How about instead of legislating the details of the presentation layer, the law simply mandated that commercials (actually, all broadcast television) be sent with appropriate metadata that identifies the content.
After that, let the free market sort things out. If somebody wants to sell a TV that makes commercials even louder, let them. If someone only wants to shop for a TV that flips to the Weather Channel during commercials, that's fine too.
Laws that restrict options -> bad Laws that enforce honesty -> good
Companies arbitrarily decide to charge more for certain products, especially in a country with lower standard of livings.
It's not arbitrary. Look at the UN statistics for income distribution:
The earnings ratio between the top 10% and the bottom 10% Argentina: 40.9 United States: 15.9
Between the top 20% and the bottom 20% Argentina: 17.8 United States: 8.4
While there may be a smaller percentage of Argentinians who could afford an XBOX360, even if it were sold at cost, those Argentinians who can afford one are able to pay more.
This just in: suppliers in an industry with little competition will charge whatever prices the market can bear. Companies set prices in an attempt to maximize profits. Film at 11.
Some people say a man is made outta mud A poor man's made outta muscle and blood Muscle and blood and skin and bones A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
>Once again, the moderators are on crack -- giving +1 to something that can be proved wrong with a simple Google search: >Two in Five Americans Live in Gun-Owning Households
Those statistics are not mutually exclusive. Gun-owners could have at least 22 people, on average, living in their household.
Having spent a few years in a gun-friendly state, I'm not going to immediately dismiss this possibility.
Yeah, when you BUY something, it is YOURS, you have the RIGHT to use it how you see fit. That is under US and Japanese Law, and most other countries as well. If they stop you from doing something that would would otherwise have the right do with your property... they are restricting your rights... seems simple to me.
The plastic disc is yours, fully and completely. The copyright on the content is not. You have no inherent right to copy that content, even from one medium in your possession to another. (keep reading!) You did not purchase the copyright.
Making a personal backup of that content may fall under the Fair Use umbrella in the US. However, Fair Use is not a right, it is a defense to a crime, like insanity or self-defense. Invoking a Fair Use defense is both an admission of breaking the law and a claim that your civil liability or criminal culpability should be limited given the circumstances. Fair Use does not give you a right to violate copyrights any more than being insane gives you a right to commit homicide.
Even if the content were not under DRM, it would still be illegal to copy it. You don't own the copyright. Just because you may have the technical means to violate a copyright does not give you any right to do so.
You are speaking out of your ass about 400 years of multinational legal history. If it "seems simple to [you]", that's a good indication that you are completely wrong. If you'd rather talk about what the law should be, I'll probably agree with you. However, your claims about what the law currently is are fundamentally incorrect.
I support Unix professionally (RHEL), and my work laptop is Ubuntu 10.04.
My home machine is Win7.
Ditto. (The zealots may want to cover their ears now). MS hit a fucking grand slam with Windows 7. My primary personal laptop with 5 years of Gentoo customizations got a wiped for a Win 7 install. It does everything I want it to do, and I spend less time as admin and more time getting work done.
Then again, I don't use Linux for it's own sake; I use it when it's the best tool for a job. Right now, for what I do, Win 7 is the king desktop OS by a mile. Ubuntu 10.04 is on par with XP SP3.
If the average global temperature increased then the average air pressure would...
It would do nothing along the lines of what you are thinking. The atmosphere is not enclosed in a rigid container (external force), but held by gravity (body force).
The average pressure at sea level is the gravitational weight of the atmosphere divided by the surface area of the earth. The classical mass of the atmosphere is independent of average temperature.
Yes, local temperature changes cause local pressure changes. This does not mean global average temperature changes cause global average pressure changes.
I'm all for cutting waste and luxuries we can do without. But when it comes to safety and personnel this is just going too far.
The exact same thing was said when the railroad industry began to eliminate brakemen.
They too were the "eyes and ears" on the train, served critical safety functions, and acted as a backup engineer. Better technology came along, and they were simply no longer needed. The new air brakes failed less often than the people did. Trains were safer with an automated system being responsible for a task formerly done by a human.
The exact same thing was said in 1911 when someone entered a car into the Indy 500 that carried only one person. It was unsafe; it endangered other drivers. The new technology this time was a rear-view mirror. Now this dangerous technological replacement for a live human being is a standard feature on all cars.
Also in 1911 came the development of automatic helm control for ships. The technology ended up faster, more accurate, and more reliable than a trained, experienced career helmsman. Guess what the major complaint was? Yeah...it was "unsafe"
I can tell, there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents. Certainly the number of inventions and works of art has increased since they were introduced, and certainly they have induced authors and artists to produce more (Winston Churchill, for example), and they have certainly rewarded the creators for the works, and they have made things like the GPL possible.
Can you ever justify extending the length of existing copyrights? Those works have already been created. The artists have already been compensated.
Have you ever re-read a classic book like The Hobbit and said, "Wow! Tolkien did a great job on that. I'm going to mail a bonus cheque to his kids for a job well done and hope he writes more books"
Have you ever bought a house and said "Wow! The electrician who wired this 50 years ago was absolutely brilliant. I'm going to send money to every electrician in the country!"
That's what extending an existing copyright means. It is taking monetizable assets from the public and giving them to the grandchildren of artists who were already compensated for their efforts 75 years ago.
Do we have artists that aren't producing because copyrights don't last long enough? 95 years is not sufficient compensation, but 125 years is? That idea is an utter load of bullshit.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!' Was there a man dismay'd ? Not tho' the soldier knew Some one had blunder'd: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do & die
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
But reenacting killing someone else is somehow more respectful?
I think you are a little confused as to what "respect" means. These soldiers are fighting and dying in the name of protecting and promoting liberty and free speech. Your concept of "respecting" that means sheltering them from a video game they may not like.
Frankly, I think veterans have earned, at the very least, the liberty to buy and play whatever goddamn video game they feel like. Instead, some corporation gets afraid of bad PR from nanny-state idiots like you, so they stop offering the game for sale to our troops. How the fuck are you able to twist that into "respecting" them?
"The FCC's brief argues the court ruling would make it almost impossible to punish broadcasters that show nudity or profanity during hours when children are likely to be watching or listening."
It returns them to arbitrating the technical aspects of spectrum licensing instead of being an unregulated police agency. They are accustomed to being the gatekeepers of content distribution in American society. Losing that kind of power really undercuts a fiefdom...can't blame them for sulking about it.
see air traffic control problems for a good reason why we shouldn't have them - safety-critical systems that depend on time synchronisation and don't reliably work with leap seconds. Great
The same argument can be made for leap-days.
December 31 23:59:60 is no less valid than February 29. Throwing out accurate timekeeping because some software designers didn't do their homework is not a good solution. Throw out the bad designers instead...or at least keep them away from "safety-critical systems"
"Net Neutrality" is too vague of a term, and it means different things to different people, depending on their agenda.
Car analogy time!
Option 1: All vehicle traffic is treated equally
Option 2: Vehicles are regulated differently based on external characteristics
-Trucks drive in right lane and pay more tolls based on weight/length/# of axles
-Emergency vehicles are given priority
Option 3: Vehicles are regulated differently based on traffic-relevant characteristics
-High-occupancy vehicles are given a private lane
Option 4: Vehicles are regulated differently based on non-traffic-related characteristics
-Fed-Ex and UPS bid for priority treatment in traffic law
-Vehicles pay different amounts based on who and what they are carrying and what the owner can afford
On a government-owned road network, Option 2 has the most universal support. We're generally OK with certain private companies (ambulances) getting special treatment. We're also OK with large trucks having to pay more and still get less access. Sometimes we're OK with Option 3, but sometimes not. Option 1 seems silly, and Option 4 is abhorrent.
Unfortunately, "Net Neutrality" refers to everything other than Option 4. That lumps all the most sensible, but still very different, options under the same umbrella, which makes the term completely useless for discussion.
When someone claims that traffic for VOIP, VOD, gaming, etc, should be treated differently than bulk downloads, they get thrown into the same "anti-NN" crowd as someone who claims Time Warner should not have to carry traffic from plannedparenthood.com because they are a private business. That does not help the debate.
They scrape the internet looking for ideas, making products that are "just different enough" to avoid existing patents, and they buy up startup companies just as you describe.
So?
Startups may have great ideas, but they typically lack any experience in industrial design, design for manufacturing, project management, manufacturing, distribution, law (especially customs and import law), marketing, retail distribution management, and customer support.
A brilliant idea is a wonderful thing, but that's only one tiny step in putting a product in consumers' hands. Just because the "behemoths" will purchase a startup for and idea and an injection of enthusiasm, that doesn't mean they don't add a whole shit-ton of value to the process. Trying to argue which part is more important is moot, since neither side is of much value without the other.
I think the pictures and videos are the important elements, because they constitute actual evidence. Otherwise, there are fairly stringent tests for what makes something a legitimate confession that's admissible in court.
Similar to the US, Canadian law does not recognize an inalienable right to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. The privilege of driving is not a fundamental human right. (Even though there are some areas of the US and Canada where the inability to drive will put someone at a severe disadvantage)
As long as the criteria are applied fairly across the populace, there is nothing unconstitutional about revoking a license for reasons less stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt". A simple preponderance of evidence that the accused is incapable or unwilling to operate a vehicle in a safe and reasonable manner is sufficient.
I'm having a hard time summoning any sympathy for this kid.
Human spaceflight is the last bastion of pure Progress. Technological, secular ideological, grand society style progress. It's the same reason why the British and the French set out to colonize the world. There was no economic justification for it, it's just what great nations do.
How many shops will unbox a PC that has no floor model to let me test it? Or (in the case of small form factor machines with no built-in optical drive) let me plug in a USB DVD-ROM drive?
Any store worth doing business worth, that's who.
If you are buying computers from an electronics/office supply store, you'll get ignored.
If you are buying from a real computer store, they know that they can't compete on price with newegg/amazon/etc, so they need to compete on service. The staff absolutely will unbox equipment to answer questions like that, because there will also be other customers asking the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
How about instead of legislating the details of the presentation layer, the law simply mandated that commercials (actually, all broadcast television) be sent with appropriate metadata that identifies the content.
After that, let the free market sort things out. If somebody wants to sell a TV that makes commercials even louder, let them. If someone only wants to shop for a TV that flips to the Weather Channel during commercials, that's fine too.
Laws that restrict options -> bad
Laws that enforce honesty -> good
Companies arbitrarily decide to charge more for certain products, especially in a country with lower standard of livings.
It's not arbitrary. Look at the UN statistics for income distribution:
The earnings ratio between the top 10% and the bottom 10%
Argentina: 40.9 United States: 15.9
Between the top 20% and the bottom 20%
Argentina: 17.8 United States: 8.4
While there may be a smaller percentage of Argentinians who could afford an XBOX360, even if it were sold at cost, those Argentinians who can afford one are able to pay more.
This just in: suppliers in an industry with little competition will charge whatever prices the market can bear. Companies set prices in an attempt to maximize profits. Film at 11.
"A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, 1835
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
--Tennessee Ford
>>Then why do only 3% of Americans own guns?
>Once again, the moderators are on crack -- giving +1 to something that can be proved wrong with a simple Google search:
>Two in Five Americans Live in Gun-Owning Households
Those statistics are not mutually exclusive. Gun-owners could have at least 22 people, on average, living in their household.
Having spent a few years in a gun-friendly state, I'm not going to immediately dismiss this possibility.
Yeah, when you BUY something, it is YOURS, you have the RIGHT to use it how you see fit. That is under US and Japanese Law, and most other countries as well. If they stop you from doing something that would would otherwise have the right do with your property... they are restricting your rights... seems simple to me.
The plastic disc is yours, fully and completely. The copyright on the content is not. You have no inherent right to copy that content, even from one medium in your possession to another. (keep reading!) You did not purchase the copyright.
Making a personal backup of that content may fall under the Fair Use umbrella in the US. However, Fair Use is not a right, it is a defense to a crime, like insanity or self-defense. Invoking a Fair Use defense is both an admission of breaking the law and a claim that your civil liability or criminal culpability should be limited given the circumstances. Fair Use does not give you a right to violate copyrights any more than being insane gives you a right to commit homicide.
Even if the content were not under DRM, it would still be illegal to copy it. You don't own the copyright. Just because you may have the technical means to violate a copyright does not give you any right to do so.
You are speaking out of your ass about 400 years of multinational legal history. If it "seems simple to [you]", that's a good indication that you are completely wrong. If you'd rather talk about what the law should be, I'll probably agree with you. However, your claims about what the law currently is are fundamentally incorrect.
I support Unix professionally (RHEL), and my work laptop is Ubuntu 10.04.
My home machine is Win7.
Ditto. (The zealots may want to cover their ears now). MS hit a fucking grand slam with Windows 7. My primary personal laptop with 5 years of Gentoo customizations got a wiped for a Win 7 install. It does everything I want it to do, and I spend less time as admin and more time getting work done.
Then again, I don't use Linux for it's own sake; I use it when it's the best tool for a job. Right now, for what I do, Win 7 is the king desktop OS by a mile. Ubuntu 10.04 is on par with XP SP3.
If the average global temperature increased then the average air pressure would...
It would do nothing along the lines of what you are thinking. The atmosphere is not enclosed in a rigid container (external force), but held by gravity (body force).
The average pressure at sea level is the gravitational weight of the atmosphere divided by the surface area of the earth. The classical mass of the atmosphere is independent of average temperature.
Yes, local temperature changes cause local pressure changes. This does not mean global average temperature changes cause global average pressure changes.
Yes I know about the plane the overflew its destination while the 2 pilots were looking at something on a laptop through their eyelids
FTFY.
I'm all for cutting waste and luxuries we can do without. But when it comes to safety and personnel this is just going too far.
The exact same thing was said when the railroad industry began to eliminate brakemen.
They too were the "eyes and ears" on the train, served critical safety functions, and acted as a backup engineer. Better technology came along, and they were simply no longer needed. The new air brakes failed less often than the people did. Trains were safer with an automated system being responsible for a task formerly done by a human.
The exact same thing was said in 1911 when someone entered a car into the Indy 500 that carried only one person. It was unsafe; it endangered other drivers. The new technology this time was a rear-view mirror. Now this dangerous technological replacement for a live human being is a standard feature on all cars.
Also in 1911 came the development of automatic helm control for ships. The technology ended up faster, more accurate, and more reliable than a trained, experienced career helmsman. Guess what the major complaint was? Yeah...it was "unsafe"
I can tell, there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents. Certainly the number of inventions and works of art has increased since they were introduced, and certainly they have induced authors and artists to produce more (Winston Churchill, for example), and they have certainly rewarded the creators for the works, and they have made things like the GPL possible.
Can you ever justify extending the length of existing copyrights? Those works have already been created. The artists have already been compensated.
Have you ever re-read a classic book like The Hobbit and said, "Wow! Tolkien did a great job on that. I'm going to mail a bonus cheque to his kids for a job well done and hope he writes more books"
Have you ever bought a house and said "Wow! The electrician who wired this 50 years ago was absolutely brilliant. I'm going to send money to every electrician in the country!"
That's what extending an existing copyright means. It is taking monetizable assets from the public and giving them to the grandchildren of artists who were already compensated for their efforts 75 years ago.
Do we have artists that aren't producing because copyrights don't last long enough? 95 years is not sufficient compensation, but 125 years is? That idea is an utter load of bullshit.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die
It's not a matter of "trust," it's a matter of respect. Maybe someone who just lost a friend to the Taliban might not really be in the mood for seeing a game where they can re-enact killing their friend.
But reenacting killing someone else is somehow more respectful?
I think you are a little confused as to what "respect" means. These soldiers are fighting and dying in the name of protecting and promoting liberty and free speech. Your concept of "respecting" that means sheltering them from a video game they may not like.
Frankly, I think veterans have earned, at the very least, the liberty to buy and play whatever goddamn video game they feel like. Instead, some corporation gets afraid of bad PR from nanny-state idiots like you, so they stop offering the game for sale to our troops. How the fuck are you able to twist that into "respecting" them?
backups are important.
Yes, the 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt make backups"
Unfortunately, it was on the third tablet...
"The FCC's brief argues the court ruling would make it almost impossible to punish broadcasters that show nudity or profanity during hours when children are likely to be watching or listening."
It returns them to arbitrating the technical aspects of spectrum licensing instead of being an unregulated police agency. They are accustomed to being the gatekeepers of content distribution in American society. Losing that kind of power really undercuts a fiefdom...can't blame them for sulking about it.
see air traffic control problems for a good reason why we shouldn't have them - safety-critical systems that depend on time synchronisation and don't reliably work with leap seconds. Great
The same argument can be made for leap-days.
December 31 23:59:60 is no less valid than February 29. Throwing out accurate timekeeping because some software designers didn't do their homework is not a good solution. Throw out the bad designers instead...or at least keep them away from "safety-critical systems"
"Net Neutrality" is too vague of a term, and it means different things to different people, depending on their agenda.
Car analogy time!
Option 1: All vehicle traffic is treated equally
Option 2: Vehicles are regulated differently based on external characteristics
-Trucks drive in right lane and pay more tolls based on weight/length/# of axles
-Emergency vehicles are given priority
Option 3: Vehicles are regulated differently based on traffic-relevant characteristics
-High-occupancy vehicles are given a private lane
Option 4: Vehicles are regulated differently based on non-traffic-related characteristics
-Fed-Ex and UPS bid for priority treatment in traffic law
-Vehicles pay different amounts based on who and what they are carrying and what the owner can afford
On a government-owned road network, Option 2 has the most universal support. We're generally OK with certain private companies (ambulances) getting special treatment. We're also OK with large trucks having to pay more and still get less access. Sometimes we're OK with Option 3, but sometimes not. Option 1 seems silly, and Option 4 is abhorrent.
Unfortunately, "Net Neutrality" refers to everything other than Option 4. That lumps all the most sensible, but still very different, options under the same umbrella, which makes the term completely useless for discussion.
When someone claims that traffic for VOIP, VOD, gaming, etc, should be treated differently than bulk downloads, they get thrown into the same "anti-NN" crowd as someone who claims Time Warner should not have to carry traffic from plannedparenthood.com because they are a private business. That does not help the debate.
Exactly. A less sensational headline could have been "XJ Power button kinda flakey". This kinda stuff is what drives technical support people nuts.
I stopped at "hundreds of millions of lines of code"
# find /usr/src/linux/ -name "*.[ch]" -exec cat {} \;|wc -l
11561604
A car OS beats that by twentyfold?
They scrape the internet looking for ideas, making products that are "just different enough" to avoid existing patents, and they buy up startup companies just as you describe.
So?
Startups may have great ideas, but they typically lack any experience in industrial design, design for manufacturing, project management, manufacturing, distribution, law (especially customs and import law), marketing, retail distribution management, and customer support.
A brilliant idea is a wonderful thing, but that's only one tiny step in putting a product in consumers' hands. Just because the "behemoths" will purchase a startup for and idea and an injection of enthusiasm, that doesn't mean they don't add a whole shit-ton of value to the process. Trying to argue which part is more important is moot, since neither side is of much value without the other.
I thought the latest studies showed conclusively that iPhones don't cause cancer.
That's only if you hold your finger in the right spot.
Government attempts to outsource censorship. Film at ..., well, you get the film when the clocks strike thirteen.
I think the pictures and videos are the important elements, because they constitute actual evidence. Otherwise, there are fairly stringent tests for what makes something a legitimate confession that's admissible in court.
Similar to the US, Canadian law does not recognize an inalienable right to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. The privilege of driving is not a fundamental human right. (Even though there are some areas of the US and Canada where the inability to drive will put someone at a severe disadvantage)
As long as the criteria are applied fairly across the populace, there is nothing unconstitutional about revoking a license for reasons less stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt". A simple preponderance of evidence that the accused is incapable or unwilling to operate a vehicle in a safe and reasonable manner is sufficient.
I'm having a hard time summoning any sympathy for this kid.
It's a simple solution really. They just replaced the airbags with ejector seats.
That way, you are no longer technically in the car when you die.
Human spaceflight is the last bastion of pure Progress. Technological, secular ideological, grand society style progress. It's the same reason why the British and the French set out to colonize the world. There was no economic justification for it, it's just what great nations do.
Do you have a flag?
How many shops will unbox a PC that has no floor model to let me test it? Or (in the case of small form factor machines with no built-in optical drive) let me plug in a USB DVD-ROM drive?
Any store worth doing business worth, that's who.
If you are buying computers from an electronics/office supply store, you'll get ignored.
If you are buying from a real computer store, they know that they can't compete on price with newegg/amazon/etc, so they need to compete on service. The staff absolutely will unbox equipment to answer questions like that, because there will also be other customers asking the same thing.