Posts by Larry F54
305 posts • joined Tuesday 13th September 2011 11:22 GMT
Re: "I am William Boot of the US Embassy of Ishmaelia......."
Nice to see the Reg's writers read Evelyn Waugh (Scoop 1938). Could better have used Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana 1958).
...or The Quiet American...
why the aluminium foil?
For making a hat?
Re: tax avoidance may be the legal kind but
Not wishing to disagree with your underlying principle, but 'paying the minimum tax you can get away with' is exactly what every individual is *expected* to do. That's why you fill in a tax return.
This isn't about individuals. It's about corporations, whose very existence is a privilege granted by the state.
tax avoidance may be the legal kind but
Why not have a national policy of preferring suppliers who pay tax fairly and honestly, not just the minimum they can get away with?
Re: Music has it right, Film wrong
The illegal product is a better product for video in a way that it is not for music.
Yup, as this Doctorow article points out:
Buy this because paying money will deliver high quality
...
But this pitch only works to the extent that the paid-for item is indeed of high quality. When anti-copying restrictions are added to media, it actually lowers their quality relative to the illegitimate item. I often hear from parents who download unauthorised cartoons for their kids because the DVDs come with long, unskippable (or difficult-to-skip) adverts, the worst of which deploy "pester power" tactics intended to get kids to nag their parents to buy something. As far as these parents are concerned, spending money gets them a product that much worse than the free version.
...[some stuff about computer games]...
Music companies have all but abandoned this route, but they did lasting damage to the reputation of their products through an escalating series of anti-copying measures that culminated with Sony-BMG intentionally shipping a "rootkit" on over six million CDs. The software would compromise your computer, leaving it vulnerable to other malicious software, and it violated many of the world's anti-hacking laws.
Re: Concert spending
But I wonder which you'll choose to believe? With "copyfighters" it's all about choosing the evidence to back up your prejudice. You must reject all evidence that doesn't.
That's true of the "strong IP" crowd as well.
The proper way to evaluate a copyright system is to ask "Is it the best possible deal for the public good?" Since it's about trading away the public's natural right to make copies against the long-term gain to the public domain, it's inherently rather subjective. But if works never enter the public domain because of Mickey Mouse laws, the system is a failure for the public.
Re: Concert spending
I think it is relevant to include it, as being a freetard can make it possible to be exposed to music you might not have otherwise listened to and then on becoming a fan gone to concerts etc.
Also relevant because performance was one of the ways that musicians made money in the world before copyright. (Yes, believe it or not, music actually existed before copyright!)
Re: Concert spending
Which is what we'd expect. Why pay for something when the alternative is substitutable and there's no risk? That's a rational economic decision.
Does that mean "freetard" will be replaced by "rationaltard"?
Which musicians are the victims of piracy?
Contrast this with the lot of the creator, who makes the stuff that Justified Bloke downloads for free. 80 per cent of musicians in the UK earn less than £10,000 a year, while 95 per cent of songwriters and composers earn less than £15,000 in royalty income.
But what proportion of pirated stuff comes from those poor musicians, and what proportion comes from highly paid ones? It makes a difference to that particular argument.
Also, what about the income of marketeers and so forth?
reformat & reinstall
Couldn't they have reformatted the HDDs & reintalled the OS? Or does MS even screw government buyers on resinstallation media?
Re: Like it much ?
Error code 0x00015502: user walked into door whilst checking email.
I'm more concerned about people driving with them on --- I hope that is banned outright.
Re: Good on them....
The fuckwit mentality of the Americans, "Oooo can't rip your CD, copy the tracks to your PC or the MP3 player...
I think you'll find that format-shifting (if it doesn't involve cracking DRM) is legal in the USA but not in the UK.
Re: Naah
It's really hard for an MP in NZ to hide or play the them-vs-us game. As a result, they're very accountable and NZ has the most transparent government in the world.
Good, but apparently (Dotcom) the police/security services are still beholden to foreign powers.
availability of data
"As the way in which we communicate changes, the data needed by the police is no longer always available."
Well, tough. Maybe if we didn't have so many things classified as e-crime...
Re: Ala Carte choices please...
Why should I have to pay for the 900 channels of sports when all I want are the News, History, Movie, Scyfy and Educational channels?
Time for the obligatory Oatmeal cartoon about that.
Re: not more work for scu.. sorry, lawyers .. ?
I look forward to the Zuck's pounding in court when people sue over job rejections because of third parties' breaches of their privacy on his "system".
Let's not forget:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Posted in The UK's copyright landgrab: The FAQ
Re: rights/privileges again
So to "maximise the public good" needs to take account of the very real possibility that people simply won't share stuff if they believe it's going to get ripped off.
Yes, it needs to take account of that, but of other things too, such as the loss of public good from restricting the public's rights.
In the old days, copyright was beneficial to artists and restrictive to publishers but had no real effect on the general public, because hand-copying was slow and printing required expensive equipment and specialist skills. Now, copyright is restrictive to the general public and that effect needs to be taken into consideration when trying to maximize the public good.
Lester, I had no opinion of you or your writing before this article, but I think it makes you look nasty and mean-spirited. And to me, every additional comment you've made only reinforces that impression.
I think it's atypical and he's not really like that, but I get the impression he lashed out at saintcroix's comments and is now digging the hole deeper instead of just saying "sorry, got carried away".
Re: I want it NOW!
Whoever makes the show/movie/music gets to decide how to release it and no laws I'm aware of give people an automatic right to access entertainment.
One purpose of copyright is to encourage dissemination. If they're not willing to publish it wherever people want to see it, they are abusing copyright.
Re: not nice
This is not a democracy, there are rules and basic politeness for the most part
There are strict limits to commenters' ability to criticize Reg authors, and that's fine. What's not OK is the asymmetry --- the authors (who are professional journalists and so can reasonably be expected to have thicker skins than the average person) are allowed to treat the commenters' much worse.
(BTW, that paragraph isn't about Lester Haines, whose work I like, but about the general Vulture situation.)
Re: Eh?
Because schools and libraries don't provide free internet to poor people...
and because the government isn't trying to force everyone to have on-line access to use public services.
Re: So
You made the rules so don't blame us cause you're still losing
The existence of corporations is a privilege granted by the state. Corporate law should go back to the old system where charters are issued for limited times and companies have to show that it's in the public interest to renew them.
Posted in The UK's copyright landgrab: The FAQ
rights/privileges again
This article makes some good points, but as usual it conflates natural rights and "property rights" with copyrights. Copyrights are a privilege that the state may grant in order to promote the public good; they are a restriction of the public's natural right to make copies. The sole aim of copyright legislation should be to maximize the public good.
Re: not nice
Is it really fair to moderate someone's comment "straight into the bin" and then use it to mock him in an article?
BTW, I'm not saying saintcroix is right --- just that it's a bit vicious for a journalist to treat an ordinary person like this, especially one who is poor and will have no right to reply.
many decent people
From the blog post:
But I do agree that the model clearly isn’t working because many decent people, who otherwise would never consider taking property without paying for it, feel entitled to take digital entertainment.
Hmm, if "many decent people" disagree with Big Media, the people must be wrongity wrong.
“Don’t Ambassadors Have Anything Better To Do?”
No, their primary job is to promote the profits of their home country's corporations.
not nice
Is it really fair to moderate someone's comment "straight into the bin" and then use it to mock him in an article?
Re: Oops...
The wrong trousers, Gromit!
Re: ID
It simply comes down to the question, "Do you trust the politicians, civil servants and other collectors of data to do so in a way that will be appropriate?" I don't, because they have shown repeatedly that they are the very last people to be trusted with any of this data.
Not just the current politicians etc., but the next bunch. Look at the Dutch census of 1930: the Netherlands was the least anti-semitic country in Europe at the time, so Jews were happy to be identified demographically; then the Nazis rolled in, found a comprehensive database of Jews with their addresses, and exterminated them more thoroughly than in any other places they occupied.
Re: Does not compute full time
You beat me to it! How you add the occasional leap second to this device?
e-government
Another reason why forcing everyone to access public services through the WWW is a bad idea.
just ban premium rate
Just ban premium rate numbers, reverse-billed SMS, etc. It would be no great loss to society if we lost live reality TV voting and crazy frog ringtones on the train.
Re: Is not the legal first duty of a company to its shareholders?
That's the fundamental problem with the law. The existence of corporations is a privilege, not a right, and their charters should be issued for limited times and renewable only if it's in the public interest to do so.
Re: So?
Sounds like an honest mistake. I didn't know about this, and I hope I didn't accidentally do it when I visited Korea.
Re: God I hate politicians...
This is a local shop, for local people. We'll have no trouble here!
crackdown on silly logins
I shouldn't have to set up an account to use the "free" wifi at the leisure centre or Asda.
Re: Bug Me Not
BugMeNot used to more useful, but they started caving in too easily to pressure from sites to put them on the no-bugmenot list.
rights/privileges
"all will lose their rights"
ITYM "privileges". There's no natural right to restrict copying; rather, the state grants artists the privilege of restricting othere people's natural right to copy, in order to encourage more work to enter the public domain in the long term.
I don't agree with the legal changes that the article rightly (IMO) criticizes, but it's important to bear the fundamental basis of copyright in mind: it's suppose to be a trade-off for the public good. If you're looking for someone to blame for the rise in anti-copyright sentiment, point the finger at Big Media for provoking it.
Re: Who voted these buffoons in?
Vote UKIP!
The big foreign threats to British sovereignty and civil liberties don't come from the EU but from the USA.
Re: Another carbon reduction failure
1) Use less energy
Especially in transport. Making single-occupancy motor vehicles more efficient (e.g., electric cars, even with better generation as in your item 2) isn't enough of a solution. We need to get most people (obviously not tradesmen, for example, because they need to carry tools and supplies around) out of single-occupancy motor vehicles and onto bikes, public transport, and car-pooling.
Re: Off peak leccy
The last Economy 7 tarif I was on was 5p day 5p night... so ever KW at night was 1/3 the price of a daytime tarif... sure you need to be an expert in maths to compare different tariffs, and understand your usage pattern.. but for my high usage, this suited well...
I guess that was a typo for 15p day 5p night! I'm on 15p day, 8p night now, and about 40% of my electricity usage is in the night range, without much difficulty: we run the dishwasher, washing machine, and immersion heater overnight. (We also run the breadmaker overnight, but that's more for convenience since a loaf only uses 0.5 kWh.)
Re: Can we all stop pretending
It's Microsoft and their industry pals trying to get the EU to hurt Google so Microsoft can try and jump and and regain their old monopoly.
"The enemy of my enemy..."
washing machines
Let's say I'm doing some laundry in the morning before leaving the house, and the smart thing decides to shut it off temporarily. I now have to wait for it to come back on and finish, or come home later and run it again because the laundry has been getting musty in the machine all day. Brilliant.
Re: Oh
But I thought everyone in the music industry was at death's door due to piracy
Yes, I'm pleasantly surprised that the report doesn't include that sort of thing.
Re: Red Dwarf
"smoke me a kipper"
Hunt's vision for digital medical records
I want to know whether MPs' & their families' medical records will be on the same system, with no more security than the rest of us get, or whether they will get special protection.
coming soon
Stuxnet for Toastgroups!
