Agreed, it would be a wonderful thing to have, but it still has issues as far as I can see.
TFS says 'but without the privacy leaks', but really you can still be tracked/followed/denied/fucked with from a single point/service, namely your email provider.
Also, there's the age old problem of common password for everything, if one is compromised, they all are. Granted in this case, it's a private key and not password, which is slightly harder to acquire though social engineering, mainly because most people aren't even aware of what private keys are, and those that are usually know enough not to give them up. But still, you shouldn't use one key for everything either... or so I've been told;)
Performing the tune in public is already infringement isn't it, except in the explicitly protected areas of fair use, namely parody or satire. Performing would including playing the copyrighted music it on a piano or any other instrument, and also singing the copyrighted lyrics.
Learning to program is not about learning a language, it's a bout learning a thought process and how to express that process through language. Like other languages, it's easier to learn when you're young. Sure the language they learn may be obsolete, but the thought process is useful forever...
I would argue that speeding is not necessarily unsafe in many circumstances, but in others it is definitely unsafe. I was the passenger in an accident once. We were pulling out of small side road and turning right (right-hand drive country, so turning right means you have to wait longer usually). We'd been waiting a while for a steady stream of traffic from the right to pass. About 50m down the road to the right, the road we were turning into curved out of sight. Having seen dozens of cars pass at a relatively steady rate, they cleared up and there were NO cars coming from either direction. We pulled out finally, and a car came tearing round the curve on our right, saw us, slammed on the brakes, and still hit us. A clear case where speeding caused the accident. So yes, in built up areas, round blind corners, over blind rises,... there are places where speeding is dangerous. On a straight highway through a desert where you can see for miles, well, if you don't brake in time, it's not because you were speeding, it's because you weren't paying attention.
Spotlight (specifically the metadata) is not portable/transferable. Quite frankly using grep/locate/find over a directory structure where files are symlinked into multiple categories is a real pain in the ass. POSIX extended attributes mean that the underlying file system is capable of storing and manipulating the metadata necessary, but the userspace tools suck!!
I've pondered this question before, and voiced some of my thoughts on the issue here. In summary we would need three things:
Convenient userspace tool for specifying tags on an individual file. Could be done easily enough with a script wrapper around attr
Convenient userspace tool for querying tags on an individual file, Again, simple with a script wrapper around attr, but ideally we would also want to add a new option to 'ls' to display an additional column to containing files/dirs tags.
A way to query collections of files matching a binary expression of tags, e.g. patient_name && x-ray; And this is the tricky part. The ideal way to do it imho is to add some form of tag expression syntax to shell globbing patterns, and modify the standard C libraries accordingly. Then the current userspace utilities would automatically fall in line as far as I can tell. Anyone up for this job? It's not the coding that's hard, it's getting the community to agree to it...
Of course that's just Linux, and possibly Mac is covered if HFS+ does POSIX extended attributes. Once again, windows user's are left out in the cold. However, it would be trivial to write an export script that would create a copy of a collection of files in a hierarchical structure using symlinks;) One could even write a fuse filesystem that makes the underlying collection appear as a symlinked hierarchy, which would be a quick step to at least get GUI file managers etc to grok the idea, although ideally the various file managers would provided direct methods to query tags, filter by tags, and modify tags.
I haven't tried thebrain (mentioned above) before, but I'm keen to give it a shot. I've certainly never seen or heard of anything else that does what I want, and what the OP has asked for. I'm especially curios to see how portable is? Can I for example, take my files from my linux laptop, and back them up to my NTFS external drie, preserving the organisation overlay provided by the brain?
The question really is, how much more would the new bureaucracy cost compared to the old one. One has to remember there is bureaucracy already in place. As far as inflation goes; hadn't though of it tbh, but yes I suppose the amount for the initial extension could be revised regularly, and the schedule of later extension amounts adjusted according to the doubling series. Come renewal time, owners pay for the next extension according to the newly revised schedules costs. That should take care of basic inflation... hyper inflation a la Zimbabwe breaks so many other things that trying to deal specifically with it for copyright would fail because the rest of the economy would already be out of whack...
Actually this brings me to one of my other pet bitches... The way I see it, ip producers (call them artists, writers, whatever) are much the same as freelancer consultants in any other industry. They don't have a reliable stream of income, so they get to charge significantly for their work when they do it to tide them over in the 'bad times'. This is fair, I'm a freelance programmer supporting myself through a PhD, I know how it goes. But what is it that justifies the *expectation* of huge incomes in the case of musicians and actors. Why should someone be able to write a song and live off royalties for the rest of their life, when any other freelance worker gets paid once. Yes, I know, "creating art is hard", but it's a also a job, like any other. I suppose the difference is that my work is commissioned, and I have no expectation any equity in my creations. But what's so different about this than girl band X teamed up with song writer Y by production house Crap Inc. We both have the opportunity to 'go it alone' and produce creative works entirely our own, but why should artists by default get equity is commissioned works.
Fair enough, I concede that the value of copyrightable work is not always immediately apparent, and hence not always immediately profitable. However, in counter argument to to your two examples
Movies: would get a longer initial period based on outlay, i.e. longer period to recoup investment. There's a balance that needs to be struck here of course, and the figure of 5 years was, I'll admit, pulled out of my ass as something I thought would be reasonable. But as the slippery slope argument goes, if we set an initial period of X years, and tanked box office film number 1 becomes a cult classic in X-2 years, recouping enough to at least tempt the owners to extend a few years, but film number 2 doesn't make the cut off, what makes the first film any more deserving of the profits, because ultimately X is essentially arbitrary.
Songs and covers: I think it's fair to say the song would not be popular enough to make a profit without the cover being released to make it so. So really the original artist owes something to the cover artist in this respect. If the song is still under copyright, the cover artist has to negotiate rights to make the cover anyway, so the original artist doesn't lose out. If the song is already out of copyright, then my argument about slippery slopes applies again: at what point is it fair for someone to stop profiting from their work.
All that said, 15 to 20 years really strikes me as too long in the internet era. Distribution is cheap, success is viral. If you haven't made any money within 5 years, chances are you're not going to.
By you're reasoning any modification of copyright rules/laws is worthless, because it simply won't be adhered to... Is doesn't affect the idea of extensions specifically. I'm not sure I get your point?
Fifteen to twenty year terms would be a more than adequate incentive for the creation of new works, as well as providing a huge catalogue of new public domain works every year which would, in turn, stimulate further creative re-use. Essentially infinite terms coupled with DRM that is illegal to remove have very little impact on infringement, but they practically obliterate the possibility of legitimate resale or re-use that would actually help the industry as a whole.
I think even 15 to 20 years is too long. To me it makes more sense to have a very short initial term, say 5 years (which can change depending on industry circumstances, e.g. motion pictures might get longer terms than music because of heavier initial investments). Then rights holders may extend the term by another year at a small cost (say $100). To extend a second year, the cost doubles. Then again, and again. As long as the ownership of the rights remains profitable, it's worth extending, but the exponential increase in price means that the ownership of those rights will become untenable pretty quickly ($102400 within 15 years of original date). You can even put a cap on the maximum term duration, again, possibly different for different industries.
The idea being, that if your idea hasn't paid off by the end of the initial term, it was probably crap anyway. At least everyone else thought it was! Your work can be considered the equivalent a defective material product; something for which nobody should be forced to pay, but can freely use the parts of to repair something that does, i.e. remixing. If your idea has paid off, you can hang on to it for as long as it stays profitable, but there's a check/balance that ensures others will eventually get access to your work. Also, as the costs of keeping the rights increases, the government, and indirectly the taxpayer, benefit from the profits of the work too
The only difference I can find is that the Palestinian authorities are less complicit than the bantustan authorities were, although considering recent releases by wikileaks, even this difference is dubious
not years, months... The same bug has existed in portmap since maverick and was, I assume, back ported to lucid, which would be why my lucid update broke. The system hadn't been updated since January, which is why I only picked it up now.
I have to disagree. Ubuntu has a nasty habit of letting non-mainstream, non-desktop related bugs pass through several release cycles. We've just this last week spent 3 full days trying to figure out why my perfectly working NFS boot over PXE cluster broke when we did a safe upgrade. Turns out there's been a bug in portmap since lucid, which still exists in natty which causes the NFS rootfs mount to fail. We had to to recreate the filesystem from scratch and install lucid without updates, then hold portmap back manually (after much trial and error to find out which package was breaking). I've had other issues with Ubuntu server too, so to me this is not an isolated incident. I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu for any scientific work, and especially not something as 'unusual' (read -> not desktop oriented) as cluster.
WTF happened to this idea of the 1970ies that giving the user a chance to improve her understanding of the system should be part of what's called ergonomy?
Amen! What happened to the idea of a highly customizable system with *intelligent defaults*? The defaults make sure that in the simple case of a straight forward install, it "just works" (which seems to be what most people want). But the configuration is there, easily accessible and well documented.
Yes, on my office desk I do. I work with large (TB+) data sets, which we need to make backups of, and generally multiple working copies on various colleagues computers. Working with the data directly over a 100Mbit network is impractical; in fact, having a single copy we all work on isn't a good idea either, because sometimes we modify the data, thereby clobbering it for others.
The counting issue is sticky. I for example don't consider myself an ubuntu user, but my work desktop, and 4 or so servers at work run ubuntu. My home machines are all gentoo. I think that most long time linux users are multi-distro in this sense. Of course there are always the stats from as a base to work from. With some stats you could possibly extrapolate.
Not sure how enforceable or practical it would be. Considering how central cookies are to today's web usage, I think it would be simply annoying to have to confirm each and every cookie before you get it. I like the the way Cookie Monster for firefox does it myself. Although, if the Swedish government wants to pay someone to write plugins/extensions for all the other browsers that work the same way, I'd be smiling.
A right is not a natural thing. It is something granted by a society or it's representative in the form of a government. Constitutional democracies/republics/other may codify these rights in written documents in the form of laws, but really the rights are defined by the behaviour of the society/government, not the laws. The term "inalienable" (as in the American bill of rights) is often misconstrued. Is does not mean "cannot be taken away", it means "cannot be given away".
By the parent's logic, you have the right to steal, murder or act otherwise as you want, because you could do this without intervention. I don't think murder is a right...
In this sense, web access is becoming a right in some developed countries because those countries already provide the right to conduct business, the right to participate in government, and a bunch other relevant rights which are increasingly becoming dependent internet access in practical terms. Web access is not yet an explicit right (except in finland), but I fell that eventually it should become an explicit and inalienable right, at the point where it is actually totally impractical to conduct business and exercise your other democratic rights without internet access.
Yet again, I think Berners-Lee is not being silly, he's prescient.
Agreed, to an extent. In a lot of respects I would describe the community of high-level leaders in big business one of your dysfunctional communities. I don't think Jobs is a sociopath. Most people don't really understand the term properly anyway. I do think that personality traits such as ruthlessness and lack of empathy in indirect cases are actually rewarded and reinforced within the world of business ethics. Yes, true sociopaths (or those with anti-social personality disorder) are rarely successful in life, but there are plenty of people with obnoxious personality traits who are successful. Those traits don't impair them functionally, and in the case of empathy and business, I think they are actually enabling traits.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, it would be a wonderful thing to have, but it still has issues as far as I can see.
TFS says 'but without the privacy leaks', but really you can still be tracked/followed/denied/fucked with from a single point/service, namely your email provider.
Also, there's the age old problem of common password for everything, if one is compromised, they all are. Granted in this case, it's a private key and not password, which is slightly harder to acquire though social engineering, mainly because most people aren't even aware of what private keys are, and those that are usually know enough not to give them up. But still, you shouldn't use one key for everything either... or so I've been told ;)
*maniacal laughter*
http://xkcd.com/538/
a) Google __made__ the same mistakes b) It's not out of beta yet.... Oh my God!!! My Arm!! That troll just bit my arm off
I..I like Engl^H^H^H^HJapan just fine... but I ain't eating any 'o that beef!
Performing the tune in public is already infringement isn't it, except in the explicitly protected areas of fair use, namely parody or satire. Performing would including playing the copyrighted music it on a piano or any other instrument, and also singing the copyrighted lyrics.
Learning to program is not about learning a language, it's a bout learning a thought process and how to express that process through language. Like other languages, it's easier to learn when you're young. Sure the language they learn may be obsolete, but the thought process is useful forever...
I would argue that speeding is not necessarily unsafe in many circumstances, but in others it is definitely unsafe. I was the passenger in an accident once. We were pulling out of small side road and turning right (right-hand drive country, so turning right means you have to wait longer usually). We'd been waiting a while for a steady stream of traffic from the right to pass. About 50m down the road to the right, the road we were turning into curved out of sight. Having seen dozens of cars pass at a relatively steady rate, they cleared up and there were NO cars coming from either direction. We pulled out finally, and a car came tearing round the curve on our right, saw us, slammed on the brakes, and still hit us. A clear case where speeding caused the accident. So yes, in built up areas, round blind corners, over blind rises, ... there are places where speeding is dangerous. On a straight highway through a desert where you can see for miles, well, if you don't brake in time, it's not because you were speeding, it's because you weren't paying attention.
I note that since Mac OS X 10.4 the HFS+ system has supported what look like extended attributes properly.
Spotlight (specifically the metadata) is not portable/transferable. Quite frankly using grep/locate/find over a directory structure where files are symlinked into multiple categories is a real pain in the ass. POSIX extended attributes mean that the underlying file system is capable of storing and manipulating the metadata necessary, but the userspace tools suck!!
I've pondered this question before, and voiced some of my thoughts on the issue here. In summary we would need three things:
Of course that's just Linux, and possibly Mac is covered if HFS+ does POSIX extended attributes. Once again, windows user's are left out in the cold. However, it would be trivial to write an export script that would create a copy of a collection of files in a hierarchical structure using symlinks ;) One could even write a fuse filesystem that makes the underlying collection appear as a symlinked hierarchy, which would be a quick step to at least get GUI file managers etc to grok the idea, although ideally the various file managers would provided direct methods to query tags, filter by tags, and modify tags.
I haven't tried thebrain (mentioned above) before, but I'm keen to give it a shot. I've certainly never seen or heard of anything else that does what I want, and what the OP has asked for. I'm especially curios to see how portable is? Can I for example, take my files from my linux laptop, and back them up to my NTFS external drie, preserving the organisation overlay provided by the brain?
The question really is, how much more would the new bureaucracy cost compared to the old one. One has to remember there is bureaucracy already in place. As far as inflation goes; hadn't though of it tbh, but yes I suppose the amount for the initial extension could be revised regularly, and the schedule of later extension amounts adjusted according to the doubling series. Come renewal time, owners pay for the next extension according to the newly revised schedules costs. That should take care of basic inflation... hyper inflation a la Zimbabwe breaks so many other things that trying to deal specifically with it for copyright would fail because the rest of the economy would already be out of whack...
Actually this brings me to one of my other pet bitches... The way I see it, ip producers (call them artists, writers, whatever) are much the same as freelancer consultants in any other industry. They don't have a reliable stream of income, so they get to charge significantly for their work when they do it to tide them over in the 'bad times'. This is fair, I'm a freelance programmer supporting myself through a PhD, I know how it goes. But what is it that justifies the *expectation* of huge incomes in the case of musicians and actors. Why should someone be able to write a song and live off royalties for the rest of their life, when any other freelance worker gets paid once. Yes, I know, "creating art is hard", but it's a also a job, like any other. I suppose the difference is that my work is commissioned, and I have no expectation any equity in my creations. But what's so different about this than girl band X teamed up with song writer Y by production house Crap Inc. We both have the opportunity to 'go it alone' and produce creative works entirely our own, but why should artists by default get equity is commissioned works.
Fair enough, I concede that the value of copyrightable work is not always immediately apparent, and hence not always immediately profitable. However, in counter argument to to your two examples
All that said, 15 to 20 years really strikes me as too long in the internet era. Distribution is cheap, success is viral. If you haven't made any money within 5 years, chances are you're not going to.
By you're reasoning any modification of copyright rules/laws is worthless, because it simply won't be adhered to... Is doesn't affect the idea of extensions specifically. I'm not sure I get your point?
Fifteen to twenty year terms would be a more than adequate incentive for the creation of new works, as well as providing a huge catalogue of new public domain works every year which would, in turn, stimulate further creative re-use. Essentially infinite terms coupled with DRM that is illegal to remove have very little impact on infringement, but they practically obliterate the possibility of legitimate resale or re-use that would actually help the industry as a whole.
I think even 15 to 20 years is too long. To me it makes more sense to have a very short initial term, say 5 years (which can change depending on industry circumstances, e.g. motion pictures might get longer terms than music because of heavier initial investments). Then rights holders may extend the term by another year at a small cost (say $100). To extend a second year, the cost doubles. Then again, and again. As long as the ownership of the rights remains profitable, it's worth extending, but the exponential increase in price means that the ownership of those rights will become untenable pretty quickly ($102400 within 15 years of original date). You can even put a cap on the maximum term duration, again, possibly different for different industries.
The idea being, that if your idea hasn't paid off by the end of the initial term, it was probably crap anyway. At least everyone else thought it was! Your work can be considered the equivalent a defective material product; something for which nobody should be forced to pay, but can freely use the parts of to repair something that does, i.e. remixing. If your idea has paid off, you can hang on to it for as long as it stays profitable, but there's a check/balance that ensures others will eventually get access to your work. Also, as the costs of keeping the rights increases, the government, and indirectly the taxpayer, benefit from the profits of the work too
The only difference I can find is that the Palestinian authorities are less complicit than the bantustan authorities were, although considering recent releases by wikileaks, even this difference is dubious
not years, months... The same bug has existed in portmap since maverick and was, I assume, back ported to lucid, which would be why my lucid update broke. The system hadn't been updated since January, which is why I only picked it up now.
I have to disagree. Ubuntu has a nasty habit of letting non-mainstream, non-desktop related bugs pass through several release cycles. We've just this last week spent 3 full days trying to figure out why my perfectly working NFS boot over PXE cluster broke when we did a safe upgrade. Turns out there's been a bug in portmap since lucid, which still exists in natty which causes the NFS rootfs mount to fail. We had to to recreate the filesystem from scratch and install lucid without updates, then hold portmap back manually (after much trial and error to find out which package was breaking). I've had other issues with Ubuntu server too, so to me this is not an isolated incident. I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu for any scientific work, and especially not something as 'unusual' (read -> not desktop oriented) as cluster.
WTF happened to this idea of the 1970ies that giving the user a chance to improve her understanding of the system should be part of what's called ergonomy?
Amen! What happened to the idea of a highly customizable system with *intelligent defaults*? The defaults make sure that in the simple case of a straight forward install, it "just works" (which seems to be what most people want). But the configuration is there, easily accessible and well documented.
Yes, on my office desk I do. I work with large (TB+) data sets, which we need to make backups of, and generally multiple working copies on various colleagues computers. Working with the data directly over a 100Mbit network is impractical; in fact, having a single copy we all work on isn't a good idea either, because sometimes we modify the data, thereby clobbering it for others.
The counting issue is sticky. I for example don't consider myself an ubuntu user, but my work desktop, and 4 or so servers at work run ubuntu. My home machines are all gentoo. I think that most long time linux users are multi-distro in this sense. Of course there are always the stats from as a base to work from. With some stats you could possibly extrapolate.
Not sure how enforceable or practical it would be. Considering how central cookies are to today's web usage, I think it would be simply annoying to have to confirm each and every cookie before you get it. I like the the way Cookie Monster for firefox does it myself. Although, if the Swedish government wants to pay someone to write plugins/extensions for all the other browsers that work the same way, I'd be smiling.
A right is not a natural thing. It is something granted by a society or it's representative in the form of a government. Constitutional democracies/republics/other may codify these rights in written documents in the form of laws, but really the rights are defined by the behaviour of the society/government, not the laws. The term "inalienable" (as in the American bill of rights) is often misconstrued. Is does not mean "cannot be taken away", it means "cannot be given away".
By the parent's logic, you have the right to steal, murder or act otherwise as you want, because you could do this without intervention. I don't think murder is a right...
In this sense, web access is becoming a right in some developed countries because those countries already provide the right to conduct business, the right to participate in government, and a bunch other relevant rights which are increasingly becoming dependent internet access in practical terms. Web access is not yet an explicit right (except in finland), but I fell that eventually it should become an explicit and inalienable right, at the point where it is actually totally impractical to conduct business and exercise your other democratic rights without internet access.
Yet again, I think Berners-Lee is not being silly, he's prescient.
Agreed, to an extent. In a lot of respects I would describe the community of high-level leaders in big business one of your dysfunctional communities. I don't think Jobs is a sociopath. Most people don't really understand the term properly anyway. I do think that personality traits such as ruthlessness and lack of empathy in indirect cases are actually rewarded and reinforced within the world of business ethics. Yes, true sociopaths (or those with anti-social personality disorder) are rarely successful in life, but there are plenty of people with obnoxious personality traits who are successful. Those traits don't impair them functionally, and in the case of empathy and business, I think they are actually enabling traits.
That's a loot of hookers!