Just because something is against the law doesn't make it wrong. For example, in countries that have more unjust laws than the US, such as China, do the journalists who break the law when they make negative reports about the government "deserve whatever happens" to them?
This is irrelevant to the argument at hand. It is a basis for an argument about a free press and free speech.
The purpose of copyright is not to make anyone money. It is to expand the public domain for the good of the public. Copyright law is meant to serve the public. The constitution says nothing about artists deserving to make any kind of money. It is all about benefiting the public. Current copyright law actually does the opposite of its original purpose: as copyright gets stretched, works never fall into public domain. It is an unjust law that should be broken. As long as politicians are paid off, this unjust law will only get worse. Because of this, I would even argue that it may even be our duty to break copyright law.
Yet another argument based upon some dreamy notion soundly grounded in fantasy. Give this a read over, you might find it contains actual facts as opposed to what you have said.
Sharing our own culture is our right. This has been taken away from us.
You can whine and snivel all you want, but the law is the law. You don't like the law? Then form a group, a coalition, raise money to hire the best K's streeters you can afford to lobby congress to get it changed, That is how the system works, use it.
Great! I suggest you support them with actual MONEY since they have people who actually know something as opposed to you who live in some sort of fantasy land, although I doubt that they will agree with your position since it is utterly and completely without merit or a basic grounded in logic or facts.
Mod me whatever the fuck you want, I don't care but I have had enough of all this mental masturbation and completely vain and worthless attempts to justify theft.
Bare the following in mind:
Did, YOU the downloader create this work?
Did, YOU the person amking said work avaiable for download create this work?
Did, YOU the Down/Uploader create this work?
Did, YOU the Down/Uploader provide the financial backing to create this work?
I am willing to bet that at least 99.99999999% of you cannot truthfully answer yes to any of the questions, and yet for some reason you think you have the right because you have a computer and an internet connection, to download, upload or host said work for someone else to download!
Well bucko's, I hate to tell you this, you dont! The law makes it quite clear that you DO NOT have any right to do so and in point of fact doing so is a violation of said LAW and in knowingly violating said LAW you damn well deserve whatever happens to you either as a result of a criminal case or civil case brought against you.
Yes the RIAA and the MPPAA are being pretty heavy handed, and I for one down blame them, you threaten the very livelihood of the industry and the artists
You can whine and snivel all you want, but the law is the law. You don't like the law? Then form a group, a coalition, raise money to hire the best K's streeters you can afford to lobby congress to get it changed, That is how the system works, use it.
But I seriously doubt you will, because you would rather whine and snivel with trite little pearls of whisdom like "Information wants to be free!" or "Those record companies suck!" or "I dont get to work on something when I am 25 and then live off it for the rest of my life" and other such complete and utter bullshit. Get your lazy ass of your couch and write a great novel, write some great music. Use the system instead of whining like a bunch of babies. I mean for fucks sake, my 6 year old whines less then you pathetic losers.
I don't know if you are missing something but let me give you my perspective on this. The people who are P2P'ng are in point of fact breaking the law, its that simple.
As the old saying goes, "Choose your battles wisely", and that is what the content owners are doing. Now we can argue all day long about the wisdom of some of the battles they have chose, but for the most part they are doing so.
What they are trying to do is corral the beast. They are fully aware that it cannot be defeated, so they are trying to contain it and put the fear of god into everyone. Trust me, no one at EMI/VIRGIN/SONY/BMG or any other of the large content owners gives a rats ass that you have a central machine in your home that streams content out to the various devices in your home especially if you purchased that content from them since that means they made the buck.
What gets their panties in a bunch is when you start hooking up your next door neighbor, or half your damn apartment complex, and I have seen people do this, or when you open your system to the internet and now lots and lots of other people are downloading content.
Now beyond that what really makes them wake up sweating are people like Pirate Bay who just give away the content that cost EMI/VIRGIN/SONY/BMG or whomever a hell of a lot of money to produce to the entire world. Eventually the likes of Pirate Bay are going to get shut down. I don't care what country they are in, at some point the political pressure will just be to much to bare for the government of the host country and it will happen.
Let me add this last little idea and I am done. You really want all these big production houses and distribution companies. Did you enjoy films like "The Matrix" or "Toy Story" or "Harry Potter" or anything like those? I am pretty sure you have. Those kinds of things cost Multiple Millions of dollars to bring to the screen. We could argue all day that Reeves is a horrible actor or that Tom Hanks ONLY used his voice and therefor why did they get paid so much, but that is irrelevant to the argument at hand. If left unchecked, unauthorized distribution will grow to the point where it really starts hitting the bottom line of these companies and then who is going to invest their money? The answer is nobody. So all that content will not be produced or not produced in a manner that you find desirable.
And I'll point out a small detail for you: Copyright law is not a natural law or a human right. It's a social contract, at best, a balance of interests within a social context.
Ok, so here we go again.. Please what exactly is natural law? What exactly is a human right? Allow me to inform you of the fact that ANY law, of any kind, with the possible exception of the laws of physics, is, in point of fact, a Social Contract that we all for the most part agree upon.
So, when I say, (for example) that an easy solution would be to make all private, non-commercial copying to be 100% legal, I'm not saying we start "taking something away" from creative producers. It's me saying "Hi, remember that free ride/monopoly we gave you back when we passed copyright laws that give you a monopoly on reproduction of your work? Well, due to changing needs in society, we're going to change the way that freebie we gave you works."
You are now talking about two very separate ideas here. 1st of all, you are perfectly free to make 10,000 copies, at your own expense, of any copyrighted work and then scatter them about your home, apartment, hovel or whatever it is you live in. You may not distribute them, sell them, or in any way cause them to be distributed. Its called fair use spend as much money as you want, its fine by me.
I suppose you could try and get the law changed, for "needs of society". let me tell you, you are going to really have to work hard to convince me, or pretty much any reasonable person that the "needs of society" demand that I can no longer have the exclusive control over the sale and distribution of anything artistic or literary work that I create.
AFAIK, no one has a guarantee of their revenue stream in the constitution.
I agree with you that there is no provision in the constitution that enumerates any such right; however, the law as passed by congress concerning copyright does.
I don't get to have one hugely successful project I work on when I'm 25 years old and then live off the results of that for the rest of my life, so why should authors/artists get to do that?
Hmmm well you could, if you create something that falls under the provision of copyright law. Those that come to mind are a book, a score of music, a screenplay, a movie, software, pick any of those and as long as people will buy/license is from you you can never work another day in your life within the framework of copyright law.
So pretty much it sounds as though you are crying "sour grapes" that you were not ____________ ( inset the appropriate adjective) enough to create such a work and now you have to be a wage slave for the rest of your life. Well guess what so do about 99.9% of the rest of the population of the planet. You know what, life sucks and until you can accomplish something like writing a book people want to buy and read, music people want to buy and listen to or any body of work covered by copyright law, copyright law is really meaningless to you, well unless you are trying to justify taking someone else's work and trying to sell it, or justify giving it away for the "cool"factor or whatever.
Any author, Musician, anyone who creates something has the right to give it away for free, as in zero cost to the person who accepts it, with the following proviso:
If the author/musician/creator of said work had entered into an agreement with another party to be compensated while creating said work, and in the agreement promised said sponsor a percentage of the revenue from the sale of said work at a price the market will bare. Unless said sponsor releases the creator of the work from said agreement, or the agreement has a defined term and that term had lapsed. Until said agreement is satisfied, then the creator of said work has no such lawful right to give away said work without satisfying the terms of the agreement.
Many creators of literary or musical works do in point of fact make those works available for free and deliver it in many ways of which the internet is only one.
Not a new point, but authors who have works available via the Baen Free Library [http://www.baen.com/library] generally seem to see more sales as a result, not less. I hope um Heap Big Pirate Chief remembers to mention this when interviewers say, 'But think of the chi^H^H^Hartists!' If not, I do hope he starts doing so.
You are posting as AC so I will assume you are one.
Allow me to point out a small detail for you. Those authors VOLUNTARILY add their literary works to that library, as opposed to some jerk who takes something that someone else created, and is SELLING so they can make a buck to feed their family, pay their mortgage, etc. etc. and decides for themselves that it should be given for free to anyone that person decides should have it
The conclusion I came to was to sell maintenance, upgrades, training and data conversion. I include the complete source code and database schema and its all very nicely documented. I cannot distribute the compiler because it is not open source ( Delphi Enterprise which includes all the runtime source ) but I include very specific instructions on how to set up the development environment and all the 3rd part bits that are required.
Doing so game me the option of including MySQL server at no cost as the database for smaller implementations. For larger implementations they are required to purchase Oracle since at the time MySQL 4.x simply could not handle the load.
So yes you can make money doing open source. Only the people that use it are required to have access to the source code, you do not, in my opinion have to make an announcement to the world that anyone can snag your product just because they feel like dorking around with it. It is available for download if you know where to look. And no I am never going to put it on any source forge.
Some will argue that this violates the spirit of GPL or FOOS, but I submit that it does not violate the rules themselves. The source is there, you can get it, but it will cost you money to be able to build it
I think your first and third group are only quantitatively different. Their idea of "reasonable price" just differs. Some of group 1 may be unwilling to pay anything more than an internet connection fee, but others are probably looking for (for example) music at much less than iTune's ~$20 an hour.
I would disagree with this statement to the extent that group 3 in the vast majority obtain music/movies/whatever from recognized vending outlets, be it iTunes, BlockBuster, Wall-Mart, Target or whatever. In doing so the proceeds of said distribution eventually get to the legitimate sellers of the content. Group 1, I assert, does not see the price of their internet connection as the fee for obtaining these items since it is not an exclusive method of delivery. Even though they pay their hosting bill, revenue from that stream does not make its way back to the legitimate sellers of the content.
As long as these media cartels set the prices and suppress the free market, this problem will be common. Although, netlabels and company are probably going to open up the markets considerably in the next decade.
I must take umbrage with this notion in the strongest terms possible. You or anyone else for that matter are free to go into the music/movie/play producing business at you desire. All you have to do is have lots of money to do the following:
Hire people to scout talent
Hire people to shepherd that talen
Rent time in or construct a recording studio
Hire recording engineers
Hire publicists to promote the product
Hire secretaries
Legal fees
Pay the talent a reasonable amount so they can eat/pay bills/send kids to school or whatnot while they are busy in the studio creating the music/movie/play or whatever
...and the list goes on and on and pretty soon it adds up to serious money
The investments required to bring a CD or a movie to a national distributor are eye popping to be sure, and even then its a huge gamble, but if you can raise the cash you or anyone else are free to go into the business. Sony can't stop you, EMI, Virgin, none of them. If you stumble across the next Police or Dave Mathews Band or John Mayer or whatever, the distributors will some to you, its that simple. Yes everyone along the chain wants a cut, but thats business, irregardless of the product be it Beer, Music, Video, Walnuts or tires.
Sorry to inform you of this but there is no middle ground.
The basic problem is that there are 3 camps:
Those that think that they don't have to pay for anything.
Those that think they created something of value, to someone, and think they deserve to be compensated./li>
Those that recognize the value of something and don't mind compensating those that created the item.
Those in the first group have many many rationals for their belief, all of which are spurious. They range from "I am helping the artist, why are you harshing me!?" to "Those record companies are all thieves, so what I am doing cannot possibly be wrong!" and the always popular, "Copyright means I can copy it as often as I want to and give to whomever I want.".
The second group are the ones who create something and then hope to sell it to pay their bills, buy a better "________________" (fill in the blank), so their lives will be better. Contrary to popular belief MANY musicians see it as nothing but a means to and end. A job they are capable of doing to raise their family, pay bills, party on or whatever. The much vilified "Record company / movie studio" are the ones who facilitate this process more often then not. Keeping this in a music / movie context, these companies bet lots and lots of money on what they perceive to be a great music act, a great screen play or whatever and pay the bills that other people send them for the services required to complete a CD or movie and bring it to the people who might want to hear/view it. If LOTS of people want to see / hear it then everyones involved makes a buck, if they don't then everyone loses a buck, but not usually the band/movie star or whatever because in the vast majority of the cases those people have been paid up front and sometimes have a promise of more if things go well.
The last group are pretty much your average folks who just want to listen to music, watch a movie at home and get on with their lives. They don't mind paying a reasonable price for their entertainment, recognize the value of what they are getting and enjoy it.
The first group of people will always be in conflict with the second group, its just they way it is. The second group perceives, and rightly so in my opinion, that the first group is stealing from them by offering the same thing that the second group produced, often at great expense, and they are selling for a price the market will bare, for free. The method of this offering is beside the point, bit torrent, ripping to MP3 whatever, it is irrelevant to the base argument.
Hmmmm I used to hang out in the ESM closet an yak with a bud that was an ET but I never paid much attention to their gear, although the little beeps, bonks and buzzes it made were pretty cool.
Spent most my off-time doing chump 'o da watch qual's. I was bored as shit a lot of the time and liked talking on the 1MC. I think I was one of the only 2nd class sts's to ever qualify to stand the watch. I would stand it occasionally if the COW for that watch was really beat and needed an equalizer.
Ahh the halcyon days of "big and black and they don't come back".
I was in Pearl a few months back on business, I saw an SSN heading out, I stood there watching until I couldn't see it any more. I must confess a part of me was longing to be riding her. In reality I would go near uncles canoe club these days. They seem to have turned into a bunch of bible thumping, non-smoking, high an tight haircut tight asses. When I was in we worked hard and we partied even harder.
Gad I am dredging here, but I think you are referring to the BQS-11/12/13 and assorted gear that was on the 637 class. I went to C school for that suite, which I much preferred.
IBM made a bit of hardware for the US Navy called the A/N-BQQ5 SONAR system. The main consoles had an array of buttons ( keys if you will ) that called functions and of course changed that actual text that was displayed on each button based upon the current function(s) selected. If memory serves, mind you this was 30 years ago, they had an acronym ( the Military has acronyms for everything ) and it was DROS . This is a link to a site that has a decent photo of the control consoles, Click on the image ( yes unfortunately it will open in a pop-up, sorry its the ONLY photo I can find ) for a larger version. As you can see the three consoles are identical; however, each console could be assigned any function that the system performed. Thus each set of keys displayed text appropriate for the consoles currently assigned function, and sub-functions.
I rode USS-OMAHA SSN-692 in winter of '78 and USS Los Angeles was commissioned in '76, so given how long it takes to get a bit of hardware like that from IBM in those days, I would imagine those buttons / keys were more then likely developed in the late 60's.
So here is the problem, there are two classes of people on just about any road, anyplace:
Drivers
Motor Vehicle Operators
Drivers. These are the people you see driving, not overly fast, but driving with intent. They pay attention, they are generally never talking on a cell phone, their eyes are always scanning the road ahead, their mirrors and their instruments. They use blinkers AND turn them off, they can be pretty much any age and any gender. You will notice that they drive consciously.
Motor Vehicle Operators - These are the people you see driving a car that scare the crap out of you. They are NOT paying attention, they are shaving, eating, reading the paper, putting on makeup, doing their hair. Their cell is glued to their ear, are fiddling with the radio very three seconds. Their left turn blinker is invariably on.
Some things I would like to see tickets given for:
Merging onto the freeway at less then the speed of traffic
Changing lanes on the freeway into to an impossibly tight spot and then nailing the breaks. I don't mind if you are a driver and you do this, because if you are a driver, you do the maneuver with grace, authority, you have made sure the person you are going to be in front of knows your intent and keep up the pace.
Driving while eating
Driving with any sort of animal ( human or otherwise ) on your lap
Trying to light any sort of smoking material with a Bic lighter
Putting on makeup. Sorry girls, but if you shove the fucking mascara wand into your eye you will crash and probably kill yourself, but worse then that, kill someone else.
I think that should prime the pump, as I am sure my fellow/.'rs will add many many more.
Actually it does. Now before you scream how wrong I am lets take a few examples:
Gimp - Damn good but always loses when compaired to PhotoShop.
OpenOffice - damn good but always loses when compared to MS-Office or even Word Perfect office, this includes all of the parts, database, presentations, etc,. And just to be clear. I loath MS-Office and MicroSoft.
Firefox - Often compared to IE and comes up just short for whatever reason. I don't use IE except for testing as I much prefer Firefox.
And yes I tell my boss ie: my customers, quite often you can only choose two. If you want software fast and cheep it is only going to do the bare minimum to accomplish the task, no bells, no whistles, and there will be very little abstraction as that takes time, thought and planning. It is going to be hard coded for the most part and in the end you will end up paying more for it. If you want it yesterday and you don't mind paying a premium I will bring on extra crew and it will get cranked out fast with bells and whistles. If you want quality and low price then you are going to wait and I will fit it in when I can and not charge you as much.
Hmmm well I suppose I should forgive your insulting comments, but not so much today since I am in a bad mood, perhaps you were as well.
Yeah I would agree that if the software they are running has problems then it should have never gotten passed QA and they deserve all the criticism for that.
I will make the same statement I made in the end of my post, you get what you pay for. Phone switch manufacturers have been facing HUGE downward price pressure an no its not unique to them, but to stay in business they are forced to keep lowering the cost of the products and that is going to be felt at some level, and it appears that in Aveya's case it was felt at the QA level.
I am old school and personally if I have a business that depends on phones I will purchase an appropriate bit of gear that has a solid reputation and provides years of solid service. I side as an exotic car mechanic and we have a sign in the shop that says:
Before I lay out my argument, let me start by saying that I really hope that one day it will be, but I am not holding my breath.
OpenSource or any other type of software that runs on a general purpose computer will not be as efficient as say a machine from Panasonic or other phone vendor, you might be able to play with the bells and whistles more, but it will just not make the grade.
Phone switches are very specialized hardware. They are definitely not you average Intel box A great deal of what they do is based in firmware and a lot of it is realized in hardware with custom ASICS and the like. Don't expect a general purpose computer to handle what they will. Yes these are all based on slip in cards but they also have to make some pretty severe trade-offs do to the architecture..
The software they run may very well be Linux based, but its not you average Linux. It might have the same kernel but that is where the similarity stops.
People trying to run their phone systems over things like cable modems are just nuts, you need a dedicated T1 channel for each line. Yes some people have had success with running things across data circuits that are cable based but there is nothing in the way of guaranteed bandwidth, its all best efforts read the contract. The biggest problem is that people want something for nothing these days, and complain when their voice is choppy when they are torrenting something or streaming video in either direction,
Modern commercial phone systems have millions and millions of R&D money that have been poured into them. The software has been QA'd up down left and right. The bug counts on the software are phenomenally low no matte who's system you are using, Mitel, Aveya, Panosonic, Northern Telecom, et all. Yes they are expensive, relatively, but when it comes down to it, measure that expense against not having your phones work for a long period of time because its OpenSource and bug resolution is slow in comming, or your el-cheepo ISP has some equipment failure.
The bottom line in telecom equipment is you get what you pay for.
The first part of the problem is the bloody registry, the second part of the problem is the moron who decided to mix critical system configuration information with user space information, the third part of the problem is the lack of a programming philosophy of keep your own shit in your own space.
I think the following design principles would go a long way to solving this problem:
Complete and total segregation of the system configuration from user space, programs may have READ ONLY access.
creation of a system services catalog where programs can discover what services are available
a distinct and separate disk space for libraries, eg: stay the fuck OUT of the system directory(s)
Keep all your own libraries that YOU build in your own user space area and stop scattering it all over the hard drive. This is what path statements and environment variables are for.
Eliminate the path searching function of LoadLibrary(), if you dont know where your fucking DLL is, to damn bad.
Damn this is one of those rare occasions when I want to be able to MOD the thread I am participating in. Oh hell its not that rare, but I would MOD your post funny as hell, if it were not so sadly true.
Thankfully most of my brain cells survived my misspent youth and I can teach my kid science, since that does not seem to be a priority of our educational system these days. But then again/sarcasm=on we Do need to spend more money on football and cultural sensitivity./sarcasm=off
ul.nav li>ul{/*Make the sub list items invisible*/
display: none;
position: absolute;
max-width: 40ex;
margin-left: -6px;
margin-top: 2px;
}
ul.nav li:hover>ul{/*When hovered, make them appear*/
display : block; }.nav ul li a{/*Make the hyperlinks as a block element, sort of a hover effect*/
display: block;
padding: 2px 10px;
ul.nav li:hover,.nav ul li a:hover{
background-color: yellow;
color: blue; }
ul.nav li:active,.nav ul li a:active{
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CSS is a miserable and irrational set of style tags that when used to do things like turn un-ordered lists in menu's becomes pretty much inscrutable and damn near unusable. Nested DIVS are a poor substitute for nested tables. If you want to say I am wrong, then show me how create that will hold data in perfect rows and columns, or how you can make two divs equally occupy 50% of the outer div's area.
It is quite difficult to tell from your remarks how far you went in stopping this. Point of fact, you were in a supervisory position, it was YOUR JOB to nail anyone to the corporate cross for doing anything that even remotely resembled breaking the privacy rules or repeating the previous behavior.
The bottom line is this: When someone hires you to work on their computer, your job is to fix it not snoop around, not make copies of anything unless it is to preserve their data, and then you hand the customer the CD!
I am consultant. I work on large systems and networks which frequently requires me to have ROOT passwords, all access, ect. I don't peek, I don't poke, I don't even ponder what might be hidden away on some corner of the corporate hard drive. I do the job I am being paid to do and wrap it up.
If you get another job in a supervisory position of technical people who work on other peoples computers, especially if its ala GeekSquad, I suggest that you immediately, if not sooner, burn anyone you catch doing something like that, tack their hide up on the wall as an example for others and do your job.
My guess is that the people who found their shit other then where they kept it are hiring or have hired lawyers and that Best Buy / GeekSquad are going to be dragged into court and taken to the cleaners for a lot of money.
Ohhh there are quite a few people out there who have bet everything they have on the notion that they have a great Novel in them, a dozen or so great songs, or a really great program, but that is not the point.
The point is this. Anyone who takes another persons hard work and just gives it away when the person who created is selling it and trying to make a living off of it is just being a thief and no amount of semantic tongue wagging will ever change that.>/p>
There are no "content owners". There are "copyright holders" and they have the rights ascribed to them by copyright law.. of which I am opposed and believe should be drastically reduced, if not immediately and completely abolished.
Ahhh yes one of the teaming throngs that believes, if they can get their hands on it they should perfectly free to give it way, to anyone they please. They think nothing of giving away someone else's hard work without any sort of compensation at all.
So Mr. "Information wants to be free, please quit your job, live off of your savings and write a screenplay or a novel and get it published. Never mind that you have bet your families future on it selling and you getting a royalty check.
So while you are watching your savings deplete and your wife get really pissed off because the bills are not getting paid and your children wearing ratty clothes you can rejoice in the fact that Information is free as I put your hard work on a bit torrent and just give it away, to anyone I want, as often as pleases me and not give you a dime. I hope I am going to remain your hero while I ensure that "information if free" like it wants to be.
After your wife divorces you and you lose your kids and your living on the street, or worse yet in your parents garage, you can rejoice in the fact that "information is free, like it wants be. But wait for it.... You don't have any money to buy a computer, much less get an internet connection so you can avail yourself of all that free information. Ohhh the irony. My god what a putz you are.
I am sorry if my language offended you, personally, but I am not sorry for stating the quite obvious about the poster. The guy who built a CPU and the surrounding computer from scratch just kicks ass, and for that fucking jerk yes NerveGas really is one, although entitled to have his say here, the way to just so off-handedly denigrated this amazing accomplishment deserves all the vitriol that can be heaped upon him.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because something is against the law doesn't make it wrong. For example, in countries that have more unjust laws than the US, such as China, do the journalists who break the law when they make negative reports about the government "deserve whatever happens" to them?
This is irrelevant to the argument at hand. It is a basis for an argument about a free press and free speech.
The purpose of copyright is not to make anyone money. It is to expand the public domain for the good of the public. Copyright law is meant to serve the public. The constitution says nothing about artists deserving to make any kind of money. It is all about benefiting the public. Current copyright law actually does the opposite of its original purpose: as copyright gets stretched, works never fall into public domain. It is an unjust law that should be broken. As long as politicians are paid off, this unjust law will only get worse. Because of this, I would even argue that it may even be our duty to break copyright law.
Yet another argument based upon some dreamy notion soundly grounded in fantasy. Give this a read over, you might find it contains actual facts as opposed to what you have said.
Sharing our own culture is our right. This has been taken away from us.
You can whine and snivel all you want, but the law is the law. You don't like the law? Then form a group, a coalition, raise money to hire the best K's streeters you can afford to lobby congress to get it changed, That is how the system works, use it.Great! I suggest you support them with actual MONEY since they have people who actually know something as opposed to you who live in some sort of fantasy land, although I doubt that they will agree with your position since it is utterly and completely without merit or a basic grounded in logic or facts.
This group is called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Mod me whatever the fuck you want, I don't care but I have had enough of all this mental masturbation and completely vain and worthless attempts to justify theft.
Bare the following in mind:
I am willing to bet that at least 99.99999999% of you cannot truthfully answer yes to any of the questions, and yet for some reason you think you have the right because you have a computer and an internet connection, to download, upload or host said work for someone else to download!
Well bucko's, I hate to tell you this, you dont! The law makes it quite clear that you DO NOT have any right to do so and in point of fact doing so is a violation of said LAW and in knowingly violating said LAW you damn well deserve whatever happens to you either as a result of a criminal case or civil case brought against you.
Yes the RIAA and the MPPAA are being pretty heavy handed, and I for one down blame them, you threaten the very livelihood of the industry and the artists
You can whine and snivel all you want, but the law is the law. You don't like the law? Then form a group, a coalition, raise money to hire the best K's streeters you can afford to lobby congress to get it changed, That is how the system works, use it.
But I seriously doubt you will, because you would rather whine and snivel with trite little pearls of whisdom like "Information wants to be free!" or "Those record companies suck!" or "I dont get to work on something when I am 25 and then live off it for the rest of my life" and other such complete and utter bullshit. Get your lazy ass of your couch and write a great novel, write some great music. Use the system instead of whining like a bunch of babies. I mean for fucks sake, my 6 year old whines less then you pathetic losers.
I don't know if you are missing something but let me give you my perspective on this. The people who are P2P'ng are in point of fact breaking the law, its that simple.
As the old saying goes, "Choose your battles wisely", and that is what the content owners are doing. Now we can argue all day long about the wisdom of some of the battles they have chose, but for the most part they are doing so.
What they are trying to do is corral the beast. They are fully aware that it cannot be defeated, so they are trying to contain it and put the fear of god into everyone. Trust me, no one at EMI/VIRGIN/SONY/BMG or any other of the large content owners gives a rats ass that you have a central machine in your home that streams content out to the various devices in your home especially if you purchased that content from them since that means they made the buck.
What gets their panties in a bunch is when you start hooking up your next door neighbor, or half your damn apartment complex, and I have seen people do this, or when you open your system to the internet and now lots and lots of other people are downloading content.
Now beyond that what really makes them wake up sweating are people like Pirate Bay who just give away the content that cost EMI/VIRGIN/SONY/BMG or whomever a hell of a lot of money to produce to the entire world. Eventually the likes of Pirate Bay are going to get shut down. I don't care what country they are in, at some point the political pressure will just be to much to bare for the government of the host country and it will happen.
Let me add this last little idea and I am done. You really want all these big production houses and distribution companies. Did you enjoy films like "The Matrix" or "Toy Story" or "Harry Potter" or anything like those? I am pretty sure you have. Those kinds of things cost Multiple Millions of dollars to bring to the screen. We could argue all day that Reeves is a horrible actor or that Tom Hanks ONLY used his voice and therefor why did they get paid so much, but that is irrelevant to the argument at hand. If left unchecked, unauthorized distribution will grow to the point where it really starts hitting the bottom line of these companies and then who is going to invest their money? The answer is nobody. So all that content will not be produced or not produced in a manner that you find desirable.
So there you have it, my POV.
Ok, so here we go again.. Please what exactly is natural law? What exactly is a human right? Allow me to inform you of the fact that ANY law, of any kind, with the possible exception of the laws of physics, is, in point of fact, a Social Contract that we all for the most part agree upon.
So, when I say, (for example) that an easy solution would be to make all private, non-commercial copying to be 100% legal, I'm not saying we start "taking something away" from creative producers. It's me saying "Hi, remember that free ride/monopoly we gave you back when we passed copyright laws that give you a monopoly on reproduction of your work? Well, due to changing needs in society, we're going to change the way that freebie we gave you works."You are now talking about two very separate ideas here. 1st of all, you are perfectly free to make 10,000 copies, at your own expense, of any copyrighted work and then scatter them about your home, apartment, hovel or whatever it is you live in. You may not distribute them, sell them, or in any way cause them to be distributed. Its called fair use spend as much money as you want, its fine by me.
I suppose you could try and get the law changed, for "needs of society". let me tell you, you are going to really have to work hard to convince me, or pretty much any reasonable person that the "needs of society" demand that I can no longer have the exclusive control over the sale and distribution of anything artistic or literary work that I create. AFAIK, no one has a guarantee of their revenue stream in the constitution.I agree with you that there is no provision in the constitution that enumerates any such right; however, the law as passed by congress concerning copyright does.
I don't get to have one hugely successful project I work on when I'm 25 years old and then live off the results of that for the rest of my life, so why should authors/artists get to do that?Hmmm well you could, if you create something that falls under the provision of copyright law. Those that come to mind are a book, a score of music, a screenplay, a movie, software, pick any of those and as long as people will buy/license is from you you can never work another day in your life within the framework of copyright law.
So pretty much it sounds as though you are crying "sour grapes" that you were not ____________ ( inset the appropriate adjective) enough to create such a work and now you have to be a wage slave for the rest of your life. Well guess what so do about 99.9% of the rest of the population of the planet. You know what, life sucks and until you can accomplish something like writing a book people want to buy and read, music people want to buy and listen to or any body of work covered by copyright law, copyright law is really meaningless to you, well unless you are trying to justify taking someone else's work and trying to sell it, or justify giving it away for the "cool"factor or whatever.
Any author, Musician, anyone who creates something has the right to give it away for free, as in zero cost to the person who accepts it, with the following proviso:
If the author/musician/creator of said work had entered into an agreement with another party to be compensated while creating said work, and in the agreement promised said sponsor a percentage of the revenue from the sale of said work at a price the market will bare. Unless said sponsor releases the creator of the work from said agreement, or the agreement has a defined term and that term had lapsed. Until said agreement is satisfied, then the creator of said work has no such lawful right to give away said work without satisfying the terms of the agreement.
Many creators of literary or musical works do in point of fact make those works available for free and deliver it in many ways of which the internet is only one.
You are posting as AC so I will assume you are one.
Allow me to point out a small detail for you. Those authors VOLUNTARILY add their literary works to that library, as opposed to some jerk who takes something that someone else created, and is SELLING so they can make a buck to feed their family, pay their mortgage, etc. etc. and decides for themselves that it should be given for free to anyone that person decides should have it
Grow the fuck up.
The conclusion I came to was to sell maintenance, upgrades, training and data conversion. I include the complete source code and database schema and its all very nicely documented. I cannot distribute the compiler because it is not open source ( Delphi Enterprise which includes all the runtime source ) but I include very specific instructions on how to set up the development environment and all the 3rd part bits that are required.
Doing so game me the option of including MySQL server at no cost as the database for smaller implementations. For larger implementations they are required to purchase Oracle since at the time MySQL 4.x simply could not handle the load.
So yes you can make money doing open source. Only the people that use it are required to have access to the source code, you do not, in my opinion have to make an announcement to the world that anyone can snag your product just because they feel like dorking around with it. It is available for download if you know where to look. And no I am never going to put it on any source forge.
Some will argue that this violates the spirit of GPL or FOOS, but I submit that it does not violate the rules themselves. The source is there, you can get it, but it will cost you money to be able to build it
I would disagree with this statement to the extent that group 3 in the vast majority obtain music/movies/whatever from recognized vending outlets, be it iTunes, BlockBuster, Wall-Mart, Target or whatever. In doing so the proceeds of said distribution eventually get to the legitimate sellers of the content. Group 1, I assert, does not see the price of their internet connection as the fee for obtaining these items since it is not an exclusive method of delivery. Even though they pay their hosting bill, revenue from that stream does not make its way back to the legitimate sellers of the content.
As long as these media cartels set the prices and suppress the free market, this problem will be common. Although, netlabels and company are probably going to open up the markets considerably in the next decade.I must take umbrage with this notion in the strongest terms possible. You or anyone else for that matter are free to go into the music/movie/play producing business at you desire. All you have to do is have lots of money to do the following:
The investments required to bring a CD or a movie to a national distributor are eye popping to be sure, and even then its a huge gamble, but if you can raise the cash you or anyone else are free to go into the business. Sony can't stop you, EMI, Virgin, none of them. If you stumble across the next Police or Dave Mathews Band or John Mayer or whatever, the distributors will some to you, its that simple. Yes everyone along the chain wants a cut, but thats business, irregardless of the product be it Beer, Music, Video, Walnuts or tires.
Sorry to inform you of this but there is no middle ground.
The basic problem is that there are 3 camps:
Those in the first group have many many rationals for their belief, all of which are spurious. They range from "I am helping the artist, why are you harshing me!?" to "Those record companies are all thieves, so what I am doing cannot possibly be wrong!" and the always popular, "Copyright means I can copy it as often as I want to and give to whomever I want.".
The second group are the ones who create something and then hope to sell it to pay their bills, buy a better "________________" (fill in the blank), so their lives will be better. Contrary to popular belief MANY musicians see it as nothing but a means to and end. A job they are capable of doing to raise their family, pay bills, party on or whatever. The much vilified "Record company / movie studio" are the ones who facilitate this process more often then not. Keeping this in a music / movie context, these companies bet lots and lots of money on what they perceive to be a great music act, a great screen play or whatever and pay the bills that other people send them for the services required to complete a CD or movie and bring it to the people who might want to hear/view it. If LOTS of people want to see / hear it then everyones involved makes a buck, if they don't then everyone loses a buck, but not usually the band/movie star or whatever because in the vast majority of the cases those people have been paid up front and sometimes have a promise of more if things go well.
The last group are pretty much your average folks who just want to listen to music, watch a movie at home and get on with their lives. They don't mind paying a reasonable price for their entertainment, recognize the value of what they are getting and enjoy it.
The first group of people will always be in conflict with the second group, its just they way it is. The second group perceives, and rightly so in my opinion, that the first group is stealing from them by offering the same thing that the second group produced, often at great expense, and they are selling for a price the market will bare, for free. The method of this offering is beside the point, bit torrent, ripping to MP3 whatever, it is irrelevant to the base argument.
Hmmmm I used to hang out in the ESM closet an yak with a bud that was an ET but I never paid much attention to their gear, although the little beeps, bonks and buzzes it made were pretty cool.
Spent most my off-time doing chump 'o da watch qual's. I was bored as shit a lot of the time and liked talking on the 1MC. I think I was one of the only 2nd class sts's to ever qualify to stand the watch. I would stand it occasionally if the COW for that watch was really beat and needed an equalizer.
Ahh the halcyon days of "big and black and they don't come back".
I was in Pearl a few months back on business, I saw an SSN heading out, I stood there watching until I couldn't see it any more. I must confess a part of me was longing to be riding her. In reality I would go near uncles canoe club these days. They seem to have turned into a bunch of bible thumping, non-smoking, high an tight haircut tight asses. When I was in we worked hard and we partied even harder.
Gad I am dredging here, but I think you are referring to the BQS-11/12/13 and assorted gear that was on the 637 class. I went to C school for that suite, which I much preferred.
IBM made a bit of hardware for the US Navy called the A/N-BQQ5 SONAR system. The main consoles had an array of buttons ( keys if you will ) that called functions and of course changed that actual text that was displayed on each button based upon the current function(s) selected. If memory serves, mind you this was 30 years ago, they had an acronym ( the Military has acronyms for everything ) and it was DROS . This is a link to a site that has a decent photo of the control consoles, Click on the image ( yes unfortunately it will open in a pop-up, sorry its the ONLY photo I can find ) for a larger version. As you can see the three consoles are identical; however, each console could be assigned any function that the system performed. Thus each set of keys displayed text appropriate for the consoles currently assigned function, and sub-functions.
I rode USS-OMAHA SSN-692 in winter of '78 and USS Los Angeles was commissioned in '76, so given how long it takes to get a bit of hardware like that from IBM in those days, I would imagine those buttons / keys were more then likely developed in the late 60's.
So there you have your prior art.
So here is the problem, there are two classes of people on just about any road, anyplace:
Drivers. These are the people you see driving, not overly fast, but driving with intent. They pay attention, they are generally never talking on a cell phone, their eyes are always scanning the road ahead, their mirrors and their instruments. They use blinkers AND turn them off, they can be pretty much any age and any gender. You will notice that they drive consciously.
Motor Vehicle Operators - These are the people you see driving a car that scare the crap out of you. They are NOT paying attention, they are shaving, eating, reading the paper, putting on makeup, doing their hair. Their cell is glued to their ear, are fiddling with the radio very three seconds. Their left turn blinker is invariably on.
Some things I would like to see tickets given for:
I think that should prime the pump, as I am sure my fellow /.'rs will add many many more.
Actually it does. Now before you scream how wrong I am lets take a few examples:
And yes I tell my boss ie: my customers, quite often you can only choose two. If you want software fast and cheep it is only going to do the bare minimum to accomplish the task, no bells, no whistles, and there will be very little abstraction as that takes time, thought and planning. It is going to be hard coded for the most part and in the end you will end up paying more for it. If you want it yesterday and you don't mind paying a premium I will bring on extra crew and it will get cranked out fast with bells and whistles. If you want quality and low price then you are going to wait and I will fit it in when I can and not charge you as much.
Hmmm well I suppose I should forgive your insulting comments, but not so much today since I am in a bad mood, perhaps you were as well.
Yeah I would agree that if the software they are running has problems then it should have never gotten passed QA and they deserve all the criticism for that.
I will make the same statement I made in the end of my post, you get what you pay for. Phone switch manufacturers have been facing HUGE downward price pressure an no its not unique to them, but to stay in business they are forced to keep lowering the cost of the products and that is going to be felt at some level, and it appears that in Aveya's case it was felt at the QA level.
I am old school and personally if I have a business that depends on phones I will purchase an appropriate bit of gear that has a solid reputation and provides years of solid service. I side as an exotic car mechanic and we have a sign in the shop that says:
SPEED - QUALITY - PRICE
Choose any two you like!
Before I lay out my argument, let me start by saying that I really hope that one day it will be, but I am not holding my breath.
OpenSource or any other type of software that runs on a general purpose computer will not be as efficient as say a machine from Panasonic or other phone vendor, you might be able to play with the bells and whistles more, but it will just not make the grade.
The first part of the problem is the bloody registry, the second part of the problem is the moron who decided to mix critical system configuration information with user space information, the third part of the problem is the lack of a programming philosophy of keep your own shit in your own space.
I think the following design principles would go a long way to solving this problem:
Damn this is one of those rare occasions when I want to be able to MOD the thread I am participating in. Oh hell its not that rare, but I would MOD your post funny as hell, if it were not so sadly true.
Thankfully most of my brain cells survived my misspent youth and I can teach my kid science, since that does not seem to be a priority of our educational system these days. But then again /sarcasm=on we Do need to spend more money on football and cultural sensitivity. /sarcasm=off
Fucking Dr. Spock anyway
Uhmmm i think I learned that in like 6th grade science class and that was like in 1969!
You call this news!?
Is this a joke or what!? Does this pocket reference explain this kind of gibberish?
/*Remove all spacings from the list items*/
/*Make the sub list items invisible*/
/*When hovered, make them appear*/ .nav ul li a{ /*Make the hyperlinks as a block element, sort of a hover effect*/
/*** Menu colors (customizable) ***/
.nav, li, a{
.nav ul li a:hover{
.nav ul li a:active{ .nav a{
Someone please translate this into something that resembles logic, please?
ul.nav,.nav, ul{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
cursor: default;
list-style-type: none;
border: 0px solid #369;
display: table ;
}
ul.nav>li{
display: table-cell;
position: relative;
padding: 2px 6px;
}
ul.nav li>ul{
display: none;
position: absolute;
max-width: 40ex;
margin-left: -6px;
margin-top: 2px;
}
ul.nav li:hover>ul{
display : block;
}
display: block;
padding: 2px 10px;
}
ul.nav,
background-color: white;
color: blue;
}
ul.nav li:hover,
background-color: yellow;
color: blue;
}
ul.nav li:active,
background-color: black;
color: white;
}
text-decoration: none;
}
CSS is a miserable and irrational set of style tags that when used to do things like turn un-ordered lists in menu's becomes pretty much inscrutable and damn near unusable. Nested DIVS are a poor substitute for nested tables. If you want to say I am wrong, then show me how create that will hold data in perfect rows and columns, or how you can make two divs equally occupy 50% of the outer div's area.
It is quite difficult to tell from your remarks how far you went in stopping this. Point of fact, you were in a supervisory position, it was YOUR JOB to nail anyone to the corporate cross for doing anything that even remotely resembled breaking the privacy rules or repeating the previous behavior.
The bottom line is this: When someone hires you to work on their computer, your job is to fix it not snoop around, not make copies of anything unless it is to preserve their data, and then you hand the customer the CD!
I am consultant. I work on large systems and networks which frequently requires me to have ROOT passwords, all access, ect. I don't peek, I don't poke, I don't even ponder what might be hidden away on some corner of the corporate hard drive. I do the job I am being paid to do and wrap it up.
If you get another job in a supervisory position of technical people who work on other peoples computers, especially if its ala GeekSquad, I suggest that you immediately, if not sooner, burn anyone you catch doing something like that, tack their hide up on the wall as an example for others and do your job.
My guess is that the people who found their shit other then where they kept it are hiring or have hired lawyers and that Best Buy / GeekSquad are going to be dragged into court and taken to the cleaners for a lot of money.
Ohhh there are quite a few people out there who have bet everything they have on the notion that they have a great Novel in them, a dozen or so great songs, or a really great program, but that is not the point.
The point is this. Anyone who takes another persons hard work and just gives it away when the person who created is selling it and trying to make a living off of it is just being a thief and no amount of semantic tongue wagging will ever change that.>/p>
Ahhh yes one of the teaming throngs that believes, if they can get their hands on it they should perfectly free to give it way, to anyone they please. They think nothing of giving away someone else's hard work without any sort of compensation at all.
So Mr. "Information wants to be free, please quit your job, live off of your savings and write a screenplay or a novel and get it published. Never mind that you have bet your families future on it selling and you getting a royalty check.
So while you are watching your savings deplete and your wife get really pissed off because the bills are not getting paid and your children wearing ratty clothes you can rejoice in the fact that Information is free as I put your hard work on a bit torrent and just give it away, to anyone I want, as often as pleases me and not give you a dime. I hope I am going to remain your hero while I ensure that "information if free" like it wants to be.
After your wife divorces you and you lose your kids and your living on the street, or worse yet in your parents garage, you can rejoice in the fact that "information is free, like it wants be. But wait for it.... You don't have any money to buy a computer, much less get an internet connection so you can avail yourself of all that free information. Ohhh the irony. My god what a putz you are.
To whomever mod'd my comment as troll.
I am sorry if my language offended you, personally, but I am not sorry for stating the quite obvious about the poster. The guy who built a CPU and the surrounding computer from scratch just kicks ass, and for that fucking jerk yes NerveGas really is one, although entitled to have his say here, the way to just so off-handedly denigrated this amazing accomplishment deserves all the vitriol that can be heaped upon him.
Here I am with Mod Points and I can't mod you as.... just a fucking jerk .
This is SO frustrating!