanuts (such as peanut butter) during pregnancy, unless you are allergic to them or a health professional advises you not to.
You may have heard that peanuts should be avoided during pregnancy. This is because the government previously advised women that they may want to avoid eating peanuts if there was a history of allergy (such as asthma, eczema, hay fever, food allergy or other types of allergy) in their child's immediate family.
This advice has now been changed because the latest research has shown that there is no clear evidence showing that eating peanuts during pregnancy affects the chances of your baby developing a peanut allergy.
Nobody ever mentioned there was an age "too young" to expose them to it,
No idea how old your son is, but there was a decade or so where "No peanuts" to babies, and even to pregnant / breastfeeding mothers was a real thing.
It was going on full volume when our kids were born 10 years ago, and we get notices every year about there being kids with major severe peanut allergies in their classes.