I dunno about you, but when an organization decides to hold a public workshop regarding the legal future of modern computers and electronics, I assume that its 'online presence' will be more than just a page giving the meatspace address. But since this is the US government we're talking about, this sort of thing isn't too surprising.
My advice: migrate to a country with more liberties.
And go where? I really do want to know. Name one halfway modernized country whose government is on the whole more in touch with reality than all the rest. You're right, the US is bad and at the rate things are going I _will_ leave it, but I'm not too hopeful about the rest of the planet either.
why don't all innovaters move outside the US?
Well, they're starting to move here from without less, that's for certain.
So when the government will eventually discover the DMCA was a counter- innovative idea, I suppose they'd get rid of it, right?!?
Hahaha, oh, that's a good one. No, when it gets to the point where even my cat and dead grandmother can see that the DMCA was fucked up from the beginning, the politicians' response will be to enact something even worse. Exhibit A, Prohibition: 12 years before it occured to them that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the brightest piece of legislation. Exhibit B, the War on Drugs: hundreds of billions of dollars spent, criminals running wild in South American countries because their product is illegal everywhere, American citizens spending cumulative eons of 'quality time' in the slammer, terrifying and draconian measures being taken, blatantly obvious government lies regarding the whole affair, all to keep people from _potentially_ harming themselves, with not even a pretense at a logical reason for it all, and they show absolutely no signs of giving up.
That's just off the top of my head for this country alone. Britain, if you'll recall, has that wonderful bit about requiring disclosure of passwords on pain of prison. Canada is poised to freeze their entire computer storage market in place in with media storage taxes. France has their Language Police and have opted to emulate the US regarding international compliance with local laws. That Australian NSW Internet Censorship bill; you know, the one outlawing anything above the level of Saturday morning cartoons, is actually still a going concern. Hell, the EU as a whole is about to duplicate the whole DMCA fiasco. I swear, none of these governments actually live on the same planet as the country that pays their bills.
I know, I know, preaching to the choir and all. But please, if you can find some place where we can go and code without fear, by all means tell us. Until then, we're kinda stuck here and can't really risk waiting for our pointy-haired legislators to grow a clue or even learn from their bonehead mistakes. They will bring the country down in flames before admitting error.
We don't elect presidents in this country by popular vote
I'm well aware of that.
I'm sure you don't really care
Say wha?
I'm sure if Gore had won the electoral and lost the popular you would be extolling the virtues of the Electoral College
This is truly fascinating. You know absolutely nothing about me and yet you somehow managed to divine my innermost thoughts from my mentioning a fact you can find in any almanac or election history website. How about next time you wait for me to say, "I don't like the electoral college" before ranting about my hypocracy? All I said was that Bush was not elected by popular vote, exactly as the parent had said that George III was not elected by popular vote. Kindly take your arrogance and shove it.
By the way, one of the reasons we don't use the popular vote is the difficulty of counting 100,000,000 votes
Well now there's the dumbest argument I've ever heard. Regardless of how you 'group' them, you still have to count all 100,000,000 of those votes.
Why am I responding to a troll? The world, may never know...
Like endless laws that are intentionally designed so that no normal person can read them.
My first reaction was to agree, but then I tought about, of all things, the rulebooks for RPG's and the various SciFi/Fantasy card games out there. I have found so very many cases where the grammar of the rules was just slightly vague or where the writers glossed over a section to some small degree. Chaos usually ensues as the parties involved battle interpretations. So it's understandable that when one wants to write a law, they want to make the language as precise as possible to avoid loopholes and misuse. Of course, they fail anyway...
Not unlike software programming, really. Languages that are detailed and complex (and therefore harder to learn) can be annoying when you try to compile, but it forces you to be _extra_ careful when writing and debugging it. Languages that are simple and have a lot of automation involved (Visual Basic comes to mind) can be convenient, but you never really have the degree of control over the software you need.
Well, we've had two Georges now who were both President and related to each other, one of whom was not elected by popular vote. Does that mean we can expect the revolution during George #3's (Dubya Jr, anyone?) reign, I mean, term of office?
Not to knock your post or anything, but a 4th spacial dimension is much more mind-bending (interesting) than a time as our 4th dimension.
Very true, but he's still pretty much right. Anyone capable of seeing an entire object 'at once' (however much that phrase means on this subject) on all 3 spatial and the temporal axis would see an ordinary cube as a tesseract (hypercube is the general term for n-d cube where n>3).
Check it out. I can read all this, but it helps me not one bit in visualizing it. The thing that blows my mind is the sheer quantity of math available for 4-d figures. Want the hyper-surface area of a Glome (4-d hypersphere) or the 'content' (hyper-volume) of a pentatope (4-d equilateral triangle)? Wild stuff...
Re:Shutting the stable door after the horse bolted
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
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· Score: 2
Searches, sure. But what about the actual file transfers themselves? Wouldn't each party have to know how to contact the other? I suppose those could be routed through supernodes as well, but that seems unlikely.
I am sure they are discovering a few pretty good sized ftp servers, some software of the "cracking" nature, instructions on how to modify cable modems, etc.
All of which could be found on a computer that had an unhacked cable modem. Or even one without any internet connection whatsoever. It is utterly useless as evidence as it means nothing. If I'm caught red-handed shooting someone, confiscating my library for evidence because it might contain books about handguns and then not charging me with anything is pretty stupid and, as we've seen before, rather typical of the FBI where computers are concerned.
No kidding. It's easy to hate M$ because Bill's evil AND they have shitty code. The MPAA may be clueless but the guys who actually make the movies really do seem to try to do a good job, even with a franchise as worn as Star Trek. Damn them for being so very excellent every now and then!
Re:I went and was minority report a few days ago
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Minority Report
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· Score: 2
The beauty of the frame-up is that it's a paradox. The only way it could happen is if it had already happened; it is an event that is both its own cause and effect. All Burgess had to do was pay Crowe and *poof*, the rest of it fell into place simply because it had already happened. One could argue that he wasn't setting anyone up, but was actually fulfilling Anderton's destiny.
what is MORE strange is that it is a "premeditated" murder.
That also bugged me, how the murder was described from the start as premeditated; didn't see how that could be the case when he didn't know Crowe. It fell into place nicely with the line "I've spent six years thinking about killing the man who took Sean" (or whatever it was). The victim wasn't planned, but the act cetainly was. Much the same way barricading oneself in a bell tower is premeditated; you may not have known who you were gonna take out, but you definitely had human targets in mind.
If they're going to be recording sections of the video, they'd do so from the raw stream, not the omputer generated 3D environment. This is just a better way of representing multiple camera shots of the same scene.
But nobody is doing it. NASA 'has plans', but that means exactly dick. If nobody does it, it won't happen.
SPACE IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY FOR LIVING THINGS
Not really. The difficult part is surviving when you have precisely zero margin for error and your equipment consists of the absolute minimum needed to keep you alive. These are all problems associated with high launch costs and having no industry up there. Problems with radiation? Tack on some armor. Lunar regolith would work if it's piled on thick enough, and it's plentiful and easy to get at. Problems with life support? Put in backup systems; keep chunks of comet ice around as backup. Problems with chemical fuels? Well duh, of course you will if you have to spend 99% of it getting out of Earth's gravity well. Problems with zero-G? Spinning exercise rooms or some such. Of course, at $10k a pound you can't do any of this if you fly NASA.
You write about mining platinum on asteroids so we can have cheap, plentiful fuel cells on Earth.
Sure. It's a resource common as dirt in space but rare as diamonds down here with a huge demand just waiting for a supply. And it's by no means the only example.
Getting there, extracting/refining the platinum, getting it back to Earth... Do you seriously believe that the bottom line - financially and/or energetically would be positive? If you do, I've got an asteroid to sell you...
You say it's inevitable, then say it's not even remotely possible? Once you're there, it's cheap and could be made mostly self-sufficient. The expense is in getting the equipment out of the gravity well in the first place. Dropping stuff down from orbit is a hell of a lot cheaper than getting it up.
Space exploration is just as much about learning how to administer huge complex systems involving thousands of people and suppliers as it is about rockets blasting spaceward-ho!
Are you sugesting that nobody has ever had to do things like organize thousands of people in complex systems before?
Look, I don't really care about the ISS. It's a toy. As far as I'm aware NASA has no plans whatsoever for permanent space stations past it. My problem is with NASA in general. The government-run agency is simply never going to do much. Period. They've arguably gone backwards in the past 30 years, so I don't see why you're so hopeful about their future.
Sure, you could probably cobble together a quick and dirty manned mission to Mars within 10 years or so
And NASA has a long and glorious history of following up on its explorations?
I don't really care about a mission to Mars, either. It would be amazing, sure, but it wouldn't matter one bit if all that happens from it is that the explorers come home with rocks. This is exactly what happened before with Apollo and NASA has made zero progress in what really matters: letting other people do stuff in space.
We do not need NASA to be our explorers in space. All we need, all we _ever_ needed from them was to get the door open for the rest of us. We have millions of people who would love nothing more than to try to build a financial empire in space. Whereas NASA thumbs its nose at would-be tourists trying to give them millions. They've spent 40 years working entirely in the wrong direction.
would we have gone to the moon if Kennedy had just offered a reward?
We went to the moon all right. Then we turned around and went home. Haven't been back for 30 years. Score one for government-run space programs!
the government can just get more done
Can, perhaps. Usually not, though.
If it is unproven that money can be made in space, the government is the only entity that can afford to go in
Sort of. Private entities have already shown it's possible to make money in space. DirecTV does turn a profit, after all. The catch is that not even the richest corporation in the world can afford to do more than establish some unmanned communications satellites due to ridiculously high launch costs. Fixing that would require serious R&D with dubious guarantees on a return, so _that_ is the part the government should have handled. Since NASA's launch costs have actually increased since the Apollo days, it's safe to say that they have failed in this regard.
I don't see exactly how playing with toys in Canada is any more exciting than flying low over the surface of Mars and taking high resolution photographs, or sending down a lander to map out the terrain at ground level.
Because those are NASA programs. And NASA has a long and treasured history of going nowhere with great fanfare. They've had 40 years to open space up to the public and what do we have? An aging shuttle fleet (which NASA has publicly said will be used for at least another 20 years) that is worse than what it replaced and a useless space station. Sure, the Mars probes are interesting; so are the Voyagers and all the others. But what good is it to know there's water on the moon or Mars if nobody goes there to use it? There's enough platinum in any given asteroid to build a dozen fuel cells for every man woman and child on the planet; why aren't we mining them? NASA has no interest in those kinds of things and is specifically interested in _not_ making it possible for others to do them. Most anything run by NASA will be fascinating, wonderous, overbudget, and useless for any practical purpose.
For the last seven decades it has been demonstrated that the government can spend money better than the individual
I would just love to see you prove that statement.
Would we have landed on the moon if it was up to the individual to get us there?
As far as I can tell, we might as well not have landed on the moon. All we have to show for it are some rocks.
There is simply too much wealth and opportunity in space for it all to be in the hands of some government bureaucracy.
Yes, but according to various sources software teams at M$ are run in such a way that they are all of them trying to beat each other by releasing working code the fastest. Therefore, documentation is glossed over, testing gets done to the bare minimum level, and overall code quality gets the biggest shaft of all.
And while it's easy to say, "Oh, just reward the team that brings in the best code instead", the article was quite correct in that, apart from Linux processes (ha ha), there's no eay way to test the 'goodness' of a piece of code.
This just occured to me. I do not see the word "CD-ROM" on the faceplate of my DVD drive. Since the label only says "no CD-ROM's", isn't it implied that it will work fine on my drive? Wouldn't the same go for my CD-RW?
Do you have a car? How about the next time you pull up to a gas station and start putting gas in, you fail to notice the itty-bitty label on the back of the pump down by the ground that says "This fuel will not work in any Ford or Toyota cars". At the very least, you have to go through the hassle of removing the gas from the tank; at worst, it can sometimes cause major damage to the engine, necessitating repair work.
Considering that the stuff looked like gas, smelled like gas, and was advertised as gas, would you really just shrug and say, "Well, I guess it's my fault for trying to use it. No one forced me to"?
This has nothing to do with individual responsibility. This is about purposely releasing faulty products and damaging equipment.
A fact that both of us are extremely happy about. But I guarantee you that the -AA's haven't given up on it. If they can't make a general purpose computer illegal, they'll try to make it unaffordable. The tax on Audio CD-R's in Canada is already several times the cost of the disc itself. The reasoning used to justify those taxes, insane though it may be, so very easily lends itself to taxing anything else available in a computer store.
I suggest that they take those laws off the books, because it's ridiculously stupid to enforce them
Hear, hear. Basically there are three options: Take the laws off the books, continue bumbling along with what we've got, or try for even more restrictive laws. The first and most sensible option is rather unlikely (though I'd be first in line to cheer if it did). There's simply too many representatives whose support has been bought for copyright as it stands today to simply die. Look at the War on Drugs; one has to be a complete moron to think it's going well and is even remotely worth the effort sunk into it, but it continues nonetheless. And given the choice between the other two, I'd rather the government didn't opt for some nutty "spread the punishment" law enforcement scheme. Sticking with what we've got is merely the lesser of two evils.
The idea is that the tax is based on the amount of copyrighted material that the drive holds.
No it's not. It's based on the amount of copyrighted data it _could_ hold, which is totally arbitrary. I get taxed for it even if I fill it up with nothing but zeros.
Is it now? Let's see, does the CBDTPA make distinctions between A/V equipment and electronics in general? Why no, it doesn't. Now where on earth could I have drawn the conclusion that, having failed once, the media industries will take a different tactic towards banning general purpose machines?
your suggestion that we do door-to-door FBI raids will cost the taxpayers much more money in the long run
I'm suggesting that they actually enforce the laws they have on the books rather than just punish everyone because they're too lazy to go after the actual offenders.
the public supported government intervention in order to promote the progress of science and useful arts
Just what planet do you come from? Since when does "granting patents and copyrights to authors and inventors" translate to "must keep giant media corporations alive as at all costs"?
Music and movie conglomerates are not critical industries. I was under the impression that the public thought otherwise
I can't imagine where you got that idea. Entertainment is certainly critical. We have a hard time functioning for any length of time without it. Disney, however, is not. Hollywood could drop off the face of the planet and the rest of the world would continue to function quite nicely. People were entertained before the -AA's and we can be entertained again without them.
If you'd rather we drop copyright law altogether, I'd certainly be willing to support that.
Copyright in the Constitutional sense does not translate very well to the information age. Authors should be compensated for their work, but copyrights and the methods of enforcing them are becoming increasingly inappropriate. If it has outlived its usefulness, then by all means, get rid of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno about you, but when an organization decides to hold a public workshop regarding the legal future of modern computers and electronics, I assume that its 'online presence' will be more than just a page giving the meatspace address. But since this is the US government we're talking about, this sort of thing isn't too surprising.
And go where? I really do want to know. Name one halfway modernized country whose government is on the whole more in touch with reality than all the rest. You're right, the US is bad and at the rate things are going I _will_ leave it, but I'm not too hopeful about the rest of the planet either.
why don't all innovaters move outside the US?
Well, they're starting to move here from without less, that's for certain.
So when the government will eventually discover the DMCA was a counter- innovative idea, I suppose they'd get rid of it, right?!?
Hahaha, oh, that's a good one. No, when it gets to the point where even my cat and dead grandmother can see that the DMCA was fucked up from the beginning, the politicians' response will be to enact something even worse. Exhibit A, Prohibition: 12 years before it occured to them that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the brightest piece of legislation. Exhibit B, the War on Drugs: hundreds of billions of dollars spent, criminals running wild in South American countries because their product is illegal everywhere, American citizens spending cumulative eons of 'quality time' in the slammer, terrifying and draconian measures being taken, blatantly obvious government lies regarding the whole affair, all to keep people from _potentially_ harming themselves, with not even a pretense at a logical reason for it all, and they show absolutely no signs of giving up.
That's just off the top of my head for this country alone. Britain, if you'll recall, has that wonderful bit about requiring disclosure of passwords on pain of prison. Canada is poised to freeze their entire computer storage market in place in with media storage taxes. France has their Language Police and have opted to emulate the US regarding international compliance with local laws. That Australian NSW Internet Censorship bill; you know, the one outlawing anything above the level of Saturday morning cartoons, is actually still a going concern. Hell, the EU as a whole is about to duplicate the whole DMCA fiasco. I swear, none of these governments actually live on the same planet as the country that pays their bills.
I know, I know, preaching to the choir and all. But please, if you can find some place where we can go and code without fear, by all means tell us. Until then, we're kinda stuck here and can't really risk waiting for our pointy-haired legislators to grow a clue or even learn from their bonehead mistakes. They will bring the country down in flames before admitting error.
Out of curiosity, which layout do you see as Adam and which as Eve?
I'm well aware of that.
I'm sure you don't really care
Say wha?
I'm sure if Gore had won the electoral and lost the popular you would be extolling the virtues of the Electoral College
This is truly fascinating. You know absolutely nothing about me and yet you somehow managed to divine my innermost thoughts from my mentioning a fact you can find in any almanac or election history website. How about next time you wait for me to say, "I don't like the electoral college" before ranting about my hypocracy? All I said was that Bush was not elected by popular vote, exactly as the parent had said that George III was not elected by popular vote. Kindly take your arrogance and shove it.
By the way, one of the reasons we don't use the popular vote is the difficulty of counting 100,000,000 votes
Well now there's the dumbest argument I've ever heard. Regardless of how you 'group' them, you still have to count all 100,000,000 of those votes.
Why am I responding to a troll? The world, may never know...
My first reaction was to agree, but then I tought about, of all things, the rulebooks for RPG's and the various SciFi/Fantasy card games out there. I have found so very many cases where the grammar of the rules was just slightly vague or where the writers glossed over a section to some small degree. Chaos usually ensues as the parties involved battle interpretations. So it's understandable that when one wants to write a law, they want to make the language as precise as possible to avoid loopholes and misuse. Of course, they fail anyway...
Not unlike software programming, really. Languages that are detailed and complex (and therefore harder to learn) can be annoying when you try to compile, but it forces you to be _extra_ careful when writing and debugging it. Languages that are simple and have a lot of automation involved (Visual Basic comes to mind) can be convenient, but you never really have the degree of control over the software you need.
Well, we've had two Georges now who were both President and related to each other, one of whom was not elected by popular vote. Does that mean we can expect the revolution during George #3's (Dubya Jr, anyone?) reign, I mean, term of office?
Very true, but he's still pretty much right. Anyone capable of seeing an entire object 'at once' (however much that phrase means on this subject) on all 3 spatial and the temporal axis would see an ordinary cube as a tesseract (hypercube is the general term for n-d cube where n>3).
Check it out. I can read all this, but it helps me not one bit in visualizing it. The thing that blows my mind is the sheer quantity of math available for 4-d figures. Want the hyper-surface area of a Glome (4-d hypersphere) or the 'content' (hyper-volume) of a pentatope (4-d equilateral triangle)? Wild stuff...
Searches, sure. But what about the actual file transfers themselves? Wouldn't each party have to know how to contact the other? I suppose those could be routed through supernodes as well, but that seems unlikely.
All of which could be found on a computer that had an unhacked cable modem. Or even one without any internet connection whatsoever. It is utterly useless as evidence as it means nothing. If I'm caught red-handed shooting someone, confiscating my library for evidence because it might contain books about handguns and then not charging me with anything is pretty stupid and, as we've seen before, rather typical of the FBI where computers are concerned.
No kidding. It's easy to hate M$ because Bill's evil AND they have shitty code. The MPAA may be clueless but the guys who actually make the movies really do seem to try to do a good job, even with a franchise as worn as Star Trek. Damn them for being so very excellent every now and then!
what is MORE strange is that it is a "premeditated" murder.
That also bugged me, how the murder was described from the start as premeditated; didn't see how that could be the case when he didn't know Crowe. It fell into place nicely with the line "I've spent six years thinking about killing the man who took Sean" (or whatever it was). The victim wasn't planned, but the act cetainly was. Much the same way barricading oneself in a bell tower is premeditated; you may not have known who you were gonna take out, but you definitely had human targets in mind.
You wouldn't want that, you'd miss the Matrix sequels next summer.
They tested this card out on Tomb Raider? My respect for Tom's Hardware just went down a notch or two.
If they're going to be recording sections of the video, they'd do so from the raw stream, not the omputer generated 3D environment. This is just a better way of representing multiple camera shots of the same scene.
But nobody is doing it. NASA 'has plans', but that means exactly dick. If nobody does it, it won't happen.
SPACE IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY FOR LIVING THINGS
Not really. The difficult part is surviving when you have precisely zero margin for error and your equipment consists of the absolute minimum needed to keep you alive. These are all problems associated with high launch costs and having no industry up there. Problems with radiation? Tack on some armor. Lunar regolith would work if it's piled on thick enough, and it's plentiful and easy to get at. Problems with life support? Put in backup systems; keep chunks of comet ice around as backup. Problems with chemical fuels? Well duh, of course you will if you have to spend 99% of it getting out of Earth's gravity well. Problems with zero-G? Spinning exercise rooms or some such. Of course, at $10k a pound you can't do any of this if you fly NASA.
You write about mining platinum on asteroids so we can have cheap, plentiful fuel cells on Earth.
Sure. It's a resource common as dirt in space but rare as diamonds down here with a huge demand just waiting for a supply. And it's by no means the only example.
Getting there, extracting/refining the platinum, getting it back to Earth... Do you seriously believe that the bottom line - financially and/or energetically would be positive? If you do, I've got an asteroid to sell you...
You say it's inevitable, then say it's not even remotely possible? Once you're there, it's cheap and could be made mostly self-sufficient. The expense is in getting the equipment out of the gravity well in the first place. Dropping stuff down from orbit is a hell of a lot cheaper than getting it up.
Space exploration is just as much about learning how to administer huge complex systems involving thousands of people and suppliers as it is about rockets blasting spaceward-ho!
Are you sugesting that nobody has ever had to do things like organize thousands of people in complex systems before?
Look, I don't really care about the ISS. It's a toy. As far as I'm aware NASA has no plans whatsoever for permanent space stations past it. My problem is with NASA in general. The government-run agency is simply never going to do much. Period. They've arguably gone backwards in the past 30 years, so I don't see why you're so hopeful about their future.
Sure, you could probably cobble together a quick and dirty manned mission to Mars within 10 years or so
And NASA has a long and glorious history of following up on its explorations?
I don't really care about a mission to Mars, either. It would be amazing, sure, but it wouldn't matter one bit if all that happens from it is that the explorers come home with rocks. This is exactly what happened before with Apollo and NASA has made zero progress in what really matters: letting other people do stuff in space.
We do not need NASA to be our explorers in space. All we need, all we _ever_ needed from them was to get the door open for the rest of us. We have millions of people who would love nothing more than to try to build a financial empire in space. Whereas NASA thumbs its nose at would-be tourists trying to give them millions. They've spent 40 years working entirely in the wrong direction.
Can someone explain to me how these things work? Are they similar to solar chimneys or what?
We went to the moon all right. Then we turned around and went home. Haven't been back for 30 years. Score one for government-run space programs!
the government can just get more done
Can, perhaps. Usually not, though.
If it is unproven that money can be made in space, the government is the only entity that can afford to go in
Sort of. Private entities have already shown it's possible to make money in space. DirecTV does turn a profit, after all. The catch is that not even the richest corporation in the world can afford to do more than establish some unmanned communications satellites due to ridiculously high launch costs. Fixing that would require serious R&D with dubious guarantees on a return, so _that_ is the part the government should have handled. Since NASA's launch costs have actually increased since the Apollo days, it's safe to say that they have failed in this regard.
I don't see exactly how playing with toys in Canada is any more exciting than flying low over the surface of Mars and taking high resolution photographs, or sending down a lander to map out the terrain at ground level.
Because those are NASA programs. And NASA has a long and treasured history of going nowhere with great fanfare. They've had 40 years to open space up to the public and what do we have? An aging shuttle fleet (which NASA has publicly said will be used for at least another 20 years) that is worse than what it replaced and a useless space station. Sure, the Mars probes are interesting; so are the Voyagers and all the others. But what good is it to know there's water on the moon or Mars if nobody goes there to use it? There's enough platinum in any given asteroid to build a dozen fuel cells for every man woman and child on the planet; why aren't we mining them? NASA has no interest in those kinds of things and is specifically interested in _not_ making it possible for others to do them. Most anything run by NASA will be fascinating, wonderous, overbudget, and useless for any practical purpose.
For the last seven decades it has been demonstrated that the government can spend money better than the individual
I would just love to see you prove that statement.
Would we have landed on the moon if it was up to the individual to get us there?
As far as I can tell, we might as well not have landed on the moon. All we have to show for it are some rocks.
There is simply too much wealth and opportunity in space for it all to be in the hands of some government bureaucracy.
And no, it doesn't really do anything. Most of those commands won't do much without parameters.
Yes, but according to various sources software teams at M$ are run in such a way that they are all of them trying to beat each other by releasing working code the fastest. Therefore, documentation is glossed over, testing gets done to the bare minimum level, and overall code quality gets the biggest shaft of all.
And while it's easy to say, "Oh, just reward the team that brings in the best code instead", the article was quite correct in that, apart from Linux processes (ha ha), there's no eay way to test the 'goodness' of a piece of code.
This just occured to me. I do not see the word "CD-ROM" on the faceplate of my DVD drive. Since the label only says "no CD-ROM's", isn't it implied that it will work fine on my drive? Wouldn't the same go for my CD-RW?
Considering that the stuff looked like gas, smelled like gas, and was advertised as gas, would you really just shrug and say, "Well, I guess it's my fault for trying to use it. No one forced me to"?
This has nothing to do with individual responsibility. This is about purposely releasing faulty products and damaging equipment.
Interesting. Opera doesn't extend italics past a line or paragraph break. So it looked quite correct when I previewed it. Thanks for the tip.
A fact that both of us are extremely happy about. But I guarantee you that the -AA's haven't given up on it. If they can't make a general purpose computer illegal, they'll try to make it unaffordable. The tax on Audio CD-R's in Canada is already several times the cost of the disc itself. The reasoning used to justify those taxes, insane though it may be, so very easily lends itself to taxing anything else available in a computer store.
I suggest that they take those laws off the books, because it's ridiculously stupid to enforce them
Hear, hear. Basically there are three options: Take the laws off the books, continue bumbling along with what we've got, or try for even more restrictive laws. The first and most sensible option is rather unlikely (though I'd be first in line to cheer if it did). There's simply too many representatives whose support has been bought for copyright as it stands today to simply die. Look at the War on Drugs; one has to be a complete moron to think it's going well and is even remotely worth the effort sunk into it, but it continues nonetheless. And given the choice between the other two, I'd rather the government didn't opt for some nutty "spread the punishment" law enforcement scheme. Sticking with what we've got is merely the lesser of two evils.
No it's not. It's based on the amount of copyrighted data it _could_ hold, which is totally arbitrary. I get taxed for it even if I fill it up with nothing but zeros.
Is it now? Let's see, does the CBDTPA make distinctions between A/V equipment and electronics in general? Why no, it doesn't. Now where on earth could I have drawn the conclusion that, having failed once, the media industries will take a different tactic towards banning general purpose machines?
your suggestion that we do door-to-door FBI raids will cost the taxpayers much more money in the long run
I'm suggesting that they actually enforce the laws they have on the books rather than just punish everyone because they're too lazy to go after the actual offenders.
the public supported government intervention in order to promote the progress of science and useful arts
Just what planet do you come from? Since when does "granting patents and copyrights to authors and inventors" translate to "must keep giant media corporations alive as at all costs"?
Music and movie conglomerates are not critical industries. I was under the impression that the public thought otherwise
I can't imagine where you got that idea. Entertainment is certainly critical. We have a hard time functioning for any length of time without it. Disney, however, is not. Hollywood could drop off the face of the planet and the rest of the world would continue to function quite nicely. People were entertained before the -AA's and we can be entertained again without them.
If you'd rather we drop copyright law altogether, I'd certainly be willing to support that.
Copyright in the Constitutional sense does not translate very well to the information age. Authors should be compensated for their work, but copyrights and the methods of enforcing them are becoming increasingly inappropriate. If it has outlived its usefulness, then by all means, get rid of it.