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WiFi usage must have really taken off recently. I was visiting Canada only nine months ago, visiting an old girlfriend who I had met while at University. The purpose of the trip was to meet her family and spend thanksgiving with them.

I arrived in Toronto airport with my trusty 17' TiBook and wanted to check my email but couldn't find any open AP's. Well I thought to my self, "fuck you asshole Canadians", rebooted my laptop into Gentoo and opened up Kismet, one of the private nets was very hight traffic and it only took a matter of hours to pick up enough packets to figure out their password. I had the time while I was waiting to be picked up, they were caught up in bad weather.
So anyway I was in the network, which was mostly running Windows.

I was amazed at what I found, it looked as though I was into British Airways private network, there were some machines that I could not access but the majority were unpatched Win2k servers with IIS running. At this moment I felt a slight tingling in my pants and a couple of seconds later a full blown erection. I considered for a moment what havoc I could cause, I decided it would be funny to steal these whore chekout sluts' hotmail passwords and send fake emails to their boyfriends. I'm jelous and if I being a GNU/Linux hippy can't have girls, these football team captins should not either.

This is how I executed my evil plan:

• ARP poisioning the netowrk so that whenever somone requests hotmail.com it goes to one of the unpatched IIS Win2k servers.

• Using the double unicode decode vunerability, I changed the defualt page to a copy of hotmail.com but with a little ASP script which dumped usernames and passwords to a file then redirect them to the real hotmail.

• Spent the next few hours sennding "I FOUND A NEW BF U SUXOR" emails to everyone in their address books.

80's band EBN-OZN

independent performance ... may very well infringe on the copyright on the *music*

Heck, independent songwriting infringes the copyright in the music. Given this evidence, which includes this precedent, how is it possible to write a song that meets copyright law's definition of originality?

Yes there is. It's called SIP: Session Initiated Protocol. Here are a couple of references.

Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code
, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling
and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time.

Nothing like a personal attack.

Take a look at the research at Columbia University. You'll see that the idea is not unique to GeoVector.

What's that, you say? But it's just research at an academic institution? The check out the work being done at HP Labs Cooltown WebSigns project. If you follow the links, you'll even see some sample algorithms and images of how this technology works.

Do the math and you'll see that the technology requires highly accurate data to make possible the type of applications that GeoVector touts.

Like I said, it's still a way off. But then, you'd have to be an anonymous GV employee or a coward corporate director to say anything else.

Why are Americans so much more paranoid than other people? Have your government really screwed over that many times?

How can you Europeans be so laid back about this, when you've got examples of ethnic cleansing in Germany, Kosovo, Turkey, Macedonia, among others.. Don't get me wrong...Americans also have our own checkered past (Slavery, Japanese interment camps, near genocide of Native-Americans, etc.) but at least we're worried about our own ugly past repeating itself.

From WordNet (r) 1.7:
pro bono
adj : done for the public good without compensation

This is not what boises & co. are doing. Pro bono is what Eben Moglen does for the Free Software Foundation. Compensation only when you win is what slip-and-fall ambulance chasers do.

At CD Baby, how do you verify that the artists wrote their own songs? If you require this as a contractual guarantee from the artist, how can an artist make such a guarantee that he did not unconsciously copy the song from somebody else ( Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs )? There's something in my journal about that.

If someone spends a year writing music

Then "someone" will get sued by the owner(s) of the musical work(s) that "someone" accidentally copied.

I'm putting finishing touches on a somewhat rigorous argument that uses copyright statutes, case law, music theory, and combinatorics to prove that it's nearly impossible to write a completely original song nowadays. See an early draft here; if you want to see the next draft, please reply to remind me to give you the URL when it's up.

Then who pays the songwriters?

If the artists (claim to) write their own songs, who checks the songs to make sure that the artists did not accidentally infringe a copyright like George Harrison did on his solo debut album?

Note especially this link on his page..

Enforcing the GPL, part I

That's silly, and wrong. The GPL is an affirmative grant of rights, providing you comply with its terms. If you don't want to comply with its terms, no problem, you just don't have any rights to copy someone else's stuff. That prohibition on copying someone else's stuff isn't a consequence of the GPL, it's a consequence of copyright law in this country.

The only way for the GPL to lose all effectiveness in the way that you imply would be if a court someplace were to rule that the GPL's terms were ridiculously onerous, and that by handing it out to everyone for public download without requiring a click-through license, the stuff had effectively been placed in the public domain.

This is about as likely as a court someplace declaring that Microsoft's software was licensed with unduly onerous terms, and that their stuff was therefore public domain as well.

I.e., not likely at all. I don't think copyright is like trademark law, where if you don't take steps to protect your mark, you can lose it.

IANAL, but the guy who drafted the GPL is.

But copyrights don't prevent others from creating what they would have created independently.

Tell that to (the estate of) George Harrison. He wrote "My Sweet Lord", not knowing that it was a copy of "He's So Fine". Harrison lost Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music to the tune of nearly $1.6 million.

The standard for copying under American copyright law is access (the defendant had access to the plaintiff's work even once) plus similarity (the defendant's work is substantially similar to the plaintiff's work). In musical works, substantial similarity can be arrived at by coincidence (about one in 47,000, but compare this to the number of existing musical works), and according to Bright Tunes, a plaintiff can apparently get the court to assume access if the song has been played on commercial radio.

So what steps can a songwriter take when writing a song to avoid accidentally copying a published song?

Marginal.

Some performers have contracts for x% of the gross, and paying such royalties increases the marginal cost to the copyright owner. And according to the article, Palladium does reduce the marginal cost of piracy, which includes reducing the marginal probability of legal action.

However, marginal costs are not everything. Fixed costs help determine whether or not a producer enters the field.

your average war3z d00d doesn't have access to massive CD/DVD presses

I understand that the following anecdote is atypical, but George Harrison was a war3z d00d who had access to a CD press through his label. He accidentally pirated "He's So Fine" written by Robert Mack when he wrote and performed "My Sweet Lord". What steps can any other songwriter take to avoid accidentally pirating one of the millions of published songs?

Almost like John Fogerty (from CCR) being sued for plagerizing himself

The monopoly is legal. Of course this is rather obvious from the fact that it still exists. Were Microsoft found to have an illegal monopoly the courts would have broken it up.

In the separate lawsuit filed by the Justice Department (news - web sites) and 18 states, the court had found that Microsoft acted as an illegal monopoly based on its dominance in desktop operating systems.

He started off with non-computer punchcards doing Neat Astronomy (two thousand hours of hand-calculations resulted in re-finding the eighth moon of Jupiter), and from there jumped into computers with IBM. His comments on the inner workings of IBM, both good (Watson, Sr. could approve your project in an hour) and bad (he got chewed out for eating a prune), are priceless.

He was involved in the world first Very Sucky Computer, the IBM 602 "Calculator", which was so bad it was silently replaced by the "602A" -- which was a totallly different machine, despite the name.

But unlike us, he actually had dates :-)

If this is like any other online label, its TOS will require artists to guarantee that any musical works that they wrote and recorded are original. How can an artist guarantee that he did not accidentally copy a popular song? What specific steps can an artist take to avoid George Harrison's fate?

OR... one might avoid inferences altoghether and simply take Eben Moglen's word for it that the GPL is absolutely solid. He is, after all, General Counsel for the FSF, and as such enforces the GPL on a regular basis.

Action games do and have always relied upon violence because violence is far easier to simulate than creation, and the need for action is a repressed desire to be exploited. This is not necessarily a failure of imagination (it can be quite creative), but a reality of the current market. For every tetris that made it into public consciousness, there are about a hundred that were ignored in droves because the public doesn't find abstract gaming to be particularly gripping.

Since the introduction of Chun-Li in Street Fighter 2 (a reasonably endowed female, at least compared to some of the other characters in the game) fighting females have been getting more and more popular. Before then, women were largely reduced to the role of helpless princess to be rescued, medic, or very occasionally villaness (whose attempt to actualize was a defining factor in her evilness). Now they can shape their environment, go toe-to-toe with the 900 lb walking dumptrucks that pass as men in videogames and can do anything that men can do. With the general lack of women as leading action-hero roles (except in terrible game-to-movie conversions) strangely a large cultural spearhead of this has come from, well, videogames.

Does violence happen against protagonist women in videogames? Yes, but the depiction of violence against women has so often been against helpless women that the two separate concepts have become intrinsically linked. It is almost assumed in this culture that *any* violence against women will expose fragility, which is not the case (come out to boston for a women's football match sometime). The problem is the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and falling down crying, not the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and who in turn beats him to a bloody pulp. All protaganists in videogames hit back, and eventually win. That's empowering.

What's disempowering and what you touched upon was the hypersexualization of the female figure in videogames, which is a real problem. Videogaming is probably not the arena to fight this larger societal problem, however. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the characters need gross anatomical differences with wildly differing dress styles to be able to tell the two apart. And with men and women's violation of the age old long-hair-is-woman, short-hair-is-man code, there is very little to be able to distinguish between 32 pixel by 32 pixel male and female characters besides huge hips and big breasts vs giant shoulders and stunted legs. That part probably can't be stopped any time soon. The role variation needs to be upped, as does the number of female characters whose sexuality or sex life just doesn't come up, but arguing against oversized breasts in a medium whose plumber posterboy features a nose the size of his head is like shouting at the wind.

Either way, with female empowerment but continued female sexualization we've taken one step forward and no steps back. That doesn't mean that there is no ground left to cover. That means demonizing a medium which has overall improved the perception of women in our culture is shooting your friends.

If you want a target, start with those aformentioned magazine shops, preferably "YM" and "Cosmo Girl."

Action games do and have always relied upon violence because violence is far easier to simulate than creation, and the need for action is a repressed desire to be exploited. This is not necessarily a failure of imagination (it can be quite creative), but a reality of the current market. For every tetris that made it into public consciousness, there are about a hundred that were ignored in droves because the public doesn't find abstract gaming to be particularly gripping.

Since the introduction of Chun-Li in Street Fighter 2 (a reasonably endowed female, at least compared to some of the other characters in the game) fighting females have been getting more and more popular. Before then, women were largely reduced to the role of helpless princess to be rescued, medic, or very occasionally villaness (whose attempt to actualize was a defining factor in her evilness). Now they can shape their environment, go toe-to-toe with the 900 lb walking dumptrucks that pass as men in videogames and can do anything that men can do. With the general lack of women as leading action-hero roles (except in terrible game-to-movie conversions) strangely a large cultural spearhead of this has come from, well, videogames.

Does violence happen against protagonist women in videogames? Yes, but the depiction of violence against women has so often been against helpless women that the two separate concepts have become intrinsically linked. It is almost assumed in this culture that *any* violence against women will expose fragility, which is not the case (come out to boston for a women's football match sometime). The problem is the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and falling down crying, not the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and who in turn beats him to a bloody pulp. All protaganists in videogames hit back, and eventually win. That's empowering.

What's disempowering and what you touched upon was the hypersexualization of the female figure in videogames, which is a real problem. Videogaming is probably not the arena to fight this larger societal problem, however. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the characters need gross anatomical differences with wildly differing dress styles to be able to tell the two apart. And with men and women's violation of the age old long-hair-is-woman, short-hair-is-man code, there is very little to be able to distinguish between 32 pixel by 32 pixel male and female characters besides huge hips and big breasts vs giant shoulders and stunted legs. That part probably can't be stopped any time soon. The role variation needs to be upped, as does the number of female characters whose sexuality or sex life just doesn't come up, but arguing against oversized breasts in a medium whose plumber posterboy features a nose the size of his head is like shouting at the wind.

Either way, with female empowerment but continued female sexualization we've taken one step forward and no steps back. That doesn't mean that there is no ground left to cover. That means demonizing a medium which has overall improved the perception of women in our culture is shooting your friends.

If you want a target, start with those aformentioned magazine shops, preferably "YM" and "Cosmo Girl."

Action games do and have always relied upon violence because violence is far easier to simulate than creation, and the need for action is a repressed desire to be exploited. This is not necessarily a failure of imagination (it can be quite creative), but a reality of the current market. For every tetris that made it into public consciousness, there are about a hundred that were ignored in droves because the public doesn't find abstract gaming to be particularly gripping.

Since the introduction of Chun-Li in Street Fighter 2 (a reasonably endowed female, at least compared to some of the other characters in the game) fighting females have been getting more and more popular. Before then, women were largely reduced to the role of helpless princess to be rescued, medic, or very occasionally villaness (whose attempt to actualize was a defining factor in her evilness). Now they can shape their environment, go toe-to-toe with the 900 lb walking dumptrucks that pass as men in videogames and can do anything that men can do. With the general lack of women as leading action-hero roles (except in terrible game-to-movie conversions) strangely a large cultural spearhead of this has come from, well, videogames.

Does violence happen against protagonist women in videogames? Yes, but the depiction of violence against women has so often been against helpless women that the two separate concepts have become intrinsically linked. It is almost assumed in this culture that *any* violence against women will expose fragility, which is not the case (come out to boston for a women's football match sometime). The problem is the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and falling down crying, not the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and who in turn beats him to a bloody pulp. All protaganists in videogames hit back, and eventually win. That's empowering.

What's disempowering and what you touched upon was the hypersexualization of the female figure in videogames, which is a real problem. Videogaming is probably not the arena to fight this larger societal problem, however. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the characters need gross anatomical differences with wildly differing dress styles to be able to tell the two apart. And with men and women's violation of the age old long-hair-is-woman, short-hair-is-man code, there is very little to be able to distinguish between 32 pixel by 32 pixel male and female characters besides huge hips and big breasts vs giant shoulders and stunted legs. That part probably can't be stopped any time soon. The role variation needs to be upped, as does the number of female characters whose sexuality or sex life just doesn't come up, but arguing against oversized breasts in a medium whose plumber posterboy features a nose the size of his head is like shouting at the wind.

Either way, with female empowerment but continued female sexualization we've taken one step forward and no steps back. That doesn't mean that there is no ground left to cover. That means demonizing a medium which has overall improved the perception of women in our culture is shooting your friends.

If you want a target, start with those aformentioned magazine shops, preferably "YM" and "Cosmo Girl."

Action games do and have always relied upon violence because violence is far easier to simulate than creation, and the need for action is a repressed desire to be exploited. This is not necessarily a failure of imagination (it can be quite creative), but a reality of the current market. For every tetris that made it into public consciousness, there are about a hundred that were ignored in droves because the public doesn't find abstract gaming to be particularly gripping.

Since the introduction of Chun-Li in Street Fighter 2 (a reasonably endowed female, at least compared to some of the other characters in the game) fighting females have been getting more and more popular. Before then, women were largely reduced to the role of helpless princess to be rescued, medic, or very occasionally villaness (whose attempt to actualize was a defining factor in her evilness). Now they can shape their environment, go toe-to-toe with the 900 lb walking dumptrucks that pass as men in videogames and can do anything that men can do. With the general lack of women as leading action-hero roles (except in terrible game-to-movie conversions) strangely a large cultural spearhead of this has come from, well, videogames.

Does violence happen against protagonist women in videogames? Yes, but the depiction of violence against women has so often been against helpless women that the two separate concepts have become intrinsically linked. It is almost assumed in this culture that *any* violence against women will expose fragility, which is not the case (come out to boston for a women's football match sometime). The problem is the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and falling down crying, not the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and who in turn beats him to a bloody pulp. All protaganists in videogames hit back, and eventually win. That's empowering.

What's disempowering and what you touched upon was the hypersexualization of the female figure in videogames, which is a real problem. Videogaming is probably not the arena to fight this larger societal problem, however. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the characters need gross anatomical differences with wildly differing dress styles to be able to tell the two apart. And with men and women's violation of the age old long-hair-is-woman, short-hair-is-man code, there is very little to be able to distinguish between 32 pixel by 32 pixel male and female characters besides huge hips and big breasts vs giant shoulders and stunted legs. That part probably can't be stopped any time soon. The role variation needs to be upped, as does the number of female characters whose sexuality or sex life just doesn't come up, but arguing against oversized breasts in a medium whose plumber posterboy features a nose the size of his head is like shouting at the wind.

Either way, with female empowerment but continued female sexualization we've taken one step forward and no steps back. That doesn't mean that there is no ground left to cover. That means demonizing a medium which has overall improved the perception of women in our culture is shooting your friends.

If you want a target, start with those aformentioned magazine shops, preferably "YM" and "Cosmo Girl."

I always take it for granted that people who want you to give them money are going to be a little to0 creative in their arguments!

Things aren't that simple.

Define "little pieces". If you play a sequence of 50 notes from some existing (copyrighted) song and use that sequence in one of your songs, are you infringing on the copyright? What if the sequence is just 10 notes long? Or what if it's just 3 notes long?

Does it matter if you made them up yourself (and just happened to sound exactly like that existing song) or if you deliberately copied them? Or if you think you made them up, but may in fact have heard the song before, and got the idea from there?

It's not a matter of "coming up with your own ideas", it's just that sometimes you have an idea that someone else had had before. And sometimes your idea involves (deliberately) using some pre-existing material in some new way.

If you write a book, chances are some sentences you use have already been written in other books. Some of which you may even have read. Does that mean you're "copying" from those books? Some sentences from Douglas Adam's books, Monty Python's, etc., are used over and over in lots of different contexts. Should people be forbidden from using them? Does the fact that your book or article has a paragraph starting with "and now for something completely different" mean you have "no ideas" and that you should "get out of the writing business"?

The first step in deciding whether someone is "copying" a part of a song or not should be to determine if that part of the song is unique enough (i.e., if there are 50 songs using extremely similar chords, it's kind of hard to say it was an "original idea" in the first place).

Then you have to determine if the sample is easily recognisable in the new song (if it's reversed, full of echo, etc., it's virtually impossible to determine its origin, even if the author admits he started with a sample from an existing song).

Finally, you need to determine if that sample could have been replaced with a custom sample that would result in the same overall effect (ex., instead of using an explosion from "Doom", could you have recorded a "new" explosion, and used that instead, resulting in something almost indistinguishable from the Doom explosion?).

Naturally, all this is still rather subjective, but at least it's "objectively subjective" (in other words: you know there's a subjective element). Saying "all tiny little pieces of a copyrighted song are copyrighted and can never be used in another song" sounds very "neat" and very objective but doesn't make any sense.

Possibly the most famous musical copyright dispute: Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.

RMN
~~~

when you are taking recorded audio directly from another source

No recorded audio was taken. The lawsuit alleged infringement of a melody in the bass line, closer to Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs (the "My Sweet Lord" case) than to any sampling case.

That reminds me of Japanese toilets, which are headed in that direction. I've even seen some with full-color LCD panels, but I can't find a picture of one right now. But these electronic toilets focus on the task at hand, not putting internet access in unpleasant portable toilets.

Americans have adopted more than 100,000 South Korean orphans.

The website for the "State Department", notes that Americans adopt about 2000 South Korean orphans per year.

The kindness and compassion of Westerners is far greater than that shown by the Internet-connected Koreans toward Korean orphans. The current rate of adoption of such orphans declined after 1990. This decline is due to the fact that the Koreans (in Internet-connected South Korea) tried to slow down the rate of adoptions. They, and especially the Korean government, were extremely embarrassed by media coverage of the indisputable fact that the Americans show more love and compassion for Korean orphans than the Internet-connected Koreans themselves. The Koreans simply do not care about orphans.

Almost no home users have control of their reverse DNS (and most of those who do don't know how to configure it).

This kind of "hope nobody does a man-in-the-middle attack when i connect for the first time" thing has been done before (perhaps better, juding by the brief description) in SSH Sentinel.

FreeS/WAN's idea is a good one, DNS is just a bad way to make it happen currently. Maybe there should be a separate simple key exchange protocol for this (based on JFK perhaps?)

Kermit is still being actively developed. So I'd say that it most likely still used by quite a few people.

Are you aware of a similar case, Selle v. Gibb ( here or here)? The same song written by two people, yet found not to infringe due to lack of access.

I took a course on copyright law at Middle Tennessee State University as part of the Recording Industry major, and it is one of the most fascinating classes I have taken.

on most major label releases, the publishing rights are also...

I wonder what measures the major labels and publishers have taken to prevent another Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs fiasco. If you're not familiar with Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs, it was a court case in which the publisher of "He's So Fine" (written by Ronald Mack and performed by the Chiffons) successfully sued the publisher of "My Sweet Lord" (written and performed by George Harrison) for copyright infringement, even though Harrison was not aware that he was copying a copyrighted song. Do the major publishers have automated databases in which composers can search for melodies that have already been copyrighted? Or is there some sort of copyright liability insurance that songwriters have to take out, similar to a physician's malpractice insurance?

There is a lot of evidence that an IRISH man Stephen Mitchell Yeates invented the telephone 10 years before Bell did.

See here if global patents had existed then, maybe the americans couldnt have stolen the idea then.

I've been pleasantly surprised by all the attention the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA has gotten.

It got to be the Google logo. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories has been very active in celebrating this. Among a few other things, they've had a really nice lecture series to commemorate the event.

I'm a little bit closer to the whole thing since I've done some genetics work (mostly at the Columbia Genome Center). My current work involves some genetic manipulation, but that's not the main focus.

Also, I happen to personally know James Watson. I first met him when he spoke at my commencement. But, I shouldn't tell that story, because it has some racist (and very amusing) content... which would only get me modded as a troll. I've kind of worked with him a bit since then, and he's really a very nice, down to earth, intelligent guy. He hasn't really let this whole thing go to his head.

Anyway, it's very nice to see the general public taking a little bit of interest in science. Maybe this will help to turn some of the scientific illiterates into elites...

I've been pleasantly surprised by all the attention the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA has gotten.

It got to be the Google logo. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories has been very active in celebrating this. Among a few other things, they've had a really nice lecture series to commemorate the event.

I'm a little bit closer to the whole thing since I've done some genetics work (mostly at the Columbia Genome Center). My current work involves some genetic manipulation, but that's not the main focus.

Also, I happen to personally know James Watson. I first met him when he spoke at my commencement. But, I shouldn't tell that story, because it has some racist (and very amusing) content... which would only get me modded as a troll. I've kind of worked with him a bit since then, and he's really a very nice, down to earth, intelligent guy. He hasn't really let this whole thing go to his head.

Anyway, it's very nice to see the general public taking a little bit of interest in science. Maybe this will help to turn some of the scientific illiterates into elites...

It's an ancient right, guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)

You're talking about copyright.

Many others on Slashdot are talking about entry barriers other than copyright. One of the biggest issues is the limited availability of FM radio broadcasting licenses from the FCC so that somebody can compete against homogenized payola-driven Clear Channel corporate radio. Another issue is negotiating with retailers: Wal-Mart and Best Buy often don't want to deal with smaller labels. Possibly the only copyright-related reason that a few large firms control music distribution is that it is difficult for lesser-known songwriters to check their newly composed songs against the hundreds of thousands of published songs in order to discover accidental infringement before being hit with a lawsuit.

The Oceans are probably a buffered carbon dioxide sink. A LOT of climate research goes into the topic of how much CO2 they contain, and how much more they might contain.

For example, CO2 appears not to be increasing in the atmosphere as fast as it should be, given increased emissions. One likely carbon sink may be forests--that is, maybe production in forests increases when CO2 availability increases. However, many people doubt that forests are CO2-limited in terms of their growth. More likely, there's more than enough CO2 to go around and trees don't grow more than they do because they're limited by some other necessary ingredient (phosphorous, nitrogen, micro-nutrients, etc.). Of course, it's possible that forests are expanding--it's probably not the case, but it's conceivable given that large, previously cleared areas (the suburban northeast of the US) are growing more trees back.

The Oceans also may be absorbing CO2. One great environmental fear is that there is a limit to this absorption. Remember how buffered solutions worked in Chemistry 1? The ph goes down really slowly as you add acid, until the buffering is overwhelmed and then wham!, the ph increases rapidly with additional acid. Same thing with CO2 buffering in the Oceans, only we don't know when the buffering may be overwhelmed. If that happens, global warming rates should dramatically increase over what we see today.

Wally Broecker from Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory used to do a lot of work on this. I don't know if he still does, or who else might be doing it now.

So then the [GPL] contradicts itself. Wouldn't the later provision override the previous one? That is, assuming the court doesn't decide to interpret the seeming contradiction to mean that running the program is not restricted, but installing or loading it into memory is.

1. Contracts (such as an EULA or the GPL) are typically written from the "most broad" restrictions down: e.g. later clauses rarely countermand an earlier one (they are intended to refine and further narrow what was originally a broad statement). Therefore, if the first clause of the GPL says you do not need to agree to that document in order to run the program, later ambiguous or contrary statements (of equal or lesser legal strength) are "overriden" into having a meaning which complies with the prior clauses. [I wish take this time to repeat: I AM NOT A LAWYER, NOR AM I A LEGAL STUDENT. Do not treat this opinion piece as hard fact, but as a general outsider's observation of the application of law. Furthermore, contradictory clauses make for the "exciting" contract violation cases. In case of doubt, seek a professional's opinion. However, even with this firm disclaimer, it should be noted that the head legal councel for the FSF shares this interpretation of the GPL.]
2. End users have the fair use right to "space shift" and "format shift" media they have legally aquired (as decided by the RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia court case). In the absense of non-copyright based restrictions (such as the clauses of a standard EULA), that right remains; therefore, the acts of installing or running a program (as space and format shifting actions, respectively) do not form copyright violations (which would require agreeing to the GPL).

So then the [GPL] contradicts itself. Wouldn't the later provision override the previous one? That is, assuming the court doesn't decide to interpret the seeming contradiction to mean that running the program is not restricted, but installing or loading it into memory is.

1. Contracts (such as an EULA or the GPL) are typically written from the "most broad" restrictions down: e.g. later clauses rarely countermand an earlier one (they are intended to refine and further narrow what was originally a broad statement). Therefore, if the first clause of the GPL says you do not need to agree to that document in order to run the program, later ambiguous or contrary statements (of equal or lesser legal strength) are "overriden" into having a meaning which complies with the prior clauses. [I wish take this time to repeat: I AM NOT A LAWYER, NOR AM I A LEGAL STUDENT. Do not treat this opinion piece as hard fact, but as a general outsider's observation of the application of law. Furthermore, contradictory clauses make for the "exciting" contract violation cases. In case of doubt, seek a professional's opinion. However, even with this firm disclaimer, it should be noted that the head legal councel for the FSF shares this interpretation of the GPL.]
2. End users have the fair use right to "space shift" and "format shift" media they have legally aquired (as decided by the RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia court case). In the absense of non-copyright based restrictions (such as the clauses of a standard EULA), that right remains; therefore, the acts of installing or running a program (as space and format shifting actions, respectively) do not form copyright violations (which would require agreeing to the GPL).

Harry Fox only gets involved if you're releasing a recording of a song that was written by someone else (ie, a cover). If a label is distributing a song written and recorded by one of its artists, then all the money should be going to the label and the artist.

Correct, but this doesn't always mean you'll be getting a discount. When the songwriter is a member of the band, this means that the artist has two revenue streams: the music and the recording. Many recording artists who (claim to) write their own songs make more money in the end from the music than from the recording.

It implies self-order.

And self-order, after a short time, implies authority. Anarchy is only a temporary state. It is a power vacum that will be filled with a power. This has happened every time anarchy occured.

Anarchism has been around for a long time. They invented the deffinition. It's the deffinition you're using that's the wrong one.

No, I said "anarchy", not "anarchism". There's a big difference. "Anarchy" is thousands of years old. "Anarchism" was invented around 100 years ago by an odd kind of utopian terrorist that sprung up in Europe. They named themselves after a political condition that had been previously viewed as only a kind of damage- not something anyone sane would desire or promote. And their pechant for bombing (something you brought up, not me) reinforced their image as dangerous lunatics.

Self-described "anarchist" writers have attempted to retroactively re-define "anarchy" to be something more positive. (They are scarcely less correct than mainstream US political pundits, who twist "conservative" and "liberal" into their own molds)

And yes. Span was doing well with anarcho-syndicatism (a social anarchism) before Hitler and his buddies decided to rain on the parade.

Spain? They failed. It is self-evident from their downfall (which was by Franco, not Hitler). Any anarchist society is a ripe target, begging for an authority to pop up (externally, or more likely from within), and seize control. Even the most "successful" examples of anarchism are spoken of in past-tense.

A social form that cannot sustain or propagate itself is weak and untenable, regardless of any other supposed virtues.

Open sourse software is also a good example of anarchist ideas (mutual aid, self-orginisation).

This is completely different. Despite what Eben Mogdlen says, free software is not true anarchy. You can call it prehaps "lateral anarchy"- a society willingly declaring that certain aspects of lifestyle should be free from centralized authority- but it's wrong to claim that free software authors exist in an "absense of authority".

Utopian communism and socialism have demonstrably failed. Prehaps those ideas can survive to be of use as sectional parts of societies that otherwise have authoritative control.

Anyother outside possibility: communism, socialism, or "anarchy" could work as part of a theocracy. But for obvious reasons, they're unlikely to remain pure.

Finally, assuming advances in computers might allow humans to live in anarchism, but only if their syndicates were run by AIs so powerful as to be authoritative. This is a far-out scifi scenario, of course. But it's more likely than voluntary and sustained "anarchy" on a wide-scale.

This would forbid me from burning my own music to CD, meaning the music that I myself composed.

Do you claim to have composed a song? Have you ever listened to the radio? If so, then you are presumed to have copied the song from another song in violation of federal copyright law (Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs; analysis; more analysis).

BTW, I wonder how online relationships will compare with real world relationships? One tends to have more acquaintances in meatspace, but our online friends are more diverse.

they do get publishing money, in Albini's case the song writers get $.07 per song per album sold minus ascap fees, if we assume 10 songs then the writers are getting $150,000

And they may not even get that. To the best of my knowledte, before a songwriter publishes a song, there is no reliable way to check whether or not that song infringes the copyright in another musical work. George Harrison got burned by this.

How do you solve the problem of accidental infringement?

Ask Albini what he thinks of Shawn Fanning or the like getting rich on the backs of Slint, Low, Big Black, The Pixies, or even Bush and he will tell you another story.

President Bush hasn't really done much about copyright. Or is there another Bush that I don't know about?

Ignoring the implication that people are incapable of writing their own music

Which was entirely the implication. I have so far found no way to prevent myself from making the same mistake that George Harrison made.

a gathering of family and friends is not a public performance.

Correct. US copyright law, 17 USC 101, defines a public performance as a performance "at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered".

[AOL's copyright on "Happy Birthday to You"] is a much more obvious abuse of copyright

Even more obvious are the perpetual copyrights in the UK on the KJV Bible and Peter Pan and the situation in Mexico.

kermit ran on it (search for "Dell").

And in a not-so-stunning coincidence it appears that Tom Roell was actually on the Dell Unix team at one point.

The source of the most unbiased news on ANYTHING that's available is called "thinking rationally". It seems that most of the world regards thought as some sort of CHORE (I recall the bland, low-content speech President Bush gave to announce the 48-hour deadline...and the calls that came into C-Span afterwards. NOBODY was thinking. I heard "I don't need any information! George Bush says it, I believe it, that settles it! Praise George Bush, for He Can Do No Wrong!"....followed by "I don't need any information! George Bush says it, I don't believe it, that settles it! Curse George Bush, for He Can Do No Right!". No wonder we're denied any useful information - it's assumed everyone's decided on their opinion and won't change it no matter what, so why bother with facts?...). Anyway, back to my point - being willing to honestly think about and evaluate information will give you the most accurate "news".

I doubt it's possible to find a single "unbiased" news source. You CAN, though, find a whole mess of different sources that all have different biases. By comparing what they report and how they report it, it's just a matter of actual thinking to determine, approximately, what the "unbiased" truth really is.

For this, I recommend The Illustrious Google News and Columbia Newsblaster as starting points. Fark occasionally has some interesting pointers to more amusing angles on breaking news as well, though Fark is more for entertainment and amusement than "serious" news...

Why on earth would you ever pay $20+ for a set of lower-than-cd-quality songs without the physical CD or packaging?

Because I don't have to buy the songs I don't want. Many recent albums have about two or three singles and 8+ filler tracks.

no more distribution/pressing/packaging costs.

What about the cost of maintaining the system's back end, front end, and Internet connection?

The artist should take over their own promotion and distribution of their music via their website - or a 3rd party hosting service.

So in that case, without the backing of a major music publisher and a major record label, how is an artist supposed to verify that the song he wrote doesn't infringe the copyright of a song he happened to have heard on the radio? (Take Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs for precedent.)

The old-style music distributors are obsolete

The labels still have one purpose in the modern music industry: to separate the Universal Records wheat from the MP3.com chaff. They sign only acts that are good enough to have a reasonable chance of commercial success.

Horse hockey. I have.

Lower-end stuff (e.g. xterms) run slower over a dialup link (I'm sure I'm not even getting 40-50 kbps here), but it's entirely usable, particularly if I've been using it for a little while. Netscape 4 was lousy. I just tried it. I'm at 16-bit colour, BTW.

Back when I had a cable modem (before I moved to a place where they said I'd have a cable modem by the end of last year. hah!), which was capped at 3Mbps, I ran Mozilla 1 over the cablemodem, over a long distance (they hadn't hooked in to KANREN, so my traffic to the university went from Manhattan, KS through Manhattan, NY and back) from my older Ultra10 workstation (It had, I think, just been upped to 256MB RAM), displaying on my Debian (XFree 4? Or was it still 3?) PII 400 w/ 512 MB RAM, and it ran just fine. I don't recall it being substantially slower than local. I was either running 16bit or 24bit depth. Quite possiby 24bit, since I wasn't trying to run many games then (I made it 16bit for games over winex).

Oh, did I mention that those were over an encrypted connection? (ssh X11 tunneling)

Heck, the university used Sun IPX/IPC with Linux as thin-clients, displaying from a couple of (actually fairly crummy IIRC) central servers. It was pretty usable, too.

Slow at 100Mbit my ass.

And, according to www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/publications/cucs-022-00.p df, Microsoft Terminal Svcs is only able to do 8 bits (256 colors). Is that still accurate?