First copyright violation is not stealing because they still hhave the information.
That is a very limited view of theft. If I have an authentic picture of the president doing lines off the presidential seal in the oval office, I have more than a photograph. If you scan the photograph and post it on the internet, you have deprived me of several things.
You'd think that readers of slashdot, people who presumably deal with information on a daily basis, would have more of an appriciation for the nuances of its handling.
Second they are sending the signals into everybodys house, so its more like the baker throwing loaves into peoples houses and them taking those loaves then
So, any form of passive scanning by any one is fine by you? Anyone can roll down the street using any form of passive scanning available to search your house and body? (I'm limiting this to passive scanning, the reception of spectrum generated and released by the object to be scanned, no x-ray backscatter scans or the like).
You have no problem with anyone sitting in the street in front of peoples houses reconstructing the images on their CRTs from the leaked radiation and doing anything they want with it?
My point is that it is unreasonable to assert that you have the right to use any signal that you can extract from the space around you, because it is not reasonable to perfectly shield all the equipment we use.
You can receive cable television by receiving the leakage from the cable companies distribution boxes, that doesnt mean its free. Heck, why limit this to reception through the air? If you run a coax cable over there you can get even higher quality 'leakage' right through the cable.
- Society grants to the individual the right to 'own' things.
Nope. There is no such entity as "society" and there are no "rights".
By 'society' I simply mean the collection of people who live within a commonly agreed upon boundary and who (mostly) agree to live under the rule of law.
'rights' are simply ideas about actions that society has determined can be applied to members. Rights exist in the same way that laws exist, because we all (mostly) agree that they do.
Rights are just one of those made up things that wouldn't be necessary if we didn't interact with each other.
IP most certainly is one of those rules, although it is a relatively new one and thus hasn't had all the details worked out and isn't as widely accepted. It is a rule about who gets to determine how some specific pieces of information are handled.
Arguing that IP does not exist is as silly as arguing that laws do not exist.
Part of the problem with IP is that it is very much founded in the idea that the only or primary reason content producers produce is to gain money. This may not be true. Many writers write because it is their passion to do so. Most have hundreds of stories that will never be published or even read by anyone.
Money derived from IP laws does support a very large infrastructure that is currently necessary to support television broadcast, but it probably won't be much longer before that distribution model is no longer needed.
IP certainly still needs tuning, but as more aspects of life start to fall into the domain of pure information, I think we'll see more need for good methods of handling IP rights. We shouldn't be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Interesting page, but the issue is less about philosophy than it is about economics. The people of the US want individuals to spend there time inovating and producing ideas and implimentations of ideas that will raise our standard of living. In order to encourage this, the people grant the individual the right to control, for a limited time, the way in which his ideas are used.
You could consider laws about physical property in the same light. Society grants to the individual the right to 'own' things. This is to encourage individuals to create things, activities that would be much less common if individuals had no right to keep things.
The baker would have much less reason to bake if the townspeople could simply take the loaves he produces. Of course the baker could attempt to physically defend the loaves, but that is an inefficent use of resources. This is a fact recognized by most people, and so societies create formalized rules regarding the handling of produced goods.
Ownership of physical things is no more 'natural' than ownership of nonphysical things. Its all rules we made up and agree to abide by so that we can all benefit.
It used to be that you could use your own equipment to decode the signal you were legally paying for. Kind of like using DeCSS to watch DVD's you've legally obtained.
Course, with the DMCA, I don't know if thats still legal, since you are circumventing encryption regardless of if you have paid for it or not. The DMCA seems to have made possesion of knowledge of how to do the circumvention illegal.
IANAL and I have not read the DMCA. Thats just what it sounds like to a layman.
Law shouldn't be so unapproachable that normal people can't understand it.
Wouldn't it be cool if all laws were required to state, in clear english, no lawyer-speak, exactly what the law was intended to accomplish, and precisely how each section was intended to achieve that goal?
That would make it much easier for regular people to understand why particular laws exist, and help to prevent abuse of laws (applying them to situations they were not intended to cover).
Thats what I've been asking for. I want a tree view in my back button, so when I navigate back to a page and then forward down a new path, it doesn't wipe out my previous path. I don't want thumbnails of the page tho, too big, and I never recognize them after drastic rescaling anyway. But I can usually recall about how many branches ago I saw that other page that I want to get back to.
In the US, when you shop you fill up a large cart, stuff your minivan, and fill your fridge
Actually, I sign onto the stores website in the morning, select two carts worth of stuff, pay with my credit card, then show up after work and let the store worker put it in the trunk (boot, whatever). The $8 charge saves me an hour of wandering around the store.
Then I do it again two weeks later.
Oh, and the milk guy brings a gallon a day right to the house.
How do londoners get away without having a large fridge? They shop every day or what?
Maybe its a difference in what we eat? Much of our stuff is frozen or dry. When I want/need fresh veggies or meat, I go pick it up that night. Perhaps in london people eat more fresh food.
Prices on the goods and services that are effect by the cost of using the road go up. The people that benefit from use of the roads end up paying for them.
I'm not sure that thats a good idea though. It seems that direct pricing like that would tend to discourage large infrastructure projects.
Re:Don't read too much into Googles response ...
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, having the same view is only critical as each auction comes to a close. For the week before it only needs to be mostly right. And if people would just bid their max instead of using things like auction sniper, even that wouldn't matter.
People who use tools like auction sniper are like drivers who wait until the last possible moment to get into the highway exit lane, cutting in ahead of all the other people waiting to exit. By not cooperating with other people for commons resources, they damage the effectiveness of the whole system.
Python feels a lot faster for me under both Windows and Linux
Probably has to do with differences in bottlenecks. My machines at home have 128 and 256MB of ram, and Java apps are intolerable. With my machine at work with 1GB, I can at lest put up with them. Python does better on the smaller machines because it doesn't take the performance hit from lack of memory.
I don't quite understand how palladium is supposed to work.
Say we have some DRM music files. They are encrypted with some private scheme. The program that decrypts and plays them is hidden by palladium so we can't snoop through it to see how the decryption works. Great, say the media providers, now we can sell media online, because we can run our trusted executable on the clients machine without worries that they will figure out how to decrypt this stuff themselves.
So, all that has to be done is convince the palladium executable that its running on a palladium platform and it will do its thing. So we need to emulate palladium in software such that other software can't tell that its not running on real hardware. Thats hard, but once its done and the DRM protection scheme is broken, its all free again.
Am I completely off base here? Anything that can be done in hardware can be simulated (however slowly) in software. Without stipulating that there must be a connection back to some central trusted site (which makes a network connection necessary for the use of any DRM content), I don't see how DRM can ever be really secure.
Of course, even if it was really secure, there's always the analog hole, which makes the whole excersize pretty much pointless (baring near-magical solutions).
It just seems like the media companies are going to have to relax their hold on redistribution of their stuff. Or start executing copyright violators.
these people would never use a pay site anyway, even if meant wasting ten hours to find and download the same songs that the pay site sold for seven dollars.
Very true, but if someone was out there selling high quality MP3's from their fast, dedicated site, its unlikely that the freeloaders would have to waste any time looking for them. Its not like most people using P2P for music have discriminating tastes.
Judging by the search hits in my P2P client, Red Hot Chili Peppers album Blood Sugar Sex Magic is the most popular album ever;)
Can you difine a little more precisely wha tyou mean by 'distributing'?
IANAL, but as far as I'm aware, its legal in the US to make copies of songs to give to your friends, or to record music from broadcast mediums (radio, digital cable music channels, etc). Legally I don't know who qualifies as 'friends', or if there is some kind of restriction on the medium in which the music is transfered.
Obviously one isn't allowed to sell these things (not even for the cost of the duplication or media I think, but again, IANAL).
I'm not much of a fan of skins. However, I've got to say that done right, they work well. I'm thinking of winamp here. I have no idea what it takes to make a winamp skin, nor what the code dealing with it looks like. But it works, and it works very nicely.
You want a standard interface? No problem, theres a skin for it. Want something ultra custom? No problem.
The vast majority of apps don't need skin support (including mozilla), most of them I just want to use my system settings. But there are a few, like winamp, that I want to do something specific and different (mostly because I want it to be as out-of-the-way as possible, but still quickly accessable), and I probably don't want it to do it the same way everybody else does.
The only drawback in winamps case is that it doesn't seem to have a 'standard' mode where it just uses standard widgets so it can look like the rest of my system.
it could be that every night I go to sleep, "I" die, and it's a different "me" that wakes up the next morning.
A better example with the same point would be going under surgical anestesia. What we call consciousness isn't an on or off thing, it seems to be composed of multiple parts. When one sleeps one is still conscious (during REM sleep one is frequenly conscious of what is happening in a dream). When one wakes one is aware of the passage of time to some degree. However, when one is put under anestesia, consciousness is, near as I can tell, 'off'. No dreams, no awareness of the passage of time, no memories form. A deep anestetic state isn't far above death, from what some anestesiaologists have told me.
Anyway, the point is the same, the concept of continuity of consciousness is difficult to define. I have a theory that there is no continuity of consciousness, only continuity of memory. What may appear to be discontinious is the memory of the events. Consciousness itself cannot be said to be continious or not, it is simply a moment-to-moment phenomenon that can evaluate if a record of events appear to be continious (such events could be its native memory system or an external record such as a video tape, or the memories of others).
If you were to suddenly find yourself lying on the floor, with no idea how you arrived there, you might be inclined to believe that your consciousness had been interrupted. However, consider the following. Your trusted friends, standing around you, show you a video of yourself, taken only minutes before. In the video, you consume a substance that blocks the formation of new memories and then perform some series of acts, then lie down on the floor, at which point the substance suddenly wears off. You have no memory of these events and yet clearly were consious while performing them. Excepting the most paranoid, most people would accept that they simply did not remember what happened.
I believe that 'me', the self, as an atomic, continious thing does not exist. 'self' is the instantanious combination of consciousness and memory. Either without the other is incomplete and not sensical to consider a 'self'.
Re:Before everyone shouts global warming...
on
The Sky Is Rising
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· Score: 1
we're just coming out of a frickin' ice age
Do you have a reference for that? Last I heard we were overdue for an ice age by some tens of thousands of years.
What you describe is similar to the system Vernor Vinge describes in 'A Deepness in the Sky' (and probably other books). Basicly a networked head up display that connects to a concensus display system. It can label anything of interest in the general vicinity (kind of a virtual reality hypertext system). or overlay graphics (why bother with real holograms).
I wonder how far off is the capability for full color laser and retinal drawing. Speaking of which, I often hear of retinal drawing in regard to displays, but I've never seen any research on it, is this real technology?
You see, I drive a 1971 Impala. Its an ugly hog, and I don't mind a few extra dents. When I see a Beamer parked sideways, taking up in-demand parking spaces(NB) you know where I park? Thats right, 8 inches from the driver-side door. Yes, it has been egged a few times, and somebody pissed on it once. Its worth it.
*NB: parking sideways out at the far end of the lot is fine, I don't like those guys that park sideways up close were everybody else wants to park.
Slashdot Mirror
First copyright violation is not stealing because they still hhave the information.
That is a very limited view of theft. If I have an authentic picture of the president doing lines off the presidential seal in the oval office, I have more than a photograph. If you scan the photograph and post it on the internet, you have deprived me of several things.
You'd think that readers of slashdot, people who presumably deal with information on a daily basis, would have more of an appriciation for the nuances of its handling.
Second they are sending the signals into everybodys house, so its more like the baker throwing loaves into peoples houses and them taking those loaves then
So, any form of passive scanning by any one is fine by you? Anyone can roll down the street using any form of passive scanning available to search your house and body? (I'm limiting this to passive scanning, the reception of spectrum generated and released by the object to be scanned, no x-ray backscatter scans or the like).
You have no problem with anyone sitting in the street in front of peoples houses reconstructing the images on their CRTs from the leaked radiation and doing anything they want with it?
My point is that it is unreasonable to assert that you have the right to use any signal that you can extract from the space around you, because it is not reasonable to perfectly shield all the equipment we use.
You can receive cable television by receiving the leakage from the cable companies distribution boxes, that doesnt mean its free. Heck, why limit this to reception through the air? If you run a coax cable over there you can get even higher quality 'leakage' right through the cable.
Just because you can doesn't mean its right.
Nope. There is no such entity as "society" and there are no "rights".
By 'society' I simply mean the collection of people who live within a commonly agreed upon boundary and who (mostly) agree to live under the rule of law.
'rights' are simply ideas about actions that society has determined can be applied to members. Rights exist in the same way that laws exist, because we all (mostly) agree that they do.
Rights are just one of those made up things that wouldn't be necessary if we didn't interact with each other.
IP most certainly is one of those rules, although it is a relatively new one and thus hasn't had all the details worked out and isn't as widely accepted. It is a rule about who gets to determine how some specific pieces of information are handled.
Arguing that IP does not exist is as silly as arguing that laws do not exist.
Part of the problem with IP is that it is very much founded in the idea that the only or primary reason content producers produce is to gain money. This may not be true. Many writers write because it is their passion to do so. Most have hundreds of stories that will never be published or even read by anyone.
Money derived from IP laws does support a very large infrastructure that is currently necessary to support television broadcast, but it probably won't be much longer before that distribution model is no longer needed.
IP certainly still needs tuning, but as more aspects of life start to fall into the domain of pure information, I think we'll see more need for good methods of handling IP rights. We shouldn't be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Interesting page, but the issue is less about philosophy than it is about economics. The people of the US want individuals to spend there time inovating and producing ideas and implimentations of ideas that will raise our standard of living. In order to encourage this, the people grant the individual the right to control, for a limited time, the way in which his ideas are used.
You could consider laws about physical property in the same light. Society grants to the individual the right to 'own' things. This is to encourage individuals to create things, activities that would be much less common if individuals had no right to keep things.
The baker would have much less reason to bake if the townspeople could simply take the loaves he produces. Of course the baker could attempt to physically defend the loaves, but that is an inefficent use of resources. This is a fact recognized by most people, and so societies create formalized rules regarding the handling of produced goods.
Ownership of physical things is no more 'natural' than ownership of nonphysical things. Its all rules we made up and agree to abide by so that we can all benefit.
It used to be that you could use your own equipment to decode the signal you were legally paying for. Kind of like using DeCSS to watch DVD's you've legally obtained.
Course, with the DMCA, I don't know if thats still legal, since you are circumventing encryption regardless of if you have paid for it or not. The DMCA seems to have made possesion of knowledge of how to do the circumvention illegal.
IANAL and I have not read the DMCA. Thats just what it sounds like to a layman.
Law shouldn't be so unapproachable that normal people can't understand it.
Wouldn't it be cool if all laws were required to state, in clear english, no lawyer-speak, exactly what the law was intended to accomplish, and precisely how each section was intended to achieve that goal?
That would make it much easier for regular people to understand why particular laws exist, and help to prevent abuse of laws (applying them to situations they were not intended to cover).
Thats what I've been asking for. I want a tree view in my back button, so when I navigate back to a page and then forward down a new path, it doesn't wipe out my previous path. I don't want thumbnails of the page tho, too big, and I never recognize them after drastic rescaling anyway. But I can usually recall about how many branches ago I saw that other page that I want to get back to.
They could go the other way. Ban all the cars.
:)
Maybe put up segway rental booths
In the US, when you shop you fill up a large cart, stuff your minivan, and fill your fridge
Actually, I sign onto the stores website in the morning, select two carts worth of stuff, pay with my credit card, then show up after work and let the store worker put it in the trunk (boot, whatever). The $8 charge saves me an hour of wandering around the store.
Then I do it again two weeks later.
Oh, and the milk guy brings a gallon a day right to the house.
How do londoners get away without having a large fridge? They shop every day or what?
Maybe its a difference in what we eat? Much of our stuff is frozen or dry. When I want/need fresh veggies or meat, I go pick it up that night. Perhaps in london people eat more fresh food.
Prices on the goods and services that are effect by the cost of using the road go up. The people that benefit from use of the roads end up paying for them.
I'm not sure that thats a good idea though. It seems that direct pricing like that would tend to discourage large infrastructure projects.
Actually, having the same view is only critical as each auction comes to a close. For the week before it only needs to be mostly right. And if people would just bid their max instead of using things like auction sniper, even that wouldn't matter.
People who use tools like auction sniper are like drivers who wait until the last possible moment to get into the highway exit lane, cutting in ahead of all the other people waiting to exit. By not cooperating with other people for commons resources, they damage the effectiveness of the whole system.
It was cool until they threw in all that roswell crap and the little alien dude.
Python feels a lot faster for me under both Windows and Linux
Probably has to do with differences in bottlenecks. My machines at home have 128 and 256MB of ram, and Java apps are intolerable. With my machine at work with 1GB, I can at lest put up with them. Python does better on the smaller machines because it doesn't take the performance hit from lack of memory.
it takes three people just to keep the systems up and running
Are there details about that? What do they do that takes so much time? What the heck were they thinking when they built it?
It says its set to zero for a particular non-fragmentable packet type, not all packets.
I have to avoid all of the following:
[...]
Artificial flavour
Natural flavour
[...]
ok, I got nothin', but that was just plain funny.
(Think Palladium here, folks)
I don't quite understand how palladium is supposed to work.
Say we have some DRM music files. They are encrypted with some private scheme. The program that decrypts and plays them is hidden by palladium so we can't snoop through it to see how the decryption works. Great, say the media providers, now we can sell media online, because we can run our trusted executable on the clients machine without worries that they will figure out how to decrypt this stuff themselves.
So, all that has to be done is convince the palladium executable that its running on a palladium platform and it will do its thing. So we need to emulate palladium in software such that other software can't tell that its not running on real hardware. Thats hard, but once its done and the DRM protection scheme is broken, its all free again.
Am I completely off base here? Anything that can be done in hardware can be simulated (however slowly) in software. Without stipulating that there must be a connection back to some central trusted site (which makes a network connection necessary for the use of any DRM content), I don't see how DRM can ever be really secure.
Of course, even if it was really secure, there's always the analog hole, which makes the whole excersize pretty much pointless (baring near-magical solutions).
It just seems like the media companies are going to have to relax their hold on redistribution of their stuff. Or start executing copyright violators.
these people would never use a pay site anyway, even if meant wasting ten hours to find and download the same songs that the pay site sold for seven dollars.
;)
Very true, but if someone was out there selling high quality MP3's from their fast, dedicated site, its unlikely that the freeloaders would have to waste any time looking for them. Its not like most people using P2P for music have discriminating tastes.
Judging by the search hits in my P2P client, Red Hot Chili Peppers album Blood Sugar Sex Magic is the most popular album ever
What's illegal is distributing
Can you difine a little more precisely wha tyou mean by 'distributing'?
IANAL, but as far as I'm aware, its legal in the US to make copies of songs to give to your friends, or to record music from broadcast mediums (radio, digital cable music channels, etc). Legally I don't know who qualifies as 'friends', or if there is some kind of restriction on the medium in which the music is transfered.
Obviously one isn't allowed to sell these things (not even for the cost of the duplication or media I think, but again, IANAL).
Unless they said so in the original deal
As if any significant fraction of the sheeple buying the crap will read the fine print?
I'm not much of a fan of skins. However, I've got to say that done right, they work well. I'm thinking of winamp here. I have no idea what it takes to make a winamp skin, nor what the code dealing with it looks like. But it works, and it works very nicely.
You want a standard interface? No problem, theres a skin for it. Want something ultra custom? No problem.
The vast majority of apps don't need skin support (including mozilla), most of them I just want to use my system settings. But there are a few, like winamp, that I want to do something specific and different (mostly because I want it to be as out-of-the-way as possible, but still quickly accessable), and I probably don't want it to do it the same way everybody else does.
The only drawback in winamps case is that it doesn't seem to have a 'standard' mode where it just uses standard widgets so it can look like the rest of my system.
Posting as an AC, criticizing another AC's post? Who looks silly?
hey, wait a second...
it could be that every night I go to sleep, "I" die, and it's a different "me" that wakes up the next morning.
A better example with the same point would be going under surgical anestesia. What we call consciousness isn't an on or off thing, it seems to be composed of multiple parts. When one sleeps one is still conscious (during REM sleep one is frequenly conscious of what is happening in a dream). When one wakes one is aware of the passage of time to some degree. However, when one is put under anestesia, consciousness is, near as I can tell, 'off'. No dreams, no awareness of the passage of time, no memories form. A deep anestetic state isn't far above death, from what some anestesiaologists have told me.
Anyway, the point is the same, the concept of continuity of consciousness is difficult to define. I have a theory that there is no continuity of consciousness, only continuity of memory. What may appear to be discontinious is the memory of the events. Consciousness itself cannot be said to be continious or not, it is simply a moment-to-moment phenomenon that can evaluate if a record of events appear to be continious (such events could be its native memory system or an external record such as a video tape, or the memories of others).
If you were to suddenly find yourself lying on the floor, with no idea how you arrived there, you might be inclined to believe that your consciousness had been interrupted. However, consider the following. Your trusted friends, standing around you, show you a video of yourself, taken only minutes before. In the video, you consume a substance that blocks the formation of new memories and then perform some series of acts, then lie down on the floor, at which point the substance suddenly wears off. You have no memory of these events and yet clearly were consious while performing them. Excepting the most paranoid, most people would accept that they simply did not remember what happened.
I believe that 'me', the self, as an atomic, continious thing does not exist. 'self' is the instantanious combination of consciousness and memory. Either without the other is incomplete and not sensical to consider a 'self'.
we're just coming out of a frickin' ice age
Do you have a reference for that? Last I heard we were overdue for an ice age by some tens of thousands of years.
What you describe is similar to the system Vernor Vinge describes in 'A Deepness in the Sky' (and probably other books). Basicly a networked head up display that connects to a concensus display system. It can label anything of interest in the general vicinity (kind of a virtual reality hypertext system). or overlay graphics (why bother with real holograms).
I wonder how far off is the capability for full color laser and retinal drawing. Speaking of which, I often hear of retinal drawing in regard to displays, but I've never seen any research on it, is this real technology?
Learn how to park. In a single space - not three.
God, I *love* it when people do that!
You see, I drive a 1971 Impala. Its an ugly hog, and I don't mind a few extra dents. When I see a Beamer parked sideways, taking up in-demand parking spaces(NB) you know where I park? Thats right, 8 inches from the driver-side door. Yes, it has been egged a few times, and somebody pissed on it once. Its worth it.
*NB: parking sideways out at the far end of the lot is fine, I don't like those guys that park sideways up close were everybody else wants to park.