As for the 3D movies, please quit going to see them, so they'll let the format die.
No. I like 3D movies, and I hope that the format will live and prosper. Notice you don't see me asking you to stop seeing 2D movies so that the format dies. Choice FTW.
You have the right to express any opinion you want, but you do not have a right to make others' lives worse with your speech. In essence, it's that simple.
So, if we found a politician doing something corrupt and evil, we can't make his life worse by telling people?
We've gone from a society of "You're not fucking good enough, go learn something and get better at it" to "It's OK to be stupid, you don't need to know how this works to use it". We've all been equipped with this marvellous organ called a BRAIN, and it is capable of LEARNING. Yet these big fucking corporations are effectively telling us that we don't need to use our brains anymore- because they're going to give us user interfaces and computers so simple an ape could run them. They've done all the thinking ON YOUR BEHALF, and if you actually think you might want to think for yourself for a change- you can't anymore, because they've eliminated all the options and settings that any reasonable device should ship with.
You know what really irks me? Software. It's like these corporations are telling me that I don't have the BRAIN to program my own machine. People these days are so fucking lazy! Whenever they want something done on their PC, they just look for some software that SOMEONE ELSE wrote, whose done all the THINKING and LEARNING for them. The end result? We get these bloated, rigid messes known as "graphical user interfaces", extremely limited customisation, and huge lags in computer speeds. All because people's time is too "precious". Less precious than their own brain development apparently.
Goddamn right that using computing equipment is not a right. Only the people who earned their chops, like in the computing's very earliest of days, should be allowed to use them. They're the ones who know what they're doing. They'd be disgusted with 99.99% of the people who use computers these days.
Then explain record labels suing individual file sharers, and explain George Harrison losing a million dollar lawsuit.
Sure. If it's not a clearly lost cause, then they'll give it a try. Most people just settle anyway.
Then what should one do to avoid losing a case like Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music or Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton? Accidental infringement cases like these serve to bolster this "fairly hefty misconception about copyright law".
Ah yes, indeed you're correct. I thought you were claiming that people, in order to defend a lawsuit in court, would have to do something profoundly ridiculous like show the judge a comparison of every song ever released by the plaintiff.
Yes, it would appear that way to someone who mostly hears about the entertainment industry via slashdot and other similarly biased sites, instead of actually following what they output. In truth, the man hours spent on lawsuits are far, far outweighed by the man hours spent on production.
Copyright is not as simple as that. While it seems intuitively obvious that this is a direct hindrance to the creation of art, thinking along these lines involves a relatively obvious (at least, in hindsight), but surprisingly common fallacy: namely the unfounded assumption that the inspiring artwork would have existed in the first place. To assume this is to implicitly assume that copyright is not valuable (since this initial existence is the mechanism by which copyright works), and thus makes any argument concluding on this basis that copyright is not valuable completely circular.
You say that copyright suppressed the creation of art, but most likely, it neither suppressed nor promoted it. It isn't likely to have suppressed it because without the support of copyright, because star trek isn't likely to have been made and been as popular without copyright. Copyright is as much responsible for the proposal to begin with, as it was for its being shot down. CBS defending their copyrights promotes copyrights, and thus the creation of art, just in a possibly unintuitive way.
But in practice, defending a work's copyright from the incumbent multinational publishers requires substantial financial resources. If you're not a corporation, you likely lack the resources to defend your copyright from false accusations of infringement.
In theory, a big corporation could drag it out for as long as they wanted, depending only on the amount of money in their bank account. In practice, if you can take the labels as far as the court stage, they'll probably drop it if as soon as it looks hopeless. There's simply no real financial sense to wasting their money trying to extract a few thousand dollars at the expense of much of their own time and money. They're not exactly defending a pristine reputation to begin with, and it appears that their business does not hinge on said reputation. Copyright infringement just happens to be one of the things where people can defend themselves, if they can be afford to go to court over it (and if they can actually defend themselves, of course).
Actually suing the labels for copyright infringement, that's another story...
Nor do you have the resources to check the work that you are preparing to publish against every existing copyrighted work to make sure that there is no substantial similarity.
Um, you do realise that a case actually needs to be made in order to successfully sue someone for copyright infringement? The onus is not on the accused to cross-check their work against every other work in existence.
That's a fairly hefty misconception about copyright law (and, I suppose, the legal system in general). Perhaps this also contributes to the animosity against copyright law?
Facebook seeks to satisfy an emptiness, a need for attention, that I do not have.
I don't think that's true. It's a tool that can definitely be used in this way, but it's also very useful for a variety of other purposes, which I would say do not simply defer to attention-seeking as the main purpose. It's an excellent tool for communicating instantly, discreetly, and cheaply, as well as the organisation of events, which is the way I have used it (and have seen it used). I use it to organise semi-regular board game nights between friends, or to casually chat to friends from other states. Very rarely (twice, in my recollection) have I used it to satisfy a need for attention. In fact, by and large, I avoid using it for long periods of time, because I often don't want attention, and the feeling of exposure is not pleasant. In fact, I've had facebook for at least four years now, but have only actually started logging in in the last 12 months.
Am I right in thinking that you've never used it? Your impressions of it sound like you've mostly read about its most negative aspects, so reinforced and repeated that they've become stereotypes and cliches, rather than its less heralded positive aspects. I suspect that if you tried using it for a decent amount of time, you'd find that you and your friends would not use for attention-seeking, and just enjoy the extra communication that it affords. Basically, I don't believe that you have invested the necessary time and gathered the necessary information to support your claim that "Facebook has little or nothing to offer me in exchange for the privacy I am giving up."
Of course, that's up to you. Nobody is forcing you to be completely informed in your decision against Facebook. However, I would think twice before pidgeonholing people who do use it.
You can call that "just my opinion" in the sense that other people don't feel that way, but I can say that one of those is definitely superior.
What does superior mean in this context? It certainly doesn't mean that everyone on earth prefers one to the other. What other metric could you be using to judge one superior over the other? Take the example of a celebrity. They have almost no privacy. If they put themselves on Facebook, they basically lose no privacy. The type of information that you can derive from facebook is not the type of information that a celebrity can hide from the public. Are you saying that their (lack of) privacy is worth more than the benefits of facebook? Even if your contention that its primary use is for attention-seeking, this may still be valuable to a celebrity. For example, to Paris Hilton, I can't imagine a downside to facebook!
I don't believe in absolute superiority, because I am (more or less) a logical positivist. As of yet, nobody has provided a method of verifying that some "thing" X is superior to another "thing" Y in such a way that people generally agree that it is superiority that its measuring (for example, I could say person A is superior to person B if A is older than B, but nobody would call it superiority that I was measuring), and thus the statement that X is superior to Y is, as of yet, meaningless.
People in general are not geeks. That's where I was coming from earlier. Geeks would be a much, much smaller market. Designing devices just for geeks would alienate "people in general". It would not be a good business decision. It wouldn't have produced the results I personally observed -- people who are not technically inclined who bought Macs and suddenly stopped having frequent "computer problems".
Sure, and this I agree with. However, it is fallacious to conclude the converse: if a person buys a non-geek computer like apple, then they are not a geek (and consequently have to hand in their geek card).
I like to think of it as a game, where you lose one life each time you accidentally click on an article without opening it in incognito mode. If you lose all 10 lives, you "lose" the game and can't read good journalism for the remainder of the month.
Have you considered subscribing? As you said, it's "good journalism", clearly something you value enough to go to the trouble of gaming the cookie. Perhaps this is something you should be actively rewarding, rather than taking active steps to avoid rewarding?
As always, an important facet of any informed debate is comprehending all sides to a given issue. With that in mind, you can download the decision, as well as the rest of the documents, here (warning: 11.3Mb, pdf wrapped in rar). I'm assuming the following is the controversial bit:
Subsection 11A(5) of the Act provides that if a document is 'conditionally exempt' it still must be disclosed unless the decision maker is satisfied that, on balance, its disclosure would be contrary to the public interest. I have decided that disclosure of these documents, in absence of any solution or agreement, would be contrary to the public interest. My reasons for so concluding are, essentially, that the discussions that are taking place are at an early stage involving various industry representatives. The discussions, therefore, are at a very delicate, sensitive and important stage. Disclosure of documents while the negotiations are still in process, would, in my view, prejudice, hamper and impede those negotiations to an unacceptable degree. That would, in my view, be contrary to the interests of good government - which would, in turn, be contrary to the public interest.
(Copied manually and quickly, so don't take as gospel)
I see her point. As I'm sure we're all aware, there is a very vocal group of people who are against the idea of these talks occurring in the first place. The early stages of the talks could (and most probably do) contain aspects that are unreasonable and will not be present towards the resolution. These points could well be exploited by people who would like to see these talks not go ahead.
Think of it like couple counselling. The couple might start out angry and at each others throats, but that doesn't necessarily reflect how they feel about each other, and the compromises they're willing to make. If someone were to make the initial proceedings public, it would potentially send completely the wrong impression out to everyone. Anyone who is genuinely interested in the outcome of the counselling would prefer to hear about the latter stages.
Anyway, now you have the information, make up your own minds.
The control exerted is obvious, not particularly forceful, and not particularly new. All the researchers have found is that some people will go a small distance out of their way in order to fulfil an objective in a mobile game. Somewhere, there's a guy in an advertising agency who's laughing his head off at their amateur discoveries.
Actually in the case of Facebook, a "geek" is someone who is technically proficient enough to understand that the private information they will inevitably give up is not worth the benefit of what is basically free, substandard Web hosting.
Someone technically proficient would understand the sort of private information they will inevitably give up, but the rest is opinion. You're prescribing ideology to something that is ideology-agnostic.
In the case of Apple, a "geek" is what you don't have to be in order to use their products because their products are specifically made for ease of use. Apple didn't design their consumer products for geeks because that's a very small market. They designed them for a general audience because that's where the sales are.
Apple designs their products for people in general, not for non-geeks specifically. Even if they did, geeks don't have to listen to Apple. There's nothing to say that geeks must have a different taste in consumer electronics to everyone else.
I don't usually indulge such childishness like what you are showing when you take a discussion about Facebook and Apple and decide that you just have to make it about me personally. But what the hell. Since you seem to really want to make this personal...if recognizing reality is your definition of a "superiority complex" then you sound like a very insecure person.
What happened to the adults who could disagree with someone's opinion without making it a personal matter? I miss them, wherever they went.
I'm sorry if you took it personally. That certainly wasn't my intention. I wholeheartedly disagree with your opinion, but not so much that I found it offensive to any degree. I don't post very politely, but that's part of the thrill of discussion on slashdot: putting passion in your arguments. As I usually do, I had endeavoured to keep personal barbs out of my post (if I want them in there, oh boy, you will know!), but I know that my usual passion can be misconstrued from time to time.
So, again, sorry for personally offending you. I remember some of your previous posts, and I know we disagree strongly on certain topics, but I too would rather keep discussions respectful (but not necessarily sterilised and boring).
Sorry, if you use Apple you have to turn your geek card.
Agreed. That's the way I feel about Facebook too.
I've always wondered exactly what characterises a "geek". Apparently it's something to do with having some kind of superiority complex that forbids you to use anything popular, convenient, and easy to use, and has nothing to do with having some kind of non-mainstream passion or quirky curiosity.
No, NP-Hard cannot be, nor ever become, a buzz word, because NP-Hard has a clear, well-defined meaning. Buzzwords are defined by their own lack of definition, making them perfect for marketing and generally impressing people without saying anything meaningful.
Yep, I can agree with all that. I mostly tend to focus on pirates, not because they're more evil and greedy than the **AA, but because I think they need a kick in the pants, and realise they are far from blameless in this situation. In fact, I'm generally happy if someone acknowledges that what they're doing hurts the artists, even if they don't stop. Having that realisation leads to genuine moderation, which I think is a fair compromise.
I'm also less keen than some of the others to dismantle the publishers. I think they still provide a valuable service, even if it won't necessarily last long. I'm far more disturbed by the mere fact that companies, or any rich party in fact, can exert this amount of control over the government. Regardless of who is abusing this hole in the political system, it should be plugged as soon as possible. Beheading one company is not a long term solution to this.
Not quite. Can you buy a single track, from any album no matter how old or obscure, for a dollar at a store? No; iTunes allows you to buy single tracks for microtransaction amounts.
However, if you want the music itself to be free, why not throw in youtube into the mix? Plenty of record labels upload to youtube these days. Combine youtube + itunes, you have the free + microtransactions model that the OP wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, you've ridden your hyperbola up its asymptote, now come down and talk sensibly with the rest of the environmentally conscious folks.
No. I like 3D movies, and I hope that the format will live and prosper. Notice you don't see me asking you to stop seeing 2D movies so that the format dies. Choice FTW.
What concerns? They didn't know why they were there!
Wow. That woman is scum. I've never before used that word to describe another human being, but I think she's as deserving as any.
So, if we found a politician doing something corrupt and evil, we can't make his life worse by telling people?
You know what really irks me? Software. It's like these corporations are telling me that I don't have the BRAIN to program my own machine. People these days are so fucking lazy! Whenever they want something done on their PC, they just look for some software that SOMEONE ELSE wrote, whose done all the THINKING and LEARNING for them. The end result? We get these bloated, rigid messes known as "graphical user interfaces", extremely limited customisation, and huge lags in computer speeds. All because people's time is too "precious". Less precious than their own brain development apparently.
Goddamn right that using computing equipment is not a right. Only the people who earned their chops, like in the computing's very earliest of days, should be allowed to use them. They're the ones who know what they're doing. They'd be disgusted with 99.99% of the people who use computers these days.
Sure. If it's not a clearly lost cause, then they'll give it a try. Most people just settle anyway.
Ah yes, indeed you're correct. I thought you were claiming that people, in order to defend a lawsuit in court, would have to do something profoundly ridiculous like show the judge a comparison of every song ever released by the plaintiff.
Yes, it would appear that way to someone who mostly hears about the entertainment industry via slashdot and other similarly biased sites, instead of actually following what they output. In truth, the man hours spent on lawsuits are far, far outweighed by the man hours spent on production.
Copyright is not as simple as that. While it seems intuitively obvious that this is a direct hindrance to the creation of art, thinking along these lines involves a relatively obvious (at least, in hindsight), but surprisingly common fallacy: namely the unfounded assumption that the inspiring artwork would have existed in the first place. To assume this is to implicitly assume that copyright is not valuable (since this initial existence is the mechanism by which copyright works), and thus makes any argument concluding on this basis that copyright is not valuable completely circular.
You say that copyright suppressed the creation of art, but most likely, it neither suppressed nor promoted it. It isn't likely to have suppressed it because without the support of copyright, because star trek isn't likely to have been made and been as popular without copyright. Copyright is as much responsible for the proposal to begin with, as it was for its being shot down. CBS defending their copyrights promotes copyrights, and thus the creation of art, just in a possibly unintuitive way.
In theory, a big corporation could drag it out for as long as they wanted, depending only on the amount of money in their bank account. In practice, if you can take the labels as far as the court stage, they'll probably drop it if as soon as it looks hopeless. There's simply no real financial sense to wasting their money trying to extract a few thousand dollars at the expense of much of their own time and money. They're not exactly defending a pristine reputation to begin with, and it appears that their business does not hinge on said reputation. Copyright infringement just happens to be one of the things where people can defend themselves, if they can be afford to go to court over it (and if they can actually defend themselves, of course).
Actually suing the labels for copyright infringement, that's another story...
Um, you do realise that a case actually needs to be made in order to successfully sue someone for copyright infringement? The onus is not on the accused to cross-check their work against every other work in existence.
That's a fairly hefty misconception about copyright law (and, I suppose, the legal system in general). Perhaps this also contributes to the animosity against copyright law?
I'm sure he's just the denying the soul-crushing agony that comes inherently with using devices for the purpose that they're built for.
You really have no clue what the Greens are like in Australia, do you?
I don't think that's true. It's a tool that can definitely be used in this way, but it's also very useful for a variety of other purposes, which I would say do not simply defer to attention-seeking as the main purpose. It's an excellent tool for communicating instantly, discreetly, and cheaply, as well as the organisation of events, which is the way I have used it (and have seen it used). I use it to organise semi-regular board game nights between friends, or to casually chat to friends from other states. Very rarely (twice, in my recollection) have I used it to satisfy a need for attention. In fact, by and large, I avoid using it for long periods of time, because I often don't want attention, and the feeling of exposure is not pleasant. In fact, I've had facebook for at least four years now, but have only actually started logging in in the last 12 months.
Am I right in thinking that you've never used it? Your impressions of it sound like you've mostly read about its most negative aspects, so reinforced and repeated that they've become stereotypes and cliches, rather than its less heralded positive aspects. I suspect that if you tried using it for a decent amount of time, you'd find that you and your friends would not use for attention-seeking, and just enjoy the extra communication that it affords. Basically, I don't believe that you have invested the necessary time and gathered the necessary information to support your claim that "Facebook has little or nothing to offer me in exchange for the privacy I am giving up."
Of course, that's up to you. Nobody is forcing you to be completely informed in your decision against Facebook. However, I would think twice before pidgeonholing people who do use it.
What does superior mean in this context? It certainly doesn't mean that everyone on earth prefers one to the other. What other metric could you be using to judge one superior over the other? Take the example of a celebrity. They have almost no privacy. If they put themselves on Facebook, they basically lose no privacy. The type of information that you can derive from facebook is not the type of information that a celebrity can hide from the public. Are you saying that their (lack of) privacy is worth more than the benefits of facebook? Even if your contention that its primary use is for attention-seeking, this may still be valuable to a celebrity. For example, to Paris Hilton, I can't imagine a downside to facebook!
I don't believe in absolute superiority, because I am (more or less) a logical positivist. As of yet, nobody has provided a method of verifying that some "thing" X is superior to another "thing" Y in such a way that people generally agree that it is superiority that its measuring (for example, I could say person A is superior to person B if A is older than B, but nobody would call it superiority that I was measuring), and thus the statement that X is superior to Y is, as of yet, meaningless.
Sure, and this I agree with. However, it is fallacious to conclude the converse: if a person buys a non-geek computer like apple, then they are not a geek (and consequently have to hand in their geek card).
Have you considered subscribing? As you said, it's "good journalism", clearly something you value enough to go to the trouble of gaming the cookie. Perhaps this is something you should be actively rewarding, rather than taking active steps to avoid rewarding?
As always, an important facet of any informed debate is comprehending all sides to a given issue. With that in mind, you can download the decision, as well as the rest of the documents, here (warning: 11.3Mb, pdf wrapped in rar). I'm assuming the following is the controversial bit:
(Copied manually and quickly, so don't take as gospel)
I see her point. As I'm sure we're all aware, there is a very vocal group of people who are against the idea of these talks occurring in the first place. The early stages of the talks could (and most probably do) contain aspects that are unreasonable and will not be present towards the resolution. These points could well be exploited by people who would like to see these talks not go ahead.
Think of it like couple counselling. The couple might start out angry and at each others throats, but that doesn't necessarily reflect how they feel about each other, and the compromises they're willing to make. If someone were to make the initial proceedings public, it would potentially send completely the wrong impression out to everyone. Anyone who is genuinely interested in the outcome of the counselling would prefer to hear about the latter stages.
Anyway, now you have the information, make up your own minds.
I'm sorry, did you say something Boobara, not Boobie?
The control exerted is obvious, not particularly forceful, and not particularly new. All the researchers have found is that some people will go a small distance out of their way in order to fulfil an objective in a mobile game. Somewhere, there's a guy in an advertising agency who's laughing his head off at their amateur discoveries.
Name one.
Just one.
Go on.
I'll be impressed.
Someone technically proficient would understand the sort of private information they will inevitably give up, but the rest is opinion. You're prescribing ideology to something that is ideology-agnostic.
Apple designs their products for people in general, not for non-geeks specifically. Even if they did, geeks don't have to listen to Apple. There's nothing to say that geeks must have a different taste in consumer electronics to everyone else.
I'm sorry if you took it personally. That certainly wasn't my intention. I wholeheartedly disagree with your opinion, but not so much that I found it offensive to any degree. I don't post very politely, but that's part of the thrill of discussion on slashdot: putting passion in your arguments. As I usually do, I had endeavoured to keep personal barbs out of my post (if I want them in there, oh boy, you will know!), but I know that my usual passion can be misconstrued from time to time.
So, again, sorry for personally offending you. I remember some of your previous posts, and I know we disagree strongly on certain topics, but I too would rather keep discussions respectful (but not necessarily sterilised and boring).
I've always wondered exactly what characterises a "geek". Apparently it's something to do with having some kind of superiority complex that forbids you to use anything popular, convenient, and easy to use, and has nothing to do with having some kind of non-mainstream passion or quirky curiosity.
No, NP-Hard cannot be, nor ever become, a buzz word, because NP-Hard has a clear, well-defined meaning. Buzzwords are defined by their own lack of definition, making them perfect for marketing and generally impressing people without saying anything meaningful.
Another possible example: the best way to collect all pickups in Metroid while minimising the encounters hazards (and the chance of getting killed).
Yep, I can agree with all that. I mostly tend to focus on pirates, not because they're more evil and greedy than the **AA, but because I think they need a kick in the pants, and realise they are far from blameless in this situation. In fact, I'm generally happy if someone acknowledges that what they're doing hurts the artists, even if they don't stop. Having that realisation leads to genuine moderation, which I think is a fair compromise.
I'm also less keen than some of the others to dismantle the publishers. I think they still provide a valuable service, even if it won't necessarily last long. I'm far more disturbed by the mere fact that companies, or any rich party in fact, can exert this amount of control over the government. Regardless of who is abusing this hole in the political system, it should be plugged as soon as possible. Beheading one company is not a long term solution to this.
Not quite. Can you buy a single track, from any album no matter how old or obscure, for a dollar at a store? No; iTunes allows you to buy single tracks for microtransaction amounts.
However, if you want the music itself to be free, why not throw in youtube into the mix? Plenty of record labels upload to youtube these days. Combine youtube + itunes, you have the free + microtransactions model that the OP wanted.
I won't.
Obviously.
Well, that explains why they flatly refused to sell their music on it. That did happen, right?
Oh yes, for the famous anti-iTunes section! Wait, which section was that again?
No, of course not. Tell me, are you sure you're replying to the right post?