What they often fail to remember is that Microsoft operating systems remain in "new" status until, usually, the second service pack, which may take two or three years. Eight months old? That's still brand spanking new, in the Microsoft world. Software development at that company moves at a glacial pace.
While this is a fair point, I think in some sense it's ceasing to be convincing for the public at large. When a technology is new, sometimes its foibles and curiousities can be overlooked. It's new, after all, it's not something we're good at yet. Civilization hasn't built a radio in 60 years that didn't 'just work'. We're good at it. The idea of making a radio that requires endless fiddling to become acceptable is laughable.
Eventually, we learn to expect that same sort of reliability from newer technologies and I think the "fad" nature of so much on the PC is wearing off. People no longer want to buy a new computer just because the OS needs new hardware. The hardware push instigated by Windows 95 and 98 is no longer acceptable to most people I talk to - they're happy with what they have and they don't want to have to buy new hardware just because the software requires it.
It's a question of maturity. At some point, there's a sense that the 'wild west' nature of the technology should die down and be replaced by a mature progression of technologies. That, however, is not as profitable to the software and hardware companies, which is why Microsoft pushes so hard to kill off its old software.
Hehehe. Some pathetic waste of flesh decided that they don't like me and modded every post of mine in this thread 'Offtopic.' Looks like I struck a nerve.
Bush's military used those weapons on Americans in New Orleans after Katrina.
The National Guard is now trained in Iraq to use them on civilians in cities. Those Guard will soon be restationed back in the USA. As economic collapses and more Katrina-scale disasters repeatedly "threaten public safety".
Yeah.. I know. Thus the last part of my post. I'm aware that much of what we once held.. dear? is no longer true.
That's very upsetting.
For a long time I made the same mistake that most Americans make: believing that "it can't happen here." I no longer have any certainty of that.
They're right. For any sort of citizen militia to be effective at present, they'd need much more than what we can have legally. They don't address hunting or protection issues though.
The only hole in that argument that I can think of is that it requires believing the US military would USE those sorts of weapons against American citizens on American soil. Since the US military has in the past flat out REFUSED to be deployed on US soil, I have a hard time believing they'd use those sorts of weapons, restricting the discussion to personal weapons anyway.
Given the events of the past 5 years or so though, this argument seems far less convincing... all the Fed need do is accuse a whole state of being 'terrorists' or whatever and a part of me can believe they'd allow that to justify almost any atrocity against Americans..
Either mine's not working, or he's found a way around the user agent switcher. I'm running the latest version, I set it to IE, and jacklewis.net [jacklewis.net] still kicks me to the "Why you are an evil commiefaggot for using Firefox" page.
He's got a bit of script that runs that uses a meta-redirect if you're on Firefox, too. Easy to get around using the Web Developer addon for Firefox which allows you to disable redirects.
I almost posted just to show him how big of an idiot he is, but then I figured it's a waste of time.
It's people like you who have lost perspective by concluding that you are somehow entitled to something for nothing.
No, it's people like YOU who have forgotten that the works produced and given to the public are the property of the public. Once you make it available for public consumption, it belongs to the public, in the most literal sense of the word. Copyright is designed to allow them to benefit from that work for a limited time in order to encourage them to then create more works - which is why long copyright terms are nonsensical.
The key word is 'allow'. In exchange for the value given to society by the work, the creator is allowed to derive personal profit from it. We don't get it for nothing until the copyright expires.
That is the meaning and purpose of copyright as the founders laid it down in the Constitution. People like you would do well to remember that.
Besides, there wasn't anything related to a "social process" about this. It was a company's marketing department disseminating industry articles to their staff. It was pretty clearly a business activity
Straw man. I'm not arguing that the company's marketing department was involved in a social process, I'm arguing the people creating those industry articles are. What people are doing with them is irrelevant to the purpose of copyright.
even if they're not the ones who committed the unpardonable sin of attempting to profit from their labors.
The problem is that not all educational uses are fair uses. You have to look at the circumstances underlying each individual use, and judge them on a case by case basis. You really can't make accurate blanket statements as to what is and is not a fair use.
Out of curiousity - What would be an example of educational use that doesn't qualify as fair use?
Man my mod points just expired or you'd get some. That was one of the clearest, most reasonable posts I have seen on the problems with copyright as it is currently practiced, without resorting to accusations and prostrations about how bad corporations are.
paragraph 8 (by my count): Your instructor is limited under copyright law to make one copy for his personal use and to place one copy on library reserve. [...] Every student is allowed under copyright law to make one copy of a magazine article for personal use. [northern.edu]
Like I said, quick Google search, but I've seen this elsewhere. I have no desire to dig through the actual statutes to cite chapter and verse where this comes from in the Act, but I trust it's there.
17 U.S.C. 107 states that under fair use, multiple copies can be made for educational purposes. It does not address the means, suggesting the means are irrelevant (that is, it doesn't matter if the professor transcribes them by hand or uses the University's copy service).
Really, though, what's the gripe? Isn't the whole point of writing an article that people read it?
Maybe when producers of culturally relevant material actually recognized that they were participating in social process, but not anymore. Now, the sole purpose of producing anything is to get as many people as possible to buy it, and treat the rest as criminals because they might read/hear/see it without paying for it.
No, copyright holders have lost all perspective and have long since abandoned the idea that their place in the world does not exist solely to make them richer.
There's no law that says it should be. There ARE laws, however, saying that we have rights that cannot be violated, even when it would make the work of law enforcement easier.
People don't seem to understand - law enforcement is hard ON PURPOSE. Those intentional roadblocks are there to protect the rights of the people, because you cannot trust people to respect the rights of others - you have to deny them those avenues instead, and here we are tearing them down because they're roadblocks!
Quite a few customers interpreted this as meaning they had actually bought, not just the right to watch the video, but a "copy" of the video itself.
And I'd contend that because the distinction is pure legalese, people were very reasonable in making such an assumption. That's the sort of thing a judge would look at Google for and say, "What the hell did you expect them to think?"
Of course, Google really should be giving a cash refund and cutting checks, but that doesn't excuse/. for once again getting a story wrong.
No, Google should be providing a DRM-free version of those downloads so that people can retain what they purchased. Then, the whole issue of how they checked out is moot, because they paid for the content and it is theirs to watch in perpetuity.
This is exactly the problem with DRM: if the technological means (e.g., the proper hardware/software with the necessary encryption keys) to watch the content that you legally purchased goes the way of the DoDo, you're left having paid for something you can no longer consume.
That's not fair to the consumer and it's absolutely contrary to the purpose of copyright.
In short, the companies piss me off enough that I like doing things that they feel costs them money. It's illegal, yes, but when they treat me like a criminal, I oblige.
As the adage goes: Treat people the way you want them to act. However you treat them, that is exactly what they will become.
My personal experience at least, bears this out as truth. It's human nature.
There is this thing called the Internet. And you know, it allows one to distribute their own stuff without the middle-men (record labels, publishers, tv/cable stations, movie studios) being involved. Perhaps you have heard of it?
When an artist on the Internet makes $10 million a year from their work and is so well known that 75% of everyone you ask knows who they are, call me. Until that is the case, using the Internet as a counter-argument to that point is intellectually dishonest.
This is a case of feeding cop experience into a database and using that for pattern matching. That begs the obvious question of why cops weren't doing this sort of pattern matching in their heads already. If I can figure out that payday (or the day after) is not the greatest day to be in the bank due to the sudden surge of activity, robbers should be able to do the same as well as the cops.
What happened to hunches and intuition?
The point of data mining to to find the NON-OBVIOUS relationships.
The problem is, the scale required to reach 'non-obvious.' How many cops gain a sufficiently wide experience to be able to determine city-wide trends for specific areas and times of the month? Very few, I'd wager; the experience of an individual officer is limited. While the cumulative experience of all the officers could be very revealing, humans are inept at communicating that kind of experience - it's too specific and too based in intuition. Intuition is understanding that by definition cannot be quantified (or, that we are presently incapable of quantifying).
That's what this sort of data mining accomplishes - it gathers the data from the sum experiences of the entire department to generate the very intuition you're talking about. It analyzes those trends that individual officers will never intuit. There's just too much information for a single person to do it on their own.
I love the rant on that website. Is it yours? Very... insightful. 'Course, just try and get anyone to admit it's true.. nobody wants to admit they're a slave to manufactured ideals that they'll never live up to.
I've learned to reject that propaganda.. it makes it hard to be around people who haven't, because they look at me like there's something wrong with me, when I know better.
Consequently, I generally feel quite isolated. Always have.
Agreed. 12 billion per year for 3000 smoking kids a day is what, $11,000 each? That doesn t sound too profitable to me, especially since the government will stick it to Big Tobacco later for these kid s admittedly poor decisions.
The $11,000 spent in one year for that one smoker can parlay into much, much more money for the tobacco company. The average smoker spends approximately $1600 per year on cigarettes directly. This means they'd only have to be a smoker for 6.5 years for the company to make a profit off of them, and most smokers smoke for much longer than that.
Multiply that over 1.1 million new smokers each year and you can see how profitable it really is. They wouldn't spend that much money if it weren't really so profitable.
But yes, I agree their advertising targets more than just children.
Not so. They've never gone after Harvard and probably never will.
That's because it's not in the RIAA's playbook to pick on someone who can fight back.
Not to be pedantic but some of those 'good ol boys' probably went to Harvard as well, and so aren't inclined to embroil their Alma Mater in legal battles when there are so many other available targets.
So people find other ways to protest than directly marching in the street, but at least if they do they aren't going TO DIE to get their message out. Boo Hoo! I didn't become a selfless martyr for my cause. I get to live and keep protesting.
It's their right to march in the street without the police jumping the gun and shooting teargas and rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd.
Thing is, nobody cares about that stuff OR those people's causes unless someone dies. It's unfortunate, but it's true. There's a threshold that has to be crossed to get most people to pay attention to anything.
Just browse a few pages on myspace...you'll get a similar nauseating effect.
When I tell people I don't use MySpace, I get the most god awful looks, like I've committed some sort of high crime. But this is exactly the reason I don't use it.. I much prefer to NOT throw up when I surf the web.
This article is obviously bogus; it is physiologically impossible. If there were a visible wavelength that made everyone puke, everyone would already be puking all day.
Obviously shining a very bright light into someone's eyes can blind- and disorient them. The rest of the story was obviously invented by a Fox news editor, to make the story sound a little sexier.
Visible daylight is scattered and incoherent. Its actual spectral power is very, very low. What you get from colored LEDs is coherent, monochromatic light that is VERY powerful and VERY directional. It's the difference between hearing a jet engine from 300 miles away and standing right behind the turbine.
blockquote> i> Imagine if you could surpress demonstrations like Tiananmen square only with non lethal weapons. It seems to me like the Chinese government may have won the battle there, but in the long run I suspect and hope frankly that the use of force was so excessive it will lose the war. But if a bunch of goons can break up demonstrations without excessive force, an unpopular government could keep the peace without ever passing that threshold.
It s not completely hypothetical either - British rule in India could have lasted longer if they could have avoided killing the demontrators at Amritsar./i>/blockquote>
And this is exactly the point. Throughout history, what has eventually turned the stomachs of the people was the level of violence required to maintain the status quo - either to maintain an occupation, a dictatorship, what have you.
By eliminating that as a factor, you empower yourselves to never cross the line of people's sensibilities - giving you limitless ability to forever hold onto that power.
Non-lethal weapons are merely an attempt to disguise the true nature of violence. In alot of ways, I don't think this is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is a fair point, I think in some sense it's ceasing to be convincing for the public at large. When a technology is new, sometimes its foibles and curiousities can be overlooked. It's new, after all, it's not something we're good at yet. Civilization hasn't built a radio in 60 years that didn't 'just work'. We're good at it. The idea of making a radio that requires endless fiddling to become acceptable is laughable.
Eventually, we learn to expect that same sort of reliability from newer technologies and I think the "fad" nature of so much on the PC is wearing off. People no longer want to buy a new computer just because the OS needs new hardware. The hardware push instigated by Windows 95 and 98 is no longer acceptable to most people I talk to - they're happy with what they have and they don't want to have to buy new hardware just because the software requires it.
It's a question of maturity. At some point, there's a sense that the 'wild west' nature of the technology should die down and be replaced by a mature progression of technologies. That, however, is not as profitable to the software and hardware companies, which is why Microsoft pushes so hard to kill off its old software.
Hehehe. Some pathetic waste of flesh decided that they don't like me and modded every post of mine in this thread 'Offtopic.' Looks like I struck a nerve.
:)
Nice
Yeah.. I know. Thus the last part of my post. I'm aware that much of what we once held.. dear? is no longer true.
That's very upsetting.
For a long time I made the same mistake that most Americans make: believing that "it can't happen here." I no longer have any certainty of that.
Obviously. What in the world made you think I was claiming such a thing? I'm just saying the military is loath to use its power against Americans.
The only hole in that argument that I can think of is that it requires believing the US military would USE those sorts of weapons against American citizens on American soil. Since the US military has in the past flat out REFUSED to be deployed on US soil, I have a hard time believing they'd use those sorts of weapons, restricting the discussion to personal weapons anyway.
Given the events of the past 5 years or so though, this argument seems far less convincing... all the Fed need do is accuse a whole state of being 'terrorists' or whatever and a part of me can believe they'd allow that to justify almost any atrocity against Americans..
Who the heck is freem?
Unless you mean Freem...
He's got a bit of script that runs that uses a meta-redirect if you're on Firefox, too. Easy to get around using the Web Developer addon for Firefox which allows you to disable redirects.
I almost posted just to show him how big of an idiot he is, but then I figured it's a waste of time.
No, it's people like YOU who have forgotten that the works produced and given to the public are the property of the public. Once you make it available for public consumption, it belongs to the public, in the most literal sense of the word. Copyright is designed to allow them to benefit from that work for a limited time in order to encourage them to then create more works - which is why long copyright terms are nonsensical.
The key word is 'allow'. In exchange for the value given to society by the work, the creator is allowed to derive personal profit from it. We don't get it for nothing until the copyright expires.
That is the meaning and purpose of copyright as the founders laid it down in the Constitution. People like you would do well to remember that.
Straw man. I'm not arguing that the company's marketing department was involved in a social process, I'm arguing the people creating those industry articles are. What people are doing with them is irrelevant to the purpose of copyright.
Childish.
Out of curiousity - What would be an example of educational use that doesn't qualify as fair use?
Man my mod points just expired or you'd get some. That was one of the clearest, most reasonable posts I have seen on the problems with copyright as it is currently practiced, without resorting to accusations and prostrations about how bad corporations are.
17 U.S.C. 107 states that under fair use, multiple copies can be made for educational purposes. It does not address the means, suggesting the means are irrelevant (that is, it doesn't matter if the professor transcribes them by hand or uses the University's copy service).
Maybe when producers of culturally relevant material actually recognized that they were participating in social process, but not anymore. Now, the sole purpose of producing anything is to get as many people as possible to buy it, and treat the rest as criminals because they might read/hear/see it without paying for it.
No, copyright holders have lost all perspective and have long since abandoned the idea that their place in the world does not exist solely to make them richer.
There's no law that says it should be. There ARE laws, however, saying that we have rights that cannot be violated, even when it would make the work of law enforcement easier.
People don't seem to understand - law enforcement is hard ON PURPOSE. Those intentional roadblocks are there to protect the rights of the people, because you cannot trust people to respect the rights of others - you have to deny them those avenues instead, and here we are tearing them down because they're roadblocks!
And I'd contend that because the distinction is pure legalese, people were very reasonable in making such an assumption. That's the sort of thing a judge would look at Google for and say, "What the hell did you expect them to think?"
No, Google should be providing a DRM-free version of those downloads so that people can retain what they purchased. Then, the whole issue of how they checked out is moot, because they paid for the content and it is theirs to watch in perpetuity.
This is exactly the problem with DRM: if the technological means (e.g., the proper hardware/software with the necessary encryption keys) to watch the content that you legally purchased goes the way of the DoDo, you're left having paid for something you can no longer consume.
That's not fair to the consumer and it's absolutely contrary to the purpose of copyright.
As the adage goes: Treat people the way you want them to act. However you treat them, that is exactly what they will become.
My personal experience at least, bears this out as truth. It's human nature.
When an artist on the Internet makes $10 million a year from their work and is so well known that 75% of everyone you ask knows who they are, call me. Until that is the case, using the Internet as a counter-argument to that point is intellectually dishonest.
The problem is, the scale required to reach 'non-obvious.' How many cops gain a sufficiently wide experience to be able to determine city-wide trends for specific areas and times of the month? Very few, I'd wager; the experience of an individual officer is limited. While the cumulative experience of all the officers could be very revealing, humans are inept at communicating that kind of experience - it's too specific and too based in intuition. Intuition is understanding that by definition cannot be quantified (or, that we are presently incapable of quantifying).
That's what this sort of data mining accomplishes - it gathers the data from the sum experiences of the entire department to generate the very intuition you're talking about. It analyzes those trends that individual officers will never intuit. There's just too much information for a single person to do it on their own.
I love the rant on that website. Is it yours? Very... insightful. 'Course, just try and get anyone to admit it's true.. nobody wants to admit they're a slave to manufactured ideals that they'll never live up to.
I've learned to reject that propaganda.. it makes it hard to be around people who haven't, because they look at me like there's something wrong with me, when I know better.
Consequently, I generally feel quite isolated. Always have.
The $11,000 spent in one year for that one smoker can parlay into much, much more money for the tobacco company. The average smoker spends approximately $1600 per year on cigarettes directly. This means they'd only have to be a smoker for 6.5 years for the company to make a profit off of them, and most smokers smoke for much longer than that.
Multiply that over 1.1 million new smokers each year and you can see how profitable it really is. They wouldn't spend that much money if it weren't really so profitable.
But yes, I agree their advertising targets more than just children.
Not to be pedantic but some of those 'good ol boys' probably went to Harvard as well, and so aren't inclined to embroil their Alma Mater in legal battles when there are so many other available targets.
It's their right to march in the street without the police jumping the gun and shooting teargas and rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd.
Thing is, nobody cares about that stuff OR those people's causes unless someone dies. It's unfortunate, but it's true. There's a threshold that has to be crossed to get most people to pay attention to anything.
When I tell people I don't use MySpace, I get the most god awful looks, like I've committed some sort of high crime. But this is exactly the reason I don't use it.. I much prefer to NOT throw up when I surf the web.
Visible daylight is scattered and incoherent. Its actual spectral power is very, very low. What you get from colored LEDs is coherent, monochromatic light that is VERY powerful and VERY directional. It's the difference between hearing a jet engine from 300 miles away and standing right behind the turbine.
blockquote> i>
/i> /blockquote>
Imagine if you could surpress demonstrations like Tiananmen square only with non lethal weapons. It seems to me like the Chinese government may have won the battle there, but in the long run I suspect and hope frankly that the use of force was so excessive it will lose the war. But if a bunch of goons can break up demonstrations without excessive force, an unpopular government could keep the peace without ever passing that threshold.
It s not completely hypothetical either - British rule in India could have lasted longer if they could have avoided killing the demontrators at Amritsar.
And this is exactly the point. Throughout history, what has eventually turned the stomachs of the people was the level of violence required to maintain the status quo - either to maintain an occupation, a dictatorship, what have you.
By eliminating that as a factor, you empower yourselves to never cross the line of people's sensibilities - giving you limitless ability to forever hold onto that power.
Non-lethal weapons are merely an attempt to disguise the true nature of violence. In alot of ways, I don't think this is a good thing.