Although campaigns do have paid staffs, and a very few of those staffers are well paid, most campaign workers are volunteers.
It's hard to imagine that Mrs. Thomas would have been in a paid position and that Justice Thomas wouldn't recuse himself. More to the point, it's nearly impossible to imagine that she would have been in a paid position and the Democrats wouldn't demand that Thomas recuse himself.
If this doesn't prevail before the Supremes, then all hope may be lost.
The copyright extension can't reasonably be argued to server any Constitutionally argued purpose. After all, to be extended, the works in question had to be produced.
Absent a time machine, how do you encourage the creation of something that's already been created?
The only thing you can do is negate the other side of the deal: transfer of your work into the public domain.
This is not even an issue of being for or against intellectual property. Congress used its Constitutinally provided powers to grant intellectual property to authors, but demanded consideration in return. That consideration was placement of works into the public domain after the author or subsequent copyright holder had been granted an adequate opportunity to exploit the work.
We have delivered on our end of the bargain. The copyright holders must deliver on theirs.
Wait a minute -- Wasn't this the Seinfeld finale?
on
The Truth Revealed
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The whole thing was eerily familiar, and then I realized why:
The plot was pretty much the same as the Seinfeld series finale, right on down dragging assorted past characters into a trial that the star(s) can't possibly win.
I guess no Kramer was a clue. But seriously, how much difference was their between Doggitt and the Soup Nazi?
Oh well, at least Mulder ended up better than Jerry: He gets to get personal with Scully, whereas the best Jerry could do was Elaine. Unless, of course, he wanted to consider George. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
This article may be the best answer yet for why Linux and Free Software community members should care about adaptation by the community at large. Two things struck me: 1. Linux has enough mind share and has been adapted by enough businesses to solve real business problems that a threat to Linux is a threat to many businesses, which is why a mag like BusinessWeek is interested.
2. Did you notice the way they referred to Hollywood? Hollywood will this, Hollywood wants that. Sounds very much like a dark force and I think that's the effect it will have on readers, especially those who wonder what in hell Hollywood is doing in the middle of what ought to be governmental functions.
Chip makers complain because the "CAD Community" isn't coming up with solutions to some of their problems, but University R&D programs are unable to keep up with fabrication standards as the equipment gets more expensive.
Isn't this a problem waiting for a few self-interested chip-makers to whip their wallets in the direction of a few universities?
I imagine because it gave them an identity and it gave them a role to play. At some point, they surely were planning to cash in.
Besides, if you know what you're indexing, it's easier to make special purpose software that is tuned to the content. Or, rather, it's easier to do that if the law doesn't shut you down.
Part 1 of the article (series) made a big deal of the 41,400 demo -- that nobody has tried to say is realistic.
That's ok, but Murphy got ridiculous in trying to intimate that each of those images had an 8 megabyte working set and that swapping those images in to handle timer pops would generate 30 gigabytes per second -- or maybe it was 30000 gigabytes per second, I don't remember -- of paging activity. Trouble is, apache and Linux together might have that big a memory footprint, but idle processes will have a much smaller working set, one measured in kilobytes. Each image will demand page only those pieces of the address space required to process the work being done. I don't think the interrupt handler and dispatcher and apache's own dispatch loop occupy that much code.
In the second section, he talks about workloads losing randomness as more and more work gets piled on. The opposite is true: they gain randomness. He's certainly right that interactive workloads have definite patterns of peaks and valleys, but that's very different from losing randomness in very small time increments, and it is that randomness that lets a mainframe (or any large processor -- including Unix) do more with less horsepower than clusters.
There's a lot in his article that I don't understand, but his treatment of things that I do understand leaves me unwilling to trust the rest.
I remember reading about work done in the robotics labs at MIT. At least one researcher there has been working on giving faces to robots so that the poor critters can smile, frown, register surprise, etc.
Seems a "HAL"-like interface doesn't work well for people, in part, because it's not rich enough. When humans speak, we don't just talk. We use our hands, we position our bodies. Most of all, we make facial expressions. We also get uncomfortable interacting with something that doesn't.
We may not get HAL, then, but PAL, HAL's more expressive brother.
I agree with your assessment on both Daley's, though I have kinder views on Jr than Sr.
Whatever faults he may have, hizzoner the second does seem to care about making Chicago work and work well. He must be doing something right. I don't recall the last mayoral election being very close.
As draconian as a one-time 50% monthly pay cut may seem, it's actually better than ongoing pay cuts in the long run. Divine may also be using this as a way to get voluntary departures.
Trouble is, people in the Chicago area are well aware of Divine and Flip Filikowski. Filikowski was a con-man when he managed to Jed Clampett his way to a fortune with Platinum and he's a con-man now.
Not confidence-inspiring.
What's to keep the one-time May cut from being joined by a one-time July cut, etc? What's to keep it from being followed by an ongoing pay cut to match the annual percentage? Who says that anybody will get a rais next year?
Corporations in general (though I know that gratifying exceptions exist) and Divine in particular have not earned the trust and loyalty of their employees. A company that had treated its employees fairly and had earned their trust might be able to do something like this after getting feedback from those affected. Divine's "stick-it" approach is certain to have repercussions.
I haven't seen the actual license or its presentation, so I don't know if it would come under that category of contracts known as "contracts of adhesion". Contracts of adhesion are those piles of fine print you see on the back of parking ticket stubs, dry-cleaning tickets, etc. They're generally ok so long as they contain no terms that might be unexpected, such as "Agreeing to park in this garage assigns title to your car to the garage owners" or some such thing.
The click-through is a problem, because contracts of adhesion generally don't have any form of overt acceptance. You park your car, you get the ticket. Still, a click-through with lots of legalese that the typical consumer wouldn't understand should, at the very least, be open to challenge.
The Ad-Aware person described the right way to handle this: make the RadLight software fail to operate without the other sofware installed.
At the very least, actions like RadLight takes against Ad-Aware are right at the edge of criminal activity.
When power is evenly split, as it is now, coalition politics come to the fore and relatively small groups -- if focused -- can make big gains.
This is where the NRA and AARP shine. They know how to focus on the issues that matter to them. As it stands today, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have demonstrated any particular warmth to digital rights issues. Carefully targetted efforts that endanger the balance of power could generate major wins.
Remember: all of those dollars that corporations spend aren't powerful because they're dollars, but because they help to generate votes, which politicians need if they are to retain power. Well-focused and well-targetted campaigns can get attention all out of proportion to the resources involved if they will be backed up by people going to the polls.
That will be the real trick, given the basic cynicism of so many in the techi spectrum.
Looks like a choice between one-time big pain and pain everlasting. Hope the schools find a reasonable way out.
It's reminiscent of the bind MS's big corporate customers are finding themselves in with the new Enterprise Agreements and their requirements for current software.
Microsoft may not be the last organization on earth to which I wish to give a blank check, but they're close enough.
So many people who have heard of so few of these authors.
I have to admit that I'm in the same boat. A little surprised that no one here (maybe its the male orientation) seems to have heard of Connie Willis, who is a five time (last I looked) Hugo winner.
>They know that, left unregulated, music piracy is going to hurt the industry,
Almost correct. You start from the assumption that piracy is unregulated today, but that isn't true. Copyright law regulates it now. You do recall that Napster has been shut down, don't you? Whether current laws are enough or are too much is the subject for reasonable debate.
OTOH, the RIAAs breathless rants (incorporated quite happily into the "findings" of the Hollings bill, BTW) are being used to support blunderbuss solutions that go far beyond protecting the rights of music publishers and into the realm of trampling the rights of consumers.
>No, the RIAA is complaining about file swapping and album swapping on the internet. This is simply not legal.
That's what they say and you are entitled to take them at their word. The laws they back, however, strike at all copying, including that which is perfectly legal. That includes the DMCA, which is law, and the CBDTPA, which, for now, is not.
>True. The economy did suck, it affected everyone. 10% is still a huge decrease though, so they need to justify it SOMEHOW.
Actually, the decline in CD sales was only 5.3%, which is actually smaller than the 7.2% decline from 1996-1997. Other formats, such as cassettes have been declining for years. Cassettes, hardly a prime source for internet piracy due to their rather low-quality anolog recordings, declined 42.9% between 2000 and 2001 midyear marks. Could it be that the legal recording enabled by the Home Recording Act, coupled with auto CD players, portable CD players, etc. is having a bigger on total shipments than "piracy"?
>Yeah, pop music is wretched now.
Fun statistic with regard to quality of product and consumer reaction: Latin CD sales were up 7% in the same period that the overall CD sales went down 5.3%. Might be a lesson in there.
>But there are a lot of smaller bands that are getting hurt by the MP3 internet thing.
I don't doubt it, I just don't how big the impact is. I do not support internet file-swapping and am quite happy that Napster was shut down.
An important note on this topic. Did you notice that Judge Patel (judge in the Napster case) has been far less sympathetic to the music industry of late? She has expressed the belief that the music industry is doing all it can to lock up its own monopoly in digitally downloaded music.
>As we all know, statistics can usually be manipulated to say whatever you want.
Which is my point. The RIAA looks at a one year drop (by the way -- no more severe than 1997) and tries to turn that into rampant piracy killing the music business. There is no basis for that conclusion in their own figures, especially considering factos such as the economy and ordinary fluctuations in taste and compelling product.
To put it in technical terms, using whichever derivative you prefer, the RIAA is passing gas and asking that we not comment on the smell.
Slashdot Mirror
Although campaigns do have paid staffs, and a very few of those staffers are well paid, most campaign workers are volunteers.
It's hard to imagine that Mrs. Thomas would have been in a paid position and that Justice Thomas wouldn't recuse himself. More to the point, it's nearly impossible to imagine that she would have been in a paid position and the Democrats wouldn't demand that Thomas recuse himself.
I'm betting she volunteered.
I am humbled.
If this doesn't prevail before the Supremes, then all hope may be lost.
The copyright extension can't reasonably be argued to server any Constitutionally argued purpose. After all, to be extended, the works in question had to be produced.
Absent a time machine, how do you encourage the creation of something that's already been created?
The only thing you can do is negate the other side of the deal: transfer of your work into the public domain.
This is not even an issue of being for or against intellectual property. Congress used its Constitutinally provided powers to grant intellectual property to authors, but demanded consideration in return. That consideration was placement of works into the public domain after the author or subsequent copyright holder had been granted an adequate opportunity to exploit the work.
We have delivered on our end of the bargain. The copyright holders must deliver on theirs.
The whole thing was eerily familiar, and then I realized why:
The plot was pretty much the same as the Seinfeld series finale, right on down dragging assorted past characters into a trial that the star(s) can't possibly win.
I guess no Kramer was a clue.
But seriously, how much difference was their between Doggitt and the Soup Nazi?
Oh well, at least Mulder ended up better than Jerry: He gets to get personal with Scully, whereas the best Jerry could do was Elaine.
Unless, of course, he wanted to consider George.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
This is one issue that doesn't seem to fall into the normal party stereotypes. It seems that Democrats are actually the ones driving these bills.
Who'd a thunk it?
This article may be the best answer yet for why Linux and Free Software community members should care about adaptation by the community at large.
Two things struck me:
1. Linux has enough mind share and has been adapted by enough businesses to solve real business problems that a threat to Linux is a threat to many businesses, which is why a mag like BusinessWeek is interested.
2. Did you notice the way they referred to Hollywood? Hollywood will this, Hollywood wants that. Sounds very much like a dark force and I think that's the effect it will have on readers, especially those who wonder what in hell Hollywood is doing in the middle of what ought to be governmental functions.
Chip makers complain because the "CAD Community" isn't coming up with solutions to some of their problems, but University R&D programs are unable to keep up with fabrication standards as the equipment gets more expensive.
Isn't this a problem waiting for a few self-interested chip-makers to whip their wallets in the direction of a few universities?
Read more of the article, or, better still, read the bill.
The bill bifurcates personal information into
"sensitive" and "not sensitive."
Oddly, much of the stuff that's "sensitive" is already protected in a variety of ways.
What the bill actually does is eliminate all of your privacy rights while identifying a few categories that aren't included in the gift to business.
Betcha those get added over time.
>Does anyone have any idea why they did that?
I imagine because it gave them an identity and it gave them a role to play. At some point, they surely were planning to cash in.
Besides, if you know what you're indexing, it's easier to make special purpose software that is tuned to the content. Or, rather, it's easier to do that if the law doesn't shut you down.
I don't know. Looks like a FUD campaign to me.
Part 1 of the article (series) made a big deal of the 41,400 demo -- that nobody has tried to say is realistic.
That's ok, but Murphy got ridiculous in trying to intimate that each of those images had an 8 megabyte working set and that swapping those images in to handle timer pops would generate 30 gigabytes per second -- or maybe it was 30000 gigabytes per second, I don't remember -- of paging activity. Trouble is, apache and Linux together might have that big a memory footprint, but idle processes will have a much smaller working set, one measured in kilobytes. Each image will demand page only those pieces of the address space required to process the work being done. I don't think the interrupt handler and dispatcher and apache's own dispatch loop occupy that much code.
In the second section, he talks about workloads losing randomness as more and more work gets piled on. The opposite is true: they gain randomness. He's certainly right that interactive workloads have definite patterns of peaks and valleys, but that's very different from losing randomness in very small time increments, and it is that randomness that lets a mainframe (or any large processor -- including Unix) do more with less horsepower than clusters.
There's a lot in his article that I don't understand, but his treatment of things that I do understand leaves me unwilling to trust the rest.
Don't know about HAL.
I remember reading about work done in the robotics labs at MIT. At least one researcher there has been working on giving faces to robots so that the poor critters can smile, frown, register surprise, etc.
Seems a "HAL"-like interface doesn't work well for people, in part, because it's not rich enough. When humans speak, we don't just talk. We use our hands, we position our bodies. Most of all, we make facial expressions. We also get uncomfortable interacting with something that doesn't.
We may not get HAL, then, but PAL, HAL's more expressive brother.
Spam, Spam, no good for you,
Cut me off and I will sue.
If and when I lose my case
I'll just find another place for
Spam, Spam, no good for you,
...
I agree with your assessment on both Daley's, though I have kinder views on Jr than Sr.
Whatever faults he may have, hizzoner the second does seem to care about making Chicago work and work well. He must be doing something right. I don't recall the last mayoral election being very close.
As draconian as a one-time 50% monthly pay cut may seem, it's actually better than ongoing pay cuts in the long run. Divine may also be using this as a way to get voluntary departures.
Trouble is,
people in the Chicago area are well aware of Divine and Flip Filikowski. Filikowski was a con-man when he managed to Jed Clampett his way to a fortune with Platinum and he's a con-man now.
Not confidence-inspiring.
What's to keep the one-time May cut from being joined by a one-time July cut, etc? What's to keep it from being followed by an ongoing pay cut to match the annual percentage? Who says that anybody will get a rais next year?
Corporations in general (though I know that gratifying exceptions exist) and Divine in particular have not earned the trust and loyalty of their employees. A company that had treated its employees fairly and had earned their trust might be able to do something like this after getting feedback from those affected. Divine's "stick-it" approach is certain to have repercussions.
I haven't seen the actual license or its presentation, so I don't know if it would come under that category of contracts known as "contracts of adhesion". Contracts of adhesion are those piles of fine print you see on the back of parking ticket stubs, dry-cleaning tickets, etc. They're generally ok so long as they contain no terms that might be unexpected, such as "Agreeing to park in this garage assigns title to your car to the garage owners" or some such thing.
The click-through is a problem, because contracts of adhesion generally don't have any form of overt acceptance. You park your car, you get the ticket. Still, a click-through with lots of legalese that the typical consumer wouldn't understand should, at the very least, be open to challenge.
The Ad-Aware person described the right way to handle this: make the RadLight software fail to operate without the other sofware installed.
At the very least, actions like RadLight takes against Ad-Aware are right at the edge of criminal activity.
The author is right-right-right-right-right.
When power is evenly split, as it is now, coalition politics come to the fore and relatively small groups -- if focused -- can make big gains.
This is where the NRA and AARP shine. They know how to focus on the issues that matter to them. As it stands today, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have demonstrated any particular warmth to digital rights issues. Carefully targetted efforts that endanger the balance of power could generate major wins.
Remember: all of those dollars that corporations spend aren't powerful because they're dollars, but because they help to generate votes, which politicians need if they are to retain power. Well-focused and well-targetted campaigns can get attention all out of proportion to the resources involved if they will be backed up by people going to the polls.
That will be the real trick, given the basic cynicism of so many in the techi spectrum.
It's reminiscent of the bind MS's big corporate customers are finding themselves in with the new Enterprise Agreements and their requirements for current software.
Microsoft may not be the last organization on earth to which I wish to give a blank check, but they're close enough.
My mistake. Should have checked my facts before posting. She's won six Hugos and six Nebulas (Nebulae?).
So many people who have heard of so few of these authors.
I have to admit that I'm in the same boat.
A little surprised that no one here (maybe its the male orientation) seems to have heard of Connie Willis, who is a five time (last I looked) Hugo winner.
>protected "meeting" between myself and N'Stync and the Backdoor Boyz at the La Brea tarpits.
I've got to admit, you have the community service angle covered.
I'd have been happy to set them up with PostgreSQL for $45 million.
Oh, what the heck. I'm bigger than that.
Guys --- if you manage to get yourself out of that Oracle boondoggle, I'll still be glad to get you PostgreSQL for $45 million.
I am such an old softie.
Re Patel v. Music Industry arrogance,
t ml
Try this wired article:
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,50625,00.h
>They know that, left unregulated, music piracy is going to hurt the industry,
Almost correct. You start from the assumption that piracy is unregulated today, but that isn't true. Copyright law regulates it now. You do recall that Napster has been shut down, don't you? Whether current laws are enough or are too much is the subject for reasonable debate.
OTOH, the RIAAs breathless rants (incorporated quite happily into the "findings" of the Hollings bill, BTW) are being used to support blunderbuss solutions that go far beyond protecting the rights of music publishers and into the realm of trampling the rights of consumers.
>No, the RIAA is complaining about file swapping and album swapping on the internet. This is simply not legal.
That's what they say and you are entitled to take them at their word. The laws they back, however, strike at all copying, including that which is perfectly legal. That includes the DMCA, which is law, and the CBDTPA, which, for now, is not.
>True. The economy did suck, it affected everyone. 10% is still a huge decrease though, so they need to justify it SOMEHOW.
Actually, the decline in CD sales was only 5.3%, which is actually smaller than the 7.2% decline from 1996-1997.
Other formats, such as cassettes have been declining for years. Cassettes, hardly a prime source for internet piracy due to their rather low-quality anolog recordings, declined 42.9% between 2000 and 2001 midyear marks. Could it be that the legal recording enabled by the Home Recording Act, coupled with auto CD players, portable CD players, etc. is having a bigger on total shipments than "piracy"?
>Yeah, pop music is wretched now.
Fun statistic with regard to quality of product and consumer reaction: Latin CD sales were up 7% in the same period that the overall CD sales went down 5.3%. Might be a lesson in there.
>But there are a lot of smaller bands that are getting hurt by the MP3 internet thing.
I don't doubt it, I just don't how big the impact is. I do not support internet file-swapping and am quite happy that Napster was shut down.
An important note on this topic. Did you notice that Judge Patel (judge in the Napster case) has been far less sympathetic to the music industry of late? She has expressed the belief that the music industry is doing all it can to lock up its own monopoly in digitally downloaded music.
Wonder what that'll do to small bands?
Which is my point. The RIAA looks at a one year drop (by the way -- no more severe than 1997) and tries to turn that into rampant piracy killing the music business. There is no basis for that conclusion in their own figures, especially considering factos such as the economy and ordinary fluctuations in taste and compelling product.
To put it in technical terms, using whichever derivative you prefer, the RIAA is passing gas and asking that we not comment on the smell.