More or less. It was a crisis of confidence, banks didn't trust each others' assets and so weren't lending. The TARP program gave some breathing room to sort things out.
The market mechanism is fantastic, but I'm astounded people interpret that to imply a laissez-faire absence of regulation. Unbridled capitalism distorts the market too. The question isn't whether to regulate or not, it's to apply as much regulation as necessary, and no more. And to not be afraid to continually reevaluate that balance.
But it's an unfortunate fact that many of us do need them, or at least want their products enough to not spite them with a total blackout of their media. We LIKE some of the products they represent, we want to see them made and distributed, we just don't like the way they conduct business, the policies they lobby Congress for, or the lawsuits they conduct against individuals.
For individuals, we'd like to have our cake and eat it to. We *want* these expensive elements of culture to be produced, but we're going to make it as difficult as possible for the business model to remain the status quo. We don't know what the future business model looks like, but we're trying to force them to find it. And it's not increasingly draconian piracy laws: it's the route they're currently pursuing but it will NEVER accomplish their monetary goals. At some point they'll have to choose between the increasing amount of control they want to exercise, and staying alive as a business.
Maybe that's wishful thinking, but it's happier to think that then just despair.
If you have iTunes. Out of all the major set-top boxes and consoles, I would place a strong wager that the PS3 actually has the friendliest and most standards-compliant LAN-media browsing.
For some reason, aside from a crappy workaround on the Boxee box, they don't sell a set-top box that does both Netflix and LAN-shared video. There's plenty that does either! It's frustrating... I would kill for a box that does this for $150 or under.
I'm personally waiting for the new Apple TV to be hacked and have custom software written for it to add the LAN functionality. Or for the PS3 to drop to bargain basement prices.
That is simply false. First Sale Doctrine has to do with what YOU can do with a purchased item, and whether a copyright owner can restrict your use of same.
If the First Sale Doctrine does not apply to a product you buy, then the copyright owner can legally restrict the way you use that product. That's what First Sale was all about: whether you own a purchased good or have merely "licensed" it.
That's completely incorrect. First Sale Doctrine, legally speaking, only applies to the ability to sell or transfer a good. It says nothing about use. See Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, which was then made into law as 17 USC 109.
This case in particular asks solely if 17 USC 109 provides an exception to the copyright holder's ability to control importation (17 USC 601 (a)). The Supreme Court held in BMG Music v. Perez in 1991 that it does not. Then they affirmed that view and extended it to products that contain copyrighted components in Quality King v. L'anza. In the current case, the Supreme Court decided not to reverse themselves. They came to no new finding and made no new precedent, and the only precedent they relied on was one interaction of the First Sale Doctrine with another part of the law.
It's a semantic distinction, but in the context of the article you're right. Debian is taking things from the stock kernel and moving them into "non-free", so if you need them it'll be exactly like the present nVidia situation.
Still I think it's worth making the distinction that there are some packages that Debian is unwilling to host at all. Debian will distribute non-free things it's legally able to, it just makes you explicitly choose to get them.
Debian ships binary and non-free stuff all the time, including the nvidia drivers, as long as it is legal for them to do so. These go into the "contrib" and "non-free" repositories that aren't turned on by default, but they're still part of the Debian project and on Debian mirrors.
What Debian *doesn't* do is ship patented software where the patent holder doesn't allow free distribution. The s3 texture compression library, mpeg video encoders, etc all live on debian-multimedia.org, where they are maintained and hosted by a separate entity.
That's not necessarily true. A lot of very common modern hardware runs on open drivers. The only places where there's any real trouble is graphics and wifi. As graphics go, Intel is fully open (aside from the GMA 500) and you'd be surprised how good their recent chips have gotten. The GMA 945 stuff, frankly, gave them a bad rep they don't really deserve anymore. But still, if you want top of the line, you'll probably want to go with an AMD or nVidia card, and a closed driver.
As wifi goes, there are plenty of choics out there you can get that are supported by a fully open driver. I have a DLink wireless-n card in my desktop that's supported wonderfully by the fully open ath9k driver. You don't need a firmware blob or anything.
So, the situation is wrt hardware is much better than it has been, and if you're the sort of person who cares about purity you can achieve it with a small amount of effort.
I'm always surprised that it takes 3 clicks to get from an article on a book to the Amazon page for the book (ISBN -> Booksellers -> Amazon.com). It really should only take one, though I appreciate all the resources for people who want to find the book elsewhere!
Not good to be dependent on specific hardware. Smartphones have a variety of text-input methods, and while you may be able to get by if it offers a Qwerty-like geometry, that's still a dependency you should rid yourself of.
The Supreme Court found that the copyright holder could not prevent re-importation of materials it had authorized.
Emphasis mine. What Quality King establishes is that 17 USC 109(a) doesn't provide an exception to 602(a) (Actually BMG v Perez 1991 established that, but Quality King explicitly affirmed it at the SC level, and spells it out for non-copyrighted works with a copyrighted component(i.e. a label or design)). However, you are right that re-importation of goods previously distributed in the US, does fall under the 109(a) exception.
Go ahead and read the decision, they help explain the judicial reasoning, references to other decisions, etc.
The contracts between "Manufacturer and Retailer" and "Retailer and Customer" are wholly separate, and Manufacturer cannot impose subsequent conditions on the contract between "Retailer and Customer". (In other words, Apple can't demand their retailers sell at a specified price).
Has Assange actually managed to cause any significant change by his releases? I don't disagree that what he does may someday be important, and he should continue to do it... but Zuckerberg, right now, created and controls how 500 million people in the world spend a not-insignificant amount of time. As far as impact goes, that's incomparable.
You're right, but not for the reason you think. The precedent was already set by the Supreme Court in 1998, Quality King Distributors v. L'anza Research (523 US 135). This case is practically a carbon copy, and the Supreme Court decided there were no new facts that made it necessary to reverse themselves or consider this case separately.
No. The law in question (17 USC 602(a) ) only affects the legality of imported goods, not goods that were already legally imported under the authority of the copyright holder.
Braid for Linux at the moment doesn't work on Intel graphics adapters, as the binary requires the OpenGL S3 texture compression extension, and of course the open source drivers don't implement that (isn't that patent expired by now??)
Anyway, there's a bug report for it, so supposedly they're working on it.
Apples and Oranges. You oversell *individuals* 5-10x because the average, or even peak, aggregate use isn't the same as everybody maxing out their connections at once.
What Comcast is doing is overselling individuals at a rate so much higher that the *aggregate* use is oversold by a factor of 2x. That's an enormous problem.
I agree with your point in the broad strokes, but also remember that a lot of military budget goes to research and development, albeit wastefully. For FY2010 (including Iraq and Afghanistan), the US spent $79B on "Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation". If even a percent of those dollars has the effectiveness of NASA's, that alone doubles the amount we spend on futurism.
(5) The same price for a given procedure must be given to a person regardless of his affiliation (or lack thereof) with a health insurer or federal or state health-care program. A health-care provider may not accept any amount less than that price (except zero) as payment for service.
Slashdot Mirror
More or less. It was a crisis of confidence, banks didn't trust each others' assets and so weren't lending. The TARP program gave some breathing room to sort things out.
The market mechanism is fantastic, but I'm astounded people interpret that to imply a laissez-faire absence of regulation. Unbridled capitalism distorts the market too. The question isn't whether to regulate or not, it's to apply as much regulation as necessary, and no more. And to not be afraid to continually reevaluate that balance.
But it's an unfortunate fact that many of us do need them, or at least want their products enough to not spite them with a total blackout of their media. We LIKE some of the products they represent, we want to see them made and distributed, we just don't like the way they conduct business, the policies they lobby Congress for, or the lawsuits they conduct against individuals.
For individuals, we'd like to have our cake and eat it to. We *want* these expensive elements of culture to be produced, but we're going to make it as difficult as possible for the business model to remain the status quo. We don't know what the future business model looks like, but we're trying to force them to find it. And it's not increasingly draconian piracy laws: it's the route they're currently pursuing but it will NEVER accomplish their monetary goals. At some point they'll have to choose between the increasing amount of control they want to exercise, and staying alive as a business.
Maybe that's wishful thinking, but it's happier to think that then just despair.
Hey! I finally got an Xbox 360... this year.
If you have iTunes. Out of all the major set-top boxes and consoles, I would place a strong wager that the PS3 actually has the friendliest and most standards-compliant LAN-media browsing.
For some reason, aside from a crappy workaround on the Boxee box, they don't sell a set-top box that does both Netflix and LAN-shared video. There's plenty that does either! It's frustrating... I would kill for a box that does this for $150 or under.
I'm personally waiting for the new Apple TV to be hacked and have custom software written for it to add the LAN functionality. Or for the PS3 to drop to bargain basement prices.
That is simply false. First Sale Doctrine has to do with what YOU can do with a purchased item, and whether a copyright owner can restrict your use of same.
If the First Sale Doctrine does not apply to a product you buy, then the copyright owner can legally restrict the way you use that product. That's what First Sale was all about: whether you own a purchased good or have merely "licensed" it.
That's completely incorrect. First Sale Doctrine, legally speaking, only applies to the ability to sell or transfer a good. It says nothing about use. See Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, which was then made into law as 17 USC 109.
This case in particular asks solely if 17 USC 109 provides an exception to the copyright holder's ability to control importation (17 USC 601 (a)). The Supreme Court held in BMG Music v. Perez in 1991 that it does not. Then they affirmed that view and extended it to products that contain copyrighted components in Quality King v. L'anza. In the current case, the Supreme Court decided not to reverse themselves. They came to no new finding and made no new precedent, and the only precedent they relied on was one interaction of the First Sale Doctrine with another part of the law.
It's a semantic distinction, but in the context of the article you're right. Debian is taking things from the stock kernel and moving them into "non-free", so if you need them it'll be exactly like the present nVidia situation.
Still I think it's worth making the distinction that there are some packages that Debian is unwilling to host at all. Debian will distribute non-free things it's legally able to, it just makes you explicitly choose to get them.
Debian ships binary and non-free stuff all the time, including the nvidia drivers, as long as it is legal for them to do so. These go into the "contrib" and "non-free" repositories that aren't turned on by default, but they're still part of the Debian project and on Debian mirrors.
What Debian *doesn't* do is ship patented software where the patent holder doesn't allow free distribution. The s3 texture compression library, mpeg video encoders, etc all live on debian-multimedia.org, where they are maintained and hosted by a separate entity.
That's not necessarily true. A lot of very common modern hardware runs on open drivers. The only places where there's any real trouble is graphics and wifi. As graphics go, Intel is fully open (aside from the GMA 500) and you'd be surprised how good their recent chips have gotten. The GMA 945 stuff, frankly, gave them a bad rep they don't really deserve anymore. But still, if you want top of the line, you'll probably want to go with an AMD or nVidia card, and a closed driver.
As wifi goes, there are plenty of choics out there you can get that are supported by a fully open driver. I have a DLink wireless-n card in my desktop that's supported wonderfully by the fully open ath9k driver. You don't need a firmware blob or anything.
So, the situation is wrt hardware is much better than it has been, and if you're the sort of person who cares about purity you can achieve it with a small amount of effort.
I'm always surprised that it takes 3 clicks to get from an article on a book to the Amazon page for the book (ISBN -> Booksellers -> Amazon.com). It really should only take one, though I appreciate all the resources for people who want to find the book elsewhere!
Not good to be dependent on specific hardware. Smartphones have a variety of text-input methods, and while you may be able to get by if it offers a Qwerty-like geometry, that's still a dependency you should rid yourself of.
The Supreme Court found that the copyright holder could not prevent re-importation of materials it had authorized.
Emphasis mine. What Quality King establishes is that 17 USC 109(a) doesn't provide an exception to 602(a) (Actually BMG v Perez 1991 established that, but Quality King explicitly affirmed it at the SC level, and spells it out for non-copyrighted works with a copyrighted component(i.e. a label or design)). However, you are right that re-importation of goods previously distributed in the US, does fall under the 109(a) exception.
Go ahead and read the decision, they help explain the judicial reasoning, references to other decisions, etc.
The contracts between "Manufacturer and Retailer" and "Retailer and Customer" are wholly separate, and Manufacturer cannot impose subsequent conditions on the contract between "Retailer and Customer". (In other words, Apple can't demand their retailers sell at a specified price).
No longer true, as of 2007,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leegin_Creative_Leather_Products,_Inc._v._PSKS,_Inc.
Retailer is free to source products from anywhere in the world (the "grey market"), they're not obliged to buy from local distributors
No longer true, as of 1998,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_King_v._L'anza
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
Has Assange actually managed to cause any significant change by his releases? I don't disagree that what he does may someday be important, and he should continue to do it... but Zuckerberg, right now, created and controls how 500 million people in the world spend a not-insignificant amount of time. As far as impact goes, that's incomparable.
That's not why this case was pursued. Omega sells in the US, but for higher prices. It's trying to price-discriminate based on region.
Nothing illustrates the collective ridiculousness of the current Supreme Court than this decision.
No it doesn't, because (ridiculous or not) it's based on the ruling of a nearly identical case from 1998.
So now, foreign companies have vastly greater control of their products in your home than American companies do.
No they don't. The decision only rules on the legality of the importation of goods, not the subsequent use of legally imported goods.
That is not exactly a decision that is in the best interest of the American people.
Entirely irrelevant. Policy isn't for the courts to decide, that role is shared between Congress and the President.
You're right, but not for the reason you think. The precedent was already set by the Supreme Court in 1998, Quality King Distributors v. L'anza Research (523 US 135). This case is practically a carbon copy, and the Supreme Court decided there were no new facts that made it necessary to reverse themselves or consider this case separately.
No. The law in question (17 USC 602(a) ) only affects the legality of imported goods, not goods that were already legally imported under the authority of the copyright holder.
Braid for Linux at the moment doesn't work on Intel graphics adapters, as the binary requires the OpenGL S3 texture compression extension, and of course the open source drivers don't implement that (isn't that patent expired by now??)
Anyway, there's a bug report for it, so supposedly they're working on it.
Yeah, at Waterloo there was actually a battle. This is like Waterloo... if Napoleon's forces decided to holiday in Marseilles.
Apples and Oranges. You oversell *individuals* 5-10x because the average, or even peak, aggregate use isn't the same as everybody maxing out their connections at once.
What Comcast is doing is overselling individuals at a rate so much higher that the *aggregate* use is oversold by a factor of 2x. That's an enormous problem.
I agree with your point in the broad strokes, but also remember that a lot of military budget goes to research and development, albeit wastefully. For FY2010 (including Iraq and Afghanistan), the US spent $79B on "Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation". If even a percent of those dollars has the effectiveness of NASA's, that alone doubles the amount we spend on futurism.
(5) The same price for a given procedure must be given to a person regardless of his affiliation (or lack thereof) with a health insurer or federal or state health-care program. A health-care provider may not accept any amount less than that price (except zero) as payment for service.