. ..one of the major reasons for the lengthening of copyright terms in the US is that we needed to bring our laws in line with the copyright laws in Europe
The question is should we have done this? Especially since the copyright laws of Europe were (and are) antithetical to American legal philosophy. They are founded on the medieval monarchial grant/guild system of rights. It seems strange to me that we should export "American values" at the point of a gun in some places, but refuse to actually hold our simple moral ground at home. In this case I think we should have made Europe come to us.
I fear that this particular step would only further help the moneyed interests at the expense of the little guy.
History shows just the opposite. If nothing else look what Lessig did with This Land is Your Land.
The primal philosophy is that of free speach. To get a grant to abrogate this you should have to actually petition the government for the rights of monopoly. Yes, there is a fee involved, but it has always been reasonable to cover filing costs and not a center of control/profit. A teenager can cover the fee by mowing a single lawn and the forms are simple; and free.
The automatic creation of copyright has also created a world of abuse by the big guy against the little guy, the big guy sometimes being the government. Internal memos and such showing criminal action and culpability are now being supressed using their copyright status as justification. Civil lawsuits have skyrocketed where none would have been filable previously over purely incidental "works" little more than someone's laundry list.
Copyright should only be applied to those works that the creator himself thinks important enough to go through the trouble of filing and said works should then be free to public access.
That, after all, was the whole original point. That protected works would be made available to the public, put on file in the Library of Congress, rather than hidden away. Conversely anything that the creator wants hidden away (like evidence of criminal activity) should not be granted protection.
. ..copyright laws . . . have not adapted to suit current conditions.
Actually, it's their adaptation to current conditions that have created the trouble. The conditions are not exactly desirable.
For the most part Lessig is promoting rolling back the adaptations to a time when the conditions were some weird ideas about the "rights" of the "The People."
Even with an "M" rating, how could any reasonable parent buy this game for their child and not thing something inappropriate would be there?
Perfectly legal conversation in much of the US between two people one of whom is sixteen years of age:
"Yeah sweetheart, I asked you over to show you the Hot Coffee mod of GTA, but the guy at the store wouldn't sell it to me because I was underage. Wanna fuck?"
"Yeah, sure."
Anyone who has ever claimed that our sex laws make a lick of sense was either lying and/or ignorant.
I don't believe telecom companies will be able to stop a company's website from being seen, only from having faster and more bandwidth available.
No sir, we are not blocking that website. You simply have to que your request a week in advance.
KFG
Re:Useless to all but theoraticians
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
Snooty? No, not really. Elite? Absolutley.
One of the reasons I am not actually snooty is because I do not seek to look down from my elite platform, I seek to help people up to it. I am elite, but not elite-ist.
If only because it would make my own life a damned sight easier.
The essential problem is, and where the appearance of snootiness can come from, is that I first have to make people understand there is something above them. Sometimes, for some people, it takes a wack upside the head. If you do not understand that you do not know you will never seek to learn. To learn you must accept that someone else has superior knowledge. That you are in that limited respect their inferior.
And for some people joining the elite simply isn't within their capabilities. That isn't snootiness. That's reality. I'll never run hurdles like Edwin Moses either, no matter how hard I train; and that's the way it is.
But if I chose to run hurdles you can be damned sure I'd supplicate Edwin to give me some pointers, unabashed in acknowledging him as my superior.
KFG
Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
on
Apache down, IIS up
·
· Score: 1
Is it hard to bear such a burden of enlightenment?
In those instances when I care, yes. When I don't it is no burden.
KFG
Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
on
Apache down, IIS up
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I predate TSS, let alone the Internet and my mother was a government mainframe operator before my time. I am not confused.
There was a time when the corporate boss, totally lacking the armament of buzzwords (except maybe "transistor"), did not even have the tools to express an order (within the domain of the article) to a sysadmin/operator. And if the sysadmin didn't like it where he was, he walked. And the boss knew it.
This was power, because a sysadmin could not simply be replaced with another cog. The Register's BOFH is so bitingly funny because he has a real life model in real world situations.
A Fortune 500 CEO would approach the OC as a Greek king would approach the oracle at Delphi; as just another supplicant to be fleeced by mystical powers well beyond his comprehension.
This is why they started buying PCs. Didn't work too well. Just because the boss now had a small, powerful computer of his very own didn't mean he understood a single thing about it.
The boss gained real power over the sysadmin only when the technical "colleges" started pumping out generic, interchangable "sysadmins" in excess of demand, sometime in the mid/late 80s. And hence Dilbert became so bitingly funny because it had real life models in real life situations.
Dilbert dates only from the early 90s.
KFG
Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
on
Apache down, IIS up
·
· Score: 1
What are you talking about? Sure it does. You want a car that doesn't blow up randomly, right? You want a car that isn't a lemon, right? You don't want to have it fall apart the day after the warranty ends - like everyone else, right?
And that's why I'm going to buy a Ford Escort instead of a Mercedes 600 or a Roller, although I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to get all of the band's gear into the thing.
Will today's games last that long, or will it be that much harder to enjoy them years from now because of the extra difficulty of creating a emu for them.
For the good ones people will take the effort.
When a 10 year old Skoda wears out its cams you might very well just dispose of it and get a new one.
When an 80 year old Bugatti wears out its cams you build them up again with welding rod and hand machine them back to their proper profile.
This has nothing to do with the current market value of the Bugatti. The current market value of a Bugatti is what it is because people started doing that with Bugattis back when they were just used cars (as late as the sixites they were often still sold by classified ad).
For me it is. I am now "middle aged," i.e. I have expended more than two thirds of my alloted three score and ten. In my youth countries of origin were brandished with a good deal of pride by manufacturers. There was a form of patriotism both in business and in consumption. The People often ignored brand names and refered to their possessions by country of origin. You owned a Japanese radio, not a Sony.
The example you give is entirely unlike what is going on now. You refer to a truely American company seeking to hide the foreign origin of their products, implying they are patriotically American. What the Chinese are doing is hiding the origins of their own products, failing to patriotically claim them as they used to. My violin was made in Beijing, but its brand name is one of the hills of Rome. Back in the day most inexpensive violins didn't even have brand names. They simply had countries of origin.
Historically if one wanted to obscure the origin of a product sold in America one would seek to give it a false foreign one, because certain import items were more valuable than the domestic product (like, oooh, china).
KFG
Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
on
Apache down, IIS up
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.
Build a better mouse trap . ..and the world will ignore you.
Market an inferior mouse trap and get rich.
Ever notice that car companies tout the fact that their product is the number one seller in something or other? Why do they do that when what someone else buys doesn't actually have anything to do with my taste and needs?
Because it works. The great masses are herd animals. They instinctively incline to doing what they see others doing. This is an overall positive virtue in a tribe seeking tribal survival. It is also extremely easy to exploit.
Back in the day sysadmins were taken largely from the highly educated, highly cynical, highly independent portion of the population, motivated by their own drummer, the computers themselves. Nowadays most of them are just typical examples of herd members who got into computers because that's what they saw everyone else doing; and, of course, that's "where the money was."
They can be led. And if they can't be led, they can be ordered.
They are totally unrelated. I just happened to like the quote. The link is simply a mini HOW-TO. One sig, two topics.
Well then you should know that to the outside world you seem to be implying that following Bucky's ideas will result in the end of mankind. Find some way to seperate the ideas in your sig.
What I don't understand is how the original post got modded offtopic.
The moderators switching from crack to LSD is what originally attracted me to your post. I don't get it either.
Lenovo has always been based in Beijing, although much of their business operation moved to Hong Kong. The company was founded to make Chinese language expansion cards for the IBM PC and eventually became the largest PC manufacturer in China, under their own brands. When IBM went looking for someone to manufacture overseas Lenovo was a natural choice. They were called Legend then, but early in the century decided to move on their own into the international market, changed the name to Lenovo and established a corporate headquarters in NY.
Raliegh was the base of IBM's Personal Computer Division which Lenovo acquired when IBM sold it out. It's fairly natural for old timers in the trade to think of Raliegh as the base of operations when discussing the laptops and Lenovo is centralizing its nonasian operations there.
And it is good western business for them to foster the continuing impression that the company actually resides in Raliegh and is some sort of spinoff of IBM. In "west facing" press you will always hear about their American bases of operation and never about the Chinese.
I was researching a new brand of guitar (Walden) the other day. I wanted to know where they were based, and where the guitars were made. On their company website I couldn't find any clue as to where they are based and in only one place the mention that the guitars were made in the "small town of Lilan."
It turns out that the "small town of Lilan" is so small and obscure that it took a bit to track it down to China.
This is how the Chinese will be doing business here for awhile. Under American sounding brand names and either obscuring their base of operations or establishing/acquiring American bases and directing all press to that base. And so Lenovo becomes based in Raliegh, even though their "home" stock exchange is Hong Kong.
This is the software/IT industry, they're not used to waiting 5 years to start earning a 10-20% return on investment that the rest of the working universe has to put up with.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.bulldogbreeds.com/
KFG
who tosses their salad?
Ballmer, obviously.
KFG
Especially if it really takes him 30 years.
I've never actually read one of his books and have no inclination to do so, but I wish him well.
KFG
. . .one of the major reasons for the lengthening of copyright terms in the US is that we needed to bring our laws in line with the copyright laws in Europe
The question is should we have done this? Especially since the copyright laws of Europe were (and are) antithetical to American legal philosophy. They are founded on the medieval monarchial grant/guild system of rights. It seems strange to me that we should export "American values" at the point of a gun in some places, but refuse to actually hold our simple moral ground at home. In this case I think we should have made Europe come to us.
I fear that this particular step would only further help the moneyed interests at the expense of the little guy.
History shows just the opposite. If nothing else look what Lessig did with This Land is Your Land.
The primal philosophy is that of free speach. To get a grant to abrogate this you should have to actually petition the government for the rights of monopoly. Yes, there is a fee involved, but it has always been reasonable to cover filing costs and not a center of control/profit. A teenager can cover the fee by mowing a single lawn and the forms are simple; and free.
The automatic creation of copyright has also created a world of abuse by the big guy against the little guy, the big guy sometimes being the government. Internal memos and such showing criminal action and culpability are now being supressed using their copyright status as justification. Civil lawsuits have skyrocketed where none would have been filable previously over purely incidental "works" little more than someone's laundry list.
Copyright should only be applied to those works that the creator himself thinks important enough to go through the trouble of filing and said works should then be free to public access.
That, after all, was the whole original point. That protected works would be made available to the public, put on file in the Library of Congress, rather than hidden away. Conversely anything that the creator wants hidden away (like evidence of criminal activity) should not be granted protection.
KFG
. . .copyright laws . . . have not adapted to suit current conditions.
Actually, it's their adaptation to current conditions that have created the trouble. The conditions are not exactly desirable.
For the most part Lessig is promoting rolling back the adaptations to a time when the conditions were some weird ideas about the "rights" of the "The People."
KFG
http://www.tor.com/jordan/
KFG
http://www.tor.com/jordan/
KFG
I'd always know where I am if I were you.
KFG
Even with an "M" rating, how could any reasonable parent buy this game for their child and not thing something inappropriate would be there?
Perfectly legal conversation in much of the US between two people one of whom is sixteen years of age:
"Yeah sweetheart, I asked you over to show you the Hot Coffee mod of GTA, but the guy at the store wouldn't sell it to me because I was underage. Wanna fuck?"
"Yeah, sure."
Anyone who has ever claimed that our sex laws make a lick of sense was either lying and/or ignorant.
KFG
. . .maybe it all falls under the same decency laws everything else does.
No, truth in advertising. The rating is a specific claim of suitability. If they had released the game unrated there would be no claim against them.
KFG
I don't believe telecom companies will be able to stop a company's website from being seen, only from having faster and more bandwidth available.
No sir, we are not blocking that website. You simply have to que your request a week in advance.
KFG
Snooty? No, not really. Elite? Absolutley.
One of the reasons I am not actually snooty is because I do not seek to look down from my elite platform, I seek to help people up to it. I am elite, but not elite-ist.
If only because it would make my own life a damned sight easier.
The essential problem is, and where the appearance of snootiness can come from, is that I first have to make people understand there is something above them. Sometimes, for some people, it takes a wack upside the head. If you do not understand that you do not know you will never seek to learn. To learn you must accept that someone else has superior knowledge. That you are in that limited respect their inferior.
And for some people joining the elite simply isn't within their capabilities. That isn't snootiness. That's reality. I'll never run hurdles like Edwin Moses either, no matter how hard I train; and that's the way it is.
But if I chose to run hurdles you can be damned sure I'd supplicate Edwin to give me some pointers, unabashed in acknowledging him as my superior.
KFG
Is it hard to bear such a burden of enlightenment?
In those instances when I care, yes. When I don't it is no burden.
KFG
I predate TSS, let alone the Internet and my mother was a government mainframe operator before my time. I am not confused.
There was a time when the corporate boss, totally lacking the armament of buzzwords (except maybe "transistor"), did not even have the tools to express an order (within the domain of the article) to a sysadmin/operator. And if the sysadmin didn't like it where he was, he walked. And the boss knew it.
This was power, because a sysadmin could not simply be replaced with another cog. The Register's BOFH is so bitingly funny because he has a real life model in real world situations.
A Fortune 500 CEO would approach the OC as a Greek king would approach the oracle at Delphi; as just another supplicant to be fleeced by mystical powers well beyond his comprehension.
This is why they started buying PCs. Didn't work too well. Just because the boss now had a small, powerful computer of his very own didn't mean he understood a single thing about it.
The boss gained real power over the sysadmin only when the technical "colleges" started pumping out generic, interchangable "sysadmins" in excess of demand, sometime in the mid/late 80s. And hence Dilbert became so bitingly funny because it had real life models in real life situations.
Dilbert dates only from the early 90s.
KFG
What are you talking about? Sure it does. You want a car that doesn't blow up randomly, right? You want a car that isn't a lemon, right? You don't want to have it fall apart the day after the warranty ends - like everyone else, right?
And that's why I'm going to buy a Ford Escort instead of a Mercedes 600 or a Roller, although I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to get all of the band's gear into the thing.
KFG
Will today's games last that long, or will it be that much harder to enjoy them years from now because of the extra difficulty of creating a emu for them.
For the good ones people will take the effort.
When a 10 year old Skoda wears out its cams you might very well just dispose of it and get a new one.
When an 80 year old Bugatti wears out its cams you build them up again with welding rod and hand machine them back to their proper profile.
This has nothing to do with the current market value of the Bugatti. The current market value of a Bugatti is what it is because people started doing that with Bugattis back when they were just used cars (as late as the sixites they were often still sold by classified ad).
Because the car was worth the effort.
KFG
As a semicentenarian he makes me feel young again. Everything is relative.
KFG
You speak of this as if its a new thing.
For me it is. I am now "middle aged," i.e. I have expended more than two thirds of my alloted three score and ten. In my youth countries of origin were brandished with a good deal of pride by manufacturers. There was a form of patriotism both in business and in consumption. The People often ignored brand names and refered to their possessions by country of origin. You owned a Japanese radio, not a Sony.
The example you give is entirely unlike what is going on now. You refer to a truely American company seeking to hide the foreign origin of their products, implying they are patriotically American. What the Chinese are doing is hiding the origins of their own products, failing to patriotically claim them as they used to. My violin was made in Beijing, but its brand name is one of the hills of Rome. Back in the day most inexpensive violins didn't even have brand names. They simply had countries of origin.
Historically if one wanted to obscure the origin of a product sold in America one would seek to give it a false foreign one, because certain import items were more valuable than the domestic product (like, oooh, china).
KFG
At some point it has to come down to merit, and which server sys admins prefer to use.
.and the world will ignore you.
Build a better mouse trap . .
Market an inferior mouse trap and get rich.
Ever notice that car companies tout the fact that their product is the number one seller in something or other? Why do they do that when what someone else buys doesn't actually have anything to do with my taste and needs?
Because it works. The great masses are herd animals. They instinctively incline to doing what they see others doing. This is an overall positive virtue in a tribe seeking tribal survival. It is also extremely easy to exploit.
Back in the day sysadmins were taken largely from the highly educated, highly cynical, highly independent portion of the population, motivated by their own drummer, the computers themselves. Nowadays most of them are just typical examples of herd members who got into computers because that's what they saw everyone else doing; and, of course, that's "where the money was."
They can be led. And if they can't be led, they can be ordered.
KFG
Yes, the industry is also used to pissing great gobs of money down black holes. This does not contravene my post, it supports it.
It's a gambling industry, not a working industry.
KFG
They are totally unrelated. I just happened to like the quote. The link is simply a mini HOW-TO. One sig, two topics.
Well then you should know that to the outside world you seem to be implying that following Bucky's ideas will result in the end of mankind. Find some way to seperate the ideas in your sig.
What I don't understand is how the original post got modded offtopic.
The moderators switching from crack to LSD is what originally attracted me to your post. I don't get it either.
KFG
Lenovo has always been based in Beijing, although much of their business operation moved to Hong Kong. The company was founded to make Chinese language expansion cards for the IBM PC and eventually became the largest PC manufacturer in China, under their own brands. When IBM went looking for someone to manufacture overseas Lenovo was a natural choice. They were called Legend then, but early in the century decided to move on their own into the international market, changed the name to Lenovo and established a corporate headquarters in NY.
Raliegh was the base of IBM's Personal Computer Division which Lenovo acquired when IBM sold it out. It's fairly natural for old timers in the trade to think of Raliegh as the base of operations when discussing the laptops and Lenovo is centralizing its nonasian operations there.
And it is good western business for them to foster the continuing impression that the company actually resides in Raliegh and is some sort of spinoff of IBM. In "west facing" press you will always hear about their American bases of operation and never about the Chinese.
I was researching a new brand of guitar (Walden) the other day. I wanted to know where they were based, and where the guitars were made. On their company website I couldn't find any clue as to where they are based and in only one place the mention that the guitars were made in the "small town of Lilan."
It turns out that the "small town of Lilan" is so small and obscure that it took a bit to track it down to China.
This is how the Chinese will be doing business here for awhile. Under American sounding brand names and either obscuring their base of operations or establishing/acquiring American bases and directing all press to that base. And so Lenovo becomes based in Raliegh, even though their "home" stock exchange is Hong Kong.
KFG
This is the software/IT industry, they're not used to waiting 5 years to start earning a 10-20% return on investment that the rest of the working universe has to put up with.
KFG
It isn't the quote that I thought needing explaining, but rather its apparent attachement to Bucky's book.
KFG
Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?
Ok, I'm a bit bored tonight so I'll bite the OT bait. Care to 'splain yo'sef?
KFG