I thought the timex Sinclair 1000 win 2 Kbytes of ram was bad.
The membrane keyboard wasn’t great (the lack of a space bar was a wierd choice) but it did work. We had programs on casette and did get the 16Kbyte memory expansion.
As Comedy Central put it. “Sports, brought to you by gambling”.
I don’t disagree on ad regulation but it’s enmeshed now and will be hard to control. Leagues kept their distance because it looked bad, but now seem to embrace it as it must generate a boat load of ad revenue.
Well, 'sports' itself is predatory and causes lots of young people to trash their health for the amusement of onlookers.
I say 'sports' to mean the stuff people watch on TV and in stadiums. You going for a run or kicking a ball with friends is fine. It's audience-driven sports that are bad.
They all seem to be using pirated books. Probably slightly better than just web stuff as it is presumably edited.
The authors case was thrown out on narrow reasoning. But companies now live by different rules so I suspect they won’t be held to account. Even Disney/nintendo are unlikely to stop this…
what if the creator is a company? They are allowed to hold copyrights.
Though one answers is: 95/120 years.
"If the work is a joint work, the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made for hire and anonymous or pseudonymous works, copyright protection is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter"
What is "financially viable"? Just hoarding copyrighted materials and not distributing them in order to create artificial scarcity could meet that criteria.
I think that's a horrible idea. There's zero benefit to society in letting corporations like Disney that can afford to pay keep works out of the public domain longer than others.
Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.
How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?
> Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
I mean they already pay taxes (allegedly). When artists create good works that become popular the state also gets sales taxes from the consumer side as money changes hands in exchange for the work. If we just wanted money we'd be better served by getting rid of the loopholes and tax games the wealthy can take advantage of to avoid paying their share.
I'm pretty adverse to the idea of codifying a system where people with vast sums of money can pay for extra rights under the law. If anything we should offer more support to small artists and not turn them into an underclass, but at a minimum we should enforce an even playing field. It's a bit twisted to call a "rights for those who can pay" system "equitable"
Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them. If the tax is high enough to stop the bad behavior we might as well have just banned it in the first place because if it isn't high enough to stop it, then the tax just becomes another cost of doing business and that's ignoring the fact that more tax money doesn't nessesarily benefit society to the extent that it should. Far too many tax dollars end up in the pockets of private corporations seeking profits (although that's a different problem)
The fact is that our economy and our culture will both benefit by works entering the public domain as that allows new creators to build on and explore those ideas which means more people being hired to work on those new projects, more products for consumers to purchase from retailers, and more taxes going to the government from a wider variety of sources which is itself a very good thing since mega-corps with monopolies on our culture and the tax revenue those cultural works generate can give those corporations a greater influence over government.
i understand your logic , but there's a problem with that assertion.
the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value . That thinking is flawed. If anything, the copyright owner contributed to the equity accrued to the copyright. They should be able to pay the high price to keep adding value to it. This does not discriminate. IN fact, i would say the opposite, what you are proposing, feels like stealing.
If i dump millions into developing a copyrighted work, why could any random artist with nothing to lose be able to exploit the work by paying a small/no fee? This seems incredibly unfair. Do you agree?
> the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value .
The owner deserves to make as much money from their product as they can, but they should only be able to exclusively profit from that work in any form for 10 years. That's entirely fair.
Copyright isn't the natural order of things. It's an extraordinary restriction on our freedoms. If I hear a song, there's no kind of natural law making it wrong for me to sing it while out in public the next day. There's nothing morally wrong with that either. It's a massive imposition for the government to tell a free person that they can't share certain stories with others.
For almost all of human history copyright did not exist. The stories that were told, and which became foundational to all stories being told today, were not protected by copyright. People who heard those stories just retold the ones they liked again and again making whatever changes they felt like making and the most popular versions of those stories spread and gained a foothold on the culture. That is the natural order.
The reason copyright law was created was not so that people can profit for as long as possible by restricting everyone else's ability to retell stories or sing the songs they've heard. It was created to promote the creation of new creative works. That aim can be easily accomplished in a single decade.
Locking up vast amounts of our culture behind copyright for ~100 years or more is what sounds like theft to me. Not only are copyright terms of that length excessive, but they are so prohibitively excessive that they actually hinder the creation of new creative works as well as the ability for people to profit from those newly created works.
For example, consider the problems encountered trying to make and sell Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_The_Blues). The artist behind that project went to extreme efforts to put her work out into the universe. It's easy to see how many others in her situation would have been forced to give up or could become disheartened enough to abandon the project after realizing that there could be no monetary profit in it.
When a work enters the public domain that doesn't even mean that the original author or previous owner of a copyright can't continue to make profit on that work. It just means that other people can build off of that work and/or can publish/sell/distribute that work to others. That's perfectly fair too. I've personally paid for works that were in the public domain on multiple occasions.
You are conflating copyright with free expression.
That's not correct and the law is clear on this respect. No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song. However, the moment you start selling tickets to the presentation, that's something entirely different.
You are literally leveraging the fact that someone put that song on the map. You didn't create it. You didn't promote it. You didn't do anything, in fact, except try to profit from it.
Libertarians still believe in property rights. Property can be tangible or intangible.
The point can easily be made with a simple peek into history. No one that recorded anything intangible, like a song, was selling it to others for commercial use because they didn't understand that intangible they had just created had value, but the moment they did, morally, they felt it was wrong and sought the courts for redress. There are examples in history:
In fact, the oldest documented examples of creators pushing back against unauthorized copying predate any formal copyright laws by centuries anda few stretch back to over a millennium! [1] [2]
Why is this important ? Because the oppression you mention of freedom, in order to happen, must be codified by government. If you have this issue going so far back in time, when government hadn't codified anything, its a clear indication that the issue trascends code and goes to the heart of what is moral and inmoral.
This debate of whether you own an idea, trascended the codification of the idea in government "repressing your freedoms" . The fact of the matter is, we believe strongly in freedom, as long as it doesn't transgress the freedoms of others. This is key. In this case, the freedom to reap the rewards of your hard work should not be infringed by the work of another. You are not more important than someone else. This is a basic tenet of liberty
> You are conflating copyright with free expression.
No, copyright is a direct infringement on free expression. We've just tolerated it because the trade off was worth it. Not worth it because people would get rich and that was import to us. Worth it because having a chance to make money on a creative work encourages the creation of more creative works and having more creative works was important to us.
I'm sure that there were many times in history when someone came up with a good story and got mad that somebody else told a version of that story that others liked better. Not only is the ability to share stories more important than that one guy's feelings, but the result is better stories for everybody. Once people starting selling their creative works and it became easier to copy them we agreed that it was important that people had an opportunity to make money off their efforts so we'd have more works and that's where we started limiting people's freedom. When those limits are reasonable, it's a good deal. A balance where briefly people wouldn't be able to copy someone's work so they had a chance to make money and then later everybody could do whatever they wanted with it.
Recently the media industry has bribed their way into making the restrictions increasingly unreasonable, but we still want people to be able to have a chance to make money on their work so we just need to readjust to something more like what copyright started out as and less like what it's become.
> No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song.
Performance rights were what kept restaurants from singing happy birthday to their customers or paying Warner/Chappell for the privilege until a lawsuit clarified that they didn't have the rights to the song in the first place. By that point they'd already collected 50,000,000 in license fees though because performance rights are real and enforceable.
Realistically, nobody is going to sue you for singing a copyrighted song in public around others, but they could and there's a decent chance you'd lose that legal battle. Similarly, many small businesses will have a radio on or a CD playing that their customers can hear. They can be sued for that as well. Enforcement in that setting is rare enough though that small players take their chances, but big companies with fat wallets are prime targets for lawsuits so they tend to have a licensed solution to avoid massive fines.
> Disney are able to pay that amount because their IP is still generating massive income.
That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does.
I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
With respect - copyright's protection of income is the point
That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
We would not be having this conversation at all if people weren't able to make money of these works - there'd be no point to copyright at all if there wasn't money to be made (by the artists) and the reproduction of their works wasn't restricting their ability to generate that income (for themselves, or their agents).
I want to emphasise that I am not arguing in favour of the system, only how and why it works this way.
> That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
The tool used was control over distribution. If income was the point copyright law could just hand tax payer money over to anyone who created something. That'd guarantee income instead of the system we have which allows artists to invest in the creation of a work and still never make a dime on it. Ultimately though, I do see your point and I agree that making it possible to earn enough money to justify the creation, publishing, and distribution of a creative work was a large part of the intention along with the establishment of the public domain.
I probably should have phrased that as "The point of copyright isn't to protect income until the work is no longer highly profitable"
Another thing that doesn't get brought up enough: Copyright is not really needed to encourage creation.
Suppose Copyright as a concept was overturned and no longer existed. Would Disney just say "Well, it was a great run, but we're going to close up shop and no longer create works." Would an independent artist who needs to paint something decide not to just because it couldn't be copyright?
"The creation of new works" doesn't need to be encouraged. It's the default. Cavemen still carved on cave walls without copyright.
You're absolutely right that artists can't stop themselves from creating, but I think that a reasonable amount of protection still does encourage more works.
Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made.
Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated. Authorship gets lost in a lot of the things we treat as if they don't have copyrights. For example memes, or the way every MP3 of a parody song on P2P platforms ended up listing Weird Al as the artist regardless of his involvement. It also happens in cases where copyright really doesn't exist like with recipes and as a result we don't really know who first came up with many of the foods we love. A very limited copyright term would more firmly establish who we should thank for the things we enjoy.
IMO, copyright is something that should be shorter the bigger the media producer is.
The reason we need a copyright in the first place is to stop someone like disney just vacuuming up popular works and republishing them because they have the money to do it.
Disney, however, doesn't need almost any copyright to still encourage them to make new products. They'll do that regardless.
For an individual author, copyright should basically be for their lifetime. If they sell it, the copyright should only last 5 years after that.
A company like disney should get copyrights for like 1 year.
But also the type of media matters. IMO, news outlets and journalists should get copyrights for 1 day max. Old news is almost worthless and it's in the public interest that news be generally accessible and recordable.
Disney didn't invent (e.g.) Beauty and the Beast. They took an idea and a story in the public domain and retold it. Then they claim ownership of that and sue anyone who uses the same character(s) for the next 75+ years.
This is not "encouraging creation". This is strip-mining our shared culture.
So yeah, agree 100% that this kind of corporate theft needs to be stopped. I can't see that happening in the face of all the money though.
With an increasing cost for age, they would eventually be paying an absurd amount for content of decreasing value. Either they end up funding the government massively, or they decide to drop commercially irrelevant copyright.
How does getting tons of money from Disney into a government's tax coffers not benefit society? That's money that the government wouldn't need to directly collect from citizens other ways.
Money going to the government in the form of taxes doesn't necessarily result in a benefit to society at all, let alone one that justifies keeping people from being able to access and expand on their own culture while also killing off all the economic and culture benefits new works would bring.
If Disney had to pay the federal government a few billion each to keep absolute control over their oldest works, every year, no tax games, that would be pretty great for society. But it's also probably true that the tax games would indeed ensue. Something something low trust, we can't have nice things.
I ended up at IBM around the turn of the century. They bought Lotus and I was brought on to write lotus notes applications.
The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together.
We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
Hard to imagine a place adopting Notes and just using the email... email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo. I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365... I understand why they've changed it how they have, I just think it was better UX for most people before, even if it didn't scale well.
Both take excellent photos, especially in low light. I reprinted some of the original 5D photos 11”x17” and even though they have fewer pixels the quality was fine.
Canons are pretty cheap on the used market because they have a new mirrorless R series cameras/lenses so the older ones value dropped a lot.
A good lens helps a lot. Someone on the thread suggested a 50mm 1.8 “plastic fantastic”. It’s a great choice. Really sharp, lets a lot of light in, feels kind of cheap. I always liked the 24-105mm f4 zoom, but it’s pricier.
Cannons are no longer pretty cheap. If so then they have huge mileage on them, shutter count might kill your camera soon. I think the window closed two years ago and now they are becoming very cool again.
Besides the 50mm nifty fifty. There is "middle" range of "ultrasonic" zooms that are actually pretty capable and underrated/cheap. I have few for canon film cameras and their secret huge advantage is weight, optics wise they are pretty good (i have them converted on lumix full frame). I would also mention sigma 35mm art which can be get for less than 300eur and is THE lens if you know you like 35mm (person i ended up being).
Had a 3x NEC external scsi cd drive. It had play/ ff and rewind buttons and a little lcd that showed the track #. With the headphone jack it made a decent cd player.
I remember seeing my friends dad’s first cd player. Huge jazz fan and it did sound great. Especially the quiet parts (No tape hiss or record pops) and easy to use. He bought a couple of cds of rock and man they sounded good.
Every other media at the time required some maintenance to sound good. Records would scratch, those tape pinch rollers would need to be cleaned. Nothing was easy, cds were (skip forward with a button push). Cassettes still were the only way to record, better for portability and sounded pretty good (we did some a:b testing cd vs cassette as kids).
Late 80s, cds were everywhere. I stopped buying records. At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.
My friends dad who liked jazz did lament that a lot of the jazz he had in record form would never be re-released as cds. Not digital so a lot of music lost to time and a format change.
Your dad's friends should have imported from Japan --- they were big on Jazz, and a lot of my Jazz CDs have spines labeled in Japanese on one side and English on the other.
The first letter was the recorder used for initial recording, say a Studer A800 as an example of an analog multitrack or DASH as an example of a digital one).
The second letter was the recorder for the mixdown, i.e. usually some 2-channel system like an analog ATR-102 or Studer A80 or a digital DAT.
The third letter was the recorder for the master, which for CD by definition was always digital. In the early days usually a Sony U-matic, which funnily enough was an analog video tape format which got reused for digital audio (and is the reason for the odd 44.1 kHz sampling rate of the CD).
Edit:
The code was actually always considered a bit meaningless.
For example, you could record on a digital DASH, but mix on an analog SSL console and print the mix to a digital recorder. That would have been a DDD CD.
On the other hand, you could record on an analog A820, mix on a digital Studer desk, print the mix on an analog A80 and that would have been a AAD CD.
So, two codes indicating "pure" digital or "pure" analog, even though both processes used both technologies.
Or record on a ADAT and mix on a Yamaha 02/R, which would have been DDD but probably sounded worse than the AAD recorded on a Studer analog tape ;)
Late 80s or early 90s there was also a DAD type, which often sounded really good.
From that Wiki link-
In practice, DAD was very rare, as many companies (especially the well-known classical music labels) used digital tape recorders (which were not prohibitively more expensive than analog tape recorders) during the editing or mixing stage.
I don't know if I have such a CD --- do you have an example which is noted as sound markedly better than other editions? (I'd especially be interested in a DAD disc which sounds better than an updated DDD disc)
Because most of my CDs are older and had previously been released as pure analog, so that's how I think of them, and that's where my experience is --- fair point though, putting parentheses around (re-) would have been better.
The membrane keyboard wasn’t great (the lack of a space bar was a wierd choice) but it did work. We had programs on casette and did get the 16Kbyte memory expansion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000
I didn’t realize the Atari 2600 had basic, always thought of it as a game console.
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