Comment Re:Premptive STFU to GPL white knighters (Score 1) 228
The unemployment rate in my country for my age bracket is 38%. The idea I can "just" move to a new a company is not realistic.
The unemployment rate in my country for my age bracket is 38%. The idea I can "just" move to a new a company is not realistic.
They didn't just get made up because it was fun to regulate taxi drivers, they're there to protect people getting into the back of cars with strangers driving them.
Oh, please. They are there because the taxi drivers lobbied for it, going as far as rioting in the streets, beating the other drivers senseless and cutting off traffic in the financial districts, because during the great depression everyone who had a car was competing with them.
Here's an article from 1934: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17056337/
If they can't ensure the source is valid, they need to specify that in the contract with their provider, so that they can know demand a reimbursement from the costs of this action. Ignorance is not an excuse in many legal wrongs, and copyright infringement is no exception, otherwise all those people writing "NO COPYRIGHT INTENDED" on Youtube wouldn't be liable either.
Good. Let them spend their money reimplementing the wheel, it gives us Free Software developers a leg up. The company I work for has already replaced dozens of SAP installations thanks to community shared code.
If they're not distributing the source, good riddance. Let them pay to build their own proprietary implementations.
No, that's not the point of the GPL. The point of the GPL is to uphold the four software Freedoms, has defined by rms in the Free Software concept.
The GPL may be useful for saving money, but that's just an helpful side effect, not the main purpose.
And you may not need to adopt its principles, but you certainly need to adopt its requirements.
If you distribute any third-party code, you need to do that anyway. It's not the GPL, it's copyright.
Copyright is violence. The GPL is self-defense. There's no double standard, even if they use similar means.
There's plenty of good films being made outside of the hugely inflated machines of Hollywood. For example, Amour, winner of last year's Palme d'Or, had a budget of less than $9 million. Pulp Fiction had an even smaller budget ($8.5M).
Movies take millions of dollars because it all goes into their pockets (it's called Hollywood accounting - look it up). If we cut the government monopoly and forced them to compete, budgets would adjust without hurting quality significantly. Maybe you wouldn't have Avatar, but I'm sure we can live without it.
I earn a living writing copyrighted works (software), and I'm still against copyright. And it has nothing to do with not wanting to "pay a dollar for a song" - I'm more than happy to do so (as long as it doesn't feed the RIAA).
People will do what they want. Technology won't stop them. Won't help in stopping them. (...) Kids will skip school, nothing you can do to stop them. They skip school if you have RFID and Cameras everywhere. All that money wasted because people don't understand the problem, and think Technology is a panacea to every known social problem we have.
I do agree that the problem is that people don't understand the problem (if you excuse the redundancy), but that doesn't mean technology can help stop such behavior - just not how it is applied by such people.
My claim is that technology can and does solve (or at least, ameliorates) social problems, if correctly used.
Sociological problems are not "social" problems. They are people's socialization issues.
I'm sorry, but no. Socialization problems are socialization problems. Sociological problems are problems pertaining to the study itself. Using the word as an "improved" version of socialization is cargo cultism.
I understand where you're coming from, but I've always found that phrase to be problematic.
Clearly technology can have a social impact, so why couldn't it be used to fix social problems? It must not be because it's powerless, but because we fail to understand its effects clearly enough to apply it effectively.
(By the way, it's social problems. Sociological problems would be those problems related to the methodology of social research, not those related to the behaviors themselves.)
I value something that doesn't require a license, whether you're running a free "e-reader" on Linux, there's probably the only thing that won't have much in the way of tangible strings but even Linux has dropped the 386 processor from support.
Yet Linux still runs just fine on 386 processors; just not the current versions. Here: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/
Just like sharing music? Or sharing copyrighted material that the MPAA considers theirs if you somehow copy it to another format? Ever here of thePirateBay? Just ask Kim DotCom how it feels to host material in an electronic form. You think the Supreme Court has your best interests at heart? All it takes is the right justices or the right set of laws and your rights are gone here in the US and it's getting worse every year. The Media distributors and publishers are a huge lobby in this country pushing what is and isn't fair copyright and it will get to the point that they'll push for single use e-books that you can't own, share or read more than once unless you're willing to keep paying for it.
Breaking DRM != sharing content. It's a completely different kettle of fish. In particular, it happens only inside your machine, instead of being broadcast to the whole world.
As for the Supreme Court, as a I said, I'm not under their jurisdiction. But they did vote for the student selling textbooks, in detriment of the copyright holders.
How long do you think it will take for e-books to get the same treatment as a movie or a piece of music.. "It was distributed electronically." Therefore some intermediary who owns the rights will go after somebody for downloading an e-book they didn't pay for that "wasn't free." Unless Authors are willing to give their stuff away royalty free, just like some musicians are doing or selling it and saying it's "yours" then you can say it's yours but the lines are getting blurry.
As I said, I don't care. I wipe my ass to their claims that I don't own it.
Again on an operating system that's not tracking you? Linux perhaps? Good, that's an alternative perhaps but again, I consider that transient, more transient than good old fashioned bound (as in book binding). Call me old fashioned but that way if I lose it, it's because of something that I did or perhaps someone overtly did or by accident, not because some company or someone with less than stellar motives took it from me using a license model, yes "free" books aside but 9 times out of 10 you're reading those probably on an O/S that will track your habits and report them back to somebody. It's not fiction, it's a fact now unfortunately. Reading that on an iPad? Guess again.. http://gizmodo.com/5951173/apple-is-tracking-you-again-in-ios-6-and-how-to-turn-it-off
Calling ebooks bad because some particular readers are bad is like calling paper books bad because some publishers use rubbish paper.
I specifically mentioned readers with no networking, so mentioning the iPad is specious at best.
Call me old fashioned, but anything electronic is transient. Your jpegs, your images. Yeah you can back them up certainly but unless you keep upgrading or shifting with the digital times, it'll become so much like the Betamax or MFM or RLL hard drives.
The physical storage is transient; the content isn't. Conflating the two is misleading.
Yes, you need to upgrade, but you're on Slashdot, so clearly you use computers, so you need to upgrade them anyway.
Maybe yes, maybe no but I don't want anybody to know what I read or why I read it. It's none of their fucking business. Again, I don't want to have to worry about battery life sometimes or form factor or bookmarking something electronically or covering my tracks or trying to manage or strip out DRM, sometimes I just want to read something. E-Books may be convenient for some but I still say that there will be some sort of string attached to them.
Strings are attached to everything.
It's easier to move a book from one shelf to another or to move it from one residence to another. You can pass them along without encumbrances like licenses or TOS or you can loan them to a friend and not have it tracked.
Easier to lose it too, or to get it destroyed. And harder to loan it to more than one friend at once, or read it yourself while someone else has it.
You may prefer paper books, but it's a subjective choice dependent on how much you value some things vs others, not clearly better either way.
Good for you, you'll be mindlessly protecting your interests against all that nasty DRM and protections that publishers and distributors will be thinking up. I have better things to do with my time, like read.
So, physical books just appear in your shelf, right? No time required to go to a shop, or pick them up? Well, personally I don't have such magical abilities, so getting a physical book takes me orders of magnitude more than un-DRMing them. Or would, if I bought DRM-ladden books, which I don't.
Remember in the US at least the DMCA allows them to protect their data with whatever means necessary and if you agree to that, then you're bound to it. Do you read all those license agreements? usually there's a clause "You agree to allow us to make changes to this agreement..." Which is usually a one-sided affair, regardless of mechanism, paper books don't have those strings attached leaving your nice little words aren't really worth the paper they're published on.
Yeah, I print those agreements and wipe my ass with them. Who the hell cares?
Not that I live in the US, anyway, but even there, when was the last time someone was convicted for breaking the DRM of their own books? I'm guessing "never".
Sometimes paper, the lowest common denominator for publishing, is the best format especially if you want to review it at your leisure without having to download an upgrade, remember to charge your e-reader or not get inundated with ads or tracked on what you're reading or have in your library. I'm not saying that open source e-readers are bad, I'm just saying the tablet your using (iPad, Android, Kindle et al.) has tracking on it, so that not necessarily your reading may be tracked but your reading list might be.
Yes, sometimes paper is the best option. I certainly don't disagree with that, nor did I ever, so I'm not sure why you're saying that.
As for ads and tracking, it takes five minutes to find a reader that has no ads or networking (kinda hard to track you with it).
If I want to read my copy of the "The Anarchist Cookbook" I don't certainly want the government knowing that Amazon or Google let them know I was reading it on my e-reader or that it's stored on my tablet (even with name obfuscation) That's one of the liberating things about a book, it's yours, nobody knows if and when at all if your reading it and you can hold it that is until some fascist decide to take it away from you.
Yeah, I agree that paper books are better if one wants to read subversive literature, especially if you live in a police state. Thankfully, you don't lose that ability even if you read most things on ebook readers.
Yes there are 'non drm' source but you're ignoring that Amazon and Apple will likely fall out as the kings in that market.
So? Apple was the first big company to kill DRM for music.
Oh and on your retarded USB example, it's no good without software, a reader. Yeah I can keep it, much like a dusty book on the shelf in the hope that someday my reader will be able to use it. So I plug it in 10 years later but that open source project has long since closed its doors and that tablet you were using went out with that last batch of kitty litter when old Felix died, so now you have to get some compatible e-reader that knows what to do with
Both PDF and EPUB (which is really just packaged HTML with a couple of domain specific changes) are open, standard formats that will be with us for much, much longer than ten years. And an open source project doesn't stop working just because it hasn't been developed in while. Hell, I was just running a twenty year old software on my laptop yesterday.
Besides, anyone doing backups should know you got to keep converting the formats, not just mindlessly copy bits around.
if it has a license or proprietary DRM, or is somehow wrapped that you can't directly read it) so now you find one but it tells you that you can't read it anymore because your "license" has expired.
It's your own fault for not breaking that DRM when you could have. My ebooks certainly don't go DRMed to my archive.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
