What are the job options for a notoriously fraudulent spoon bender? Probably a lucrative book contract and endless daytime TV talk-show appearances, cameo roles in films, and so on. At least these days...
Copyright law is pretty much designed to cause this sort of idiocy.
Re the ease of censoring on the net- It is quite scary how easily controlled most people's internet access (including my own, really) could be. People often think the internet is this robust, uncensorable system, because of old stories about being "designed to withstand a nuclear attack" and all that. That kind of applied when most network nodes were in universities and research labs, who were owner/operators of routing nodes with peering agreements with eachother. Nowadays, the vast majority of people on the internet are "edge nodes", connected to a single corporate ISP. So it's basically degenerated to a star/tree topology at the "home" level. No longer resistant to control, in fact facilitating control by establishing choke points. Blind, complacent faith in the "power" of the internet to "interpret censorship as damage and route around it" as the adage used to go, when that power is being neutered further with each upgrade cycle and your own only routing consists of sending stuff upstream on your sole connection to your sole ISP, is probably not a good idea. What can one do? Learn about wireless mesh networking fast I guess...
I'm not sure about fingerprinting - certainly, I don't think one should be obliged to give a fingerprint if asked, but if someone collects a fingerprint you've left, or DNA sample from the biological gunk all humans leave in their wake, I'm not sure I'd consider it a privacy violation. The problem arises if it's used as _evidence_ though - it is relatively easy to grab someon's fingerprings and constuct a fairly convincing false fingerprint stamp, and scatter someone else's DNA about a crime scene, if you want to frame them. So, since everyone has DNA and you just can't help leaving it everywhere (stop sniggering down the back) where any so-and-so could collect it, the problem is with what often seems to be the legal system's blind trust in forensic evidence.
Hell, people still tend to blindly believe video "evidence", even after TV shows with computer-reconstructed historical characters have aired on national TV. Sigh.
Illegal does not mean wrong, and a copy of someone's work is not their work. (Destroy one copy, the other still exists. They are different things). Personally I don't argue against attribution (being recognised as the author of a work), and disagree with plagiarism (it's fraud). But that's very different to current copyright law, which gives people power to prevent communication of information, and is often used as an _excuse_ for building a surveillance state, alongside terrorism and child porn.
I'm not your mate you english twat. Getting paid for your work is not the same as being able to charge a per-copy fee. I get paid to write _new_ code all the time. The hard part of composing a song, writing a book, writing a computer program etc is making the FIRST copy. I work on commission to do that. I'll still do fine when copyright law is abolished.
And those links cross the borders of countries at a relatively limited number of internet exchanges / peering points. Don't think that the Corporate Reich of America could never implement a "Great Firewall of the USA". And, unlike China, the CRA might even have the resources and technical know-how to make it work properly.
And names do matter, or "rape" and "dogfish" wouldn't now be called "canola" and "rock salmon" (at least in the USA). "Framing" is a very old dirty debating trick.
"Words come with conceptual frames, imposing an understanding on a situation." - George Lakoff.
That just means it's been a pro-copyright/patent-holder-interests propaganda term for a long time... (although, really, 1771 is not all that long ago in the millenia of history to a european eye), and I assure you the people of the 1700s were quite capable of propaganda, even if Goebbels wasn't around to make quite such an art of it.
The OED merely documents usage of words, there is no authoritative reference for correct english, unlike the way the way some french try to impose an "official" french language. If a few people (very few in the case of the unabridged OED) use a word to mean something, and Oxford find out, in it goes.
Heh. One of the first (and worst) applications I released onto the internet was a program to rip emails to plaintext from an Amiga microdot email file...
because infringing on monsanto's intellectual "property" is a crime? I"P" law now has criminal penalties in several countries.
Welcome to the glorious new age of Information Feudalism, please leave your Freedom at the door.
Re:Exercise I do to help develop multitasking abil
on
Life Interrupted
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I actually attempt the same thing with typing... but...
[And it also usually means typing one-handed on keyboards designed for two hands, which also sucks, for obvious reasons]
Re:Exercise I do to help develop multitasking abil
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Life Interrupted
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· Score: 1
You can't do it, and no amount of "practise" will improve that
That's a positive attitude...
What you are doing is simple motor-skill type of multitasking
Um. That really depends on _what_ I'm writing, now, doesn't it, in effect (though I haven't tried poetry and a HOWTO specifically) I am attempting to do similar to what you ask. What did you think I meant - Alternating sentences from one text? (I guess my comment could be read that way, it's not what I meant...)
I actually attempt the same thing with typing rather than handwriting, too, but only occasionally, as I don't always have two computers handy, and the X Window System has (or seems to have, haven't really investigated the issue deeply) a "there can be only one" idea of input focus.
results in your switching back and forth between them, to the detriment of both, due to the overhead of switching
I freely acknowledged I was merely switching back and forth (that's what "timeslicing" meant!) - my goal is to drastically reduce the overhead of switching through practice and make the process second nature. Yes, that means aping a timeslicing computer processor.
In software, this has been called "concurrent programming".
Um no, switching rapidly to give the illusion of multitasking is called timeslicing. concurrent programming would be writing a program that is composed of (interacting) concurrently running processes at runtime, perhaps to run on a truly parallel system (like the ones I manage at work), or to run on a timesliced system emulating a truly parallel system.
Exercise I do to help develop multitasking ability
on
Life Interrupted
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· Score: 1
I write different sentences with each hand (at the same time). They don't come out all that legibly I guess (much less legibly than either hand on its own), and I may be simply timeslicing rapidly, obviously, but with practice my ability to do it is definitely improving.
Unlikely, at least that's what my friend Mr. Flippy in his green star blanket in the good ceiling tells me. What's that Mr. Flippy? Servants of the bad ceiling must die? Yes, Mr. Flippy, I agree.
I can quite happily do the opposite, going into a "coding trance", but lately it has become important to be able to multitask well (moved to a somewhat more sysadminny job involving running linux clusters). So I started to investigate ways to improve my ability there. The most fun thing to do was to write two different things at the same time, one pen in each hand. It feels very strange, but I'm getting better and better at it, and the exercise seems to have helped with other mental multitasking as well.
The strangest thing (apart from doing it itself), is just how much your handwriting changes compared to either hand alone.
People may be confused by the wording of that comment (I'd also heard a slightly lower figure than 72%, but still above 60% - do you have a reference?)
To be clear, the software patents have been illegitimately granted by the EPO, but are not legally enforceable at the moment, the bureaucrats and corporate sock-puppets, (embarrassingly, many of them from my home country (Ireland)), are trying to change that.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As far as I'm concerned, I"P" law is plain evil (well, I'm a bit vague about Trademarks, but certainly Copyright and Patent), but Article 27 (which I have doubts about) also says:
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
So the problems arise at the collision between 19+27(1) and 27(2), mostly. (18, "Freedom of Thought" might also become important in the near future, particularly for those of us who consider our computers extensions of our minds).
Personally, I would hold Article 19 and 27(1) as obviously trumping any "protection" under Article 27(2) if the "protection" causes a violation of Article 19 or Article 27(1). But maybe other people care less about freedom and more about profit - if so, then fuck them if they think they'll restrict my freedom, I have a masters in mechanical engineering and I'm not afraid to use it...
And "Protection" is not defined - perhaps sufficient protection would be protection from fraud/plagiarism - i.e. while I should be able to freely copy information or implement devices as I see fit, I should probably not be able to claim that I wrote or designed them if I didn't. Then:
(1) Re "copyright": you can't censor me, but people know it's a better bet to pay you, not me, to produce further cool new information-patterns, and
(2) Re "patent": I can share in scientific advancements without interference, but people know it's a better bet to pay you, not me, to make further ones.
Hm.. and upon further further investigation, emacs already has a secondary selection behaviour (try alt(meta) + drag-with-left button). I didn't notice previously because my window manager by default grabs that as move-window - but the emacs behaviour is there if I turn off the window manager shortcut. It behaves in other respects as PRIMARY, and in my cursory examination there doesn't seem to be an exchange-primary-secondary command (but it would be a short step to add it, the "hard bit" of secondary selection tracking is already implemented)
Actually, thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure there's any easy protocol for a "swap" within the X selection framework in the two independent applications case (how to tell App1 that it needs to get data when "swap" is requested in App2 ???.
Hm. Should have actually reread the effing ICCCM Spec before posting that. I'm actually covering old ground, so my "idea" is not very new at all anyway...). The thing in my suggestion not already in the ICCCM spec I think is that applications should grab secondary corresponding to their old primary on losing primary. Anyway, reading the ICCCM Spec I kinda get the impression that they had some idea of SECONDARY being a bit more independent than that, maybe like ordinary left-drag => highlight in blue => PRIMARY, right-drag => highlight in orange => SECONDARY, or something.
Still, maybe the temporally ordered PRIMARY-to-SECONDARY transition I suggested would be less confusing than two completely separate highlights. Or not. Have to code _both_ and try them:-).
I'm _really_ going to bed now...
ICCCM excerpts:
2.6.1.2 The SECONDARY Selection The selection named by the atom SECONDARY is used: o As the second argument to commands taking two arguments (for example, "exchange primary and secondary selections") o As a means of obtaining data when there is a primary selection and the user does not want to disturb it.
2.6.3 Selection Targets with Side Effects
These side-effect targets are used to implement operations such as "exchange PRIMARY and SECONDARY selections".
2.6.3.2 INSERT_SELECTION The owner should use the selection mechanism to convert the named selection into the named target and should insert it at the location of the selection for which it got the INSERT_SELECTION request.
Might work, though I think I'd need to code it up and try it to decide how it felt - might be "too easy" to do accidentally (btw, don't hold your breath waiting for me to code it, I've got lots of other less fun things to do...).
I also know some applications use middle-button drag for x-y scrolling/panning, which I also like, as the scroll bars are sooo far away on my desktop and I don't have one of those newfangled 2-axis x-y new-mouse-wheel thingies - but that's not a long-term problem, I suppose, as Microsoft will eventually have pretty much everyone with the 2-axis new-mouse-wheel thingy.
Actually, thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure there's any easy protocol for a "swap" within the X selection framework in the two independent applications case (how to tell App1 that it needs to get data when "swap" is requested in App2 ???. It's easier to make an "fast replace" of PRIMARY in App2 from App1's SECONDARY as App1 doesn't need to know to get new data from App2, but that's a bit different from what I originally had in mind and doesn't buy much over ctrl-x/c/v IMHO).
I will have to meditate upon it further, it's 1am here at the moment and I'm not at my best...
Here's an idea, publically disclosed so no evil little fuck can patent it:
Whenever PRIMARY changes, make the secondary selection the previous primary, and add a "Swap" menu item + shortcut to make Cut/Copy/Paste/Swap.
Use Case:
Highlight some text "hello", lets say the highlight is bright blue background.
Go to somewhere else, highlight some more text "goodbye". "goodbye" becomes bright blue background indicating it is now PRIMARY. "hello" has become faded blue, indicating it is now SECONDARY.
Now "Swap". "hello"+"goodbye" exchange places! I think "hello" in its new position should have the PRIMARY selection, and "goodbye" in its new position the SECONDARY, as that's where the user will "be" after swapping, and a second "Swap" will restore the text to its original state.
Most cut/paste operations I do are reorganisations of that nature. Other people might differ - but it's certainly one of those features that would keep legal people loyal to a word processor, say.
I think it would be dead handy, and no-one I know is doing it.
I hate to break it to you, but open source is "proprietary" in legal terms - copyright is asserted over open-source software, it's not "public domain". Having said that, legal terms are generally bunk.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright law is pretty much designed to cause this sort of idiocy.
Re the ease of censoring on the net- It is quite scary how easily controlled most people's internet access (including my own, really) could be. People often think the internet is this robust, uncensorable system, because of old stories about being "designed to withstand a nuclear attack" and all that. That kind of applied when most network nodes were in universities and research labs, who were owner/operators of routing nodes with peering agreements with eachother. Nowadays, the vast majority of people on the internet are "edge nodes", connected to a single corporate ISP. So it's basically degenerated to a star/tree topology at the "home" level. No longer resistant to control, in fact facilitating control by establishing choke points. Blind, complacent faith in the "power" of the internet to "interpret censorship as damage and route around it" as the adage used to go, when that power is being neutered further with each upgrade cycle and your own only routing consists of sending stuff upstream on your sole connection to your sole ISP, is probably not a good idea. What can one do? Learn about wireless mesh networking fast I guess...
I'm not sure about fingerprinting - certainly, I don't think one should be obliged to give a fingerprint if asked, but if someone collects a fingerprint you've left, or DNA sample from the biological gunk all humans leave in their wake, I'm not sure I'd consider it a privacy violation. The problem arises if it's used as _evidence_ though - it is relatively easy to grab someon's fingerprings and constuct a fairly convincing false fingerprint stamp, and scatter someone else's DNA about a crime scene, if you want to frame them. So, since everyone has DNA and you just can't help leaving it everywhere (stop sniggering down the back) where any so-and-so could collect it, the problem is with what often seems to be the legal system's blind trust in forensic evidence.
Hell, people still tend to blindly believe video "evidence", even after TV shows with computer-reconstructed historical characters have aired on national TV. Sigh.
Well, if the gun is intended as a deterrent, you might want people to be aware you're armed rather than hide it, so you don't need privacy for that.
Might be interesting to see if there's anyone who is against privacy and for a requirement (not just a right) to keep/bear arms...
Well that sounds fairly sensible. It'll never catch on. ;-)
It could well be a step along the way in its own small way, if it serves to encourage contempt for copyright law.
Illegal does not mean wrong, and a copy of someone's work is not their work. (Destroy one copy, the other still exists. They are different things).
Personally I don't argue against attribution (being recognised as the author of a work), and disagree with plagiarism (it's fraud). But that's very different to current copyright law, which gives people power to prevent communication of information, and is often used as an _excuse_ for building a surveillance state, alongside terrorism and child porn.
I'm not your mate you english twat. Getting paid for your work is not the same as being able to charge a per-copy fee. I get paid to write _new_ code all the time. The hard part of composing a song, writing a book, writing a computer program etc is making the FIRST copy. I work on commission to do that. I'll still do fine when copyright law is abolished.
And those links cross the borders of countries at a relatively limited number of internet exchanges / peering points. Don't think that the Corporate Reich of America could never implement a "Great Firewall of the USA". And, unlike China, the CRA might even have the resources and technical know-how to make it work properly.
But what we call it is just a name.
And names do matter, or "rape" and "dogfish" wouldn't now be called "canola" and "rock salmon" (at least in the USA). "Framing" is a very old dirty debating trick.
"Words come with conceptual frames, imposing an understanding on a situation." - George Lakoff.
That just means it's been a pro-copyright/patent-holder-interests propaganda term for a long time... (although, really, 1771 is not all that long ago in the millenia of history to a european eye), and I assure you the people of the 1700s were quite capable of propaganda, even if Goebbels wasn't around to make quite such an art of it.
The OED merely documents usage of words, there is no authoritative reference for correct english, unlike the way the way some french try to impose an "official" french language. If a few people (very few in the case of the unabridged OED) use a word to mean something, and Oxford find out, in it goes.
Heh. One of the first (and worst) applications I released onto the internet was a program to rip emails to plaintext from an Amiga microdot email file...
because infringing on monsanto's intellectual "property" is a crime? I"P" law now has criminal penalties in several countries.
Welcome to the glorious new age of Information Feudalism, please leave your Freedom at the door.
I actually attempt the same thing with typing... but...
[And it also usually means typing one-handed on keyboards designed for two hands, which also sucks, for obvious reasons]
You can't do it, and no amount of "practise" will improve that
That's a positive attitude...
What you are doing is simple motor-skill type of multitasking
Um. That really depends on _what_ I'm writing, now, doesn't it, in effect (though I haven't tried poetry and a HOWTO specifically) I am attempting to do similar to what you ask. What did you think I meant - Alternating sentences from one text? (I guess my comment could be read that way, it's not what I meant...)
I actually attempt the same thing with typing rather than handwriting, too, but only occasionally, as I don't always have two computers handy, and the X Window System has (or seems to have, haven't really investigated the issue deeply) a "there can be only one" idea of input focus.
results in your switching back and forth between them, to the detriment of both, due to the overhead of switching
I freely acknowledged I was merely switching back and forth (that's what "timeslicing" meant!) - my goal is to drastically reduce the overhead of switching through practice and make the process second nature. Yes, that means aping a timeslicing computer processor.
In software, this has been called "concurrent programming".
Um no, switching rapidly to give the illusion of multitasking is called timeslicing. concurrent programming would be writing a program that is composed of (interacting) concurrently running processes at runtime, perhaps to run on a truly parallel system (like the ones I manage at work), or to run on a timesliced system emulating a truly parallel system.
I write different sentences with each hand (at the same time). They don't come out all that legibly I guess (much less legibly than either hand on its own), and I may be simply timeslicing rapidly, obviously, but with practice my ability to do it is definitely improving.
Unlikely, at least that's what my friend Mr. Flippy in his green star blanket in the good ceiling tells me. What's that Mr. Flippy? Servants of the bad ceiling must die? Yes, Mr. Flippy, I agree.
I can quite happily do the opposite, going into a "coding trance", but lately it has become important to be able to multitask well (moved to a somewhat more sysadminny job involving running linux clusters). So I started to investigate ways to improve my ability there. The most fun thing to do was to write two different things at the same time, one pen in each hand. It feels very strange, but I'm getting better and better at it, and the exercise seems to have helped with other mental multitasking as well.
The strangest thing (apart from doing it itself), is just how much your handwriting changes compared to either hand alone.
People may be confused by the wording of that comment (I'd also heard a slightly lower figure than 72%, but still above 60% - do you have a reference?)
To be clear, the software patents have been illegitimately granted by the EPO, but are not legally enforceable at the moment, the bureaucrats and corporate sock-puppets, (embarrassingly, many of them from my home country (Ireland)), are trying to change that.
See here
For reference, Article 19 is:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As far as I'm concerned, I"P" law is plain evil (well, I'm a bit vague about Trademarks, but certainly Copyright and Patent), but Article 27 (which I have doubts about) also says:
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or
artistic production of which he is the author.
So the problems arise at the collision between 19+27(1) and 27(2), mostly. (18, "Freedom of Thought" might also become important in the near future, particularly for those of us who consider our computers extensions of our minds).
Personally, I would hold Article 19 and 27(1) as obviously trumping any "protection" under Article 27(2) if the "protection" causes a violation of Article 19 or Article 27(1). But maybe other people care less about freedom and more about profit - if so, then fuck them if they think they'll restrict my freedom, I have a masters in mechanical engineering and I'm not afraid to use it...
And "Protection" is not defined - perhaps sufficient protection would be protection from fraud/plagiarism - i.e. while I should be able to freely copy information or implement devices as I see fit, I should probably not be able to claim that I wrote or designed them if I didn't. Then:
(1) Re "copyright": you can't censor me, but people know it's a better bet to pay you, not me, to produce further cool new information-patterns, and
(2) Re "patent": I can share in scientific advancements without interference, but people know it's a better bet to pay you, not me, to make further ones.
Hm.. and upon further further investigation, emacs already has a secondary selection behaviour (try alt(meta) + drag-with-left button). I didn't notice previously because my window manager by default grabs that as move-window - but the emacs behaviour is there if I turn off the window manager shortcut. It behaves in other respects as PRIMARY, and in my cursory examination there doesn't seem to be an exchange-primary-secondary command (but it would be a short step to add it, the "hard bit" of secondary selection tracking is already implemented)
Actually, thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure there's any easy protocol for a "swap" within the X selection framework in the two independent applications case (how to tell App1 that it needs to get data when "swap" is requested in App2 ???.
:-).
Hm. Should have actually reread the effing ICCCM Spec before posting that. I'm actually covering old ground, so my "idea" is not very new at all anyway...). The thing in my suggestion not already in the ICCCM spec I think is that applications should grab secondary corresponding to their old primary on losing primary. Anyway, reading the ICCCM Spec I kinda get the impression that they had some idea of SECONDARY being a bit more independent than that, maybe like ordinary left-drag => highlight in blue => PRIMARY, right-drag => highlight in orange => SECONDARY, or something.
Still, maybe the temporally ordered PRIMARY-to-SECONDARY transition I suggested would be less confusing than two completely separate highlights. Or not. Have to code _both_ and try them
I'm _really_ going to bed now...
ICCCM excerpts:
2.6.1.2 The SECONDARY Selection
The selection named by the atom SECONDARY is used:
o As the second argument to commands taking two arguments (for example, "exchange primary and secondary selections")
o As a means of obtaining data when there is a primary selection and the user does not want to disturb it.
2.6.3 Selection Targets with Side Effects
These side-effect targets are used to implement operations such as "exchange PRIMARY and SECONDARY selections".
2.6.3.2 INSERT_SELECTION
The owner should use the selection mechanism to convert the named selection into the named target and should insert it at the location of the selection for which it got the INSERT_SELECTION request.
Might work, though I think I'd need to code it up and try it to decide how it felt - might be "too easy" to do accidentally (btw, don't hold your breath waiting for me to code it, I've got lots of other less fun things to do...).
I also know some applications use middle-button drag for x-y scrolling/panning, which I also like, as the scroll bars are sooo far away on my desktop and I don't have one of those newfangled 2-axis x-y new-mouse-wheel thingies - but that's not a long-term problem, I suppose, as Microsoft will eventually have pretty much everyone with the 2-axis new-mouse-wheel thingy.
Actually, thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure there's any easy protocol for a "swap" within the X selection framework in the two independent applications case (how to tell App1 that it needs to get data when "swap" is requested in App2 ???. It's easier to make an "fast replace" of PRIMARY in App2 from App1's SECONDARY as App1 doesn't need to know to get new data from App2, but that's a bit different from what I originally had in mind and doesn't buy much over ctrl-x/c/v IMHO).
I will have to meditate upon it further, it's 1am here at the moment and I'm not at my best...
Here's an idea, publically disclosed so no evil little fuck can patent it:
Whenever PRIMARY changes, make the secondary selection the previous primary, and add a "Swap" menu item + shortcut to make Cut/Copy/Paste/Swap.
Use Case:
Highlight some text "hello", lets say the highlight is bright blue background.
Go to somewhere else, highlight some more text "goodbye". "goodbye" becomes bright blue background indicating it is now PRIMARY. "hello" has become faded blue, indicating it is now SECONDARY.
Now "Swap". "hello"+"goodbye" exchange places! I think "hello" in its new position should have the PRIMARY selection, and "goodbye" in its new position the SECONDARY, as that's where the user will "be" after swapping, and a second "Swap" will restore the text to its original state.
Most cut/paste operations I do are reorganisations of that nature. Other people might differ - but it's certainly one of those features that would keep legal people loyal to a word processor, say.
I think it would be dead handy, and no-one I know is doing it.
I hate to break it to you, but open source is "proprietary" in legal terms - copyright is asserted over open-source software, it's not "public domain". Having said that, legal terms are generally bunk.