Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Nerves, Unis, Subtitles
Yes, does that come with insurance? An anonymous reader writes "Channel 4 news has a small report on the way that financial institutions are moving their computer systems and data backup out of central London to establishments such as The Bunker and Sealand."
Suddenly, those places seem a bit like less of a novelty and more good plain sense.
Copyright vs. Presumptive Scanning, part VXIIIXIX AnElder writes "The SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) now reports that 'Recording companies have asked the Federal Court to allow their computer experts to scan all computers at the University of Melbourne for sound files and email accounts, so they can gather evidence of claimed widespread breaches of copyright.' Are libraries next? "Counsel for the companies, Mr Tony Bannon SC, said industry studies of piracy had found public institutions such as universities and libraries were the biggest repositories of unlawful sound recordings."
Speaking of brand integrity. increment writes "The Engrish TTT Captions Site that was mentioned earlier here has apparently received a cease and desist order from AOL/Warner Bros and taken down their hilarious bootleg screenshots of The Two Towers. You did know that AOL is the parent company of New Line Cinema, right? AOL probably contends that humorous captions 'degrade their brand integrity,' though they should be grateful for such a vivid illustration of the poor quality of bootlegs. A few mirrors of the site can still be found around the net."
What about robotic juicers for the home? CallNElvis writes "Here's another interesting (translate that to "Cool! I want one") site lazydrinker.com showing a tabletop automatic drink pouring machine. It seems to be a little more polished than the last one posted here. The site includes a pretty cool mpeg of it in action."
Blend it into Knoppix, please :) 3-D modeling program Blender was converted from a proprietary license to the GPL last October. What's been going on since then? An anonymous reader writes "A couple of days ago, Blender 2.26 was released. This is the first open source version, and has all the features of the previous proprietary version, except physics support in the gamekit, which was not owned by NaN, and could thus not be opened.
Blender is 'the vi of 3d-modeling,' and was Freed by the community, when NaN (the company creating blender) went broke. It is platform independent (with roots in Unix), scriptable, has a steep but rewarding learning curve, ingenious but nonstandard user interface, and can be used to make games, 3d-web-thingies (there exists a browser plugin) and of course images, animations and models (which among others, can be exported to POV-ray)."
Mandrake keeps moving -- give it a whirl.
An anonymous reader writes "The Mandrake 9.1 testing cycle is coming to an end. I haven't noticed any big fan-fare for testing this version, but I noticed that RC-1 is now on many of the ftp mirrors found here.
If you like the distro, don't forget to join MandrakeClub where you can help the company and have a say in what packages they include in their user-friendly distro."
May I be the first to point you to this penny arcade strip on the topic: Penny Arcade
Disco Stu was talkin' to you.
They want to scan their email too?
We all have seen the clauses in the Terms of Service that say that email is not private, that this is univerisity owned equipment and such. I can understand if they were going to scan incoming email for attachments, but it would appear that they want to scan the student's personal computer too!
My bet is that if they scan the student's computers that they are going to find more porn than music...
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
A neighbooring school, to where I shall be attending, had a like threat. What did people do? The college store suddenly had USB 2.0 and Firewire hard drives in stock. People copied everything to hard drives and stored them in a safe place in case the threat was real. It wasn't, but they were prepared.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
It's a well known adage that engineers are supposed to be lazy. Larry Wall enumerates it as one of the traits of good programmers and the impetus behind Perl. What they mean is that engineers should strive to automate repetitive tasks instead of performing them manually each time.
Lazy Drinker has clearly misunderstood the concept. The device they show is not automated in any way. The user still has to move the cup(!) under the spout and type(!!) commands into an attached computer to begin pouring the drink. Frankly, pouring the drink is the easiest part of the process. Any fast food restaurant has for ages had machines that have been doing this kind thing.
Lazy Drinker has arguably made pouring drinks *more difficult* by way of this device. It's kind of sad that Slashdot is reduced to running such a non-story.
I have been pwned because my
There have been a number of memos from the Dean lately about copyrighted material, including music. The University's stance is that any copies of music, whether you own an original or not, are illegal unless you have written permission from the copyright holder. I believe that this is consistent with Australian copyright law, which (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't seem to have a Fair Use clause. If that's true, it makes me wonder why you can buy solid-state MP3 players in this country at all.
find / -name "*.mp3" -print returned nothing on my laptop, so it's not a big deal to me, and since it's the University's equipment, they're entitled to set their own rules. But searching our hard disks doesn't exactly foster a trusting relationship between staff and university. More to the point, it's also going to have a nasty effect on research on audio compression.
No, you are wrong. Yours is the most ignorant.
Amendments to the Constitution ALWAYS override the main body of the Constitution. That's the definition of an amendment. Something that changes the original document.
The result of the First Amendment is the doctrine of "fair use." Fair use was not created by Congress, but was created by the courts in order to reconcile the clash between the monopoly clause (which authorizes the government to create speech monopolies in the form of copyright) with the First Amendment (which guarantees freedom of speech.) Fair Use was developed to "save" copyright from being declared unconstitutional in light of the First Amendment.
The theory behind Fair Use is that copyright is compatible with the First Amendment, so long as copyright does not suppress speech. In other words, I can be stopped from reprinting and selling copies of "Gone With The Wind", because "Gone With The Wind" has already been published, sold, and made available to the public. The public already has access to that particular speech, and is therefore minimally harmed by my not being allowed to publish an unauthorized edition.
That's the theory, anyway. In 1976, the copyright laws were rewritten, and the Fair Use doctrine was codified into law. However, the scope of copyright was so enlarged in the 1976 rewrite that the copyright laws are now arguably unconstitutional. Prior to 1976, copyright did not extend to derivative works. Now it does.
The extension of copyright to derivative works flies both in the face of the First Amendment and the copyright clause itself.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but the copyright laws outlaw speech that is derived from a copyrighted work.
The monopolies clause authorize Congress:
The 1976 copyright law goes far beyond this. In addition to giving authors the right to exclude others from copying and publish the works of the author, it allows an author to exclude other authors from publishing their own original works.
For instance, there are probably hundreds of authors who are fully capable and willing to write and create additional "Winnie The Pooh" stories and movies. Some of those authors might very well rival the vision and artistry of A.A. Milne. However, because the Disney corporation owns the copyright on Winnie the Pooh, the only Winnie the Pooh books and movies that we will see in our lifetime are the forgetable direct-to-video trash and crappy commercial children's picture books.
The 1976 copyright revision has been a complete disaster. It has resulted in the massive consolidation of copyright power, the forced destruction and dumbing down of culture, and a wave of speech suppression that has never been seen in the history of the United States.
How do you tell "unlawful sound recordings" from legal ones?
I have a whole lot of MP3's on my hard drive -- all of it personally ripped from legally purchased CD's. (Except that which I downloaded, legally, from MP3.com as explicitly permitted by the copyright holder, and much of which I ended up buying on CD anyway.) So, supposing the RIAA, et al. were to scan my computer (as if I'd allow them), how could they tell whether or not the files I have are there legally?
I ask because I am concerned that the answer is "you can't tell, so we'll just have to make *all* copyrighted sound files illegal."
I don't condone copyright violation, and don't want my rights curtailed because of it.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.