My impression was that some of the studios who belong to the RIAA have unofficially condoned the practice of producing unauthorized infringing mix tapes. Yes, that's my reading of the linked article too. A few posters are suggesting that there was entrapment, which is how I read the Slashdot article before I read the linked article. Because a few folks got the wrong end of what the RIAA were doing I think it's fair to say that the Slashdot article was misleading.
The RIAA can go fuck itself. That sounds too much as if they might enjoy it.
Mind you, the raid itself seemed a bit extreme. Well, considering "one of their trademark Gangsta Grillz sound effects is a few shots fired by a gun with a silencer, followed by the thud of a body dropping", one can understand the law enforcement folks being a bit nervous. Or to look at it another way, if the Gangsta Grillz are going to act tough, why shouldn't the Sheriff's office?
Not as far as I can see from the article; the Slashdot summary seems misleading. As far as I can see from the article the RIAA had somebody busted that they had previously employed on a different project. I can't find anything in the linked article to suggest the set-up that the Slashdot article implies. Surely the RIAA does enough scummy things that we don't have to make things up about them?
You don't have to. You can turn off your computer just as easily as you can turn off your TV and radio.
Please note that I don't think that the freedom of speech argument is any justification for allowing spam to continue. I just don't happen to think it's an argument for most of the other things it's brought out in defence of, either (and I write as a member of Liberty, an approximate UK parallel to the ACLU, so don't read me as being pro-censorship, either!)
It's amazing how quickly Slashdotters switch from quoting the Bill of Rights in order to defend freedom of speech that they want to ignoring the Bill of Rights in order to to condemn freedom of speech that they don't want. It's no wonder American lawyers earn so much!
RBL-based systems do lose mail. A potential customer emails me and a competitor with a request for a quotation. From me they get a blacklist notification, from my competitor they get a quotation. The potential customer, upset at being accused of being a spammer, never bothers trying to email me again. I've not only lost their original email but I've lost all future email from them too.
You americans and your "Bill O'Rights", heaven forbid that you should do things for the good of all. We British do not have a constitution (not a written one anyway) so we basically don't have ANY rights That's a common misconception. In Britain we do have rights. The legal basis for them is Britain's ratification of various treaties derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A constitution is not the only way to get rights, although Americans (and some Brits, it seems) seem to think it is.
Neither television nor radio falls within the definition of "press" according to my dictionary [1] (admittedly a British English one, not US English), except that there might be a let-out for writing for television or radio (the definition refers to "journalism"). But, as the dictionary defines "journalism", that still only refers to words, not images. Sure they're a technicalities, but it's on such technicalities that law works in practice and I bet it's on these and other such technicalities that the FCC would argue their censorship to be constitutional.
Absurd? Well, yes, but this is the law we're talking about here, so absurd doesn't necessarily mean wrong.
[1] Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, Chambers, 1996
Well, it seems that you haven't! That gives freedom of speech, not freedom of showing images. Here in the UK we have a watershed on TV but not on Radio (at least, not on stations that are not considered to have a significant listenership amongst minors).
So have different systems for terrestial and for satellite/cable. That's what we do in the UK. No strong sex, violence or profanity on terrestial channels before 9pm (and it's up to the parents/guardians whether they let their kids watch TV after 9pm); pretty much anything goes on cable/satellite at any time but if it contains strong sex, violence or profanity then it's protected by the parential control PIN (and it's up to the parents/guardians whether they tell their kids the PIN).
There are static analysis tools that do full semantic analysis as well as syntactic analysis, tools such as SPARK and MALPAS. They look at your code and tell you what it does. They'll only work on a subset of programs (in a subset of the relevant programming language), of course, and you have to give them some hints (to overcome the halting problem, for one thing), and the output is a mass of predicate calculus that you are then expected to prove matches your formal specification for the program. Huge fun, if you like pages of math (and we are supposed to be geeks here, aren't we?)
But it looks to me like a case of out of the fundamentalist frying pan and into the new-wave fire, with stuff like "In some respects, humans at the dawn of the species probably knew more about the
natural world than does the average Kansas citizen of today. The rise of civilization and more recent increase in urbanization
has been paralleled by decreasing personal contact with the natural world. Despite the fact that we are a part of a highly
interconnected web of life, the separation of so many people from direct contact with nature has had enormous
consequences. The accumulating research reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child development."
Is this the Disney version of science? Or Rousseau's 'Noble Savage'?
They were religious ultra-conservatives, not (necessarily) political ultra-conservatives. The description was correct, but maybe not as precise as it could have been. There are plenty of ultra-religious types who are quite happy with science.
That's not what the first cited article says, and the article that the secong article cites misinterprets the first article in the same way as you do.
The first article cited says SL is "partially legitimate, partially ponzi" and that "there are plenty of legitimate SecondLife customers who just like to go there to get their kicks, spend a couple dollars, and be on their way". It's only a Ponzi if it's treated as a get-rich-quick scheme, which most users don't seem to be doing. So it's not that SL is a scam, it's that scammers are using SL alongside legitimate users. Gosh, I bet nobody saw that one coming!
There is one sense in which it is more secure. I don't have to worry about anybody looking over my shoulder to see my password if I'm scanning my finger.
No, Galileo is proof that a lone nutter with enough theories can fluke it occasionally. After all, most of Galileo's crank theories have been quietly forgotten, and what Galileo got into trouble with the authorities for wasn't so much for resurrecting the (then) long discredited heliocentric theory, but rather for suggesting that anybody who disagreed (up to and including the Pope) was a simpleton.
So what we really need to learn from Galileo is that just because a theory is espoused by a lone nutter doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.
Too binary. The only truly free speech is speech that's not heard by anyone; any other speech has some consequence, varying from adjusting the hearer's opinion of us at one end of the scale to a prison term (or torture and execution in some places) at the other. Freedom of speech is a continuum, not an absolute, and the issue is always really whether speech is free enough. Each of us has a different view of "enough", which is why mention of "free speech" tends to provoke a debate, rather than everybody just saying "yup!" and moving on to the next topic.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "ceci n'est pas..." covers that nicely.
Based on what we see on UK TV, that doesn't seem to represent any significant change ;-)
Not as far as I can see from the article; the Slashdot summary seems misleading. As far as I can see from the article the RIAA had somebody busted that they had previously employed on a different project. I can't find anything in the linked article to suggest the set-up that the Slashdot article implies. Surely the RIAA does enough scummy things that we don't have to make things up about them?
It's not necessarily a matter of the server logs. It's whether a formal record was kept of the warning.
But surely that's a legal interpretation? AFAICS it's not inherent in the bill of rights itself, and so it presumably doesn't have the same force?
You don't have to. You can turn off your computer just as easily as you can turn off your TV and radio.
Please note that I don't think that the freedom of speech argument is any justification for allowing spam to continue. I just don't happen to think it's an argument for most of the other things it's brought out in defence of, either (and I write as a member of Liberty, an approximate UK parallel to the ACLU, so don't read me as being pro-censorship, either!)
It's amazing how quickly Slashdotters switch from quoting the Bill of Rights in order to defend freedom of speech that they want to ignoring the Bill of Rights in order to to condemn freedom of speech that they don't want. It's no wonder American lawyers earn so much!
RBL-based systems do lose mail. A potential customer emails me and a competitor with a request for a quotation. From me they get a blacklist notification, from my competitor they get a quotation. The potential customer, upset at being accused of being a spammer, never bothers trying to email me again. I've not only lost their original email but I've lost all future email from them too.
Neither television nor radio falls within the definition of "press" according to my dictionary [1] (admittedly a British English one, not US English), except that there might be a let-out for writing for television or radio (the definition refers to "journalism"). But, as the dictionary defines "journalism", that still only refers to words, not images. Sure they're a technicalities, but it's on such technicalities that law works in practice and I bet it's on these and other such technicalities that the FCC would argue their censorship to be constitutional.
Absurd? Well, yes, but this is the law we're talking about here, so absurd doesn't necessarily mean wrong.
[1] Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, Chambers, 1996
Well, it seems that you haven't! That gives freedom of speech, not freedom of showing images. Here in the UK we have a watershed on TV but not on Radio (at least, not on stations that are not considered to have a significant listenership amongst minors).
So have different systems for terrestial and for satellite/cable. That's what we do in the UK. No strong sex, violence or profanity on terrestial channels before 9pm (and it's up to the parents/guardians whether they let their kids watch TV after 9pm); pretty much anything goes on cable/satellite at any time but if it contains strong sex, violence or profanity then it's protected by the parential control PIN (and it's up to the parents/guardians whether they tell their kids the PIN).
There are static analysis tools that do full semantic analysis as well as syntactic analysis, tools such as SPARK and MALPAS. They look at your code and tell you what it does. They'll only work on a subset of programs (in a subset of the relevant programming language), of course, and you have to give them some hints (to overcome the halting problem, for one thing), and the output is a mass of predicate calculus that you are then expected to prove matches your formal specification for the program. Huge fun, if you like pages of math (and we are supposed to be geeks here, aren't we?)
But it looks to me like a case of out of the fundamentalist frying pan and into the new-wave fire, with stuff like "In some respects, humans at the dawn of the species probably knew more about the natural world than does the average Kansas citizen of today. The rise of civilization and more recent increase in urbanization has been paralleled by decreasing personal contact with the natural world. Despite the fact that we are a part of a highly interconnected web of life, the separation of so many people from direct contact with nature has had enormous consequences. The accumulating research reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child development."
Is this the Disney version of science? Or Rousseau's 'Noble Savage'?
They were religious ultra-conservatives, not (necessarily) political ultra-conservatives. The description was correct, but maybe not as precise as it could have been. There are plenty of ultra-religious types who are quite happy with science.
Oh, I expect they can see it perfectly well [1], it's just convenient for them to pretend that they can't.
[1] After all, what do you expect to find up somebody's ass? Yep, Open XML fits the bill neatly!
And a whole new meaning to the system being hosed.
News just in: bears defecate in woods. Rumours that Pope may be Catholic confirmed.
That's not what the first cited article says, and the article that the secong article cites misinterprets the first article in the same way as you do.
The first article cited says SL is "partially legitimate, partially ponzi" and that "there are plenty of legitimate SecondLife customers who just like to go there to get their kicks, spend a couple dollars, and be on their way". It's only a Ponzi if it's treated as a get-rich-quick scheme, which most users don't seem to be doing. So it's not that SL is a scam, it's that scammers are using SL alongside legitimate users. Gosh, I bet nobody saw that one coming!
There is one sense in which it is more secure. I don't have to worry about anybody looking over my shoulder to see my password if I'm scanning my finger.
No, Galileo is proof that a lone nutter with enough theories can fluke it occasionally. After all, most of Galileo's crank theories have been quietly forgotten, and what Galileo got into trouble with the authorities for wasn't so much for resurrecting the (then) long discredited heliocentric theory, but rather for suggesting that anybody who disagreed (up to and including the Pope) was a simpleton.
So what we really need to learn from Galileo is that just because a theory is espoused by a lone nutter doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.
Too binary. The only truly free speech is speech that's not heard by anyone; any other speech has some consequence, varying from adjusting the hearer's opinion of us at one end of the scale to a prison term (or torture and execution in some places) at the other. Freedom of speech is a continuum, not an absolute, and the issue is always really whether speech is free enough. Each of us has a different view of "enough", which is why mention of "free speech" tends to provoke a debate, rather than everybody just saying "yup!" and moving on to the next topic.