The article points out that if spy planes have no pilot, we need not worry so much about them being shot down.
From the enemy perspective, this sounds like an invitation to shoot them down. For example, if we fly a plane with 24 people off China's coast, they may harass it, but would have to be pretty crazy to intentionally kill two dozen Americans during peacetime. But if we fly an unmanned spy plane, why not just take random potshots at it? If survival of the plane really is less vital in our eyes, so must it be in theirs.
In times of tense peace, pilots may have an ante-raising function that reduces the probability of an incident occurring at all. And "tense peace" is not an uncommon condition for the US in recent decades around the world...
This is the same guy that provided Boies with his technical ammunition in the Microsoft trial. It was while trying to prove that Felten's IE-remover program didn't work that Microsoft was devastatingly caught showing a faked video.
Would you prefer this incident has been used as a First Amendment challenge on DMCA? Say by the ACLU? Back in January, baby!!! (See page 15, or 8 by the document's own numbering.)
And now, just to pour salt on the wounds, his group leaks the SDMI cracks anyway. I love it!
As I understand it, swapping music non-commerically between friends is legally okay, right?
So how about this for a music-sharing system? There's a little client that lets you enter up to 16 friends with whom you are willing to share music. These should be real-world people that you know, like, and trust.
Now, when you request a song, the request goes to the 16 people you know. If they don't have it, they forward the request to THEIR friends, without revealing your identity. Eventually the song is found and passed back friend-to-friend to the requester. Everything is kept all crypty. There are potocol issues, but yada-yada...
The "friends list" has a few advantages:
By entering the system, you're not giving away your valuable Starcraft-playing bandwidth to random jerks out on the net. The only requests come from a small number of people who are your friends.
Since only a few people request from you, you can manage your relationships with them in detail: give them only so many downloads at such-and-such times, etc.
By taking advantage of real-world trust relationships, the system becomes much harder for RIAA to crack. Okay, RIAA goon gets the client. But he hasn't gained a thing; RIAA goons don't have any friends.
Who exactly has committed a crime? My buddy requested a song. I gave it to him. Did he commit a crime? Did I? Isn't that legal? I'm sure the courts would eventually resolve this in some unpleasant way, but this sort of legal muddying still seems all to the good to me.
Digital copying is not ethically wrong. In the worst case, digital copying may bankrupt some musicians. Well, mechanical looms bankrupt some textile workers. No one has a guarantee that progress won't disrupt the way they make a living.
We may need to increase private or federal funding of the arts, now that copying requires only a mouse click and not a CD factory and a national distribution system. But banning digital copying is akin to Luddites smashing looms.
Every now and then I like to get the latest news about how CueCat is taking over the world. For example, recent Digital Convergence press releases reveal the following juicy tidbits:
Adoption of CueCat technology in the catalog for ClassOne Orthodontics of Lubbock, Texas, maker of the world's widest range of ceramic dental brackets.
"New Jersey Bride will be the first bridal publication to include:CRQ print-to-Web technology" That's what I call a major business coup right there.
"With its January/February edition, Connecticut Traveler magazine became the first consumer travel magazine to include:CRQ print-to-Web technology" I'm sure we'll all be anxiously checking our mailboxes for the next issue of Connecticut Traveler!
(Follow the link above if you think I made these up.)
Good to see that $100 million in startup funding for Digital Convergence is paying off in spades!
THE PARENT POST IS NOT A TROLL. THE POSTER IS FROM THE TIMES OF LONDON.
The short answer is that copyright is not an unlimited right. For example, if I purchase a music CD, then I can legally copy it to tape to listen to in the car. Or I can make a copy for a friend, provided I don't do so commercially. As another example, the US Supreme Court has affirmed that I can record a television broadcast to watch it later.
Of course, large copyright holders would like to destroy such "fair use" rights so that they can double or triple charge for the same material. Since these fair use rights are so well established, their line of attack has been indirect: subvert these established rights by technological means.
A recent example concerns DVD movies. If you purchase a movie on DVD, you have a legal right to play it on your Linux machine. Except the movie studios try to absolutely prevent you from exercising this right by encrypting the movies.
Fair enough. But here's the problem: their encryption is a farce, and few believe that any form of encryption can ever succeed in this context. So they get laws like the DMCA passed that make trafficking in programs that subvert their encryption illegal. So you have the right to watch the movie, there are tools that let you watch the movie, but creating or distributing such a tool is illegal. Go figure.
Furthermore, banning trafficking in such programs has a chilling effect on free speech. For example, I can not post a certain decryption program that is shorter than this paragraph for you here without risking a lawsuit by the motion picture industry. Slashdot is full of people who communicate all day, every day in computer code. Now our essential mode of communication is curtailed so that wealthy execs in the recording and motion picture industry can illicitly rake in more cash. Furthermore, a recent court ruling limits my right even to post a *link* to such a program. We're not talking about pornography or atomic weapons secrets here (both of which I could post), but a little snippet of computer code (which I can not).
I work in the Theory of Computation Group at MIT. A central activity is the creation and cracking of cryptographic protocols as a scientific endeavor. If a protocol is used to protect any copyrighted material, then is our right to publish a crack in a research journal curtailed? This is not a theoretical problem: on advice of counsel, Edward Felton of Princeton University has refrained from publishing his cracks of several Secure Digitial Music Initiative watermarking systems. I personally know several researchers who have worked on watermarking. Since since the SDMI systems employ a whole spectrum of the techniques, must that entire field of academic research be abandoned? I hope not, but the ground is certainly shaky.
Yes, opposition to such laws may benefit people who like to swap free music. But these laws also trample on fundamental rights at the same time. When there's a clash between the rights of all citizens and the rights of the oh-so-seedy recording industry, there is no question which ought to prevail. That is why organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are fighting to overturn such laws. And that is why Slashdot is so up in arms. Jealously guarding our basic freedoms is the duty of all citizens in a democracy.
a GOOD book on cold fusion
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 3
There is a great book on cold fusion by Gary Taubes called Bad Science. Really a fascinating read. He details the interplay of carelessness, need for funding, fraud, and flawed science that produced cold fusion.
One point he makes is that scientists and journalists are distributed in a bell-shaped curve just like measurement errors. Therefore, he predicts, one will always be able to find kooks three or four standard deviations from the mean who will still claim that cold fusion works.
Akamai shares a block with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Recently, there was a despicable, unprovoked snowball attack on innocent MIT graduate students by Akamai customer care thugs. (Well, okay, there's a little more to the story...:-) But anyway, differences will be settled in a mathematical/theoretical computer science shootout on the evening of April 3. Should be fun.
The role of computation in science is magnified beyond its usefulness because futzing with computers is fun, easy, and something to do when you're out of other ideas.
One example is global climate modeling. The predictions of these computer models are cited all the time, but no one really knows if they're putting out valid results or garbage. (Since these models can't predict the weather 10 days out, one must wonder about their century-term results.) That's not real science.
Another example, I'll bet, is the computational archaeology mentioned in the article. It is easy to imagine these guys assigning variables to a lot of inexactly quantifiable phenomenon, writing equations for things that are not precisely equatable, and plugging in estimates for unknowns. Garbage in, garbage out. That's futzing, not science.
(For that matter, has the Santa Fe Institute ever produced any useful science? As far as I can tell, they're a sensational press release factory.)
What you said was, "There is no global sea level change -- that's only another prediction." This is patently false: sea levels have been rising steadily. It is not a prediction; it is an observation.
You suggest that I not attack the messenger, but then immediately question whether simulated ice levels were "tinkered with" by IPCC scientists? You take a coal-producer's propaganda as serious commentary and impugn IPCC scientists as data manipulators? What... on earth... are you thinking?
Let's be clear: you haven't read one single word of the IPCC report that you're attacking and that you're asking me to defend in detail, have you? Everything you know about sea level change in that report comes from a few sentences in the summary for policymakers and what you read on that coal-producer site, right? (You did at least read the IPCC summary, didn't you?)
On the prediction side, the global warming trend projected by all of the dozen or so major global climate models-- not just by the IPCC-- implies corresponding warming in the oceans and consequent thermal expansion and sea-level rise. The IPCC conclusion is not some rogue hypothesis, as your favorite propaganda site would have you believe, but rather is consistent with the findings of many independent research groups.
If you're interested in this issue, you really need an unbiased source, don't you? The full IPCC report is surely too much. But the book "Earth's Climate: Past and Future" by William Ruddiman comes highly-recommended, though I've not yet read it myself.
You are quoting from Greening Earth, a site produced by the Western Fuels Association. WFA supplies coal to power plants, making it a world leader in production of greenhouse gases. "We promote the benign effects of carbon dioxide on the earth's biosphere and humankind." Oooh-la-la...
You might as well quote Steve Balmer on the merits of Linux.
By contrast, here's what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says about sea levels change:
"...it is an observed fact that relative sea level is rising in most coastal regions and causing major problems..."
You seem to be saying, "Ha! But there's a *REASON* why what you're saying is true! Therefore your point is stupid!" This... logic... confusing...
My point: Given that the US is a disproportionate cause of the CO2 problem, it is unfortunate that Bush has decided that we will not take any part in the solution.
Who will, then? Your Hoovaloo and Lin Chang will take the full impact of global warming, but there's not much they can do, since (as you point out) they're not CO2 producers.
Yet our Senate voted *unanimously* that we ought not to enter a CO2 reduction treaty unless-- you guessed it!-- the third world is bound also.
...which is again too bad, since OPEC states will never sign on, for obvious reasons.
When the media reports on global warming, they like to talk about coastal flooding and severe weather... direct human impacts.
What particularly bums me, though, is the fact that probably every ecosystem on earth is going to be affected. There will be no pristine places left on the entire planet that are safe from the effects SUV exhaust and other excesses. Not northern Canada, not Sibera. Everywhere there will be tundra melting or species adjustment or rainfall changes in response to human activity. That makes me sorta sad.
We Americans are 5% of the world population, and we produce 25% of the world's CO2. So it is too bad that Bush has decided not to do anything.
Interesting post. I'm sorry I don't have moderator points to bump it up!
Is there a conversation between the Packager and the Receiver whenever a file is transferred, or does the Packager just send an ordinary email and that's it?
If there is no fancy protocol, I think I'd just want to extract a piece of Receiver code sufficient to decrypt a newly-received file and put it in my own wrapper. I'd throw out all other Infraworks code and never let it screw with my filesystem. What would stop this attack?
I'm reasonably up on cryptography, but I don't know about "ball-token encryption". Could you point me to a reference?
At what point did everyone start to believe "as long as I've got one legal copy, I can make as many copies of as many damn times as I want, in any format I want??
Around 1998.
Seriously, for the centuries when copying required a lot of effort, it was reasonable to have laws controlling it. When high-speed net access arrived and copying became easier than typing this sentence, those laws became unreasonable. They're not effectively enforcable and laws so flouted and floutable shouldn't be on the books. As a society, we might think about how to support artists and authors in an age where copying is unlimited. But trying to limit copying is futile.
The cynical stuff we see on-camera comes from a media fascination with partisanship and conflict rather than from politicians being two-faced. Media people choose to point the camera at conflict, not thoughtful policy discussion. They prefer soap opera drama over substantive concepts. Fox News is the worst offender. They cast EVERYTHING in terms of an American left-right political struggle. That's just not a very meaningful way to look at the world, but I guess that's the way Rupert Murdoch likes it.
I also think the media's attempts to hype up global warming are regrettable. Flimsy alarmism gives the impression that global warming is not a real problem, which I think it is. Air-conditioned corporate cubicle life can probably be totally insulated from the effects of global warming for the forseeable future. The difficulties are elsewhere:
Low-lying islands and poor, low-lying countries are doomed. It seems pretty low of us rich folk to destroy everything they have because we're wusses about nuclear power and like to drive big cars.
Non-human ecosystems will be trashed. Yes, life will go on in a new form, but it is sad that there will be no pristine place left anywhere on earth that has not been reshaped by human excess.
The real problem, I think, is that heating the entire planet will change a million things that no one has even considered yet. Maybe all changes will be relatively harmless. Maybe there will be a positive feedback that wipes out the human race. Most likely there will be some big hassles that we can survive. But there's really no way to know; the state of planetary science stinks. We're gambling the planet to win convenience. Even if the odds are 10-1 in our favor, that seems like a dumb bet to me.
But they clearly state in their products that you can't copy them. [...] You are NOT paying to own a small piece of the show, no matter how you argue it.
These aren't fundamental truths fiated from on-high; they're matters of public policy. I don't care what "they" state, and I don't care how "they" interpret my payment. I want unlimited right to copy and store shows for non-commercial use. If this conflicts with some lofty principles, I want those principles outlawed immediately. It's my goddamn country, and I want laws that serve me and the 99.999% of the population not in the "rich Hollywood slob" category. Are you trolling or forgetting that this is a democracy?
Nice post, but you use a disturbing phrase: consumer rights.
In the United States, citizens have rights.
Rights are not earned by consuming a requisite amount of mass-manufactured corporate pabulum.
Corporations want us to act like consumers (of course), not like citizens (of course).
Once we start meekly thinking of ourselves as "consumers" (rather than as entitled citizens) and possessed of rights on that basis (rather than because it is our goddamn country), we're already far, far down the wrong road.
Informally, a function is O(n^2) if it grows no faster than n^2. A function is Omega(n^2) if it grows at least as fast as n^2. The latter is at issue here.
DO NOT waste space toadying to your chief bureaucrat at the expense of useful content.
For example, the top of the menu bar at NASA is a paean to NASA administrator Daniel Goldin: links to his bio, his welcome letter, his speeches. Click hot topics and the menu bar full of juicy Dan Goldin information is still there. In contrast, try to find out what's up with the NEAR mission to Eros. Go ahead-- I gave up.
This problem isn't isolated. Pick another site, say Department of Commerce. The "tribute link" to the chief bureaucrat is top-right, and you get a biography, speeches, op-eds, even "official photographs".
Here's the USDA site, where prime position is taken by a big picture of Secretary Glickman at the ribbon cutting for a new wing of the Dept. of Agriculture.
Slashdot Mirror
The article points out that if spy planes have no pilot, we need not worry so much about them being shot down.
From the enemy perspective, this sounds like an invitation to shoot them down. For example, if we fly a plane with 24 people off China's coast, they may harass it, but would have to be pretty crazy to intentionally kill two dozen Americans during peacetime. But if we fly an unmanned spy plane, why not just take random potshots at it? If survival of the plane really is less vital in our eyes, so must it be in theirs.
In times of tense peace, pilots may have an ante-raising function that reduces the probability of an incident occurring at all. And "tense peace" is not an uncommon condition for the US in recent decades around the world...
Edward Felten is amazing.
This guy is my hero! Looks so *innocent*, doesn't he? :-)
As I understand it, swapping music non-commerically between friends is legally okay, right?
So how about this for a music-sharing system? There's a little client that lets you enter up to 16 friends with whom you are willing to share music. These should be real-world people that you know, like, and trust.
Now, when you request a song, the request goes to the 16 people you know. If they don't have it, they forward the request to THEIR friends, without revealing your identity. Eventually the song is found and passed back friend-to-friend to the requester. Everything is kept all crypty. There are potocol issues, but yada-yada...
The "friends list" has a few advantages:
Or does Freenet already do all this? :-)
Digital copying is not ethically wrong. In the worst case, digital copying may bankrupt some musicians. Well, mechanical looms bankrupt some textile workers. No one has a guarantee that progress won't disrupt the way they make a living.
We may need to increase private or federal funding of the arts, now that copying requires only a mouse click and not a CD factory and a national distribution system. But banning digital copying is akin to Luddites smashing looms.
I wish your friends the best!
Every now and then I like to get the latest news about how CueCat is taking over the world. For example, recent Digital Convergence press releases reveal the following juicy tidbits:
(Follow the link above if you think I made these up.)
Good to see that $100 million in startup funding for Digital Convergence is paying off in spades!
THE PARENT POST IS NOT A TROLL. THE POSTER IS FROM THE TIMES OF LONDON.
The short answer is that copyright is not an unlimited right. For example, if I purchase a music CD, then I can legally copy it to tape to listen to in the car. Or I can make a copy for a friend, provided I don't do so commercially. As another example, the US Supreme Court has affirmed that I can record a television broadcast to watch it later.
Of course, large copyright holders would like to destroy such "fair use" rights so that they can double or triple charge for the same material. Since these fair use rights are so well established, their line of attack has been indirect: subvert these established rights by technological means.
A recent example concerns DVD movies. If you purchase a movie on DVD, you have a legal right to play it on your Linux machine. Except the movie studios try to absolutely prevent you from exercising this right by encrypting the movies.
Fair enough. But here's the problem: their encryption is a farce, and few believe that any form of encryption can ever succeed in this context. So they get laws like the DMCA passed that make trafficking in programs that subvert their encryption illegal. So you have the right to watch the movie, there are tools that let you watch the movie, but creating or distributing such a tool is illegal. Go figure.
Furthermore, banning trafficking in such programs has a chilling effect on free speech. For example, I can not post a certain decryption program that is shorter than this paragraph for you here without risking a lawsuit by the motion picture industry. Slashdot is full of people who communicate all day, every day in computer code. Now our essential mode of communication is curtailed so that wealthy execs in the recording and motion picture industry can illicitly rake in more cash. Furthermore, a recent court ruling limits my right even to post a *link* to such a program. We're not talking about pornography or atomic weapons secrets here (both of which I could post), but a little snippet of computer code (which I can not).
I work in the Theory of Computation Group at MIT. A central activity is the creation and cracking of cryptographic protocols as a scientific endeavor. If a protocol is used to protect any copyrighted material, then is our right to publish a crack in a research journal curtailed? This is not a theoretical problem: on advice of counsel, Edward Felton of Princeton University has refrained from publishing his cracks of several Secure Digitial Music Initiative watermarking systems. I personally know several researchers who have worked on watermarking. Since since the SDMI systems employ a whole spectrum of the techniques, must that entire field of academic research be abandoned? I hope not, but the ground is certainly shaky.
Yes, opposition to such laws may benefit people who like to swap free music. But these laws also trample on fundamental rights at the same time. When there's a clash between the rights of all citizens and the rights of the oh-so-seedy recording industry, there is no question which ought to prevail. That is why organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are fighting to overturn such laws. And that is why Slashdot is so up in arms. Jealously guarding our basic freedoms is the duty of all citizens in a democracy.
There is a great book on cold fusion by Gary Taubes called Bad Science. Really a fascinating read. He details the interplay of carelessness, need for funding, fraud, and flawed science that produced cold fusion.
One point he makes is that scientists and journalists are distributed in a bell-shaped curve just like measurement errors. Therefore, he predicts, one will always be able to find kooks three or four standard deviations from the mean who will still claim that cold fusion works.
Looks like his prediction was correct...
Akamai shares a block with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Recently, there was a despicable, unprovoked snowball attack on innocent MIT graduate students by Akamai customer care thugs. (Well, okay, there's a little more to the story... :-) But anyway, differences will be settled in a mathematical/theoretical computer science shootout on the evening of April 3. Should be fun.
The role of computation in science is magnified beyond its usefulness because futzing with computers is fun, easy, and something to do when you're out of other ideas.
One example is global climate modeling. The predictions of these computer models are cited all the time, but no one really knows if they're putting out valid results or garbage. (Since these models can't predict the weather 10 days out, one must wonder about their century-term results.) That's not real science.
Another example, I'll bet, is the computational archaeology mentioned in the article. It is easy to imagine these guys assigning variables to a lot of inexactly quantifiable phenomenon, writing equations for things that are not precisely equatable, and plugging in estimates for unknowns. Garbage in, garbage out. That's futzing, not science.
(For that matter, has the Santa Fe Institute ever produced any useful science? As far as I can tell, they're a sensational press release factory.)
What you said was, "There is no global sea level change -- that's only another prediction." This is patently false: sea levels have been rising steadily. It is not a prediction; it is an observation.
You suggest that I not attack the messenger, but then immediately question whether simulated ice levels were "tinkered with" by IPCC scientists? You take a coal-producer's propaganda as serious commentary and impugn IPCC scientists as data manipulators? What... on earth... are you thinking?
Let's be clear: you haven't read one single word of the IPCC report that you're attacking and that you're asking me to defend in detail, have you? Everything you know about sea level change in that report comes from a few sentences in the summary for policymakers and what you read on that coal-producer site, right? (You did at least read the IPCC summary, didn't you?)
On the prediction side, the global warming trend projected by all of the dozen or so major global climate models-- not just by the IPCC-- implies corresponding warming in the oceans and consequent thermal expansion and sea-level rise. The IPCC conclusion is not some rogue hypothesis, as your favorite propaganda site would have you believe, but rather is consistent with the findings of many independent research groups.
If you're interested in this issue, you really need an unbiased source, don't you? The full IPCC report is surely too much. But the book "Earth's Climate: Past and Future" by William Ruddiman comes highly-recommended, though I've not yet read it myself.
You are quoting from Greening Earth, a site produced by the Western Fuels Association. WFA supplies coal to power plants, making it a world leader in production of greenhouse gases. "We promote the benign effects of carbon dioxide on the earth's biosphere and humankind." Oooh-la-la...
You might as well quote Steve Balmer on the merits of Linux.
By contrast, here's what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says about sea levels change:
"...it is an observed fact that relative sea level is rising in most coastal regions and causing major problems..."
You seem to be saying, "Ha! But there's a *REASON* why what you're saying is true! Therefore your point is stupid!" This... logic... confusing...
My point: Given that the US is a disproportionate cause of the CO2 problem, it is unfortunate that Bush has decided that we will not take any part in the solution.
Who will, then? Your Hoovaloo and Lin Chang will take the full impact of global warming, but there's not much they can do, since (as you point out) they're not CO2 producers.
Yet our Senate voted *unanimously* that we ought not to enter a CO2 reduction treaty unless-- you guessed it!-- the third world is bound also.
...which is again too bad, since OPEC states will never sign on, for obvious reasons.
Blech.
When the media reports on global warming, they like to talk about coastal flooding and severe weather... direct human impacts.
What particularly bums me, though, is the fact that probably every ecosystem on earth is going to be affected. There will be no pristine places left on the entire planet that are safe from the effects SUV exhaust and other excesses. Not northern Canada, not Sibera. Everywhere there will be tundra melting or species adjustment or rainfall changes in response to human activity. That makes me sorta sad.
We Americans are 5% of the world population, and we produce 25% of the world's CO2. So it is too bad that Bush has decided not to do anything.
Interesting post. I'm sorry I don't have moderator points to bump it up!
Is there a conversation between the Packager and the Receiver whenever a file is transferred, or does the Packager just send an ordinary email and that's it?
If there is no fancy protocol, I think I'd just want to extract a piece of Receiver code sufficient to decrypt a newly-received file and put it in my own wrapper. I'd throw out all other Infraworks code and never let it screw with my filesystem. What would stop this attack?
I'm reasonably up on cryptography, but I don't know about "ball-token encryption". Could you point me to a reference?
Also, the authors of the bible, koran, and most other religious texts have been dead for quite a while, which means they're public domain.
HA! Let's see how the courts deal with the Second Coming.
At what point did everyone start to believe "as long as I've got one legal copy, I can make as many copies of as many damn times as I want, in any format I want??
Around 1998.
Seriously, for the centuries when copying required a lot of effort, it was reasonable to have laws controlling it. When high-speed net access arrived and copying became easier than typing this sentence, those laws became unreasonable. They're not effectively enforcable and laws so flouted and floutable shouldn't be on the books. As a society, we might think about how to support artists and authors in an age where copying is unlimited. But trying to limit copying is futile.
The cynical stuff we see on-camera comes from a media fascination with partisanship and conflict rather than from politicians being two-faced. Media people choose to point the camera at conflict, not thoughtful policy discussion. They prefer soap opera drama over substantive concepts. Fox News is the worst offender. They cast EVERYTHING in terms of an American left-right political struggle. That's just not a very meaningful way to look at the world, but I guess that's the way Rupert Murdoch likes it.
Will you tell us the name of the company so that we can avoid it or avoid doing business with it?
I also think the media's attempts to hype up global warming are regrettable. Flimsy alarmism gives the impression that global warming is not a real problem, which I think it is. Air-conditioned corporate cubicle life can probably be totally insulated from the effects of global warming for the forseeable future. The difficulties are elsewhere:
Your scheme might work.
Or it might not.
Shall we bet the world on it?
I have an alternative scheme that we know works: lower C02 levels.
But they clearly state in their products that you can't copy them. [...] You are NOT paying to own a small piece of the show, no matter how you argue it.
These aren't fundamental truths fiated from on-high; they're matters of public policy. I don't care what "they" state, and I don't care how "they" interpret my payment. I want unlimited right to copy and store shows for non-commercial use. If this conflicts with some lofty principles, I want those principles outlawed immediately. It's my goddamn country, and I want laws that serve me and the 99.999% of the population not in the "rich Hollywood slob" category. Are you trolling or forgetting that this is a democracy?
What makes you think you should be able to copy them?
Because we feel like it. It's our country, not some Hollywood exec's.
Nice post, but you use a disturbing phrase: consumer rights.
In the United States, citizens have rights.
Rights are not earned by consuming a requisite amount of mass-manufactured corporate pabulum.
Corporations want us to act like consumers (of course), not like citizens (of course).
Once we start meekly thinking of ourselves as "consumers" (rather than as entitled citizens) and possessed of rights on that basis (rather than because it is our goddamn country), we're already far, far down the wrong road.
Informally, a function is O(n^2) if it grows no faster than n^2. A function is Omega(n^2) if it grows at least as fast as n^2. The latter is at issue here.
DO NOT waste space toadying to your chief bureaucrat at the expense of useful content.
For example, the top of the menu bar at NASA is a paean to NASA administrator Daniel Goldin: links to his bio, his welcome letter, his speeches. Click hot topics and the menu bar full of juicy Dan Goldin information is still there. In contrast, try to find out what's up with the NEAR mission to Eros. Go ahead-- I gave up.
This problem isn't isolated. Pick another site, say Department of Commerce. The "tribute link" to the chief bureaucrat is top-right, and you get a biography, speeches, op-eds, even "official photographs".
Here's the USDA site, where prime position is taken by a big picture of Secretary Glickman at the ribbon cutting for a new wing of the Dept. of Agriculture.
Gag.