Most publishers are using a copyright statement that prohibits scanning or any other conversion and storage in an "electronic data system". With this copyright statement I do not believe it would be permissible to scan the book or do anything else that results in the text in any digital form.
I believe you mean "statement of claims the publisher happened to place alongside the actual copyright notice"; if the publisher wants to enforce them their lawyer can show up with the contract we signed - oh wait, we didn't, I purchased the book in a retail store.
These copyright statements became pretty popular in the 1970s, so don't blame e-readers.
Do however blame 1970s publishers, who foreseeing the inevitable production of e-readers promptly began shoving their legal thumb into the analog dike (for all the good it would do them: none).
Now that you know how "global warming denier" and "AGW denier" really came to be, you can stop using the term.
I suspect this will be about as successful as educating folks about the difference between "hacker" and "cracker".
And besides, if someone is denying global warming exists (without objectively examining the evidence for and against) isn't "global warming denier" a technically accurate description regardless - and even because of - of its allegorical links?
The problem with your idea is that it requires the theatre to maintain a database of barred patrons, creating (1) overhead for them and (2) inconvenience for all the good patrons who now have to show ID just to get in to a movie. And even if you're in a state where ID has to be shown for (some) movies anyway, IDs can be forged.
Or they could just boot asshats (who carry on despite being warned of the consequences) out of the theater at the time, with no refund. This focuses the societal cost of poor decisions on those responsible, who might possibly even learn not to be asshats in future.
Also note that a patent mandates to explain how a given process works and means that after a period (currently 20 years, we should shorten that) imitation becomes fair game.
In theory, that's true; in practice, corporate strategy is to build those "patent thickets" that the GP mentioned: a large set of adjacent/overlapping patents, with new patents filed every so often that are often merely minor advancements/alterations of the old patents. The end result that if you try to use an expired patent from someone's thicket as a basis for your own new innovation, it will be similar enough to the new patents to come under legal fire (and even if it isn't, by the time the lawyers are done, the point will be moot).
Yes, in theory, such slight advancements/alterations should not be patentable; in practice, the burden of distinguishing between true innovations and mere incremental advances (if that) is overwhelming.
tldr: The patent system is fundamentally flawed. We approach (or have reached) that region in the graph where the negatives overtake the positives.
The patent system is fundamentally a legalised protection racket.
It does not allow independent innovation and it is exploited by the already powerful to exclude poorer parties. It also does not scale, and rather than recognise this, the idiots in government think that in addition to bearing this millstone around our necks, we should contribute our own labour towards making it even bigger?
Living in Australia, one of the bigger differences here is that (so far) we still have a political system where the smaller parties, independents, etcetera, actually matter.
The US has two utterly dominant and remarkably similar parties, and a "first past the post" system to help ensure it stays that way.
Nobody's "playing" with DNA much less the "very foundation of life," whatever that is.
Not the GP, but Biosphere: irregularly shaped envelope of the earth's air, water, and land encompassing the heights and depths at which living things exist. [...] Disruption of basic ecological activities in the biosphere can result from pollution.
Our glorious leaders are playing with that a lot, lately.
What amazes me is not how many idiots don't understand science, it's how many scientists don't understand idiots - i.e., they keep on very carefully and rigorously inventing stuff for ruthless (or outright sociopathic) alphas whose decision tree process is pretty much "will doing X make me more powerful than doing Y?"
Sadly, we get caught up in making the shiny toys almost as much as the alphas get caught up in exploiting them.
Just because there's no little "sucks to be you" flag besides your particular entry in the TSA/DHS database, or even 99.9% of everyone else, doesn't mean it's all sunshine and rainbows. Even if we assume a tiny false positive rate, that can still be a problem if the scale is large enough, and millions of individuals use commercial air transport.
And? If the reason Foxconn died overnight was because the dollar and yen had just simultaneously imploded, it wouldn't matter who owned it. They'd be screwed like everyone else.
I've been giving IP/culture/democracy a lot of thought lately. I think the legal snafu isn't just "one of many" results, it's directly due to one of the major underlying causes.
Civilisation can be described as a combination of culture, knowledge, and resources. IP monopolies demand control over all three. And as an arbitrary construct of society, the expansion of one entity's intellectual monopoly can only be achieved by constraining the intellectual freedom of everyone else.
Humans naturally resist constraints, so resources must be expended to overcome this - ranging from advertising and lobbying to blackmail and thuggery - which means that any society which grants a monopoly is allowing its own resource base to be used against it. If society was a physical organism, this would be called "cancer".
Consider the sheer size of what IP monopolies influence. Anything, anywhere, that has, or ever had, a trademark, patent or copyright on it. Soft drinks. Pharmaceuticals. Software. Crops. Transport. Genetics. Books. Film. Energy. Mining. And so on and on.
Don't blow off democracy just because the US didn't quite get it right.
It's has an unfixable security bug with known exploit.
Oh, it's fixable. But here's what you can't do: have "democracy" AND "intellectual monopolies".
You can have trademarks, IF their sole function is to identify who made something. This helps document your civilisation's "resource tree". You can have patents, IF their sole function is to describe how something is made. This helps document your civilisation's "tech tree". You can even have copyrights, IF their sole function is to identify the author for potential patrons (so it becomes a subset of trademarks).
But whenever a democratic civilisation grants a private monopoly over the expression/implementation/exchange of an idea, that civilisation is sliding (a little or a lot) to a non-democratic form of government. Whether that new form is better, worse, similar, whatever. Because ultimately (IMNSHO) a functional democracy holds as a central tenet the free expression, implementation and exchange of ideas, both as concepts and realised forms.
Well, given my limited outsider's perspective of US, things don't look rosy, no. I see some parallels to Ancient Rome - immense military budget, financially overextended, and politically cancerous. But given the alternative superpower might be China (assuming it doesn't implode) or the multinationals (sociopathic by design), I really hope there's a rabbit hiding in Uncle Sam's hat.
It's been said the only good thing about taxes is that they buy civilization, but that's something I actually value a great deal. So should most people who don't want to live in the Stone Age.
As you are apparently a proponent of an anonymous, untraceable currency, and keeping in mind that the human species has both hierarchical and territorial instincts and contains a non-negligible number of charismatic sociopaths, how do you plan on successfully buying civilization without taxes?
"However, the first applicant to file has the prima facie right to the grant of a patent. Should a second patent application be filed for the same invention, the second applicant can institute interference proceedings to determine who was the first inventor (as discussed in the preceding paragraph) and thereby who is entitled to the grant of a patent. Interference can be an expensive and time-consuming process."
So while the US in principle has a "first to invent" system, as my post and your own link points out it doesn't always work in practice. If Alice invents first but Bob files first, Alice better have the resources to fight or Bob'll be keeping that patent.
In the US a patent goes to whoever is first to invent, in most of the rest of the world it is first to file.
No, in the US a patent goes to whoever is first to file too, it's just that if the first to invent has enough time, money and lawyers, it may be overturned.
Reminds me of Piers Anthony's "On A Pale Horse": if you truly refuse the afterlife - not merely "I don't believe", but rather "do not want" - you don't get one.
Well, not all leeches have enough brain cells to change their MAC address. And some will hog whatever bandwidth they can get, even if it is rate-limited, so having at least some possibility of identifying and kicking them off - yet letting others stay on - would be nice.
"Not turning over a computer that appears in the logs": uh, public wifi network? Obviously hard to turn over a computer you don't have.
"+that matches the name of one of your computers": if the cops and/or judge are that malicious AND your defence is that incompetent, you're screwed ANYWAY, log or no log.
Prosecution: "the computer had his name!" Defence: "Here's a laptop, your honor." *click, type, click*. "As you can see, I just changed it from my name to that of the prosecutor." Prosecution: "it also had his address!" Defence: *click, type, click* "And now this one has the prosecutor's."
A competent investigator looks for patterns and builds up a solid case.
Prosecution: "A computer regularly connected blah blah... the defendant regularly visited blah blah... CCTV footage from the cafe blah blah... a shredded laptop with the defendant's DNA and fingerprints and blah blah was recovered from blah blah... files which matched those stored on the blah blah server we had under surveillance. We also subpoenaed the defendant's insurance company, and present to the court a notarised copy of a tax invoice for that particular model laptop with the defendant's name on it. Oh, and here's a youtube video of the defendant in which he is pushing the victim into a shredder while saying, "and I would've gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!", your honour."
Funny you mention news reports, I known an ex-journo, part of why she got out was the increasing demand by the PHBs for shorter deadlines (which hinders quality) and an emphasis on "bad" news (because it sells more).
So we get crappy news about crappy people, and when all you see is crap you tend to assume the worst of people - which just perpetuates the cycle.
Not the OP, but the Fire Dept's problem wasn't you deciding whether or not to shoot the guy breaking in through the window based on the circumstances at the time - it was some idiot deciding he'd kill all comers without question, be they burglar, child or good samaritan, and a bunch of other idiots thinking that was a good idea.
It's the difference between a signed sentry post and an unmarked minefield, in a civilian area to boot.
GP seems to have come up with a sensible security plan for fighting the battles he can win. He's minimised his radio footprint, encrypted his network and logs access, which is far more than many folks with SSIDs of "linksys" or "default" do.
What other _cost-effective_ measures would you suggest that he spend his limited resources on (that he could otherwise be spending elsewhere)?
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you mean "statement of claims the publisher happened to place alongside the actual copyright notice"; if the publisher wants to enforce them their lawyer can show up with the contract we signed - oh wait, we didn't, I purchased the book in a retail store.
Do however blame 1970s publishers, who foreseeing the inevitable production of e-readers promptly began shoving their legal thumb into the analog dike (for all the good it would do them: none).
Perhaps he lives in a country where "innocent until proven guilty" is supposed to hold sway.
Your papers please, citizen Splab.
Parity files? http://parchive.sourceforge.net/
That way you can verify and also repair.
I suspect this will be about as successful as educating folks about the difference between "hacker" and "cracker".
And besides, if someone is denying global warming exists (without objectively examining the evidence for and against) isn't "global warming denier" a technically accurate description regardless - and even because of - of its allegorical links?
The problem with your idea is that it requires the theatre to maintain a database of barred patrons, creating (1) overhead for them and (2) inconvenience for all the good patrons who now have to show ID just to get in to a movie. And even if you're in a state where ID has to be shown for (some) movies anyway, IDs can be forged.
Or they could just boot asshats (who carry on despite being warned of the consequences) out of the theater at the time, with no refund. This focuses the societal cost of poor decisions on those responsible, who might possibly even learn not to be asshats in future.
I know which I'd prefer.
In theory, that's true; in practice, corporate strategy is to build those "patent thickets" that the GP mentioned: a large set of adjacent/overlapping patents, with new patents filed every so often that are often merely minor advancements/alterations of the old patents. The end result that if you try to use an expired patent from someone's thicket as a basis for your own new innovation, it will be similar enough to the new patents to come under legal fire (and even if it isn't, by the time the lawyers are done, the point will be moot).
Yes, in theory, such slight advancements/alterations should not be patentable; in practice, the burden of distinguishing between true innovations and mere incremental advances (if that) is overwhelming.
tldr: The patent system is fundamentally flawed. We approach (or have reached) that region in the graph where the negatives overtake the positives.
What we need, for patents, is abolition.
The patent system is fundamentally a legalised protection racket.
It does not allow independent innovation and it is exploited by the already powerful to exclude poorer parties. It also does not scale, and rather than recognise this, the idiots in government think that in addition to bearing this millstone around our necks, we should contribute our own labour towards making it even bigger?
Living in Australia, one of the bigger differences here is that (so far) we still have a political system where the smaller parties, independents, etcetera, actually matter.
The US has two utterly dominant and remarkably similar parties, and a "first past the post" system to help ensure it stays that way.
Not the GP, but Biosphere: irregularly shaped envelope of the earth's air, water, and land encompassing the heights and depths at which living things exist. [...] Disruption of basic ecological activities in the biosphere can result from pollution.
Our glorious leaders are playing with that a lot, lately.
What amazes me is not how many idiots don't understand science, it's how many scientists don't understand idiots - i.e., they keep on very carefully and rigorously inventing stuff for ruthless (or outright sociopathic) alphas whose decision tree process is pretty much "will doing X make me more powerful than doing Y?"
Sadly, we get caught up in making the shiny toys almost as much as the alphas get caught up in exploiting them.
Just because there's no little "sucks to be you" flag besides your particular entry in the TSA/DHS database, or even 99.9% of everyone else, doesn't mean it's all sunshine and rainbows. Even if we assume a tiny false positive rate, that can still be a problem if the scale is large enough, and millions of individuals use commercial air transport.
Which would be incredibly expensive. A far cheaper and safer method would be to bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Geologic_disposal
Nuclear waste - like so much else in our world - has become a political, not technical, problem.
And? If the reason Foxconn died overnight was because the dollar and yen had just simultaneously imploded, it wouldn't matter who owned it. They'd be screwed like everyone else.
I've been giving IP/culture/democracy a lot of thought lately. I think the legal snafu isn't just "one of many" results, it's directly due to one of the major underlying causes.
Civilisation can be described as a combination of culture, knowledge, and resources. IP monopolies demand control over all three. And as an arbitrary construct of society, the expansion of one entity's intellectual monopoly can only be achieved by constraining the intellectual freedom of everyone else.
Humans naturally resist constraints, so resources must be expended to overcome this - ranging from advertising and lobbying to blackmail and thuggery - which means that any society which grants a monopoly is allowing its own resource base to be used against it. If society was a physical organism, this would be called "cancer".
Consider the sheer size of what IP monopolies influence. Anything, anywhere, that has, or ever had, a trademark, patent or copyright on it. Soft drinks. Pharmaceuticals. Software. Crops. Transport. Genetics. Books. Film. Energy. Mining. And so on and on.
You could also consider copyrights, in the above form, to help document your civilisation's "culture tree".
Don't blow off democracy just because the US didn't quite get it right.
Oh, it's fixable. But here's what you can't do: have "democracy" AND "intellectual monopolies".
You can have trademarks, IF their sole function is to identify who made something. This helps document your civilisation's "resource tree".
You can have patents, IF their sole function is to describe how something is made. This helps document your civilisation's "tech tree".
You can even have copyrights, IF their sole function is to identify the author for potential patrons (so it becomes a subset of trademarks).
But whenever a democratic civilisation grants a private monopoly over the expression/implementation/exchange of an idea, that civilisation is sliding (a little or a lot) to a non-democratic form of government. Whether that new form is better, worse, similar, whatever. Because ultimately (IMNSHO) a functional democracy holds as a central tenet the free expression, implementation and exchange of ideas, both as concepts and realised forms.
Well, given my limited outsider's perspective of US, things don't look rosy, no. I see some parallels to Ancient Rome - immense military budget, financially overextended, and politically cancerous. But given the alternative superpower might be China (assuming it doesn't implode) or the multinationals (sociopathic by design), I really hope there's a rabbit hiding in Uncle Sam's hat.
It's been said the only good thing about taxes is that they buy civilization, but that's something I actually value a great deal. So should most people who don't want to live in the Stone Age.
As you are apparently a proponent of an anonymous, untraceable currency, and keeping in mind that the human species has both hierarchical and territorial instincts and contains a non-negligible number of charismatic sociopaths, how do you plan on successfully buying civilization without taxes?
Quoting from your own link (emphasis mine):
So while the US in principle has a "first to invent" system, as my post and your own link points out it doesn't always work in practice. If Alice invents first but Bob files first, Alice better have the resources to fight or Bob'll be keeping that patent.
No, in the US a patent goes to whoever is first to file too, it's just that if the first to invent has enough time, money and lawyers, it may be overturned.
Reminds me of Piers Anthony's "On A Pale Horse": if you truly refuse the afterlife - not merely "I don't believe", but rather "do not want" - you don't get one.
Hmm. Are there any emergent phenomenons that continue to exist after decoupling from the original source?
Well, not all leeches have enough brain cells to change their MAC address. And some will hog whatever bandwidth they can get, even if it is rate-limited, so having at least some possibility of identifying and kicking them off - yet letting others stay on - would be nice.
"Not turning over a computer that appears in the logs": uh, public wifi network? Obviously hard to turn over a computer you don't have.
"+that matches the name of one of your computers": if the cops and/or judge are that malicious AND your defence is that incompetent, you're screwed ANYWAY, log or no log.
Prosecution: "the computer had his name!"
Defence: "Here's a laptop, your honor." *click, type, click*. "As you can see, I just changed it from my name to that of the prosecutor."
Prosecution: "it also had his address!"
Defence: *click, type, click* "And now this one has the prosecutor's."
A competent investigator looks for patterns and builds up a solid case.
Prosecution: "A computer regularly connected blah blah... the defendant regularly visited blah blah... CCTV footage from the cafe blah blah... a shredded laptop with the defendant's DNA and fingerprints and blah blah was recovered from blah blah... files which matched those stored on the blah blah server we had under surveillance. We also subpoenaed the defendant's insurance company, and present to the court a notarised copy of a tax invoice for that particular model laptop with the defendant's name on it. Oh, and here's a youtube video of the defendant in which he is pushing the victim into a shredder while saying, "and I would've gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!", your honour."
Defence: "... crap."
But your idea works too. It's all pro/con. :)
Funny you mention news reports, I known an ex-journo, part of why she got out was the increasing demand by the PHBs for shorter deadlines (which hinders quality) and an emphasis on "bad" news (because it sells more).
So we get crappy news about crappy people, and when all you see is crap you tend to assume the worst of people - which just perpetuates the cycle.
Not the OP, but the Fire Dept's problem wasn't you deciding whether or not to shoot the guy breaking in through the window based on the circumstances at the time - it was some idiot deciding he'd kill all comers without question, be they burglar, child or good samaritan, and a bunch of other idiots thinking that was a good idea.
It's the difference between a signed sentry post and an unmarked minefield, in a civilian area to boot.
GP seems to have come up with a sensible security plan for fighting the battles he can win. He's minimised his radio footprint, encrypted his network and logs access, which is far more than many folks with SSIDs of "linksys" or "default" do.
What other _cost-effective_ measures would you suggest that he spend his limited resources on (that he could otherwise be spending elsewhere)?