Yeah, that was thirty years ago. Every year there's an announcement of some new memory technology that's going to revolutionize the computer industry. The last time I checked we're all still using DRAM or Flash, we still need lots of batteries, and we still have to reboot after powering down. Whatever happened to MRAM and half a dozen other pretenders?
Seems to me the information in question is public, i. e. each television station broadcasts to hundreds of thousands of people, any one of which could describe the station and its market area. That's about as public as it gets. Wikipedia presents information in a well-known format of its own. (IANAL but) I really don't see how Nielsen could possibly have a legal leg to stand on. This looks like a great opportunity to exercise the false claim provision of the DMCA.
I feel obliged to point out that, in the 2000 election a majority of US citizens (including me) voted for someone other than George Bush. And currently the Bush administration represents a decreasing minority of the American people.
As for how GWB came to power, I agree we have a problem. This sort of thing should never happen again. What must we do to prevent a recurrence?
You have put your finger on another example where current trends in US legislation support a special interest rather than the interests of the people at large. I am not a gambler, but I would wager that there are more people in the United States who use marijuana (or would, if it were legal) than there are people with a major stake in the pharmaceutical industry. It's Big Pharma who stands to lose if people could find relief from their aches and pains in their own back yard.
And, oh yeah, drug smugglers. They have a lot of money for campaign contributions, too.
Speaking as a US citizen, what I want to know is, how do we stop this? Most of the people in the world, myself included, do not work for or even own stock in any of the major intellectual property companies. We have nothing to gain from this kind of legislation. On the contrary, most people would stand to benefit from free or negligible cost movies, music, etc. So how do we put a stop to this kind of back-room wheeling and dealing? How can we restore the correct functioning of our government? Members of the United States government are supposed to be public servants. Unfortunately they seem to have a very narrow definition of who "we the people" are. Why is there no public debate on these issues? Why must we find out about ACTA on WikiLeaks? It all started with DMCA during the last decade. Who ordered that?
Part of the problem dates back to Ronald Reagan's decision to deemphasize federal funding for pure research in favor of applied research. While it's true that pure research seldom has immediate practical application, sooner or later failure to support pure research has practical consequences for all of us. We're paying for Reagan's shortsightedness now.
To me the fact that this proposal was submitted in secret seems more worrisome than whether we jigger the clock by a second or by an hour. Normally I would expect my democratic government to be quite open about something as public as timekeeping. Indeed, this seems like a subject on which popular comment would be welcome, even solicited. Bush's favorite line about national security and the "Battle Against Extremism" (or whatever) hardly seems applicable here. So what's up?
Marketers are free to pollute my life with advertising, and I'm free to do my best to ignore it. If advertisers are free to pursue more modern, aggressive and intrusive methods of beaming their messages at me, I'm free to deploy ever more powerful means to block and intercept them.
I'm waiting for somebody to start selling Carl Sagan's AdNix. I want one. (I would buy PreachNix, too.)
The thing about wireless networking, as it is currently implemented, is that it is a broadcast. Unless the data are coded or encrypted in some non-obvious fashion, any wireless network is de facto a public service.
I don't know about you, but I pay my internet service provider for service, not for content. That's why they call 'em ISPs, not 'Internet Content Providers'. I want access to the internet. I want my e-mail delivered. I'll find my own content, thank you.
That's also why I dislike 'push' technology and why I don't mind when the ISP filters spam for me. Spam is something I don't want. I don't want to pay for stuff I don't want. I'm happy to pay for good filtering service, because it makes e-mail, a valuable technology, usable.
As for the Pennsylvania law, what about my right to freely access information? If I'm paying for internet service, I should be able to visit any site on the web. I am not a citizen of Pennsylvania, but if I were I would not trust any state government official to choose for me which sites I might be allowed to view. My contention, my assertion, is that I should make that choice.
I was talking about information in general. Anime is a kind of information. When you look at a cartoon you see not only a story about giant robots, et cetera, but you can see something about the animator's view of the world as well. Why do we watch anime in preference to American cartoons? There must be something special about that Japanese point of view.
The kind of mindset that results in censorship is grotesque and possibly dangerous. Censorship interferes with my free access to information. In limiting the content of information it does violence to the truth; it produces a lie. How am I to form accurate judgements about my world based on distorted information? Garbage in, garbage out.
And what of the children? Will they be better equipped for life if raised in a fairy tale sandbox? Or will they do better if inculcated with a firm grasp on reality?
I can't believe someone was prepared to sue Cartoon Network over the content of a cartoon. Is he so avaricious and venal? Or is he just an idiot? If he sees something on his television that he doesn't like, why doesn't he just change the channel? Or better yet, turn the box off and read a book. On second thought, if he is so terrified that he might accidently be exposed to unadulterated content, perhaps he should stick with Readers Digest.
You, on the other hand, are as full of crap as the commercials about which he complains.
Why has no one ever marketed Carl Sagan's Adnix gadget? It can't be that hard to design. I'd buy half a dozen, keep one, and give away the rest to my friends.
This item has been moderated up to 3, Funny.
Trouble is, this is no joke!
When did the phone companies turn from providing communications services to dealing in legal obstruction? These same companies are constantly advertising high tech equipment and services. It's time for them to put up or shut up.
What can we (the customers at the end of the 'last mile') do to induce the phone companies to fire their lawyers and start selling us some serious bandwidth at home? What's needed is a technical, not a legal, solution.
There are two kinds of intellectual property to consider here. One is the company's plans and specifications that motivate the programmer's development effort on the job. The other is the programmer's own knowledge and skills. These are his stock in trade. He brings his toolkit along when he takes a job, and he takes it with him when he departs.
A programmer knows how to do a certain number of things. He learns as he works. Whether he works at home or on the job, it's likely that he will find similar solutions for similar problems. It's a two-way street. He may use a technique he learned at work in his code at home, or he may take to work an idea that came to him as he was lying awake in bed at night. It would be very difficult to draw an arbitrary line and say, "I did this entirely at work," or "This I did entirely at home."
The best you can do is to say that something that was developed at the company on behalf of the company on company time using company tools belongs to the company. Similarly, code written at home using the programmer's own time, resources and initiative belongs to him. One can stipulate that there may be gray hazy situations in between, but given the tone of this discussion it probably behooves the programmer to try and keep it black or white.
I would assert that the programmer does not have the right to use his company's IP to develop, on his own time, a competing product. He does not have the right to use copyrighted company source code in his private projects. But neither does the company have the right to expropriate the results of the programmer's independent labor. That amounts to involuntary servitude on the part of the programmer. Given the attitude in this country toward slavery, the programmer should have a legal leg to stand on even if he knowingly or unknowingly signed away rights to his work in an employment contract. We all have reasonable expectations of being able to exercise our skills on our own behalf, and to benefit from the fruits of our labor, irrespective of our state of employment.
One cost effective method for dealing with spammers would be to take them out back and shoot 'em.
Note that my cost estimate covers the cost of a bullet, not legal expenses. There is a real risk of legal consequences for this type of action, but if enough victims rise up in arms the courts will be jammed with cases and appeals for years. It's likely that the ACLU and various charitable organizations would help defray your legal fees. Most sensible juries would render a verdict of justifiable homicide. On balance, I think many people would consider the risks worthwhile. After all, you get the satisfaction of knowing you did your bit to make the world a nicer place to live.
Costs of storage and transmission are only the beginning. From my point of view the most serious cost is loss of time spent dealing with spam in my mailbox. I have to clean it out or I have to go to the trouble to erect some kind of barrier between the spammer and my mailbox.
Porn doesn't inflict itself on the recipient, wasting his time and resources. You have to actively seek it out.
Or are you counting the costs of legal prosecution?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that was thirty years ago. Every year there's an announcement of some new memory technology that's going to revolutionize the computer industry. The last time I checked we're all still using DRAM or Flash, we still need lots of batteries, and we still have to reboot after powering down. Whatever happened to MRAM and half a dozen other pretenders?
Anybody who can read that shit... deserves it.
Seems to me the information in question is public, i. e. each television station broadcasts to hundreds of thousands of people, any one of which could describe the station and its market area. That's about as public as it gets.
Wikipedia presents information in a well-known format of its own. (IANAL but) I really don't see how Nielsen could possibly have a legal leg to stand on. This looks like a great opportunity to exercise the false claim provision of the DMCA.
I feel obliged to point out that, in the 2000 election a majority of US citizens (including me) voted for someone other than George Bush. And currently the Bush administration represents a decreasing minority of the American people.
As for how GWB came to power, I agree we have a problem. This sort of thing should never happen again. What must we do to prevent a recurrence?
You have put your finger on another example where current trends in US legislation support a special interest rather than the interests of the people at large. I am not a gambler, but I would wager that there are more people in the United States who use marijuana (or would, if it were legal) than there are people with a major stake in the pharmaceutical industry. It's Big Pharma who stands to lose if people could find relief from their aches and pains in their own back yard.
And, oh yeah, drug smugglers. They have a lot of money for campaign contributions, too.
Speaking as a US citizen, what I want to know is, how do we stop this? Most of the people in the world, myself included, do not work for or even own stock in any of the major intellectual property companies. We have nothing to gain from this kind of legislation. On the contrary, most people would stand to benefit from free or negligible cost movies, music, etc. So how do we put a stop to this kind of back-room wheeling and dealing? How can we restore the correct functioning of our government? Members of the United States government are supposed to be public servants. Unfortunately they seem to have a very narrow definition of who "we the people" are. Why is there no public debate on these issues? Why must we find out about ACTA on WikiLeaks? It all started with DMCA during the last decade. Who ordered that?
Has anyone managed to hack WGA so that each time it calls home, it automatically sends Microsoft a message of your choice?
Yeah, our tax dollars at work.
I want a refund.
Part of the problem dates back to Ronald Reagan's decision to deemphasize federal funding for pure research in favor of applied research. While it's true that pure research seldom has immediate practical application, sooner or later failure to support pure research has practical consequences for all of us. We're paying for Reagan's shortsightedness now.
To me the fact that this proposal was submitted in secret seems more worrisome than whether we jigger the clock by a second or by an hour. Normally I would expect my democratic government to be quite open about something as public as timekeeping. Indeed, this seems like a subject on which popular comment would be welcome, even solicited. Bush's favorite line about national security and the "Battle Against Extremism" (or whatever) hardly seems applicable here. So what's up?
Indeed.
Marketers are free to pollute my life with advertising, and I'm free to do my best to ignore it. If advertisers are free to pursue more modern, aggressive and intrusive methods of beaming their messages at me, I'm free to deploy ever more powerful means to block and intercept them.
I'm waiting for somebody to start selling Carl Sagan's AdNix. I want one. (I would buy PreachNix, too.)
It takes two people to reach an agreement. I never signed any contract.
What's to keep folks from disconnecting this gadget, or smashing it... or simply buying their cars in, say, France?
Food without calories, coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol. and now cigarettes without nicotine. Is reality an endangered species?
The thing about wireless networking, as it is currently implemented, is that it is a broadcast. Unless the data are coded or encrypted in some non-obvious fashion, any wireless network is de facto a public service.
I don't know about you, but I pay my internet service provider for service, not for content. That's why they call 'em ISPs, not 'Internet Content Providers'. I want access to the internet. I want my e-mail delivered. I'll find my own content, thank you.
That's also why I dislike 'push' technology and why I don't mind when the ISP filters spam for me. Spam is something I don't want. I don't want to pay for stuff I don't want. I'm happy to pay for good filtering service, because it makes e-mail, a valuable technology, usable.
As for the Pennsylvania law, what about my right to freely access information? If I'm paying for internet service, I should be able to visit any site on the web. I am not a citizen of Pennsylvania, but if I were I would not trust any state government official to choose for me which sites I might be allowed to view. My contention, my assertion, is that I should make that choice.
I was talking about information in general. Anime is a kind of information. When you look at a cartoon you see not only a story about giant robots, et cetera, but you can see something about the animator's view of the world as well. Why do we watch anime in preference to American cartoons? There must be something special about that Japanese point of view.
The kind of mindset that results in censorship is grotesque and possibly dangerous. Censorship interferes with my free access to information. In limiting the content of information it does violence to the truth; it produces a lie. How am I to form accurate judgements about my world based on distorted information? Garbage in, garbage out.
And what of the children? Will they be better equipped for life if raised in a fairy tale sandbox? Or will they do better if inculcated with a firm grasp on reality?
I can't believe someone was prepared to sue Cartoon Network over the content of a cartoon. Is he so avaricious and venal? Or is he just an idiot? If he sees something on his television that he doesn't like, why doesn't he just change the channel? Or better yet, turn the box off and read a book. On second thought, if he is so terrified that he might accidently be exposed to unadulterated content, perhaps he should stick with Readers Digest.
KillerKane makes some good points.
You, on the other hand, are as full of crap as the commercials about which he complains.
Why has no one ever marketed Carl Sagan's Adnix gadget? It can't be that hard to design. I'd buy half a dozen, keep one, and give away the rest to my friends.
This item has been moderated up to 3, Funny.
Trouble is, this is no joke!
When did the phone companies turn from providing communications services to dealing in legal obstruction? These same companies are constantly advertising high tech equipment and services. It's time for them to put up or shut up.
What can we (the customers at the end of the 'last mile') do to induce the phone companies to fire their lawyers and start selling us some serious bandwidth at home? What's needed is a technical, not a legal, solution.
There are two kinds of intellectual property to consider here. One is the company's plans and specifications that motivate the programmer's development effort on the job. The other is the programmer's own knowledge and skills. These are his stock in trade. He brings his toolkit along when he takes a job, and he takes it with him when he departs.
A programmer knows how to do a certain number of things. He learns as he works. Whether he works at home or on the job, it's likely that he will find similar solutions for similar problems. It's a two-way street. He may use a technique he learned at work in his code at home, or he may take to work an idea that came to him as he was lying awake in bed at night. It would be very difficult to draw an arbitrary line and say, "I did this entirely at work," or "This I did entirely at home."
The best you can do is to say that something that was developed at the company on behalf of the company on company time using company tools belongs to the company. Similarly, code written at home using the programmer's own time, resources and initiative belongs to him. One can stipulate that there may be gray hazy situations in between, but given the tone of this discussion it probably behooves the programmer to try and keep it black or white.
I would assert that the programmer does not have the right to use his company's IP to develop, on his own time, a competing product. He does not have the right to use copyrighted company source code in his private projects. But neither does the company have the right to expropriate the results of the programmer's independent labor. That amounts to involuntary servitude on the part of the programmer. Given the attitude in this country toward slavery, the programmer should have a legal leg to stand on even if he knowingly or unknowingly signed away rights to his work in an employment contract. We all have reasonable expectations of being able to exercise our skills on our own behalf, and to benefit from the fruits of our labor, irrespective of our state of employment.
One cost effective method for dealing with spammers would be to take them out back and shoot 'em.
Note that my cost estimate covers the cost of a bullet, not legal expenses. There is a real risk of legal consequences for this type of action, but if enough victims rise up in arms the courts will be jammed with cases and appeals for years. It's likely that the ACLU and various charitable organizations would help defray your legal fees. Most sensible juries would render a verdict of justifiable homicide. On balance, I think many people would consider the risks worthwhile. After all, you get the satisfaction of knowing you did your bit to make the world a nicer place to live.
That's one business Microsoft can have and welcome. At least we would know who to blame.
Costs of storage and transmission are only the beginning. From my point of view the most serious cost is loss of time spent dealing with spam in my mailbox. I have to clean it out or I have to go to the trouble to erect some kind of barrier between the spammer and my mailbox.
My time is not free for other people to waste!
Porn doesn't inflict itself on the recipient, wasting his time and resources. You have to actively seek it out. Or are you counting the costs of legal prosecution?