Here's my experience with the supposedly world class editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
First, look up the Macropedia article "number games" and go to the heading "logical paradoxes" (under problems of logical inference). There you'll find an appallingly false statement, namely the claim that the sentence "All statements made by Cretans are false", if uttered by a Cretan, leads to a self-contradiction. In truth, there is no contradiction there, as anyone who has studied elementary logic and negation of quantified statements (deMorgan's laws) knows.
Well, so I thought that should be pointed out, and I wrote a letter to the author of that article, a retired professor in New York. I learned that he had since deceased; I then sent the letter to the editor of the EB. The editor wrote back that he would study the issue. Several months later, I received a reply: his "sources" disagreed with my assessment and argued that the text should remain unchanged!
I have since lost interest in helping them correct the numerous inaccuracies in their mathematical articles.
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Re:The best way to expose a bad law is to enforce
on
Still in DMCA Prison
·
· Score: 2
so the police should pick and choose laws to enforce?
They are doing that already. Here in MN, oral sex between consenting (even married) adults is illegal, and the penalty is higher than that for prostitution. Still, the police does not have undercover operations in single bars with offers for oral sex. Plenty of undercover operations with offers for sex for sale though.
As we know, corporations care only about profit. They will happily pay for legislation circumventing fair use rights, and then they will have people thrown into jail for breaking those laws.
Who is responsible? If you asked Adobe's CEO, he would say: "I'm just doing what the shareholders want me to do; I have to maximize the return on their investment. DMCA may be ugly, but it sure is good for the profit prospects of us IP companies. My owners tell me to maximize profit, that's what I'm being paid for, and that's what I do."
And he's right: the ultimate culpability lies with the owners. The buck stops with the shareholders, nowhere else. Ultimately, owners are responsible for what is perpetrated in their names and with their money.
Do you own Adobe stock? Have you checked the holdings of the funds in your retirement accounts lately? Maybe you yourself are responsible for this mess?
How EASY does fair use have to be in order for it to be provided?
It doesn't have to be easy. My having a right doesn't mean that you have to make exercising that right easy for me. But: while you may make it difficult, you cannot make it illegal. And that's exactly what DMCA does. It outlaws my exercising a legal right.
If Adobe can come up with some strong encryption to prevent copying, more power to them. But they shouldn't use the cowardly approach of outlawing circumvention technology.
Anyone in the US who believes in the DMCA should get the fuck out of my country and move to red China, where they like that kind of bullshit. Adobe is a bunch of fucking commies.
Adobe is a bunch of fucking capitalists. Nobody pisses as happily on "intellectual property rights" as red China.
First of all, Hitler didn't run for office under the banner, "Gas the Jews and Gypsies! Annex France and Russia! Take over the world!"
Even before he was elected, his views were very clear: he had laid them down in his book "Mein Kampf". It was clear that he wanted war to enlarge living space for the German race, and it was clear that he hated nobody as much as the "eternal jew". Everybody who voted for Hitler is personally responsible for what followed.
that Congress or the Senate pass a law doesn't necessarily mean the citizens desire it.
Again, something must be wrong with the country then, no? Either the country wills a wrong law, or it accepts a system which produces a wrong law.
Plain vanilla copyright. Just insert the words "Copyright (c) 2001, J. Random Hacker".
Then give them the source code. Copyright law will allow them to fold, spindle, mutilate and otherwise experiment with the source code. They can
reverse engineer it, make archival copies, modify for their own personal use, yada, yada, yada. But they will not have the rights to redistribute it.
This is not true. Copyright is the right to copy,
it has nothing to do with redistribution. If you don't have the copyright, and the copyright owner doesn't grant you a special license, then you cannot make copies or derivative works, even if those copies are only used in-house. Just because you don't distribute it does not automatically make it fair use.
If you find a pamphlet in the street, take it home, and copy it in the privacy of your own home for your personal enjoyment, then you are breaking the law, because you don't have the copyright.
Of course: after all Hitler had strong support
among Germans. He came to power legally. And
that is exactly why I would never claim to love or be proud of Germany.
Obviously, the severity of fascism cannot be compared to the injustice of the DMCA, but still: DMCA
was enacted following the standard practices of the US; it is what the country wanted. The legislative process is how the country chooses to express its will. If the DMCA is wrong, then something must be wrong with the country.
I love this country, I just hate the government that's running it.
The country has the government it deserves.
But really, isn't the government an important part of every country? How is it possible to love something and at the same time hate an integral part of it?
These IP companies have to be punished. There is only one way: don't buy their crap. Use libraries,
ebay, used book and CD stores, borrowing among friends.
As we know, corporations care only about profit. They will happily pay for legislation circumventing fair use rights, and then they will have people thrown into jail for breaking those laws.
Who is responsible? If you asked Adobe's CEO, he would say: "I'm just doing what the shareholders want me to do; I have to maximize the return on their investment. DMCA may be ugly, but it sure is good for the profit prospects of us IP companies. My owners tell me to maximize profit, that's what I'm being paid for, and that's what I do."
And he's right: the ultimate culpability lies with the owners. The buck stops with the shareholders, nowhere else. Ultimately, owners are responsible for what is perpetrated in their names and with their money.
Do you own Adobe stock? Have you checked the holdings of the fonds in your retirement accounts lately? Before you go out and protest, shouldn't you maybe make sure that you are not protesting against yourself?
a consumer CD player bridges the gaps. It looks at the music on either side of the gap and interpolates a replacement section. A computer does the same when playing CDs for listening
... and so does cdparanoia when ripping. Case closed.
Bernoulli principle - decreased pressure exerted by air in motion - the same physics that allows airplanes to fly and causes two sheets of paper to stick together when you blow between them (try it!).
Or, more to the point, try blowing into an open plastic bag. The sides will still tend to come together.
According to Marx, the big will get bigger
until the whole thing collapses in a huge singularity.
Of course, he was read by the enemy and they
wrote anti-trust laws and encouraged stock ownership by the common man. But basically, his analysis stands.
Mysql.org offers stuff for "free download", but only if you hand over your personal information first. This information is property, and valuable property at that, so they are deceiving when they talk about "free".
AOL could pull that off, because they have a near monopoly. But no web site today has a near monopoly. Virtually every web site is struggling. If CNN or Yahoo or The New York Times shuts me out tomorrow, there are plenty of other options and I'll never look back.
That's not clear at all. It's much easier to grow if you are the first kid on the block. The thirld world countries have to deal with lots of difficulties that the growing first world wasn't exposed to:
Brain drain: the best leave to study in the US, never to return.
Patents. Even if you can think it up, you still can't use it.
Crushing debt.
IMF and world bank dictating public policy.
No industry in the thirld world can compete with highly technologized adversaries, so they are confined to sell resources and agricultural goods.
If a company spends a lot of time and effort making something that they really believe you would like, what do you suggest they do to let you know about it?
They should create a web site. If I ever need their product, I will find it through google.
Think about all of the things you have purchased. Do you really believe that you have done all of your own research and fully cogitated on the pluses and minuses of all the competition?
Certainly not. And I hate it when I catch myself buying something without first having identified a need and then researched the available products. Because it means that the advertisers have won with their subliminal messages.
Capitalims is based on the assumption that the best product wins in a Darwinian manner, not the best advertised product. So advertising is actually counterproductive: it just increases cost but doesn't create value.
Furthermore, the whole purpose of an economy is to satisfy the material needs of a population, and not to artificially create those needs.
Or use WebWasher, from Siemens no less. Runs on Linux and Windows and is free as in beer. I have never seen an X10
ad, or a Slashdot banner ad for that matter. You don't need to know regexps to use it.
If you disable the advertising on a given site, that site stops earning money from that advertising, and either turns into a pay site, or closes it's doors.
Correction: Only the sites that are in it for the profit will go down. Those sites typically suck anyway. Free sites by enthusiastic volunteers will always be around without advertising. The internet was created and run for 25 years by these people.
Big Business wants to help its shareholders, which may number in the millions. When a big business gives $5,000,000 to a candidate, its really giving maybe $5 per shareholder, isn't it? How is that unfair?
In two ways:
Shareholders are richer than average, and rich people don't deserve more political influence than poor people. If anything, they deserve less influence, since they have already gotten more out of the system.
The millions of shareholders have not been asked whether they want their money to be spent on a particular politician. If they wanted to support that politician, they could do that with their private money, just like they would have to in order to support Greenpeace.
Slashdot Mirror
First, look up the Macropedia article "number games" and go to the heading "logical paradoxes" (under problems of logical inference). There you'll find an appallingly false statement, namely the claim that the sentence "All statements made by Cretans are false", if uttered by a Cretan, leads to a self-contradiction. In truth, there is no contradiction there, as anyone who has studied elementary logic and negation of quantified statements (deMorgan's laws) knows.
Well, so I thought that should be pointed out, and I wrote a letter to the author of that article, a retired professor in New York. I learned that he had since deceased; I then sent the letter to the editor of the EB. The editor wrote back that he would study the issue. Several months later, I received a reply: his "sources" disagreed with my assessment and argued that the text should remain unchanged!
I have since lost interest in helping them correct the numerous inaccuracies in their mathematical articles.
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They are doing that already. Here in MN, oral sex between consenting (even married) adults is illegal, and the penalty is higher than that for prostitution. Still, the police does not have undercover operations in single bars with offers for oral sex. Plenty of undercover operations with offers for sex for sale though.
--
Who is responsible? If you asked Adobe's CEO, he would say: "I'm just doing what the shareholders want me to do; I have to maximize the return on their investment. DMCA may be ugly, but it sure is good for the profit prospects of us IP companies. My owners tell me to maximize profit, that's what I'm being paid for, and that's what I do."
And he's right: the ultimate culpability lies with the owners. The buck stops with the shareholders, nowhere else. Ultimately, owners are responsible for what is perpetrated in their names and with their money.
Do you own Adobe stock? Have you checked the holdings of the funds in your retirement accounts lately? Maybe you yourself are responsible for this mess?
--
It doesn't have to be easy. My having a right doesn't mean that you have to make exercising that right easy for me. But: while you may make it difficult, you cannot make it illegal. And that's exactly what DMCA does. It outlaws my exercising a legal right.
If Adobe can come up with some strong encryption to prevent copying, more power to them. But they shouldn't use the cowardly approach of outlawing circumvention technology.
--
Adobe is a bunch of fucking capitalists. Nobody pisses as happily on "intellectual property rights" as red China.
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Even before he was elected, his views were very clear: he had laid them down in his book "Mein Kampf". It was clear that he wanted war to enlarge living space for the German race, and it was clear that he hated nobody as much as the "eternal jew". Everybody who voted for Hitler is personally responsible for what followed.
that Congress or the Senate pass a law doesn't necessarily mean the citizens desire it.
Again, something must be wrong with the country then, no? Either the country wills a wrong law, or it accepts a system which produces a wrong law.
--
Then give them the source code. Copyright law will allow them to fold, spindle, mutilate and otherwise experiment with the source code. They can reverse engineer it, make archival copies, modify for their own personal use, yada, yada, yada. But they will not have the rights to redistribute it.
This is not true. Copyright is the right to copy, it has nothing to do with redistribution. If you don't have the copyright, and the copyright owner doesn't grant you a special license, then you cannot make copies or derivative works, even if those copies are only used in-house. Just because you don't distribute it does not automatically make it fair use.
If you find a pamphlet in the street, take it home, and copy it in the privacy of your own home for your personal enjoyment, then you are breaking the law, because you don't have the copyright.
--
But the computer industry did not vote MS into power.
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Of course: after all Hitler had strong support among Germans. He came to power legally. And that is exactly why I would never claim to love or be proud of Germany.
Obviously, the severity of fascism cannot be compared to the injustice of the DMCA, but still: DMCA was enacted following the standard practices of the US; it is what the country wanted. The legislative process is how the country chooses to express its will. If the DMCA is wrong, then something must be wrong with the country.
--
The country has the government it deserves.
But really, isn't the government an important part of every country? How is it possible to love something and at the same time hate an integral part of it?
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Who is responsible? If you asked Adobe's CEO, he would say: "I'm just doing what the shareholders want me to do; I have to maximize the return on their investment. DMCA may be ugly, but it sure is good for the profit prospects of us IP companies. My owners tell me to maximize profit, that's what I'm being paid for, and that's what I do."
And he's right: the ultimate culpability lies with the owners. The buck stops with the shareholders, nowhere else. Ultimately, owners are responsible for what is perpetrated in their names and with their money.
Do you own Adobe stock? Have you checked the holdings of the fonds in your retirement accounts lately? Before you go out and protest, shouldn't you maybe make sure that you are not protesting against yourself?
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Or, more to the point, try blowing into an open plastic bag. The sides will still tend to come together.
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These advertising/infotainment sites have no value to thinking people anyway. Who cares if idiots will be forced to pay to access them?
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That's not clear at all. It's much easier to grow if you are the first kid on the block. The thirld world countries have to deal with lots of difficulties that the growing first world wasn't exposed to:
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They should create a web site. If I ever need their product, I will find it through google.
Think about all of the things you have purchased. Do you really believe that you have done all of your own research and fully cogitated on the pluses and minuses of all the competition?
Certainly not. And I hate it when I catch myself buying something without first having identified a need and then researched the available products. Because it means that the advertisers have won with their subliminal messages.
Capitalims is based on the assumption that the best product wins in a Darwinian manner, not the best advertised product. So advertising is actually counterproductive: it just increases cost but doesn't create value.
Furthermore, the whole purpose of an economy is to satisfy the material needs of a population, and not to artificially create those needs.
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Correction: Only the sites that are in it for the profit will go down. Those sites typically suck anyway. Free sites by enthusiastic volunteers will always be around without advertising. The internet was created and run for 25 years by these people.
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In two ways:
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