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Copyright Rules Eased For Distance Learning
fixion writes "This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved bill S.487, the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2001 yesterday. The TEACH Act updates the Copyright Act to make it easier for educators involved in online distance education to use copyrighted materials without violating fair use guidelines. The Senate passed it well over a year ago, but it has been languishing in the House Judiciary Committee eve since, held up by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). Since the Senate and House Committee passed identical bills, getting it through the full House and to the President to sign should happen fairly quickly now."
Jesus fucking Christ. I nearly died today on the highway. Kansas City drivers are terrible anyways so I am always aloof when I drive. But today was something a little more than careless drivers. Someone was out to kill me.
I started off today late. Work starts at 08:00 sharp and I had just crept onto US 69-South at 08:02. My truck was fucking freezing. I had a minute ando a half of 75MPH travel before I hit the I-435 East and West exits, which are a big slowdown. So I was trying to make good time before I got locked in traffic.
Well, just like every other day, everyone slowed to about 45MPH at the I-435 exits. As I was sitting there eyeing the cars around me for hot girls (there were none, it was a bunch of ugly office bitches wearing sunglasses and yuppie faggots with their little spiked-forward haircuts and Honda Civics) when I saw this atrocious car enter US 69 from I-435. It was a very old Dodge Omni and it was blowing smoke all over. Laughing out loud, I watched as it merged with traffic and stunk out the person behind them. Oddly enough, the windows were tinted on this car too. WTF?
After another false start and subsequent halt, I noticed the smell carrying from this offensive little car. Whoever owned that piece of shit needed to change their oil. Badly. That and their fucking breaks, which were making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. God, what kind of moron can't take care of simple maintenance on their car? The thing had gone from funny to annoying at this point, between the sound and smell, and it was then that I noticed the stickers.
The back end of this idtiot's car looked like a small billboard. It has sticker upon sticker upon overlapping sticker piled across the back. The only thing not skinned by the stickers was his license plate (oddly from Pennsylvania, I noted), which read "LNUX!" What the fuck!? Darting my eyes over the stickers I noticed there were several "LNX" and "Open Source: Love It or Leave It" bumper-stickers, as well as a "America = Gun Ownership" and "WILL ROLEPLAY FOR FOOD." Whoever was in this car was clearly-- between the condition of the vehicle and their fascination with roleplaying, guns, and Linux-- disattached from reality. Someone else who shouldn't be on the road.
Traffic started moving again and I revved my V6 into gear in the far left lane, trying to make up for lost time. It was already 08:08. Then I heard a bunch of honking beside me and off to my right. Had my bed's gate come open in the back? If it had I'd be spilling garbage all over the highway (LOL!). Glancing around, however, I saw there was nothing wrong with me. Then I caught what the commotion was all about-- it was that God-damned little Omni, weaving in and out of traffic, cutting across three lanes, and heading straight toward me! I'd seen this happen before, when some hapless loser wants to make time and charges into the passing lane, but this guy seemed not to even notice any traffic around him at all!
In a split second the Omni was next to me. Traffic was in full motion now, so I leadfooted it and climbed to 70MPH. Whatever this guy was up to he could be up to it 50 feet behind me. Then I hear this terrible sound like a tricked out Civic exhaust system with bronchitis and the guy's next to me again. His car is shaking like it's gonna fall apart too. I pushed it to 80MPH and the same thing-- the car shook harder and it sounded like the engine was gonna blow, but he was up beside me again.
I tried looking through the tinting on the Omni's windows but it was no good. For all I knew this Omni could be a driverless Transformer drunk off of bad energon cubes. So I braked. He braked. Everyone behind us was keeping their distance by about 15 cars. I began reaching for my celphone in case I couldn't get away from this guy and needed to call the state police when the window began rolling down. Then I saw this dickhead.
The man behind it was short, stout, had a mess of greasy red hair on his head, a drooping red mustache, and was yelling what looked like a string of emotionally charged profanities at me. He also had some sort of dark brown liquid dribbling from his lower lip off of his chin. He looked drunk to me, and I figured the brown stuff was Jagermeister. He started swerving wildly in what I took as an attempt to crash into my side and push me off the road. Right as he was about to ram me I floored it and punched ahead just in time.
My needle was buried now and I was putting distance between us. That's when I saw the guy's window fly out of his door and his exhaust system drop in the road. The black smoke was now coming from the center of his car's underbody and it was making the air grey all over 69. I slowed to 70MPH again as I thought the ordeal was over, his car literally falling apart. And just as I took a breath of relief, the dying automobile jerked, wretched, and wobbled violently up next to me again.
A hand shoved the sun-roof off of the Omni, and the driver stood up through it with a shotgun. As he took aim I heard him shout, "You son of a bitch! I know who you are, God dammit it! I came all the way from PA so I could put a stop to your trolling, you motherfucker!"
A look of pure hatred then came over his drunken, ruddy face.
"I'm gonna have your dead ass, Trollaxor!"
I froze... But just as he was going to take his shot both front tires blew out and his transmission dropped. He was propelled forward from where he stood and I saw his body hit and crumple on the unforgiving concrete of US-69. His car swerved 90 degrees to the left and hit the impact wall, and the resulting explosion billowed into a thick black ball of flame and smoke.
I winced as I imagined the broken mess the EMTs would have to scrape off of the highway a few minutes from now. The police would have quite a story to put together too, explaining why a drunken man from Pennsylvania had ended up dead after wrecklessly chasing someone.
I knew I'd been very lucky today.
A Linux user goes back.
/etc/fstab file so that it always automounted when plugged in. I was very impressed.
/dev/null, once I find where that actually is.
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins.
Introduction...
In much of today's online news, we hear of how many people are migrating to GNU/Linux. What we don't seem to hear much of, is users going back to their old operating systems. The reason for this article is to say that I've done just that.
Yes, I've gone back. After three and a half years of trying to make GNU/Linux work on the desktop, I've decided that it's simply too hard for the average home user. Before I go into my reasons for going back, let me outline what I believe an 'average' home user is. Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Three and a half years; that's how long I've been trying to make Linux work on my desktop computer. Right about now, I'm sure that you are now screaming that I didn't try hard enough, or that I'm just plain stupid. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Stupid users don't doggedly stick at something for three and a half years, trying distribution after distribution in the hope of finding the holy grail of Linux desktops. They give up in less than a few hours of trying to (unsuccessfully) install RedHat Linux. Hear now my sad tale of why Linux isn't suitable for my desktop.
Some background...
The year is 1998. I've had my Windows '95 computer for around six months. Frustrated with the constant crashes, I desperately asked an online mate for help. Even though he was a windows user, he calmly suggested that I try something I'd never come across before...
âoeLinux, eh? Never heard of it.â
âoeOh, it's a free OS that you can download. Apparently it doesn't crash much. Just do an online search for it.â
Armed with this meagre knowledge, I set out on my quest for the ultimate stable operating system. I searched online, and found places where you could even buy copies of Linux! So, I left the comfort of my warm study, and returned forty minutes later with my first Linux boxed set â" RedHat Linux 5.2. After initially balking at the very basic installer (and few false starts), I had it up and running on my lovely AMD K6-233. I even got X working in no time at all. Then the system booted up for the first time.... and it was dead ugly. I had a very stable new OS, but I didn't even want to look at it. I was happy that I had several installed interfaces to choose from, but none of them appealed to me whatsoever. Wanting to download a nicer interface led me to my next problem.
I had absolutely no idea how to even get this nice, stable OS onto the internet! After reinstalling windows and RedHat in a dual-boot configuration, I got the help I needed by using Windows and USENET. Strangely enough, I can still remember the name of the long-suffering person who helped me get RedHat online, but that's another story. After looking around online, I discovered KDE. Only up to version one, it was the closest thing I had to a completely useable Linux system. I downloaded all the KDE packages for RedHat 5.2, only to discover another distro called Mandrake, that came with KDE preinstalled and configured. Back to my local distributor, and I was set.
Mandrake with KDE was exactly what I needed at that stage in my Linux using life, and I stuck with it for over a year and a half. Always seeking the 'perfect' desktop OS, I followed releases from version 5.3 all the way through to 7.0. Eventually I became dissatisfied with Mandrake, and briefly tried a number of other distros until I finally settled on Debian. I was impressed by the simple power, configurability, and the ease of upgrade that is apt-get. I felt good about being among the uber-elite Debian user community. Needless to say, I learned a lot about how to configure hardware under Linux during my time with Debian. I learned to sift through the old HOWTOs on Linux Doc until I found something suitable and accurate, I learned to utilize the power of USENET and IRC. Life was good.
Right now you must be wondering; âoeWhere is this leading? This guy seemed quite happy with Linux!â. True, I was. After a while, I decided I didn't want to have fine-grained control. I wanted something simple. I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so... well... unstable. I got tired of having to recompile my kernel every time I got new hardware. I got tired of using command line to talk to my PC. It was time for a change. I had good experiences years ago with Mandrake, so I figured I'd try it again. As good as Mandrake 8.1 was, it wasn't what I was after. SuSE Linux 8.0 Professional (boxed set) was installed onto my PC instead.
I have to stop at this point, and say that SuSE Linux 8.0 (Pro) is the best Linux distribution that I've ever used. It has an easy installer, reasonable hardware support, and comes with the very good KDE 3.0. The box contains seven CDROMS, one DVD and three decent books that would help even the most inexperienced user get up and going. YaST2 is a decent graphical system configuration tool. When (not if) I go back to Linux, I'll definitely try SuSE again. However, there are quite a number of things that have improve (or change completely) before I'll consider going back. Read on for my brief list of things that must must get better before I'll switch back from the Microsoft camp.
Where GNU/Linux needs to improve...
X11
The X Window System is an awesomely powerful, network transparent graphical subsystem. It's perfectly suited to running applications from remote servers. However, this is NOT what a home user needs. My experience with X is that it's too big, bloated, slow and unstable to be any good to the home user. Most crashes that I ever experienced with Linux have been X's fault. My servers don't run X, and they never crash.
What home users need is something small and fast, so they can run local applications efficiently. I would like to see the X Window System dumped in favour of a hardware accelerated framebuffer, running something like directFB or Qtopia. Home users need a small, fast graphical subsystem, with built in 3d support. BeOS seemed to be on the right track before they went under.
Fonts are truly awful under X. Most distributions ship with appalling fonts, and there is no standard way to add additional (nicer) fonts to the system. Even after extra fonts have eventually been added, many applications (eg Abiword, Staroffice) refuse to use the new fonts anyway. Perhaps the framebuffer-based graphical subsystem I suggested could incorporate decent font support, and use a readable naming scheme as well.
Drivers
While having access to the latest version of the kernel is a good thing for developers, for home users it can be a nightmare. Got RedHat Linux 7.3? Perhaps you run SuSE 7.3 or Debian 2.2. You'll have to download a binary package specific to your distro. (I'm assuming that home users won't change their default kernel, but if they did, that binary package wouldn't even work!) Hardware manufacturers should be able to provide one single driver that works on all minor versions of a major kernel release. This way it would work will all current distros, instead of having to provide multiple binaries or source code. Hardware manufacturers don't want to give out the source, as this often gives away trade secrets about how their hardware is designed.
The solution seems to be to make binary drivers work on a variety of kernel versions. I'm not sure if this is even possible with the way the kernel is designed (I'm no kernel hacker), but it would go a long way toward making Linux more accessible to the home user. Even if the kernel needs to be redesigned to support this, then in my opinion, it should be done. Linux users are always clamouring for drivers... perhaps if the kernel had something like this, it might one day become a reality.
Hardware setup
While SuSE Linux 8.0 gave me some good experiences with hardware detection (such as automatic download of NVIDIA drivers), it also let me down as in this area.
The good: I recently borrowed a digital camera from a mate at work, to take photos of my case mod. Imagine how happy I was when I plugged it into my nearest USB port, and it was automatically configured (as a SCSI device) and mounted! SuSE even added it to my
The bad: Along came my new IDE CDRW drive. At AU$99, I couldn't pass up the purchase. Plugging it in gave me no joy. I was very disappointed that a device so common couldn't be detected and automatically configured under a modern operating system. The instructions on the SuSE support site said to add lines to lilo.conf and reboot. While this is a perfectly acceptable way to get hardware working for a geek familiar with *NIX, I believe that a home user shouldn't have to do more than plug it in. It's an IDE device, it's not that complicated!
The ugly: Once the hardware was finally working (as a pseudo-scsi drive), the next hurdle was to find decent graphical tools to burn and copy CDs. I finally settled on CDBakeOven, an above average KDE application. It burned CDs from data on the hard drive, but for some reason cdrecord (the command line backend) refused to allow me to copy a cd directly. Yes, it was installed SUID root. CD copying is such a basic function nowadays, why is it so hard to do under GNU/Linux?
Software distribution
I'll put this simply. I'm a home user, not a programmer. Why on earth should I have to compile the software I want to use? I know that having the source available is a good thing, but I'll say it again: I'm no programmer. I just want to install software and run it.
This leads to another point. Although having package databases (such as the rpm and deb systems use) is great, there should definitely be seperation between system packages and additionally installed software. There needs to be a standard installer and database for user-installed applications such as word processors, email clients and games, and it should be seperate from the rpm or deb databases used for system software such as lilo, init and cron. This will make it much easier for home users to know what applications they have installed on their PC, and to easily uninstall them if necessary, without knowing some arcane commands and weird package names.
Support
There is a huge wealth of knowledge among the thousands (millions?) of people that run GNU/Linux around the world. If you have a problem, odds are that someone out there can help you, often for free. This is one of the linux platform's greatest strengths. However, Linux users are also its greatest weakness. This may not apply to most of the community, but there is a very vocal minority that gives Linux a bad name. To every Linux user that has ever helped a newbie, I thank you. I have been helped by many a guru, often when I've been asking the simplest of questions. It's the remainder that are a problem.
I once heard a song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie called Every OS Sucks, where Linux users were described as 'elitist nerdy shmucks'. Sadly this is true for much of the 'community'. Too many consider themselves better than the rest of the world because they run Linux. Can you believe that? It's just a computer operating system, but somehow they think that it makes them better than those people who run systems such as Microsoft Windows! Elitism drives people away, as does saying âoeRTFMâ or belittling people who choose a different distro from yourself.
'Nuff said about that.
So what now?
Well, I decided to go back to a Microsoft platform. Initially being paranoid after reading things about DRM and spyware, I bit the bullet and installed Microsoft Windows XP. Like every OS, it has good and bad points; most of which you can learn about from online reviewers. I'll just point out several things that make me want to keep using it instead of GNU/Linux.
Fast graphical subsystem: Windows has lighting quick graphics, both 2d and 3d. There's no denying it. When I move a window, it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.
Drivers: Point and click to install (as a superuser, of course). Windows warns you if the driver isn't likely to work properly, and can roll back to working drivers if you deliberately choose to install one that hoses your system.
Hardware setup: My CDRW worked right away, without a hitch. I am able to drag and drop files from the Explorer file manager to the CDRW icon and they get added to the list of things to burn. A quick install of Nero Burning Rom, and I was able to make a backup copy of my game CDs. (I don't like taking originals to LANs where they can get destroyed or stolen).
Software distribution: All windows software comes in binaries, either with an installer or in a zip file. I hope to never compile an application ever again. Software designed for a different version of windows is 99% guaranteed to run, but if not, there is always 'compatibility mode'. One thing to note, however: Applications designed for single user versions of windows usually only run properly as a superuser, and this includes 3d games. I expect this to be rectified as the rest of the Windows world catches up to a multi-user environment.
I can't comment on the Windows using community yet. I've not yet had a problem that a simple point and click couldn't fix. However, I will say that my original concern with Windows '95 has been addressed in Windows XP. The stability is finally there.
Final Notes
In conclusion, I'd just like to make it known that I haven't completely abandoned the Linux community. My home server still runs Mandrake, and IPCop on my gateway/firewall. There is no way I'd ever put any form of Windows on my server, nor would I ever connect a Windows PC directly to the internet without a *NIX gateway in between. Microsoft has a history of poor security, so I protect myself the only way I know how; using Linux. I will continue to advocate the use of GNU/Linux in the server arena. This is where its strength lies at the moment.
Because of their history of spreading virii, I don't use the applications that Microsoft has provided with Windows XP. My wife and I use Mozilla for web browsing and email, OpenOffice.org for word processing, and Psi (Jabber client) for instant messaging. All of these are true multi-user win32 programs, and are perfectly interoperable with their Linux counterparts.
I expect that the Linux community will have something to say about this article; I welcome comments and constructive criticism. Flames will be automatically sent to the Windows equivalent of
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins
- posted by poopbot: providing truth in a deceitful world
MC0wL1mg7g Post #281
Please, please, please...for the love of God...do not abuse this law. I don't want to hear anything about anyone trying to defend sharing their MP3 collection by saying they were just trying to teach people about audio compression schemes. This is a damn good law and I don't want the 3l33t w4rez d00d's messing it up for the rest of us.
I liked the old Title 17, Section 110(2), which this bill takes away. It seems to me that this version is much more restrictive.
Heres an intelligently forewarded email I got from a friend today. It seems the 3l33t w4rez d00d's might even have a chance...
Oh well... The law might be useful for as long as it takes to search KaZaA and write a cheque. The kidz dont give a crap about anyone else. The 'Stellas' site is under construction.
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
Old law will be in italics, new law will not.
p 1.html#110? c107:1:./tem p/~c107RwkEFX::
(A) the performance or display is a regular part of the systematic instructional activities of a governmental body or a nonprofit educational institution; and
(A) the performance or display is made by, at the direction of, or under the actual supervision of an instructor as an integral part of a class session offered as a regular part of the systematic mediated instructional activities of a governmental body or an accredited nonprofit educational institution;
(C) the transmission is made primarily for-
(i) reception in classrooms or similar places normally devoted to instruction, or
(ii) reception by persons to whom the transmission is directed because their disabilities or other special circumstances prevent their attendance in classrooms or similar places normally devoted to instruction, or
(iii) reception by officers or employees of governmental bodies as a part of their official duties or employment;
(C) the transmission is made solely for, and, to the extent technologically feasible, the reception of such transmission is limited to--
`(i) students officially enrolled in the course for which the transmission is made; or
`(ii) officers or employees of governmental bodies as a part of their official duties or employment; and
`(D) the transmitting body or institution--
`(i) institutes policies regarding copyright, provides informational materials to faculty, students, and relevant staff members that accurately describe, and promote compliance with, the laws of the United States relating to copyright, and provides notice to students that materials used in connection with the course may be subject to copyright protection; and
`(ii) in the case of digital transmissions--
`(I) applies technological measures that reasonably prevent--
`(aa) retention of the work in accessible form by recipients of the transmission from the transmitting body or institution for longer than the class session; and
`(bb) unauthorized further dissemination of the work in accessible form by such recipients to others; and
And it continues this way, they also removed exemptions for religious uses, AND the previous version had an exemption for use of copywrited material used to gather funds for a charitible donation without permission. This is removed.
Compare the 2 versions yourself!
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92cha
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D
...until school systems get enough funding to buy modern equipment, which will DRM'ed out the wazoo. Fortunately most government bodies are more interesting in kissing up to corporate funds that funding education, so schools will be using outdated, fully functional stuff for a while.
...and it's stale BS too; it's been circulating for a long time. Not a single one of the cases checks out. The whole thing is a fabrication. See this page on the ever-reliable Snopes. It's always worth doing a background check on these things before passing them on. A google search on "terrence dickson" brought the Snopes page up first, followed by hundreds of repetitions of the original canard.
As someone already noted, the actual "Stella" McDonald's/hot coffee case is real, but not so easily deemed a "frivolous" lawsuit when you examine the facts and background of the case.
Kiscica
My fsckup, and I'm never short of them.
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!