Actually, Northern Light does not charge to access its search engine, or to access it's classification links of the web.
It has a second, separate business re-selling articles from trade journals, professional publications, etc., for which you do pay... but less than you would pay to buy the same thing in dead-tree format from the publisher.
What confuses people is that, by default, the main engine will return hits on both the web and the special collection.
Musicians, if they are not careful, often play faster when they play louder. This is a case of "mistaken equivalence".
In this issue, the big mistake is drawing an equivalence between copyright (the right to manufacture copies of a work) and access right (the right to access/view a copy of the work). In the cited brief, the author(s) bandy the two concepts about interchangably.
Does the law of the land still maintain the logical distinction between the act of creating a copy and the act of access?...or is reading a memo the same as making a photocopy in the eyes of the law?
One reason we have such a wealth of culture is that we can refer to the works produced in the past. In the period immediately following the fall of Rome, records were either not made at the previous rate, or had been destroyed. This resulted what we call the "Dark Ages", a period from which the culture did not survive.
If any of these copy protection schemes finally take root, what will the future see when they try to access the culture of the 21st century? Once all the readers for a particular format are gone, and the content could not be migrated forward to new media, will our culture be lost to the future?
Will they see this as another "Dark Ages"?
It scared me to see how many of these systems I have actually had experience with, including the TI980 and the Varian. Conspicuous by its absence: UYK-7, that workhorse of the military, both at sea and in the air.
The antithesis of net blocking is "freedome to choose".
The antithesis of selling browsing habits is also "freedom to choose".
...the sale of the aggregate behavior of children... promises a future marked by ever-more-sophistiated (sic) digital tracking and eavesdropping.
It also promises a future marked by ever-more-sophisticated marketing techniques aimed at compelling us to choose, freely, what the marketer wants us to choose. If a marketer gets inside my child's head and knows what will make them do something, then does it, where has the freedom to choose gone?
And who is going to protect our oh-so-coddled (and oh-so-sequestered) children from the seeming benignity of a web site designed by these marketers? Parents? I think not. The average parent will not have the savvy of a major marketing department to recognize subliminal manipulation when they see it.
I'm concerned about the impact of this technology on the people for whom mining has been a way of life for generations. Did they also take steps to help these people re-train and/or re-locate?
(What will happen to us programmers when we finally write the A.I. that can do the programming for us?)
If I build a house, it is possible for anyone to go to the deeds office and find out that I own the land, and even how much the county thinks it is worth. If it is a commercial building, they may even give out the blueprints and results of code inspections.
The last time I bought a house, the county wanted to know how much I paid, but the law didn't demand that I tell them. I folded their polite (and oh-so-official) request until it was all corners and filed it in the round cabinet. The previous owner had a similar view as to building permits. Near as I can tell, the county still doesn't know that there's a house on that land.
Recently, a township near Boston got up in arms when its city hall put their house floor plans on the 'net. Part of the town records include floor plans, and it was possible for anyone to come to city hall and research them, so they just skipped the need to bring a real person to a real place and put the whole shootin' match online. One of the major complaints from the citizens was that criminals could browse houseplans for a neighborhood to help them plan break & enters. That issue is still not resolved.
Just because something is already extant in "the system" doesn't make it right.
Er... no. We agree that the problem is abuse of information and the invasion of privacy. Better insulation from those who would violate our privacy solves nothing. A real solution has to make it utterly and totally wrong to violate somebody's privacy, with some method of redress that has real teeth in it.
Becoming a society of locks doesn't make it a society without criminals.
Mind you, until that happens, your proposal may be one of the only types of defense available. Sigh.
That's me, and everyone's different. Why companies are compelled to have everyone on a fixed schedule... I don't know.
I would hazard a guess that some of the companies that require fixed schedules are managed by the same sort of people who gave us geeks such trouble in high school.
I think that the underlying meme is "everybody ought to be the same". Differences are not situations to be worked around to mutual advantage, but are potential problems that must be elminated.
(I worked with the military as a civilian expert for 18 years. They don't encourage differences. Gave me quite the perspective.)
...it is about analysis: taking things apart, potentially breaking them, to find out how they work...
It suddenly occurred to me that most of physics is based on reverse-engineering the universe. Everything from the experimental method to atom-smashers.
Where would we be if the creator of that universe had issued a decree that dis-allowed reverse engineering?
Lawyers are a funny lot. If you try to comply with the spirit of the law and police your postings, you've got to get it right each and every time or they'll hang you for your first mistake. If you say you won't police the postings, then you are not generally held liable, but your posters are.
IANAL, but my opinion is to let anything go, make your posters know that they should not post copyright materials, and when a copyright holder gets in touch with you about a posting, and can prove that they hold the rights, and they request that it be removed, then comply.
Looking at the hullabaloo surrounding easy-to-copy software, I can just imagine what it will be like when you have easy-to-copy hardware. Will they make test tubes illegal?
My theory born of my own experience (25 years, YMMV) is that the thin strip that connects the halves of the brain (the corpus collosum) has a limited bandwidth and inefficient transport protocol, especially for complex ideas.
Time and again I've been able to "break the block" by doing an end-run around the corpus collosum. All I need is a plausible excuse to hook my logic centers into my verbal output and then feed that output (left brain) into the right brain's audio input circuit. The resulting abstract communication is usually enough to get the two halves of my brain synchronized to the same thought frame and I stop losing contemplation packets.
To put it another way: as soon as I start to explain the problem to somebody (even my dog!) the solution comes to me.
Oh, yes! "Trusted" software requires a formal spec, and a testing spec designed to assure that the original spec has been satisfied. A lot of research has gone into how to derive the testing spec from the design spec, but in the real world I have never, ever seen a design spec that didn't need change after change after change.
The entire concept of trusted software is predicated on the notion that the user knows what he wants, that this desire will not change and that it can be captured in a specification. That is sheer folly.
They are a vital resource, but they DO store copyrighted material for re-distribution. If the original material is changed, the change does not immediately propagate, thus creating a situation where the copyright holder can notice that they no longer are in control of the distribution of their work.
Surely there is some precedent in law covering proxy servers. I would expect that same precedent to apply. If there is no precedent, I'm willing to bet that there will be a legal challenge sometime in the future.
This insanity has got to STOP! (Says the preacher to the choir.)
Every time a teacher exploits humiliation to control a class or a student, they're really exploiting peer-pressure. It makes a god of conformity.
When I first read this, I thought I'd like to make a poster of it. That was my first response.
Then I pondered the phrase "exploiting peer-pressure". The concept of peer pressure already pre-supposes the urge (instinct?) to both want to conform (fit in) and to force conformity on others. This god already exists.
Most of the horrors that happened to me in school had their genesis in either my disappointment at not fitting in or the attacks on me by people who were trying to force me to conform.
I wish that I'd had somebody train me in how to deal with these conformity urges, how to not be controlled by them and how to resist trying to control others. Instead, the adults around me used this weakness against me... and it allowed them far more control over me than any other method. OF COURSE it would have been against their self interest to help me deal with the issues of conformity!
But to be the devil's advocate: I believe the conformity instinct is inborn. Why do we have it? What use is it? Do we have the wisdom to say "it ain't right" when we don't even understand why millions of years of evolution has given it to us?
My interest in the IOpener, as it was marketed, went to zero when I realized I couldn't get their service in Canada.
A fully functional Linux box, however, would work with any of my local ISPs.
Even at a higher cost, the "hacked" hardware would find a market in places (countries) where they had not been willing (or able) to provide the net service. Too many folks "up north" are net.disabled, often due to hardware cost. A low-cost, highly capable machine (i.e. the IOpener running Linux) would really help ease that.
Slashdot Mirror
It has a second, separate business re-selling articles from trade journals, professional publications, etc., for which you do pay... but less than you would pay to buy the same thing in dead-tree format from the publisher.
What confuses people is that, by default, the main engine will return hits on both the web and the special collection.
In this issue, the big mistake is drawing an equivalence between copyright (the right to manufacture copies of a work) and access right (the right to access/view a copy of the work). In the cited brief, the author(s) bandy the two concepts about interchangably.
Does the law of the land still maintain the logical distinction between the act of creating a copy and the act of access? ...or is reading a memo the same as making a photocopy in the eyes of the law?
If any of these copy protection schemes finally take root, what will the future see when they try to access the culture of the 21st century? Once all the readers for a particular format are gone, and the content could not be migrated forward to new media, will our culture be lost to the future? Will they see this as another "Dark Ages"?
The antithesis of selling browsing habits is also "freedom to choose".
It also promises a future marked by ever-more-sophisticated marketing techniques aimed at compelling us to choose, freely, what the marketer wants us to choose. If a marketer gets inside my child's head and knows what will make them do something, then does it, where has the freedom to choose gone?And who is going to protect our oh-so-coddled (and oh-so-sequestered) children from the seeming benignity of a web site designed by these marketers? Parents? I think not. The average parent will not have the savvy of a major marketing department to recognize subliminal manipulation when they see it.
I'm concerned about the impact of this technology on the people for whom mining has been a way of life for generations. Did they also take steps to help these people re-train and/or re-locate?
(What will happen to us programmers when we finally write the A.I. that can do the programming for us?)
Study your history. Follow the money.
I looked at the page source and there's lots there.
Whyinhell should I have to debug someone else's HTML just so that I can read their bluddy page? ARGH!
Pretty vague. Did he crack RSH? ...or NetNanny?
There is a difference, and inquiring minds want to know.
But what informationwill they base their vote upon, if their access to information has been compromised?
The last time I bought a house, the county wanted to know how much I paid, but the law didn't demand that I tell them. I folded their polite (and oh-so-official) request until it was all corners and filed it in the round cabinet. The previous owner had a similar view as to building permits. Near as I can tell, the county still doesn't know that there's a house on that land.
Recently, a township near Boston got up in arms when its city hall put their house floor plans on the 'net. Part of the town records include floor plans, and it was possible for anyone to come to city hall and research them, so they just skipped the need to bring a real person to a real place and put the whole shootin' match online. One of the major complaints from the citizens was that criminals could browse houseplans for a neighborhood to help them plan break & enters. That issue is still not resolved.
Just because something is already extant in "the system" doesn't make it right.
Er... no. We agree that the problem is abuse of information and the invasion of privacy. Better insulation from those who would violate our privacy solves nothing. A real solution has to make it utterly and totally wrong to violate somebody's privacy, with some method of redress that has real teeth in it.
Becoming a society of locks doesn't make it a society without criminals.
Mind you, until that happens, your proposal may be one of the only types of defense available. Sigh.
I would hazard a guess that some of the companies that require fixed schedules are managed by the same sort of people who gave us geeks such trouble in high school.
I think that the underlying meme is "everybody ought to be the same". Differences are not situations to be worked around to mutual advantage, but are potential problems that must be elminated.
(I worked with the military as a civilian expert for 18 years. They don't encourage differences. Gave me quite the perspective.)
Yabut: will it take them out of the gene pool before they breed?
It suddenly occurred to me that most of physics is based on reverse-engineering the universe. Everything from the experimental method to atom-smashers.
Where would we be if the creator of that universe had issued a decree that dis-allowed reverse engineering?
I would expect that windows in wearable computers would be no less so.
IANAL, but my opinion is to let anything go, make your posters know that they should not post copyright materials, and when a copyright holder gets in touch with you about a posting, and can prove that they hold the rights, and they request that it be removed, then comply.
Looking at the hullabaloo surrounding easy-to-copy software, I can just imagine what it will be like when you have easy-to-copy hardware. Will they make test tubes illegal?
Time and again I've been able to "break the block" by doing an end-run around the corpus collosum. All I need is a plausible excuse to hook my logic centers into my verbal output and then feed that output (left brain) into the right brain's audio input circuit. The resulting abstract communication is usually enough to get the two halves of my brain synchronized to the same thought frame and I stop losing contemplation packets.
To put it another way: as soon as I start to explain the problem to somebody (even my dog!) the solution comes to me.
The entire concept of trusted software is predicated on the notion that the user knows what he wants, that this desire will not change and that it can be captured in a specification. That is sheer folly.
They are a vital resource, but they DO store copyrighted material for re-distribution. If the original material is changed, the change does not immediately propagate, thus creating a situation where the copyright holder can notice that they no longer are in control of the distribution of their work.
Surely there is some precedent in law covering proxy servers. I would expect that same precedent to apply. If there is no precedent, I'm willing to bet that there will be a legal challenge sometime in the future.
This insanity has got to STOP! (Says the preacher to the choir.)
When I first read this, I thought I'd like to make a poster of it. That was my first response.
Then I pondered the phrase "exploiting peer-pressure". The concept of peer pressure already pre-supposes the urge (instinct?) to both want to conform (fit in) and to force conformity on others. This god already exists.
Most of the horrors that happened to me in school had their genesis in either my disappointment at not fitting in or the attacks on me by people who were trying to force me to conform.
I wish that I'd had somebody train me in how to deal with these conformity urges, how to not be controlled by them and how to resist trying to control others. Instead, the adults around me used this weakness against me... and it allowed them far more control over me than any other method. OF COURSE it would have been against their self interest to help me deal with the issues of conformity!
But to be the devil's advocate: I believe the conformity instinct is inborn. Why do we have it? What use is it? Do we have the wisdom to say "it ain't right" when we don't even understand why millions of years of evolution has given it to us?
A fully functional Linux box, however, would work with any of my local ISPs.
Even at a higher cost, the "hacked" hardware would find a market in places (countries) where they had not been willing (or able) to provide the net service. Too many folks "up north" are net.disabled, often due to hardware cost. A low-cost, highly capable machine (i.e. the IOpener running Linux) would really help ease that.
KNOCK, KNOCK! It's opportunity!