You have mis-stated the facts. By international treaty, downloading copyrighted material in Canada is NOT legal, regardless of Canada's unwillingness to enforce the treaties it signs.
It might be legal according to province or national law, but Canada's own agreements to international treaties make it illegal. Now, as a Libertarian, I do not agree with that state of affairs... but that is the way it stands today. So it is not me who is confused. I should really be in bed, but first, i had to reply to this.
I did some quick research and while it was far from thorough (i didn't look through every treaty, i did a quick search on ones dealing with copyrights) it turned out something startling, there is no treaty that forbids personal copying!
That's right, of the 4 treaties that Canada has signed and/or put into law, not one of them says anything about 'personal'copying. public copying and reselling is illegal, no one is denying that, but personal?
3 of the 4 have been made into law, and all are quite old (one was to do with IP/Copyrights in the patent and world stage, nothing to do with infringement), the fourth one, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, was signed by Canada, however, no law has been made. Unless I missed something, there is no reference forbidding personal copying (post links to prove me wrong, preferribly to the treaty itself).
Also, international treaties are about as hard to enforce has it is to hold back a river with my hands. Take a look at the Kyoto Accord, or a better example, the US going against the WTO in banning online gambling. Kyoto is such a mess in many countries in terms of legislation to meet the targets.
A Treaty is not a law-binding piece of paper. It's a bunch of country leaders sitting down and creating a document, then signing it. There's no binding effect to that treaty, you can (usually) pull out, not to mention the general public might not like it.
Your words summed it all up nicely, you might want to follow them too...
I suspect you could use a little education about the facts yourself.
What I meant is that it is completely legal now, but that the CRIA is attempting to make it illegal. Whether they'll succeed or not depends on how corruptible our legislators are. A better question to ask is how much influence the CRIA has left, considering they lost the biggest Canadian labels. If I was a polition (and I'm glad I'm not) I'd be more willing to listen to Canadian artists and companies than large international companies, especially with the past few blows the RIAA has taken.
I expect we will see a levy on iPods and mp3 players, and I will be happy to have that. I have no problem paying a little extra per disc since the money will be going to the artists, maybe not the ones I listen to, but artists nonetheless.
The Record Companies everywere should focus more on cracking down on real piracy rather than the file sharing. After all, in Canada, if the levy really was killing music sales wouldn't sales have taken a nose dive after the highly publicised ruling against the CRIA on the account of the levy?
Yep. It's like comparing apples to oranges to grapefruits. All 3 have their huge strengths and all 3 have big weaknesses. It depends on the project and how it'll be worked, not the language.
I find it stunning (and disturbing) that there is this notion that adding tech to the classroom is by default beneficial. This idea is complete rubbish and the studies are starting to mount that show this (see below). Especially when it comes to the hard sciences and mathematics. We know that 'dead poets society' ruined a generation of english teachers. IMO, technology is ruining a generation (or more) of science/math teachers. I don't think anyone is claiming that adding technology to the classroom is by default beneficial. It's a fallacy to say so. No one will benefit from poorly used technology in the classroom. Technology can and does improve learning on an individual basis, and will create interesting projects for anyone, but that's not the point here. We're talking a teacher using technology to teach their students.
Powerpoint (and similar products) are so poorly used (I've actually/never/ seen it used properly) that they actually seriously detract from the class. In fact, people tend to do the exactly same nonsense with powerpoint that they do with the chalkboard i.e. write what they say. Yes, I can read, tell me/write on the board something I can't. Here's the problem though. I have never seen anyone use powerpoint in classrooms effectively either, but that doesn't mean it can't be.
This also illistrates another problem. Every student learns differently. Some students can absorb information by listening and writing out the notes. Others (like myself) have to see something written down to grasp it, and usually stuggle when trying to write down notes pulled out of the air of the lecturer. There's others that need to feel and do the experiments to fully grasp them.
A good example of this is from my C++ programming class. Some programs we were required to do a plan. Write out in english how we're going to do a function. Make notes of what functions were being used, how to figure out if a cell would contain a 5 or a 7, etc. etc. I know for a fact that some students needed this to fully grasp how to program. They weren't bad programmers at all. Others, like myself, saw no use for this and hated doing it. You have to try and teach every kid.
So, my suggestion is to put away all of you expensive toys (that are proving to be less and less effective as time goes on), pick up a piece of chalk and actually teach them. After all, when it comes to Math and Science, all you need is quick sketches to get the ideas across, now don't you. Not to all. Again, teaching is to make sure as many people get it as possible. Take my Physics. I was always extremely good with math, but when it came to calculating forces of various things in Physics, I was lost. Maybe a bad teacher, or maybe lack of good information, or maybe I needed an example done like that one in the MIT video further up to grasp all the forces and how they interact. While that is the past, you never know with the future.
Using too much technology is bad. No one will ever learn if the screen is sparkling and playing sounds all the time, and you're just regurgitating what you see on the screen. Using the right technology can be benificial no matter what subject you teach. Videotape a marble rolling down an incline, show the students, discuss it, draw over a still. I will learn much better if i have an actual image that I can remember, rather than just some lines and arrows on a chalkboard. I'm sure I'm not alone in that either.
I don't normally post, but this one hit the nail on the head for me.
6 1/2 years ago I built my first site, and since then my designs have grown in complexity. I used to use tables, nesting them deep, but I've moved on to CSS.
Must have been 3 or so years ago now I set out to develop a CSS based site (wow, has it been that long). I used various things, following standards. There were transparent png's, alpha transparency, some more advanced CSS, etc. Mozilla displayed the page properly, as did Opera (with a small bug), but IE sent it through the washer and spat it out. I had to hack the css with tricks and stupid things to even get it looking close to what it should.
I left web design and coding behind. I'm back, working on a personal site. RIght now I'm CSS designing some very intricate work, using many many different positioning of elements. I use Opera as my main browser, and of the pages I have finished cssing (still got a few dozen to go) ALL display flawlessly in Opera, Firefox, and Safari. The only issue I have found so far is there is a 1 pixel difference in firefox/safari compared to opera. I dread loading up the site to see it on IE6, to see how poorly it's rendered it.
So basically, on top of some of the other things mentioned here, that is what makes me dislike MS. The disreguard of standards and locking of IE6 that did it. While IE7 is better (I hear) web dev still has to wait a few years before IE6 dies down to a small share before development can actually move forward again.
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I did some quick research and while it was far from thorough (i didn't look through every treaty, i did a quick search on ones dealing with copyrights) it turned out something startling, there is no treaty that forbids personal copying!
That's right, of the 4 treaties that Canada has signed and/or put into law, not one of them says anything about 'personal'copying. public copying and reselling is illegal, no one is denying that, but personal?
3 of the 4 have been made into law, and all are quite old (one was to do with IP/Copyrights in the patent and world stage, nothing to do with infringement), the fourth one, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, was signed by Canada, however, no law has been made. Unless I missed something, there is no reference forbidding personal copying (post links to prove me wrong, preferribly to the treaty itself).
Also, international treaties are about as hard to enforce has it is to hold back a river with my hands. Take a look at the Kyoto Accord, or a better example, the US going against the WTO in banning online gambling. Kyoto is such a mess in many countries in terms of legislation to meet the targets.
A Treaty is not a law-binding piece of paper. It's a bunch of country leaders sitting down and creating a document, then signing it. There's no binding effect to that treaty, you can (usually) pull out, not to mention the general public might not like it.
Your words summed it all up nicely, you might want to follow them too... I suspect you could use a little education about the facts yourself.
Yep. It's like comparing apples to oranges to grapefruits. All 3 have their huge strengths and all 3 have big weaknesses. It depends on the project and how it'll be worked, not the language.
I don't normally post, but this one hit the nail on the head for me.
6 1/2 years ago I built my first site, and since then my designs have grown in complexity. I used to use tables, nesting them deep, but I've moved on to CSS.
Must have been 3 or so years ago now I set out to develop a CSS based site (wow, has it been that long). I used various things, following standards. There were transparent png's, alpha transparency, some more advanced CSS, etc. Mozilla displayed the page properly, as did Opera (with a small bug), but IE sent it through the washer and spat it out. I had to hack the css with tricks and stupid things to even get it looking close to what it should.
I left web design and coding behind. I'm back, working on a personal site. RIght now I'm CSS designing some very intricate work, using many many different positioning of elements. I use Opera as my main browser, and of the pages I have finished cssing (still got a few dozen to go) ALL display flawlessly in Opera, Firefox, and Safari. The only issue I have found so far is there is a 1 pixel difference in firefox/safari compared to opera. I dread loading up the site to see it on IE6, to see how poorly it's rendered it.
So basically, on top of some of the other things mentioned here, that is what makes me dislike MS. The disreguard of standards and locking of IE6 that did it. While IE7 is better (I hear) web dev still has to wait a few years before IE6 dies down to a small share before development can actually move forward again.