Stop bitching about it and put the blame where it belongs, on the people violating the rights of the copyright holders. (see, the word "right" is built into the name") Uh, no, it's anticipation of people violating the rights of others. If you don't believe me, go look up the history of home movies. DRM isn't a response to actual damages.
Everyone bitches about DRM and how much they hate it and how it violates their rights when most of those same people are violating the legally granted rights of the copyright holders. I am so fucking tired of hearing it. Tough shit. You don't know who's guilty and who's not. Worse, assuming you're not being an asshat hypocrite, are being 'punished' for stuff you didn't do, too. So, yes, you're going to have to listen to people who don't agree with the propoganda you've subscribed to. Boo fucking hoo.
But you MUST admit, they are STEALING the music. I don't know that:
a.)... the files they were downloading were the actual songs. b.)... they didn't have the CDs (or some other license to the songs in question) already to begin with. c.)... they even heard the songs they downloaded.
You're not using the term 'stealing' properly here, so I'll just assume you mean: They downloaded music and listened to it without paying for a license to it. I can suspect it, but no, I cannot 'admit' that they are breaking the law at all. Perhaps if you took another stab at your Law School homework, you'd see the shades of grey your ignorance is blinding you to right now.
This in fact is the only way to count the colors if you want to claim that dithering does not count. (Conversely if you do count dithering you could claim that the screen can display an astronomical number of colors, if viewed from so far away that the entire display looks like a single dot) I might agree with you except those are sub-pixels, not pixels, and if both of these units weren't so strictly defined. If the term 'sub-pixel' didn't exist, you'd be right.
What the hell is the complaint about? Even a screen with an 8-bit DAC is only capable of displaying 766 colours - each subpixel can show 255 brightnesses of three distinct wavelengths of light (as each subpixel can show the same black this makes 766, not 768). And if you want to get really picky, you can only display three colours - a flourescent backlit display does not emit light like a blackbody, it has a particular spectrum which is filtered by one of three filters. No matter the brightness, each red subpixel displays the same spectrum. Wow, this paragraph uses extreme literalism to remove any practicality from the argument.
So why the claims of millions of colours? Because the eye dithers. Light from all three subpixels land on cosited cones on the retina, and the optic nerve processes this weighted tristimulus response so that the brain perceives the equivalent of a particular wavelength. And then this shoots the previous argument in the foot.
Whether an individual subpixel can display 256 levels is quite irrelevant since dithering is capable of producing a higher colour depth at the expense of colour resolution. You still get full brightness resolution. And this is ok, because its not really possible to tell the difference. This point is irrelevent because you should get what is advertised.
What next, suing Nikon for daring to include Bayer filters on their CCDs? Yes, it is possible to build CCDs where the R, G and B are cosited, nobody actually uses the Foveon sensor because the difference in the capture picture is not discernable. This is a useless metaphor.
This whole thing is stupid. It sounds like people nitpicking advertising, without actually being aware of the technical concepts involved the image display process. You and the people that wasted their mod-points on your post are using your understanding of how displays work in order to artificially elevate yourselves above the masses. This may seem harsh, well, sorry, I wasn't very impressed with your post. The displays aren't reaching their advertised specs, some people noticed it, they feel they should get what was advertised to them. It doesn't matter that sub-pixels are just R, G, or B or that the color emitted is an illusion. Specs are specs. "Most people won't notice" is not a good argument, no matter how intimately you describe how a pixel on an LCD display works. Spare us the bullshit.
This isn't a phenomenon limited to Apple, it's an industry-wide phenomenon. 1.) That does not exhonorate Apple by any stretch of the imagination.
2.) Apple is held to a higher standard in this regard, Macs are quite popular in the illustration industry. They're supposed to be superior in this regard, but obviously that's questionable now.
Laugh at the though that when they go to bed, it will start beeping, frequently and quietly enough to be annoying, but infrequently enough that it's hard to find. But when they turn the lights back on... the beeping stops! As a victim of a prank similar to this, I feel compelled to warn you that you're risking your life.
You mean like when your airplane flight is cancelled and the airline offers you a free ticket. Or when the food at a restaurant is crappy and they give you a coupon to eat there again. Well.. sorta. It's more like when a company loans you a laptop to hack, then they let ya keep it, then they give ya ten thousand dollars on top of that.
1. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed. Part of me is digusted by this, part of me wonders how Adobe could possibly defend themselves from frivilous lawsuits otherwise. (I'm thinking about that story from yonks ago where somebody sued somebody else because there was a 'copy' of their content in their browser cache.)
I'm not familiar with the original case, but it is a minor technical tweak to solve the problem you describe. I work for a Large Media Company who out-sources their web email to a third party. We want our users to have one user name and password for everything they do with us, but we don't want the third party to see this information. When users go to our third-party hosted web mail site they are redirected to a login page we host which on success sets a cookie that the third party can use to verify that the user's login succeeded. Wow. Call me paranoid, but I'm glad I'm not using that mail service. I ran that past an IT friend of mine just to make sure I'm not misinterpretting what's going on and he had a similar reaction.
If Blizzard's only concern had been exposing CD keys they could have implemented a similar protocol. This was not what they objected to. Blizzard Does Not Get It. The protocol you suggested isn't exactly rife with security to begin with. And now you're suggesting that they should have opened that up to some group they've never heard of. This should be understood before claiming that Blizzard's not getting anything. BNETD's request only sounds reasonable to those not holding the purse strings.
Why is it that anyone who stands up for something worth standing up for (like the right to run a multiplayer game on your own terms) gets called stupid here when they get stamped on? I'll answer your question even though it was obviously intended to be rhetorical:
I was all for BNETD, actually. I loved StarCraft, hated seeing ads while using their service while games like Quake didn't have that centralization. BNETD would have been great! But they had too many ingredients stacked against them. First, it's Blizzard, they're successful, they have an enormous stash of lawyers and given that their money comes from games run on PCs (i.e. easiest to pirate) they are filled with resolve. Second, they quite intentionally designed Battle.net to be THE way their on-line games are matched. It's quite clear they had bigger plans to make money from that service. More resolve. Third, for reasons that either incredibly greedy or incredibly practical, they used this service in an attempt to maintain their CD-Key system to keep the gamers legit. Forth, all this was happening right when about the time the DMCA was out and about and untested. I remember when this was going on I couldn't believe they were actually going to try this battle. Worse, they were using the EFF to help them. I wanted them to win, believe me, but I just couldn't see how there was any way they thought they'd actually win this. From where I sat, the best outcome they could have hoped for was a racking up of huge lawyer bills and a precedent set against them. They made a nice PR push: "Well we tried to ask if we could have permission to talk to their servers to okay a game being played, but gee golly gosh they wouldn't let us into their copy protection system! Jerks!" But it wasn't a PR battle, and the CD-Key was a pretty big deal.
So, I will correct you, sir: I am not stamping on the guy standing up for something. I'm kicking the idiot for picking the wrong battle to fight and making it worse for everybody. That's the sort of thing that caused some content makers to seek the DMCA's introduction into law, and if the people involved had been running more on practicality than idealism, some serious trouble could have been spared. I wish they had won, but I wish more that they hadn't fought it at all.
It's not just 'fun to villify' Blizzard for this - they deserve far worse than villification - they've abused the courts to wreck other people's hard work because it exposed the obvious flaw in their copy-protection system I'm not happy with Blizzard's decisions that led to BNETD getting developed. Despite that, I don't agree with this here. For one thing, Blizzard did not act out of the norm. They created something and sought control over it. Anybody with a surprised look on their face that the C&D went out would not be able to claim they're very much in tune with how corps work. Nobody working at BNETD had any right to say "You gotta be kidding!" Second, you're not the judge of when a game's put out to pasture. There were copies of StarCraft still in stores after this whole BNETD thing died down. Third, that's nice that they had a flaw in their scheme and all, but BNETD still fought the battle they didn't have to.
That whole thing should never have escalated that far. A little bit of common sense would have prevented that. Instead, what we got was an appeal for sympathy. All I could do was shake my head and wonder just how many of the DMCAs teeth were sharpened over it.
"Actually, bnetd tried to discuss the issue with blizzard so they could authenticate against their CD-key servers. It's not like the effort wasn't made. Blizzard refused, because they would much rather sue them out of existence. And that's exactly what they did."
I remember. But look at this from another perspective: They wanted to be able to send any CD-Key they want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response. Does that really make sense from a copy protection point of view? Did anybody really expect Blizzard to go "well, alright, here's your own way of verifying any CD-Key you run across..."? Personally, for practical reasons or even for greedy ones, I don't see how.
Blizzard chose to sue them out of existence, but they did get a C&D. In other words, they had their opportunity to bow out, too. At least that would have spared us the whole DMCA bullshit that followed. That battle could have been saved for something other than copy protection. Blizzard was greedy, but they did not act unpredictably, here. If, for the noblest of noble reasons, I tried to create my own server to authenticate Windows XP/Vista boxes, could I reaaaaaaaaaaallllllly go crying about how big bad mean ol Microsoft was bullying me with their lawyers?
In all non-fairness, blizzard made it impossible for BNETD servers to discriminate over CD-KEYs, by utilizing encryption to prevent it. Yes, they're guilty of protecting their protection. Fine.
I.E. blizzard made it impossible for a third-party server interoperable with the battle net client to _not_ circumvent their protections. Right. They centralized the CD-Keys through their servers so they can blacklist pirated keys. That reason makes perfect sense even before the big obvious greed reason. This argument only makes it clearer why BNETD shouldn't have allowed this to go to court in the first place.
Your first line explains my point exactly. Britney Spears suck. However, she used to be (at least in the eyes of teenagers) hot, and had marketing experts push career. As long as you're relatively good looking (not even on your own: as long as you have something to work with for the makeup artist, good enough), and can follow a tune, it just depends on how good the marketing is I bolded the part where you made my point. Heh. She's gotta have some talent. Take that away? *Blip* No product to sell.
They built up a network that allows them to call the shot. There's very few that can do that and do it well (thus why you can count them on one hand) And they have THOUSANDS of employes to make it work. The content has to work or those thousands of employees can't really do anything. Yes, there are lots of people with talent out there, no, not all of them (by a loooong shot) are million dollar talent. Believe me, the music industry would love for that to be the case. They could churn out more albums and double their yearly profits. Heck, websites like YouTube or iTunes or even Rhapsody would love it, they'd have more content to sell. Novelty is well covered, but... well, Chocolate Rain won YouTube's awards. Heh.
Your sample source if flawed. American Idol is finding the top singers who: 1) Have no professional experience 2) Have no formal training Wrong on both counts. The only restriction is that they're not under contract. They've had professional singers before.
They eliminate them right off the bat so that they can make it seem like 98% of the people out there can only produce crap. They don't need to do anything clever to make it seem like 98% of the people that audition are crap. They are crap. Don't understimate the appeal of Hollywood.
One person out of every fifty is good enough to make a living making music at the level of current pop musicians if they so chose. I can agree with that, too. My problem, though, is that for all this talent, we're sure not hearing a lot about it. That's really surprising given the internet. Heck, YouTube made Chocolate Rain a star. What's going on here? I have two theories:
1.) The talent out there is talented, but still mediochre at best. Maybe they're stuck re-singing the same old songs that have already been written. Maybe they're not playing themselves up enough to be taken seriously. Maybe there's too much noise? I dunno, but for some reason they're not bubbling up into public consciencenous.
2.) Indie groups don't have enough appeal to reach behind niches. This is a sad possibility.
Mm.. Dunno. I'd just expect sites like YouTube to be far more entertaining with a ratio of talent that high.
They successfully used the DMCA to stop bnetd, a reverse engineering of the protocol. This was the first real test of the DMCA in court on many of the provisions and gave the law so many real teeth that it became the terror it is today. There was even a huge boycott of Blizzard for a short while. In all fairness, that lawsuit came about because BNETD's servers didn't discriminate over CD-KEYs, thus nullifying Blizzard's copy protection. It's fun to villify Blizzard over their use of the DMCA, but why anybody expected them to do anything but protect the IP of their cashcows (like Starcraft, for example) is a mystery. No other company would have acted differently. Frankly, the group behind BNETD had no reason to even act surprised about it. They picked that battle and they lost. Stupid.
Re:Artists should make the most money, not the lab
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 1
In virtually every businesses, the actual creators of the work generally have the easy/fun part. The real stress and money handling is NOT done by them...so they don't get to be picky when it DOES come to money. (And again: 1 artist vs hundreds of people and companies dealing with all the surrounding stuff... OF COURSE the artist isn't going to get a large percentage). I understand what you're saying here, but the point I'm trying to make is that the creator/writer/director is the person with the final vision of the product. If that vision isn't viable, there really isn't much you can do (save for luck) to sell it. I know people work hard to make the product work. Heck, I'm one of those people. I work in film, I know exactly what being one of those hundreds of people trying to get it out means. I also know that without the director, I'm aimless. Everybody does their part, but they've gotta have a goal or it's a no-go.
how many indy bands are there who can make better music than Britney Spears (who made millions until she went nutso). Considering her success, obviously not many. I mean, be serious, I can't stand her music either, but she had millions of teeny-tots throwing their allowances at her.
Now, how many companies/business groups are there who can pump out a hundred thousand discs with a pretty picture on it, convince big name chains to put it on the shelves, and advertise it? That all depends on what product they're putting in the packages. If it's a no-name indie band, not many.
I don't know about you, but just among the people I personally know, there's more GOOD bands than there are of the later. And those people are making the music for FUN, not even money. Finding people with talent is the easy part by far. I have no doubt your friends are talented. I'd even go as far as to wager that there are a few that would make a lot of other 'big' stars look bad. You should have them go to the distributer and say "make 100k copies of these and put them on retail shelves".
There is lots of talent and creativity in the music business and not all (or even most) of it is in the making of the music itself. I don't doubt that. However, without the music, well let's just say that packaging companies don't make money from selling empty boxes.;)
I'd say more but I already covered this in my last post.
"Without those individuals and their machines there is NO product. It might not be as creative (though I would argue the engineering requires just as much talent) but it's every bit as vital." One could argue that the security guard is the most important person at a baseball field based on his or her ability to prevent a game from making money. That's all fine and good but doesn't get you anywhere until you can explain how that security guard's going to sell out a stadium.;)
It's not as hard to turn out popular music as most suppose. (Please note I did not say "good" music - different discussion) I might generally agree with you except I recently watched the latest round of American Idol auditions. Heh. A lot of it is mindless drivel, but it's still beyond the grasp of 98% of the people out there that want to be professional singers or song writers.
Re:Artists should make the most money, not the lab
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 1
It should, though we have to agree: writing and singing a song isn't much compared to all of the processing that has to be involved to print thousands of CDs... Its 1 person's work vs hundreds, who will also most likely spend douzans of time more man hours on it than the artist. I get what you mean, but, and I mean this with respect, I do not agree. None of the individuals in the packaging process are creating the key component of a product that'll earn millions. This has to be considered before judging the value of an individual's work. If an ablum was that easy to turn out, there would be no superstars.
Also a note of interest, in other fields, such as the gaming industry, the developers/artists get a lot more. I've been doing artwork for movies for quite a while. I dunno how my 'salary' compares to a song-writer, but I know I'm not getting any royalties or anything like that. I'd be surprised if I made more, at least in the long run. That said, though, the art I'm creating would not be possible without the script from the writers and the vision of the director. I wouldn't dream of asking for more money than those peeps.
Slashdot Mirror
If it hasn't been discovered, we don't know it exists. Once discovered, we know about it. Simple.
a.)
b.)
c.)
You're not using the term 'stealing' properly here, so I'll just assume you mean: They downloaded music and listened to it without paying for a license to it. I can suspect it, but no, I cannot 'admit' that they are breaking the law at all. Perhaps if you took another stab at your Law School homework, you'd see the shades of grey your ignorance is blinding you to right now.
Fatality!
2.) Apple is held to a higher standard in this regard, Macs are quite popular in the illustration industry. They're supposed to be superior in this regard, but obviously that's questionable now.
Then you'd get banned for a while if you tried it too many times. Security risk, otherwise. :P
Lame.
I was all for BNETD, actually. I loved StarCraft, hated seeing ads while using their service while games like Quake didn't have that centralization. BNETD would have been great! But they had too many ingredients stacked against them. First, it's Blizzard, they're successful, they have an enormous stash of lawyers and given that their money comes from games run on PCs (i.e. easiest to pirate) they are filled with resolve. Second, they quite intentionally designed Battle.net to be THE way their on-line games are matched. It's quite clear they had bigger plans to make money from that service. More resolve. Third, for reasons that either incredibly greedy or incredibly practical, they used this service in an attempt to maintain their CD-Key system to keep the gamers legit. Forth, all this was happening right when about the time the DMCA was out and about and untested. I remember when this was going on I couldn't believe they were actually going to try this battle. Worse, they were using the EFF to help them. I wanted them to win, believe me, but I just couldn't see how there was any way they thought they'd actually win this. From where I sat, the best outcome they could have hoped for was a racking up of huge lawyer bills and a precedent set against them. They made a nice PR push: "Well we tried to ask if we could have permission to talk to their servers to okay a game being played, but gee golly gosh they wouldn't let us into their copy protection system! Jerks!" But it wasn't a PR battle, and the CD-Key was a pretty big deal.
So, I will correct you, sir: I am not stamping on the guy standing up for something. I'm kicking the idiot for picking the wrong battle to fight and making it worse for everybody. That's the sort of thing that caused some content makers to seek the DMCA's introduction into law, and if the people involved had been running more on practicality than idealism, some serious trouble could have been spared. I wish they had won, but I wish more that they hadn't fought it at all. It's not just 'fun to villify' Blizzard for this - they deserve far worse than villification - they've abused the courts to wreck other people's hard work because it exposed the obvious flaw in their copy-protection system I'm not happy with Blizzard's decisions that led to BNETD getting developed. Despite that, I don't agree with this here. For one thing, Blizzard did not act out of the norm. They created something and sought control over it. Anybody with a surprised look on their face that the C&D went out would not be able to claim they're very much in tune with how corps work. Nobody working at BNETD had any right to say "You gotta be kidding!" Second, you're not the judge of when a game's put out to pasture. There were copies of StarCraft still in stores after this whole BNETD thing died down. Third, that's nice that they had a flaw in their scheme and all, but BNETD still fought the battle they didn't have to.
That whole thing should never have escalated that far. A little bit of common sense would have prevented that. Instead, what we got was an appeal for sympathy. All I could do was shake my head and wonder just how many of the DMCAs teeth were sharpened over it.
"Actually, bnetd tried to discuss the issue with blizzard so they could authenticate against their CD-key servers. It's not like the effort wasn't made. Blizzard refused, because they would much rather sue them out of existence. And that's exactly what they did."
I remember. But look at this from another perspective: They wanted to be able to send any CD-Key they want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response. Does that really make sense from a copy protection point of view? Did anybody really expect Blizzard to go "well, alright, here's your own way of verifying any CD-Key you run across..."? Personally, for practical reasons or even for greedy ones, I don't see how.
Blizzard chose to sue them out of existence, but they did get a C&D. In other words, they had their opportunity to bow out, too. At least that would have spared us the whole DMCA bullshit that followed. That battle could have been saved for something other than copy protection. Blizzard was greedy, but they did not act unpredictably, here. If, for the noblest of noble reasons, I tried to create my own server to authenticate Windows XP/Vista boxes, could I reaaaaaaaaaaallllllly go crying about how big bad mean ol Microsoft was bullying me with their lawyers?
1) Have no professional experience
2) Have no formal training Wrong on both counts. The only restriction is that they're not under contract. They've had professional singers before. They eliminate them right off the bat so that they can make it seem like 98% of the people out there can only produce crap. They don't need to do anything clever to make it seem like 98% of the people that audition are crap. They are crap. Don't understimate the appeal of Hollywood. One person out of every fifty is good enough to make a living making music at the level of current pop musicians if they so chose. I can agree with that, too. My problem, though, is that for all this talent, we're sure not hearing a lot about it. That's really surprising given the internet. Heck, YouTube made Chocolate Rain a star. What's going on here? I have two theories:
1.) The talent out there is talented, but still mediochre at best. Maybe they're stuck re-singing the same old songs that have already been written. Maybe they're not playing themselves up enough to be taken seriously. Maybe there's too much noise? I dunno, but for some reason they're not bubbling up into public consciencenous.
2.) Indie groups don't have enough appeal to reach behind niches. This is a sad possibility.
Mm.. Dunno. I'd just expect sites like YouTube to be far more entertaining with a ratio of talent that high.
I'd say more but I already covered this in my last post.
"Losen up, will ya? Their not that bad. You just can't let it effect you."
I hope one day I'm so smart that I can't comprehend what you just said. Heh.