I see your point, but I still think Dyson is using Crichton as an excuse to air his disagreement with Joy, and it doesn't seem to me as though "Prey" makes a worthy basis for that. He may as well criticize "Armageddon" for raising unrealistic fears about asteroids crashing into Earth. I'd rather see Dyson addressing Joy more directly, without the distraction.
I also think Crichton gives people what they want: cheap thrills with scary monsters, basically. Whether the monsters are dinosaurs, evil nanites, or bugs from space doesn't really make much difference. He's not so much shaping public opinion, as tapping into it. I don't think Dyson has to worry about terribly negative opinions of nanotech developing because of entertainment like "Prey".
Five years ago (1998) hardly anyone had heard of Linux.
Define "hardly anyone". 1998 was when clients of mine, including some pure Windows shops, started installing Linux to run things like CVS, or special-purpose web servers, or just to experiment. People in Unix environments were pretty aware of it - often mainly as a threat, or something to be dismissed as not as good as BSD or Solaris. You're just extrapolating from your own limited experience.
It is only very recently - in the last six months or so - that people have moved on to the "I know it's good" stage.
"People"? You just haven't been paying attention If you read the trade mags that PHBs like to subscribe to, like Infoworld or Computerworld, you've been deluged with articles about Linux for at least a few years now. Some of them might say things like "is it ready for x", but more of them say "ABC Corp used it successfully and saved $XXX". If you want a list of such articles in the mainstream computer press, just search Slashdot - many of them were linked to from here.
The really important stage is yet to come - that's when organisations that are still running Microsoft are looked down upon as being out of date. That's my prediction for about 3-4 years time.
Whatever you do, don't quit your day job to become a pundit...
Personally, I hate the "dude, it's fiction" argument for the reasons described by the OP. Crichton's stuff often sucks from that point of view, but you're right, the masses eat it up, precisely because they don't know any better, and it all sounds cool.
Not sure that too many people really believed that scientists could soon have dinosaurs rampaging through their back yard.
I think you've hit on an important point here: there's no reason to believe that anyone will take "Prey" any more seriously than they did Jurassic Park. In that sense, I think Dyson's entire piece is misguided. If he wants to argue with Bill Joy, he should do so directly, rather than dragging a piece of unrealistic irrelevant pulp fiction into it.
Dyson's comparison to "On the Beach" doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The consequences of a major nuclear war would not be very different, in the most important respects, from that described in On the Beach - i.e. unthinkable numbers of people would die, and life on Earth would barely be worth living. The situation with nanotech is nowhere near so clear.
Dyson claims he's trying to combat myths that might enter the public consciousness as a result of "Prey", but it's not clear that the public is going to be any more worried about the realistic consequences of nanotech, than it is about scientists cloning killer dinosaurs.
That bugged me too, especially since Joy was consciously trying to be prescient, specifically on the subject in question. The only odd thing is the submitter's choice of words.
You're right, but I think that a lot of people get lulled by their ability to be hired as "warm bodies" when they're young and still cheap. But they don't understand that their value as warm bodies is relatively low, and is easily outweighed by increasing salary requirements, combined with (on average) outdated skills.
So when they reach the point of finding that no-one wants them as a warm body any more, and they haven't paid any attention to developing marketable skills that put them beyond warm-body-hood, it's a big shock. And then you start seeing the complaints about age discrimination, etc.
I drink hot tea regularly. But I work from home, and my g/f often brings me tea. So now it turns out she might be contributing to my demise, by minimizing my need to walk to the kitchen regularly... Damn her!
Is it because it's 'too random to judge accurately' or something like that?
Probably, yes. It's going to depend on factors which could even come down to things like whether you jiggle your legs while sitting (know we know how ADD is a survival mechanism), how much you change position, how you sit, how often you get up and take even minor breaks, etc. Then there are other risk factors that affect the vascular system, such as smoking, diet, other drugs you're taking.
You want all of these factors boiled down to a single number like "hours per day sitting to get symptoms". You could probably put a lower bound on it, but it's likely to be low enough to scare a lot of people that actually aren't at risk, because of better habits when sitting.
One reason I think there may be some validity to the computer connection is that computer work & play is often much more absorbing than other things you do when sitting generally upright, and there's a tendency amongst many people not to move around much while they're totally focused on their computer activities. Prologonged inaction, particularly in an unnatural position, is bad for you - and sitting in a chair is unnatural. Break up the inaction a bit, and you're much less likely to suffer from problems.
bullshit it wouldnt take 50-100 years.
They have cities, they have electricity, they have schools and computers RIGHT NOW.
Why would it take them 50-100 years to learn C and make stuff like computer games and software?
I can tell you've never been to Africa.
Yes, they have cities. Yes, they have electricity in the cities, and other places - but not everywhere, by any means. And yes, they have schools. But they're nothing like the schools you're probably familiar with! Have you even seen any TV programs about this sort of thing in Africa? For example, many schools in South Africa, which is one of the richest African nations, have crumbling buildings, leaking roofs, no books for the children, no stationery, no way to feed the children during the schoolday, and children who are often undernourished at home... The list goes on. The idea of computers at a school like this is laughable - these schools often don't have electricity. And where do you think their teachers come from? Most are not really qualified to teach - how would these countries have developed a large force of well-trained teachers?
So the next generation of African children is not going to be spawning a lot of high tech workers.
What they have in Africa as a whole, are hundreds of millions of people with little to no education, by first world standards. These adults are a lost cause - they're not going to suddenly learn the skills to become more economically productive. So you have to look to the next generation, the children that are growing up now. But by far the majority of those children are still not receiving an education that will allow them to build a much better economy. Improvement, if it happens at all, will be a gradual process that will happen from generation to generation, if things are managed well.
Simply "learning C" is a nearly impossible task, if you haven't learned to read and write well, or learned basic arithmetic or mathematics. Sure, some of the more well-educated people will be able to do this, but they're in a small minority - there aren't enough of them to transform the economy.
The cities and electricity you mention are misleading, because they only represent a fraction of the African population - the most highly educated. The most developed cities in Africa (ignoring Arab nations like Egypt) are in South Africa - Johannesburg, Cape Town. But these cities exist in their current form because of 50 years of apartheid rule, in which blacks were used by a relatively elite white population as, essentially, slave labor, to mine resources such as gold and diamonds. A superficially impressive system could be built that way: 5 million white people with 45 million low-paid black laborers working for them, resulted in a country with a decent infrastructure, unlike most of the rest of Africa. But that was a morally bankrupt system which was not sustainable, not a model for development in the rest of Africa - and when the government changed, much of the intellectual capital left for other countries, leaving shortages of qualified personnel in all areas.
Go one country to the north, to Botswana or Zimbabwe, and check out their cities. Even though Botswana is one of the richer and more politically stable African nations, its biggest city, Gaborone, is nothing remotely like a first world city. It's dusty, with few tall buildings, and mostly poor roads. When I was last there about 5 years ago, there weren't even that many traffic lights.
In Zimbabwe, looters attack farms, kill the farmers, and take over the land, sometimes even with tacit government support. They have some impressive bits of infrastructure, such as a sports stadium in Harare, but that was a gift from the Chinese back in the cold war days, when Africa was a covert first-world battleground for communism vs. capitalism. Mugabe, Zimbabwe's dictator, is a leftover relic from those days, much like Castro in Cuba - but Mugabe is much more corrupt, and Zimbabwe suffers as a result. The people don't rise up to overthrow him, because they're too busy dealing with their own survival - it's easier to loot a farm than to overthrow the government and figure out what to do next (other than letting another dictator take over).
Moving north, things don't get any better. "Cities" like Kinshasa, in the Congo, could just as easily be called overgrown shantytowns.
I don't think the situation in Africa is completely hopeless. But short of divine intervention, there's no way that it can quickly or easily develop significantly better national economies. The process of bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and ignorance is a long, slow one.
And how do you think this stuff is built? Just because they lack it doesnt mean they should just give up on ever having it.
What? because they dont have education, infastructure, a good economy, medical care etc they should do everything in their power to ensure they never have it tomorrow?
You said they could have it "easily", which is clearly false. A more accurate assessment is that if the appropriate steps are taken now, then after a number of generations - in perhaps 50-100 years - it would be possible for some African nations to be in a much better position.
"How this stuff is built", as you put it, is that over a long period of time, a nation or a people's collective knowledge and ability is built up, through education, research, study, good political decisions, favorable conditions, and a host of other factors. There are many factors that can prevent this from happening - and many of them can be seen in Africa. "Easy" is exactly the wrong word to describe what needs to happen in Africa for the situation to improve.
Far and away the most absurd analogy I've ever heard.
It was in response to your absurd analogy about a lock on one's house. There's no comparison.
Are you one of those "no intellectual property" whackos who believe that people should be free to do whatever they want with anybody's works or ideas?
No. But as I said, I think you're conveniently ignoring the history and concepts behind copyright. The people you're defending are in fact doing damage to the public domain from which they derived their work. They've succeeded recently in selling a wildly exaggerated concept of their "rights" - one which you certainly seem to have bought into.
I'm a copyright holder myself, and I earn royalties from software. I understand and support the concept of copyright. However, what the RIAA, Disney, and their ilk have turned this into is little more than government-sanctioned corporate welfare for an essentially obsolete mode of doing business - or at the very least, a model that is bloated and not currently subject to the competition that it should be subject to (a lot like Microsoft).
Although I don't support widescale file-sharing on the scale of something like Napster, I think there's a very real sense in which that's simply a tough negotiating position on the part of consumers. It's a behavior which in large measure the record companies have brought on themselves, by ignoring technological advances for decades, by fighting their customers, and ignoring customer desires.
Closing the iron fist isn't going to help them. They're going to learn some hard laws of economics eventually, and the laws which you've been defending won't be able to save them. The people who allegedly break those laws won't be that different, in spirit, from people who burned their Vietnam draft cards.
We're not talking about some legal grey area here. The law is very clear, and it has been repeatedly upheld by the appellate courts. The unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted works is not lawful.
Unless it's non-infringing. We were talking about a non-infringing case, whether you like it or not.
If somebody goes to the trouble of wrapping an access control mechanism around their content, it should be illegal for somebody to come along behind them and circumvent that mechanism. If you put a lock on your door, it's illegal for someone to come into your house, isn't it? Same issue.
Not at all, because the kinds of "property" in question are very different. If I put a collar with a lock around your neck, should it be illegal for you to unlock it?
You don't seem to know much about the history and purpose of copyright, or you're deliberately ignoring that. Which brings me to:
You're trying to make this out to be about control. That's obfuscation. The DMCA is, in fact, about giving legal protection to the rights of copyright holders.
Admit it - you work in the RIAA legal department, don't you?
Or, I've been trolled by the most dedicated troll ever to haunt/.
Why don't you get back to me when you've figured out why Africa doesn't have a hope in hell of having "an economy like [Japan's] easily". Some hints: lack of education, infrastructure, economy, skills, medical care, AIDS epidemic, political corruption...
"Ignorant" is not an insult in this case - it's simply a fact. There seems to be a lot you don't know about Africa. Ignorance is "lacking knowledge or comprehension of the thing specified". Instead of making pointless & content-free responses here, why don't you try to learn more about the situation in Africa, instead.
That's because it seems as though you haven't noticed the issue. The mysterious "easy way to factor large prime numbers" for which Bill is searching has existed since prime numbers were invented, and by definition, it's never going to get any easier. What Bill presumably meant to say is "easy way to find the prime factors of large numbers". What's more interesting is whether Bill understood that when he wrote that, or whether he really was as clueless on this subject as his comment seems to superficially indicate. Which might explain why he eschewed academia for business - his own observation was that he realized (paraphrasing) that he wouldn't be the smartest fish in the academic pool, so he picked a playing field where he could excel.
However, if a efficient prime factorization routine was developed, I'm sure the discovery would be suppressed until encryption was changed to something not based on prime numbers.
Only if it's developed by someone who gives a shit...
Although, part of the evolution of usage in language is presumably also the rejection of usages that don't find favor. Who knows, perhaps the fucktard-slinger's post will shift the balance away from those who believe "alot" should be aword.
Besides, having to teach the next generation about the difference between "alot" and "allot" seems like it'd be alot of unnecessary trouble...
I wish you weren't a Coward, so I could add you to my friends list... You came up with the perfect response to the most ignorant post I've seen all day.
I'm not kidding. There ought to be a Federal law against this sort of thing, for government agencies. In the commercial world, when a company makes dumb technical decisions, in the worst case, it can go out of business. When the US Navy makes dumb technical decisions, it could literally cost people's lives, and affect national security.
This gives new meaning to phrases like "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft)". No-one ever got killed by allowing heterogenous systems.
You're just young, obviously. You can look forward to a lifetime of this sort of thing.
For example, holographic storage has been 5 years away for the last 20 years. All that data that you currently store on inconvenient and fragile spinning magnetic platters will instead be stored in some kind of tiny crystal with no moving parts except laser read/write heads.
If you want to see some of these things in your lifetime, you're going to need some pretty advanced life extension technology. Luckily, I hear that's just around the corner -- oh wait...
Are you a judge? If not, then it's not up to you to interpret the law.
You're wrong there. It is up to every citizen to interpret the law as best he can, to guide his own actions, since ignorance is no excuse. You've been interpreting, too, and we're arguing about that interpretation.
It doesn't say "except" at all.
It does say "except", and that's the whole point. And the exceptions are deliberately vague and broad, for activities which fall outside the commercial realm, which is what has allowed the same law to continue to be applied to new situations - up until recently, when lobbying money shifted the balance dramatically.
You're trying to use quotes from MCA v. Sony to refute quotes from the Napster case, and taking them out of context at that.
Not at all. You were quoting the Napster case to support your position. The quotes I gave are all generic quotes related to the interpretation of copyright law and the fair use exemption. Read them again. Read them in context, if you like. I considered their context before quoting them.
Do you want TiVo put out of business by a costly lawsuit? Do you want mandatory encryption on your TiVo? If so, then by all means keep pushing the envelope. For myself, I will continue to stay within the bounds of the law, and hope that
others do the same, so we can continue to go about our business without government interference.
That would all make sense, if I thought we were talking about going outside the bounds of the law. The fact that the FCC chairman publicly mentioned plans to commit such an act perhaps ought to tell you something. Yeah, me and the FCC Chairman, we're such scofflaws!
Remember, it's the quacking duck that gets shot.
I'm beginning to see where our differences really lie. I consider this sort of attitude to be truly dangerous and undemocratic, and is how we end up with bad government. You're basically telling me "don't stick your neck out, comrade."
You should stand up for yourself, "and hope that others do the same, so we can continue to go about our business without government interference".
The reason the Sony/Universal case applies in this case is that because the use is noncommercial. Your interpretation of the case as being about the activity being "entirely within the home" seems naive. In the case we're talking about, you could change that to "entirely within the family", and the issues are essentially the same. In particular, the use would need to cause "nonminimal harm" to the copyright holder's commercial interests.
The anti-circumvention remedies in the DMCA have nothing to do with copyright infringement. This is a common misconception. The anti-circumvention remedies make it unlawful for a person to circumvent a system of access control. This is orthogonal to the question of authorization to copy. One can copy encrypted media with the encryption intact and be guilty of copyright violation without being guilty of unlawful circumvention. One can decrypt encrypted media without copying it and be guilty of unlawful circumvention without being guilty of copyright infringement. The two have nothing to do with each other.
I'm not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse, or just missing something huge. The whole point is that the DMCA gives copyright holders an alternate way to legally control their content, where copyright doesn't give them the control they want. The whole point, for them, is that the issues are orthogonal - they can say "ok, we can't get you on copyright violations because of fair use, but we can get you on DMCA violations." In this respect, the DMCA as originally written effectively gave copyright owners the ability to take away rights that citizens had under prior copyright laws. We have fair use rights, we just can't always exercise them.
But really how would this be any different than the current situation with many languages vs. assembler as meta-language only with an additional obfuscating level of go-between.
The "meta-language" in OSes like Unix and Windows is actually C - it's primarily C conventions and architecture that defined the basics of APIs, program linking, etc. The fact that the meta-language is higher-level than assembler is important - it imposes rules and minimum conditions about how functions can be invoked between languages, etc., without which, it would be much more difficult for programs to communicate with the OS or with each other.
One of the consequences of what Flatt is saying would be to raise the bar of the lowest common denominator language in an OS. If this were done in such a way as not to limit the applications that could be developed on the OS, it could only be a good thing.
I'm prepared to call that bullshit until he presents some evidence. I don't see it happening, who wants to code on a machine that can only use one language?
We already do - if your language is not C, it better have good ability to integrate with C, or you'll be limited by that lack. In fact, most languages on current OSes are implemented in C, either directly or indirectly, for exactly these kinds of reasons. As long as the meta-language is sufficiently efficient and powerful to be used to implement other languages, there really shouldn't be any problem, theoretically. The barriers to getting commercially viable implementations of such systems developed and accepted, though, are quite large. That doesn't make the concept bullshit, it just means Flatt may be forecasting fairly far ahead.
According to which law? "Yeah, trafficking in stolen merchandise is illegal, but it doesn't really count if the only person to whom you're giving the merchandise to is your sister." "Yeah, conspiracy to commit fraud is illegal, but it doesn't really count if the only person with whom you're conspiring is your sister."
Nope. Doesn't work.
You're making a simple logical error, assuming the conclusion. None of these things are fraud, stealing, or conspiracy, under the Copyright Act - precisely because the activity is limited in scope, and non-commercial in nature. Even the fact that it involves a family member would likely be a consideration in an assessment of fair use.
It's the part where it says only the copyright holder has the authority to make copies. Pretty cut-and-dried, really. Fair use is an extremely limited exemption-- read 17 USC 107 for details-- and does not apply to the distribution of complete and unmodified copies of works to any person, for any reason.
I think you should re-read 107, and also a bit about how it's usually applied. The issues I mentioned are there: "whether such use is of a commercial nature", "the nature of the copyrighted work" and also "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." For advertising-supported shows in particular, fair use seems obvious, as confirmed in the timeshifting decision. Of course, these decision have to be made in court, they involve balancing of interests and interpretation, and are not black and white. If I was recording stuff off a premium subscription channel, the situation would be greyer.
Part of the reason big copyright owners wanted the DMCA is that it allows them to sidestep all this greyness and make it black and white: "you circumvented my protection, you're in violation of the law". It was never that simple with the copyright act.
Unfortunately, there also seems to be a widely held opinion that "fair use" means whatever the hell a person says it means in a given context, and that's not remotely true. All the information a person needs to make a critical judgment is out there, freely available to all. Why people don't take ten minutes to read the statute is beyond me.
I have read that, and more. I think that you're simply interpreting fair use more narrowly than judges typically have, which is your right, but has no bearing on what people are actually allowed to do, until a court case rules in your favor. If you can point me to a case where uses of the kind we're talking about are found infringing, I'd love to see it.
In MCA vs Sony, assuming you really mean SONY CORP. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., you could substitute "timeshifting" with "giving a copy to my sister", and factoring out the fact that we're talking about the activity, not the equipment, almost exactly the same issues apply. I believe a court would find that use non-infringing.
A couple of pertinent statements from the above decision:
"Private, noncommercial time-shifting in the home satisfies this standard of noninfringing uses [...] because the District Court's findings reveal that even the unauthorized home time-shifting of respondents' programs is legitimate fair use."
This goes directly to your claim that "It's the fact that the exchange was unauthorized that makes it illegal". The Supreme Court in this case disagreed with you:
"Even unauthorized uses of a copyrighted work are not necessarily infringing. An unlicensed use of the copyright is not an infringement unless it conflicts with one of the specific exclusive rights conferred by the copyright statute. "
...
"One may search the Copyright Act in vain for any sign that the elected representatives of the millions of people who watch television every day have made it unlawful to copy a program for later viewing at home."
This case was specifically concerned with timeshifting, but the same issues seem to apply to sharing with one's siblings. For a sibling-sharing case to be problematic, a plaintiff would have to show, among other things, that such use causes "nonminimal harm to the potential market for, or the value of, respondents' copyrighted works".
In short, I believe your interpretation is flat wrong.
No, absolutely not. Cite me a precedent anywhere that includes the distribution of home recordings under the banner of "fair use." You won't find one.
I quoted someone else's use of the term, but "distributing" doesn't really apply if the only person to whom you're giving copies to is your sister.
Once you pass home recordings outside the home and exchange them with others, you're no longer in the realm of fair use. You're breaking the law.
That's not at all true, afaik. Where do you get that from? It's nowhere near as cut and dried as that.
One of the reasons the Napster case was interesting was that in the end, one of the major issues that made Napster's operation "illegal" was that they profited commercially from people's exchanging of music. Without the profit factor, the illegality is much less obvious.
Another factor mentioned in the Napster case was the sheer volume of distribution. I recall the judge saying (although perhaps not in the final judgement) that there had to be a line somewhere between the fair use sharing of copies, and the sharing on a mass scale being done by Napster. Implied in this was that fair use sharing on a minor scale, without profit involved, is legal.
I don't believe there's any way, under ordinary copyright law, that giving recordings of a TV show to your sister could be construed as illegal.
In fact, one explicit basis for the legality of this would be that timeshifting of TV shows has been found to be legal. Given that, if my sister asks me to timeshift shows for her, and no money is involved, I believe I can do that without even technically violating copyright law.
Unfortunately, there seems to be widespread ignorance of quite how favorable regular copyright law is to the ordinary citizen. So people don't realize quite how much has been lost with the DMCA.
Re:Effective Java? What is this Java?
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Effective Java
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Haven't you heard? Our revered leaders, the beloved Bill and Ted^H^H^HSteve, have been instructed by the Leaders of the High Command, George and Dick, to include this "Java" in every shiny new copy of the.NET mother ship, which we fondly know as Windows. So bow down to the great and mighty Java, we must worship it now, for it has been ordained...
[Sorry I couldn't keep your Logan's thing going...]
I take your point, and basically agree, but in the example you mention, the problem was with the people you were helping. In this case, the PCI-SIG organization is not the primary beneficiary of his site, even if it benefits indirectly. That's where I see a difference here. If users of Jim's site were directly making things difficult for him, that would be different.
I think an aspect of this is probably just naivete. If you have a bit of business or legal knowledge, you know that something like this is a non-issue - it can be taken care of in maybe an hour at most, send a letter and make a minor site mod, and you're clean. Getting upset about it seems pointless - you're getting upset at a non-profit organization consisting of member companies whose lawyers are bored and dumb. (Or maybe not so dumb, if they end up getting Jim's content.)
Business is business, especially in America, and I don't think kowtowing to unreasonable demands helps anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I also think Crichton gives people what they want: cheap thrills with scary monsters, basically. Whether the monsters are dinosaurs, evil nanites, or bugs from space doesn't really make much difference. He's not so much shaping public opinion, as tapping into it. I don't think Dyson has to worry about terribly negative opinions of nanotech developing because of entertainment like "Prey".
Define "hardly anyone". 1998 was when clients of mine, including some pure Windows shops, started installing Linux to run things like CVS, or special-purpose web servers, or just to experiment. People in Unix environments were pretty aware of it - often mainly as a threat, or something to be dismissed as not as good as BSD or Solaris. You're just extrapolating from your own limited experience.
It is only very recently - in the last six months or so - that people have moved on to the "I know it's good" stage.
"People"? You just haven't been paying attention If you read the trade mags that PHBs like to subscribe to, like Infoworld or Computerworld, you've been deluged with articles about Linux for at least a few years now. Some of them might say things like "is it ready for x", but more of them say "ABC Corp used it successfully and saved $XXX". If you want a list of such articles in the mainstream computer press, just search Slashdot - many of them were linked to from here.
The really important stage is yet to come - that's when organisations that are still running Microsoft are looked down upon as being out of date. That's my prediction for about 3-4 years time.
Whatever you do, don't quit your day job to become a pundit...
Not sure that too many people really believed that scientists could soon have dinosaurs rampaging through their back yard.
I think you've hit on an important point here: there's no reason to believe that anyone will take "Prey" any more seriously than they did Jurassic Park. In that sense, I think Dyson's entire piece is misguided. If he wants to argue with Bill Joy, he should do so directly, rather than dragging a piece of unrealistic irrelevant pulp fiction into it.
Dyson's comparison to "On the Beach" doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The consequences of a major nuclear war would not be very different, in the most important respects, from that described in On the Beach - i.e. unthinkable numbers of people would die, and life on Earth would barely be worth living. The situation with nanotech is nowhere near so clear.
Dyson claims he's trying to combat myths that might enter the public consciousness as a result of "Prey", but it's not clear that the public is going to be any more worried about the realistic consequences of nanotech, than it is about scientists cloning killer dinosaurs.
That bugged me too, especially since Joy was consciously trying to be prescient, specifically on the subject in question. The only odd thing is the submitter's choice of words.
So when they reach the point of finding that no-one wants them as a warm body any more, and they haven't paid any attention to developing marketable skills that put them beyond warm-body-hood, it's a big shock. And then you start seeing the complaints about age discrimination, etc.
I drink hot tea regularly. But I work from home, and my g/f often brings me tea. So now it turns out she might be contributing to my demise, by minimizing my need to walk to the kitchen regularly... Damn her!
Probably, yes. It's going to depend on factors which could even come down to things like whether you jiggle your legs while sitting (know we know how ADD is a survival mechanism), how much you change position, how you sit, how often you get up and take even minor breaks, etc. Then there are other risk factors that affect the vascular system, such as smoking, diet, other drugs you're taking.
You want all of these factors boiled down to a single number like "hours per day sitting to get symptoms". You could probably put a lower bound on it, but it's likely to be low enough to scare a lot of people that actually aren't at risk, because of better habits when sitting.
One reason I think there may be some validity to the computer connection is that computer work & play is often much more absorbing than other things you do when sitting generally upright, and there's a tendency amongst many people not to move around much while they're totally focused on their computer activities. Prologonged inaction, particularly in an unnatural position, is bad for you - and sitting in a chair is unnatural. Break up the inaction a bit, and you're much less likely to suffer from problems.
Why would it take them 50-100 years to learn C and make stuff like computer games and software?
I can tell you've never been to Africa.
Yes, they have cities. Yes, they have electricity in the cities, and other places - but not everywhere, by any means. And yes, they have schools. But they're nothing like the schools you're probably familiar with! Have you even seen any TV programs about this sort of thing in Africa? For example, many schools in South Africa, which is one of the richest African nations, have crumbling buildings, leaking roofs, no books for the children, no stationery, no way to feed the children during the schoolday, and children who are often undernourished at home... The list goes on. The idea of computers at a school like this is laughable - these schools often don't have electricity. And where do you think their teachers come from? Most are not really qualified to teach - how would these countries have developed a large force of well-trained teachers?
So the next generation of African children is not going to be spawning a lot of high tech workers.
What they have in Africa as a whole, are hundreds of millions of people with little to no education, by first world standards. These adults are a lost cause - they're not going to suddenly learn the skills to become more economically productive. So you have to look to the next generation, the children that are growing up now. But by far the majority of those children are still not receiving an education that will allow them to build a much better economy. Improvement, if it happens at all, will be a gradual process that will happen from generation to generation, if things are managed well.
Simply "learning C" is a nearly impossible task, if you haven't learned to read and write well, or learned basic arithmetic or mathematics. Sure, some of the more well-educated people will be able to do this, but they're in a small minority - there aren't enough of them to transform the economy.
The cities and electricity you mention are misleading, because they only represent a fraction of the African population - the most highly educated. The most developed cities in Africa (ignoring Arab nations like Egypt) are in South Africa - Johannesburg, Cape Town. But these cities exist in their current form because of 50 years of apartheid rule, in which blacks were used by a relatively elite white population as, essentially, slave labor, to mine resources such as gold and diamonds. A superficially impressive system could be built that way: 5 million white people with 45 million low-paid black laborers working for them, resulted in a country with a decent infrastructure, unlike most of the rest of Africa. But that was a morally bankrupt system which was not sustainable, not a model for development in the rest of Africa - and when the government changed, much of the intellectual capital left for other countries, leaving shortages of qualified personnel in all areas.
Go one country to the north, to Botswana or Zimbabwe, and check out their cities. Even though Botswana is one of the richer and more politically stable African nations, its biggest city, Gaborone, is nothing remotely like a first world city. It's dusty, with few tall buildings, and mostly poor roads. When I was last there about 5 years ago, there weren't even that many traffic lights.
In Zimbabwe, looters attack farms, kill the farmers, and take over the land, sometimes even with tacit government support. They have some impressive bits of infrastructure, such as a sports stadium in Harare, but that was a gift from the Chinese back in the cold war days, when Africa was a covert first-world battleground for communism vs. capitalism. Mugabe, Zimbabwe's dictator, is a leftover relic from those days, much like Castro in Cuba - but Mugabe is much more corrupt, and Zimbabwe suffers as a result. The people don't rise up to overthrow him, because they're too busy dealing with their own survival - it's easier to loot a farm than to overthrow the government and figure out what to do next (other than letting another dictator take over).
Moving north, things don't get any better. "Cities" like Kinshasa, in the Congo, could just as easily be called overgrown shantytowns.
I don't think the situation in Africa is completely hopeless. But short of divine intervention, there's no way that it can quickly or easily develop significantly better national economies. The process of bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and ignorance is a long, slow one.
You said they could have it "easily", which is clearly false. A more accurate assessment is that if the appropriate steps are taken now, then after a number of generations - in perhaps 50-100 years - it would be possible for some African nations to be in a much better position.
"How this stuff is built", as you put it, is that over a long period of time, a nation or a people's collective knowledge and ability is built up, through education, research, study, good political decisions, favorable conditions, and a host of other factors. There are many factors that can prevent this from happening - and many of them can be seen in Africa. "Easy" is exactly the wrong word to describe what needs to happen in Africa for the situation to improve.
It was in response to your absurd analogy about a lock on one's house. There's no comparison.
Are you one of those "no intellectual property" whackos who believe that people should be free to do whatever they want with anybody's works or ideas?
No. But as I said, I think you're conveniently ignoring the history and concepts behind copyright. The people you're defending are in fact doing damage to the public domain from which they derived their work. They've succeeded recently in selling a wildly exaggerated concept of their "rights" - one which you certainly seem to have bought into.
I'm a copyright holder myself, and I earn royalties from software. I understand and support the concept of copyright. However, what the RIAA, Disney, and their ilk have turned this into is little more than government-sanctioned corporate welfare for an essentially obsolete mode of doing business - or at the very least, a model that is bloated and not currently subject to the competition that it should be subject to (a lot like Microsoft).
Although I don't support widescale file-sharing on the scale of something like Napster, I think there's a very real sense in which that's simply a tough negotiating position on the part of consumers. It's a behavior which in large measure the record companies have brought on themselves, by ignoring technological advances for decades, by fighting their customers, and ignoring customer desires.
Closing the iron fist isn't going to help them. They're going to learn some hard laws of economics eventually, and the laws which you've been defending won't be able to save them. The people who allegedly break those laws won't be that different, in spirit, from people who burned their Vietnam draft cards.
Unless it's non-infringing. We were talking about a non-infringing case, whether you like it or not.
If somebody goes to the trouble of wrapping an access control mechanism around their content, it should be illegal for somebody to come along behind them and circumvent that mechanism. If you put a lock on your door, it's illegal for someone to come into your house, isn't it? Same issue.
Not at all, because the kinds of "property" in question are very different. If I put a collar with a lock around your neck, should it be illegal for you to unlock it?
You don't seem to know much about the history and purpose of copyright, or you're deliberately ignoring that. Which brings me to:
You're trying to make this out to be about control. That's obfuscation. The DMCA is, in fact, about giving legal protection to the rights of copyright holders.
Admit it - you work in the RIAA legal department, don't you?
Or, I've been trolled by the most dedicated troll ever to haunt /.
"Ignorant" is not an insult in this case - it's simply a fact. There seems to be a lot you don't know about Africa. Ignorance is "lacking knowledge or comprehension of the thing specified". Instead of making pointless & content-free responses here, why don't you try to learn more about the situation in Africa, instead.
There are David Hasselhoff records that are even remotely listenable?
That's because it seems as though you haven't noticed the issue. The mysterious "easy way to factor large prime numbers" for which Bill is searching has existed since prime numbers were invented, and by definition, it's never going to get any easier. What Bill presumably meant to say is "easy way to find the prime factors of large numbers". What's more interesting is whether Bill understood that when he wrote that, or whether he really was as clueless on this subject as his comment seems to superficially indicate. Which might explain why he eschewed academia for business - his own observation was that he realized (paraphrasing) that he wouldn't be the smartest fish in the academic pool, so he picked a playing field where he could excel.
However, if a efficient prime factorization routine was developed, I'm sure the discovery would be suppressed until encryption was changed to something not based on prime numbers.
Only if it's developed by someone who gives a shit...
Besides, having to teach the next generation about the difference between "alot" and "allot" seems like it'd be alot of unnecessary trouble...
I wish you weren't a Coward, so I could add you to my friends list... You came up with the perfect response to the most ignorant post I've seen all day.
I'm not kidding. There ought to be a Federal law against this sort of thing, for government agencies. In the commercial world, when a company makes dumb technical decisions, in the worst case, it can go out of business. When the US Navy makes dumb technical decisions, it could literally cost people's lives, and affect national security.
This gives new meaning to phrases like "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft)". No-one ever got killed by allowing heterogenous systems.
For example, holographic storage has been 5 years away for the last 20 years. All that data that you currently store on inconvenient and fragile spinning magnetic platters will instead be stored in some kind of tiny crystal with no moving parts except laser read/write heads.
If you want to see some of these things in your lifetime, you're going to need some pretty advanced life extension technology. Luckily, I hear that's just around the corner -- oh wait...
You're wrong there. It is up to every citizen to interpret the law as best he can, to guide his own actions, since ignorance is no excuse. You've been interpreting, too, and we're arguing about that interpretation.
It doesn't say "except" at all.
It does say "except", and that's the whole point. And the exceptions are deliberately vague and broad, for activities which fall outside the commercial realm, which is what has allowed the same law to continue to be applied to new situations - up until recently, when lobbying money shifted the balance dramatically.
You're trying to use quotes from MCA v. Sony to refute quotes from the Napster case, and taking them out of context at that.
Not at all. You were quoting the Napster case to support your position. The quotes I gave are all generic quotes related to the interpretation of copyright law and the fair use exemption. Read them again. Read them in context, if you like. I considered their context before quoting them.
Do you want TiVo put out of business by a costly lawsuit? Do you want mandatory encryption on your TiVo? If so, then by all means keep pushing the envelope. For myself, I will continue to stay within the bounds of the law, and hope that others do the same, so we can continue to go about our business without government interference.
That would all make sense, if I thought we were talking about going outside the bounds of the law. The fact that the FCC chairman publicly mentioned plans to commit such an act perhaps ought to tell you something. Yeah, me and the FCC Chairman, we're such scofflaws!
Remember, it's the quacking duck that gets shot.
I'm beginning to see where our differences really lie. I consider this sort of attitude to be truly dangerous and undemocratic, and is how we end up with bad government. You're basically telling me "don't stick your neck out, comrade."
You should stand up for yourself, "and hope that others do the same, so we can continue to go about our business without government interference".
The reason the Sony/Universal case applies in this case is that because the use is noncommercial. Your interpretation of the case as being about the activity being "entirely within the home" seems naive. In the case we're talking about, you could change that to "entirely within the family", and the issues are essentially the same. In particular, the use would need to cause "nonminimal harm" to the copyright holder's commercial interests.
The anti-circumvention remedies in the DMCA have nothing to do with copyright infringement. This is a common misconception. The anti-circumvention remedies make it unlawful for a person to circumvent a system of access control. This is orthogonal to the question of authorization to copy. One can copy encrypted media with the encryption intact and be guilty of copyright violation without being guilty of unlawful circumvention. One can decrypt encrypted media without copying it and be guilty of unlawful circumvention without being guilty of copyright infringement. The two have nothing to do with each other.
I'm not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse, or just missing something huge. The whole point is that the DMCA gives copyright holders an alternate way to legally control their content, where copyright doesn't give them the control they want. The whole point, for them, is that the issues are orthogonal - they can say "ok, we can't get you on copyright violations because of fair use, but we can get you on DMCA violations." In this respect, the DMCA as originally written effectively gave copyright owners the ability to take away rights that citizens had under prior copyright laws. We have fair use rights, we just can't always exercise them.
The "meta-language" in OSes like Unix and Windows is actually C - it's primarily C conventions and architecture that defined the basics of APIs, program linking, etc. The fact that the meta-language is higher-level than assembler is important - it imposes rules and minimum conditions about how functions can be invoked between languages, etc., without which, it would be much more difficult for programs to communicate with the OS or with each other.
One of the consequences of what Flatt is saying would be to raise the bar of the lowest common denominator language in an OS. If this were done in such a way as not to limit the applications that could be developed on the OS, it could only be a good thing.
I'm prepared to call that bullshit until he presents some evidence. I don't see it happening, who wants to code on a machine that can only use one language?
We already do - if your language is not C, it better have good ability to integrate with C, or you'll be limited by that lack. In fact, most languages on current OSes are implemented in C, either directly or indirectly, for exactly these kinds of reasons. As long as the meta-language is sufficiently efficient and powerful to be used to implement other languages, there really shouldn't be any problem, theoretically. The barriers to getting commercially viable implementations of such systems developed and accepted, though, are quite large. That doesn't make the concept bullshit, it just means Flatt may be forecasting fairly far ahead.
I think you should re-read 107, and also a bit about how it's usually applied. The issues I mentioned are there: "whether such use is of a commercial nature", "the nature of the copyrighted work" and also "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." For advertising-supported shows in particular, fair use seems obvious, as confirmed in the timeshifting decision. Of course, these decision have to be made in court, they involve balancing of interests and interpretation, and are not black and white. If I was recording stuff off a premium subscription channel, the situation would be greyer.
Part of the reason big copyright owners wanted the DMCA is that it allows them to sidestep all this greyness and make it black and white: "you circumvented my protection, you're in violation of the law". It was never that simple with the copyright act.
I have read that, and more. I think that you're simply interpreting fair use more narrowly than judges typically have, which is your right, but has no bearing on what people are actually allowed to do, until a court case rules in your favor. If you can point me to a case where uses of the kind we're talking about are found infringing, I'd love to see it.
In MCA vs Sony, assuming you really mean SONY CORP. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., you could substitute "timeshifting" with "giving a copy to my sister", and factoring out the fact that we're talking about the activity, not the equipment, almost exactly the same issues apply. I believe a court would find that use non-infringing.
A couple of pertinent statements from the above decision:
This goes directly to your claim that "It's the fact that the exchange was unauthorized that makes it illegal". The Supreme Court in this case disagreed with you: This case was specifically concerned with timeshifting, but the same issues seem to apply to sharing with one's siblings. For a sibling-sharing case to be problematic, a plaintiff would have to show, among other things, that such use causes "nonminimal harm to the potential market for, or the value of, respondents' copyrighted works".In short, I believe your interpretation is flat wrong.
No, absolutely not. Cite me a precedent anywhere that includes the distribution of home recordings under the banner of "fair use." You won't find one.
I quoted someone else's use of the term, but "distributing" doesn't really apply if the only person to whom you're giving copies to is your sister.
Once you pass home recordings outside the home and exchange them with others, you're no longer in the realm of fair use. You're breaking the law.
That's not at all true, afaik. Where do you get that from? It's nowhere near as cut and dried as that.
One of the reasons the Napster case was interesting was that in the end, one of the major issues that made Napster's operation "illegal" was that they profited commercially from people's exchanging of music. Without the profit factor, the illegality is much less obvious.
Another factor mentioned in the Napster case was the sheer volume of distribution. I recall the judge saying (although perhaps not in the final judgement) that there had to be a line somewhere between the fair use sharing of copies, and the sharing on a mass scale being done by Napster. Implied in this was that fair use sharing on a minor scale, without profit involved, is legal.
I don't believe there's any way, under ordinary copyright law, that giving recordings of a TV show to your sister could be construed as illegal.
In fact, one explicit basis for the legality of this would be that timeshifting of TV shows has been found to be legal. Given that, if my sister asks me to timeshift shows for her, and no money is involved, I believe I can do that without even technically violating copyright law.
Unfortunately, there seems to be widespread ignorance of quite how favorable regular copyright law is to the ordinary citizen. So people don't realize quite how much has been lost with the DMCA.
[Sorry I couldn't keep your Logan's thing going...]
Distributing copies to sister = fair use. The DMCA is the only law that might apply.
I think an aspect of this is probably just naivete. If you have a bit of business or legal knowledge, you know that something like this is a non-issue - it can be taken care of in maybe an hour at most, send a letter and make a minor site mod, and you're clean. Getting upset about it seems pointless - you're getting upset at a non-profit organization consisting of member companies whose lawyers are bored and dumb. (Or maybe not so dumb, if they end up getting Jim's content.)
Business is business, especially in America, and I don't think kowtowing to unreasonable demands helps anyone.