That doesn't really answer the question of WHY minors don't have these rights even though they are enumerated in the constitution. Noone disagrees that the status quo is that they don't have them, and many people would probably agree with you that they *shouldn't* have them[1], but the GP raised a good question, and so far, I fail to understand WHY they legally don't have them.
1. Myself, I'm still trying to make up my mind about this. So far, I think that you've got it wrong with regard to contracts, at least: it's not that a minor doesn't have the *right* to enter into contracts, it's that he doesn't have the *ability* to do so. (Contracts, after all, require more than just a signature or a verbal agreement: they require a meeting of minds, and an understanding of what the contract means and entails, and I think that minors, up to a certain age, are simply not fully able to realise what a contract means - and therefore, they lack the ability to enter into ones. But that's really not that important.
But the constitution merely recognises rights that you already have rather than granting them, doesn't it? And if that's the case, how can rights (such as the right to free speech) suddenly develop when you reach a certain age? I'm pretty sure I didn't grow a free speech gland when I turned 18, for example.
You'd have a point if the constitution *granted* rights, but from my (admittedly limited) understanding, it doesn't.
If the prison population was 50/50 minority/majority isn't that pretty much what you'd expect from a purely chaotic system where there isn't any "targetting" going on ?
That's such naive oversimplification I don't think I'm even going to read the rest of your comment.
Doesn't that just mean it'd make all the more sense to portray sex (real sex, that is, not the stuff you see in porn movies that you just described) in a positive way? If the problem's ignorance, the solution is not to limit the amount of available information eve further - the solution is to provide *accurate* information and expose the disinformation for what it really is. And that's doubly true considering that no matter what you try, you're not really going to be able to make sure that children don't get exposed to porn, anyway.
If children were taught about sexuality, relationships, their bodies etc. from an early age on, they wouldn't be so susceptible to the way sex is displayed in porn movies.
In the windows 3.x days? Hardly. I'm not sure when this changed, since I never made the switch to windows 95 at all, but 3.x certainly wasn't like that (which probably isn't surprising when you consider that it was, ultimately, just an application, not an OS).
I know we're talking about the situation in the USA, but I think it's worth pointing out that in other states, copyright is sometimes considered a "creator's right" that cannot be sold or transferred. Germany is a prominent example, but as far as I know (not very far, admittedly), the situation's similar in many other civil law countries.
First sale also applies to other things, not just books. You're perfectly free to resell an audio CD after you've listened to it or a DVD after you've watched it, for example.
5) is the same as 1) and 2), depending on whether you do it loudly or in silence. The GP did not talk about not buying music/movies/... anymore at all, after all; they just talked about following the restrictions. You can refuse to be part of the game, but if you're a fan of a (relatively) mainstream artist and don't get to listen to that artist's music because their label is a member of the RIAA, for example, then you do suffer, no matter how much you try to make up for it by listening to other artists instead. The fact that you'd be buying music from indie labels only to stick it to the *AA rather than because you genuinely like only the stuff they publish is proof for that.
6) is irrelevant for the same reason; in fact, I'd say that it's pretty unlikely that somebody would start listening to music because they're making their own, and even IF they did and even IF it was because they truly didn't *want* other music anymore (as opposed to suffering the consequences of the *AA's actions), this still would only apply to music, while the OP was about copyright in general. I doubt most people are able to make their own music, film their own movies *and* write their own books, for example.
So while you certainly do raise interesting points, you're wrong when you say that the GP's list was not exhaustive: it was. You could certainly split it up further and discuss the individual points in more detail, but he didn't leave anything out completely.
Indeed; you'd have to come up with something better to beat them, and you need to be MUCH better, too, in order to overcome the inertia and natural unwillingness of people to invest time and energy and learn about a new system.
But in order for that to be possible, things like accurate specs are crucial. The whole thing really isn't about punishing Microsoft, anyway; it's about creating a real market again and enabling competition to actually, well, compete. That's the fundamental idea behind capitalism, isn't it? Have a competitive market in order to ensure a maximum of innovation and progress and in order to allow the customer to benefit. Monopolies are, by definition, the antithesis of capitalism.
So, that being said... if there is a real, competitive market, and if Microsoft still wins out, simply by virtue of being better (as opposed to resorting to strongarming and other illegal tactics again, or as opposed to having a huge war chest with tens of billion to spend on destroying the market again, and so on)... then good for them; noone will complain. The EU is neither trying to hurt anyone nor in favour of anyone; all they are in favour of is a level playing field where capitalism can actually *work*.
I'm not sure about that - of course 0-day exploits are bad, but you're making a mistake when you assume that the fact that none is known means that none exists. *All* remote holes should be treated as having 0-day exploits until you can prove that there aren't any (which is impossible for all practical purposes at least).
That's an interesting site (bookmarked - thanks), but I'm quite appalled that they don't handle non-English characters at all. Just try searching for "Björk", for example; you won't get any results until you change the query to "Bjork" (ugh) instead, and that's despite the fact that most of the CDs that will come up then *do* have the correct name (i.e., "Björk") listed.
Twenty-three thousand people is not a small sample size at all; most actual (meaningful) surveys are conducted with considerably less people than that. If anything, the issue here is that the whole thing doesn't use probability sampling to achieve a meaningful result; FWIW, they didn't even give people a list of companies and ask "who do you think is worst", but rather did some sort of elimination-style tourmanent thing, a series of matches between two "contenders". It's still interesting, but I think the main idea here was to ensure as much traffic for the Consumerist as possible, not to really find out which company people REALLY dislike most.
I don't think there's any real hatred for college degrees on Slashdot, at least not in general - there's just lots of hatred for Bill Gates (and thus everything associated with him).
I want fair-use to be very clear under the law, but I don't think what Google/YouTube is doing is right. Slapping users on the wrists and deleting infringing videos obviously isn't enough to deter infringement.
Why not?
It's often said that guns don't kill but that people do, using guns; and most people, I assume, would agree that totally outlawing guns because they *might* be used for illegitimate purposes would be unjustified (even those who, like me, are in favour of tougher gun control laws). And isn't killing people a much, MUCH more serious issue than the copyright infringement that occurs when somebody posts a 2 minute clip from an old BBC show that ran in the 60s on YouTube?
There is a reason why we don't blame tools for what they're being used for, and "safe harbour" provisions for service providers make sense for the same reason. As long as providers do take down infringing material when they're notified, I don't see the issue here. Your phone company does not preemptively monitor your calls, your bank does not track all of your purchases in a huge database that gets shared with the NSA (well, one'd hope they don't), and cops don't pull you over on the road and give you a ticket merely because your car is capable of going higher than the speed limit allows. So why should service/platform providers have to watch users' activities just because something illegal *might* happen?
Myself, I don't hope for a fair-use ruling: I hope for a ruling that says that as long as Google etc. only provide the platform instead of making videos etc. available themselves, they don't even NEED to argue that what they're doing is fair use. (Of course, this only really applies to Google Video, YouTube etc.; Google News would still need a fair use ruling, but that's a different case.)
(Also, I should add that the above only addresses the legal side of things. Others have already raised the question of whether certain activities should be considered criminal at all; it ultimately boils down to the question of who owns culture and who's got the rights to exploit and control it. I firmly believe that copyright holders should be reminded that they have been given a *temporary* monopoly as an incentive to further culture, and nothing else.)
Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?
Please, do look up the difference between "begging the question" and "raising a/the question".
Also, the headline ("Virginia ISPs silently blocking websites") is so misleading I'm really having trouble applying Hanlon's razor here - either CmdrTaco needs to learn how to read (i.e., do more than just glance over the first paragraph in an attempt to find certain trigger words that'd likely get an emotional response from the Slashdot crowd), or he needs to develop some ethics of his own. This site is not supposed to be more than a tech-oriented, (mostly) liberal version of FOX "news", after all (or at least that's what I think).
(And the fact that it's the site's head honcho who posted this story with this headline instead of one of his subordinate drones just makes it even sadder.)
I do agree with his opinion, but I do not have my head so deep inside my ass to avoid seeing that in reality with hardware manufacturers need to protect certain parts of their code, be it because it is a trade secret or because it is part of a NDA signed against another company to use their technology.
But... first of all, we're talking about documentation, not code. Second, even if we were talking about code, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that manufacturers "need to protect certain parts of their code" (trade secrets at least shouldn't really apply, since we'd only be talking about the code for a driver, not the VRML sources for the chips themselves). And third, while there might be NDAs involved even when we're only talking about documentation, I think that asking for documentation can still be a good thing in that case since it shows that there is demand for open documentation and that entering NDAs might therefore be detrimental.
Put another way, as a user, you've got something to gain and nothing to lose, but I can tell you right away that you won't win if you don't try. I don't have a crystal ball, and I can't tell you what the best course of action would be (FWIW, I don't actually believe that there is a single course of action that's *always* best), but that, too, shouldn't be a reason not to *try*.
As for "his game"... I'm not sure what you're referring to there, really, unless you mean that it's pointless to post on Slashdot saying that open documentation is needed/good since it amounts to preaching to the choire. That's certainly true, but I don't think you can deduce from that that discussion of these matters is pointless; outside of that fact that Slashdot is not as homogenous as one might believe, anyway (there is a certain majority opinion in many cases, but there's also a considerable "long tail"), the fact that you participate in this discussion also proves that you do not consider it a priori pointless to discuss these matters.
That being said, I apologise if I misunderstood what you were trying to say.
That's a pretty strange opinion really. Sure, *whining* isn't going to solve anything, but how is this whining? The GGP has a point when he asks for documentation so he can make the hardware he bought actually work, but even if you disagree with that and think that he doesn't, you shouldn't troll him by labelling his opinion as "whining" simply because you don't agree with it.
There might not be a clear revolution, but there certainly is a lot of evolution going on. For example, compare early web pages (written a mere 15 years ago) to, say, Google Maps; I think it's safe to say that there happened more than just a move from "Web 1.0" to "Web 1.0 patch 3283".
The problem with "web 2.0" is not that the web hasn't changed dramatically, it's that the term is rooted in marketing rather than technology.
Google is actually somewhat fault-tolerant when it comes to spellings - it doesn't just offer suggestions along the lines of "did you mean FOOBAR" when it thinks you mistyped something, it also includes spelling variants in your search results by default. I can't come up with a *good* example right now, but for a bad one, try to search for "head set" (sans quotes) and observe that you also get hits for the word "headset".
I do agree about noise, but only to the extent that the spam sites and the like you get when searching for, um, certain terms are annoying. Outside of that, the sites you cast aside as irrelevant may well be what someone else was looking for, and that's doubly true for queries that are not as specific as "give me a list of all the goals scored by Romario". I sometimes look up error messages etc. on Google, for example, and any mailing list archive where they are mentioned might have the solution I'm looking for. I'm not sure at all how the semantic web would deal with that kind of query.
Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. I like and use Flickr a lot, and Yahoo really hasn't changed it much; there are some things I dislike (the integration of the Organizr with Yahoo maps, for example, which are vastly inferior to Google maps both in terms of slickness and accuracy[1]), but I can understand why they want to consolidating "old-school" and newer Flickr accounts into one system instead of operating two different systems at the same time, and I have no idea how anyone could construe that to be an example of the alleged failure of the semantic web.
Seriously - the semantic web doesn't even exist so far, and even if it did, what would the backend used for signing in to Flickr have to do with it? I just don't get it.
1. YMMV if you're from the USA or Canada, but I'm not, and I can definitely say that Google Maps provides a much better experience for me.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't really answer the question of WHY minors don't have these rights even though they are enumerated in the constitution. Noone disagrees that the status quo is that they don't have them, and many people would probably agree with you that they *shouldn't* have them[1], but the GP raised a good question, and so far, I fail to understand WHY they legally don't have them.
1. Myself, I'm still trying to make up my mind about this. So far, I think that you've got it wrong with regard to contracts, at least: it's not that a minor doesn't have the *right* to enter into contracts, it's that he doesn't have the *ability* to do so. (Contracts, after all, require more than just a signature or a verbal agreement: they require a meeting of minds, and an understanding of what the contract means and entails, and I think that minors, up to a certain age, are simply not fully able to realise what a contract means - and therefore, they lack the ability to enter into ones. But that's really not that important.
But the constitution merely recognises rights that you already have rather than granting them, doesn't it? And if that's the case, how can rights (such as the right to free speech) suddenly develop when you reach a certain age? I'm pretty sure I didn't grow a free speech gland when I turned 18, for example.
You'd have a point if the constitution *granted* rights, but from my (admittedly limited) understanding, it doesn't.
60% is 20% greater than 50%.
That's such naive oversimplification I don't think I'm even going to read the rest of your comment.
Why am I not surprised...
Doesn't that just mean it'd make all the more sense to portray sex (real sex, that is, not the stuff you see in porn movies that you just described) in a positive way? If the problem's ignorance, the solution is not to limit the amount of available information eve further - the solution is to provide *accurate* information and expose the disinformation for what it really is. And that's doubly true considering that no matter what you try, you're not really going to be able to make sure that children don't get exposed to porn, anyway.
If children were taught about sexuality, relationships, their bodies etc. from an early age on, they wouldn't be so susceptible to the way sex is displayed in porn movies.
In the windows 3.x days? Hardly. I'm not sure when this changed, since I never made the switch to windows 95 at all, but 3.x certainly wasn't like that (which probably isn't surprising when you consider that it was, ultimately, just an application, not an OS).
Check and mate - if I had mod points I'd spend one on you.
Thank you, that was a perfect illustration.
The same value as this year's - none at all. :) (SCNR...)
I know we're talking about the situation in the USA, but I think it's worth pointing out that in other states, copyright is sometimes considered a "creator's right" that cannot be sold or transferred. Germany is a prominent example, but as far as I know (not very far, admittedly), the situation's similar in many other civil law countries.
First sale also applies to other things, not just books. You're perfectly free to resell an audio CD after you've listened to it or a DVD after you've watched it, for example.
5) is the same as 1) and 2), depending on whether you do it loudly or in silence. The GP did not talk about not buying music/movies/... anymore at all, after all; they just talked about following the restrictions. You can refuse to be part of the game, but if you're a fan of a (relatively) mainstream artist and don't get to listen to that artist's music because their label is a member of the RIAA, for example, then you do suffer, no matter how much you try to make up for it by listening to other artists instead. The fact that you'd be buying music from indie labels only to stick it to the *AA rather than because you genuinely like only the stuff they publish is proof for that.
6) is irrelevant for the same reason; in fact, I'd say that it's pretty unlikely that somebody would start listening to music because they're making their own, and even IF they did and even IF it was because they truly didn't *want* other music anymore (as opposed to suffering the consequences of the *AA's actions), this still would only apply to music, while the OP was about copyright in general. I doubt most people are able to make their own music, film their own movies *and* write their own books, for example.
So while you certainly do raise interesting points, you're wrong when you say that the GP's list was not exhaustive: it was. You could certainly split it up further and discuss the individual points in more detail, but he didn't leave anything out completely.
Indeed; you'd have to come up with something better to beat them, and you need to be MUCH better, too, in order to overcome the inertia and natural unwillingness of people to invest time and energy and learn about a new system.
But in order for that to be possible, things like accurate specs are crucial. The whole thing really isn't about punishing Microsoft, anyway; it's about creating a real market again and enabling competition to actually, well, compete. That's the fundamental idea behind capitalism, isn't it? Have a competitive market in order to ensure a maximum of innovation and progress and in order to allow the customer to benefit. Monopolies are, by definition, the antithesis of capitalism.
So, that being said... if there is a real, competitive market, and if Microsoft still wins out, simply by virtue of being better (as opposed to resorting to strongarming and other illegal tactics again, or as opposed to having a huge war chest with tens of billion to spend on destroying the market again, and so on)... then good for them; noone will complain. The EU is neither trying to hurt anyone nor in favour of anyone; all they are in favour of is a level playing field where capitalism can actually *work*.
I'm not sure about that - of course 0-day exploits are bad, but you're making a mistake when you assume that the fact that none is known means that none exists. *All* remote holes should be treated as having 0-day exploits until you can prove that there aren't any (which is impossible for all practical purposes at least).
That's an interesting site (bookmarked - thanks), but I'm quite appalled that they don't handle non-English characters at all. Just try searching for "Björk", for example; you won't get any results until you change the query to "Bjork" (ugh) instead, and that's despite the fact that most of the CDs that will come up then *do* have the correct name (i.e., "Björk") listed.
Twenty-three thousand people is not a small sample size at all; most actual (meaningful) surveys are conducted with considerably less people than that. If anything, the issue here is that the whole thing doesn't use probability sampling to achieve a meaningful result; FWIW, they didn't even give people a list of companies and ask "who do you think is worst", but rather did some sort of elimination-style tourmanent thing, a series of matches between two "contenders". It's still interesting, but I think the main idea here was to ensure as much traffic for the Consumerist as possible, not to really find out which company people REALLY dislike most.
I don't think there's any real hatred for college degrees on Slashdot, at least not in general - there's just lots of hatred for Bill Gates (and thus everything associated with him).
Why not?
It's often said that guns don't kill but that people do, using guns; and most people, I assume, would agree that totally outlawing guns because they *might* be used for illegitimate purposes would be unjustified (even those who, like me, are in favour of tougher gun control laws). And isn't killing people a much, MUCH more serious issue than the copyright infringement that occurs when somebody posts a 2 minute clip from an old BBC show that ran in the 60s on YouTube?
There is a reason why we don't blame tools for what they're being used for, and "safe harbour" provisions for service providers make sense for the same reason. As long as providers do take down infringing material when they're notified, I don't see the issue here. Your phone company does not preemptively monitor your calls, your bank does not track all of your purchases in a huge database that gets shared with the NSA (well, one'd hope they don't), and cops don't pull you over on the road and give you a ticket merely because your car is capable of going higher than the speed limit allows. So why should service/platform providers have to watch users' activities just because something illegal *might* happen?
Myself, I don't hope for a fair-use ruling: I hope for a ruling that says that as long as Google etc. only provide the platform instead of making videos etc. available themselves, they don't even NEED to argue that what they're doing is fair use. (Of course, this only really applies to Google Video, YouTube etc.; Google News would still need a fair use ruling, but that's a different case.)
(Also, I should add that the above only addresses the legal side of things. Others have already raised the question of whether certain activities should be considered criminal at all; it ultimately boils down to the question of who owns culture and who's got the rights to exploit and control it. I firmly believe that copyright holders should be reminded that they have been given a *temporary* monopoly as an incentive to further culture, and nothing else.)
I really wish I had mod points to mod you up - it's so nice to FINALLY see someone on Slashdot who does not equate "sexuality" with "heterosexuality".
- asninn (who's bi)
3/5th of a person, actually. Not that that's any less shameful and disgusting, of course...
Please, do look up the difference between "begging the question" and "raising a/the question".
Also, the headline ("Virginia ISPs silently blocking websites") is so misleading I'm really having trouble applying Hanlon's razor here - either CmdrTaco needs to learn how to read (i.e., do more than just glance over the first paragraph in an attempt to find certain trigger words that'd likely get an emotional response from the Slashdot crowd), or he needs to develop some ethics of his own. This site is not supposed to be more than a tech-oriented, (mostly) liberal version of FOX "news", after all (or at least that's what I think).
(And the fact that it's the site's head honcho who posted this story with this headline instead of one of his subordinate drones just makes it even sadder.)
But... first of all, we're talking about documentation, not code. Second, even if we were talking about code, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that manufacturers "need to protect certain parts of their code" (trade secrets at least shouldn't really apply, since we'd only be talking about the code for a driver, not the VRML sources for the chips themselves). And third, while there might be NDAs involved even when we're only talking about documentation, I think that asking for documentation can still be a good thing in that case since it shows that there is demand for open documentation and that entering NDAs might therefore be detrimental.
Put another way, as a user, you've got something to gain and nothing to lose, but I can tell you right away that you won't win if you don't try. I don't have a crystal ball, and I can't tell you what the best course of action would be (FWIW, I don't actually believe that there is a single course of action that's *always* best), but that, too, shouldn't be a reason not to *try*.
As for "his game"... I'm not sure what you're referring to there, really, unless you mean that it's pointless to post on Slashdot saying that open documentation is needed/good since it amounts to preaching to the choire. That's certainly true, but I don't think you can deduce from that that discussion of these matters is pointless; outside of that fact that Slashdot is not as homogenous as one might believe, anyway (there is a certain majority opinion in many cases, but there's also a considerable "long tail"), the fact that you participate in this discussion also proves that you do not consider it a priori pointless to discuss these matters.
That being said, I apologise if I misunderstood what you were trying to say.
That's a pretty strange opinion really. Sure, *whining* isn't going to solve anything, but how is this whining? The GGP has a point when he asks for documentation so he can make the hardware he bought actually work, but even if you disagree with that and think that he doesn't, you shouldn't troll him by labelling his opinion as "whining" simply because you don't agree with it.
There might not be a clear revolution, but there certainly is a lot of evolution going on. For example, compare early web pages (written a mere 15 years ago) to, say, Google Maps; I think it's safe to say that there happened more than just a move from "Web 1.0" to "Web 1.0 patch 3283".
The problem with "web 2.0" is not that the web hasn't changed dramatically, it's that the term is rooted in marketing rather than technology.
Google is actually somewhat fault-tolerant when it comes to spellings - it doesn't just offer suggestions along the lines of "did you mean FOOBAR" when it thinks you mistyped something, it also includes spelling variants in your search results by default. I can't come up with a *good* example right now, but for a bad one, try to search for "head set" (sans quotes) and observe that you also get hits for the word "headset".
I do agree about noise, but only to the extent that the spam sites and the like you get when searching for, um, certain terms are annoying. Outside of that, the sites you cast aside as irrelevant may well be what someone else was looking for, and that's doubly true for queries that are not as specific as "give me a list of all the goals scored by Romario". I sometimes look up error messages etc. on Google, for example, and any mailing list archive where they are mentioned might have the solution I'm looking for. I'm not sure at all how the semantic web would deal with that kind of query.
Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. I like and use Flickr a lot, and Yahoo really hasn't changed it much; there are some things I dislike (the integration of the Organizr with Yahoo maps, for example, which are vastly inferior to Google maps both in terms of slickness and accuracy[1]), but I can understand why they want to consolidating "old-school" and newer Flickr accounts into one system instead of operating two different systems at the same time, and I have no idea how anyone could construe that to be an example of the alleged failure of the semantic web.
Seriously - the semantic web doesn't even exist so far, and even if it did, what would the backend used for signing in to Flickr have to do with it? I just don't get it.
1. YMMV if you're from the USA or Canada, but I'm not, and I can definitely say that Google Maps provides a much better experience for me.