"Selling reselling the same thing over and over again? Without any further investments?? And expect to be paid the same money forever???"
Straw man all the way.
Artists do have to keep making more art to keep making money. Those that don't, fade away. So "without any further investments" is nonsense.
The price of an album does go down over time. So "expect to be paid the same money forever" is mostly nonsense. ("Mostly" because copyright terms have become excessive; but that's a far different claim from the anti-copyright message you're sending.)
"Concert, shows, etc. That's how artists should earn their living"
Maybe in your state that's true. Here in MO, if a city makes too high a fraction of its revenue from traffic violations, they get severely penalized by the state. (Historically this only applied to moving violations, but - as a result of the braindead implementation of camera-enforcement - that is being changed so that it applies to "non-moving" violations as well.)
Traffic law enforcement is a complicated issue in my mind. I don't have a lot of sympathy for speeders who don't like paying speeding tickets, but I do think there's a reason that speeding is the only moving violation you really see enforced these days (and I don't think "safety" has much to do with it).
That aside, there are lots of things wrong with typical camera-enforcement schemes. They tend to be operated by private firms who profit off of the tickets. (This is a bigger problem with red-light cameras, because light timings can be manipulated for revenue-genration purposes, but I digress...)
Also, they usually don't even try to prove who's driving. For example, here in St. Louis County, a camera-enforced ticket is a non-moving violation. It's like a parking ticket - the ticket is against the vehicle, not the driver. They don't try to prove who's driving and they don't care - the owner of the vehicle gets the ticket. This also means no points on the license; the "enforcement" is purely monitary.
I'd suggest demanding a reasonable application of individual accountability. This isn't just about oil drilling, it's about corporate behavior. Corporations behave irresponsibly because the people that decide how the corporation will act are not accountable for the consequences of those actions; only the imaginary legal entity of the corporation itself is accountable.
To an extent, this is intentional; when you form a corporation you get a shield against personal liability because otherwise any form of business would be too risky. But IMO it goes too far today. It's one thing to be able to say "uh oh, I lost millions of dollars and can't pay back my investors; good thing I'm not personally liable". It's something else to be able to say "uh oh, my stupid orders got 11 people killed and caused vast environmental damage..."
"Oh, come'on, what a lame argument. Your local gas station owner could always switch companies (especially if he's environmentally responsible). Also, he's probably a millionaire and can afford to lose some business"
You're missing the point: Oil is fungible and is traded several steps up the supply chain from you buying gas. You cannot affect demand for BP oil. When GP says you'll have a minimal impact on BP, he's wrong; in fact you'll have none at all.
If your local station owner switched to a different franchise - in fact if every station owner did so - the impact on BP's oil operations would be... none at all.
See, it's not that the collateral damage to the gas station is to high; it's that the collateral damage is the only damage that will occur. The only way you can contribute a penny less to the fortunes of any given oil company is to use less petrol-based products.
Oh, and I find your assumption that gas station owners are swimming in cash amusing.
'Finally, even if all of us "morally outraged" people quit buying BP gas, we're such a small segment of the overall population they'd only see a small dip in their profits anyways. Basically, you're demonstrating the classic example in psychology of a narcissistic personality, "If I stop buying gas from them, they'll go out of business."'
So what exactly is your point? Just arguing for the sake of it? Because a minute ago you were saying his arguments against a boycot were bunk, and now you're saying a boycot is a dumb idea - which was his point.
'Also, you're acting like a victim. "There's nothing I can do about this that won't hurt me more than I'll hurt them."'
Funny, it read to me as "the things I've thought of won't work; what are some ideas that will?" Not sure how asking for ideas is "acting like a victim", but I guess it's easier to criticize than contribute.
Relax, dude, I'm pretty sure we can all find plenty of things to blame BP for without pretending that buying keyword impressions is somehow harmful.
Go google "oil spill". Sure enough, the top sponsored link will be the BP oil spill site. The other sponsored link will be... yet another partison point of view from someone who was willing to pay to get a message out. That's what sponsored links are.
Right below them - right where they always are - you still find the real search results. How that squares with the flow of information being "clogged" is beyond me.
I'd find more to complain about if BP wasn't trying to present a strong media presence. You know, saying "I'd like my life back" or something like that.
You think "free market" means no regulations? What color is the sky in your world? It takes a lot of carefully aligned laws and regulations to create a free market.
"Recently health care laws were changed to designate that adults up to 28 are dependents to their parents if so chosen."
At a minimum, you're playing fast and loose with the definition of "dependent" and glossing over the fact that a person cannot be coerced into dependent status at that age.
The trouble I'm having here is, I agree with what you're saying and think this is a bad policy, but I disagree with the doctor's whining about it. The simple solution, which avoids all the negative effects the doctor complains about, is to just write the damned word on the order. Call me a pragmatist I suppose, but the fact is this will get the test done, avoid risking the patient's health, avoid wasting hours of the doctor's time... and stupid or not it's a simple thing to do.
In fact I'll go one further: If the doctor knows this poilcy - knows that not writing please will result in the work not being done - and still dosn't write please, then any resulting waste of his time and/or risk to the patient are the doctor's fault.
Ok, by that logic: what definition of vector excludes drawing dots? My 1980's vintage dot matrix printer can draw dots, and dots are included in the set of things that are vectors, therefore my dot matrix printer must be a plotter, right? Wrong.
This particular printer uses horizontal lines to implement the drawing of adjacent pixels. It is nonetheless raster based.
So wait... you're saying that when two groups work toward opposing goals, they each spend money on nothing more than negating the effect of the money the other spent?
What a shocking revelation! You should be an economist or something!
I'm not so sure that "innocent infringement" can mean "I assumed I had a license". I think it's intended to mean "I didn't realize the material was copyrighted in the first place". Presumably that's why the statutes NYCL pointed to say that you can't claim innocent infrigement if you "had access to" a properly marked copy of the work (which is a typically lovely bit of vague wording).
Of course, that's not to say that you can never legally make a copy of a work for which you've seen a copyright notice. You can if you really do have a license - but you wouldn't claim innocent infringement in that case (and you wouldn't want to - if you did you'd still be on the hook for $200 or more at the court's discretion); instead you'd claim no infringement on the grounds that the copying was authorized.
Perhaps, I don't think that applies very well to the case at hand.
When I go to/., I can reasonably assume the person who posted the content intends to allow me to view the content (as you say); but I can also reasonably assume the copyright owner is the person who posted the content.
If I go to a song-swapping service, I can certainly assume that the person who's sharing the files intends to let me copy them; but the crux of the issue seems to be whether I can reasonably assume the person sharing the files has the authority to do so.
Now, I grew up when physical distribution was still the norm. I can't see how any of my peers would reasonably expect mainstream commercial music to either not be protected by copyright, or be available under a free distribution license - especially absent an explicit statement of a license.
However, this girl was 16 at the time. A lot of kids these days don't have any concept that sharing music online might be illegal. In the context of youth culture, is that reasonable lack of knowledge that the act was infringing, or is it merely ignorance of the law? To me it's a tough area, which is why this should go to trial.
That doesn't sound like much of a citation. GGP claimed the pressure was on getting his roommate to quit smoking; a roommate is almost never a "covered person". Either way, an increase in premium is not the same as being fired.
Actually, it looks like you're the one missing the point. If you go read the thread again, remembering that each post is a reply to its parent post, I think you'll find that the SCO example was not presented as a flaw in the patent defense idea; but rather that it was presented as a reason to doubt that changes to the law will gut the patent defense idea (which the prior post had suggested without providing any supporting details).
I'm not sure whether I think the logic is valid, but if you're going to criticize it at least figure out what it's saying first.
No, it's not about the effects. Terms that imply bias are about intentions. There's a huge difference between giving a cookie to every male, vs. flipping a coin and giving a cookie every time it comes up heads, even if by random chance it happens that I end up giving each male (and no females) a cookie.
Drumming up emotions by using terms that imply deliberate bias to situations where there is none is a disservice to everyone involved, most of all those who advocate against true bias.
Er... why do you theorize Facebook is exchanging browser profiles info with random porn sites?
Like many people assessing online privacy threats, you seem to be looking at what a sufficiently well-placed cabal could do (from a "technically plausible" standpoint) and not thinking about real-world applicability. If your best reason to be concerned about privacy is to conceal your porn habits, you can rest assured nobody's that interested anyway. (Yes, there are exceptions. If you're trying to conceal predatory behavior, my attitude switches from apathy to lack of sympathy.)
Which is not to say there's no threat. If Facebook realizes that those profile-to-person mappings have commercial value, they certainly might start sharing them with commercial sitest that are willing to pay for them.
Re:www.google.com/ie gone -- also used by the blin
on
Scroogle Has Been Blocked
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm legally blind (but not to the extent that I require a screen-reader) and certainly I advocate for accessability features. But, just like the/ie interface wasn't intended to be a stable screen-scraping interface for Scroogle, it wasn't intended to be an accessability feature. That's the problem with using things in unsupported ways. Sure, they may work now - but you have no assurances going forward.
I'd suggest your wife, and anyone else who finds Google's support for low-vision users lacking, contact them and start lobbying for a proper solution that they will then have proper knowledge of and reason to support.
You need a more precise understanding of what licenses are and what they do than you are demonstrating. At inception code has a copyright; it does not have a license. Even if it is derived from GPL code, it still does not have a license until the copyright owner licenses it to someone.
If you were correct, then once I illegally distributed my modificiations under a non-free license, the people receiving it would have the same rights as if I had distributed it under the GPL. In reality they would not get such rights, nor would they have any cause of action against me. The only people with a cause of action against me would be the copyright holders of the original code, because I would have violated the license they gave me.
Very few businesses will deliberately violate their software license, though, because they could lose the right to use the software (including their modifications) if the license is fully enforced. So GP's comment is not very practical, but it is still correct; whereas your comment is neither practical nor correct.
What is both practical and correct is: if I make modifications to GPL code I am under no obligation to license my modifications at all. Submitter got into a situation of code ownership without fully understanding it, as many people do. The loophole submitter is hoping to use to escape that situation does not exist.
I go back and forth on this issue. I (almost) always felt compelled to attend the courses in which I was enrolled, and how useful that was varied a lot from course to course.
The assumption that a good grade shows you got what was expected out of the course is flawed (grades aren't a perfect measure). A good philosophy course is partially about discussion. A good physics class is partially about seeing physics work (not just reading about it); and you can't really test for experience on an exam. (It's a little harder to see what you might get out of, e.g., a pure math class beyond what's in the book.)
Still, flawed though grades are, they are a Universities defined measure of how well a student is doing; if they want to eject students who aren't getting the job done, they can (and do) use grades for that, rather than a statistical predictor of what one's grades might turn out to be.
On the other hand, a University might argue that it's selling an educational experience, and that the lectures (which have only X seats) are what sets them apart; if you just want to pass tests and get a piece of paper, surely there's someplace you can go to do that, but don't take up one of our seats when somenoe might want that experience.
I think most students who've sat in a large lecture hall will have the same answer for that.
Off hand I'm not a big fan of the RFID attendance system. If I were subjected to it, I'd favor a large-scale protest in the form of leaving the ID at home while attending class. See how the University reacts when profs report full lecture halls and the official stats show zero attendance. Only workable if you get broad support, though. (A lone individual trying this can expect a suboptimal outcome.)
Sorry, it's not worth my time to keep chasing through this rabbit hole that is your lack of understanding of the judicial system. I suggest you go educate yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
"Selling reselling the same thing over and over again? Without any further investments?? And expect to be paid the same money forever???"
Straw man all the way.
Artists do have to keep making more art to keep making money. Those that don't, fade away. So "without any further investments" is nonsense.
The price of an album does go down over time. So "expect to be paid the same money forever" is mostly nonsense. ("Mostly" because copyright terms have become excessive; but that's a far different claim from the anti-copyright message you're sending.)
"Concert, shows, etc. That's how artists should earn their living"
LOL
Maybe in your state that's true. Here in MO, if a city makes too high a fraction of its revenue from traffic violations, they get severely penalized by the state. (Historically this only applied to moving violations, but - as a result of the braindead implementation of camera-enforcement - that is being changed so that it applies to "non-moving" violations as well.)
I didn't say "there's no safety issue with driving too fast".
I said "safety doesn't appear to be the primary motivation for current patterns of traffic law enforcement".
These are entirely unrelated propositions, and none of your evidence has anything to do with the one on the table.
Traffic law enforcement is a complicated issue in my mind. I don't have a lot of sympathy for speeders who don't like paying speeding tickets, but I do think there's a reason that speeding is the only moving violation you really see enforced these days (and I don't think "safety" has much to do with it).
That aside, there are lots of things wrong with typical camera-enforcement schemes. They tend to be operated by private firms who profit off of the tickets. (This is a bigger problem with red-light cameras, because light timings can be manipulated for revenue-genration purposes, but I digress...)
Also, they usually don't even try to prove who's driving. For example, here in St. Louis County, a camera-enforced ticket is a non-moving violation. It's like a parking ticket - the ticket is against the vehicle, not the driver. They don't try to prove who's driving and they don't care - the owner of the vehicle gets the ticket. This also means no points on the license; the "enforcement" is purely monitary.
"Write my senator demanding what exactly?"
I'd suggest demanding a reasonable application of individual accountability. This isn't just about oil drilling, it's about corporate behavior. Corporations behave irresponsibly because the people that decide how the corporation will act are not accountable for the consequences of those actions; only the imaginary legal entity of the corporation itself is accountable.
To an extent, this is intentional; when you form a corporation you get a shield against personal liability because otherwise any form of business would be too risky. But IMO it goes too far today. It's one thing to be able to say "uh oh, I lost millions of dollars and can't pay back my investors; good thing I'm not personally liable". It's something else to be able to say "uh oh, my stupid orders got 11 people killed and caused vast environmental damage..."
"Oh, come'on, what a lame argument. Your local gas station owner could always switch companies (especially if he's environmentally responsible). Also, he's probably a millionaire and can afford to lose some business"
You're missing the point: Oil is fungible and is traded several steps up the supply chain from you buying gas. You cannot affect demand for BP oil. When GP says you'll have a minimal impact on BP, he's wrong; in fact you'll have none at all.
If your local station owner switched to a different franchise - in fact if every station owner did so - the impact on BP's oil operations would be... none at all.
See, it's not that the collateral damage to the gas station is to high; it's that the collateral damage is the only damage that will occur. The only way you can contribute a penny less to the fortunes of any given oil company is to use less petrol-based products.
Oh, and I find your assumption that gas station owners are swimming in cash amusing.
'Finally, even if all of us "morally outraged" people quit buying BP gas, we're such a small segment of the overall population they'd only see a small dip in their profits anyways. Basically, you're demonstrating the classic example in psychology of a narcissistic personality, "If I stop buying gas from them, they'll go out of business."'
So what exactly is your point? Just arguing for the sake of it? Because a minute ago you were saying his arguments against a boycot were bunk, and now you're saying a boycot is a dumb idea - which was his point.
'Also, you're acting like a victim. "There's nothing I can do about this that won't hurt me more than I'll hurt them."'
Funny, it read to me as "the things I've thought of won't work; what are some ideas that will?" Not sure how asking for ideas is "acting like a victim", but I guess it's easier to criticize than contribute.
Relax, dude, I'm pretty sure we can all find plenty of things to blame BP for without pretending that buying keyword impressions is somehow harmful.
Go google "oil spill". Sure enough, the top sponsored link will be the BP oil spill site. The other sponsored link will be... yet another partison point of view from someone who was willing to pay to get a message out. That's what sponsored links are.
Right below them - right where they always are - you still find the real search results. How that squares with the flow of information being "clogged" is beyond me.
I'd find more to complain about if BP wasn't trying to present a strong media presence. You know, saying "I'd like my life back" or something like that.
You think "free market" means no regulations? What color is the sky in your world? It takes a lot of carefully aligned laws and regulations to create a free market.
Yeah, I think you're missing a few key points.
"Recently health care laws were changed to designate that adults up to 28 are dependents to their parents if so chosen."
At a minimum, you're playing fast and loose with the definition of "dependent" and glossing over the fact that a person cannot be coerced into dependent status at that age.
The trouble I'm having here is, I agree with what you're saying and think this is a bad policy, but I disagree with the doctor's whining about it. The simple solution, which avoids all the negative effects the doctor complains about, is to just write the damned word on the order. Call me a pragmatist I suppose, but the fact is this will get the test done, avoid risking the patient's health, avoid wasting hours of the doctor's time... and stupid or not it's a simple thing to do.
In fact I'll go one further: If the doctor knows this poilcy - knows that not writing please will result in the work not being done - and still dosn't write please, then any resulting waste of his time and/or risk to the patient are the doctor's fault.
Ok, by that logic: what definition of vector excludes drawing dots? My 1980's vintage dot matrix printer can draw dots, and dots are included in the set of things that are vectors, therefore my dot matrix printer must be a plotter, right? Wrong.
This particular printer uses horizontal lines to implement the drawing of adjacent pixels. It is nonetheless raster based.
Plotters draw vectors. Based on the demo this is pretty clearly raster-based. Don't let the way it holds the ink fool you; it's a printer.
So wait... you're saying that when two groups work toward opposing goals, they each spend money on nothing more than negating the effect of the money the other spent?
What a shocking revelation! You should be an economist or something!
Or... you know... just don't give your roomba a grenade launcher.
I'm not so sure that "innocent infringement" can mean "I assumed I had a license". I think it's intended to mean "I didn't realize the material was copyrighted in the first place". Presumably that's why the statutes NYCL pointed to say that you can't claim innocent infrigement if you "had access to" a properly marked copy of the work (which is a typically lovely bit of vague wording).
Of course, that's not to say that you can never legally make a copy of a work for which you've seen a copyright notice. You can if you really do have a license - but you wouldn't claim innocent infringement in that case (and you wouldn't want to - if you did you'd still be on the hook for $200 or more at the court's discretion); instead you'd claim no infringement on the grounds that the copying was authorized.
Perhaps, I don't think that applies very well to the case at hand.
When I go to /., I can reasonably assume the person who posted the content intends to allow me to view the content (as you say); but I can also reasonably assume the copyright owner is the person who posted the content.
If I go to a song-swapping service, I can certainly assume that the person who's sharing the files intends to let me copy them; but the crux of the issue seems to be whether I can reasonably assume the person sharing the files has the authority to do so.
Now, I grew up when physical distribution was still the norm. I can't see how any of my peers would reasonably expect mainstream commercial music to either not be protected by copyright, or be available under a free distribution license - especially absent an explicit statement of a license.
However, this girl was 16 at the time. A lot of kids these days don't have any concept that sharing music online might be illegal. In the context of youth culture, is that reasonable lack of knowledge that the act was infringing, or is it merely ignorance of the law? To me it's a tough area, which is why this should go to trial.
That doesn't sound like much of a citation. GGP claimed the pressure was on getting his roommate to quit smoking; a roommate is almost never a "covered person". Either way, an increase in premium is not the same as being fired.
Clever change of subject, though.
Actually, it looks like you're the one missing the point. If you go read the thread again, remembering that each post is a reply to its parent post, I think you'll find that the SCO example was not presented as a flaw in the patent defense idea; but rather that it was presented as a reason to doubt that changes to the law will gut the patent defense idea (which the prior post had suggested without providing any supporting details).
I'm not sure whether I think the logic is valid, but if you're going to criticize it at least figure out what it's saying first.
No, it's not about the effects. Terms that imply bias are about intentions. There's a huge difference between giving a cookie to every male, vs. flipping a coin and giving a cookie every time it comes up heads, even if by random chance it happens that I end up giving each male (and no females) a cookie.
Drumming up emotions by using terms that imply deliberate bias to situations where there is none is a disservice to everyone involved, most of all those who advocate against true bias.
A large organization has a subjective policy that defines a keyword list on which they base ad acceptance.
You think it's more likely that an inconsistency in that list is based on sexist attitudes, than that it's based on a lack of central quality control?
Don't anthropomorphize bureaucracies. They hate when you do that.
Er... why do you theorize Facebook is exchanging browser profiles info with random porn sites?
Like many people assessing online privacy threats, you seem to be looking at what a sufficiently well-placed cabal could do (from a "technically plausible" standpoint) and not thinking about real-world applicability. If your best reason to be concerned about privacy is to conceal your porn habits, you can rest assured nobody's that interested anyway. (Yes, there are exceptions. If you're trying to conceal predatory behavior, my attitude switches from apathy to lack of sympathy.)
Which is not to say there's no threat. If Facebook realizes that those profile-to-person mappings have commercial value, they certainly might start sharing them with commercial sitest that are willing to pay for them.
I'm legally blind (but not to the extent that I require a screen-reader) and certainly I advocate for accessability features. But, just like the /ie interface wasn't intended to be a stable screen-scraping interface for Scroogle, it wasn't intended to be an accessability feature. That's the problem with using things in unsupported ways. Sure, they may work now - but you have no assurances going forward.
I'd suggest your wife, and anyone else who finds Google's support for low-vision users lacking, contact them and start lobbying for a proper solution that they will then have proper knowledge of and reason to support.
You need a more precise understanding of what licenses are and what they do than you are demonstrating. At inception code has a copyright; it does not have a license. Even if it is derived from GPL code, it still does not have a license until the copyright owner licenses it to someone.
If you were correct, then once I illegally distributed my modificiations under a non-free license, the people receiving it would have the same rights as if I had distributed it under the GPL. In reality they would not get such rights, nor would they have any cause of action against me. The only people with a cause of action against me would be the copyright holders of the original code, because I would have violated the license they gave me.
Very few businesses will deliberately violate their software license, though, because they could lose the right to use the software (including their modifications) if the license is fully enforced. So GP's comment is not very practical, but it is still correct; whereas your comment is neither practical nor correct.
What is both practical and correct is: if I make modifications to GPL code I am under no obligation to license my modifications at all. Submitter got into a situation of code ownership without fully understanding it, as many people do. The loophole submitter is hoping to use to escape that situation does not exist.
I go back and forth on this issue. I (almost) always felt compelled to attend the courses in which I was enrolled, and how useful that was varied a lot from course to course.
The assumption that a good grade shows you got what was expected out of the course is flawed (grades aren't a perfect measure). A good philosophy course is partially about discussion. A good physics class is partially about seeing physics work (not just reading about it); and you can't really test for experience on an exam. (It's a little harder to see what you might get out of, e.g., a pure math class beyond what's in the book.)
Still, flawed though grades are, they are a Universities defined measure of how well a student is doing; if they want to eject students who aren't getting the job done, they can (and do) use grades for that, rather than a statistical predictor of what one's grades might turn out to be.
On the other hand, a University might argue that it's selling an educational experience, and that the lectures (which have only X seats) are what sets them apart; if you just want to pass tests and get a piece of paper, surely there's someplace you can go to do that, but don't take up one of our seats when somenoe might want that experience.
I think most students who've sat in a large lecture hall will have the same answer for that.
Off hand I'm not a big fan of the RFID attendance system. If I were subjected to it, I'd favor a large-scale protest in the form of leaving the ID at home while attending class. See how the University reacts when profs report full lecture halls and the official stats show zero attendance. Only workable if you get broad support, though. (A lone individual trying this can expect a suboptimal outcome.)
Sorry, it's not worth my time to keep chasing through this rabbit hole that is your lack of understanding of the judicial system. I suggest you go educate yourself.