So in order to generate enough business to sustain a strongly competitive registration market, we'd probably have to require renewal at shorter intervals
Renewal isn't just important in order to drum up business for registrars, it's important so that public and orphan works actually become usable by the public.
However, even proposals like registering works for $1 every 10 years have been strongly opposed by publishers. Why? The current legal uncertainty means that they don't have to compete with orphan works and that they can potentially retain copyright for their works indefinitely.
Also, we might not be able to do anything like this without violating the Berne Treaty. So perhaps it's just a fantasy. But I really wish we could.
The US has signed some really bad international treaties: Berne is one of them, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which prohibits any kind of rational drug policy, is another. There are more. These usually get passed by special interests while nobody is paying attention, and people are tied into those conventions for perpetuity.
(Not all international conventions and treaties are bad, of course, but separating the good from the bad is hard.)
It seems to me that codifying fair use rights in return for lifetime+50 copyright terms and no requirement for explicit copyright registration was very bad deal.
Without explicit copyright registration, the public domain becomes severely restricted, since the burden to prove that something is public domain is on the user--often an impossible burden.
(I won't even go into why lifetime+50 is not justified either constitutionally or economically.)
Who cares about his opinion? Get out of this corporate mindset where some Steve Jobs or some Microsoft committee decides what features go into the product.
With Linux, all that matters is that some developer finds a feature useful and works on it. When it comes to touch screens, Linux has supported them for longer than OS X has even existed. Linux runs on touch screen PDAs, touch screen embedded systems, and desktops with touch screens attached. There are general purpose drivers for the Wacom devices, which also work with tablets, and there are special purpose drivers for specific devices. There are touch-friendly applications and toolkits, and pen-based text input.
Honestly, I'm getting sick of this stupidity from Windows and Macintosh fanboys where you draw incorrect inferences about how features end up in Linux based on the corporate straight jacket that your pet OS is being developed under, and when you criticize Linux and don't even know what's out there.
Adding more code to a system cannot make it more secure by definition.
According to which definition would that be?
(I generally sympathize with the idea of keeping things very simple in order to help security, but that's a rule of thumb, not something "by definition")
Well, it depends on how you define "literacy", how you measure it, and at what age you measure it. My impression is that many Japanese have trouble with writing the less frequent characters, for example. Think English spelling only much worse.
Yes, but they don't apply to non-citizens outside the country. Why don't they apply? Because if you're not a citizen, you can't even come to the US and sue over this.
Many people use open source even though they already have a paid license for a Microsoft product. So, obviously, open source users are already focusing on value.
The reason we don't want to have warrantless wiretapping is not for people like you and me; it's for this: if the government can listen in on the opposition, it can blackmail them to fall in line politically. So, this case isn't "ironic", it's what you expect to happen when warrantless wiretaps are tolerated, and it's a really bad sign.
Japanese doesn't have "tones", it has pitch stress. Pitch stress would be easy to add to a phonetic writing system, either Romaji or Kana-based; in the case of Japanese, a simple accent would suffice).
Apple does NOT use "proprietary formats" for its iPod, that's just FUD spread around by people who never even tried one.
All the formats you list are proprietary. But the bigger problem is the restrictions on what can connect to the iPod and what applications can run on it.
Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand.
For small players, like the shuffle, drag-and-drop is fine. For large players, disk support and/or MTP support allows a wide range of management apps to work with them.
With iPod, you're stuck with iTunes, which is pretty lousy.
I once had a device where I had to drop and drag. Here's the problem with that: It got extremely cumbersome after a dozen songs. You may think you want "control" but when you have to manage 10,000 songs manually, it's a pain.
That's not the issue. The issue is that there is no way people can write iTunes alternatives for the iPod players because the iPod doesn't use standard protocols, tries to restrict access cryptographically, and prohibits the creation of applications for syncing. And iTunes really sucks badly for managing large numbers of songs; it needs a replacement.
Rendering Japanese in romaji (roman characters) makes it all but unreadable. You lose a massive amount of semantic information.
The same information is lost when speaking or reading out aloud, which is a serious problem with the Japanese language and probably not a good state of affairs. Switching Japanese to a purely phonetic writing system would be very painful, but it might still be the right thing to do.
For Tibetan, the situation is much simpler: the complex writing system serves no semantic purpose at all; replacing it with a simpler system wouldn't change the language or its meaning.
Also, changing your society to match the capabilities of some software is -always- the wrong way.
Sorry to be so blunt, but that's bullshit. Europe made massive changes to its writing systems with the advent of new writing and printing technologies. And that was the right thing to do because it greatly increased literacy.
Tibetan literacy rates historically have been atrocious, and even today, they are worse than many other nations. Reform and simplification of the Tibetan writing system might well be the right thing to do, and the requirements of software generally coincide with sensible simplification.
Combining letters aren't an intrinsic necessity in any language, they are an affectation and a mechanism for keeping people illiterate. European languages used to have them and got rid of them because the only purpose they serve is to restrict access to reading and writing.
Tibetan can be written just fine in an alphabetic style. It would be prudent for the Dalai Lama to make that the standard for the Tibetan community.
I'm not sure what people are trying to prove here. Global warming leads to increased evaporation and so you expect some areas of the Antarctic to accumulate more snow and ice for a while. Furthermore, at the current levels of warming, you wouldn't expect anything to melt in the interior of Antarctica yet. None of that tells us anything about whether global warming is a threat or not. By the time the ice sheets in the interior of Antarctica would start to melt, we'd already have much bigger problems on our hands elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
So in order to generate enough business to sustain a strongly competitive registration market, we'd probably have to require renewal at shorter intervals
Renewal isn't just important in order to drum up business for registrars, it's important so that public and orphan works actually become usable by the public.
However, even proposals like registering works for $1 every 10 years have been strongly opposed by publishers. Why? The current legal uncertainty means that they don't have to compete with orphan works and that they can potentially retain copyright for their works indefinitely.
Also, we might not be able to do anything like this without violating the Berne Treaty. So perhaps it's just a fantasy. But I really wish we could.
The US has signed some really bad international treaties: Berne is one of them, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which prohibits any kind of rational drug policy, is another. There are more. These usually get passed by special interests while nobody is paying attention, and people are tied into those conventions for perpetuity.
(Not all international conventions and treaties are bad, of course, but separating the good from the bad is hard.)
It seems to me that codifying fair use rights in return for lifetime+50 copyright terms and no requirement for explicit copyright registration was very bad deal.
Without explicit copyright registration, the public domain becomes severely restricted, since the burden to prove that something is public domain is on the user--often an impossible burden.
(I won't even go into why lifetime+50 is not justified either constitutionally or economically.)
It took Mathematica many years to become even marginally correct and useful. If Alpha proceeds at the same pace, it won't have any impact at all.
Who cares about his opinion? Get out of this corporate mindset where some Steve Jobs or some Microsoft committee decides what features go into the product.
With Linux, all that matters is that some developer finds a feature useful and works on it. When it comes to touch screens, Linux has supported them for longer than OS X has even existed. Linux runs on touch screen PDAs, touch screen embedded systems, and desktops with touch screens attached. There are general purpose drivers for the Wacom devices, which also work with tablets, and there are special purpose drivers for specific devices. There are touch-friendly applications and toolkits, and pen-based text input.
Honestly, I'm getting sick of this stupidity from Windows and Macintosh fanboys where you draw incorrect inferences about how features end up in Linux based on the corporate straight jacket that your pet OS is being developed under, and when you criticize Linux and don't even know what's out there.
You can use Nokia or Windows mobile with ustream.tv or qik.com. I think they both do live broadcasting and they record the video.
If you happen to be in range of Wifi, they can use that, but they also work over 3G.
As in, that poster is not ironic.
Well, the poster is actually ironic, but not intentionally so.
Adding more code to a system cannot make it more secure by definition.
According to which definition would that be?
(I generally sympathize with the idea of keeping things very simple in order to help security, but that's a rule of thumb, not something "by definition")
Well, it depends on how you define "literacy", how you measure it, and at what age you measure it. My impression is that many Japanese have trouble with writing the less frequent characters, for example. Think English spelling only much worse.
Yes, but they don't apply to non-citizens outside the country. Why don't they apply? Because if you're not a citizen, you can't even come to the US and sue over this.
iTunes works overseas (it's based on your credit card's billing address), Hulu doesn't.
There are plenty of GUIs, tools, and wizards available for Linux. Many people prefer Linux because it's overall easier to administer.
Many people use open source even though they already have a paid license for a Microsoft product. So, obviously, open source users are already focusing on value.
The reason we don't want to have warrantless wiretapping is not for people like you and me; it's for this: if the government can listen in on the opposition, it can blackmail them to fall in line politically. So, this case isn't "ironic", it's what you expect to happen when warrantless wiretaps are tolerated, and it's a really bad sign.
Yeah, if you spend enough time on it and if you're rich enough, you can teach even hard writing systems. Tibet has neither the time nor the money.
I also wonder whether Japanese literacy rates are really as high as claimed.
Japanese doesn't have "tones", it has pitch stress. Pitch stress would be easy to add to a phonetic writing system, either Romaji or Kana-based; in the case of Japanese, a simple accent would suffice).
Having installed both of them, I can't recommend SELinux for anything. AppArmor is simple and it works. It's well-supported on Ubuntu and SuSE.
Dig a little deeper and then you'll find that that's not actually useful for managing the music.
In fact, you can do that. Plug the ipod into a PC without itunes and it appears to be a usb drive.
Not in any way that's useful for managing music. On the iPod Touch, Apple has succeeded in making the music inaccessible.
Apple does NOT use "proprietary formats" for its iPod, that's just FUD spread around by people who never even tried one.
All the formats you list are proprietary. But the bigger problem is the restrictions on what can connect to the iPod and what applications can run on it.
Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand.
For small players, like the shuffle, drag-and-drop is fine. For large players, disk support and/or MTP support allows a wide range of management apps to work with them.
With iPod, you're stuck with iTunes, which is pretty lousy.
I once had a device where I had to drop and drag. Here's the problem with that: It got extremely cumbersome after a dozen songs. You may think you want "control" but when you have to manage 10,000 songs manually, it's a pain.
That's not the issue. The issue is that there is no way people can write iTunes alternatives for the iPod players because the iPod doesn't use standard protocols, tries to restrict access cryptographically, and prohibits the creation of applications for syncing. And iTunes really sucks badly for managing large numbers of songs; it needs a replacement.
SELinux is a mess to install and configure; just use AppArmor--it's simple, comes with rules for plenty of apps, and it works well.
Rendering Japanese in romaji (roman characters) makes it all but unreadable. You lose a massive amount of semantic information.
The same information is lost when speaking or reading out aloud, which is a serious problem with the Japanese language and probably not a good state of affairs. Switching Japanese to a purely phonetic writing system would be very painful, but it might still be the right thing to do.
For Tibetan, the situation is much simpler: the complex writing system serves no semantic purpose at all; replacing it with a simpler system wouldn't change the language or its meaning.
Also, changing your society to match the capabilities of some software is -always- the wrong way.
Sorry to be so blunt, but that's bullshit. Europe made massive changes to its writing systems with the advent of new writing and printing technologies. And that was the right thing to do because it greatly increased literacy.
Tibetan literacy rates historically have been atrocious, and even today, they are worse than many other nations. Reform and simplification of the Tibetan writing system might well be the right thing to do, and the requirements of software generally coincide with sensible simplification.
Combining letters aren't an intrinsic necessity in any language, they are an affectation and a mechanism for keeping people illiterate. European languages used to have them and got rid of them because the only purpose they serve is to restrict access to reading and writing.
Tibetan can be written just fine in an alphabetic style. It would be prudent for the Dalai Lama to make that the standard for the Tibetan community.
I'm not sure what people are trying to prove here. Global warming leads to increased evaporation and so you expect some areas of the Antarctic to accumulate more snow and ice for a while. Furthermore, at the current levels of warming, you wouldn't expect anything to melt in the interior of Antarctica yet. None of that tells us anything about whether global warming is a threat or not. By the time the ice sheets in the interior of Antarctica would start to melt, we'd already have much bigger problems on our hands elsewhere.