Just as some people are susceptible to overeating. What are we going to do next, ban McDonald's? Heart disease kills how many people now?
If it's about risks and dangers, marijuana is very, very low on the list when it comes to health. Now when it comes to the law... well, a cheeseburger is more likely to kill you but you're not going to get 2 years in jail for eating one.
Keeping people of below-average intelligence off of my website? That doesn't sound like discrimination, that sounds like reduced costs and maintenance in tech support.
Hey now, you gotta respect the religious right. They were makin' up stories that break most of the laws of physics and science before we even knew they existed!
Now that takes dedication - precognitive ignorance.
No, how about we let it be decided at the STATE LEVEL? Let the individual states decide their own drug laws, not the federal government.
Because one of the major problems with the system is the insane federal mandatory sentencing laws.
A judge has absolutely NO discretion with a case like that if it comes down to a conviction. Got an ounce of weed? Say goodbye to a few years of your life - whether you were dealing or not.
Getting that repealed and having it moved down to a misdemeanor is a step in the right direction.
If I wanted to find meth, it would probably take me weeks, or months. I don't even know where to start.
No, it wouldn't. It would take you a couple days at most.
First off, you have your immediate friends. Even those that say they "wouldn't ever do drugs" - odds are one of them does some kind of illegal drug if you've more than one or two close friends. Weed, speed, coke, etc.
Failing option one, just go to where young people congretate like a college. Go up to someone and ask if they know where you can get some weed - a relatively innocuous and common question on many campuses.
When you get to a dealer, see if he knows someone that can get you your drug of choice. (He might even have it himself.) Once you've done this you have an established contact where you can pretty much get more any time you'd like.
It's really not as hard as you make it out to be. It's frightening easy, in fact. Hell, I could buy drugs in my high school. IN my high school. I went to class with at least one weed dealer than I knew of. I'm sure I could have found stronger substances easily if I so desired. I'm not one to use most drugs, but if I had wanted to find them it wouldn't have been all that hard.
The thing is, anyone could get to it readily and easily. The only value would be in seeing a live performance or getting a dead tree copy, etc.
Unless the RIAA wants to spontaneously develop a theater company, there wouldn't be much they could do aside from work with concerts and radio stations.
One of the saddest problems with ridiculously long copyright terms is that you basically lose loads of stuff because they're out of print, and the person controlling the copyright has no financial interest in a reissue -- but society would benefit enormously from having free access to it. Or you find something, but you don't know who has the rights to it, and it would be quite expensive to track them down (when the people involved might be dead, or have forgotten about it, and ownership has passed to some as-yet unknown third party).
I think "out of print" is irrelevant in the age of cheap disk space and bandwidth. There's plenty of stuff that would be nigh impossible to find an original hard copy of such as the Star Wars Christmas Special (in this case, a first generation VHS or Betamax from the original broadcast).
Books? Text is cheap when it comes to data. I recall learning in computer class many, many years ago that a 1.44MB floppy disk (not even compressed!) could store over 1,000 pages of text. PDFs aren't that much larger, either - most PDFs of books I've seen are in the tens to hundreds megabyte range.
I think an important part of reform would be an online, easily-accessible copyright registry that's largely automated. A simple database that could be sorted by medium, artist, etc. It shows the date the copyright was filed as well as the date it was approved and took effect. Set up a filter so you can see which material in which subject are public domain and which material is not yet in public domain.
From here, it's a matter of actually storing the material. Having one place host something means its bound to get hammered for bandwidth if its popular. Recording studios could set up archive servers with torrents and make use of sites like rapidshare where files could be downloaded legally after the copyright expires. Once its out on the net, there will always be a copy out there somewhere. Once its legal to share a majority of the material, people won't have to cower in fear behind proxies and Peerguardian. We can organize and work as a society to preserve and distribute this material as best we can.
The only way something is "lost" is if it is never uploaded in the first place. Anyone who records music can make a MP3 easily, even if they rip from the master CD from a recording studio. Anyone who writes a book could easily request a proof PDF from the publisher. I don't think it's as big of a problem as you envision it.
More and more people are regarding copyright as this nasty thing that just funnels money into fat cartels so they can get fatter, and its not being used. If this system isn't reformed, then it is going to be largely obsolete in a few decades time. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Jonny C - it's already begun.
The fact is that wanton copyright infringement is occurring. As copyright holders, the RIAA does in fact have the right to go after the infringers.
Yes, they do. I don't think that we'd have had a problem with them if they followed the rules of the game. The problem is that they keep changing the rules in their favor to make money.
The U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to enact copyright laws, and in 1790 they did. The original copyright term was 14 years with the right to renew for an additional 14 year term. So, at most, 28 years.
But in the last 200 years, the copyright has been extended 5 or 6 times to a point where it's flat-out ridiculous. Most artists who create a song (under the current terms) will be dead before their works enter the public domain.
Copyright is, in modern times, basically meant to protect content creators' works so they can exclusively make money from those works. This would ostensibly allow people in creative industries like writing, composing, etc. can have a livelihood since they do not produce tangible goods like machinists, farmers, etc. It's supposed to encourage content creators to create new works for the greater public good.
But they don't. Sure, people write new books and make new songs, but the incentive isn't really there anymore. Most copyrights nowadays are held by corporations, not people. I personally believe that this is one of the factors that contributed to the emerging anti-copyright movement (copyleft, creative commons, etc.)
For copyright to reform, changes need to be made. One day the system may be functionally obsolete if people continue to give up their copyrights as it, and its enforcers, is being viewed as a less palatable scheme more and more over time. A good start, in my opinion, would be:
1) Bring down copyright back to reasonable terms - something like 5-10 years. How often do books/music/etc. make money after the first few years? Certainly not enough to justify such a long copyright.
2) Make it so only people - not corporations - can hold copyrights. Copyright cartels literally sit on their duffs getting fat off of royalties and trying to protect that money. It's the very definition of protection money and most of the time it doesn't even go to the artists themselves anyway.
3) Make fines in the case of restitution more reasonable. A fine of hundreds of dollars for a song that can be bought for $0.99 is patently ridiculous. Restitution on fair market value with a 200%-300% penalty would be more than fair enough to make up any money lost.
Ultimately, reforms like these will help unclog the courts and make it much more likely that money actually gets into the artist's hands - where it's intended. The RIAA is necessary in some ways - like a union for artists. But rather than working for the artists, the artists work for them. Put the power back in the hands of the creators.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you honestly expect people to be able to do everything in their head?
How about we just get rid of cars. I mean, people should walk everywhere!
And they get very dizzy from their toilets flushing in the opposite direction all the time.
Well no wonder Homer has so many heart attacks!
Just as some people are susceptible to overeating. What are we going to do next, ban McDonald's? Heart disease kills how many people now?
If it's about risks and dangers, marijuana is very, very low on the list when it comes to health. Now when it comes to the law... well, a cheeseburger is more likely to kill you but you're not going to get 2 years in jail for eating one.
I'm assuming that CAPTCHA stores the correct answer in such a way that it can't be directly read by a bot - the CAPTCHA has to be solved.
Why don't they just use CAPTCHAs that ask questions that are artistic, subjective, etc.? Smoe examples, using pictures I searched for on flickr:
1) What color is this fruit?
2) What kind of animal is this?
3) How many rungs are on this ladder?
All questions that would be easy for a human to ask but are subjective enough that it would be difficult for a computer to answer them.
We could even go for outright trickery, such as this one: How many dogs are in this picture? (Acceptable answers: zero, 0, none, no dogs, etc.)
And just for shits and giggles, we can randomly include letters in pictures to confuse the Hell out of CAPTCHA readers.
The only thing I wonder about something like this - would having multiple possible answers make a CAPTCHA like this stronger or weaker?
This wouldn't solve the CAPTCHA farmer problem, but I think it would solve the bot problem.
This is why. All a CAPTCHA bot would have to do is run a google search.
It would be difficult to have a sufficiently random math-based CAPTCHA scheme that couldn't be cracked by Google's calculator.
Keeping people of below-average intelligence off of my website? That doesn't sound like discrimination, that sounds like reduced costs and maintenance in tech support.
I think forcing everyone who uses a video camera to dress up like a French cheerleader would fall under cruel and unusual punishment.
I wouldn't really call systems with sensitive data that they were stupid enough to connect to the Internet "secure".
Why can't NASA just patch into the military private net for sending data to its various colleagues around the world?
Hey now, you gotta respect the religious right. They were makin' up stories that break most of the laws of physics and science before we even knew they existed!
Now that takes dedication - precognitive ignorance.
Monogamy (enforced by law/church) was a way of reducing societal violence.
Exactly. It's worked so well, we haven't seen crimes of passion for generations.
Oh wait.
Orderlies also pick up the slack here, too.
Replace "marijuana" with the next most popular drug for young people in college (cocaine, speed, ecstasy) and it still works.
It's distributed risk. You don't have to go out looking for a dealer because somebody else already knows one.
Exactly! Plus, if everyone is smoking weed, then the bacteria will be too lazy to mutate and just veg out.
No, how about we let it be decided at the STATE LEVEL? Let the individual states decide their own drug laws, not the federal government.
Because one of the major problems with the system is the insane federal mandatory sentencing laws.
A judge has absolutely NO discretion with a case like that if it comes down to a conviction. Got an ounce of weed? Say goodbye to a few years of your life - whether you were dealing or not.
Getting that repealed and having it moved down to a misdemeanor is a step in the right direction.
If I wanted to find meth, it would probably take me weeks, or months. I don't even know where to start.
No, it wouldn't. It would take you a couple days at most.
First off, you have your immediate friends. Even those that say they "wouldn't ever do drugs" - odds are one of them does some kind of illegal drug if you've more than one or two close friends. Weed, speed, coke, etc.
Failing option one, just go to where young people congretate like a college. Go up to someone and ask if they know where you can get some weed - a relatively innocuous and common question on many campuses.
When you get to a dealer, see if he knows someone that can get you your drug of choice. (He might even have it himself.) Once you've done this you have an established contact where you can pretty much get more any time you'd like.
It's really not as hard as you make it out to be. It's frightening easy, in fact. Hell, I could buy drugs in my high school. IN my high school. I went to class with at least one weed dealer than I knew of. I'm sure I could have found stronger substances easily if I so desired. I'm not one to use most drugs, but if I had wanted to find them it wouldn't have been all that hard.
No, you don't. The government could save a Hell of a lot of money by abolishing prohibition of certain drugs - even just starting with marijuana.
The government doesn't have a right to tell you what you can and can't put inside your own body.
Regrettably, currently illegal drugs don't really have lobbies on the same scale that tobacco and alcohol companies have.
The thing is, anyone could get to it readily and easily. The only value would be in seeing a live performance or getting a dead tree copy, etc.
Unless the RIAA wants to spontaneously develop a theater company, there wouldn't be much they could do aside from work with concerts and radio stations.
One of the saddest problems with ridiculously long copyright terms is that you basically lose loads of stuff because they're out of print, and the person controlling the copyright has no financial interest in a reissue -- but society would benefit enormously from having free access to it. Or you find something, but you don't know who has the rights to it, and it would be quite expensive to track them down (when the people involved might be dead, or have forgotten about it, and ownership has passed to some as-yet unknown third party).
I think "out of print" is irrelevant in the age of cheap disk space and bandwidth. There's plenty of stuff that would be nigh impossible to find an original hard copy of such as the Star Wars Christmas Special (in this case, a first generation VHS or Betamax from the original broadcast).
Books? Text is cheap when it comes to data. I recall learning in computer class many, many years ago that a 1.44MB floppy disk (not even compressed!) could store over 1,000 pages of text. PDFs aren't that much larger, either - most PDFs of books I've seen are in the tens to hundreds megabyte range.
I think an important part of reform would be an online, easily-accessible copyright registry that's largely automated. A simple database that could be sorted by medium, artist, etc. It shows the date the copyright was filed as well as the date it was approved and took effect. Set up a filter so you can see which material in which subject are public domain and which material is not yet in public domain.
From here, it's a matter of actually storing the material. Having one place host something means its bound to get hammered for bandwidth if its popular. Recording studios could set up archive servers with torrents and make use of sites like rapidshare where files could be downloaded legally after the copyright expires. Once its out on the net, there will always be a copy out there somewhere. Once its legal to share a majority of the material, people won't have to cower in fear behind proxies and Peerguardian. We can organize and work as a society to preserve and distribute this material as best we can.
The only way something is "lost" is if it is never uploaded in the first place. Anyone who records music can make a MP3 easily, even if they rip from the master CD from a recording studio. Anyone who writes a book could easily request a proof PDF from the publisher. I don't think it's as big of a problem as you envision it.
More and more people are regarding copyright as this nasty thing that just funnels money into fat cartels so they can get fatter, and its not being used. If this system isn't reformed, then it is going to be largely obsolete in a few decades time. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Jonny C - it's already begun.
When the Hell did I sign a contract saying I can't sell stuff *I* bought for less than X amount of money?
But I'd love to see a Presidential-elect playlist.
1) Queen - "We Are The Champions"
2) Journey - "Don't Stop Believin'"
3) The Presidents of the United States of America - "Lump"
This would be a fun drinking game.
Well, go over the whole thing with him and get his consent. Have him sign a paper.
Leave the room, get a new clipboard, repeat. 10/10 times and I'd say you have consent.
...and his wife has of course visibly aged, he's not surprised by her current appearance.
Well of course not, he hasn't seen her in years!
When the independent's work expires, no one would make any money from it. It would be free. Copy it left and right.
The fact is that wanton copyright infringement is occurring. As copyright holders, the RIAA does in fact have the right to go after the infringers.
Yes, they do. I don't think that we'd have had a problem with them if they followed the rules of the game. The problem is that they keep changing the rules in their favor to make money.
The U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to enact copyright laws, and in 1790 they did. The original copyright term was 14 years with the right to renew for an additional 14 year term. So, at most, 28 years.
But in the last 200 years, the copyright has been extended 5 or 6 times to a point where it's flat-out ridiculous. Most artists who create a song (under the current terms) will be dead before their works enter the public domain.
Copyright is, in modern times, basically meant to protect content creators' works so they can exclusively make money from those works. This would ostensibly allow people in creative industries like writing, composing, etc. can have a livelihood since they do not produce tangible goods like machinists, farmers, etc. It's supposed to encourage content creators to create new works for the greater public good.
But they don't. Sure, people write new books and make new songs, but the incentive isn't really there anymore. Most copyrights nowadays are held by corporations, not people. I personally believe that this is one of the factors that contributed to the emerging anti-copyright movement (copyleft, creative commons, etc.)
For copyright to reform, changes need to be made. One day the system may be functionally obsolete if people continue to give up their copyrights as it, and its enforcers, is being viewed as a less palatable scheme more and more over time. A good start, in my opinion, would be:
1) Bring down copyright back to reasonable terms - something like 5-10 years. How often do books/music/etc. make money after the first few years? Certainly not enough to justify such a long copyright.
2) Make it so only people - not corporations - can hold copyrights. Copyright cartels literally sit on their duffs getting fat off of royalties and trying to protect that money. It's the very definition of protection money and most of the time it doesn't even go to the artists themselves anyway.
3) Make fines in the case of restitution more reasonable. A fine of hundreds of dollars for a song that can be bought for $0.99 is patently ridiculous. Restitution on fair market value with a 200%-300% penalty would be more than fair enough to make up any money lost.
Ultimately, reforms like these will help unclog the courts and make it much more likely that money actually gets into the artist's hands - where it's intended. The RIAA is necessary in some ways - like a union for artists. But rather than working for the artists, the artists work for them. Put the power back in the hands of the creators.