Check out this site: http://www.policeabuse.org/ -- these guys go and do things like ask police stations for a complaint form, and videotape the results. As often as not they get arrested or get some very interesting non-legal comments from the cops. Amusingly, once the cops find out they've been videotaped, every single time they drop all charges. Check on your locale and see how the cops there rate (Dekalb County in Atlanta got a grade of F).
I'm sure there are drawbacks to any copyright proposal. The question is, however, do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? In this case, I think the answer is undoubtedly yes.
My main thought to combat this and other such scenarios is to only start the 3/5/10 year clock ticking if the item is ever published. In this scenario, if the artist realizes that it doesn't sound good in stereo and doesn't release it, he retains his full 100 years of rights.
Alternately, allow separate copyrights for higher levels of quality, so that the stereo version might have gone public, but the unreleased quadrophonic version would still have its 100 years. Since the stereo version would be public domain, any derived versions like a mono version would also be public, but it doesn't go the other direction.
I incorporated this into my 'modest proposal' to reform copyright that I posted in my livejournal last month: http://www.livejournal.com/users/fin9901/day/200 3/ 01/15
(excerpt quoted below:)
We need to reform the copyright laws. My modest proposal goes something like this:
1) No copyright will ever under any circumstances last more than 100 years from original creation. If you can't make enough money off it in 100 years, you never will. This also makes it very simple to know when items are definitely out of copyright.
2) Items under copyright that are not being published fall out of copyright much quicker: any item that has been out of publication in the US cumulatively longer than a given time (varying as to the media type) becomes public domain-- i.e. "use it or lose it". Such a scheme might be: books, 20 years; audio and video, 10 years; computer software, 3 years; etc. The 'cumulative' wording is to keep publishers from trying to skirt the law by publishing things for 1 day every n years.
Millions of soldiers (not citizens) have gone to die based on their command's say-so without explanation. It's called the chain of command. Perhaps you need to read up on this and other modern concepts.
Oh, and by the way, the United States is not and has never been a democracy. Democracies have no concept of things like the Bill of Rights-- a less flattering name for them is 'mob rule'. The US is a representative republic. Perhaps you need to read up on that too.
If someone expects me to die for them, they better give me a damn good reason, not "trust me. I know some secrets that I can't tell you."
So did you join the military (in which case you'd be court-martialed, since the word of your superior officer is considered enough), or did they reinstate the draft when I wasn't looking, or are you just on crack?
Solution: attack all of NWLink's other customers
on
SDF Punted, Due to DDOS
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Think we could drive NWLink out of business by simply attacking all their customers, one by one?
After all, if they drop customers just because they're being attacked..
There have been numerous reports of the BSA harassing Unix or open-source shops out of ignorance/malice (choose one) because they have the mentality that all PCs run Windows. Businesses have been destroyed because of them.
Actually, banks are required by law to report to the Federal Reserve each year with a list of all officers of the bank (pretty much anyone in any manager role at all, plus major non-managers) who did not take 2 weeks of consecutive vacation that year.
In the past, this time was used to audit the person's desk. Nowadays, it's kept around under the theory that if someone wants to hide something, it's much more likely to show up if they can't cover their tracks for 2 weeks straight.
On the 4th page (obrant about splitting up stories into 'pages' when browsers are designed to be able to scroll), Brin makes the following observation:
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Unfortunately (for him), he's dead wrong. I don't have my Tolkien handy to check the reference, but I distinctly remember reading that in the battle of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men at the end of the Second Age, it explicitly states that every race and type of creature on Middle-Earth was divided in that battle, with the sole exception of the Elves which were the only beings to entirely be on one side, the side of Good.
You don't just control the rights to your work, you also control the rights to everything that could be made from your work. And face it, how much original material is out there any more? If you lock up your material indefinitely, you're also prohibiting the use of that material by everyone else forever.
And that is denying the public a vast resource that could be used for much creative good.
Copyrights have to expire eventually so that the material can be used by others to make new stuff. Otherwise the waters stagnate and go lifeless. This is especially deplorable for material that no one is making any use of (hence my plan for expiring those much quicker) but no idea is developed in a vacuum. Try to name a single creative work that developed in a vacuum-- even Tolkien borrowed ideas from the past, just his past was more like 500+ years ago.
Copyrights are a game of give and take. You want to take but not give, and that's wrong.
My idea: 100 years max but *only* if it's in print
on
Copyright and Copy Rights
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Here's my stupid idea regarding copyrights:
1) No copyright should ever under any circumstance exceed 100 years. A nice round figure that's easy to compute and no one can really complain that it's too short. Personally I'd like it much shorter, but this is a figure I think everyone can agree on as an absolute maximum.
2) If a copyrighted work is ever out of publication, then a clock starts ticking: depending on the class of material, if the total time out of publication exceeds the time for that class, then the item becomes public domain. These times are cumulative to keep a company from thwarting it by offering items for 1 day every few years or so. Such categories might be 20 years for books and other printed material, 10 years for audio and video, and 3 years for computer programs. The idea here is to get abandoned stuff into public domain before it totally loses all value. (This would also have the result that Microsoft would have to keep selling Windows 98 or else 3 years later everyone could copy it for free.) After all, does anyone have any doubt that PKZIP will be totally useless in 2101 except for historical purposes?
3) If an author sells the copyright on his works, and it subsequently goes out of print, all copyrights revert to said author immediately. This will let said author possibly get some value out of it before the copyright expires due to inactivity.
There are some details that would have to be ironed out in a system like this (e.g. what's to keep a company from having something 'in print' but only sold at some exorbitant rate), but hell, it's much better than what we have now.
Here's an interesting research project for you: go back to the 1980s and read the Washington Post's articles each year for when Reagan submitted his budget to Congress. It was declared DOA each year before the ink had even dried.
Of course, that kind of blows your little thesis there right out of the water, so feel free to continue with your head in the sand.
If your idea of creativity is having a different tie than others, you probably also use phrases like 'thinking outside the box' and listen to such creative bands as Hootie and the Blowfish.
Sure, ties are all creative and such. That's why you see so many artists and rock stars wearing them.
Maybe with 1.2 I'll actually be able to get the Java plugin working with Linux Mozilla under FreeBSD. I tried two different java runtime environments; not only could they not be found by anyone but root (even with world r-x perms), but neither worked-- one tried to create a window that was 4000x3000 pixels when I loaded a page with a java app that created a new window, the other just hung. (And before you ask, yes I followed all the instructions.)
Would it be too much to ask for to have a few of the very common plugins like java to be loaded & shipped by default? I'd rather have multiple JREs around than be scratching my head trying to get mozilla and java to talk to each other.
On one show, Adam Carolla stated that if he had a kid, he'd let him see his penis exactly once, so the kid would grow up thinking his dad has the biggest penis in the world.
Purdue has had unrm for years and years
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 2
Purdue had an unrm package when I was a sysadmin there in 1995, and it was old then. It worked by having a new unlink() that could then be merged in with libc (if you were brave) or linked to separately so you could have/usr/local/bin/rm instead (if you weren't), along with tools that understood how to read the filesystem tomb and restore files from it, and a daemon (preend) that cleaned the tombs of old files. Unfortunately, it has never been extremely portable, since it involves rewriting unlink(). It had pretty much everything you could want in an entombing package; but I don't know if anyone has picked up the ball with it. Last I heard they were having trouble porting it to the newer versions of FreeBSD; check out this note from Purdue ECN.
I went to install apache 2.0 on my home server running FreeBSD 4.4, which isn't all that old./usr/ports told me that my OS wasn't new enough to install apache 2, so I installed 1.3 instead.
Maybe that's why apache 2 isn't all that popular yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree with you regarding how NFS hard mounts can totally freeze up client machines, but:
:-)
Then a user I didn't know had root access
I think you have bigger problems than NFS hard mounts
Check out this site: http://www.policeabuse.org/ -- these guys go and do things like ask police stations for a complaint form, and videotape the results. As often as not they get arrested or get some very interesting non-legal comments from the cops. Amusingly, once the cops find out they've been videotaped, every single time they drop all charges. Check on your locale and see how the cops there rate (Dekalb County in Atlanta got a grade of F).
I'm sure there are drawbacks to any copyright proposal. The question is, however, do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? In this case, I think the answer is undoubtedly yes.
My main thought to combat this and other such scenarios is to only start the 3/5/10 year clock ticking if the item is ever published. In this scenario, if the artist realizes that it doesn't sound good in stereo and doesn't release it, he retains his full 100 years of rights.
Alternately, allow separate copyrights for higher levels of quality, so that the stereo version might have gone public, but the unreleased quadrophonic version would still have its 100 years. Since the stereo version would be public domain, any derived versions like a mono version would also be public, but it doesn't go the other direction.
I incorporated this into my 'modest proposal' to reform copyright that I posted in my livejournal last month:0 3/ 01/15
http://www.livejournal.com/users/fin9901/day/20
(excerpt quoted below:)
We need to reform the copyright laws. My modest proposal goes something like this:
1) No copyright will ever under any circumstances last more than 100 years from original creation. If you can't make enough money off it in 100 years, you never will. This also makes it very simple to know when items are definitely out of copyright.
2) Items under copyright that are not being published fall out of copyright much quicker: any item that has been out of publication in the US cumulatively longer than a given time (varying as to the media type) becomes public domain-- i.e. "use it or lose it". Such a scheme might be: books, 20 years; audio and video, 10 years; computer software, 3 years; etc. The 'cumulative' wording is to keep publishers from trying to skirt the law by publishing things for 1 day every n years.
Millions of soldiers (not citizens) have gone to die based on their command's say-so without explanation. It's called the chain of command. Perhaps you need to read up on this and other modern concepts.
Oh, and by the way, the United States is not and has never been a democracy. Democracies have no concept of things like the Bill of Rights-- a less flattering name for them is 'mob rule'. The US is a representative republic. Perhaps you need to read up on that too.
Read the polls and weep-- the American people support going to war against Iraq.
But then again, I've never seen the facts get in the way of a good liberal rant.
If someone expects me to die for them, they better give me a damn good reason, not "trust me. I know some secrets that I can't tell you."
So did you join the military (in which case you'd be court-martialed, since the word of your superior officer is considered enough), or did they reinstate the draft when I wasn't looking, or are you just on crack?
Think we could drive NWLink out of business by simply attacking all their customers, one by one?
After all, if they drop customers just because they're being attacked..
There have been numerous reports of the BSA harassing Unix or open-source shops out of ignorance/malice (choose one) because they have the mentality that all PCs run Windows. Businesses have been destroyed because of them.
Actually, banks are required by law to report to the Federal Reserve each year with a list of all officers of the bank (pretty much anyone in any manager role at all, plus major non-managers) who did not take 2 weeks of consecutive vacation that year.
In the past, this time was used to audit the person's desk. Nowadays, it's kept around under the theory that if someone wants to hide something, it's much more likely to show up if they can't cover their tracks for 2 weeks straight.
On the 4th page (obrant about splitting up stories into 'pages' when browsers are designed to be able to scroll), Brin makes the following observation:
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Unfortunately (for him), he's dead wrong. I don't have my Tolkien handy to check the reference, but I distinctly remember reading that in the battle of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men at the end of the Second Age, it explicitly states that every race and type of creature on Middle-Earth was divided in that battle, with the sole exception of the Elves which were the only beings to entirely be on one side, the side of Good.
So much for that theory of his. (*boom*)
I posted this in my livejournal a couple weeks ago:
Finrod's First Rule of Politics
If a political candidate mentions children in his campaign ads that he did not personally sire or adopt, then he is evil.
This could also be known as the Kyle's Mom Rule.
Two words: derivative works.
You don't just control the rights to your work, you also control the rights to everything that could be made from your work. And face it, how much original material is out there any more? If you lock up your material indefinitely, you're also prohibiting the use of that material by everyone else forever.
And that is denying the public a vast resource that could be used for much creative good.
Copyrights have to expire eventually so that the material can be used by others to make new stuff. Otherwise the waters stagnate and go lifeless. This is especially deplorable for material that no one is making any use of (hence my plan for expiring those much quicker) but no idea is developed in a vacuum. Try to name a single creative work that developed in a vacuum-- even Tolkien borrowed ideas from the past, just his past was more like 500+ years ago.
Copyrights are a game of give and take. You want to take but not give, and that's wrong.
Here's my stupid idea regarding copyrights:
1) No copyright should ever under any circumstance exceed 100 years. A nice round figure that's easy to compute and no one can really complain that it's too short. Personally I'd like it much shorter, but this is a figure I think everyone can agree on as an absolute maximum.
2) If a copyrighted work is ever out of publication, then a clock starts ticking: depending on the class of material, if the total time out of publication exceeds the time for that class, then the item becomes public domain. These times are cumulative to keep a company from thwarting it by offering items for 1 day every few years or so. Such categories might be 20 years for books and other printed material, 10 years for audio and video, and 3 years for computer programs. The idea here is to get abandoned stuff into public domain before it totally loses all value. (This would also have the result that Microsoft would have to keep selling Windows 98 or else 3 years later everyone could copy it for free.) After all, does anyone have any doubt that PKZIP will be totally useless in 2101 except for historical purposes?
3) If an author sells the copyright on his works, and it subsequently goes out of print, all copyrights revert to said author immediately. This will let said author possibly get some value out of it before the copyright expires due to inactivity.
There are some details that would have to be ironed out in a system like this (e.g. what's to keep a company from having something 'in print' but only sold at some exorbitant rate), but hell, it's much better than what we have now.
Personally, I've never owned any computer that ran Windows. I once had a 8088 that ran DOS, and that's it.
Granted, sometimes I browse slashdot from NT (like right now), but that's because it's forced upon me at work.
Here's an interesting research project for you: go back to the 1980s and read the Washington Post's articles each year for when Reagan submitted his budget to Congress. It was declared DOA each year before the ink had even dried.
Of course, that kind of blows your little thesis there right out of the water, so feel free to continue with your head in the sand.
Personally, I'm waiting for the all-Pink Floyd route.
Point, I mostly skipped the 80s musically.
If your idea of creativity is having a different tie than others, you probably also use phrases like 'thinking outside the box' and listen to such creative bands as Hootie and the Blowfish.
Sure, ties are all creative and such. That's why you see so many artists and rock stars wearing them.
Maybe with 1.2 I'll actually be able to get the Java plugin working with Linux Mozilla under FreeBSD. I tried two different java runtime environments; not only could they not be found by anyone but root (even with world r-x perms), but neither worked-- one tried to create a window that was 4000x3000 pixels when I loaded a page with a java app that created a new window, the other just hung. (And before you ask, yes I followed all the instructions.)
Would it be too much to ask for to have a few of the very common plugins like java to be loaded & shipped by default? I'd rather have multiple JREs around than be scratching my head trying to get mozilla and java to talk to each other.
On one show, Adam Carolla stated that if he had a kid, he'd let him see his penis exactly once, so the kid would grow up thinking his dad has the biggest penis in the world.
Purdue had an unrm package when I was a sysadmin there in 1995, and it was old then. It worked by having a new unlink() that could then be merged in with libc (if you were brave) or linked to separately so you could have /usr/local/bin/rm instead (if you weren't), along with tools that understood how to read the filesystem tomb and restore files from it, and a daemon (preend) that cleaned the tombs of old files. Unfortunately, it has never been extremely portable, since it involves rewriting unlink(). It had pretty much everything you could want in an entombing package; but I don't know if anyone has picked up the ball with it. Last I heard they were having trouble porting it to the newer versions of FreeBSD; check out this note from Purdue ECN.
Since no one else has stepped forward yet, let me be the first to say thank you for your efforts.
Even though your servers are often used to express opinions that you disagree with, or even find revolting.
Even though there are probably many times when it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Even though you and your staff sometimes seem to be the most criticized people on here, after Bill Gates anyways.
Keep up the good work. We all appreciate it, even if it isn't said very often.
I went to install apache 2.0 on my home server running FreeBSD 4.4, which isn't all that old. /usr/ports told me that my OS wasn't new enough to install apache 2, so I installed 1.3 instead.
Maybe that's why apache 2 isn't all that popular yet.