Who is going to "educate" users? What will be taught? Where will it be taught, and to how many people? How do you deal with the differing systems that people would need to be "educated" on (remember there are still people using OSes that are 10+ years old)?
More importantly, who will pay for it?
It is easy to talk about "educating users", almost as easy as it is to blame the current problems on "uneducated users". But there are too many unanswered questions related to the statement.
create hardened operating systems that may never need antivirus
That is a great dream until someone goes to wal-mart and buys some nifty USB gadget from the $10 bin that only works in windows.
promote open web standards and good coding practices open to scrutiny for flaws exploits and bugs
That is a very good idea. Unfortunately getting it to go anywhere is another challenge altogether. If you know a good way to eliminate Flash from the web, I'm all ears...
stop letting marketing drive the internet bus
Good luck with that. Remember that a serious portion of all web sites are looking to make money. Which means they need exposure to bring in customers. While marketing droids seldom know much about web standards, they still have to be invited to the table.
While it is pretty meaningless to go after spammers themselves in many cases, we could use a similar approach to cut off spammers where it really matters - at the revenue stream. If we made some strategic purchases from spamvertised sites, we could potentially figure out who is making money in the deal. And when we find them, we will find who is funding the spammers. After all, spam isn't sent out just for fun; it is sent out because someone is paying the spammers to send it out. You can use the merchant information to go after the people who are paying for spamvertising - they are often involved in illegal sales of (pirated software / counterfeit drugs / counterfeit property) anyways. If the funding dries up, the spammers will need to find other work.
Seriously, what is the purpose of running a regular operating system on the Kindle? I don't see how that would make it more useful or practical in any way.
How many people are still upgrading their systems often enough for this to be relevant to them anyways? I was a pathological upgrader for years, but I honestly have spent on average less than $100 on hardware per year over the past 5 years. Granted this is partially because of how my financial situation changed in that time, but also because from my vantage point it doesn't seem that there has been any great progress made in the past 5 years in terms of hardware or software that requires new hardware.
Honestly, with the exception of the gamers that want to run Half Life 7 or Quake 9, are many people really bothering to upgrade anymore? From my vantage point it will be surprising to see Windows 7 do well commercially - not because of vista - because there haven't been great reasons to upgrade from the hardware and software of 5 years ago.
I'll start by saying that I genreally despise texting. It is too expensive and too time consuming for my life, and it is extremely distracting. However, there is something that toddlers with cell phones could be good for.
The US currently has a dismal literacy rate amongst children entering kindergarten. I don't know when or how it happened, but a significant portion of children in this country today enter kindergarten without even a basic understanding of the alphabet, yet alone any ability to read or write. In comparison I and every child in my kindergarten class (so many years ago) were all able to read at least Dr. Susus books.
So if giving cell phones to kids gets them reading sooner, then I guess it isn't all bad.
Someone please tell us how this problem with the democrats.org website must clearly be related to the impending socialist takeover of schools and soda machines. Certainly this is how Marxism takes root, by allowing 419 emails to propagate, right?
As someone who has used both Alpha and SPARC chips in high-performance computing environments, I was a bit saddened when the Alpha went away for good. Seeing the SPARC also go the way of the Dodo would be a shame as well.
I am not aware of any guaranteed right that we have that ensures that companies will host any and all files we create. The original artist could still take his image and have it hosted elsewhere (unless he for some reason deleted his original after uploading it to flickr), or even establish his own web page somewhere else and host it himself. I do not see how his rights were in any way violated.
If the law protects a person from damages due to DMCA then Flickr can't legally have someone sign that protection away.
However we are not sure that there actually was anything DMCA related issued in this case. The only "evidence" of DMCA offered up so far comes from a discussion forum hosted on flickr.com. If flickr removed the image on their own, due to concerns of their own that they had, then DMCA terms are irrelevant.
Furthermore, flickr is still a company of their own. As best I know they are not legally bound to host every and any image that is thrown their way; they have the right as a company to refuse business as they see fit.
in this case, we have some low level help desk/support forum person making the claim that a DMCA take down notice was filed with them
Being as the only source I have seen for this so far is a discussion forum hosted on flickr.com, I see a couple assumptions that need to be made for this statement to be credible:
The person actually works for flickr.com (I haven't seen any statements to support or refute the claim yet)
If so, the employee either
Has direct access to legal documents (such as DMCA notices served), or
Has a reliable source who does have that access
My guess is that someone at the company didn't like it and removed it for their own personal or political justifications
It seems odd that someone would have suddenly had a personal or political problem with a file that was almost 8 months old. And if someone removed it for personal (rather than corporate) reasons, then it would seem that person for some reason believed that getting rid of the flickr copy would make all other copies go away - and I don't think many reasonable people would argue against that being a stupid assumption.
However, I find this extremely troubling because they have sought to protect these actions as if it was sanctioned or something
Sanctioned by flickr? I stated before, and I continue to believe, that this action was indeed sanctioned by flickr, just not for the reasons that some suggest. The initial statement given from flickr to the artist was that there were "copyright concerns", which from my vantage point is a reasonable concern for a company like flickr to have regarding a piece of artwork that so rapidly went viral.
That assumes that DMCA was applied in this case. There is no solid evidence to support a DMCA notice having been served.
Indeed, the earlier evidence suggests that DMCA was not applied.
Flickr would have had to pass the information on to the user in order to be immune from damages of the content being removed.
I suspect that may depend on the TOS for Flickr. It is possible for Flickr to have a TOS agreement that says they are not liable for any loss of profit any customer may face as a result of images hosted there.
As it stands now, Flickr is not immune from potential lawsuits over the removal of the image
Again, it depends on several factors that we don't have information on.
The user is guaranteed a right to file a counter claim (under the law)
Again, that is only valid under the assumption that DMCA was in some way applied to this case. We haven't seen solid information to support that conjecture; earlier Flickr told the artist that they had "copyright concerns" which does not inherently imply DMCA. And as a private company Flickr does not have the obligation to put themselves at risk of copyright suits just to host a user's images.
There are several assumptions that people are making to arrive at the conclusion of this having been orchestrated by the white house or the Obama administration. Let's review a few of these:
You have to assume that someone in the administration saw it on Flickr
You have to assume that someone in the administration felt it was worthy of being removed
You have to assume that someone in the administration felt it was worthy of legal action
You have to assume that someone in the administration had never seen it anywhere else
If any of those were not true, then it wouldn't make sense for the administration to take up the actions that people are accusing them of taking up. In particular, the first and fourth combine to a statement along the lines of
Someone thought that Flickr had the only copy of this known to man and having their copy removed would somehow make things better
Which is a particularly hard assumption to reasonably agree with being as the more prevalent copy - with the word socialism on the bottom - was not the one removed from Flickr.
but you missed the obvious. When a DCMA take down notice
This story provides no clear evidence of a DMCA take down notice having been issued. The closest it comes to that is referring to a discussion on Flickr.com. The last time we heard from the original artist to the best of my knowledge was in the interview that I provided a link to earlier.
Last week, Flickr only said they took down the image due to "copyright concerns". They did not say whose copyright they were concerned about; and considering the prevalence of the image over the past couple months this is a pretty reasonable concern for them to have. It would be rather bad business for Flickr to suddenly find out that they were hosting material that was in violation of copyright laws.
Dude, you linked your own post as though it was a source. And I clicked it, too. Silly me.
In that post, I provided a source. I linked to an interview with the artist who created the original poster - if you know of a more recent interview with him feel free to provide it.
Since I'm in this far let me just say that your own partisan conjecture doesn't seem to carry any more weight than any other kind of partisan conjecture.
First, I disagree with your labeling my sourced statement as "partisan conjecture". The statement I made and linked to, that I stand behind, was not partisan in nature. It referenced what was known at the time and shared by the artist. I have seen nothing more recent since then that actually includes statements from the artist.
Second, the partisan conjecture coming from the conservative conspiracy theorists is based on several assumptions that make little to no sense. In order to believe the claims that the white house is somehow tied to Flickr's removal of the image one would have to believe that they would see a reason to do this. Which would mean you would have to believe that someone in the white house believes Flickr has the only copy of the image.
Didn't the Supreme Court just hold that the city acting in fear of a lawsuit that obviously had no merit was in the wrong to do so? How is this any different?
Flickr is not a city. Flickr is a company.
There's no legal defense for doing whatever the hell you please because you MIGHT get sued
Flickr has an obligation to make money. If they were to be sued for copyright infringement it could end with them out of business.
Nothing to protect means no fear which means that 'the' (i.e. 'your') reasonable explanation fails the first logical test.
I just told you what Flickr has to protect.
but I can say with certainty that yours fails to convince anyone of anything because it simply doesn't make any sense
I'm not convinced you actually read what I said, or read the LA Times article that I linked to.
So at a minimum, please replace 'the' with 'my' and let your opinion stand on its own merit. You do that and I'll put away my soapbox. Deal?
My statement was
the actual reasons given [slashdot.org] last week
I stand by that. I gave a source for that statement. I have seen nothing here in this discussion that meets that same criteria.
But now someone is claiming DMCA - and only providing a link to a discussion forum to back it up? If there is no acknowledgment from Flickr of a DMCA notice having been issued, then why are we speculating on this? Last week they cited "copyright concerns" (read the LA Times article that actually interviewed the artist to see what they told him) and never mentioned DMCA - why is it there suddenly?
the complete notice had to be provided to the user against whom the takedown was performed
Was, most likely, met. If there was a DMCA takedown issued (and that is speculative at this point) it would have been issued against Flickr, not the artist. After all the image was being hosted by Flickr, not the artist.
I pointed out the actual reasons given last week. Go read that comment if you don't want to RTFA; consider it your Cliff's notes to what is actually happening.
i seen that ObamaJoker pic all over the intertubes so taking it off Flicker is about like removing the poster from one telephone pole when it is all over town and not able to do anything about it = lame and futile effort
Which tells us that there is nearly no chance of it having been taken down for the political reasons that people are trying so hard to suggest. To suggest that the white house, or anyone remotely connected to the Obama administration, is in any way connected to this makes almost no sense. Certainly they are well aware that taking down the image from flickr - which mind you does not have the word socialism on it - would accomplish nothing as there are thousands of copies of that image on the internet in other places.
The reasonable explanation for this was offered up last week, though it was dramatically overshadowed by conservative hype. It still stands, however.
Hence it is not the "lame and futile effort" you describe it to be. Flickr is trying to protect themselves from copyright issues. It is no more complicated than that. There is no great executive branch conspiracy driving this.
Another opportunity for a conservative yank-fest! We haven't had one on the slashdot front page in exactly 1 week, so clearly another one is needed. Hate to spoil the party, but anyone who read the link to the Flickr discussion would have seen some insight:
This article latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/08/obama-joker-a... with the originator of the Joker image contains this paragraph:
"Flickr had removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement concerns, Alkhateeb says the company told him in an e-mail. A Flickr spokeswoman declined to comment due to a company policy that bars discussing inquiries about individual users."
(note that comment references a story that nobody from slashdot read last week...)
So in short, before people start shouting "ZOMG! Teh POTUS iz teh fashcist!", it would be wise to read up on what is going on here.
As was pointed out here (and previously), the original artist was told that his images were removed due to copyright concerns. It is to be expected that the ownership of any piece of art - derivative or otherwise - could become a matter of suspect when it becomes as widespread as the "joker-ized" Obama piece.
I moved from a place that uses old coin-driven meters to a place that uses "smart" meters with paystations like what is described in the summary. I for one actually prefer the smart meters over the coin-driven meters for a few reasons:
The new ones don't require a pocket full of quarters
The new ones know accurate time and when they are under enforcement
You can take a pass from one spot to another if a better spot opens up before you are out of time
Parking receipts help keep meter maids honest; your slip shows what time you really paid for
Slashdot Mirror
1. educate users
Who is going to "educate" users? What will be taught? Where will it be taught, and to how many people? How do you deal with the differing systems that people would need to be "educated" on (remember there are still people using OSes that are 10+ years old)?
More importantly, who will pay for it?
It is easy to talk about "educating users", almost as easy as it is to blame the current problems on "uneducated users". But there are too many unanswered questions related to the statement.
create hardened operating systems that may never need antivirus
That is a great dream until someone goes to wal-mart and buys some nifty USB gadget from the $10 bin that only works in windows.
promote open web standards and good coding practices open to scrutiny for flaws exploits and bugs
That is a very good idea. Unfortunately getting it to go anywhere is another challenge altogether. If you know a good way to eliminate Flash from the web, I'm all ears...
stop letting marketing drive the internet bus
Good luck with that. Remember that a serious portion of all web sites are looking to make money. Which means they need exposure to bring in customers. While marketing droids seldom know much about web standards, they still have to be invited to the table.
While it is pretty meaningless to go after spammers themselves in many cases, we could use a similar approach to cut off spammers where it really matters - at the revenue stream. If we made some strategic purchases from spamvertised sites, we could potentially figure out who is making money in the deal. And when we find them, we will find who is funding the spammers. After all, spam isn't sent out just for fun; it is sent out because someone is paying the spammers to send it out. You can use the merchant information to go after the people who are paying for spamvertising - they are often involved in illegal sales of (pirated software / counterfeit drugs / counterfeit property) anyways. If the funding dries up, the spammers will need to find other work.
...why?
Seriously, what is the purpose of running a regular operating system on the Kindle? I don't see how that would make it more useful or practical in any way.
It looks like they are at 16 hours and counting of interrupted service. I also see that I can connect via POP but not the web interface.
Will we (wii?) ever see the price come down? It has been on the market for almost 3 years now and the price has yet to change.
How many people are still upgrading their systems often enough for this to be relevant to them anyways? I was a pathological upgrader for years, but I honestly have spent on average less than $100 on hardware per year over the past 5 years. Granted this is partially because of how my financial situation changed in that time, but also because from my vantage point it doesn't seem that there has been any great progress made in the past 5 years in terms of hardware or software that requires new hardware.
Honestly, with the exception of the gamers that want to run Half Life 7 or Quake 9, are many people really bothering to upgrade anymore? From my vantage point it will be surprising to see Windows 7 do well commercially - not because of vista - because there haven't been great reasons to upgrade from the hardware and software of 5 years ago.
Dr. Susus books.
Not sure who Dr. Susus is. It appears my fingers betrayed me, that should have been Dr Seuss.
I'll start by saying that I genreally despise texting. It is too expensive and too time consuming for my life, and it is extremely distracting. However, there is something that toddlers with cell phones could be good for.
The US currently has a dismal literacy rate amongst children entering kindergarten. I don't know when or how it happened, but a significant portion of children in this country today enter kindergarten without even a basic understanding of the alphabet, yet alone any ability to read or write. In comparison I and every child in my kindergarten class (so many years ago) were all able to read at least Dr. Susus books.
So if giving cell phones to kids gets them reading sooner, then I guess it isn't all bad.
Someone please tell us how this problem with the democrats.org website must clearly be related to the impending socialist takeover of schools and soda machines. Certainly this is how Marxism takes root, by allowing 419 emails to propagate, right?
As someone who has used both Alpha and SPARC chips in high-performance computing environments, I was a bit saddened when the Alpha went away for good. Seeing the SPARC also go the way of the Dodo would be a shame as well.
I am not aware of any guaranteed right that we have that ensures that companies will host any and all files we create. The original artist could still take his image and have it hosted elsewhere (unless he for some reason deleted his original after uploading it to flickr), or even establish his own web page somewhere else and host it himself. I do not see how his rights were in any way violated.
If the law protects a person from damages due to DMCA then Flickr can't legally have someone sign that protection away.
However we are not sure that there actually was anything DMCA related issued in this case. The only "evidence" of DMCA offered up so far comes from a discussion forum hosted on flickr.com. If flickr removed the image on their own, due to concerns of their own that they had, then DMCA terms are irrelevant.
Furthermore, flickr is still a company of their own. As best I know they are not legally bound to host every and any image that is thrown their way; they have the right as a company to refuse business as they see fit.
in this case, we have some low level help desk/support forum person making the claim that a DMCA take down notice was filed with them
Being as the only source I have seen for this so far is a discussion forum hosted on flickr.com, I see a couple assumptions that need to be made for this statement to be credible:
My guess is that someone at the company didn't like it and removed it for their own personal or political justifications
It seems odd that someone would have suddenly had a personal or political problem with a file that was almost 8 months old. And if someone removed it for personal (rather than corporate) reasons, then it would seem that person for some reason believed that getting rid of the flickr copy would make all other copies go away - and I don't think many reasonable people would argue against that being a stupid assumption.
However, I find this extremely troubling because they have sought to protect these actions as if it was sanctioned or something
Sanctioned by flickr? I stated before, and I continue to believe, that this action was indeed sanctioned by flickr, just not for the reasons that some suggest. The initial statement given from flickr to the artist was that there were "copyright concerns", which from my vantage point is a reasonable concern for a company like flickr to have regarding a piece of artwork that so rapidly went viral.
The take down law is in two parts
That assumes that DMCA was applied in this case. There is no solid evidence to support a DMCA notice having been served.
Indeed, the earlier evidence suggests that DMCA was not applied.
Flickr would have had to pass the information on to the user in order to be immune from damages of the content being removed.
I suspect that may depend on the TOS for Flickr. It is possible for Flickr to have a TOS agreement that says they are not liable for any loss of profit any customer may face as a result of images hosted there.
As it stands now, Flickr is not immune from potential lawsuits over the removal of the image
Again, it depends on several factors that we don't have information on.
The user is guaranteed a right to file a counter claim (under the law)
Again, that is only valid under the assumption that DMCA was in some way applied to this case. We haven't seen solid information to support that conjecture; earlier Flickr told the artist that they had "copyright concerns" which does not inherently imply DMCA. And as a private company Flickr does not have the obligation to put themselves at risk of copyright suits just to host a user's images.
Jesus-titty-fucking-Christ!!!!
Well, thank you much for the insightful response to my question. The matter is made so much clearer now.
If any of those were not true, then it wouldn't make sense for the administration to take up the actions that people are accusing them of taking up. In particular, the first and fourth combine to a statement along the lines of
Which is a particularly hard assumption to reasonably agree with being as the more prevalent copy - with the word socialism on the bottom - was not the one removed from Flickr.
but you missed the obvious. When a DCMA take down notice
This story provides no clear evidence of a DMCA take down notice having been issued. The closest it comes to that is referring to a discussion on Flickr.com. The last time we heard from the original artist to the best of my knowledge was in the interview that I provided a link to earlier.
Last week, Flickr only said they took down the image due to "copyright concerns". They did not say whose copyright they were concerned about; and considering the prevalence of the image over the past couple months this is a pretty reasonable concern for them to have. It would be rather bad business for Flickr to suddenly find out that they were hosting material that was in violation of copyright laws.
Dude, you linked your own post as though it was a source. And I clicked it, too. Silly me.
In that post, I provided a source. I linked to an interview with the artist who created the original poster - if you know of a more recent interview with him feel free to provide it.
Since I'm in this far let me just say that your own partisan conjecture doesn't seem to carry any more weight than any other kind of partisan conjecture.
First, I disagree with your labeling my sourced statement as "partisan conjecture". The statement I made and linked to, that I stand behind, was not partisan in nature. It referenced what was known at the time and shared by the artist. I have seen nothing more recent since then that actually includes statements from the artist.
Second, the partisan conjecture coming from the conservative conspiracy theorists is based on several assumptions that make little to no sense. In order to believe the claims that the white house is somehow tied to Flickr's removal of the image one would have to believe that they would see a reason to do this. Which would mean you would have to believe that someone in the white house believes Flickr has the only copy of the image.
Didn't the Supreme Court just hold that the city acting in fear of a lawsuit that obviously had no merit was in the wrong to do so? How is this any different?
Flickr is not a city. Flickr is a company.
There's no legal defense for doing whatever the hell you please because you MIGHT get sued
Flickr has an obligation to make money. If they were to be sued for copyright infringement it could end with them out of business.
Nothing to protect means no fear which means that 'the' (i.e. 'your') reasonable explanation fails the first logical test.
I just told you what Flickr has to protect.
but I can say with certainty that yours fails to convince anyone of anything because it simply doesn't make any sense
I'm not convinced you actually read what I said, or read the LA Times article that I linked to.
So at a minimum, please replace 'the' with 'my' and let your opinion stand on its own merit. You do that and I'll put away my soapbox. Deal?
My statement was
the actual reasons given [slashdot.org] last week
I stand by that. I gave a source for that statement. I have seen nothing here in this discussion that meets that same criteria.
We saw in last week's story that Flickr removed it "due to copyright concerns". It was well explained last week for those who didn't care to RTFA.
But now someone is claiming DMCA - and only providing a link to a discussion forum to back it up? If there is no acknowledgment from Flickr of a DMCA notice having been issued, then why are we speculating on this? Last week they cited "copyright concerns" (read the LA Times article that actually interviewed the artist to see what they told him) and never mentioned DMCA - why is it there suddenly?
the complete notice had to be provided to the user against whom the takedown was performed
Was, most likely, met. If there was a DMCA takedown issued (and that is speculative at this point) it would have been issued against Flickr, not the artist. After all the image was being hosted by Flickr, not the artist.
I pointed out the actual reasons given last week. Go read that comment if you don't want to RTFA; consider it your Cliff's notes to what is actually happening.
i seen that ObamaJoker pic all over the intertubes so taking it off Flicker is about like removing the poster from one telephone pole when it is all over town and not able to do anything about it = lame and futile effort
Which tells us that there is nearly no chance of it having been taken down for the political reasons that people are trying so hard to suggest. To suggest that the white house, or anyone remotely connected to the Obama administration, is in any way connected to this makes almost no sense. Certainly they are well aware that taking down the image from flickr - which mind you does not have the word socialism on it - would accomplish nothing as there are thousands of copies of that image on the internet in other places.
The reasonable explanation for this was offered up last week, though it was dramatically overshadowed by conservative hype. It still stands, however.
Hence it is not the "lame and futile effort" you describe it to be. Flickr is trying to protect themselves from copyright issues. It is no more complicated than that. There is no great executive branch conspiracy driving this.
This article latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/08/obama-joker-a... with the originator of the Joker image contains this paragraph:
"Flickr had removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement concerns, Alkhateeb says the company told him in an e-mail. A Flickr spokeswoman declined to comment due to a company policy that bars discussing inquiries about individual users."
(note that comment references a story that nobody from slashdot read last week...)
So in short, before people start shouting "ZOMG! Teh POTUS iz teh fashcist!", it would be wise to read up on what is going on here.
As was pointed out here (and previously), the original artist was told that his images were removed due to copyright concerns. It is to be expected that the ownership of any piece of art - derivative or otherwise - could become a matter of suspect when it becomes as widespread as the "joker-ized" Obama piece.
He wants to nationalize heathcare and privatize NASA
Doesn't it seem to be a contradictory statement to both accuse the president of nationalization and privatization in the same breath?
To say nothing of the fact that single-payer health care has been dead (in terms of the current legislative session) for over a month now.