I read through the study, and their methodology seems decidedly odd. They collected photos of women, then asked men and other women to rate them as conveying "sadness", "friendliness", "sexual interest", or "rejection". However, as far as I can tell, the "ground truth" here is what the women whose photos were taken were asked, in a laboratory (i.e. non-social) environment, to convey. So, the study could simply be finding that women are better at picking up what emotions other women are articially aping than men are, not that they're actually better at detecting real sexual interest in a social (dating, courting) environment.
The proportion of Indians who speak English as their first language
is perishingly small. Even the proportion growing up in families where
English is fluently and regularly spoken is much smaller than you
might imagine. One gets a distorted view in the West because the
Indians one regularly meets are generally from the educated upper classes.
But for most Indians, teaching their children fluent English involves
saving hard to pay for them to attend English-language private schools.
My Bombay friend's housemaid, who comes from a village and speaks not
a word of English, did this for her son, who then got professional job,
and my friend's driver is saving up to do this for his twins, too.
This processor was discussed on slashdot in July last year. They haven't implemented the parts of the MIP architecture that are patented, so patents shouldn't be an issue.
As the article itself says, the real problem is with entry-level IT workers, not with experienced, skilled ones. What is going on is that the Australian government still classes an IT qualification as a preferred one for granting Permanent Residency (equivalent to a US green card), so overseas students are attracted to study IT courses in Australia. But at the end, there just aren't enough jobs locally for them. And at the same time, the oversupply of IT graduates this causes and the poor job prospects that IT graduates face is driving local students away from doing IT courses. Really, the problem here is not one of the government failing to maintain barriers to the free movement of labour (as many posters here are suggesting), but artificially boosting a particular segment and class of labour (entry-level IT graduates) through a kind of "immigration subsidy". The results are not pretty. I know of many overseas students who have completed masters, and even PhD degrees, in IT in Australia and, after working at McDonalds for a few months, give up and return to their own countries.
The creation story from the Book of Genesis was historically used to support monarchy and the divine right of kings, far more than democracy and innate human rights. For instance, from Filmer, Patriarcha, or the Natural Right of Kings (1680), the most famous divine right ideologue:
not only Adam, but the succeeding patriarchs had, by right of fatherhood, royal authority over their children.... [F]or as Adam was lord of his children, so his children under him had a command and power over their own children...
I see not then how the children of Adam, or of any man else, can be free from subjection to their parents. And this subjection of children being the fountain of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself; it follows that civil power... in general is by divine institution
The Samsung YEPP yp-c1 mp3 player plays Ogg Vorbis files fine (in my not-too-demanding experience), and works easily with Linux. If Ogg and Linux support are important to you (as they were to me), it's not a bad choice. I'm not sure whether it's readily available in the West, though; mine was bought for me in China.
Just a bit of trivia, but Coptic, the liturgical
language of the Coptic (Egyptian) Orthodox
Church, is basically Ancient Egyptian written
with Greek characters.
Here are a couple of questions raised by the
placebo effects for enthusiasts of the scientific
method:
If the placebo effect relies on the
conviction of the patient that their treatment
is going to help them, then aren't medical
systems with a simpler-to-understand and more
immersive theoretical foundation, such as various
traditional and new-age therapies, going to be
more effective (ceteris paribus) than
scientific, Western medicine?
For the same reason, is research
intended to debunk traditional and new-age
therapies likely, if successful, to reduce
the overall health of society?
Finally, is scepticism therefore bad for
your health?
That's right: God is punishing Indonesia, India,
Sri Lanka, and Thailand for a crime committed by
a dozen Arabs in the north-eastern US, because
he has no better grasp on geography, morality, or
rationality than the red-necks who have such immediate insight into his intentions and workings.
I see a lot of Americans accusing Iran, Russia,
and Pakistan of not adequately guarding their nuclear
materials adequately. But what about the
nuclear facilities in Iraq, which are apparently
being left unguarded altogether by the American
occupation forces? And consequently, what about
the American justification for the invasion of Iraq as preventing these materials being transferred to terrorists?
Whoa, I think you're spectacularly misinformed here...
Chinese attitudes to homosexuality are very conservative. I've met mainland Chinese who assert that there aren't any homosexuals in China. Until not so long ago (at least the 70s), homosexuality was treated as a psychiatric disorder, and homosexuals could wind up in a psychiatric hospital.
As for China being a mostly Buddhist country... well, China is a mostly Confucian country, with a strong familial ethos and a traditionally prudish attitude to sexuality. That's not a culture which homosexuality fits into very easily...
That said, I have had a gay Chinese man
(discretely) proposition me in Shanghai...
This is a sad day for public information in Australia--and just when it looked like the free trade agreement was not going to go through because of US intransigence over agriculture! Unfortunately, John Howard decided to sell out completely.
When this was first
mentioned, I spent some time reading up on the topic: I might as well share some links here.
The only organisation that I could find actively lobbying against the dilution of Public Domain rights in Australia was Australian Library and Information Association, a professional organisation for librarians. They are following
this issue, and may appreciate your input and support; their online journal also contains an insightful article by an Australian National University professor of law on copyrights and public domain.
As other have pointed out, the retrospective extension of copyrights from Life+50 to Life+70, which even those advocating a longer copyright term admitted had no justification, is of particular concern to Project Gutenberg of Australia (site seems to be down at present--anyone know why?), which had published
a number of until now Public Domain works on their site (for instance, the works of George Orwell). There's already some discussion of this on Distributed Proofreaders (registration may be required)--if you're a DP'er, you might like to contribute, and if you're not a DP'er, you should be.
It wasn't about oil prices. At the time we had no idea how far the Arab states would go. Suppose they said to us "Cut off Israel or we'll slowly bleed you to death?"
At the time, OPEC produced just 17% of the US's oil consumption (and note that OPEC includes a number of non-Arab countries). And this shortfall could
readily have been met by buying from non-Arab countries, or just buying from third-parties that had bought from OPEC. So yes, it was about oil prices.
The point here is that any nation-state would have done the same if it was in our shoes during the 70s -- or in the Japanese shoes in 1941 if you want to use that example.
Well, let's take Japan as an example again. They
were faced by a far greater crisis than the US by the 1973-4 oil crisis, in that their dependence on
petroleum was greater, and they had no domestic sources of oil at all. So what did they do? Reduce their dependence on oil, and diversify to other energy sources--and embark upon two decades of rapid economic growth. What did the US do? Draw up plans to invade foreign countries for refusing to sell their resources to them, continue to prop up dictatorial regimes throughout
the Middle East, like the Shah in Iran and then, when that blew up in their faces, their then good friend Saddam Hussein, and now Saudi Arabia, the home and ongoing breeding-ground of Al-Qaeda, while all the time increasing their consumption of and dependence on foreign oil
(OPEC now makes up 28%
of US imports).
So which is the better characterisation of the situation: the US as a cornered nation, forced to act in its own survival, as any other nation would do in the same circumstances? Or the US as an arrogant and short-sighted bully, ready to back brutal and repressive regimes, and if that fails invade foreign countries, in order to keep domestic petrol prices low, rather than adopt even the most basic of conservation measures?
The US was prepared to invade Saudia Arabia and
Kuwait in order to ensure its oil supply was
not hampered by "under-developed, under-populated"
countries (quote from the report). Its intentions
were serious enough that it not only drew up detailed military plans, but even started to sound out the British about joining in such an invasion. These were more than just contingency plans: they were designed for a contingency that US planners regarded as very real and imminent.
That such a course of action was considered indicates that the US was prepared to go to war to seize other countries' oil resources. I agree with you that the US probably has similar contigency plans in place now: but all this means is that it still feels it has the right to seize foreign oil reserves by force in order to keep oil prices down in the US. Indeed, isn't this what the US has recently done in Iraq? (Ironically, one of the concerns about the US plan was that Iraq might interfere with US control of Kuwait. Well, that concern has been taken care of...)
Of course, the US is grossly hypocritical in all of this. The US embargo of Japan in 1941 cut off nearly all of Japan's oil supplies, from third-party countries, when Japan was in a state of war, yet Japan's attack on the US to restore these supplies was supposedly an act of infamy; yet when the Arab nations embargo something like 13% of the US's oil supply, in peace time, threatening no more than higher oil prices, the US
plans to invade.
All of this proves the following points, which are presumably apparent to everyone by now:
The US will happily break international law and conventions, invade other countries and kill their citizens, in order to maintain their level of resource consumption.
The US expects other countries to live by rules that it has no intention of following itself.
The US wants to live in a world ruled by force, not law.
I hope I'm still around in another half century, when China is stronger than the US, so that I can have the satisfaction of seeing these principles come back to bite them.
Don't be too cynical. The proposal to extend
copyright from Life+50 to Life+70 was rejected by
the Australian Parliament's Intellectual Property
and Competition Review Committee in 2000 as
"unconvincing". The report under discussion here
is transparently a case of special-interest
lobbying, largely by a US organization (the MPAA),
and adds very little to the case (read it: it
concedes that "the net financial impact of term
extension in Australia is likely to be neutral"
[p X]). This should be easy to swat down, if
enough Australians write their representatives
against it.
> Sadly this is another example of politicians putting corporate needs before the greater good.
This is a proposal from a special-interest lobbying group, not a policy position from the government. Don't be so defeatist. The Australian Government
has stood up to the US before on IP issues, such as parallel importing of copyrighted material. There's
no reason to assume that they won't do so again.
That said, Australian citizens who realise that
this copyright extension is not in the public
interest should definitely write to their
member of parliament, and probably the
responsible minister, too.
There's an interesting side-note to this. In the Australian
federal budget last month, the Government
implicitly valued
Telstra at $5.25 a share, whereas (as the previous poster
points out) they are now trading down around $4.50.
This makes around $AUS3.5 billion ($US2.4 billion)
difference to the valuation of government assets.
Since it's no
secret that the government wants to privatise its remaining
50.1% stake in Telstra, this is a pretty strong indication that
$5.25 is the price the government wants. This makes it all the
more unlikely that the government is going to take serious
steps to challenge the Telstra monopoly (and thereby depress the
Telstra share price), at least until the company is fully
privatised.
It surprises and disturbs me how readily people
are accepting the Attorney-General's claim that
the accusation is "ridiculous". What his
press release actually says is that forwarding
personal email is "unlikely" to be illegal
under the legislation because "rehashed jokes"
and "office gossip" are "probably" not going
to be considered "original literary works" in a
court of law. This amounts to saying no more
than that "works which are probably non-copyrightable are
probably not copyrightable". It says nothing
at all about personal emails that are not just
"rehashed jokes" or "office gossip" and that
almost certainly do contain copyrightable material
(such as this posting would do if it were
an email), and since at least a large chunk if
not the majority of personal email would fall
into this category (despite the AG's apparent
belief that the "little people" do nothing with
email other than forward tired jokes and trivial
rumours), this so-called "rebuttal" acknowledges by admission that a sizeable portion of current
email-forwarding is, indeed, illegal under the
legislation. (For instance, were this post an
email, and you lived in Australia, forwarding it
to a friend without my permission [which I hereby
give] could land you with a five-year jail term and a $60,000 fine.)
Besides which, it is a telling indictment of the
Attorney-General's and the Government's priorities that freshly passed legislation designed to carry Australian copyright law "forward into the digital age" leaves even forwarding "rehashed jokes" in a legal status where according to the legislation's own author doing so is only "probably" not illegal. Obviously, guaranteeing the profits of large copyright-holding multinationals was far more important to the government that providing legal security of usage of the Internet to ordinary Australian citizens.
I've written to the Attorney General telling him he's an idiot who is damaging Australia's international IT reputation and severely threatening the rights of individual Internet users. If you're an Australian, why don't you do likewise?
Yes and no. The issue is that in many countries,
notably the US and increasingly here in Australia,
too, private health insurance is touted as the
free-market-friendly alternative to universal
health care. While most everyone pays more or
less the same premium, this may be true enough
(provided of course you can pay that premium).
However, the better insurance companies are able
to discriminate between those who will need more
medical attention and those who will need less,
and rate their premiums accordingly, the less
satisfactory the system becomes as a universal
safety net. And remember, people with a genetic
disposition to ill-health spend more on health
services than the average literally through no
fault of their own.
The answer? (Re-)socialise medicine. It worked
fine in Australia for 20 years, and the current
government is moving away from it for no
reason other than ideology. The alternatives
(genetically susceptible citizens having
increasingly steep premiums foisted upon them,
leading eventually to the non-affordability
of either insurance or health care) is
unacceptable in any decent modern society
(except the US - or is that proviso
tautological?)
Most of the expressions of praise you are quoting
are part of the prizes that the place-getters win.
From the
contest home page:
"The team winning first prize in the competition
will be awarded:...
* Peer recognition: Finally, the context judges
agree to state at least once during the
presentation of the awards that the winning team's
programming language is ``the programming tool
of choice for discriminating hackers.''"
Which I still don't understand. I can't see how any of this is the US's fault. On the contrary, we should be grateful for the support we have received from organisations like the EFF and individuals like cananian (great site). Even RMS spoke up about this to the local media when he was here recently.
No; this is a typical product of Australian complacency. The government needed an extra vote to get their tax legislation through, so they bribed that Catholic idiot Harradine with this censorship legislation; not enough of the population knew enough to care, and too few of those who did cared enough to protest (kudos to you for being an exception, BTW); EFA was left in an isolated position, being actually taunted by the government for being politically naive and ineffectual; and now the IIA and the EFA have decided to play the government's deceitful little game as the best of a bad lot.
Mea culpa, too, by the way; my initial reaction to the legislation was "well, what can I do about it?". But I'm damned if I'm going to let some filtering software manufacturer censor my internet viewing, and I'm also damned if I'm going to pretend that I'm doing so (he says, still wondering "well, what can I do about it?").
I was flabbergasted when I first read that article in the local papers; flabbergasted, that is, that the scheme had got such fulsome support from the IIA and (of all organisations) the EFA. I have subsequently gathered that ISPs see this as a way of essentially avoiding the whole issue (as you outline above). I guess it hasn't hurt that censorship is now a potential revenue stream for them.
But I'm still not impressed. The people backing this scheme must still realise that this is bad legislation, and that the scheme itself, prima facie, is a nefarious one. It would oblige Australian internet users to accept censorship based not on the criteria decided by government (which would be bad enough, but at least allows for public scrutiny and a formal process), but by the private makers of censorship software. And the EFA's pages themselves provide an example of what happens when censorship decisions fall to private hands.
There is a long tradition in Australia of avoiding threats of government regulation by proposing a scheme of essentially unenforced industry self-regulation, allowing the government to wash their hands of the issue, which self-regulation the industry essentially ignores. But I can't help feel that this is a particularly craven approach for the Australian internet community to be taking, especially since it shifts the burden of dishonesty to all internet users, who now have to either allow (doubtless mostly US) proprietary software makers to censor their Internet viewing for them, or lie that they are doing so.
BTW, it seems to me that this article never made it to slashdot's front page. Last night (Australian time), the article on "The World's Smallest PII Motherboard" was at the top of the page, without the current article being there; this morning, the PII motherboard article is at the bottom of the page, and the current article turned up in yesterday's list. Or am I hallucinating?
> Why is it immoral for a company to want to get a return on it's investment?
Per se, it isn't. But just because a desire is acceptable, it does not mean that everything done to achieve it is acceptable.
> While you (and others) may feel that the $5000 fee is too high, there is nothing either legally wrong or immoral with what they are doing.
Did the original poster assert that there was anything legally wrong with what UNISYS is doing? No; on the contrary, he points out the UNISYS is abusing the constituted legal system. So why do you introduce this into your argument at this point? Because either you're confused, or you're trying to confuse your readers, by the invalid conclusion that "it isn't illegal, so it can't be wrong".
Personally I do think it is wrong for UNISYS to be trying to extort such high licensing fees (really, any licensing fees) for a 14-year-old patent on a de facto standard compression format from people using free software. This is in part because I think software patents are wrong; if I held a software patent and were trying to get money from people to use it, I would feel that I was doing the wrong thing. So, by extension, I believe that UNISYS is also doing the wrong thing. And therefore, I believe that the law that supports them in doing it is a bad law.
OK, now go through the preceding paragraph, and substitute the melodramatic immoral for the homely wrong. See, legality has nothing to do with it.
> The answer? Follow the law, even if you disagree. Use another format, there are many others to choose from. Stop feeling that you are totally rightous, you have no basis for that belief.
I'm not sure that it's right to follow laws you disagree with, if you disagree with them strongly enough. Even when a law has become terminally outdated (such as IMHO IP law has), actually trying to get it changed in the face of entrenched and well-funded interests is an extremely difficult task. On the other hand, if it is generally ignored, it will slowly die of inanition.
Slashdot Mirror
I read through the study, and their methodology seems decidedly
odd. They collected photos of women, then asked men and other
women to rate them as conveying "sadness", "friendliness",
"sexual interest", or "rejection". However, as far as I can
tell, the "ground truth" here is what the women whose photos
were taken were asked, in a laboratory (i.e. non-social)
environment, to convey. So, the study could simply be finding
that women are better at picking up what emotions other women
are articially aping than men are, not that they're actually
better at detecting real sexual interest in a social (dating,
courting) environment.
The proportion of Indians who speak English as their first language is perishingly small. Even the proportion growing up in families where English is fluently and regularly spoken is much smaller than you might imagine. One gets a distorted view in the West because the Indians one regularly meets are generally from the educated upper classes. But for most Indians, teaching their children fluent English involves saving hard to pay for them to attend English-language private schools. My Bombay friend's housemaid, who comes from a village and speaks not a word of English, did this for her son, who then got professional job, and my friend's driver is saving up to do this for his twins, too.
This processor was discussed on slashdot in July last year. They haven't implemented the parts of the MIP architecture that are patented, so patents shouldn't be an issue.
/ 26/0029224
See http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07
As the article itself says, the real problem is with entry-level IT workers, not with experienced,
skilled ones. What is going on is that the Australian government still classes an IT qualification as
a preferred one for granting Permanent Residency (equivalent to a US green card), so overseas students
are attracted to study IT courses in Australia. But at the end, there just aren't enough jobs
locally for them. And at the same time, the oversupply of IT graduates this causes and the poor
job prospects that IT graduates face is driving local students away from doing IT courses. Really,
the problem here is not one of the government failing to maintain barriers to the free movement
of labour (as many posters here are suggesting), but artificially boosting a particular segment
and class of labour (entry-level IT graduates) through a kind of "immigration subsidy". The results
are not pretty. I know of many overseas students who have completed masters, and even PhD degrees,
in IT in Australia and, after working at McDonalds for a few months, give up and return to their
own countries.
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/xfil.htm/
The Samsung YEPP yp-c1 mp3 player plays Ogg Vorbis files fine (in my not-too-demanding experience), and works easily with Linux. If Ogg and Linux support are important to you (as they were to me), it's not a bad choice. I'm not sure whether it's readily available in the West, though; mine was bought for me in China.
Anyway, here are some pictures: http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/337/C3890/
And on this basis, how would the internet itself have been developed?
Just a bit of trivia, but Coptic, the liturgical language of the Coptic (Egyptian) Orthodox Church, is basically Ancient Egyptian written with Greek characters.
- If the placebo effect relies on the
conviction of the patient that their treatment
is going to help them, then aren't medical
systems with a simpler-to-understand and more
immersive theoretical foundation, such as various
traditional and new-age therapies, going to be
more effective (ceteris paribus) than
scientific, Western medicine?
- For the same reason, is research
intended to debunk traditional and new-age
therapies likely, if successful, to reduce
the overall health of society?
- Finally, is scepticism therefore bad for
your health?
Just wondering...The Balkan version:
The enemy of my friend is my enemy, as is the enemy of my enemy, and my friend.
That's right: God is punishing Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand for a crime committed by a dozen Arabs in the north-eastern US, because he has no better grasp on geography, morality, or rationality than the red-necks who have such immediate insight into his intentions and workings.
I see a lot of Americans accusing Iran, Russia, and Pakistan of not adequately guarding their nuclear materials adequately. But what about the nuclear facilities in Iraq, which are apparently being left unguarded altogether by the American occupation forces? And consequently, what about the American justification for the invasion of Iraq as preventing these materials being transferred to terrorists?
Chinese attitudes to homosexuality are very conservative. I've met mainland Chinese who assert that there aren't any homosexuals in China. Until not so long ago (at least the 70s), homosexuality was treated as a psychiatric disorder, and homosexuals could wind up in a psychiatric hospital.
As for China being a mostly Buddhist country... well, China is a mostly Confucian country, with a strong familial ethos and a traditionally prudish attitude to sexuality. That's not a culture which homosexuality fits into very easily...
That said, I have had a gay Chinese man (discretely) proposition me in Shanghai...
When this was first mentioned, I spent some time reading up on the topic: I might as well share some links here.
The only organisation that I could find actively lobbying against the dilution of Public Domain rights in Australia was Australian Library and Information Association, a professional organisation for librarians. They are following this issue, and may appreciate your input and support; their online journal also contains an insightful article by an Australian National University professor of law on copyrights and public domain.
As other have pointed out, the retrospective extension of copyrights from Life+50 to Life+70, which even those advocating a longer copyright term admitted had no justification, is of particular concern to Project Gutenberg of Australia (site seems to be down at present--anyone know why?), which had published a number of until now Public Domain works on their site (for instance, the works of George Orwell). There's already some discussion of this on Distributed Proofreaders (registration may be required)--if you're a DP'er, you might like to contribute, and if you're not a DP'er, you should be.
HTH
At the time, OPEC produced just 17% of the US's oil consumption (and note that OPEC includes a number of non-Arab countries). And this shortfall could readily have been met by buying from non-Arab countries, or just buying from third-parties that had bought from OPEC. So yes, it was about oil prices.
The point here is that any nation-state would have done the same if it was in our shoes during the 70s -- or in the Japanese shoes in 1941 if you want to use that example.
Well, let's take Japan as an example again. They were faced by a far greater crisis than the US by the 1973-4 oil crisis, in that their dependence on petroleum was greater, and they had no domestic sources of oil at all. So what did they do? Reduce their dependence on oil, and diversify to other energy sources--and embark upon two decades of rapid economic growth. What did the US do? Draw up plans to invade foreign countries for refusing to sell their resources to them, continue to prop up dictatorial regimes throughout the Middle East, like the Shah in Iran and then, when that blew up in their faces, their then good friend Saddam Hussein, and now Saudi Arabia, the home and ongoing breeding-ground of Al-Qaeda, while all the time increasing their consumption of and dependence on foreign oil (OPEC now makes up 28% of US imports).
So which is the better characterisation of the situation: the US as a cornered nation, forced to act in its own survival, as any other nation would do in the same circumstances? Or the US as an arrogant and short-sighted bully, ready to back brutal and repressive regimes, and if that fails invade foreign countries, in order to keep domestic petrol prices low, rather than adopt even the most basic of conservation measures?
That such a course of action was considered indicates that the US was prepared to go to war to seize other countries' oil resources. I agree with you that the US probably has similar contigency plans in place now: but all this means is that it still feels it has the right to seize foreign oil reserves by force in order to keep oil prices down in the US. Indeed, isn't this what the US has recently done in Iraq? (Ironically, one of the concerns about the US plan was that Iraq might interfere with US control of Kuwait. Well, that concern has been taken care of...)
Of course, the US is grossly hypocritical in all of this. The US embargo of Japan in 1941 cut off nearly all of Japan's oil supplies, from third-party countries, when Japan was in a state of war, yet Japan's attack on the US to restore these supplies was supposedly an act of infamy; yet when the Arab nations embargo something like 13% of the US's oil supply, in peace time, threatening no more than higher oil prices, the US plans to invade.
All of this proves the following points, which are presumably apparent to everyone by now:
- The US will happily break international law and conventions, invade other countries and kill their citizens, in order to maintain their level of resource consumption.
- The US expects other countries to live by rules that it has no intention of following itself.
- The US wants to live in a world ruled by force, not law.
I hope I'm still around in another half century, when China is stronger than the US, so that I can have the satisfaction of seeing these principles come back to bite them.Don't be too cynical. The proposal to extend copyright from Life+50 to Life+70 was rejected by the Australian Parliament's Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee in 2000 as "unconvincing". The report under discussion here is transparently a case of special-interest lobbying, largely by a US organization (the MPAA), and adds very little to the case (read it: it concedes that "the net financial impact of term extension in Australia is likely to be neutral" [p X]). This should be easy to swat down, if enough Australians write their representatives against it.
This is a proposal from a special-interest lobbying group, not a policy position from the government. Don't be so defeatist. The Australian Government has stood up to the US before on IP issues, such as parallel importing of copyrighted material. There's no reason to assume that they won't do so again.
That said, Australian citizens who realise that this copyright extension is not in the public interest should definitely write to their member of parliament, and probably the responsible minister, too.
There's an interesting side-note to this. In the Australian federal budget last month, the Government implicitly valued Telstra at $5.25 a share, whereas (as the previous poster points out) they are now trading down around $4.50. This makes around $AUS3.5 billion ($US2.4 billion) difference to the valuation of government assets. Since it's no secret that the government wants to privatise its remaining 50.1% stake in Telstra, this is a pretty strong indication that $5.25 is the price the government wants. This makes it all the more unlikely that the government is going to take serious steps to challenge the Telstra monopoly (and thereby depress the Telstra share price), at least until the company is fully privatised.
I've written to the Attorney General telling him he's an idiot who is damaging Australia's international IT reputation and severely threatening the rights of individual Internet users. If you're an Australian, why don't you do likewise?
The answer? (Re-)socialise medicine. It worked fine in Australia for 20 years, and the current government is moving away from it for no reason other than ideology. The alternatives (genetically susceptible citizens having increasingly steep premiums foisted upon them, leading eventually to the non-affordability of either insurance or health care) is unacceptable in any decent modern society (except the US - or is that proviso tautological?)
Which I still don't understand. I can't see how any of this is the US's fault. On the contrary, we should be grateful for the support we have received from organisations like the EFF and individuals like cananian (great site). Even RMS spoke up about this to the local media when he was here recently.
No; this is a typical product of Australian complacency. The government needed an extra vote to get their tax legislation through, so they bribed that Catholic idiot Harradine with this censorship legislation; not enough of the population knew enough to care, and too few of those who did cared enough to protest (kudos to you for being an exception, BTW); EFA was left in an isolated position, being actually taunted by the government for being politically naive and ineffectual; and now the IIA and the EFA have decided to play the government's deceitful little game as the best of a bad lot.
Mea culpa, too, by the way; my initial reaction to the legislation was "well, what can I do about it?". But I'm damned if I'm going to let some filtering software manufacturer censor my internet viewing, and I'm also damned if I'm going to pretend that I'm doing so (he says, still wondering "well, what can I do about it?").
But I'm still not impressed. The people backing this scheme must still realise that this is bad legislation, and that the scheme itself, prima facie, is a nefarious one. It would oblige Australian internet users to accept censorship based not on the criteria decided by government (which would be bad enough, but at least allows for public scrutiny and a formal process), but by the private makers of censorship software. And the EFA's pages themselves provide an example of what happens when censorship decisions fall to private hands.
There is a long tradition in Australia of avoiding threats of government regulation by proposing a scheme of essentially unenforced industry self-regulation, allowing the government to wash their hands of the issue, which self-regulation the industry essentially ignores. But I can't help feel that this is a particularly craven approach for the Australian internet community to be taking, especially since it shifts the burden of dishonesty to all internet users, who now have to either allow (doubtless mostly US) proprietary software makers to censor their Internet viewing for them, or lie that they are doing so.
BTW, it seems to me that this article never made it to slashdot's front page. Last night (Australian time), the article on "The World's Smallest PII Motherboard" was at the top of the page, without the current article being there; this morning, the PII motherboard article is at the bottom of the page, and the current article turned up in yesterday's list. Or am I hallucinating?
Per se, it isn't. But just because a desire is acceptable, it does not mean that everything done to achieve it is acceptable.
> While you (and others) may feel that the $5000 fee is too high, there is nothing either legally wrong or immoral with what they are doing.
Did the original poster assert that there was anything legally wrong with what UNISYS is doing? No; on the contrary, he points out the UNISYS is abusing the constituted legal system. So why do you introduce this into your argument at this point? Because either you're confused, or you're trying to confuse your readers, by the invalid conclusion that "it isn't illegal, so it can't be wrong".
Personally I do think it is wrong for UNISYS to be trying to extort such high licensing fees (really, any licensing fees) for a 14-year-old patent on a de facto standard compression format from people using free software. This is in part because I think software patents are wrong; if I held a software patent and were trying to get money from people to use it, I would feel that I was doing the wrong thing. So, by extension, I believe that UNISYS is also doing the wrong thing. And therefore, I believe that the law that supports them in doing it is a bad law.
OK, now go through the preceding paragraph, and substitute the melodramatic immoral for the homely wrong. See, legality has nothing to do with it.
> The answer? Follow the law, even if you disagree. Use another format, there are many others to choose from. Stop feeling that you are totally rightous, you have no basis for that belief.
I'm not sure that it's right to follow laws you disagree with, if you disagree with them strongly enough. Even when a law has become terminally outdated (such as IMHO IP law has), actually trying to get it changed in the face of entrenched and well-funded interests is an extremely difficult task. On the other hand, if it is generally ignored, it will slowly die of inanition.