rewriting the constitution to remove term limits so he can stay in power indefinitely
You mean like those terrible dictatorships Britain, or Germany, or Canada? Or that terrible dictatorship, the US before 1951? I don't get this recent obsession with term limits as a shibboleth of democracy. If the Venezuelan people keep voting for Chavez indefinitely, why shouldn't he stay in power indefinitely? There's nothing dictatorial about the person who wins an election becoming the president; quite the contrary.
why would Ubuntu include a version of x.org in their release that doesn't work with ATI cards?
It does work with ATI cards, it just doesn't work with the closed-source ATI drivers. This does mean no acceleration on HD 5000 cards, and somewhat slower acceleration on other ATI cards, but it does work. The alternative would be either sticking with an older version of X (thereby foregoing important bug fixes and performance enhancements), or shipping two X servers (which would be possible, but would be a serious support headache, particularly as this is a long-term support release).
It's in the bussiness of providing the best explaination for the available evidence.
That sounds right, but isn't part of being the best explanation, that such an explanation is true? Establishing the truth of an explanation would fit into one of the commonly used meanings of "proof."
I don't think your restriction of proof to axiomatic systems coincides with the way that that word is usually used. Axiomatic systems allow for a "proof" in the mathematical sense, but other kinds of demonstrations of truth are also possible, and could reasonably be called "proof."
Well, through technical means they can make it difficult to access certain content, sure. I was wondering if you thought there were any ways they can make it illegal to access certain content.
The only thing that you own when you buy a game is the physical disk.
Given that you own the physical disk, you can do what you want with it, except where restricted by law. You can't snort coke off the disk, because snorting coke is illegal, and you can't distribute copies of the disk, because distributing copies is illegal. Accessing the data on the disk for your own personal use would typically be legal, even if the publisher wants to charge you $5 to access that data. It's possible that under the DMCA altering the game to use the DLC without paying counts as an illegal circumvention device, so it would be illegal in that case. But the idea that the copyright holder gets to set any conditions they like on your use of an object you own is a misconception.
I'm going to write an economics paper on what I call convergopolies.
Aren't you just giving a new name to what everyone else calls "markets"? A perfectly free market will reach equilibrium (by definition - neoclassical economics is tautological), that is, it will converge on optimal behavior. Though there might be more than one optimum, it doesn't seem surprising that a number of market participants would converge on the same optimum.
20 Euros is about $27, which is round about what T-mobile and AT&T in the US charge for their "unlimited" data plan (which is in fact a 5GB plan, despite the name). I don't think they'll give you a lower price for less usage, unfortunately (this is, in general, an annoying feature of the US cell phone market - the providers are keen to sell expensive "unlimited" plans, and reluctant to sell you a cheaper plan that only offers what you actually need).
You can't require purchase of a particular device to use a service, but is the reverse true? After all, none of the wireless operators in the US will sell you a phone without voice service, as far as I know; how is refusing to sell you a phone without data service any different?
If you happen to be running an open source OS on your phone, you get to pay 3x the amount you'd pay for THE EXACT SAME SERVICE if your phone ran Symbian.
I don't think that's true. If you buy an Android phone, they force you to buy an unlimited text and data package; but this costs the same as adding unlimited text and data to any of their regular packages. And, if you bring your own Android phone, TMobile isn't going to know, or care, about it: they'll charge you the same for data access as they would charge anyone else.
Well, you can still use data on Go phones, it just costs a crazy amount of money to do so. They have packages at $20 for 100MB or $5 for 1MB; without that, you're paying 1 for 1KB.
These things need to be left in the hands of experts.
Absolutely. I know I'm not qualified to make all kinds of decisions about my healthcare, and so I don't want to be in a position where I'm forced to make them. And I suspect I may well be incapable of making a rational decision about end-of-life care for someone I love (thank god, I've never yet been in that position), and I don't want to be in a position where I have to decide something incredibly important, where I know I'm incapable of making a good decision in this instance.
You might think this is obvious, but any Slashdot article on Wikipedia inevitably includes lots of comments saying "My drive-by edit was reverted and I'm never contributing again and Wikipedia is dying." Lots of people on Slashdot do seem to think that an agglomeration of off-the-cuff edits could somehow produce quality articles.
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.
No, you can't. Without references, a reader has no way of knowing whether the article is accurate or not; and an editor who writes an article who is unfamiliar with the references that could be cited is unlikely to be sufficiently knowledgeable to genuinely produce a high-quality article.
The "rights of the author" system which influenced the Berne Convention defines two sorts of rights - proprietary and moral. The proprietary rights (the rights to gain economically from the work, roughly equivalent to the anglophone conception of copyright) can be transferred; it's only the moral rights that cannot. I don't think that republication or adaptation would be absolutely restricted by moral rights (though they would be limited by the moral right to protection of reputation).
It would quite literally take an act of Parliament to change this.
As TFA says, it wouldn't take an act of Parliament - the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries act gives the government the power to issue regulations concerning the archiving of non-print media.
That seems stupid as everyone can do it for themselves
I don't think that's true. I would have thought that making a copy of a website, for anything other than transient use in the course of normal access to the site, would require permission of the copyright holder, even if you don't make the copy available to anyone else (much like keeping recording of TV and the radio for longer than is required for time-shifting purposes is copyright infringement, too; actually, I'm not even sure if time-shifting is explicitly legal under UK law).
No, it's the regular copyright law that legitimizes the dumbassery. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act provides a partial relief from this, in that it exempts deposit libraries from aspects of copyright law in copying online material if they are doing so for the purposes of archiving materials covered by the act. The problem is that, at the moment, websites are not specifically covered by the act, which gives the government the power to set up regulations covering non-print media, without specifying any particular non-print media.
This is why the summary is wrong to claim that the law would have to be changed to permit archiving of websites; as TFA says, all it would take is the government issuing relevant regulations under the act, which the consultation document (linked from the article) suggests they have a fairly clear plan to do.
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rewriting the constitution to remove term limits so he can stay in power indefinitely
You mean like those terrible dictatorships Britain, or Germany, or Canada? Or that terrible dictatorship, the US before 1951? I don't get this recent obsession with term limits as a shibboleth of democracy. If the Venezuelan people keep voting for Chavez indefinitely, why shouldn't he stay in power indefinitely? There's nothing dictatorial about the person who wins an election becoming the president; quite the contrary.
HD video, gaming, compiz
All of those work fine with the open source ATI drivers for any ATI older than the 5000 series.
why would Ubuntu include a version of x.org in their release that doesn't work with ATI cards?
It does work with ATI cards, it just doesn't work with the closed-source ATI drivers. This does mean no acceleration on HD 5000 cards, and somewhat slower acceleration on other ATI cards, but it does work. The alternative would be either sticking with an older version of X (thereby foregoing important bug fixes and performance enhancements), or shipping two X servers (which would be possible, but would be a serious support headache, particularly as this is a long-term support release).
Opera's website is not entirely clear about how Opera Mini works, but I think the parent is pretty much correct. The servers that support Opera Mini run the same rendering engine that is used in the desktop version of Opera, and the CSS features which Opera Mini supports are limited by the graphics system running on these servers. This suggests pretty strongly to me that the HTML+CSS is indeed rendered to an image server-side.
W. V. O. Quine would like a word.
It's in the bussiness of providing the best explaination for the available evidence.
That sounds right, but isn't part of being the best explanation, that such an explanation is true? Establishing the truth of an explanation would fit into one of the commonly used meanings of "proof."
I don't think your restriction of proof to axiomatic systems coincides with the way that that word is usually used. Axiomatic systems allow for a "proof" in the mathematical sense, but other kinds of demonstrations of truth are also possible, and could reasonably be called "proof."
I think your example would be more persuasive if it involved algebra, though.
science is not in the bussiness of proof
So what is it in the business of?
Well, through technical means they can make it difficult to access certain content, sure. I was wondering if you thought there were any ways they can make it illegal to access certain content.
they can restrict whether or not you can access all of the software
Really? How?
The only thing that you own when you buy a game is the physical disk.
Given that you own the physical disk, you can do what you want with it, except where restricted by law. You can't snort coke off the disk, because snorting coke is illegal, and you can't distribute copies of the disk, because distributing copies is illegal. Accessing the data on the disk for your own personal use would typically be legal, even if the publisher wants to charge you $5 to access that data. It's possible that under the DMCA altering the game to use the DLC without paying counts as an illegal circumvention device, so it would be illegal in that case. But the idea that the copyright holder gets to set any conditions they like on your use of an object you own is a misconception.
Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do.
That's not entirely true - you could write in Haskell and compile to JavaScript.
I'm going to write an economics paper on what I call convergopolies.
Aren't you just giving a new name to what everyone else calls "markets"? A perfectly free market will reach equilibrium (by definition - neoclassical economics is tautological), that is, it will converge on optimal behavior. Though there might be more than one optimum, it doesn't seem surprising that a number of market participants would converge on the same optimum.
20 Euros is about $27, which is round about what T-mobile and AT&T in the US charge for their "unlimited" data plan (which is in fact a 5GB plan, despite the name). I don't think they'll give you a lower price for less usage, unfortunately (this is, in general, an annoying feature of the US cell phone market - the providers are keen to sell expensive "unlimited" plans, and reluctant to sell you a cheaper plan that only offers what you actually need).
You can't require purchase of a particular device to use a service, but is the reverse true? After all, none of the wireless operators in the US will sell you a phone without voice service, as far as I know; how is refusing to sell you a phone without data service any different?
If you happen to be running an open source OS on your phone, you get to pay 3x the amount you'd pay for THE EXACT SAME SERVICE if your phone ran Symbian.
I don't think that's true. If you buy an Android phone, they force you to buy an unlimited text and data package; but this costs the same as adding unlimited text and data to any of their regular packages. And, if you bring your own Android phone, TMobile isn't going to know, or care, about it: they'll charge you the same for data access as they would charge anyone else.
Well, you can still use data on Go phones, it just costs a crazy amount of money to do so. They have packages at $20 for 100MB or $5 for 1MB; without that, you're paying 1 for 1KB.
These things need to be left in the hands of experts.
Absolutely. I know I'm not qualified to make all kinds of decisions about my healthcare, and so I don't want to be in a position where I'm forced to make them. And I suspect I may well be incapable of making a rational decision about end-of-life care for someone I love (thank god, I've never yet been in that position), and I don't want to be in a position where I have to decide something incredibly important, where I know I'm incapable of making a good decision in this instance.
You might think this is obvious, but any Slashdot article on Wikipedia inevitably includes lots of comments saying "My drive-by edit was reverted and I'm never contributing again and Wikipedia is dying." Lots of people on Slashdot do seem to think that an agglomeration of off-the-cuff edits could somehow produce quality articles.
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.
No, you can't. Without references, a reader has no way of knowing whether the article is accurate or not; and an editor who writes an article who is unfamiliar with the references that could be cited is unlikely to be sufficiently knowledgeable to genuinely produce a high-quality article.
"The anglophone world" (or at least, the UK, USA, and Australia) has signed the Berne convention, so I don't think your distinction here makes sense.
The "rights of the author" system which influenced the Berne Convention defines two sorts of rights - proprietary and moral. The proprietary rights (the rights to gain economically from the work, roughly equivalent to the anglophone conception of copyright) can be transferred; it's only the moral rights that cannot. I don't think that republication or adaptation would be absolutely restricted by moral rights (though they would be limited by the moral right to protection of reputation).
It would quite literally take an act of Parliament to change this.
As TFA says, it wouldn't take an act of Parliament - the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries act gives the government the power to issue regulations concerning the archiving of non-print media.
That seems stupid as everyone can do it for themselves
I don't think that's true. I would have thought that making a copy of a website, for anything other than transient use in the course of normal access to the site, would require permission of the copyright holder, even if you don't make the copy available to anyone else (much like keeping recording of TV and the radio for longer than is required for time-shifting purposes is copyright infringement, too; actually, I'm not even sure if time-shifting is explicitly legal under UK law).
No, it's the regular copyright law that legitimizes the dumbassery. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act provides a partial relief from this, in that it exempts deposit libraries from aspects of copyright law in copying online material if they are doing so for the purposes of archiving materials covered by the act. The problem is that, at the moment, websites are not specifically covered by the act, which gives the government the power to set up regulations covering non-print media, without specifying any particular non-print media.
This is why the summary is wrong to claim that the law would have to be changed to permit archiving of websites; as TFA says, all it would take is the government issuing relevant regulations under the act, which the consultation document (linked from the article) suggests they have a fairly clear plan to do.