Xanthir 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (90) comment rss

  • On the post: ASCAP's Bill Of Wrongs

    Xanthir ( profile ), 01 Jun, 2008 @ 01:41pm

    Re: Rights

    Yes we need to change the way we do business but theft is theft. No I don't think we should be arresting grandma because her granddaughter downloaded a couple songs. But the people still believe they are not stealing. The writers yell foul and everybody pulls their digital hands out of the cookie jar and says, "I didn't steal anything!"

    You are completely correct. Theft is theft. And if someone broke into your house at night and stole the lyric sheets you were writing, I'd be with everyone else in condemning them as a thief and wanting them in jail.

    However, you losing out of royalties isn't theft (unless you were actually due some royalties and they went to someone else). You apparently aren't even compensated from the actual song - you say that you just get a cut of the generic licensing fee. You are not even touched by downloading.

    Your pain comes from a shift in business plans. It sure does suck that your current plan for making money doesn't work so well anymore. It sucked for all those buggy-whip makers too. However, we as a society didn't declare that Henry Ford was stealing from the whip makers, and we as a society are gradually coming to realize that downloading isn't stealing from people like you either. It's just shifting the marketplace, and you have to deal with it, like people have always had to when technology changes what's possible.

  • On the post: Bill Gates Claims Open Source Means Nobody Can Improve Software

    Xanthir ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2008 @ 01:11pm

    Re: BUT..

    Incorrect. The GPL states that you must release the source code to people you distribute the program to. If you never distribute it, you never have to share the source, and your improvements remain your own.

    However, if you make an improvement to some GPLed code and then use that in your product that you sell, you *do* have to release the source code with it (along with your improvements). As noted by a previous respondent, that's THE feature of GPL. GPL is a viral license that infects anything that touches it. The point is to eventually make virtually everything GPL, so that we return to the early state of computing where anyone could change any program they had to do what they wished.

  • On the post: Lou Reed Upset By MP3 Quality; Has He Ever Listened To Velvet Underground Recordings?

    Xanthir ( profile ), 17 Mar, 2008 @ 06:07am

    Re: Re: It is not true- there is a major differenc

    Yes, there *is* a huge difference... if you know which is which. Your mind is astoundingly good at tricking itself based on irrelevant information and preconceptions.

    Multiple double-blinded studies have shown that there is no perceptible difference between a high-bitrate lossy encoding, a standard lossless, and a fresh LP. Of course a worn LP will sound a bit different, because it's worn and that affects the sound.

    As well, the difference between a high-end audiophile system and a $200 stereo is so small that only people who were born with exceptionally sensitive ears can hear it. When comparing low-end audiophile equipment to high-end, we're once again in the realm of no perceptible difference. People will pay tens of thousands of dollars for absolutely nothing, and it's a nothing that can be scientifically proven.

  • On the post: UK Gov't Recognizes That Songs Performed 50 Years Ago Don't Need Any Additional Incentive To Get Recorded

    Xanthir ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2007 @ 09:35am

    100% Fair

    Keep in mind that I am still alive, and that my voice is now being used to support ideas that are not my own and that I disagree with. Now this would be legal because my copyright has expired, but is this anywhere near fair to me?

    This is completely fair. You made the song years ago and made your money off of it. Once you put it out there, it's not yours anymore - only the government's intervention allows you to claim that.

    Look up at the previous examples. An architect designs a high-rise. Let's say this is his life's work, it's really original and beautiful and everyone knows the architect that did it. Now, 20 years later, the building gets sold by its original owners and is turned into a strip club. Is this fair to the architect?

    YES. Because the architect doesn't have rights to his building after it's been built. Not legally, and not ethically or morally. The same should be true of music. A musician is a content producer in the exact same way that an architect is. The payment method is usually a bit different (it's something like an architect building things for free and then being given the right to collect rent for X many years), but the underlying structure is the same.

  • On the post: Now Here's A Surprise: 'Free Energy' Company Cancels Demo

    Xanthir ( profile ), 07 Jul, 2007 @ 11:59am

    Jeezus X...

    Jeez, people, study some damned science.

    Vir Mundi - You have absolutely no idea what the crap you are talking about. The law of conservation of energy is absolute. It has been proven over and over again. I'll put it this way: if it wasn't true, physics wouldn't work.

    comicfan - You're a little better off, but still don't know what you're talking about. Antimatter is extremely rare in our universe. It's definitely not what's "out there". The sun is not made of it, nor was it started by antimatter.

    Nor does the sun utilize cold fusion. It uses perfectly ordinary fusion, which is extremely hot. That's why the summer sun still feels so warm, despite the sun being 93 million miles away. It's a giant nuclear bomb that takes 10 billion years to finish exploding.

    I have absolutely no idea what you mean in your "personal theory". It seems that you misunderstand basically everything about cosmology. The Big Bang is the event that 'started' the universe - it's when space and time began to have meaning. Our solar system is formed from a third-generation dust cloud - all of its material comes from the original intersteller hydrogen that was burned in a star, exploded outward, burned in a new star, exploded outward again, and finally formed into our Sun and planets. It is thought that comet impacts in the early Solar System are what brought us a lot of our water, but that has nothing to do with anything else you have said.

  • On the post: Dell Warns Customers About Complications From Vista

    Xanthir ( profile ), 05 Jul, 2007 @ 11:06pm

    Bleh on Vista

    Just to put this out front, I'm an XP-lover. I've used Windows all my life, and only recently have I started using Linux (put Kubuntu on my laptop, and even then I dualboot to XP for a couple of apps).

    I see Vista, though, as an unadulterated piece of crap. We've got a Vista machine in the office, and it's pure and simple difficult to get around in. They've taken all the power out of the XP user interface (what was there, at least), without adding ease-of-use. This isn't even "new software" talking - I've sat down and learned the damned thing so that our company can support it. Even after you learn it, it's just not as good for getting around your computer.

    Plus, a substantial portion of the OS is build around enabling DRM. Wanna know why Vista's had so many driver issues? It's because MS is drastically rewriting the standard on how hardware and drivers are supposed to work so that 'premium content' is more secure! The OS actually downgrades your video signal quality if it's 'too high', an evaluation made not based on how powerful your hardware is, but whether or not it's running above 800x600. That stuff's hardcoded into the OS!

    No thank you. I'm sticking with XP for the familiarity and app support, and gradually moving into Linux for the various things it simply does better.


    While I'm here, "bradley stuart" just screams SHILL to me. I've got nothing against people who like MS (I'm one of them, after all - the company still does a lot of good things), but that guy is just creaming all over the company. Throw in some "blame the user", and you've got a healthy recipe for shill pie.

  • On the post: If Google Gives In On Library Scanning — Will It Hurt Everyone?

    Xanthir ( profile ), 30 Jan, 2007 @ 03:37pm

    Thanks a lot, Jamaal

    Congratulations, Jamaal. You've just killed every search engine that has ever existed. If permission isn't implicit (requiring special action to withdraw that permission), then the vast majority of sites on the net become completely invisible to search engines.

    With a policy like that, the internet becomes a whole lot crappier.

    The same thing with books. If I wrote and published a book, I wouldnt want others to be able to replicate it freely in any way. If someone wants to advertise my book, I will give them specific copy that they may crop.

    Good for you. Copyright does exactly what you said in your first sentence - prevents them from replicating it freely in any way. What you don't seem to understand, though, is that it *also* gives one the right to replicate some portions of your book in some ways. These are clearly deliniated by Fair Use, and somewhat less clearly by legal precedent.

    In any case, currently Google has every right to index pages. It could even ignore robots.txt if it wanted to - it honors that to be nice. The law can change, certainly, but that's how the law works.

  • On the post: Video Games Belong In Schools Because Some Teachers Think They Might Possibly Consider Using Them, Maybe

    Xanthir ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2006 @ 11:50am

    Bad stats are bad stats, from anyone

    EA and Take Two, I love you guys. You do a lot of good stuff, and you're big players in some of the pro-vg associations. However, throwing together a crappy study showing next to nothing and then playing up the results far beyond what the numbers can support is exactly the sort of crap that your enemies do.

    Please stop it. Thanks.


    Oh, and on the side-topic, Number Munchers FTW! The fact is, to be good at math you *need* to do math over and over again. There are basics that need to be continually repeated until they are instinctual, just like in reading. Do you think it would be fun to read a book if you had to look up every other word in the dictionary? No, and so you drill kids with words every single day. This is simply natural, though. Math skills have the same need to be constantly drilled in, though, and the lack of this is a big contributor to the hatred of math, imo. If you can't quickly and reliably multiply single-digit numbers, how are you ever going to enjoy algebra? It's like throwing someone a copy of Proust and a french-to-english dictionary, and saying, "Enjoy! He's a great poet, you'll see." The amount of work involved in just figuring out what he's saying will turn people off of putting in the work to *understand* what he's saying.

  • On the post: How The Internet Helps You Understand Charming Homes In Great Neigborhoods

    Xanthir ( profile ), 01 Oct, 2006 @ 12:09pm

    I'm suspicious that keywords can really be lined up to house quality. Most Realtors are part-time, non-degreed, people who like working with people. They're all just trying to make a place sound good by making stuff up without technically lying.

    Exactly. And that can possibly carry with it certain tendencies influenced by our culture. That's what Freakonomics was looking for.

    They're not saying that, whenever a house is odd or small, the realtor deceptively uses 'charming' as an innocuous codeword. They're saying that, when trying to write up a favorable shot of the house, the word 'charming' is often (likely unconsciously) used for small or odd houses. It's just a consequence of our minds and the English language.

  • On the post: Just How Violent Is Pacman, Anyway?

    Xanthir ( profile ), 25 Aug, 2006 @ 02:11pm

    The Study Methodology

    Basically, the % violence was based on what percent of the time violent activities were going on. That's why a game like Galage was 100% violent - you're shooting things the entire time!

    On the other hand, a game like Hitman which is mostly sneaking with a tiny bit of violence at the end would rate extremely low on her scale.

    So, just on this little glimpse into the study, you see that it is so flawed as to be completely useless.

    There's also the matter of what exactly she defines 'violence' as...