you ejected such media by throwing them in the black hole
OK, call me a rebel or clue-impaired, but why did anyone ever think that the best metaphor for ejecting a disk is throwing it away? How did that even occur to anyone, much less make it past any kind of peer review. When you think about it, that function isn't even related to the usual function of the trash can. For its day, the original Mac OS was a real step forward in user ease... except for that stupid metaphor.
A few people have written that this sounds too goofy to be true. Alas, there is no such thing as "too goofy to be true"...
Quick summary: In 1998 March, a kid at a school wore a Pepsi shirt on "Coke Day", when his school was trying to win some contest for most Coke-themed day or something. He was suspended for "disruption" and for ruining the picture they were trying to take. It's a pretty sorry story, actually.
But we in the U.S. had schools free of this nonsense for two hundred years.
Technically true, as corporate sponsorship is a relatively new phenomenon (< 50 y or so). But money (in the form of wealthy donors) has always talked on campus. Heck, the University of Paris (one of the earliest) was beholden to (I believe) the King of France and tended to put out theological "proofs" that the crown was right in this or that squabble.
The problem is, education is expensive, increasingly so, and we haven't figured out a funding model that preserves the schools' independence. Tuition will probably never cut it, alumni donations come with strings, state funding thrusts the school into the political minefield, and (as we see) corporate sponsorship leads to extortion.
Also blockquoth the poster:
The figures from a few years back were, I think, in Los Angeles, $7,200 per student in the L.A. Unified School District vs. $3,000 per student in the Catholic schools there.
I love the Catholic school system -- heck, I'm a product of it -- but you have to be fair: (a) Catholic schools are always hurting for adequate facilities and (b) a significant fraction of their faculties are religious, with a noticeably lower cost in salaries, benefits, etc.
Funny, I never read the first or second. I didn't really understand everything that was happening until book 4
Um, don't you think the first and second sentences might be causally connected?
Foundation remains a great, ground-breaking book. Sure, in many ways he just stole from the Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet he also formalized and birthed the Great Galactic Empire found in many later works. Almost all vast Empires are spiritual descendants of Asimov's. (Don't believe me? Look at Phantom Menace... Coruscant == Trantor.)
I think people are forgetting the right of assocation.
which got me to thinking about
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or
the right of the people peaceably to assemble
(US Contitution, First Amendment)
I wonder if one could argue that links are indeed the way in which people "assemble" on the Web. It is after all how associations are formed. If that case could be made, then things become interesting, because First Amendment trumps almost everything.
Okay, so we can't SUE you to get you to take down that site, but lets say we park all of our warships around your island. Any of your planes try to take off or land, we'll consider that hostile. What? Okay, so when will you have the site offline?
Oh, wait, another call is coming through. It's from who? The Royal Navy? Ah, I see... about all these warships in your national territory, it's really just a billing dispute...
As has been said elsewhere, it's really only the Brits who can militarily challenge Sealand. All others would be violating the UK's territorial waters, and no matter how they feel about Sealand, the Brits probably couldn't afford to let such encroachment go through...
Re:MPAA backpedalling
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 2
Quoth the poster:
Now that they're getting a substantial amount of bad press in mainstream publications...
Are they really? I'm not looking for flamebait but I can't recall any such. I'd love to see it, though, because that's a wonderful development if true.
It's not about a "right" to sell
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 2
The issue is not about the merchant's right to sell encrypted DVDs. It's not even about a merchant's right to license rather than sell. That misses the point.
It's about an alleged "right" the merchant has to insist on selling encrypted, controlled-access intellectual "property"* and then to bring the full force of the state to bear upon people who hack around the encryption. It's about the alleged "right" of the merchant to enjoy the protections of copyright while encircling, diluting, and ennervating the rights of Fair Use and First Sale. Yet these rights are well-established prices one must pay to enjoy the protection of copyright.
The MPAA and other intellectual "property"* owners want to eat their cake and have it too: They want the government to protect them but they don't want to uphold their part of the bargain. They want unprecendented control over access and content use, yet they want to rely on the precedents for enforcement and protection.
To be succinct, the MPAA does not want to play fair. And I think this is the chord that has been struck. I hope you can forgive the following Americentrism, but that's where I'm from. And I believe that Americans have a very deep and abiding belief in fair play. Sometimes (many times, even) we do wonders convincing ourselves that the thing in our own interest is also the most fair -- but I have real faith that most Americans can recognize the grossly unfair and that most are repelled by it.
* Intellectual property is property in the way that fool's gold is gold.
I think it's a photo of a drop splashing into a pool of water... perhaps signalling that 20th-century implements like the WIPO are mere drops in the bucket compared to the flood of info that will be seeking freedom? Or that actual losses to "piracy"* due to deCSS is just a drop in the bucket compared to actual losses due to traditional means?
* Copyright infringement is not piracy. Few geeks walk around with knives in their mouths saying "Arrgh! Avast!"
Reacting to my distinction between Micros~1 and (say) murderers, the poster notes that even mass murderers never topped 500 or so, while Mircos~1 has affected billions. Then the poster asks:
are you *sure* you don't wish to re-consider your statement?
To which I reply: No, I don't wish to reconsider it. Equating the (admittedly egregious and predatory) damages done by Micros~1 to actual murder or rape is simply over the top. There is a difference in kind that can never be erased by a difference in scale. Saying the two are truly comparable is to demean the dignity of human life. It is, in fact, to buy into the current madness, to believe that economic value is the only value.
Let me say again: I agree that Micros~1 is predatory, nasty, and maybe even evil. They have done a lot of damage. But that doesn't equate them to murderers, rapists, and such.
do murders, rapists, theives, etc. get to say what they want their sentance to be? I think not!
First, though I am far from a Micros~1 zealot, I think it's a bit far to lump them in with murderers and rapists.
Second, even people convicted of felonies get to attend the sentencing hearing -- in fact, it isn't valid without them -- and of course their attorneys can most definitely speak to the harshness of the sought penalty. I believe it happens all the time.
On the other hand, I'm not sure I believe the poster who claimed that anti-trust decisions are always remedial, not punitive. I'm not saying he/she is wrong, exactly, but I'm not saying I think he/she is right, either.
But I wonder if it would hurt to at least *research* the story before posting it.
Hmmm. What research is being suggested? I read the Apogee license site (which, incidentally, had a non-link to a privacy policy), I've now read the public response of Scott Miller, and I even dashed off an email to Mr. Miller myself. His response was much the same as the public one -- essentially, dismissive of the concerns people have raised and sort of "We'll never do that -- TRUST us." in a Joe Izuzu tone.
From what's developing, the original post was dead-on and the cause for concern in my mind hasn't been reduced one whit. Slashdot sometimes goes off half-cocked; this is not one of those times.
From MS's side they also provide those OEM licenses at a discount in a lot of cases. Shitty yes, but it makes sense that they don't want those just floating around in the world when they can make much more money directly by selling the Retail boxes as the poster above said.
It might make sense. That doesn't mean it's legal. The well-established principle of First Sale seems to come into play here...
Why has there been an incredible increase in the number of computer software related patents such that the USPTO cannot keep up with the work load?
Actually, this sort of ticked me off. What Dickinson failed to say -- perhaps, because he honestly doesn't know -- is that something fundamental has changed in the past decade. Previously, only functioning physical devices could be patented. Since the late 1980s, however, the courts have (unwisely, IMHO) expanded patents to include non-tangibles like software and "business methods". A lot of the abuses seem to stem from that.
Copyright is a kind of property, called "intellectual property"
assumes the answer to the argument, meaning it's not particularly persuasive (at least to me). I know that people refer to "intellectual property" as if it were really property. But then again, they refer to "software pirates" as if pale-skinned geeks went around with knives in their mouths saying "Arrgh!" all the time. The choice of words was deliberate to create a (largely subconscious) connotation of legitimacy. Just because the word has been mis-applied (IMHO) doesn't mean I have to accept it.
But actually, that's not what I wanted to reply about. I am more interested in
When you bypass copyright, you do indeed take away a thing someone had, which had value to that person.
I will assume "value to that person" is not refering to sentimental value or the sheer pride of creation, but in fact, to economic value. That is, I assume the value referenced is the services or goods that someone would have been willing to exchange for that item (in this case, an idea).
But my argument was this: in an age of digitial copying, that intellectual "property" has no intrinsic value in this sense. If copies are available and essentially cost nothing, and if I need not go through a particular distribution channel to copy that IP, then it has no intrinsic value because I certainly will want to pay the least I can (i.e., zero).
Copyright, then, exists to artificially add (economic) value to ideas, works, etc., precisely because they have none to start with. I am not saying that this artificiality necessarily means that copyrights are evil. In fact, I lean the other way. But because the copyright is a non-natural monopoly granted to create value for intellectual "property", it is entirely reasonable to insist that it fulfill the intended social goals and to restrict copyright holders when they act against the social good intended by the copyright law.
My original post was exactly a reaction to the assumption that these intellectual "property" rights exist outside a social contract. Because we've allowed the corporate droids to appropriate loaded words like "property" (and "piracy"), we start behind the 8-ball when trying to discuss the issues.
You have to agree that any incompetence involved with fabricating the gyros will be a sign in their favor, unlike the other missions
Um, no, you don't have to agree to that at all. You see, there's this little process called "calibration", which will allow the mission scientists to quantify how precise and how stable the gyros are. I'm not sure what the procedure will be, but you can bet they'll check these things in a way that minimizes or negates any real signal. Then, if there's drift, they'll know it comes from fabrication error or other noise.
I don't know if the poster is a scientist or not, but that kind of misconception is very common. Nothing is made perfectly, so if science depended on that, we'd all be in trouble. Science is not about what you know -- it's about quantifying what you don't know. The important thing is never the number by itself but the number with its error bars.
Indeed, one complaint levelled at GPB over the years is that their signal-to-noise ratio is so low, it'll be hard to believe anything that comes out. Personally I believe they've got a handle but honest opinion, for now, can easily differ.
You mentioned many of the other strugles the project had to overcome, was the fabrication of the spheres to such a tight tolerance among these challanges?
Disclaimer: I never worked on GPB, I just knew grads in my department who did. And I sat through a handful of colloquia on the subject.
Making the gyros to the right tolerance was definitely one of the big challenges. I think they did some pioneering work in computer aided design and fabrication because they needed such precision. Making quartz pure enough was a big problem for the chemists on the project. Designing a bus vehicle that would cushion the gyros enough so that the launch didn't damage them consumed a lot of effort, too, I think. They also advanced the state of the art in cryonics, because they needed a stable, light, small system.
My earlier comment might have sounded like I didn't like GPB. Actually, I've generally been impressed with them. If you ever want to see how "basic research" can benefit the larger economy, look at the diverse areas of research needed for GPB to fly. They have "spin-off" written all over them.
I was at Stanford for grad school back in the early nineties, and GPB occupied a special place in grad student lore. On the one hand, it's sounds really cool and obviously pushes the edge of the envelope on a host of technologies. (Something not mentioned in the article: They had to invent a way to screen magnetic fields, so someone came up with inflatable superconducting "balloons", since superconductors exclude the field within them. After twelve or so layers of balloons, the magnetic field was lower in the test chamber than the field in the great voids between superclusters...)
On the other hand, it seemed that they got a large share of resources for a project that had been in place for thirty (and now nearly forty) years. There are whole dynasties of physicists who have worked on essentially nothing else during that time. I'm not saying it is wrong, exactly, but it was odd to talk to GPB people while struggling to get a grant to keep your lab going for just one more year.
The article fails to mention the extended time that this experiment has been going on. After all, although 13 months sounds like a lot, it's really only 2.5% of the total project time -- well below most probes, I think. We used to joke that the launch date -- which I distinctly remember being announced as 1994 -- slips at a rate of slightly more than one year per year.
It'll be nice when they start getting the results they've been working towards for so long.
I usually try to read through everything, but just reading this guy's speech made my blood boil. In particular,
All of us who believe in the right to own property, and therefore in the sanctity of copyright, will be fiercely aggressive in this area.
Tue only if you believe that copyright == property. Of course, it doesn't. Copyright is a legal mechanism to allow some control of distribution of ideas. If ideas were truly property, there'd be no need for copyright laws. Precisely because the natural value of an idea, in a digital age, is zero (because why should someone pay for something which is easily and widely available for free?), there exist laws to prop up the value.
Those laws do exist. We can argue as to whether they are worthwhile. But they do not make ideas into "property".
The university server is a private server, therefore they can shut down whatever page they want. U.S. first amendment rights are placed there to prevent government censorship ("Congress shall make no law...")
Fair enough, except (I believe) that Oxford is taxpayer-supported. That means that, were it a US university, it would have to respect First Amendment rights.
Um, bugs in the Linux kernel may sometimes get fixed in weeks. But bugs in other software aren't fixed that quickly.
Ooooh-kay. <scratches head> The original post included the line "Yeah, go ahead and use Linux, I hear it has no bugs *giggle*". So I sort of assumed the poster was talking about Linux... which is the kernel, unless I am mistaken. I'm not sure how "other software" snuck in here.
I'm also not sure how abandonment of software fits in here anyhow. I would expect there are a lot more abandoned commericial software packages than general-release open source ones. (And has anyone seen an update for Crusade in Europe, anyway?)
I guess I had never appreciated exactly how much rage -- how much pointless rage -- resides on slashdot. I can't believe the intensity of anger displayed in some of the posts so far.
I guess I'll admit to enjoying UF and even (gasp) owning both books. Apparently this makes me a miscreant or a fallen angel or something. But I really can't see getting worked up to defend the strip. Nor can I see spending so much energy venting over it, either. There are things that get my blood boiling -- such as watching the race between governments and corporations to be the first to completely strip us of human dignity -- but a comic strip just doesn't make muster.
I simply don't have the time or energy to love or hate UF, or any strip, that much.
I suppose it's obvious how this thread has highlit the dangerous fanatic tendencies of the slashdot readership. We all too easily veer off into quasi-religious debate over topics of dubious significance. Far be it from me to intone "Get a life", but an emergency helping of perspective might be in order.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Sneakers -- one of the most underappreciated movies of the 1990s -- said it best, through the character of Cosmo:
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons.
and my favorite,
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think...
it's all about the information!
That is an interesting question. Is it legal to download an MP3 of an album you've purchases on another medium.[?]
Well, in one court (New York?), the judge found against my.mp3.com for doing precisely this. So the current legal opinion is that this is not OK. Of course, since the two files would be completely indistinguishable, the judge's decision is utterly goofy, but for now it holds...
Slashdot Mirror
Quick summary: In 1998 March, a kid at a school wore a Pepsi shirt on "Coke Day", when his school was trying to win some contest for most Coke-themed day or something. He was suspended for "disruption" and for ruining the picture they were trying to take. It's a pretty sorry story, actually.
Here's list of links to stories on the affair:
http://www.adbu sters.org/campaigns/commercialfree/toolbox/coke.ht ml
http://www.corpwa tch.org/trac/corner/worldnews/other/other122.html
http://www.sjmercury.com/digita lhigh/news/coke98.htm
The problem is, education is expensive, increasingly so, and we haven't figured out a funding model that preserves the schools' independence. Tuition will probably never cut it, alumni donations come with strings, state funding thrusts the school into the political minefield, and (as we see) corporate sponsorship leads to extortion.
Also blockquoth the poster:
I love the Catholic school system -- heck, I'm a product of it -- but you have to be fair: (a) Catholic schools are always hurting for adequate facilities and (b) a significant fraction of their faculties are religious, with a noticeably lower cost in salaries, benefits, etc.Foundation remains a great, ground-breaking book. Sure, in many ways he just stole from the Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet he also formalized and birthed the Great Galactic Empire found in many later works. Almost all vast Empires are spiritual descendants of Asimov's. (Don't believe me? Look at Phantom Menace ... Coruscant == Trantor.)
I wonder if one could argue that links are indeed the way in which people "assemble" on the Web. It is after all how associations are formed. If that case could be made, then things become interesting, because First Amendment trumps almost everything.
As has been said elsewhere, it's really only the Brits who can militarily challenge Sealand. All others would be violating the UK's territorial waters, and no matter how they feel about Sealand, the Brits probably couldn't afford to let such encroachment go through...
It's about an alleged "right" the merchant has to insist on selling encrypted, controlled-access intellectual "property"* and then to bring the full force of the state to bear upon people who hack around the encryption. It's about the alleged "right" of the merchant to enjoy the protections of copyright while encircling, diluting, and ennervating the rights of Fair Use and First Sale. Yet these rights are well-established prices one must pay to enjoy the protection of copyright.
The MPAA and other intellectual "property"* owners want to eat their cake and have it too: They want the government to protect them but they don't want to uphold their part of the bargain. They want unprecendented control over access and content use, yet they want to rely on the precedents for enforcement and protection.
To be succinct, the MPAA does not want to play fair. And I think this is the chord that has been struck. I hope you can forgive the following Americentrism, but that's where I'm from. And I believe that Americans have a very deep and abiding belief in fair play. Sometimes (many times, even) we do wonders convincing ourselves that the thing in our own interest is also the most fair -- but I have real faith that most Americans can recognize the grossly unfair and that most are repelled by it.
* Intellectual property is property in the way that fool's gold is gold.
* Copyright infringement is not piracy. Few geeks walk around with knives in their mouths saying "Arrgh! Avast!"
Let me say again: I agree that Micros~1 is predatory, nasty, and maybe even evil. They have done a lot of damage. But that doesn't equate them to murderers, rapists, and such.
Second, even people convicted of felonies get to attend the sentencing hearing -- in fact, it isn't valid without them -- and of course their attorneys can most definitely speak to the harshness of the sought penalty. I believe it happens all the time.
On the other hand, I'm not sure I believe the poster who claimed that anti-trust decisions are always remedial, not punitive. I'm not saying he/she is wrong, exactly, but I'm not saying I think he/she is right, either.
From what's developing, the original post was dead-on and the cause for concern in my mind hasn't been reduced one whit. Slashdot sometimes goes off half-cocked; this is not one of those times.
But actually, that's not what I wanted to reply about. I am more interested in
I will assume "value to that person" is not refering to sentimental value or the sheer pride of creation, but in fact, to economic value. That is, I assume the value referenced is the services or goods that someone would have been willing to exchange for that item (in this case, an idea).But my argument was this: in an age of digitial copying, that intellectual "property" has no intrinsic value in this sense. If copies are available and essentially cost nothing, and if I need not go through a particular distribution channel to copy that IP, then it has no intrinsic value because I certainly will want to pay the least I can (i.e., zero).
Copyright, then, exists to artificially add (economic) value to ideas, works, etc., precisely because they have none to start with. I am not saying that this artificiality necessarily means that copyrights are evil. In fact, I lean the other way. But because the copyright is a non-natural monopoly granted to create value for intellectual "property", it is entirely reasonable to insist that it fulfill the intended social goals and to restrict copyright holders when they act against the social good intended by the copyright law.
My original post was exactly a reaction to the assumption that these intellectual "property" rights exist outside a social contract. Because we've allowed the corporate droids to appropriate loaded words like "property" (and "piracy"), we start behind the 8-ball when trying to discuss the issues.
I for one refuse to concede those words.
I don't know if the poster is a scientist or not, but that kind of misconception is very common. Nothing is made perfectly, so if science depended on that, we'd all be in trouble. Science is not about what you know -- it's about quantifying what you don't know. The important thing is never the number by itself but the number with its error bars.
Indeed, one complaint levelled at GPB over the years is that their signal-to-noise ratio is so low, it'll be hard to believe anything that comes out. Personally I believe they've got a handle but honest opinion, for now, can easily differ.
Of course, I am a physics teacher , too, so you might lump me in on the conspiracy. :)
Making the gyros to the right tolerance was definitely one of the big challenges. I think they did some pioneering work in computer aided design and fabrication because they needed such precision. Making quartz pure enough was a big problem for the chemists on the project. Designing a bus vehicle that would cushion the gyros enough so that the launch didn't damage them consumed a lot of effort, too, I think. They also advanced the state of the art in cryonics, because they needed a stable, light, small system.
My earlier comment might have sounded like I didn't like GPB. Actually, I've generally been impressed with them. If you ever want to see how "basic research" can benefit the larger economy, look at the diverse areas of research needed for GPB to fly. They have "spin-off" written all over them.
On the other hand, it seemed that they got a large share of resources for a project that had been in place for thirty (and now nearly forty) years. There are whole dynasties of physicists who have worked on essentially nothing else during that time. I'm not saying it is wrong, exactly, but it was odd to talk to GPB people while struggling to get a grant to keep your lab going for just one more year.
The article fails to mention the extended time that this experiment has been going on. After all, although 13 months sounds like a lot, it's really only 2.5% of the total project time -- well below most probes, I think. We used to joke that the launch date -- which I distinctly remember being announced as 1994 -- slips at a rate of slightly more than one year per year.
It'll be nice when they start getting the results they've been working towards for so long.
Those laws do exist. We can argue as to whether they are worthwhile. But they do not make ideas into "property".
I'm also not sure how abandonment of software fits in here anyhow. I would expect there are a lot more abandoned commericial software packages than general-release open source ones. (And has anyone seen an update for Crusade in Europe, anyway?)
I guess I'll admit to enjoying UF and even (gasp) owning both books. Apparently this makes me a miscreant or a fallen angel or something. But I really can't see getting worked up to defend the strip. Nor can I see spending so much energy venting over it, either. There are things that get my blood boiling -- such as watching the race between governments and corporations to be the first to completely strip us of human dignity -- but a comic strip just doesn't make muster.
I simply don't have the time or energy to love or hate UF, or any strip, that much.
I suppose it's obvious how this thread has highlit the dangerous fanatic tendencies of the slashdot readership. We all too easily veer off into quasi-religious debate over topics of dubious significance. Far be it from me to intone "Get a life", but an emergency helping of perspective might be in order.