>But you never know when something is going to be in demand. Some company like Microsoft should never be able to go "Jackpot! I can use that >formerly copyrighted material in this marketing campaign, I can make millions because it is still popular, I won't have to pay a dime for it, AND >the artists who made it is still alive to see me make millions off their work." According to you, this is exactly what should have happened.
So a company like Disney shouldn't have been able to say: "Jackpot, we'll use this story by Hans Christian Anderson, that one by Alexandre Dumas [etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum] to base a movie on since it's still popular and there is no more copyright on it" ?
Yet they could, and then they gained copyright on their derivative work. Now the company that has made the MOST MONEY OF ANYBODY EVER out of using public domain works is fighting like cats in a sack to keep THEIR works from ever becoming public domain in turn.
Basically, it's hipocrisy, the very same companies that MADE a fortune out of what went into the public domain before, is now using those fortunes to ensure they never contribute to it themselves. The purpose of copyright is to make the public domain as large as possible - anything else has nothing to do with the conversation.
Should artists earn for years or just once off ? It doesn't matter one IOTA to the debate of what copyright should be. What matter is WHAT WILL MAKE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN THE BIGGEST. A copyrighted work benifits one person or company only, a public domain work benifits all of society now and for eternity. The purpose of copyright is to make the public domain bigger. If lifetime royalties will make it bigger over-all, then life-time royalties it is, if not, then it's once-off. I would say the best balance may be something like partial public domain after 5 years (where only commercial uses/copying remain restricted so normal folk aren't affected) and complete public domain release after 10 for MOST types of works. I also agree with Richard Stallman that copyright should classify works and copyright terms should vary. Software should have no copyright at all, opinion pieces and editorials should have eternal copyright (since derivative works and other public domain uses make no SENSE there and can in fact REDUCE the value of the piece to society).
>but uncomfortable because he's being kinda creepy.
Sorry, let me get this straight ? Being 'creepy' should be against the law according to you ? You do realize that to most of the rest of the planet the average slashdotter's entire LIFE is 'kinda creepy' don't you ? Living in a basement. Watches porn but doesn't have the spherical appendages to talk to actual females... on the rare occasions he tries he looks/sounds/acts in way that makes their 'stalker alert' neurons fire (however true or false it may be of the specific slashdotter)...
On the other hand... I find cheerleaders and commerialist drones to be 'kinda creepy'. I find absolutely ANYBODY who wears a pair of sketchers shoes with a picture of Che to be SERIOUSLY creepy (do they not REALIZE that their outfit is simultaneously promoting two ideals that are directly contradictory ?)... I would love to be able to ban that, but I know I SHOULDN'T be able to ban it, because if I can ban what I find creepy, then everyone can... and then anything except the utmost of conformist behavior will very soon be banned. I grew up in a country and culture that was like that, it took us just short of a civil war to change it - trust me, you do NOT want to live in a world where being different is considered illegal, or grounds to have less rights. I say it again: taking a picture (no matter what off) is an artform, artforms are expression, and expression is legally protected free speech. You may not like his methods, or what he took pictures of, or where - but none of that changes that he was stopped from creating a piece of art for absolutely no good reason. Being 'creepy' is NOT a good reason, it's not even a bad reason - it's no reason at all. If he was a bit eccentric, well he's an artist - most of them are a bit eccentric, it's part of what makes them good at it.
In Nigeria. The company I worked for used to hire a lot of fresh-out-of-school interns with no experience and train them up so they could then get better jobs outside (it was part of our CSR to do skills development). Sort of like an internship, but they earned a salary. While I was on a project there, one of the 'youngsters' as we called them was asked to come join me on the project to learn. He had never been on a plane before, or out of South Africa. So of course he took LOTS of pictures, including of the airport in Lagos - since these things were all new to him.
Next thing he knew, he gets arrested by airport police - his pictures of airplanes apparently constituted industrial espionage !
Now how you can be guilty of industrial espionage against a country for taking pictures of technology NOT DEVELOPED IN THAT COUNTRY, and on the market to the whole world for 30 years (try finding a plane younger than that in Nigeria) I don't know, but that was their excuse. I got one of my local contacts to go bail him out, a bit of money changed hands (this WAS Nigeria after all) and he was released with the charges dropped.
I just never expected that the idiocies of corrupt guards (whether they are private security acting for corporate overlords or cops acting for the state is really rather irrelevant) being able to intimidate people out of basic rights (taking a picture is a form of art, that's expression = free speech) happening in the so-called DEVELOPED world. You EXPECT that kind of bullshit to happen in Nigeria, you don't expect it in the USA. Mind you, these days that's not so true anymore, recent history has made me believe that the US's love affair with civil liberties is pure lip service.
Hell yeah ! Uplink was the first game I ever bought commercially. It was a really great game and I played it on Linux for a long time, and then hacked it up to create my own cheatputers just to see where I could take it.
Introversion does things right. I don't buy many games, but I don't pirate many either. I have too little time for gaming but I can say outright that I have NEVER bought a game I hadn't tried before. I bought the prince of persia series as an omnibus pack in a bargain bin because it was cheap and I had played it on my brother's box earlier and liked the style. I bought UT2004 on the day it was released - and my number one reason for buying it was that it came with a Linux installer. I have bought Doom3 and Quake4 for the same reason.
Basically, PoP GTAVC was the only games I ever bought WITHOUT a Linux version - and I bought that only because I knew it.
Mostly my opinion is that being a linux user, I would probably if I really wanted a game that didn't sell with a native linux version, I would pirate it - if only because a pirate copy is usually a LOT easier to get going under wine (which really isn't very good at copy-protection).
For me, wine works well, in fact on my previous video card GTA:VC was MUCH more playable under wine than on windows. There was a bug in GTA with that specific nvidia card of some sort that caused massive screen corruption (could be DX+card too, dunno) - wine didn't have that problem as it ended up rendering through openGL which NVidia has always been very cool at supporting (too bad they SUCK at 2D acceleration which is why I'll never buy another NVidia card).
>McDonald's food sales compare with the profits from the sale of its unwanted real estate and so on. Ray Krog is on record as stating that McDonald's core business is PROPERTY - not burgers. As he put it: everyone I ever met can make a better hamburger than McDonalds- none of them are rich though. What McDonalds did so well was to let you finance the cost of the franchise (with it's massive brand recognition and marketing power) by using the bond on the property where you wanted to put it. The result is that McDonalds corporation now owns many of the most valuable street corners in all the biggest cities in the world: and that lets you finance any other investment you care to make. When the franchise no longer works in the region (it became less residential and more commercial as an area) - you can rent or sell out the property you got there at massive profits over the cost of giving somebody a franchise there ones. If the franchise never fails, you ultimately end up earning not only repetitive franchise-fees but rent on the property as well !
Did I say they didn't ? I agree they do - often anyway. Actually every form of government we have tried so far denigrates into tyranny unless you actively and constantly fight to keep the limits on it's power in place. The kind of constitutional democracy the US and South Africa has are designed to give the people the means to do so (by placing the governments power secondary to the constitution with a court that can take away laws that are unconstitutional). It isn't perfect (as it still depends on having enough people who are informed enough to actually use those means - but at least it gives us such means.
In South Africa I think we did one thing better than the US though - the constitutional court is NOT appointed BY the government (I think that is your stupidest mistake, having the government's watchdog appointed BY the government it's supposed to watch over is just not sensible), it is appointed by the judiciary, same as any other judges and subject to the judiciary review systems, same as all other courts. We consider the independence of our court system from all other aspects of government (including the legislature) to be an absolute cornerstone of our democracy. Here it has been the rule, rather than the exception, for good constitutional court cases to defeat government laws that tried to reduce civil liberties.
Where laws are unfair, people go to the court, win cases (and I mean ordinary Joe Sixpack's) and the laws are changed. That is why we got gay marriage so easily - one court case was all it took. That is why we could make it illegal for a woman to give up a child for adoption without the consent of the father (regardless of marital state and in contrast to the law before) - it took one case by a father who wanted to take care of the child his ex-girlfriend did not want. It is why our government's stupidity about HIV did not prevent the availability of Nevirapine to pregnant women and rape victims (despite serious efforts by the minister of health to ban it) - the court ruled that it's unconstitutional to prevent people access to a lifesaving drug - especially unborn children - and FORCED the government to start a program to make nevirapine available for free in state hospitals.
I am not really praising my country so much -just showing that a well thought-out system of constitutional limitation on democracy can sufficiently counteract the tendency of democracy to denigrate into tyranny to (hopefully) keep the people mostly free and using examples from my own experience.
I would say that proves that Washington knew what happens when a person has too much power for too long - and was wise enough to know he wouldn't be immune to it forever, and thus protected his own integrity by not accepting it in the first place. I would call that very noble. It takes true wisdom to realise that you are as bad as everyone else and to care enough for other people not to risk becoming worse later.
>Power only reliably corrupts if it is linked with immunity, and even then, it's not the power doing the work. If you remove immunity, people will only be as corrupt as their own nature.
I just don't agree with you at all. Immunity is also a corrupter, a very big one - but just because immunity is a corrupter doesn't mean power isn't - to use your own example - sorry I don't think there IS such a thing as a non-corrupt CEO (at least, of a non-trivial business). The CEO is corrupt, and he is more corrupt than before he was CEO and less than he will be after ten years as a CEO. No, this will not get him flak from his shareholders - on the contrary, his corruption is their benefit. The most reliably stories on/. every day is of corporate corruption. The reality that if the cost of weasling out of legal consequences are less than the cost of following the law - then they choose to break the law. That is corporate corruption, and it requires a corrupt CEO for that to happen. Shareholders do not, as a rule, fire a CEO for increasing shareholder value, regardless of how he did it - this is, at least in part, because to have enough shares to be able to influence the hiring/firing of the CEO meaningfully you have to be quite powerful (or at least greedy) yourself (and greed is certainly a corrupter, personally I think power is a bigger one, but there is no real way to measure it so it's a matter of opinion - the two usually go together though).
Basically - a person who isn't corrupt at all (well assuming such a person could exist) - would not become either a school shooter OR a CEO, he would be dirtpoor and spend his entire life working for peanuts unable to survive in a world where literally every single other person lie, cheat and steal as a matter of course. The amount we lie, cheat and steal is, first and foremost, determined by the amount we CAN lie, cheat and steal. Our conscience only comes into play as a secondary concern. For most of us, it stops us short of the big thefts or the terrible lies or cheating people with less than us. That's why most of us will never be CEO's (please note: I never said it's the ONLY reason, just that I think it's a major one). But now, even for a person who is fairly honest as a matter of course, when the amount you can lie, cheat and steal increases to "everything" (which is what absolute power means) - well nobody is so honest that you can eternally keep your hand out of a cookie jar - sooner or later, you're going to take a cookie, once you take the first one... the next one comes easier. Sooner or later, you're eating everyones cookies - and now you cannot dare relinquish power because you know that if anybody else gets it while you're still alive, they are going to discover where all the cookies went and you'll get the spanking you deserve, so now holding on to power at all costs becomes a survival requirement... The scenario I just described is exactly how Robert Mugabe went from leading to freedom a country that was considered the bread bin of Southern Africa, to being a despotic maniac that left that same country in starvation (it takes skill to make the largest agricultural producer in one of the best agricultural regions on the planet starve).
So, I'm not saying immunity is not a corrupter, but immunity usually comes with power -and don't, for one second, delude yourself into thinking only one thing causes corruption, or that power is not by default a corrupting influence. If you accept (as I do) that merely WANTING power in the first place IS corruption (a fairly benign corruption unless it becomes too strong a want) then you have to accept the rest - even if you do not, the rest doesn't become untrue - you just changed the logical route, not the end-location.
Oh, and your school-shooters... well I think a large part of their motivation IS power lust, in their case it's the frustration of having absolutely no way to fulfill that power lust that ultimately drives them to an act of insanity which DOES give them power over others (however briefly). Power corrupts but so does wanting it, no matter how little you start with.
>If power corrupts, why are powerless "small-fries" corrupted? Did I ever say ONLY power corrupts ? Lots of things corrupt, and not one of us is entirely uncorrupted. Power just happens to be one of the most reliable corrupters, and because the very desire to HAVE power is already corruption... well the more you get, the more corrupt you must become.
Yes this is a blanket statements and a few rare exceptions have existed in history - but betting your nation's welfare on rare exceptions turning up is not a reliable enough system for my liking.
Douglas Adams put it all rather better than I could: Anybody who is capable of getting himself made president, should on no account be allowed to become president.
Trouble is - kings breed kings, and sooner or later your philosopher-kingdom is a tyranny. Even if you can rule that out, power corrupts and nobody is incorruptible. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. Philosopher kings become tyrants given enough time. Robert Mugabe was deemed a hero of freedom and democracy 30 years ago - now he is nothing short of a power-mad tyrant who will rather let his people starve than to let anybody else be in charge. Same person, only difference is too much power for too long.
It took humanity at least 6 milenniums to figure this out - I am not, at all, sure that I would like to forget what we learned.
I suggest the following excercise. Remind yourself that if YOU got enough power, you would start out the ultimate force for good in society -but one day, you WILL wake and discover you are a mad dictator. You won't be able to recognize it after the fact. You won't be able to stop it. The only way it could fail to happen is if your power is removed fast enough. That's why presidents in most free countries have term limits. The idea is to get them out before they get TOO badly corrupted.
All security needs some way to identify a person to a computer, which should be as hard as possible to fake. Biometrics rely on unique (but not unfakeable) biological traits of a person, passwords rely on knowledge which hopefully nobody else has - they however rely on custom hardware to get this biological data (e.g. fingerprint scanners) - which makes them wholly unsuitable for the web.
One possible replacement for passwords is security keys, which now relies on not letting anybody else get access to a certain file. The fact that those, by themselves, are not secure enough (as getting a file once now opens up the whole world it's used on) is why most key-based authentication systems allow you to protect the key itself with a passphrase. It can still be more secure as you can prevent the servers from accepting passwords so they cannot be so easily brute-forced but if somebody gets the keyfile, bruteforcing the passphrase is perhaps even EASIER as he can do it on his own machine where it cannot be logged by the target.
Replacing the key with a picture or a sound file won't help much - unless you can protect access to the file... which leaves you right back where you started. Even if you just send a hash based on it (so it cannot be ripped from a server) anybody who gets the file (and knows what file to get) has all your access. And now... there isn't even a pass phrase to protect it.
The fundamental problem of all security remains - the identifying information needs to be limited to a single person. Whether that is something in his head you try to stop others from guessing or brute-forcing, or something about his body or a file on his computer - there is still no real way to make sure it cannot be faked.
You could come up with a billion variations on the theme. KDE has the option to lock the screen if a bluetooth device is out of range, and unlock it if it comes back into range (I'm sure other desktops/OS's have similar tools) - now you rely on an object (like a cellphone) being owned by a certain user and hard to get without that person noticing - but you're back to why we don't use fingerprint scans to log onto websites. Users need trusted hardware for it to work (trusted by the service provider I mean) - the only way to prevent any old scanner with a picture of somebody's thumb (and who has never taken one of those by accident ?) - that are not common and are expensive. Even if you could make it trusted, when you cannot see the user, you cannot be sure his hardware isn't compromised. Even if you lock the hardware with a secret key (DRM style) you still cannot prevent it being fooled with a picture of somebody's thumb (and who hasn't taken a few of those by accident over the years ?)
Ultimately, we won't really have better security until we crack the problem of identifying a person who is somewhere else. Even the most draconian approaches won't work, if you require a webcam stream of the person - that won't be impossible to fake either, in fact since nobody could monitor all of them, all of the time, moving the cam or sending back a recording will be ridiculously easy.
In short this is just another attempt to come up with a better kind of keyfile - and frankly, it's not even as good as the ones we have - and nobody has really grokked a better way to solve the identity of a distant person problem yet.
>This technology could make an invisible cloak, not an invisibility cloak. You could see right through the cloak, at the person wearing it. Eerm... we already HAVE that ! - Just use something transparent !
We do not (yet) have anything that can do full transparency but some materials come remarkably close. It doesn't fit they story anyway. Why would you bend light to get transparency when simple letting it through will do the same job ?
So how can you make a person invisible ? Well you could make him translucent... kind of a problem though since most of the stuff he is made out of isn't transparent so you'll probably kill him replacing it all with glass or something. Alternative ? Bend the light around him. That IS exactly what is being talked about here - you fail.
>A true invisibility cloak must gather every incident photon and then re-emit it out the other side of the cloak as if it had passed through the wearer. That would >require a highly magical system of fiberoptic cables (currently impossible), or else require measuring both the velocity and position of each photon (forever possible).
Yes, it's extremely hard, easier than to make a transparent person though. And for that matter, a translucent material that becomes translucent by bending light around it would be... well... stupid... it's easier to make THOSE by using something like plastic that just lets the light through. Nobody said the tech was finished, this was step one toward the tech for bending the photon's around the object - we're a few years (at least) from having it in practical application. So in short, your 'currently impossible)' just became a little closer to the time when it will NOT be 'current' anymore. They do NOT however use fiber-optic cables, they use metamaterials that rely on their chemical structure to get around the limitations of trying to build a billion cables.
>It would also have to do something with all the photons being emitted by the wearer, particularly the infrared photons (heat rays). -1 Redundant.
Even if it didn't do that - you would only be visible to people with IR goggles - that is enough for a LOT of uses.
To get my laptop past US customs without having it 'confiscated'...
Seriously though - how long do you think until any tech like this is restricted to military use only ? If you actually do achieve human-level visible-spectrum invisibility (even if you have to move very slowly to avoid being caught by reflection shifts and such and have to avoid anybody with IR) - it will be banned for civilian use like a shot. The people who want it for 'hunting purposes' will kick up a fuss but we couldn't take the risk of an invisible man sneaking into the white house and farting on the president's desk now could we ?
Okay... I tried to become serious but I failed... let's try this again: Considering the real security implications of true invisibility from the naked eye - do you think it will be banned/restricted ? Do you think it SHOULD be banned or restricted ?
I know Iraq is in the Middle East, but the Middle East just happens to be ON the Continent of Africa...
While there is a known difference (a cultural division though, not a physical one) between the Arab World and the African world - when we refer to that we say "Sub-Saharan Africa" - when we talk about both, we typically say "Africa".
Seriously though. There are many industry specific apps for Linux, but perhaps not enough. They come when somebody writes them. Everyday this problem is becoming smaller - what does he want ? A miracle ? Then put your money where your mouth is.
How about going the ID route ? Write the engine with one level and make it FOSS. Then license the engine for commercial use if you want, but more importantly - sell the game data for the other levels.
If the game is good, everybody at the end of level one will want the rest - and if the price is right, you'll get it sold.
Who says I don't have everything you do ? I DO ! I have all the same protections, and I can accrue days over years. BUT my employer is legally NOT allowed to enter into an employment contract with LESS than 14 days of paid leave (not counting sick leave etc).
When I quit/get fired/whatever - any unused days have to be paid back.
I don't know about other countries in this regard but I must defend the system here because it works well. Nobody forces me to do anything, but all workers know they can GET a holiday when they need one - there is no excuse for an employer to work you into burnout, and since leave is protected by law there is (almost) no pressure not to use it when you want. Employers cannot DARE to put you under pressure not to take leave, they can request you take it later (after a deadline) but even then HAVE to give a viable and reasonable alternative - not doing so makes them liable to huge legal costs. In short, workers rights taken care off. Corporate productivity boosted (because workers actually take holidays and can come back refreshed and energized).
Really ? According to an article I read (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the US is the ONLY industrialized nation where annual leave is not a legal requirement. Heck, most DEVELOPING countries have it as a requirement. 14 days a year in South Africa (and if you don't use them all, they have to pay you for it), a full month in Brazil, 2 months in Germany. And the grand irony - legally protected annual leave has been proven to INCREASE corporate productivity (as much as any economic idea is ever proven anyways).
This reminds me of when superman all but destroyed the KKK back in the 50's. Back then the superman radio show was one of the most popular on the air, and the KKK was a powerful secret society of criminals far beyond what it is today. The producers of the show decided to take the KKK on. They got an undercover reporter (sorry, I forgot his name) who slowly worked his way into a particular klan group. Once he was fully in, the next episode of the show had Superman breaking up a meeting - and all the passwords used by the characters were the real passwords of the klan. There was panic in the klan - their children were running around quoting their passwords ! The next week, half the members didn't show up for the meeting, the remainder hurriedly changed the passwords. The next episode of Superman had him bust up another meeting - with the NEW passwords all cited correctly !
The week after that, only 3 people showed up for the meeting. The Klan NEVER really recovered from that, their membership remains dwindled and their power minor to this day.
All in all, a very good outcome - proving a few things. Firstly that fiction really can make the world a better place. Secondly that sometimes the best solution to a problem isn't the law (which had been failing to shut down the klan for about 60 years by this point). And it all worked, because one man took the risk of lying about his identity and believes to infiltrate them and learn the secrets they didn't want known.
By your measurements - somebody trying to do the same thing on the web today is guilty of a crime ?
Lori Drew is guilty of reckless endangerment at the very least. Sure it would be a difficult case to prove since she used very novel methods - but there is no doubt in my mind that her actions were premeditated and intentionally harmful - somebody died because of them - and that fitst the bill for reckless endangerment. Many people have, in the past, used novel methods to commit a crime and made it harder to prove - hell everybody who ever wiped their prints off the gun did just that - but we didn't outlaw dishrags now did we ?
The law needs to simply find ways to prove the malicious intent. If you deliberately perform actions intended to harm somebody - that is reckless endangerment. If the person dies as a result of the harm, that is manslaughter (the law, at least in South Africa, defines manslaughter as: to cause a death where a reasonable man would not have caused it). At least under South African law this case would be cut and dried. A reasonable person would not have done what she did, and somebody died. Manslaughter by definition. Making it a crime to lie about your identity online would be trying to (a) solve the wrong problem and (b) cause massive additional harm.
Try her for manslaughter say I, or sue her for wrongful death. This is not THAT hard a case to prove.
>That doesn't change the fact that GNU is a copy of Unix. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, and I never said that FOSS doesn't innovate. I was just pointing out to the OP that (at least >in the software business) everyone copies sometimes.
You are right about that, I wasn't arguing the point - just adding the important highlight that the REASON wasn't for lack of WANTING or ABILITY to do something new.
>I'm not sure what set you off on the whole KDE4 vs Vista rant, Actually I specifically compared KDE4.1 which is the snazzy new desktop - it is NOT similar to windows. I pointed it out as an example of many radical new desktop innovations brought together in one project from the FOSS world. Lower level things like python are ALSO great innovations, that started out and remain FOSS.
Point to ponder though... would this be where there WAS a fire ? In which case it could be deemed an attempt at warning people - misguided in implementation but certainly it should be protected speech as the goal was after all to SAVE lives.
If you shout it without cause and people die in the resulting panic, even if the speech is protected I'll be very surprised if you aren't at LEAST liable to a civil suit for reckless endangerment. Just because you have a right to say anything, doesn't mean you aren't responsible for the consequences if you deliberately deceive people in a dangerous way. Heck - free speech cannot be held to protect a fraudster. If I sell snake-oil I am still committing a crime, the crime may not be to say 'this cures snakebite' - but selling it under a false premise remains fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
>But you never know when something is going to be in demand. Some company like Microsoft should never be able to go "Jackpot! I can use that >formerly copyrighted material in this marketing campaign, I can make millions because it is still popular, I won't have to pay a dime for it, AND >the artists who made it is still alive to see me make millions off their work." According to you, this is exactly what should have happened.
So a company like Disney shouldn't have been able to say: "Jackpot, we'll use this story by Hans Christian Anderson, that one by Alexandre Dumas [etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum] to base a movie on since it's still popular and there is no more copyright on it" ?
Yet they could, and then they gained copyright on their derivative work. Now the company that has made the MOST MONEY OF ANYBODY EVER out of using public domain works is fighting like cats in a sack to keep THEIR works from ever becoming public domain in turn.
Basically, it's hipocrisy, the very same companies that MADE a fortune out of what went into the public domain before, is now using those fortunes to ensure they never contribute to it themselves. The purpose of copyright is to make the public domain as large as possible - anything else has nothing to do with the conversation.
Should artists earn for years or just once off ? It doesn't matter one IOTA to the debate of what copyright should be. What matter is WHAT WILL MAKE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN THE BIGGEST. A copyrighted work benifits one person or company only, a public domain work benifits all of society now and for eternity. The purpose of copyright is to make the public domain bigger.
If lifetime royalties will make it bigger over-all, then life-time royalties it is, if not, then it's once-off.
I would say the best balance may be something like partial public domain after 5 years (where only commercial uses/copying remain restricted so normal folk aren't affected) and complete public domain release after 10 for MOST types of works. I also agree with Richard Stallman that copyright should classify works and copyright terms should vary. Software should have no copyright at all, opinion pieces and editorials should have eternal copyright (since derivative works and other public domain uses make no SENSE there and can in fact REDUCE the value of the piece to society).
It's a lie ! A lie !
Those pictures of me and Salma Hayek REALLY HAPPENED !!!!
*sob*
>but uncomfortable because he's being kinda creepy.
Sorry, let me get this straight ? Being 'creepy' should be against the law according to you ? You do realize that to most of the rest of the planet the average slashdotter's entire LIFE is 'kinda creepy' don't you ? Living in a basement. Watches porn but doesn't have the spherical appendages to talk to actual females... on the rare occasions he tries he looks/sounds/acts in way that makes their 'stalker alert' neurons fire (however true or false it may be of the specific slashdotter)...
On the other hand... I find cheerleaders and commerialist drones to be 'kinda creepy'. I find absolutely ANYBODY who wears a pair of sketchers shoes with a picture of Che to be SERIOUSLY creepy (do they not REALIZE that their outfit is simultaneously promoting two ideals that are directly contradictory ?) ... I would love to be able to ban that, but I know I SHOULDN'T be able to ban it, because if I can ban what I find creepy, then everyone can... and then anything except the utmost of conformist behavior will very soon be banned.
I grew up in a country and culture that was like that, it took us just short of a civil war to change it - trust me, you do NOT want to live in a world where being different is considered illegal, or grounds to have less rights.
I say it again: taking a picture (no matter what off) is an artform, artforms are expression, and expression is legally protected free speech.
You may not like his methods, or what he took pictures of, or where - but none of that changes that he was stopped from creating a piece of art for absolutely no good reason. Being 'creepy' is NOT a good reason, it's not even a bad reason - it's no reason at all. If he was a bit eccentric, well he's an artist - most of them are a bit eccentric, it's part of what makes them good at it.
In Nigeria. The company I worked for used to hire a lot of fresh-out-of-school interns with no experience and train them up so they could then get better jobs outside (it was part of our CSR to do skills development). Sort of like an internship, but they earned a salary. While I was on a project there, one of the 'youngsters' as we called them was asked to come join me on the project to learn. He had never been on a plane before, or out of South Africa. So of course he took LOTS of pictures, including of the airport in Lagos - since these things were all new to him.
Next thing he knew, he gets arrested by airport police - his pictures of airplanes apparently constituted industrial espionage !
Now how you can be guilty of industrial espionage against a country for taking pictures of technology NOT DEVELOPED IN THAT COUNTRY, and on the market to the whole world for 30 years (try finding a plane younger than that in Nigeria) I don't know, but that was their excuse.
I got one of my local contacts to go bail him out, a bit of money changed hands (this WAS Nigeria after all) and he was released with the charges dropped.
I just never expected that the idiocies of corrupt guards (whether they are private security acting for corporate overlords or cops acting for the state is really rather irrelevant) being able to intimidate people out of basic rights (taking a picture is a form of art, that's expression = free speech) happening in the so-called DEVELOPED world. You EXPECT that kind of bullshit to happen in Nigeria, you don't expect it in the USA.
Mind you, these days that's not so true anymore, recent history has made me believe that the US's love affair with civil liberties is pure lip service.
Yes, so have you. What's your point ?
Hell yeah !
Uplink was the first game I ever bought commercially. It was a really great game and I played it on Linux for a long time, and then hacked it up to create my own cheatputers just to see where I could take it.
Introversion does things right. I don't buy many games, but I don't pirate many either. I have too little time for gaming but I can say outright that I have NEVER bought a game I hadn't tried before. I bought the prince of persia series as an omnibus pack in a bargain bin because it was cheap and I had played it on my brother's box earlier and liked the style. I bought UT2004 on the day it was released - and my number one reason for buying it was that it came with a Linux installer.
I have bought Doom3 and Quake4 for the same reason.
Basically, PoP GTAVC was the only games I ever bought WITHOUT a Linux version - and I bought that only because I knew it.
Mostly my opinion is that being a linux user, I would probably if I really wanted a game that didn't sell with a native linux version, I would pirate it - if only because a pirate copy is usually a LOT easier to get going under wine (which really isn't very good at copy-protection).
For me, wine works well, in fact on my previous video card GTA:VC was MUCH more playable under wine than on windows. There was a bug in GTA with that specific nvidia card of some sort that caused massive screen corruption (could be DX+card too, dunno) - wine didn't have that problem as it ended up rendering through openGL which NVidia has always been very cool at supporting (too bad they SUCK at 2D acceleration which is why I'll never buy another NVidia card).
>McDonald's food sales compare with the profits from the sale of its unwanted real estate and so on.
Ray Krog is on record as stating that McDonald's core business is PROPERTY - not burgers. As he put it: everyone I ever met can make a better hamburger than McDonalds- none of them are rich though.
What McDonalds did so well was to let you finance the cost of the franchise (with it's massive brand recognition and marketing power) by using the bond on the property where you wanted to put it. The result is that McDonalds corporation now owns many of the most valuable street corners in all the biggest cities in the world: and that lets you finance any other investment you care to make. When the franchise no longer works in the region (it became less residential and more commercial as an area) - you can rent or sell out the property you got there at massive profits over the cost of giving somebody a franchise there ones.
If the franchise never fails, you ultimately end up earning not only repetitive franchise-fees but rent on the property as well !
Did I say they didn't ?
I agree they do - often anyway. Actually every form of government we have tried so far denigrates into tyranny unless you actively and constantly fight to keep the limits on it's power in place. The kind of constitutional democracy the US and South Africa has are designed to give the people the means to do so (by placing the governments power secondary to the constitution with a court that can take away laws that are unconstitutional).
It isn't perfect (as it still depends on having enough people who are informed enough to actually use those means - but at least it gives us such means.
In South Africa I think we did one thing better than the US though - the constitutional court is NOT appointed BY the government (I think that is your stupidest mistake, having the government's watchdog appointed BY the government it's supposed to watch over is just not sensible), it is appointed by the judiciary, same as any other judges and subject to the judiciary review systems, same as all other courts. We consider the independence of our court system from all other aspects of government (including the legislature) to be an absolute cornerstone of our democracy.
Here it has been the rule, rather than the exception, for good constitutional court cases to defeat government laws that tried to reduce civil liberties.
Where laws are unfair, people go to the court, win cases (and I mean ordinary Joe Sixpack's) and the laws are changed. That is why we got gay marriage so easily - one court case was all it took. That is why we could make it illegal for a woman to give up a child for adoption without the consent of the father (regardless of marital state and in contrast to the law before) - it took one case by a father who wanted to take care of the child his ex-girlfriend did not want. It is why our government's stupidity about HIV did not prevent the availability of Nevirapine to pregnant women and rape victims (despite serious efforts by the minister of health to ban it) - the court ruled that it's unconstitutional to prevent people access to a lifesaving drug - especially unborn children - and FORCED the government to start a program to make nevirapine available for free in state hospitals.
I am not really praising my country so much -just showing that a well thought-out system of constitutional limitation on democracy can sufficiently counteract the tendency of democracy to denigrate into tyranny to (hopefully) keep the people mostly free and using examples from my own experience.
I would say that proves that Washington knew what happens when a person has too much power for too long - and was wise enough to know he wouldn't be immune to it forever, and thus protected his own integrity by not accepting it in the first place.
I would call that very noble. It takes true wisdom to realise that you are as bad as everyone else and to care enough for other people not to risk becoming worse later.
>Modded troll.
>Wow. Just wow. I'm speechless.
Anybody who claims he is incorruptible is:
A) Arrogant
B) Stupid
C) In denial
D) Trolling
And only one of those has a mod option.
>Power only reliably corrupts if it is linked with immunity, and even then, it's not the power doing the work. If you remove immunity, people will only be as corrupt as their own nature.
I just don't agree with you at all. Immunity is also a corrupter, a very big one - but just because immunity is a corrupter doesn't mean power isn't - to use your own example - sorry I don't think there IS such a thing as a non-corrupt CEO (at least, of a non-trivial business). The CEO is corrupt, and he is more corrupt than before he was CEO and less than he will be after ten years as a CEO. /. every day is of corporate corruption. The reality that if the cost of weasling out of legal consequences are less than the cost of following the law - then they choose to break the law. That is corporate corruption, and it requires a corrupt CEO for that to happen. Shareholders do not, as a rule, fire a CEO for increasing shareholder value, regardless of how he did it - this is, at least in part, because to have enough shares to be able to influence the hiring/firing of the CEO meaningfully you have to be quite powerful (or at least greedy) yourself (and greed is certainly a corrupter, personally I think power is a bigger one, but there is no real way to measure it so it's a matter of opinion - the two usually go together though).
No, this will not get him flak from his shareholders - on the contrary, his corruption is their benefit. The most reliably stories on
Basically - a person who isn't corrupt at all (well assuming such a person could exist) - would not become either a school shooter OR a CEO, he would be dirtpoor and spend his entire life working for peanuts unable to survive in a world where literally every single other person lie, cheat and steal as a matter of course.
The amount we lie, cheat and steal is, first and foremost, determined by the amount we CAN lie, cheat and steal. Our conscience only comes into play as a secondary concern. For most of us, it stops us short of the big thefts or the terrible lies or cheating people with less than us. That's why most of us will never be CEO's (please note: I never said it's the ONLY reason, just that I think it's a major one).
But now, even for a person who is fairly honest as a matter of course, when the amount you can lie, cheat and steal increases to "everything" (which is what absolute power means) - well nobody is so honest that you can eternally keep your hand out of a cookie jar - sooner or later, you're going to take a cookie, once you take the first one... the next one comes easier. Sooner or later, you're eating everyones cookies - and now you cannot dare relinquish power because you know that if anybody else gets it while you're still alive, they are going to discover where all the cookies went and you'll get the spanking you deserve, so now holding on to power at all costs becomes a survival requirement...
The scenario I just described is exactly how Robert Mugabe went from leading to freedom a country that was considered the bread bin of Southern Africa, to being a despotic maniac that left that same country in starvation (it takes skill to make the largest agricultural producer in one of the best agricultural regions on the planet starve).
So, I'm not saying immunity is not a corrupter, but immunity usually comes with power -and don't, for one second, delude yourself into thinking only one thing causes corruption, or that power is not by default a corrupting influence. If you accept (as I do) that merely WANTING power in the first place IS corruption (a fairly benign corruption unless it becomes too strong a want) then you have to accept the rest - even if you do not, the rest doesn't become untrue - you just changed the logical route, not the end-location.
Oh, and your school-shooters ... well I think a large part of their motivation IS power lust, in their case it's the frustration of having absolutely no way to fulfill that power lust that ultimately drives them to an act of insanity which DOES give them power over others (however briefly). Power corrupts but so does wanting it, no matter how little you start with.
>If power corrupts, why are powerless "small-fries" corrupted?
Did I ever say ONLY power corrupts ? Lots of things corrupt, and not one of us is entirely uncorrupted. Power just happens to be one of the most reliable corrupters, and because the very desire to HAVE power is already corruption... well the more you get, the more corrupt you must become.
Yes this is a blanket statements and a few rare exceptions have existed in history - but betting your nation's welfare on rare exceptions turning up is not a reliable enough system for my liking.
Douglas Adams put it all rather better than I could: Anybody who is capable of getting himself made president, should on no account be allowed to become president.
Trouble is - kings breed kings, and sooner or later your philosopher-kingdom is a tyranny. Even if you can rule that out, power corrupts and nobody is incorruptible. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. Philosopher kings become tyrants given enough time. Robert Mugabe was deemed a hero of freedom and democracy 30 years ago - now he is nothing short of a power-mad tyrant who will rather let his people starve than to let anybody else be in charge.
Same person, only difference is too much power for too long.
It took humanity at least 6 milenniums to figure this out - I am not, at all, sure that I would like to forget what we learned.
I suggest the following excercise. Remind yourself that if YOU got enough power, you would start out the ultimate force for good in society -but one day, you WILL wake and discover you are a mad dictator.
You won't be able to recognize it after the fact. You won't be able to stop it. The only way it could fail to happen is if your power is removed fast enough. That's why presidents in most free countries have term limits. The idea is to get them out before they get TOO badly corrupted.
All security needs some way to identify a person to a computer, which should be as hard as possible to fake. Biometrics rely on unique (but not unfakeable) biological traits of a person, passwords rely on knowledge which hopefully nobody else has - they however rely on custom hardware to get this biological data (e.g. fingerprint scanners) - which makes them wholly unsuitable for the web.
One possible replacement for passwords is security keys, which now relies on not letting anybody else get access to a certain file. The fact that those, by themselves, are not secure enough (as getting a file once now opens up the whole world it's used on) is why most key-based authentication systems allow you to protect the key itself with a passphrase. It can still be more secure as you can prevent the servers from accepting passwords so they cannot be so easily brute-forced but if somebody gets the keyfile, bruteforcing the passphrase is perhaps even EASIER as he can do it on his own machine where it cannot be logged by the target.
Replacing the key with a picture or a sound file won't help much - unless you can protect access to the file... which leaves you right back where you started. Even if you just send a hash based on it (so it cannot be ripped from a server) anybody who gets the file (and knows what file to get) has all your access.
And now... there isn't even a pass phrase to protect it.
The fundamental problem of all security remains - the identifying information needs to be limited to a single person. Whether that is something in his head you try to stop others from guessing or brute-forcing, or something about his body or a file on his computer - there is still no real way to make sure it cannot be faked.
You could come up with a billion variations on the theme. KDE has the option to lock the screen if a bluetooth device is out of range, and unlock it if it comes back into range (I'm sure other desktops/OS's have similar tools) - now you rely on an object (like a cellphone) being owned by a certain user and hard to get without that person noticing - but you're back to why we don't use fingerprint scans to log onto websites. Users need trusted hardware for it to work (trusted by the service provider I mean) - the only way to prevent any old scanner with a picture of somebody's thumb (and who has never taken one of those by accident ?) - that are not common and are expensive. Even if you could make it trusted, when you cannot see the user, you cannot be sure his hardware isn't compromised. Even if you lock the hardware with a secret key (DRM style) you still cannot prevent it being fooled with a picture of somebody's thumb (and who hasn't taken a few of those by accident over the years ?)
Ultimately, we won't really have better security until we crack the problem of identifying a person who is somewhere else. Even the most draconian approaches won't work, if you require a webcam stream of the person - that won't be impossible to fake either, in fact since nobody could monitor all of them, all of the time, moving the cam or sending back a recording will be ridiculously easy.
In short this is just another attempt to come up with a better kind of keyfile - and frankly, it's not even as good as the ones we have - and nobody has really grokked a better way to solve the identity of a distant person problem yet.
>This technology could make an invisible cloak, not an invisibility cloak. You could see right through the cloak, at the person wearing it.
Eerm... we already HAVE that ! - Just use something transparent !
We do not (yet) have anything that can do full transparency but some materials come remarkably close. It doesn't fit they story anyway. Why would you bend light to get transparency when simple letting it through will do the same job ?
So how can you make a person invisible ? Well you could make him translucent... kind of a problem though since most of the stuff he is made out of isn't transparent so you'll probably kill him replacing it all with glass or something.
Alternative ? Bend the light around him. That IS exactly what is being talked about here - you fail.
>A true invisibility cloak must gather every incident photon and then re-emit it out the other side of the cloak as if it had passed through the wearer. That would >require a highly magical system of fiberoptic cables (currently impossible), or else require measuring both the velocity and position of each photon (forever possible).
Yes, it's extremely hard, easier than to make a transparent person though. And for that matter, a translucent material that becomes translucent by bending light around it would be... well ... stupid... it's easier to make THOSE by using something like plastic that just lets the light through.
Nobody said the tech was finished, this was step one toward the tech for bending the photon's around the object - we're a few years (at least) from having it in practical application. So in short, your 'currently impossible)' just became a little closer to the time when it will NOT be 'current' anymore. They do NOT however use fiber-optic cables, they use metamaterials that rely on their chemical structure to get around the limitations of trying to build a billion cables.
>It would also have to do something with all the photons being emitted by the wearer, particularly the infrared photons (heat rays).
-1 Redundant.
Even if it didn't do that - you would only be visible to people with IR goggles - that is enough for a LOT of uses.
To get my laptop past US customs without having it 'confiscated'...
Seriously though - how long do you think until any tech like this is restricted to military use only ? If you actually do achieve human-level visible-spectrum invisibility (even if you have to move very slowly to avoid being caught by reflection shifts and such and have to avoid anybody with IR) - it will be banned for civilian use like a shot. The people who want it for 'hunting purposes' will kick up a fuss but we couldn't take the risk of an invisible man sneaking into the white house and farting on the president's desk now could we ?
Okay... I tried to become serious but I failed... let's try this again:
Considering the real security implications of true invisibility from the naked eye - do you think it will be banned/restricted ? Do you think it SHOULD be banned or restricted ?
I know Iraq is in the Middle East, but the Middle East just happens to be ON the Continent of Africa...
While there is a known difference (a cultural division though, not a physical one) between the Arab World and the African world - when we refer to that we say "Sub-Saharan Africa" - when we talk about both, we typically say "Africa".
So yes... Bush DID invade Africa.
They put the linux trolls on the frontpage now ?
Seriously though. There are many industry specific apps for Linux, but perhaps not enough. They come when somebody writes them. Everyday this problem is becoming smaller - what does he want ? A miracle ? Then put your money where your mouth is.
How about going the ID route ?
Write the engine with one level and make it FOSS.
Then license the engine for commercial use if you want, but more importantly - sell the game data for the other levels.
If the game is good, everybody at the end of level one will want the rest - and if the price is right, you'll get it sold.
More-over, your overheads are WAY lower.
Who says I don't have everything you do ? I DO ! I have all the same protections, and I can accrue days over years. BUT my employer is legally NOT allowed to enter into an employment contract with LESS than 14 days of paid leave (not counting sick leave etc).
When I quit/get fired/whatever - any unused days have to be paid back.
I don't know about other countries in this regard but I must defend the system here because it works well. Nobody forces me to do anything, but all workers know they can GET a holiday when they need one - there is no excuse for an employer to work you into burnout, and since leave is protected by law there is (almost) no pressure not to use it when you want. Employers cannot DARE to put you under pressure not to take leave, they can request you take it later (after a deadline) but even then HAVE to give a viable and reasonable alternative - not doing so makes them liable to huge legal costs. In short, workers rights taken care off. Corporate productivity boosted (because workers actually take holidays and can come back refreshed and energized).
Sorry, your argument is a complete moot point.
Really ? According to an article I read (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the US is the ONLY industrialized nation where annual leave is not a legal requirement. Heck, most DEVELOPING countries have it as a requirement. 14 days a year in South Africa (and if you don't use them all, they have to pay you for it), a full month in Brazil, 2 months in Germany.
And the grand irony - legally protected annual leave has been proven to INCREASE corporate productivity (as much as any economic idea is ever proven anyways).
This reminds me of when superman all but destroyed the KKK back in the 50's. Back then the superman radio show was one of the most popular on the air, and the KKK was a powerful secret society of criminals far beyond what it is today. The producers of the show decided to take the KKK on. They got an undercover reporter (sorry, I forgot his name) who slowly worked his way into a particular klan group. Once he was fully in, the next episode of the show had Superman breaking up a meeting - and all the passwords used by the characters were the real passwords of the klan.
There was panic in the klan - their children were running around quoting their passwords !
The next week, half the members didn't show up for the meeting, the remainder hurriedly changed the passwords. The next episode of Superman had him bust up another meeting - with the NEW passwords all cited correctly !
The week after that, only 3 people showed up for the meeting. The Klan NEVER really recovered from that, their membership remains dwindled and their power minor to this day.
All in all, a very good outcome - proving a few things. Firstly that fiction really can make the world a better place. Secondly that sometimes the best solution to a problem isn't the law (which had been failing to shut down the klan for about 60 years by this point).
And it all worked, because one man took the risk of lying about his identity and believes to infiltrate them and learn the secrets they didn't want known.
By your measurements - somebody trying to do the same thing on the web today is guilty of a crime ?
Lori Drew is guilty of reckless endangerment at the very least. Sure it would be a difficult case to prove since she used very novel methods - but there is no doubt in my mind that her actions were premeditated and intentionally harmful - somebody died because of them - and that fitst the bill for reckless endangerment. Many people have, in the past, used novel methods to commit a crime and made it harder to prove - hell everybody who ever wiped their prints off the gun did just that - but we didn't outlaw dishrags now did we ?
The law needs to simply find ways to prove the malicious intent. If you deliberately perform actions intended to harm somebody - that is reckless endangerment. If the person dies as a result of the harm, that is manslaughter (the law, at least in South Africa, defines manslaughter as: to cause a death where a reasonable man would not have caused it). At least under South African law this case would be cut and dried. A reasonable person would not have done what she did, and somebody died. Manslaughter by definition.
Making it a crime to lie about your identity online would be trying to (a) solve the wrong problem and (b) cause massive additional harm.
Try her for manslaughter say I, or sue her for wrongful death. This is not THAT hard a case to prove.
Apparently... that would be ALL forces then ? :p
>That doesn't change the fact that GNU is a copy of Unix. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, and I never said that FOSS doesn't innovate. I was just pointing out to the OP that (at least >in the software business) everyone copies sometimes.
You are right about that, I wasn't arguing the point - just adding the important highlight that the REASON wasn't for lack of WANTING or ABILITY to do something new.
>I'm not sure what set you off on the whole KDE4 vs Vista rant,
Actually I specifically compared KDE4.1 which is the snazzy new desktop - it is NOT similar to windows. I pointed it out as an example of many radical new desktop innovations brought together in one project from the FOSS world. Lower level things like python are ALSO great innovations, that started out and remain FOSS.
Point to ponder though... would this be where there WAS a fire ? In which case it could be deemed an attempt at warning people - misguided in implementation but certainly it should be protected speech as the goal was after all to SAVE lives.
If you shout it without cause and people die in the resulting panic, even if the speech is protected I'll be very surprised if you aren't at LEAST liable to a civil suit for reckless endangerment. Just because you have a right to say anything, doesn't mean you aren't responsible for the consequences if you deliberately deceive people in a dangerous way. Heck - free speech cannot be held to protect a fraudster. If I sell snake-oil I am still committing a crime, the crime may not be to say 'this cures snakebite' - but selling it under a false premise remains fraud.