I saw them try this with a bull in the first TV episode of This American Life. The results were not good.
Synopsis: The original bull was nice. The cloned bull was irritable, short-tempered and just not quite right. Also, he kicked the owner in the balls.
I suppose you could just take from that the irony that the cloned animal managed to block its cloner's own ability to reproduce conventionally. But you could also just note that cloned bull was really ugly. You probably won't get what you wanted, unless you delude yourself into thinking you have it.
Because you can pick it up, unencrypted, right out of the radio spectrum just about anywhere. People have been stealing television content for years, with equipment kits you can buy at most garage sales.
Some content providers have started to insert commercials both as a deterrent against stealing content, and as a way to recoup the massive losses. Advanced piracy tools already have hacked this system, with things like a 'mute' button.
I oppose the mute button on moral grounds. Also, I am miserable.
You know, I don't think we're disputing any of this based on how the judge finds. The article, and the discussion here, is about scale. Getting nearly a quarter of a million dollars from a normal civilian is wrong. Yes, yes, so is distributing without copyright. But that doesn't make them equal. That's what the whole "You-break-the-law-you-go-to-jail" (or, in the case of your argument "-you-lose-all-your-money-forever") premise always seems to neglect. As to your new example of software, it's hard to imagine such a case in reality, but such a blatant display of disingenuous pricing and legal manipulation would hopefully factor into the court's decision; again maybe not on the judgment itself, but at least on the number of zeros in the penalty sum.
My point about artists was this: A lot of us don't like the charaterization making everyone think that Downloading Music From The Internet Is Illegal. It's often not illegal, and I would guess even more often not against the wishes of the artist. I am not speaking for Timbaland or Radiohead or anyone else, just the handful of guys I know who feel that way.
And finally, that was exactly my point you just made with the traffic case. You could try to take it to court; you'd probably have a tough case to prove. The scale of retaliation is different, and I would say the woman's actual harm done to the world is about the same scale of a bad move in traffic. Maybe wrong, buy definitely not worth that astronomical sum, unless it directly harmed someone.
Ok, I think we've done this to death, I'm afraid I've got some real work to get back to. Thanks as well.
I didn't say it was because of the money that you would feel differently but because it would be your wages that are being stolen
Right, so...because of the money. But since you call it my 'wages', it sounds like I have less lying around and need it a little more. If you're trying to set up some kind of them-or-me choice, that's the same shaky ground you were on before. Of course, if they were actually selling, and profiting off of my music, I would change my answer. But they're not. Technology has turned real scarcity into artificial scarcity, and a 6MB compressed version of a recording I made just isn't worth that much, as much as I, the hypothetical artist living off his work would like it to be.
While we're on the subject of, "If you were the artist." Let's look at it from the other side. There are pretty much two kinds of musicians out there: struggling, and household name. I know a few of the first kind, and I moonlight as one myself. I can't speak for all of them, but I know most of us would prefer our work gets shared 'illegally'/'stolen', to get it more exposure. If I were type 2, the household name, I wouldn't care at all, because, hey, I'm already loaded. Not enough money? Just do another concert or movie cameo. Labeling any of this as 'your wages are being stolen' is wrong (as in incorrect). There was a time when there were no recordings to sell at all, then it became profitable because it was so costly to reproduce recordings, and now, not.
As for financial ruin of the defendant, while unfortunate, is what happens when you do stuff that is wrong.
Ok, next time someone cuts you off in traffic, I suppose you should rear-end them at the next light, at about 30mph. What they did was wrong, and they knew it was wrong; it put you at risk, and quite likely cost you money by making you late, maybe even to an important meeting! Apparently, that entitles you to ruin them, because there must be consequences. Seem excessive? You might have forgotten to include the properly scaled units in your calculation.
Maybe I was a bit short with my earlier reply because I had just woken up. Unless you missed the sarcasm in my first paragraph (using stoner speech patterns to give RIAA talking points), the point should be pretty clear. So here it is with out the/. snark: The damages you support are:
Based on the assumption that everyone who could download, did download.
Based on the assumption that everyone who did download, would have paid if they hadn't.
Therefore at least a couple of orders of magnitude too high.
Then, I said, you must have been a bit too high yourself when you decided to carry the RIAA's water here on Slashdot, and I failed at humor. So, there it is. I don't see any sane reason why the defendant and her family's lives need total financial ruin, or how that could possibly right any harm done.
And one other thing, I've had time to formulate a little...
I think you would feel about the situation differently if it was your music or software that was illegally being distributed.
Really? You think I could be swayed to endorse such nonsense if someone dangled a couple grand (or less, a few percent of the ~$10k/song penalty) in front of me? And not only that, but it's money need from someone who would need it a lot more than I would. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would have no trouble passing on that financial windfall, whether it's my music or not. Why on earth would you think that? Are you that easy to influence?
I think you would feel about the situation differently if it was your music or software that was illegally being distributed.
No, I wouldn't, and don't. The only type of unauthorized music distribution I really can't stand is when some teenage thug-4-life plays the stuff on his cell phone ringtone speakers on the bus during commuting hours.
Oops I should have put, ^*at the very most*^ as much harm as a a smoker or speeder. Those people actually put people's lives at risk. File-sharers don't.
At the risk of being stoned here I would like to say I agree with that argument.
Heh, sounds like you are already stoned. Thanks for the RIAA's journey through the wonderful world of dorm-room-debate what-ifs which makes up their boilerplate logic of absurd extremes:...like, what if everyone who could access the songs actually downloaded them? and what if each and every one of those guys was, like, someone who was totally going to go out and buy it, but didn't? Think about it, she would owe us, like infinity dollars!!! We should totally get that from her, because like, if bits were like physical CDs, she would be just like a street vendor, you know, and not a blindfolded street vendor.
Anyway, yeah, usually when RIAA guys are reciting that, they're wearing suits and not laughing, so some people get fooled into repeating the goofball logic and thinking it justifies total financial destruction of a few unlucky draft picks. I'm not saying people should never pay for music they hear, but there's something seriously wrong with the thinking process that leads to ruining the life of a middle-class family breadwinner who is guilty of about as much actual, real harm as that caused by speeding or smoking.
I think one of the major problems with the common perception of computers and freedom (both as in beer and as in freedom) is that many people are poorly informed and conditioned so that they think it must be illegal if it is free. Online Mp3s are free and illegal, Online Movies online are free and illegal, Warez are free and illegal (I'm using a definition of illegal which, unfortunately, normally gets used in this context; the one that includes the possibility that a large private lobby will sue you if you do it). Open-Source is free, and so is probably illegal too. It's legacy of hacker imagery doesn't help matters. How many regular users can explain the difference between open-source software and cracked proprietary software? Probably a few, but I'd be surprised if it were a majority.
To reverse this conditioning, you need to have someone's full attention for the two or three minutes it takes to explain the difference. I think this is what the CNet article (one among many) is attempting; and I don't think it would accomplish much to bring up pay-open-source software during the first lesson, because it is a relatively rare breed and is likely only to confuse.
The percentage of people who are qualified to recognize a virus-bearing FLAC vs a correct FLAC is approximately zero. So if you're going to refrain from accepting files from people who are "untrustworthy", then you are essentially not going to be able to accept files from anyone.
...unless you encode it yourself from CD or wav, or a trusted friend gives you one she encoded herself, or you get it from a reputable distributor, etc.
This actually happens to be the source of most of the FLACs I have. I think it's an obscure enough format that most people know who encoded most of the files they have, so I doubt this really affects anything at all.
Remember people, if you want to be taken seriously, snail mail is the only way to go.
No, not anymore, unfortunately. Snail mail now just takes forever to get through because they have to process it all for hazardous materials after all the anthrax and white powder scares. The turnaround time is usually longer than Washington's attention span.
Email and phone is the way to get the point across in any reasonable amount of time, or take them out to an expensive dinner.
Wish I could mod you up for that. What good does it do to spread the RIAA's top-40 tripe around and give it free publicity? GP(AC) does little more than two favors for the RIAA:
A. Free advertising for their artists, and by extension their cynical business/art model.
2. Support their sue-everyone campaign by showing that everyone has their music, and no one has paid for it.
So we have more people getting sued, more outrage from the clueless and influential over all this 'rampant lawlessness', and a bunch more terrible music coming out of speakers. hooray.
Actually, if I remember Fat Land correctly, wasn't it Earl Butz under Nixon who started the big corn-subsidy initiative? Maybe he was under Ford too. Glad to say I'm too young to know from experience...
No, they exist to make money: corn's just a cheap foodstuff that they can turn into money.
Maybe I was shorting the explicitness of my description in the interest of snappy prose. You are correct; they exist to make money, and they do that by selling cheap corn in various disguises.
No, while "fast-food" style serving may contribute to creating bad habits, the main culprit is still what people eat
First of all, you walked about 6 times the distance that might be considered the maximum for an American before getting into a car and driving:) . But yeah, of course, it's what is in the vending machines that counts. Next time you're in the States, see if you can buy something from a vending machine without some type of corn or corn-syrup or corn-byproduct as a major ingredient (sometimes it's even in 'diet' products, which have their own set of health threats). I won't say it's impossible, but it's not easy either. The stuff is cheap as dirt to produce, and has long been known to be extremely efficient for conversion and storage as fat.
Fast-food in the States is essentially cheap food. It's there because its corn-syrup ingredients are so cheap to produce and easy to maintain and transport (bonus: it doubles as a preservative). Most of this vending-machine / fast-food / suburban-feed-bag (TGIFriday's et al.) industry is built around this cheapness and ease. They are symptoms. I would guess that vending machines in Japan are the result of a different economic cause.
At least as long as Fat Land has been out, but probably a bit longer than that. The story of American obesity is the story of American corn subsidies, which is therefore the story of high-fructose corn syrup and omnipresent, cheaper-than-water soda; and the story of vending machines and fast-food restaurants, 'family-style' Applebee's-like chains that exist solely to help burn off the excess corn stock by selling almost nothing but corn and its byproducts.
Don't tell the presidential candidates though, they have to win in Iowa!
I'm still getting replies to this? Ok, let's relax. I know. I know. I was just making a joke about the arguably excessive measure of security for a home network.
Oh, and the logon screen wouldn't be the source of frustration. They're not employees; they're family, and they might wonder/worry/be annoyed with their brother/sister spending so much time locking down the home computer network and not interacting with loved ones. Or maybe they are bothered by what they perceive as an unhealthy level of paranoia...but now that I'm explaining it, this whole conversation does seem kind of silly, doesn't it?
Such insane personal security does make sense if the whole internet hates you, or if you have issues with the government. I don't know the GP's situation, though.
True, there's also the added fun of feeling like a secret agent. So I can see where s/he's coming from;)
If the whole internet or some government really did have it in for me, though, I probably wouldn't be posting my security practices on slashdot, as cool as they do sound.
At my house, everyone logs in to a Linux powered Domain, LDAP coated in SSL for Authorization, Kerberos for Authentication. Traffic (especially Wifi) encapsulated with IPSec. SE Linux policies in place. Directory service authorized Radius Server with MySQL server Accounting, and cataloged MAC Addresses in OpenLDAP. These are good security policies. Everyone should have some variation of this.
Seriously, has your family tried to kill you, or maybe send you to a therapist?
If they haven't, you should thank them for being so patient. Most people I know are far too annoyed to bother with password-protecting their windows account, let alone participate in such tinfoil-hat activities as encrypting their wireless signals.
Verizon was secretly cooperating with questionable investigations, not trying to engage in political discourse. If it were 'free speech' why were making such an effort to hide it?
Anyway, free speech or not, it's evidence of wrongdoing that should be used against them. See what happens when you try to call your W2 'political expression' and don't let anyone see it.
"listen, now that we have the internet, there's no privacy anymore, ok? If you want some hotsy-totsy job or career or livable wage, then stop going out, having a non-Disney social life and letting people take pictures of you, I mean jeez. If I can do it, so can you."
Sorry, I guess I've been reading slashdot(myspace/privacy) discussions for too long. I hope the woman gets the degree she actually worked for. Unfortunately, If the photos are a problem for her students, she'll be the first to know about it.
I've performed on both laptop and turntables, and the visual effect is what makes all the difference.
I once did a DJ set on a laptop, and hardly anyone realized I was even even doing anything related to the music coming out of the speakers.
When people see someone on turntables, they automatically make the connection. They need the visual cue to go with the music. Even though I could DJ with just my laptop, and it would be a lot easier than lugging turntables and extra hardware, I stick with turntables for the control so no one gets confused.
I would think actual instruments make a similar difference for other kinds of music. No one knows what a guy on a laptop is doing, partially because there's a big screen panel blocking the audience's view of you. And if you're actually doing something instead of just playing back a track, you're looking at the screen instead of them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right—a double goring. It was even worse than I remembered it. Thanks for the correction.
I saw them try this with a bull in the first TV episode of This American Life. The results were not good.
Synopsis: The original bull was nice. The cloned bull was irritable, short-tempered and just not quite right. Also, he kicked the owner in the balls.
I suppose you could just take from that the irony that the cloned animal managed to block its cloner's own ability to reproduce conventionally. But you could also just note that cloned bull was really ugly. You probably won't get what you wanted, unless you delude yourself into thinking you have it.
Because you can pick it up, unencrypted, right out of the radio spectrum just about anywhere. People have been stealing television content for years, with equipment kits you can buy at most garage sales.
Some content providers have started to insert commercials both as a deterrent against stealing content, and as a way to recoup the massive losses. Advanced piracy tools already have hacked this system, with things like a 'mute' button.
I oppose the mute button on moral grounds. Also, I am miserable.
You know, I don't think we're disputing any of this based on how the judge finds. The article, and the discussion here, is about scale. Getting nearly a quarter of a million dollars from a normal civilian is wrong. Yes, yes, so is distributing without copyright. But that doesn't make them equal. That's what the whole "You-break-the-law-you-go-to-jail" (or, in the case of your argument "-you-lose-all-your-money-forever") premise always seems to neglect. As to your new example of software, it's hard to imagine such a case in reality, but such a blatant display of disingenuous pricing and legal manipulation would hopefully factor into the court's decision; again maybe not on the judgment itself, but at least on the number of zeros in the penalty sum.
My point about artists was this: A lot of us don't like the charaterization making everyone think that Downloading Music From The Internet Is Illegal. It's often not illegal, and I would guess even more often not against the wishes of the artist. I am not speaking for Timbaland or Radiohead or anyone else, just the handful of guys I know who feel that way.
And finally, that was exactly my point you just made with the traffic case. You could try to take it to court; you'd probably have a tough case to prove. The scale of retaliation is different, and I would say the woman's actual harm done to the world is about the same scale of a bad move in traffic. Maybe wrong, buy definitely not worth that astronomical sum, unless it directly harmed someone.
Ok, I think we've done this to death, I'm afraid I've got some real work to get back to. Thanks as well.
Right, so...because of the money. But since you call it my 'wages', it sounds like I have less lying around and need it a little more. If you're trying to set up some kind of them-or-me choice, that's the same shaky ground you were on before. Of course, if they were actually selling, and profiting off of my music, I would change my answer. But they're not. Technology has turned real scarcity into artificial scarcity, and a 6MB compressed version of a recording I made just isn't worth that much, as much as I, the hypothetical artist living off his work would like it to be.
While we're on the subject of, "If you were the artist." Let's look at it from the other side. There are pretty much two kinds of musicians out there: struggling, and household name. I know a few of the first kind, and I moonlight as one myself. I can't speak for all of them, but I know most of us would prefer our work gets shared 'illegally'/'stolen', to get it more exposure. If I were type 2, the household name, I wouldn't care at all, because, hey, I'm already loaded. Not enough money? Just do another concert or movie cameo. Labeling any of this as 'your wages are being stolen' is wrong (as in incorrect). There was a time when there were no recordings to sell at all, then it became profitable because it was so costly to reproduce recordings, and now, not.
As for financial ruin of the defendant, while unfortunate, is what happens when you do stuff that is wrong.Ok, next time someone cuts you off in traffic, I suppose you should rear-end them at the next light, at about 30mph. What they did was wrong, and they knew it was wrong; it put you at risk, and quite likely cost you money by making you late, maybe even to an important meeting! Apparently, that entitles you to ruin them, because there must be consequences. Seem excessive? You might have forgotten to include the properly scaled units in your calculation.
Often, a medical problem is so obvious that any reasonable person can advise on it. The advice often goes something like this:
...and so on. To me, these seem about as obvious as, "You shouldn't penalize someone $200,000+ for sharing some songs online."
Maybe I was a bit short with my earlier reply because I had just woken up. Unless you missed the sarcasm in my first paragraph (using stoner speech patterns to give RIAA talking points), the point should be pretty clear. So here it is with out the /. snark: The damages you support are:
Then, I said, you must have been a bit too high yourself when you decided to carry the RIAA's water here on Slashdot, and I failed at humor. So, there it is. I don't see any sane reason why the defendant and her family's lives need total financial ruin, or how that could possibly right any harm done.
And one other thing, I've had time to formulate a little...
I think you would feel about the situation differently if it was your music or software that was illegally being distributed.Really? You think I could be swayed to endorse such nonsense if someone dangled a couple grand (or less, a few percent of the ~$10k/song penalty) in front of me? And not only that, but it's money need from someone who would need it a lot more than I would. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would have no trouble passing on that financial windfall, whether it's my music or not. Why on earth would you think that? Are you that easy to influence?
No, I wouldn't, and don't. The only type of unauthorized music distribution I really can't stand is when some teenage thug-4-life plays the stuff on his cell phone ringtone speakers on the bus during commuting hours.
Oops I should have put, ^*at the very most*^ as much harm as a a smoker or speeder. Those people actually put people's lives at risk. File-sharers don't.
Heh, sounds like you are already stoned. Thanks for the RIAA's journey through the wonderful world of dorm-room-debate what-ifs which makes up their boilerplate logic of absurd extremes: ...like, what if everyone who could access the songs actually downloaded them? and what if each and every one of those guys was, like, someone who was totally going to go out and buy it, but didn't? Think about it, she would owe us, like infinity dollars!!! We should totally get that from her, because like, if bits were like physical CDs, she would be just like a street vendor, you know, and not a blindfolded street vendor.
Anyway, yeah, usually when RIAA guys are reciting that, they're wearing suits and not laughing, so some people get fooled into repeating the goofball logic and thinking it justifies total financial destruction of a few unlucky draft picks. I'm not saying people should never pay for music they hear, but there's something seriously wrong with the thinking process that leads to ruining the life of a middle-class family breadwinner who is guilty of about as much actual, real harm as that caused by speeding or smoking.
I think one of the major problems with the common perception of computers and freedom (both as in beer and as in freedom) is that many people are poorly informed and conditioned so that they think it must be illegal if it is free. Online Mp3s are free and illegal, Online Movies online are free and illegal, Warez are free and illegal (I'm using a definition of illegal which, unfortunately, normally gets used in this context; the one that includes the possibility that a large private lobby will sue you if you do it). Open-Source is free, and so is probably illegal too. It's legacy of hacker imagery doesn't help matters. How many regular users can explain the difference between open-source software and cracked proprietary software? Probably a few, but I'd be surprised if it were a majority.
To reverse this conditioning, you need to have someone's full attention for the two or three minutes it takes to explain the difference. I think this is what the CNet article (one among many) is attempting; and I don't think it would accomplish much to bring up pay-open-source software during the first lesson, because it is a relatively rare breed and is likely only to confuse.
...unless you encode it yourself from CD or wav, or a trusted friend gives you one she encoded herself, or you get it from a reputable distributor, etc.
This actually happens to be the source of most of the FLACs I have. I think it's an obscure enough format that most people know who encoded most of the files they have, so I doubt this really affects anything at all.
No, not anymore, unfortunately. Snail mail now just takes forever to get through because they have to process it all for hazardous materials after all the anthrax and white powder scares. The turnaround time is usually longer than Washington's attention span.
Email and phone is the way to get the point across in any reasonable amount of time, or take them out to an expensive dinner.
Wish I could mod you up for that. What good does it do to spread the RIAA's top-40 tripe around and give it free publicity? GP(AC) does little more than two favors for the RIAA:
A. Free advertising for their artists, and by extension their cynical business/art model.
2. Support their sue-everyone campaign by showing that everyone has their music, and no one has paid for it.
So we have more people getting sued, more outrage from the clueless and influential over all this 'rampant lawlessness', and a bunch more terrible music coming out of speakers. hooray.
Actually, if I remember Fat Land correctly, wasn't it Earl Butz under Nixon who started the big corn-subsidy initiative? Maybe he was under Ford too. Glad to say I'm too young to know from experience...
Maybe I was shorting the explicitness of my description in the interest of snappy prose. You are correct; they exist to make money, and they do that by selling cheap corn in various disguises.
Didn't know about the Hawaii thing though. neat.
First of all, you walked about 6 times the distance that might be considered the maximum for an American before getting into a car and driving :) . But yeah, of course, it's what is in the vending machines that counts. Next time you're in the States, see if you can buy something from a vending machine without some type of corn or corn-syrup or corn-byproduct as a major ingredient (sometimes it's even in 'diet' products, which have their own set of health threats). I won't say it's impossible, but it's not easy either. The stuff is cheap as dirt to produce, and has long been known to be extremely efficient for conversion and storage as fat.
Fast-food in the States is essentially cheap food. It's there because its corn-syrup ingredients are so cheap to produce and easy to maintain and transport (bonus: it doubles as a preservative). Most of this vending-machine / fast-food / suburban-feed-bag (TGIFriday's et al.) industry is built around this cheapness and ease. They are symptoms. I would guess that vending machines in Japan are the result of a different economic cause.
At least as long as Fat Land has been out, but probably a bit longer than that. The story of American obesity is the story of American corn subsidies, which is therefore the story of high-fructose corn syrup and omnipresent, cheaper-than-water soda; and the story of vending machines and fast-food restaurants, 'family-style' Applebee's-like chains that exist solely to help burn off the excess corn stock by selling almost nothing but corn and its byproducts.
Don't tell the presidential candidates though, they have to win in Iowa!
Indiana, jealous of Chicagoland, Wisconsin and Michigan, has decided to mount an ecological attack on us!
If only it weren't considered ridiculous to think about it that way. We can't really call it an attack for two reasons:
This is just disgusting. But what's more disgusting is that it hardly qualifies as news.
I'm still getting replies to this? Ok, let's relax. I know. I know. I was just making a joke about the arguably excessive measure of security for a home network.
Oh, and the logon screen wouldn't be the source of frustration. They're not employees; they're family, and they might wonder/worry/be annoyed with their brother/sister spending so much time locking down the home computer network and not interacting with loved ones. Or maybe they are bothered by what they perceive as an unhealthy level of paranoia...but now that I'm explaining it, this whole conversation does seem kind of silly, doesn't it?
True, there's also the added fun of feeling like a secret agent. So I can see where s/he's coming from ;)
If the whole internet or some government really did have it in for me, though, I probably wouldn't be posting my security practices on slashdot, as cool as they do sound.
Seriously, has your family tried to kill you, or maybe send you to a therapist?
If they haven't, you should thank them for being so patient. Most people I know are far too annoyed to bother with password-protecting their windows account, let alone participate in such tinfoil-hat activities as encrypting their wireless signals.
Verizon was secretly cooperating with questionable investigations, not trying to engage in political discourse. If it were 'free speech' why were making such an effort to hide it?
Anyway, free speech or not, it's evidence of wrongdoing that should be used against them. See what happens when you try to call your W2 'political expression' and don't let anyone see it.
IANAL, this is just common sense.
Someone gets a +5 for saying
"listen, now that we have the internet, there's no privacy anymore, ok? If you want some hotsy-totsy job or career or livable wage, then stop going out, having a non-Disney social life and letting people take pictures of you, I mean jeez. If I can do it, so can you."Sorry, I guess I've been reading slashdot(myspace/privacy) discussions for too long. I hope the woman gets the degree she actually worked for. Unfortunately, If the photos are a problem for her students, she'll be the first to know about it.
I've performed on both laptop and turntables, and the visual effect is what makes all the difference.
I once did a DJ set on a laptop, and hardly anyone realized I was even even doing anything related to the music coming out of the speakers.
When people see someone on turntables, they automatically make the connection. They need the visual cue to go with the music. Even though I could DJ with just my laptop, and it would be a lot easier than lugging turntables and extra hardware, I stick with turntables for the control so no one gets confused.
I would think actual instruments make a similar difference for other kinds of music. No one knows what a guy on a laptop is doing, partially because there's a big screen panel blocking the audience's view of you. And if you're actually doing something instead of just playing back a track, you're looking at the screen instead of them.