When I send mix CD's full of copyrighted material via USPS to my friends, USPS is using those copyrighted works to make money and doing so without permission. Does that absolve the USPS of wrong-doing?
You're actually comitting a federal offense.
The USPS doesn't know and has no way of knowing the contents of your package, Google proudly proclaims how powerful it's search technology is.
USPS deliver the package as per your explicit instructions, Google allows all and sundry to view content on YouTube.
You pay USPS (once) to carry a package for you, Google make money by selling advertising, effectively making money everytime a clip is viewed on YouTube.
Googles' operation of YouTube is not overly dissimilar to the way in which television stations make money - the exception being that television stations have to pay for content to fill the gaps in their advertising schedules, Google are "re-broadcasting" copyright materials without a license.
The clips often suffer from the compression process, which presents Viacom's products in a less than satisfactory light with poor audio and video quality.
As lovely as Google and YouTube are, they are in the wrong, but hey it's America, if you don't like a law and you've got enough cash then you can just pay for a new one to be drafted - that's democracy 2.0!
I killed an iPod by knocking it off a desk onto a wooden floor - planes work a lot higher than desks and the ground is a lot harder. Crazy idea - what kind of a moron would want to 'open source' avionics ?
J.J. Abrams is one of the guys who brought us "Lost" - coming December 2008 "Star Trek XI - Lost in Space" - Brent Spiner to play Robbie the Robot with a cameo from Matt le Blanc playing crewman #7.
The post was made on 28th december 2006, which means that Amazon contacted the guy saying they'd made a mistake and offered free return delivery, less than five days after the order date (23/12/06). Now, bear in mind that the 23rd was a saturday - so you wouldn't reasonably expect the order to have been reviewed until the next business day - which would have been the 27th of december 2006.
This is a typical load of slash-dot bollox, Amazon acted to correct the issue in a timely way and at their expense, nobody ignoring their apology and offer to correct the issue has a leg to stand on, chances are that he recieved the email before he recieved the goods. Amazon are within their rights to ask for him to return a mis-dispatched or incorrect order, it's like ordering a copy of the ring on dvd and finding a diamond ring in the mail, you'd be obliged to return it and liable if you kept it knowing that it had been dispatched in error.
Typical, your debate implied that people have only just started getting emails, when in fact they've been sitting on them for over a month. Don't you have any editors to at least RTFA! before accepting postings ?
All the work may be wasted, but for the fact that the law will hold the company involved liable, not the people making the claims, see, on this side of the Atlantic laws are written to protect consumers from corporations and not the other way around.
The law is intended to be Internet proof, if false claims are made then the company involved will have to either refute the claims or prove them at its own expense - kind of a ironic punishment - you exagerate about the desirability of your new product and then you have either carry out a large scale market research project to prove what you've said or you have to issue a public retraction stating that you made a mistake and nobody really likes your stuff after-all.
Sounds like it was drafted with Steve Jobs and the Mac Cult in mind.
Erm, no, European Law works for the benefit of the people, not the lawyers.
In the UK, the various consumer watchdogs, the advertising standards agency and the press complaints commission would look after them.
I don't see what the fuss is all about, all the new legislation is doing is applying a common framework across the EU, member states have always had the power to investigate faux-testimonials and misleading product claims, it's just that some countries (e.g. Italy) turned a blind eye to certain industries, it now applies right across the board.
It's a great thing for the consumer and will mean that companies wouldn't be able to use 'gifts' to encourage 'independant' third parties to 'tell the truth' or 'correct inaccuracies' about their products and services - so for example. Microsoft wouldn't be able to pay a French technology blogger to 'edit' wikipedia entries without falling foul of yet another EU law.
Well I dunno, the Queen is head of state for the UK and Australia, but not Scotland or England.
I suppose... maybe ?
I don't hold with any of the "nationalism" nonsense, it made sense in the late 19th century, but "countries" and "nations" are just lines on a map nowadays - they used to demarcate where groups of people were supposed to be, but air travel, transnational trading blocs and the Internet have deprecated them.
Look at the Balkan region, when I was a kid it was *just* Yugoslavia, now there's a dozen countries and they're still fragmenting, better to just do away with the lines and let people just get on with living their lives.
What's good for the goose? Let's make it illegal to have closed Siemens and Nokia phones so that any phone will work with each carriers network. Seems reasonable.
Eh ? as far back as I can remember, that's how phones have always worked.
Since 1992 I've had ten different phones, I re-negotiate my contracts every year and every device I've had since 1998 still works with my current billing plan and will work most places around the World - well except in the USA, you get a better service on the Serengeti than you get in the burbs of NYC, but that's what you get from a primitive market economy I guess.
With the exception of the numbering chages a few years ago, I've had the same mobile number since the early 90's.
Same goes for my mates in Finland, Greece, France, Ireland and people all over Europe.
If you're not happy with your Telco, you just ring up and switch, that's why they came up with "Number Portability" in the first place, as long as you've met the terms of your contract then you have no obligations to stay loyal to any company.
In the EU the thinking is that customer loyalty is something that has to be earned, you can't buy it.
The only "vendor lock-ins" I have are with the local bus company, Severn Trent Water and BT, but that's only because it doesn't make sense to buy my water from a supplier in Cornwall and despite an open market for the local loop there are no competing telcos in my area, other bus companies are available, but I'm too lazy to walk 50M down the road to get a different bus line, but that's my choice.
All of this is not to say that we do not harming the environment - we certainly do, and sometimes in irreversible [in the terms of our lifetimes] proportions. However we should fully understand the difference between chemical spills that damage our own food chain and other stuff, and green eco-activists' fantasies like the one about the Antarctic ozone hole. Some details on the last statement: a lot of eco-activists say that
1. Ozon is good for environment and should be praised [partially true - stratospheric ozone absorbs solar ultraviolet radiation, but high concentrations of ozone irritate human respiratory system]
2. There are huge ozon holes near the Earth's poles [true]
3. Ozon is known to decay in reactions with CFCs [true]
4. Thus, CFCs are responsible for the antartic ozone hole [not true]
The main reason that there always was and will be an ozone hole over the Antarctics is that ozone decays in the lack of sunlight, and it's pretty dark half of the year out there.
P.S. This post has been made with my current understanding of the problem; if a more informed person can correct me wherever I am wrong, I'd be grateful.
rewind to 1990
there seems to be a correlation between CFC levels at high altitudes and damage to the ozone layer
there is a new ozone hole opening over Europe
we don't need to use CFCs
maybe we should phase them out
cue Montreal Protocol
fastforward 15 years
CFCs are only used in niche applications
there was no longterm economic impact
ozone levels are still falling all over the planet
So, we haven't fixed the problem, but at least we're not making it any worse. Cutting pollution, recycling and being more energy efficient may not fix anything, but if we can get by without making a mess than shouldn't we at least try.
pft! - you can target groups of humans very easily, all you've got to do is play around with the symptoms of some ethnic diseases - e.g. sickle cell anemics get into difficulty when you mess around with their blood pressure or constrict their blood vessels.You want to wipe out lots of african americans ?: then release a virus that inhibits Parathyroid hormone.
Not much to it - most traditionally close-knit ethnic groups have inherited skeletons lurking in their genomic cupboards - you've just got the think laterally to explout them.
Woah! - I'd always thought Linux was cheap - but if you're saying that it requires the Mercedes of support contracts then I better go jack up our support budget.
Oxford University is one of the UK copyright libraries - it has a copy of every book and published in the UK and Ireland since the 1600s - it gets them by default.
You'd end up with the kind of running battles that go on between the ISPs and bit-torrent.
If it's a regular pattern, then it will be identifiable and anything encoded or carrying some kind of obfuscation technology will be easy to block at the point of upload, if were to find a way of creating a removable wrapper so that it got through the fingerprinting process then what's to stop the fingerprinter taking a peek inside as part of the process. These people aren't idiots, the will adpat their technology.
To keep up with the filterers you'd probably have to make it into an open-source project to enable enough people to work on it round-the-clock - the MPAA have already employed hackers to do their dirty work, so doubtless they'd find ways of infiltrating the project.
Best thing would be to put the effort into creating your own content in the first place, that's what this whole 2.0 thing is about or just stick to using stuff released as part of the creative commons initatives.
Wow you should go work for Bose or somebody like that - hell you should work for NASA.
When I was at school noise was random and irremovable because, without reference to the original you couldn't tell what was signal and what was noise.
I take my hat off to you, removing an unpredictable distortion is an impressive feat - it would have to be pretty much random and unpredictable otherwise the fingerprinting software would just spot your filtered signal and correct for it.
You can't really just go and 'insert' a gene into an organism and expect it to start working, there is a whole regulatory framework up and down stream of the gene that regulates it's expression - it might go something like this :
1 STUFFTOEAT = TASTE() : REM RETURNS A LIST
2 MOREFOOD = HOWMUCHFOOD()
5 ENOUGHFORGLUCOSE = 8
6 ENOUGHFORSUCROSE = 5
7 ENOUGHFORFRUCTOSE = 10
10 REM PROCESS FOOD
11 IF CONTAINS(SUFFTOEAT,"GLUCOSE") THEN GENETOEXPRESS = 7 : GOSUB 1200
12 IF CONTAINS(SUFFTOEAT,"SUCROSE") THEN GENETOEXPRESS = 15 : GOSUB 1220
13 IF CONTAINS(SUFFTOEAT,"FRUCTOSE") THEN GENETOEXPRESS = 10 : GOSUB 1250 ...
200 GOSUB 3000
201 RETURN ...
999 IF MOREFOOD : GOTO 10
1000 GOTO 1 ...
1250 PRODUCTS=MEASURE("FRUCTOSE")
1251 WHILE (PRODUCTS
1260 IF GENETOEXPRESS = 10 AND THEN GOSUB 2000
1270 NEXT
1275 GENETOEXPRESS = -1
1348 GOSUB 200
1349 MOREFOOD --
1350 RETURN ...
2000 REM CODE FOR THE EXPRESSION OF GENE 10 GOES HERE
2001 FRUCTOSEINCREMENT = 2 ...
2099 PRODUCTS += FRUCTOSEINCREMENT
2100 RETURN ...
3000 REM CODE TO CLEAN UP AFTER GENE EXPRESSION GOES HERE ...
3100 RETURN
One way to boost output in response to "FRUCTOSE" could be:
duplicate line #13 which would be analagous to adding a new promotor site,
tweak FRUCTOSEINCREMENT which would make the analagous to the regulator,
tweak ENOUGHFORFRUCTOSE which would be control how long the gene was expressed.
If they only moved the "pink gene" than it's no surprise it didn't work. It's oft quoted how similar our DNA is to that of chimps, but quite clearly we're not chimps - it's not the code per se that determines what you are, it how and when you read it.
# ok, I know it's not the cleanest bit of code, it's not OO, it's poorly documented and it mixes in functions into a what looks like a procedural language, but it's the best analogy I could figure out. DNA is a random access data store, but the transcription system is fairly linear. In a cell - the functions would be inputs from other organelles, and the constants wouldn't be hardcoded. But it'll do.
The issue is having an actual usable vector for mass-propogation, resulting in the massive downtime and recovery time, billions of dollars of lost productivity, and tens of thousands of manhours in remediation.
Let's face it, even if you had something as highly virulent and damaging, so few organisations rely solely on Macs and they make up such a small proportion of pc's out there, that although it would make headlines, it would be unlikely to have much of an impact on the global economy.
Windows viruses can cost billions of dollars because they can infect hundreds of millions of machines.
It's a lot easier with different sized bills, a bit of colour doesn't go amiss either.
I was in Detroit last year, a homeless guy posed for a photo, asked for a dollar, so I pulled out a greenish bill - he skipped off down the road singing my praises - I felt sorry for the guy, a dollar made such a difference to him, only noticed my mistake back at the hotel - I'd given him a 100 dollar bill.
But surely that invalidates the point of lugging everything around with you, isn't the advantage of such a system that anything you could potentially watch would be available to you, not just reviewm things you'd have watched anyway.
Serendipity (not the movie) would be the main selling point - you may get hooked on some 70's telenovella from Brazil or a bit of Korean Anime, maybe you re-discover your inner child and get-off on those 70's squiggle V square animations from Czechsolvakia, stuff you'd never normally have the opportunity to watch.
It would take less effort to have *all* video than to sift through and discover specific shows.
"For now I will assume that 100mb per hour of video would be of "watchable" quality (I'll use metric gb for easy maths).
100mb * 24hours = 2.4gb per day.
2.4gb * 365 days = 876gb per year"
LOL - that's the thing I love about/. the way you Americans have such a global view of things:|
In the UK, Sky+ is getting on for 600 channels now, and that's just one of many platforms in Europe. There must be tens of thousands of tv and radio channels out there broadcasting 24 hours a day seven days a week.
Yes there may be products that might just about store the output of one channel, but that's a tiny fraction of all the available broadcast media.
But storing it is only part of the problem, how are you going to find anything on the stupid thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The USPS doesn't know and has no way of knowing the contents of your package, Google proudly proclaims how powerful it's search technology is.
USPS deliver the package as per your explicit instructions, Google allows all and sundry to view content on YouTube.
You pay USPS (once) to carry a package for you, Google make money by selling advertising, effectively making money everytime a clip is viewed on YouTube.
Googles' operation of YouTube is not overly dissimilar to the way in which television stations make money - the exception being that television stations have to pay for content to fill the gaps in their advertising schedules, Google are "re-broadcasting" copyright materials without a license.
The clips often suffer from the compression process, which presents Viacom's products in a less than satisfactory light with poor audio and video quality.
As lovely as Google and YouTube are, they are in the wrong, but hey it's America, if you don't like a law and you've got enough cash then you can just pay for a new one to be drafted - that's democracy 2.0!
Microsoft is the big bully in the playground, Google is the suave stranger in the flash car outside the school gates.
Microsoft demands your lunch money or else, Google offers sweets and a lift to come see some puppies.
Both are evil monopolists at least microsoft if upfront about it.
I killed an iPod by knocking it off a desk onto a wooden floor - planes work a lot higher than desks and the ground is a lot harder. Crazy idea - what kind of a moron would want to 'open source' avionics ?
J.J. Abrams is one of the guys who brought us "Lost" - coming December 2008 "Star Trek XI - Lost in Space" - Brent Spiner to play Robbie the Robot with a cameo from Matt le Blanc playing crewman #7.
Have a look again at the copy of email sent from from amazon (linked above) : http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=487954
The post was made on 28th december 2006, which means that Amazon contacted the guy saying they'd made a mistake and offered free return delivery, less than five days after the order date (23/12/06). Now, bear in mind that the 23rd was a saturday - so you wouldn't reasonably expect the order to have been reviewed until the next business day - which would have been the 27th of december 2006.
This is a typical load of slash-dot bollox, Amazon acted to correct the issue in a timely way and at their expense, nobody ignoring their apology and offer to correct the issue has a leg to stand on, chances are that he recieved the email before he recieved the goods. Amazon are within their rights to ask for him to return a mis-dispatched or incorrect order, it's like ordering a copy of the ring on dvd and finding a diamond ring in the mail, you'd be obliged to return it and liable if you kept it knowing that it had been dispatched in error.
Typical, your debate implied that people have only just started getting emails, when in fact they've been sitting on them for over a month. Don't you have any editors to at least RTFA! before accepting postings ?
All the work may be wasted, but for the fact that the law will hold the company involved liable, not the people making the claims, see, on this side of the Atlantic laws are written to protect consumers from corporations and not the other way around.
The law is intended to be Internet proof, if false claims are made then the company involved will have to either refute the claims or prove them at its own expense - kind of a ironic punishment - you exagerate about the desirability of your new product and then you have either carry out a large scale market research project to prove what you've said or you have to issue a public retraction stating that you made a mistake and nobody really likes your stuff after-all.
Sounds like it was drafted with Steve Jobs and the Mac Cult in mind.
Erm, no, European Law works for the benefit of the people, not the lawyers.
In the UK, the various consumer watchdogs, the advertising standards agency and the press complaints commission would look after them.
I don't see what the fuss is all about, all the new legislation is doing is applying a common framework across the EU, member states have always had the power to investigate faux-testimonials and misleading product claims, it's just that some countries (e.g. Italy) turned a blind eye to certain industries, it now applies right across the board.
It's a great thing for the consumer and will mean that companies wouldn't be able to use 'gifts' to encourage 'independant' third parties to 'tell the truth' or 'correct inaccuracies' about their products and services - so for example. Microsoft wouldn't be able to pay a French technology blogger to 'edit' wikipedia entries without falling foul of yet another EU law.
With great freedoms come great responsibilities.
Well I dunno, the Queen is head of state for the UK and Australia, but not Scotland or England.
I suppose... maybe ?
I don't hold with any of the "nationalism" nonsense, it made sense in the late 19th century, but "countries" and "nations" are just lines on a map nowadays - they used to demarcate where groups of people were supposed to be, but air travel, transnational trading blocs and the Internet have deprecated them.
Look at the Balkan region, when I was a kid it was *just* Yugoslavia, now there's a dozen countries and they're still fragmenting, better to just do away with the lines and let people just get on with living their lives.
Eh ? as far back as I can remember, that's how phones have always worked.
Since 1992 I've had ten different phones, I re-negotiate my contracts every year and every device I've had since 1998 still works with my current billing plan and will work most places around the World - well except in the USA, you get a better service on the Serengeti than you get in the burbs of NYC, but that's what you get from a primitive market economy I guess.
With the exception of the numbering chages a few years ago, I've had the same mobile number since the early 90's.
Same goes for my mates in Finland, Greece, France, Ireland and people all over Europe.
If you're not happy with your Telco, you just ring up and switch, that's why they came up with "Number Portability" in the first place, as long as you've met the terms of your contract then you have no obligations to stay loyal to any company.
In the EU the thinking is that customer loyalty is something that has to be earned, you can't buy it.
The only "vendor lock-ins" I have are with the local bus company, Severn Trent Water and BT, but that's only because it doesn't make sense to buy my water from a supplier in Cornwall and despite an open market for the local loop there are no competing telcos in my area, other bus companies are available, but I'm too lazy to walk 50M down the road to get a different bus line, but that's my choice.
Last time I checked Sunderland and Dundee were both in the United Kingdom - different countries, same nation.
rewind to 1990
cue Montreal Protocol
fastforward 15 years
So, we haven't fixed the problem, but at least we're not making it any worse. Cutting pollution, recycling and being more energy efficient may not fix anything, but if we can get by without making a mess than shouldn't we at least try.
pft! - you can target groups of humans very easily, all you've got to do is play around with the symptoms of some ethnic diseases - e.g. sickle cell anemics get into difficulty when you mess around with their blood pressure or constrict their blood vessels.You want to wipe out lots of african americans ?: then release a virus that inhibits Parathyroid hormone.
Not much to it - most traditionally close-knit ethnic groups have inherited skeletons lurking in their genomic cupboards - you've just got the think laterally to explout them.
Woah! - I'd always thought Linux was cheap - but if you're saying that it requires the Mercedes of support contracts then I better go jack up our support budget.
Oxford University is one of the UK copyright libraries - it has a copy of every book and published in the UK and Ireland since the 1600s - it gets them by default.
You'd end up with the kind of running battles that go on between the ISPs and bit-torrent. If it's a regular pattern, then it will be identifiable and anything encoded or carrying some kind of obfuscation technology will be easy to block at the point of upload, if were to find a way of creating a removable wrapper so that it got through the fingerprinting process then what's to stop the fingerprinter taking a peek inside as part of the process. These people aren't idiots, the will adpat their technology. To keep up with the filterers you'd probably have to make it into an open-source project to enable enough people to work on it round-the-clock - the MPAA have already employed hackers to do their dirty work, so doubtless they'd find ways of infiltrating the project. Best thing would be to put the effort into creating your own content in the first place, that's what this whole 2.0 thing is about or just stick to using stuff released as part of the creative commons initatives.
Wow you should go work for Bose or somebody like that - hell you should work for NASA.
When I was at school noise was random and irremovable because, without reference to the original you couldn't tell what was signal and what was noise.
I take my hat off to you, removing an unpredictable distortion is an impressive feat - it would have to be pretty much random and unpredictable otherwise the fingerprinting software would just spot your filtered signal and correct for it.
doh! didn't encode a chevron :( - see, now that's an example as to how the misencoding of a single character can destroy the sense of a message ;)
...
1000-1270 should read :
1000 GOTO 1
1250 PRODUCTS=MEASURE("FRUCTOSE")
1251 WHILE (PRODUCTS < ENOUGHFORFRUCTOSE )
1260 IF GENETOEXPRESS = 10 AND THEN GOSUB 2000
sorry 'bout that !
If they only moved the "pink gene" than it's no surprise it didn't work. It's oft quoted how similar our DNA is to that of chimps, but quite clearly we're not chimps - it's not the code per se that determines what you are, it how and when you read it.
# ok, I know it's not the cleanest bit of code, it's not OO, it's poorly documented and it mixes in functions into a what looks like a procedural language, but it's the best analogy I could figure out. DNA is a random access data store, but the transcription system is fairly linear. In a cell - the functions would be inputs from other organelles, and the constants wouldn't be hardcoded. But it'll do.
It's a lot easier with different sized bills, a bit of colour doesn't go amiss either.
I was in Detroit last year, a homeless guy posed for a photo, asked for a dollar, so I pulled out a greenish bill - he skipped off down the road singing my praises - I felt sorry for the guy, a dollar made such a difference to him, only noticed my mistake back at the hotel - I'd given him a 100 dollar bill.
But surely that invalidates the point of lugging everything around with you, isn't the advantage of such a system that anything you could potentially watch would be available to you, not just reviewm things you'd have watched anyway.
Serendipity (not the movie) would be the main selling point - you may get hooked on some 70's telenovella from Brazil or a bit of Korean Anime, maybe you re-discover your inner child and get-off on those 70's squiggle V square animations from Czechsolvakia, stuff you'd never normally have the opportunity to watch.
It would take less effort to have *all* video than to sift through and discover specific shows.
Good point, maybe he's got a freeview box - I'm lucky if our one can even get a signal.
But lingusitics aside, it was still a blinkered perspective on the problem.
I can't believe you actually suggested DRMing a file on /. - LMAO
"For now I will assume that 100mb per hour of video would be of "watchable" quality (I'll use metric gb for easy maths). 100mb * 24hours = 2.4gb per day. 2.4gb * 365 days = 876gb per year" LOL - that's the thing I love about /. the way you Americans have such a global view of things :|
In the UK, Sky+ is getting on for 600 channels now, and that's just one of many platforms in Europe. There must be tens of thousands of tv and radio channels out there broadcasting 24 hours a day seven days a week.
Yes there may be products that might just about store the output of one channel, but that's a tiny fraction of all the available broadcast media.
But storing it is only part of the problem, how are you going to find anything on the stupid thing.
"Have Wikipedia in the head..." ... and History 3.0 will be nothing but the consensus of people with axes to grind.