"Stealing" must be the most misused word at slashdot. China didn't steal any jobs, those jobe were freely given to China by their rightful owners, the corporations.
If you're against that, I suggest you do as I do and stop voting for the Republicans and Democrats, both of whom are bought and owned by the corporations who are giving American jobs to China and India.
If you hand me your wallet and say "here, it's yours" I didn't steal your wallet.
There are only 2 parties here, but many other countries have far more than 2 parties.
No, there is only one party here - the Corporate Republicrat Party. Well, that's what the corporations would have you believe. Personally, I split my vote between the Greens and the Libertarians rather than waste my vote of a corporate stooge like Obama, whose Senate campaign was bankrolled by the banks and whose forst vote was FOR bankrupcy "reform".
A vote for a candidate that will vote against your own interests is worse than a wasted vote. I'll continue "wasting" my vote on parties who have my interests in mind rather than the corporations who own the media that tell you we only have two parties.
The election that really opened my eyes about the corporate influence on American politics was the one where the Greens ran Ralph Nader. Nader's election was mathematically impossible; he wasn't on the ballots in enough states to win even if he took all of them. Despite this fact, and despite the fact that the Libertarians were on the ballot in 49 states, the corporate owned media never even mentioned the Libbies while they slobbered all over Nader.
Please stop voting for Republicans and Democrats. Vote for anyone else, we have a lot of parties, and no vote is ever wasted!
A 'top ten' political party means the people of the country are behind you? You mean, like just how the American people are behind Ron Paul.
Most countries don't have one party with two wings like the US does. IINM any of Sweden's top ten can win, which would make it damned expensive for the corporations to bribe all the viable candidates like they do in the US. It's a lot harder to bribe ten men than it is two of them.
I'll be registering as a Republican just to vote for Ron Paul, bit I don't kid myself that he has any sort of chance; he's not the sort that would make a good corporate stooge. There's no way in hell the corporations will let him win.
In a plutocracy like the US, the golden rule is strictly followed: he who has the gold, rules. And the corporations have the gold.
I'll be splitting my vote between the Greens and Libertarians in th egeneral election. Again. The corporations' agenda is opposite to my own, and I believe that a vote for a candidate who will pass laws against my own interests is worse than a wasted vote; I'd be better off staying home than voting for someone who would have me in jail.
Even so, BECAUSE digitization makes perfectly copying a work a trivial task, what is then the incentive to publish at all?
Writers will write, singers will sing, painters will paint, because they have to, as surely as an alcoholic will drink or a crack whore will smoke crack. The creative process is addictive. Writing slashdot journals is addictive, particularly when you get positive feedback like in the linked one.
Take the money from art, and all that is left is the art itself.
While it would be quite nice if all works were freely available, who would compensate writers/editors of anthologies or magazines? Who would pay those who do peer-review for scientific journals?
Who would write FOSS?
Copyright is NOT THE SAME AS DRM
That's so; IMO any work protected by DRM should have copyright stripped and be placed immediately into the public domain.
I'm not against copyright per se, but believe that if copyright terms were like before the 20th century (20 years) there would be so much stuff in the public domain that copyright infringement would pretty much disappear.
In the US a work has to be "affixed in tangible form" to be copyrighted, I would posit that electrons and bits are intangible. Your manuas, for example, are a whole lot more useable in paper form.
A haircut is a tangible item and will garner "thieft of service" if you walk out, but if they catch you in a theater or train without a ticket you'll be charged with trasspass.
The K5 article Useful Dead Technologies highlighted some older, now gone (or nearly gone) technologies I sorely miss.
"McGrew," the Kurobots squealed, "You're a geezer! A crazy old, ranting coot! A Luddite! Aren't there any technologies you're glad are gone?"
Actually, there are. Here are a few of them, and like the useful dead technologies, some of these inventions (like the power pile and gravity furnace) were before my time, and I only knew this technology from being in the possession of an antique something or other like a house, or just reading about them.
...snip...
The automobile distributor and points Unless you are a classic car collector, or a geezer, you have no idea how much of a pain in the butt these things were. About every oil change or two, your car's performance and gas mileage would go down, and you would need a tuneup.
To tune your car, you could simply hire someone. That is, if you were a sissy.
A real man changed his own oil and tuned his own car up. You could tell a real man by the scars and scabs on his knuckles from working on his car.
First you had to change all eight of your spark plugs. What? You only have six? Pussy! Make sure you don't get the wires on wrong, or if your car will start at all, it will lurch and backfire and run like crap.
Then you had to take off the distributor cap, usually held on by two clips that would cut your fingers and were harder than a rubic cube solution to get clipped back on.
Under the distributor cap was the contact points. These had to be replaced. Then you had to adjust the gap on the points. Oh shit, I forgot to adjust the gaps on the spark plugs... do that all over again...
Now that the plugs are gapped and the points are replaced and gapped, you put the new distributor cap on... Come on... SHIT... GOD DAMNED PIECE OF SHI... ok, there it goes. Good. Gimme a bandaid, would ya?
Now you have to set the points' dwell. What's "dwell?" Beats the hell out of me, maybe it's the amount of time the points are closed. But you have to set it with a dwell meter or your car will run like it's powered by gerbils and will suck gas like Bush sucks at being President.
Then you have to get out your strobe and set the timing. You loosen the distributor, point your strobe at the mark on the... wait a minute... I can't see the damned mark. Stop the engine, would you?
Damn, it's all rusty and... to hell with it, start it back up and I'll time the God damned thing by ear, piece of shit...
Thank God and modern electronics for electronic ignition!
As to the "boat sized cars that get 8 mpg", those are newer tech. SUVs are a modern vehicle and are far bigger and gas hoggish than even the biggest car on the road in 1970. The small SUV my roommate had only got 12 mpg in the city, her BF's bigassed Dodge pickup gets 7.
My Concorde gets the same mileage in the city as my '74 LeMans got on the highway. It, however, had a V8 350 cubic inch engine and was a bit quicker and faster than the Concorde (which is damned powerful for a six cylinder).
One thing I hate about new cars is you can't work on them, while one thing I love about them is I don't have to work on them.
And here in this other thread I just told someone they were stealing air by breathing. It now looks like you can steal air, and the air ain't cheap. Almost two grand?
Not wanting to RTFA, why is it called "air"? And why is wifi called wifi?
At one level, the apparent intent of the offender (as seen from the point-of-view of the victim[1]) -- to get something for nothing -- is similar
You're stealing air. Stop breathing.;)
I do agree that someone needs to come up with a short word for "copyright infringement".
There's a lot wrong with copyright as it exists today, but I hold that none of it will be changed by getting people to say "infringe copyright" instead of "steal".
I have a problem with the term "intellectual property". The very term is unAmerican (which you may not care about as this is the internet and you could be anywhere) but here, copyright is supposed to get authors and artists to create, so the work can go into the public domain.
I hold two registered copyrights, and have written a shitload of prose. You cannot steal it from me. I don't own it. I have a "limited time" (ha) monopoly on its distribution, but I don't own it. It is NOT property.
Those who call copyright infringement "thieft" are trying to get something for themselves that they don't own (ownership of the copyrighted work), and I take issue with that.
You can't steal something from me if I don't own it, and I don't own the works to which I hold copyright. "Steal" isn't anywhere near the correct term.
What has me scratching my head is the recent bankrupcy "reform" that one of my Senators voted for (Obama, Senate campaign bankrolled by bankers) and how the (corporate owned) media has everyone thinking that awful law is a good thing.
All my life (I'm 55) if you declared bankrupcy you got to keep your primary residence and one automobile. Now they can leave you homeless and without transportation, and people think this is a GOOD thing.
The corporate owned media has us thinking that bankrupcy is primarily caused by bad financial decisions, but personal bankrupcy is almost always caused by divorce, job loss, or medical bills, none of which can be controlled by the person whose bankrupcy is caused by them.
In the US people don't like safety nets, it appears. Score one more for the corporations and the media and government they control.
The same with lawsuits. Take the infamous McDonald's suit. "Oh a lady sued McDonald's for spilled coffee". What the corporate-owned media doesn't stress (or even mention) that the coffee was boiling hot (not drinkable) and all the woman wanted was the medical bills for her THIRD DEGREE BURNS paid. The McClown's McLawyers refused to settle. I don't know about anybody else but if I have to sue you because you're an evil bastard who won't face up to your responsibilities, I'm going to take everything I can get!
If a monitor you sell me burns my house down it's not likely to be me that sues. More likely it will be my insurance company that does the suing.
Copyright infringement is enough like stealing that it can reasonably be called "stealing"
If I shoplift a CD, the proprietor no longer has that CD. If I infringe your copyright you still have both the work and its copyright. The difference is if you're caught you have a small criminal fine with stealing but a large civil penalty with copyright infringement.
If you go into a theatre without paying that is also described as "stealing" the movie, and similarly if you take a ride on a train without a ticket.
No, that's "tresspass" and if you're caught you will be charged not with thieft, but tresspass.
It's basically NewSpeak under a different agenda.
Calling copyright infringement "stealing" is the newspeak. Cats are cats, dogs are dogs, copyright infringement is copyright infrienement, stealing is stealing and small furry animals from Alpha Centauti are small furry animals from Alpha Centauti. And that last bit was plagairism, not copyright infriengement.
"Newspeak" is calling a spade a "pointy shovel" as you are doing when you confuse copyright infringement with stealing.
This is kind of like sueing a car company for being seriously injured when you crashed into the pole.
No, it's like suing Ford when your ignition system catches fire and burns your house down while parked in your garage. In fact, this happened to Ford; a design defect in the ignition actually did burn some houses down, and Ford settled without a suit and recalled the rest of the product; going to trial when you are at fault is stupid. And if your merchandise catches fire without its owner doing anything stupid, YOU are at fault.
Any high electric-use device is "likely" to cause an electrical fire.
Only if it is poorly designed and/or built. They've been doing electrical engineering for over a hundred years and there is no excuse for ANY appliance to catch fire.
Hey ya old geezer, you might enjoy an article I wrote a few years back Useful Dead Technologies. From the article:
Steel gears During the 1950s when I was a young boy, machinery was made of steel. Not just machinery, but almost everything. Even my toys were made of solid steel. I learned at an early age not to drop things on my foot.
All the mechanical parts in your automobile, your washer and dryer, your furnace, etc were made of solid steel. Good strong durable steel. If a gear broke, it usually broke within the machinery's warranty period, as a broken gear meant that its casting or tempering was flawed.
Nylon and other plastics replaced the steel for many gears, including in your washing machine, in your car's now obsolete distributor, and in almost all electric motors.
Now, some time after your warranty expires, your washing machine or dryer or dishwasher or other appliance will fail it. Old appliances' lifespans were in the decades. In the late 1960s when I worked in a drive-in theater, its refrigerator was a model made in the 1920s and still hummed along merrily. For all I know, it's cooling someone's beer today.
Today's appliances will give you a few short years - if you're lucky. Then, one of its cheap plastic parts will break, usually a part that cannot be replaced; a part that was designed to never be able to be replaced or repaired. If you're lucky you'll shell out big bucks to get your cheap appliance repaired. If not, and more and more often these days, it will be unrepairable and you will shell out even bigger bucks to replace it, as your old (but not very old at all) nylon-gear laden piece of junk goes into a landfill.
They don't make 'em like they used to. They used to make 'em solid, to last. Now they're made of materials designed and guaranteed to break. Get out your wallets, suckers!
You are entirely correct. I've had two chip fans fail, and in both cases all that happened was that the PC stopped working when the CPU died from overheating. Nothing close to a fire.
Any other geezers out there remember how computers in movies and TV shows from the '60s (Star Trek, The Prisoner, James Bond) would explode and burn at the least provocation? A phaser shot would cause a Star Trek computer to explode and burn, and in one Prisoner episode a computer was made to explode and catch fire simply by asking it "why?" (rather than having it give the correct answer, 42).
It seems that Dell and HP are making the 1960s science fiction a reality!
Licenses are for publishers, not end users. You don't "license a work" to me, you license the content to the publisher, who sells me the media containing the work. This is how it's worked since Gutenberg.
Now that the printing press has been invented, all the scribes will be out of business and nobody will write any more books!
Just like Gutenberg changed media, the internet changed media. The world is not as it was in the 20th century and never will be again. This is no more the time to invest in media companies than 1900 was the time to be investing in carraiges. Like that business then, the future paradigm is completely unlnown. What is known is that DRM doesn't work and cannot work. As has been said countless times before, making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet.
What's more, if I can buy a new, loaded Caddilac for $2000 or a stripped, used Yugo for $50,000, why in the world would I choose the Yugo?
This is the choice faced by someone wanting digital content: get full rights for free, or pay for a product crippled by Dumb Restricted Media.
The fact is that DRM doesn't work, PERIOD.
DRM tends to punish your paying customers as much (or more) than those stealing it
Copyright infringement is not thieft. For one thing, the penalties for copyright infringement are far, far greater than the penalties for thieft, to the point that if you get caught, you're better off shoplifting a CD or DVD than infringing copyright on it.
Honestly. Wtf? Server in the Sky? That cannot be serious. I can't think of a name more likely to inspire fear/conspiracy theories. Why not call it the Big Brother Server? Or the Stalin Server? Or the Anal Rapist server?
The people who fought the "war on drugs" were obviously on drugs, since their remedies caused the very behavior they were allegedly fighting against: teenaged drug use, gangs, violence, etc just like alcohol prohibition.
So what are the "warriers" fighting the "war on terror" on? Terror?
Slashdot Mirror
"Stealing" must be the most misused word at slashdot. China didn't steal any jobs, those jobe were freely given to China by their rightful owners, the corporations.
If you're against that, I suggest you do as I do and stop voting for the Republicans and Democrats, both of whom are bought and owned by the corporations who are giving American jobs to China and India.
If you hand me your wallet and say "here, it's yours" I didn't steal your wallet.
There are only 2 parties here, but many other countries have far more than 2 parties.
No, there is only one party here - the Corporate Republicrat Party. Well, that's what the corporations would have you believe. Personally, I split my vote between the Greens and the Libertarians rather than waste my vote of a corporate stooge like Obama, whose Senate campaign was bankrolled by the banks and whose forst vote was FOR bankrupcy "reform".
A vote for a candidate that will vote against your own interests is worse than a wasted vote. I'll continue "wasting" my vote on parties who have my interests in mind rather than the corporations who own the media that tell you we only have two parties.
The election that really opened my eyes about the corporate influence on American politics was the one where the Greens ran Ralph Nader. Nader's election was mathematically impossible; he wasn't on the ballots in enough states to win even if he took all of them. Despite this fact, and despite the fact that the Libertarians were on the ballot in 49 states, the corporate owned media never even mentioned the Libbies while they slobbered all over Nader.
Please stop voting for Republicans and Democrats. Vote for anyone else, we have a lot of parties, and no vote is ever wasted!
A 'top ten' political party means the people of the country are behind you? You mean, like just how the American people are behind Ron Paul.
Most countries don't have one party with two wings like the US does. IINM any of Sweden's top ten can win, which would make it damned expensive for the corporations to bribe all the viable candidates like they do in the US. It's a lot harder to bribe ten men than it is two of them.
I'll be registering as a Republican just to vote for Ron Paul, bit I don't kid myself that he has any sort of chance; he's not the sort that would make a good corporate stooge. There's no way in hell the corporations will let him win.
In a plutocracy like the US, the golden rule is strictly followed: he who has the gold, rules. And the corporations have the gold.
I'll be splitting my vote between the Greens and Libertarians in th egeneral election. Again. The corporations' agenda is opposite to my own, and I believe that a vote for a candidate who will pass laws against my own interests is worse than a wasted vote; I'd be better off staying home than voting for someone who would have me in jail.
Free the hookers and druggies!
-mcgrew
Even so, BECAUSE digitization makes perfectly copying a work a trivial task, what is then the incentive to publish at all?
Writers will write, singers will sing, painters will paint, because they have to, as surely as an alcoholic will drink or a crack whore will smoke crack. The creative process is addictive. Writing slashdot journals is addictive, particularly when you get positive feedback like in the linked one.
Take the money from art, and all that is left is the art itself.
While it would be quite nice if all works were freely available, who would compensate writers/editors of anthologies or magazines? Who would pay those who do peer-review for scientific journals?
Who would write FOSS?
Copyright is NOT THE SAME AS DRM
That's so; IMO any work protected by DRM should have copyright stripped and be placed immediately into the public domain.
I'm not against copyright per se, but believe that if copyright terms were like before the 20th century (20 years) there would be so much stuff in the public domain that copyright infringement would pretty much disappear.
In the US a work has to be "affixed in tangible form" to be copyrighted, I would posit that electrons and bits are intangible. Your manuas, for example, are a whole lot more useable in paper form.
A haircut is a tangible item and will garner "thieft of service" if you walk out, but if they catch you in a theater or train without a ticket you'll be charged with trasspass.
My Concorde gets the same mileage in the city as my '74 LeMans got on the highway. It, however, had a V8 350 cubic inch engine and was a bit quicker and faster than the Concorde (which is damned powerful for a six cylinder).
One thing I hate about new cars is you can't work on them, while one thing I love about them is I don't have to work on them.
And here in this other thread I just told someone they were stealing air by breathing. It now looks like you can steal air, and the air ain't cheap. Almost two grand?
Not wanting to RTFA, why is it called "air"? And why is wifi called wifi?
At one level, the apparent intent of the offender (as seen from the point-of-view of the victim[1]) -- to get something for nothing -- is similar
;)
You're stealing air. Stop breathing.
I do agree that someone needs to come up with a short word for "copyright infringement".
There's a lot wrong with copyright as it exists today, but I hold that none of it will be changed by getting people to say "infringe copyright" instead of "steal".
I have a problem with the term "intellectual property". The very term is unAmerican (which you may not care about as this is the internet and you could be anywhere) but here, copyright is supposed to get authors and artists to create, so the work can go into the public domain.
I hold two registered copyrights, and have written a shitload of prose. You cannot steal it from me. I don't own it. I have a "limited time" (ha) monopoly on its distribution, but I don't own it. It is NOT property.
Those who call copyright infringement "thieft" are trying to get something for themselves that they don't own (ownership of the copyrighted work), and I take issue with that.
You can't steal something from me if I don't own it, and I don't own the works to which I hold copyright. "Steal" isn't anywhere near the correct term.
My first computer was a slide rule, you insensitive clod! Not many games you can play on a slide rule.
I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did get all the bugs out.
What has me scratching my head is the recent bankrupcy "reform" that one of my Senators voted for (Obama, Senate campaign bankrolled by bankers) and how the (corporate owned) media has everyone thinking that awful law is a good thing.
All my life (I'm 55) if you declared bankrupcy you got to keep your primary residence and one automobile. Now they can leave you homeless and without transportation, and people think this is a GOOD thing.
The corporate owned media has us thinking that bankrupcy is primarily caused by bad financial decisions, but personal bankrupcy is almost always caused by divorce, job loss, or medical bills, none of which can be controlled by the person whose bankrupcy is caused by them.
In the US people don't like safety nets, it appears. Score one more for the corporations and the media and government they control.
The same with lawsuits. Take the infamous McDonald's suit. "Oh a lady sued McDonald's for spilled coffee". What the corporate-owned media doesn't stress (or even mention) that the coffee was boiling hot (not drinkable) and all the woman wanted was the medical bills for her THIRD DEGREE BURNS paid. The McClown's McLawyers refused to settle. I don't know about anybody else but if I have to sue you because you're an evil bastard who won't face up to your responsibilities, I'm going to take everything I can get!
If a monitor you sell me burns my house down it's not likely to be me that sues. More likely it will be my insurance company that does the suing.
Same company makes your mac laptop that made my dell laptop. :)
laptop? *shudders*
I'm your genitals.
And I'm a Oh my God, I'm on fire!
You don't have to be a slashdotter to download something a slashdotter has cracked, hacked, or tracked.
Copyright infringement is enough like stealing that it can reasonably be called "stealing"
If I shoplift a CD, the proprietor no longer has that CD. If I infringe your copyright you still have both the work and its copyright. The difference is if you're caught you have a small criminal fine with stealing but a large civil penalty with copyright infringement.
If you go into a theatre without paying that is also described as "stealing" the movie, and similarly if you take a ride on a train without a ticket.
No, that's "tresspass" and if you're caught you will be charged not with thieft, but tresspass.
It's basically NewSpeak under a different agenda.
Calling copyright infringement "stealing" is the newspeak. Cats are cats, dogs are dogs, copyright infringement is copyright infrienement, stealing is stealing and small furry animals from Alpha Centauti are small furry animals from Alpha Centauti. And that last bit was plagairism, not copyright infriengement.
"Newspeak" is calling a spade a "pointy shovel" as you are doing when you confuse copyright infringement with stealing.
This is kind of like sueing a car company for being seriously injured when you crashed into the pole.
No, it's like suing Ford when your ignition system catches fire and burns your house down while parked in your garage. In fact, this happened to Ford; a design defect in the ignition actually did burn some houses down, and Ford settled without a suit and recalled the rest of the product; going to trial when you are at fault is stupid. And if your merchandise catches fire without its owner doing anything stupid, YOU are at fault.
Any high electric-use device is "likely" to cause an electrical fire.
Only if it is poorly designed and/or built. They've been doing electrical engineering for over a hundred years and there is no excuse for ANY appliance to catch fire.
Hey ya old geezer, you might enjoy an article I wrote a few years back Useful Dead Technologies. From the article:
You are entirely correct. I've had two chip fans fail, and in both cases all that happened was that the PC stopped working when the CPU died from overheating. Nothing close to a fire.
Any other geezers out there remember how computers in movies and TV shows from the '60s (Star Trek, The Prisoner, James Bond) would explode and burn at the least provocation? A phaser shot would cause a Star Trek computer to explode and burn, and in one Prisoner episode a computer was made to explode and catch fire simply by asking it "why?" (rather than having it give the correct answer, 42).
It seems that Dell and HP are making the 1960s science fiction a reality!
-mcgrew
(latest journal is in 5 parts)
Futile. Another question
Excuse me, Yoda, but as a cyborg I have to ask you to stop using part of our catchphrase "resistance is futile. You will be assimilated".
You will hear from our cybernetic lawyers shortly. Oh, and when they come, resistance is, of course, futile.
-mcgrew
Licenses are for publishers, not end users. You don't "license a work" to me, you license the content to the publisher, who sells me the media containing the work. This is how it's worked since Gutenberg.
Now that the printing press has been invented, all the scribes will be out of business and nobody will write any more books!
Just like Gutenberg changed media, the internet changed media. The world is not as it was in the 20th century and never will be again. This is no more the time to invest in media companies than 1900 was the time to be investing in carraiges. Like that business then, the future paradigm is completely unlnown. What is known is that DRM doesn't work and cannot work. As has been said countless times before, making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet.
What's more, if I can buy a new, loaded Caddilac for $2000 or a stripped, used Yugo for $50,000, why in the world would I choose the Yugo?
This is the choice faced by someone wanting digital content: get full rights for free, or pay for a product crippled by Dumb Restricted Media.
The fact is that DRM doesn't work, PERIOD.
DRM tends to punish your paying customers as much (or more) than those stealing it
Copyright infringement is not thieft. For one thing, the penalties for copyright infringement are far, far greater than the penalties for thieft, to the point that if you get caught, you're better off shoplifting a CD or DVD than infringing copyright on it.
Stop confusing potsmoking with murder.
Honestly. Wtf? Server in the Sky? That cannot be serious. I can't think of a name more likely to inspire fear/conspiracy theories. Why not call it the Big Brother Server? Or the Stalin Server? Or the Anal Rapist server?
I think this answers your question.
The people who fought the "war on drugs" were obviously on drugs, since their remedies caused the very behavior they were allegedly fighting against: teenaged drug use, gangs, violence, etc just like alcohol prohibition.
So what are the "warriers" fighting the "war on terror" on? Terror?
War on terror: "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
Oh, wait, there's only sluts on MySpace.
Who are you calling a slut?
As part of a job I used to have I had to sort through ads for prostitution on craigslist
Hookers got ads? 'Scuse me while I check craigslist...