Bev Oda *is* my MP. I sent her the following letter and posted it the first time this story was on Slashdot. Here it is again, in case it inspires someone...
--snip--
Dear Ms. Oda,
I currently live with my family in north Oshawa and I have been a resident of Durham Region for most of my life. As one of your constituents, I read with concern this article recently published by the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/01/11/copy right-canada.html.
As a consumer and a content producer (I've written software professionally for the last 15 years, including a large application that I've licensed for public use and redistribution), I believe that copyright law strikes a delicate balance between the rights of content producers and society at large. Any changes to that balance must be very carefully conceived. While I obviously can't comment on the proposed changes you are currently preparing, I would like to offer some of my concerns about where copyright reform appears to be headed.
Firstly, I believe the push behind copyright reform is coming from the film and recording industries. No other stakeholders appear to have any pressing desire to reform copyright law. The software industry, in particular, realized years ago that technological copyright protection measures (euphemistically called Digital Rights Management today) were an un-winnable arms race that served only to frustrate their legitimate customers, and for the most part have stopped the practice. They seem to be happy with going after egregious copyright violators while letting their own customers create backup copies of their purchased software in peace.
Further, I do not believe that the recording industry is acting in the interest of the artists (in fact, several prominent Canadian artists have actually said as much over the last year); instead, I believe they are trying to preserve an outmoded business model (shipping information around on CDs with trucks) against the Internet, which does the same job far more efficiently. Rather than adapt to the progress of technology (for example, by looking for ways to use the Internet to expose more artists to more fans), they have chosen instead to pressure governments to enact legislation disrupting the balance of our current copyright laws. I feel such changes, especially made in haste, will disadvantage both consumers *and* artists in favour of propping up an industry that is in decline.
As a result, I feel that any changes to copyright legislation proposed by the recording industry must be viewed with a large degree of scepticism, and that changes, if any, must be made carefully and with the full consultation of the Canadian people. I would urge you in particular to steer clear of a couple of particularly misguided concepts:
1. Canada must not implement the equivalent of the "DRM anti-circumvention" clause of the American DMCA. Laws preventing open discussion of algorithms (i.e. mathematics) are perilously close to recognizing thought-crime.
2. Canada must not reduce fair-use rights, such as the right to time- and format-shift legitimately purchased content. To do so would be to criminalize ordinary Canadians for doing things they believe they have the inherent right to do.
I currently live with my family in north Oshawa and I have been a resident of Durham Region for most of my life. As one of your constituents, I read with concern this article recently published by the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/01/11/copy right-canada.html.
As a consumer and a content producer (I've written software professionally for the last 15 years, including a large application that I've licensed for public use and redistribution), I believe that copyright law strikes a delicate balance between the rights of content producers and society at large. Any changes to that balance must be very carefully conceived. While I obviously can't comment on the proposed changes you are currently preparing, I would like to offer some of my concerns about where copyright reform appears to be headed.
Firstly, I believe the push behind copyright reform is coming from the film and recording industries. No other stakeholders appear to have any pressing desire to reform copyright law. The software industry, in particular, realized years ago that technological copyright protection measures (euphemistically called Digital Rights Management today) were an un-winnable arms race that served only to frustrate their legitimate customers, and for the most part have stopped the practice. They seem to be happy with going after egregious copyright violators while letting their own customers create backup copies of their purchased software in peace.
Further, I do not believe that the recording industry is acting in the interest of the artists (in fact, several prominent Canadian artists have actually said as much over the last year); instead, I believe they are trying to preserve an outmoded business model (shipping information around on CDs with trucks) against the Internet, which does the same job far more efficiently. Rather than adapt to the progress of technology (for example, by looking for ways to use the Internet to expose more artists to more fans), they have chosen instead to pressure governments to enact legislation disrupting the balance of our current copyright laws. I feel such changes, especially made in haste, will disadvantage both consumers *and* artists in favour of propping up an industry that is in decline.
As a result, I feel that any changes to copyright legislation proposed by the recording industry must be viewed with a large degree of scepticism, and that changes, if any, must be made carefully and with the full consultation of the Canadian people. I would urge you in particular to steer clear of a couple of particularly misguided concepts:
1. Canada must not implement the equivalent of the "DRM anti-circumvention" clause of the American DMCA. Laws preventing open discussion of algorithms (i.e. mathematics) are perilously close to recognizing thought-crime.
2. Canada must not reduce fair-use rights, such as the right to time- and format-shift legitimately purchased content. To do so would be to criminalize ordinary Canadians for doing things they believe they have the inherent right to do.
I too was an Emacs fan for years, but I've been fully converted to an Eclipse user. The crappy demo from your co-worker does not do Eclipse justice.
A long wait as it analysed the file and drew a pretty progress bar, followed by a dialog prompting for confirmation for each import, and it was done.
The function is called Organize Imports, and it's usually sub-second for me, also only prompting in the case of ambiguity. I use it so often that my Shift, Ctrl, and O keys are getting all shiny.
But that's just one of many cool things in Eclipse. There's Refactor > Rename, where I can rename any kind of language element (class, method, field,...). Not only does it rename the element, but also scours your code for all references to that element and changes them too. Or Refactor > Encapsulate Field, where you can convert a public field to a private one wrapped with getters and setters. Again, all references to the field are converted to getter and setter calls. In both cases, I can preview all the changes using a graphical diff tool. Does your Emacs do that?
Are you trolling? By following your own link, I found this:
"The failure rate for a vasectomy is less than one percent."
Yup, my doc said the failure rate was something like one in 5,000. What he didn't mention was that was the rate given that you have had a negative semen test. Turns out the actual failure rate before the test is much higher. I was a little, uh, tardy in getting my test. For the record, I was tested before the second vasectomy, and the first had indeed failed.
So for all of you considering a vasectomy, be sure to have your test.
The PFC site must be quite different from CIBC's. When I try to log in with Moz 1.0 I'm summarily booted back to the PC banking home page without even a warning.
It's not really that complicated. The patent applies to the method, not the code. So if they in future decide to require a license for their patent, you can't distribute any code that implements the method, whether it's the previously released GPL'd code or something you wrote from scratch, without their license.
(I might be a lawyer, but you shouldn't trust me anyway)
jk
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Or hell, just turn the css + html into C, call the compiler, make it a dynamically loadable library, load it, and use it to render. Yes, this is a dumb idea, but it's just one very obvious way of turning it into native widgets.
In your zeal to flame the guy, you totally misunderstood what he said. The point was that native widgets do their own rendering, and you have very little control over how that's done. Sure you could draw a control based on CSS properties, but then it's no longer native, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, those are just approximations. It's like saying the Imperial system is better since my feet are each a foot long.
Consider your geek status revoked. No more Slashdot for you!
...that embiggens our understanding of the Internet.
Bev Oda *is* my MP. I sent her the following letter and posted it the first time this story was on Slashdot. Here it is again, in case it inspires someone...
y right-canada.html.
--snip--
Dear Ms. Oda,
I currently live with my family in north Oshawa and I have been a resident of Durham Region for most of my life. As one of your constituents, I read with concern this article recently published by the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/01/11/cop
As a consumer and a content producer (I've written software professionally for the last 15 years, including a large application that I've licensed for public use and redistribution), I believe that copyright law strikes a delicate balance between the rights of content producers and society at large. Any changes to that balance must be very carefully conceived. While I obviously can't comment on the proposed changes you are currently preparing, I would like to offer some of my concerns about where copyright reform appears to be headed.
Firstly, I believe the push behind copyright reform is coming from the film and recording industries. No other stakeholders appear to have any pressing desire to reform copyright law. The software industry, in particular, realized years ago that technological copyright protection measures (euphemistically called Digital Rights Management today) were an un-winnable arms race that served only to frustrate their legitimate customers, and for the most part have stopped the practice. They seem to be happy with going after egregious copyright violators while letting their own customers create backup copies of their purchased software in peace.
Further, I do not believe that the recording industry is acting in the interest of the artists (in fact, several prominent Canadian artists have actually said as much over the last year); instead, I believe they are trying to preserve an outmoded business model (shipping information around on CDs with trucks) against the Internet, which does the same job far more efficiently. Rather than adapt to the progress of technology (for example, by looking for ways to use the Internet to expose more artists to more fans), they have chosen instead to pressure governments to enact legislation disrupting the balance of our current copyright laws. I feel such changes, especially made in haste, will disadvantage both consumers *and* artists in favour of propping up an industry that is in decline.
As a result, I feel that any changes to copyright legislation proposed by the recording industry must be viewed with a large degree of scepticism, and that changes, if any, must be made carefully and with the full consultation of the Canadian people. I would urge you in particular to steer clear of a couple of particularly misguided concepts:
1. Canada must not implement the equivalent of the "DRM anti-circumvention" clause of the American DMCA. Laws preventing open discussion of algorithms (i.e. mathematics) are perilously close to recognizing thought-crime.
2. Canada must not reduce fair-use rights, such as the right to time- and format-shift legitimately purchased content. To do so would be to criminalize ordinary Canadians for doing things they believe they have the inherent right to do.
I thank you sincerely for your time.
John Krasnay
Dear Ms. Oda,
y right-canada.html.
I currently live with my family in north Oshawa and I have been a resident of Durham Region for most of my life. As one of your constituents, I read with concern this article recently published by the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/01/11/cop
As a consumer and a content producer (I've written software professionally for the last 15 years, including a large application that I've licensed for public use and redistribution), I believe that copyright law strikes a delicate balance between the rights of content producers and society at large. Any changes to that balance must be very carefully conceived. While I obviously can't comment on the proposed changes you are currently preparing, I would like to offer some of my concerns about where copyright reform appears to be headed.
Firstly, I believe the push behind copyright reform is coming from the film and recording industries. No other stakeholders appear to have any pressing desire to reform copyright law. The software industry, in particular, realized years ago that technological copyright protection measures (euphemistically called Digital Rights Management today) were an un-winnable arms race that served only to frustrate their legitimate customers, and for the most part have stopped the practice. They seem to be happy with going after egregious copyright violators while letting their own customers create backup copies of their purchased software in peace.
Further, I do not believe that the recording industry is acting in the interest of the artists (in fact, several prominent Canadian artists have actually said as much over the last year); instead, I believe they are trying to preserve an outmoded business model (shipping information around on CDs with trucks) against the Internet, which does the same job far more efficiently. Rather than adapt to the progress of technology (for example, by looking for ways to use the Internet to expose more artists to more fans), they have chosen instead to pressure governments to enact legislation disrupting the balance of our current copyright laws. I feel such changes, especially made in haste, will disadvantage both consumers *and* artists in favour of propping up an industry that is in decline.
As a result, I feel that any changes to copyright legislation proposed by the recording industry must be viewed with a large degree of scepticism, and that changes, if any, must be made carefully and with the full consultation of the Canadian people. I would urge you in particular to steer clear of a couple of particularly misguided concepts:
1. Canada must not implement the equivalent of the "DRM anti-circumvention" clause of the American DMCA. Laws preventing open discussion of algorithms (i.e. mathematics) are perilously close to recognizing thought-crime.
2. Canada must not reduce fair-use rights, such as the right to time- and format-shift legitimately purchased content. To do so would be to criminalize ordinary Canadians for doing things they believe they have the inherent right to do.
I thank you sincerely for your time.
John Krasnay
The function is called Organize Imports, and it's usually sub-second for me, also only prompting in the case of ambiguity. I use it so often that my Shift, Ctrl, and O keys are getting all shiny.
But that's just one of many cool things in Eclipse. There's Refactor > Rename, where I can rename any kind of language element (class, method, field,
Are you trolling? By following your own link, I found this:
"The failure rate for a vasectomy is less than one percent."
Yup, my doc said the failure rate was something like one in 5,000. What he didn't mention was that was the rate given that you have had a negative semen test. Turns out the actual failure rate before the test is much higher. I was a little, uh, tardy in getting my test. For the record, I was tested before the second vasectomy, and the first had indeed failed.
So for all of you considering a vasectomy, be sure to have your test.
I have three kids, the third of which was conceived after my first vasectomy.
I have decided to begin placing my ThinkPad directly on my scrotum, just to be sure the heat has the desired effect.
The PFC site must be quite different from CIBC's. When I try to log in with Moz 1.0 I'm summarily booted back to the PC banking home page without even a warning.
(I might be a lawyer, but you shouldn't trust me anyway)
jk
How do you download a browser without a browser?
Easy: apt-get install mozilla