Fine, put inverted commas around 'decriminalising'. Whether it is civil or common law (or whatever the other one is) it is still some kind of offence that leads to punishments, which makes it "a crime" to the majority of people. It's like saying a 10cc bike is a moped and not a motorbike - most people will happily call it a motorbike anyway because it is close enough for their rough definition.
...along with decriminalising personal copyright infringement.
Basically abolishing copyright, then, for all intents and purposes that relate to the majority of the population. How much do people spend on creative media versus how much companies spend? I doubt most big corps buy anywhere near as many CDs as music-buying teens.
I think the UK way of doing it is right - let "non-trading individuals" have an option to hide their address but make companies show it. That way the ones you need to have an address for to help with trust issues (companies) have the details shown and those who don't show it (individuals and hobbyists) still have it recorded in case of legal proceedings, but their home address isn't there for every crazy nutjob to see and associate with a domain. The.com method of making everyone show their address is unnecessary and just leads to registrars making an extra buck from it as a "value added" service.
As for the earlier idea of having a mailbox - PO Box addresses in the UK cost money. If you're registering a £3 per year domain (rough price of a.uk domain) then why would you want to spend twenty times that just so that some idiot online can't read your address from the WhoIs record? Only in the first half of the new millennium did I receive anything to my registered address, and that was before.uk domains stopped posting paper certificates for your registration. Other than that then the address isn't legitimately used by the registration, so the PO Box is a waste of money.
While you could, in theory, "swipe it back" in a copyright-free world, you wouldn't get the requirement for access to source code. I see the GPL as a use of the rights granted by copyright to keep things open, rather than a subversion of a mechanism that it is completely at odds with.
MIT/BSD-like licenses would be unaffected in as much as people could still use the code as they wanted, but without copyright then I'd also expect that attribution requirements are also lost (after all, without a claim to copyright then you have no claim of ownership and no claim for having been plagiarised).
No-one standing for plagiarism assumes that people have some kind of moral grounding, rather than the more likely (and already existing) situation of people not caring about morals as long as they they can get their grubby little mits on some free stuff.
DRM, a lack of consumer rights and corporate-oriented copyright law is bad, but the message most pushed by the Pirate Party and those that support it sends things too far down the opposite side for it to be workable in anything other than short-term greed.
There's sarcasm in the name? Everything I'd read makes it look like it is rather literal (using the media's definition) because they quite literally seem to want everyone to be able to download everything for free. They're possibly closest to my leanings because they realise that things like "fair use", "sensible legislation", "privacy" and "right to format-shift" make sense, but basically destroying/ignoring copyright (which is what FOSS is based on) takes it too far IMO.
As for the "open rights group", I don't think they've even made a splash in the UK, have they? I've never seen anything about them.
Opera have quite a lead, then, and Firefox aren't making big pushes to catch up from 3.x.
Or maybe it is uglyness rating: Opera scores over 10 for having a hideous default UI that looks out of place on all desktops; IE scores an 8 for...well, being IE with those stupid shiny buttons; Firefox is slowly moving up as it tries to look more like IE; Chrome perhaps over-rates itself, but it still gets points for not quite understanding that "GTK theme" shouldn't mean "pick the colours and use them in random places, then ignore parts of controls".
Probably the same reason as most other networks can't handle it - sheer bandwidth that people will be using. Start browsing a social networking site? Not huge bandwidth in general. Start downloading porn? People can go crazy with bandwidth usage! It'll all be limited out in the field, and why should the government pay for it on base?
Surely that depends on what type of "time shifting" you mean. If you're talking about "recording to watch later" then VCRs do it, but "live TV pausing" time-shifts are presumably new to newer technology like the TiVo.
Are there, or are there lots of people exploiting it? The bill allowed for judge-less subpoena based on child sex crimes, and the statistic says that more than one judge-less subpoena was asked for per day, but it doesn't explicitly say that more than one judge-less subpoena was asked for per day that then led to the receipt of information about child sex offences. Given the way that governments work once they've got a loophole then it wouldn't surprise me if they're not all entirely kosher requests.
No it won't - "tits" is never assigned to, so the loop will either have an initial/default value "36c" and loop for ever, or "tits" will be null and crash out with a null pointer (assuming a Java/C#-like language) or potentially show undefined behaviour (most other languages).
Aren't those two basically a dichotomy when it comes to copyright law and the like?
Granted, there may have been other issues involved here (e.g. licensing) but the issue that is presented seems reasonable enough for it to be silly to threaten the profs/university.
But the original was "mm sqr" (millimetres square) rather than "mm sqrd" (millimetres squared).
I still thought that "mm^2" was "square millimetres", though, as in "tin of paint covers nine square metres" = "covers nine x 1m x 1m" = "covers 9m^2".
All so confusing, and so very liable to getting things completely wrong by huge orders of magnitude!
Isn't it 240mm sq = 240mm x 240mm (as in (240mm) squared) and 240 sq mm is 240 x 1mm x 1mm (as in 240 x (square mms))? It's always an awkward one to represent and be clear on.
But, as with so many other new laws, why is it even necessary when there are already laws in place?
The instructions state jurors must not use cell phones, e-mail, Blackberry, iPhone, text messaging, or on Twitter, or communicate through any blog or website, through any internet chat room, or by way of any other social networking websites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
So that would be "You're not allowed to discuss the case, and refrain from news about it" with the extra clarification of "using any technology available, whether it existed at the time the law was drafted or not". That's still "You're not allowed to discuss the case, and refrain from news about it", whichever way you look at it. Unless someone was completely short-sighted in drafting the original law then these rewrites seem pointless and overly verbose purely for the sake of having another law.
They're body scanners, not genital scanners. Unless you're one big genital then you needn't worry about the focus being genitals. If they need to take an x-ray of your hip (or, heaven forbid, a child's hip) for medical reasons, do you complain that genitals will show up as a silhouette in that as well?
Not that any of this makes a difference really - if you're intent on dying while blowing up a plane then you're going to have nothing against consuming or implanting the explosives so that they don't show up on surface scanners.
As for highways, I think we need brain scanners more than anything else to stop the idiots who don't know how to drive safely.
I'd then hope that the courts turn round and say "Look, there is a difference between silhouettes/nudity and pornographic content. Learn it and stop wasting our time with these stupid cases."
Unfortunately, due to modern conditioning that nudity = porn = evil, regardless of context, I don't suppose that would actually happen.
That works well until you can't remember what something says and can't remember how to get to the menu to switch it back to your native language! I've done it by accident before now (switched a device to Portuguese or something) and had to hunt down a manual to find the "put it back to English" option just by clicking and not reading.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, put inverted commas around 'decriminalising'. Whether it is civil or common law (or whatever the other one is) it is still some kind of offence that leads to punishments, which makes it "a crime" to the majority of people. It's like saying a 10cc bike is a moped and not a motorbike - most people will happily call it a motorbike anyway because it is close enough for their rough definition.
Basically abolishing copyright, then, for all intents and purposes that relate to the majority of the population. How much do people spend on creative media versus how much companies spend? I doubt most big corps buy anywhere near as many CDs as music-buying teens.
What address do you use, then?
I think the UK way of doing it is right - let "non-trading individuals" have an option to hide their address but make companies show it. That way the ones you need to have an address for to help with trust issues (companies) have the details shown and those who don't show it (individuals and hobbyists) still have it recorded in case of legal proceedings, but their home address isn't there for every crazy nutjob to see and associate with a domain. The .com method of making everyone show their address is unnecessary and just leads to registrars making an extra buck from it as a "value added" service.
As for the earlier idea of having a mailbox - PO Box addresses in the UK cost money. If you're registering a £3 per year domain (rough price of a .uk domain) then why would you want to spend twenty times that just so that some idiot online can't read your address from the WhoIs record? Only in the first half of the new millennium did I receive anything to my registered address, and that was before .uk domains stopped posting paper certificates for your registration. Other than that then the address isn't legitimately used by the registration, so the PO Box is a waste of money.
While you could, in theory, "swipe it back" in a copyright-free world, you wouldn't get the requirement for access to source code. I see the GPL as a use of the rights granted by copyright to keep things open, rather than a subversion of a mechanism that it is completely at odds with.
MIT/BSD-like licenses would be unaffected in as much as people could still use the code as they wanted, but without copyright then I'd also expect that attribution requirements are also lost (after all, without a claim to copyright then you have no claim of ownership and no claim for having been plagiarised).
No-one standing for plagiarism assumes that people have some kind of moral grounding, rather than the more likely (and already existing) situation of people not caring about morals as long as they they can get their grubby little mits on some free stuff.
DRM, a lack of consumer rights and corporate-oriented copyright law is bad, but the message most pushed by the Pirate Party and those that support it sends things too far down the opposite side for it to be workable in anything other than short-term greed.
There's sarcasm in the name? Everything I'd read makes it look like it is rather literal (using the media's definition) because they quite literally seem to want everyone to be able to download everything for free. They're possibly closest to my leanings because they realise that things like "fair use", "sensible legislation", "privacy" and "right to format-shift" make sense, but basically destroying/ignoring copyright (which is what FOSS is based on) takes it too far IMO.
As for the "open rights group", I don't think they've even made a splash in the UK, have they? I've never seen anything about them.
Opera have quite a lead, then, and Firefox aren't making big pushes to catch up from 3.x.
Or maybe it is uglyness rating: Opera scores over 10 for having a hideous default UI that looks out of place on all desktops; IE scores an 8 for...well, being IE with those stupid shiny buttons; Firefox is slowly moving up as it tries to look more like IE; Chrome perhaps over-rates itself, but it still gets points for not quite understanding that "GTK theme" shouldn't mean "pick the colours and use them in random places, then ignore parts of controls".
They passed 1.0 a long while ago. Chromium is up at 5.0 and Chrome is already beyond 4.0!
How long will it be before the first tweet is posted with GPS co-ordinates that give away an important location or mission?
Forget the "rob my house" Twitter app, now the 'bad guys' can set up a "where are they attacking from" Twitter app!
Probably the same reason as most other networks can't handle it - sheer bandwidth that people will be using. Start browsing a social networking site? Not huge bandwidth in general. Start downloading porn? People can go crazy with bandwidth usage! It'll all be limited out in the field, and why should the government pay for it on base?
Surely that depends on what type of "time shifting" you mean. If you're talking about "recording to watch later" then VCRs do it, but "live TV pausing" time-shifts are presumably new to newer technology like the TiVo.
Are there, or are there lots of people exploiting it? The bill allowed for judge-less subpoena based on child sex crimes, and the statistic says that more than one judge-less subpoena was asked for per day, but it doesn't explicitly say that more than one judge-less subpoena was asked for per day that then led to the receipt of information about child sex offences. Given the way that governments work once they've got a loophole then it wouldn't surprise me if they're not all entirely kosher requests.
Neither did this group - they're filing in Northern Texas ;)
Alvin and who?
Quick, someone with mod points mod this "+1 ironic" for matching the "corporate whores" by turning the noun "verb" into a verb ;)
If only the outcomes of these crazy ideas were that good...
No it won't - "tits" is never assigned to, so the loop will either have an initial/default value "36c" and loop for ever, or "tits" will be null and crash out with a null pointer (assuming a Java/C#-like language) or potentially show undefined behaviour (most other languages).
Aren't those two basically a dichotomy when it comes to copyright law and the like?
Granted, there may have been other issues involved here (e.g. licensing) but the issue that is presented seems reasonable enough for it to be silly to threaten the profs/university.
But the original was "mm sqr" (millimetres square) rather than "mm sqrd" (millimetres squared).
I still thought that "mm^2" was "square millimetres", though, as in "tin of paint covers nine square metres" = "covers nine x 1m x 1m" = "covers 9m^2".
All so confusing, and so very liable to getting things completely wrong by huge orders of magnitude!
Isn't it 240mm sq = 240mm x 240mm (as in (240mm) squared) and 240 sq mm is 240 x 1mm x 1mm (as in 240 x (square mms))? It's always an awkward one to represent and be clear on.
But, as with so many other new laws, why is it even necessary when there are already laws in place?
So that would be "You're not allowed to discuss the case, and refrain from news about it" with the extra clarification of "using any technology available, whether it existed at the time the law was drafted or not". That's still "You're not allowed to discuss the case, and refrain from news about it", whichever way you look at it. Unless someone was completely short-sighted in drafting the original law then these rewrites seem pointless and overly verbose purely for the sake of having another law.
Today? TODAY? Are you new here, or do you have a short memory? ;)
They're body scanners, not genital scanners. Unless you're one big genital then you needn't worry about the focus being genitals. If they need to take an x-ray of your hip (or, heaven forbid, a child's hip) for medical reasons, do you complain that genitals will show up as a silhouette in that as well?
Not that any of this makes a difference really - if you're intent on dying while blowing up a plane then you're going to have nothing against consuming or implanting the explosives so that they don't show up on surface scanners.
As for highways, I think we need brain scanners more than anything else to stop the idiots who don't know how to drive safely.
I'd then hope that the courts turn round and say "Look, there is a difference between silhouettes/nudity and pornographic content. Learn it and stop wasting our time with these stupid cases."
Unfortunately, due to modern conditioning that nudity = porn = evil, regardless of context, I don't suppose that would actually happen.
Great thought, but we're currently seeing it "advertised" in a /. news article. "hot looking girl" might not be what you get ;)
That works well until you can't remember what something says and can't remember how to get to the menu to switch it back to your native language! I've done it by accident before now (switched a device to Portuguese or something) and had to hunt down a manual to find the "put it back to English" option just by clicking and not reading.