If briggster took actions which were intended to damage Fuddruckers' image, and they can show damages, the fact that Fudd's actions were also illegal probably won't save Briggster.
Imagine if, every night after you went to bed, I stole your car to go joyriding. There are lots of legal responses, from calling the police to putting a boot on your car to hiding your car so that I can't find it. But if, instead, you respond by cutting your own brakes before I steal it again, you would very likely be brought up on murder charges.
It's true that nobody is required to guarantee that a piece of information will always be hosted in the same place. But if this incident ever goes to court, Briggster can't use it. It's clear that what happened wasn't just a wacky coincidence that resulted from incidental site maintenance. His actions specifically targeted Fuddruckers, as evidenced by the fact that only people coming from the Fuddruckers home page saw the images.
Now, if the Fuddrucker's management is wise, they'll severely discipline the webmaster (I wouldn't go so far as firing him) and slink away, cursing the day they heard the name Briggster.com. But if they're litigious bastards, this may not be the end of things, especially once their lawyers explain that Briggster's actions have really hurt his ability to wage an effective countersuit.
See, this is exactly why people have been using this incident to question this guy's employability. You mishandle a situation like this, and soon your company is up to its eyeballs in litigation.
There is much more to consider when you're hiring an employee than whether he is exceptional at performing 'the job' in the absolute narrowest sense of the word. For example, say that I hire an "exceptional" coder to write software for me. However, he insists on writing himself backdoors into every application, obfuscating all his code so that only he can understand and maintain it, being verbally abusive to coworkers and customers alike, etc.
Or say I hire a network administrator who one day discovers that somebody has been hotlinking a picture on the corporate website for their own personal use, then decides to go on a crusade against the linker, replacing the image with embarassing pornography, writing hateful, threatening letters, and generally making my company look like it's staffed entirely by petulant five-year-olds.
When you go to hire a person, you have to decide not only whether they have the technical chops to do the job, but also the judgment and temperament to "do the right thing" when difficult situations arise. In the Fuddrucker's case, the game creator showed acceptable technical prowess, but also the sort of bad judgment, unwillingness to pursue nondestructive solutions, and borderline sociopathy that would make any sane boss worry about how the guy would represent his company.
"Talmudic"? That would imply that I'm drawing all my conclusions from the article itself. I've actually read a couple of Lessig's books and occasionally visited his blog, so in reality I'm merely summarizing arguments Lessig has made in other forums. Further, this was only necessary because your retort showed that you didn't grasp the full implications of what he was saying.
Now, if you were unfamiliar with Lessig's work before, his op-ed piece was far too terse, so I'm not holding that against you. However, he has done a masterful job explaining and defending his ideas in other forums. Maybe he had more pressing things to do, maybe the magazine sprung the request on him, or maybe six paragraphs is what they actually wanted. While I wasn't impressed by this particular piece either, the one thing you can't blame its quality on is a lack of ideas or understanding in Lessig himself.
Trusted Computing measures won't simply allow copyright holders to "enforce their copyright." It will allow them the ability to decide whether to permit any given use of a work, whether requiring such permission makes sense under copyright law or not. They can deny uses that would normally be covered under fair use, and continue their complete control long after copyright expires.
I also deny your second premise: that such a state of affairs wouldn't diminish the value of the public domain which currently exists. In order for the public domain to remain relevant, it has to be continually refreshed with new ideas. Back when works only fifteen years old could be taken and profitably used, the public domain was an extremely valuable tool. Now the only works in the public domain (excluding a handful that were explicitly put into the public domain by the owners) are decrepit and don't interact well with the most powerful ideas in our society. The public domain meant to be a pool of ideas that fed our society, not just a nostalgic trip down memory lane.
Software really should have a separate copyright system. If we were still under the "fourteen years" copyright rule that existed when the U.S. was founded, we would right now be right around the time when Linux 0.0.1, Windows 3.1, and Word 5.5 fell into the public domain. It's hard to argue that these products have any commercial value, but under current copyright law, they don't fall to the public domain for another... well, some godawful long time.
The commercial utility of software simply erodes too quickly. Long copyright terms (more than 30 years) on software just don't make sense.
Okay, I'll admit that the follow-on "problem" has always existed. When a truly innovative game became a huge commercial success, people copied and remixed ruthlessly. Some of the follow-ons could even be described as innovative in their own right: the creators took the genre in a slightly different direction, or simply added the sort of polish that turned the game into an outstanding example of what the genre could be.
But the fact that the problem has always existed, and has given rise to some creativity in its own right, doesn't mean that there isn't a downside. Every time a publisher decides, "Our most promising route to commercial success is a quick Starcraft knockoff," it takes the time and energy that could otherwise have gone into exploring a more innovative idea.
You're missing the point, as evidenced by your Holodeck reference. When people complain about the lack of creativity in games, it's usually the case that "more realistic graphics" is the last thing on their list. Katamari Damacy is often listed as one of the really innovative games, despite having among the most primitive graphics I've ever seen on the PS2. For other examples, check out the Indy Gaming Jam, a small event held each year where a group of developers come together and churn out a bunch of games over the course of a few days.
Each year has a different technology focus. For example, the first one focused on sprites in gameplay, and led to a series of games where the player controls thousands upon thousands of units. The most recent Jam, subtitled, "Physics must be good for something besides ragdolls and exploding crates!" led to one game where your goal was to help a yoga master maintain increasingly difficult positions.
None of these games is intended to be a runaway blockbuster. But it's a good indication of just how tiny a fraction of potential gaming ideas actually get commercial attention.
I'm not sure that makes sense. Sure, a diverse infrastructure is harder to crack (though also requires more expertise to maintain). But then turning around and saying, "That's why everything should be cross-platform" is worrisome, because it undercuts the diversity that you're relying on for security.
Simple answer #1: Because barring a thorough IQ testing of the New Orleans population that shows them to be basically dumber than the people who chose to live elsewhere, I reject your assertion of stupidity. We do things for all manner of reasons. Some people probably chose to live there because they were born and raised. Others saw all the other people living there and just assumed it was "safe enough". Still others were aware of the problem, but figured, "Hey, that's why my tax dollars are going towards building levees." Finally, some might have been eager to move to a safer location, but were waiting until they could afford to make the move.
These are the sorts of thought processes you and I use to make our own decisions. Individuals are notoriously bad at gauging risk, and while it might gratify your ego to think how much smarter you are than every one of the citizen of New Orleans who just lost their homes, the simple fact is that you and I have both made unwitting decisions in our lives that may come back to bite us.
Simple answer #2: Because everyone does stupid things at one time or another, or suffers the consequences of the stupid or greedy actions of others. Since it isn't possible to choose correctly in every decision we make, why is it a moral good to demand that everyone receive the full consequences of their bad decisions?
Government intervention can be a wonderful thing. The government programs we've created have given us cleaner drinking water, safer food, medicine, and workplaces, and emergency relief when the vagaries of life overwhelm local resources.
If things ever get bad in your neck of the woods, I'm happy that my tax dollars will protect you from the full logical consequences of your philosophy of rugged individualism.
If we were just talking about New Orleans, I might agree with you. Building a city below sea level, that close to the sea, is asking for trouble. But you cannot seriously be considering abandoning the entire coast south of Virginia.
The first obvious problem is that people need to live there to run the ports. More important, most of the trouble caused by hurricanes can be mitigated by having proper building codes and early warning systems. For example, 2004 was a very bad year for hurricanes, but only resulted in about twenty deaths in the United States.
Where we choose to live has much less effect on our mortality rate than what we choose for occupations, what we choose to eat, how we choose to drive, and whether we choose to smoke. People cannot be written off as irredeemably stupid just because they chose to live in a major metropolitan area within fifty miles of the coast. If you want to talk about magnets for stupidity, McDonalds is an ideal candidate.
Taxes aren't taken at gunpoint. They're taken because of the decisions of your elected representatives, who have been duly authorized to make such decisions.
Now, maybe Nawlins is just one of those places where it doesn't make economic sense to put a city. But name one area of the country that is fundamentally safe from major disasters. So when things overwhelm a local population, the rest of us pitch in. Why do you find that idea so threatening?
But here comes my big beef with Linux security: it's user accounts and permissions. First I'll talk user accounts. In all my conversations with Linux admins, I've never met one with a system configured where they didn't "su - root" to do admin stuff.
That isn't even possible on Ubuntu, so I can't imagine you've talked to many admins.
Actually, it is possible. First, you type 'sudo passwd root' and create a password for root. Then go into/etc/sudoers and disable sudo for everybody.
Okay, why whould you want to do this? I did it because Ubuntu's sudo system turns my everyday password into a root password. That struck me as a security risk. As the sole administrator of my personal boxes, I'm quite sure that if the logs say that root did something, it was me what done it.
Okay, I'm coming around a bit. I don't have time for a full response, but I don't see a simple percentage working, because the percent you can demand is very much a function of how the source work is used. For example, somebody uses a song of mine in a movie. Is it the full song, or just a few seconds? Is it playing in the background, or is it the audience's main focus? Is it the second song on the end credits (presumably to be heard after everyone has left the theater and turned off the VCR)?
I guess I can see a use for a dual license, where a work is licensed both under CC-NC and CC-RoyaltyScheme. And I guess there is something compelling about letting people define a full-fledged system within the confines of traditional copyright law.
This is a bit unnerving. I came to Slashdot, and actually had to reconsider my original opinion. I'm feeling a bit lightheaded.
Where would we be without this guy to deride Wikipeds and Creative Commons fans as self-important, talentless nobodies who just don't comprehend that the truly talented people will not contribute to their culture unless tricked into it by the siren song of the Almighty Buck?
Apparently, Toone is one of the handful of people willing to provide Orlowski with deliciously inflammatory quotes at a moment's notice. From this article:
"Personally I'm happy to accept their information on Klingons as being authoritative," writes Andy Toone. "However, the people who get overexcited about the social effects of Wiki/ Blogs/ Open Source seem to be far less reliable when it comes to the economics and practicalities of providing time, effort and information to such projects."
Sure, Wikipedia has been an unmitigated economic disaster, chewing up hundreds of millions in startup capital while providing no benefit to anybody... no, wait. That was pets.com.
When Toone says, "[geeks think] that the geek experience somehow supplants all previous culture and creative expression," it's clear that he is either making stuff up to get under peoples' skins, or is basing his impressions on the extreme fringe. Either way, he and Orlowski both seem to feel personally threatened by the idea of open culture. My theory is that they've both got too much invested in the idea that "quality is paid for". For Orlowski, the fact that he gets paid to write his drivel is the very thing that raises it above the drivel unpaid masses to the level of "Good Culture". So if a significant number of people prefer the work of "amateurs", then what is it that gives him a right to a paycheck?
Okay, nothing good comes from armchair psychoanalysis. But if you saw the hatchet job he did on Lessig, well, the bastard deserves far worse.
I hope that in your attempts to bring enlightenment to the musical masses, you don't go overboard and turn musicians away from a powerful promotional tool. I really don't see how the people at Creative Commons could be any clearer about how their license works. I'm sorry if "many artists" jumped onto the bandwagon without understanding the details, but they shouldn't be blaming anyone but themselves.
Nor do I see that the CC would be improved by adding your licenses into the mix. The CC is about letting people say, "Here's what you can do with this work, without involving me in any way." I don't see how a license that took pages of legalese to say, "Ask me first" would serve anybody, including the people who wanted to be asked first. Nor do I see any hope for the royalties license. Since everybody is going to have a slightly different idea of what constitutes a proper royalty formula, the end result will be so complicated and error prone that you probably ought to bring a lawyer in anyways. But above and beyond that, these additional licenses simply fly in the face of the goals of the Creative Commons.
If you think a series of royalties boilerplates would be useful to the world, have a lawyer draw them up, and publish them for anyone to use. In essence, that's all CC is doing.
[delete rant about proper spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, along with a WTF regarding your use of the "double period".]
1) A Creative Commons license is not an EULA. The Creative Commons licenses does not say anything about how the end user can use the work being licensed. Like the GPL, the CC licenses only grant additional rights to potential redistributors, which is a distinct group.
2) Not all EULAs are equally enforceable. For example, good luck trying to enforce mine.
3) An EULA is NOT necessary for enforcing copyright. Quite the contrary, EULAs are generally where people shove stuff that they know damned well wouldn't be enforceable under simple copyright.
4) Okay, I have to know. What is it with those double-periods?
The problem you cite (and, come to think of it, Orlowski cites as well) doesn't exist, because the Creative Commons offers both "commercial-ok" and "non-commercial-only" versions of its license. If you're not okay with commercial entities picking up your work, it's pretty obvious which one to use.
You can also choose whether or not the license is "GPL-like", in that you can say that anyone republishing or modifying your work must make the work available to others under the same terms and in an editable format. If a corporation can pick up your work and improve it, but can't demand exclusive rights to those improvements, it's a huge check on their power.
In essence, there is no single license, even though the author of the article gives no indication that such fine-grained control exists.
I really can't imagine it being profitable for them to buy thousands of a song to increase its ranking. Remember that Apple keeps a cut of the profits. Buying the songs wouldn't cost them nothing.
That's not the way this sort of research usually works. Rather than "fixing the gene", their likely goal is to figure out what protein it codes for, then figure out the metabolic pathways that the protein is involved in, and then see what sort of drugs can be formulated to make those processes work the way they'd like.
My alternative proposal: The Kid-a-pult 5000! Improvements over the Kid-a-pult 4500 include:
* Interface with NOAA for more accurate wind speed predictions. * Computerized targeting system that interfaces with Google Maps. * Increased payload capacity for the Mickey D's generation. Now you can launch your kid and her backpack at the same time. * $200,000 in death and dismemberment coverage.
Biodiesel, sheesh. You people just don't know how to think big.
5) Talk to the guy, explain in a constructive way how you think his managing could be improved, ask him why he does the things he does, and try to understand that it will be difficult to change.
Maybe I'm being wildly naive to think that a friendly chat with your boss is anywhere near as fun or satisfying as setting him up for failure. But it seems to me that when everyone is swearing that your options are "abandon ship," "destroy him," "cover your ears and pretend the problem will go away by itself," and "spend five years earning a business degree so you can have his job," then people are suffering from an odd sort of tunnel vision.
Slashdot, as we well know, is both frequented almost entirely by males, and the last remaining bastion of erudite conversation and higher discourse on the Internet.
If you need proof of the intellectual superiority of the Male, look no further than Slashdot.org.
We live in a shamelessly corporate age, and you simply cannot trust that the drugs the FDA approves are actually safe. IANAD(octor), but my advice would to take only those drugs which you absolutely need, and give new drugs five or six years on the market unless the benefits are just too important to pass up. Somehow, I don't consider "eliminating sleep from my life" to be a medical necessity.
You read wrong. The problem is, there is a direct, linear correlation between body size and amount of time spent sleeping, that has nothing to do with whether one is predator or prey. For example, mice spend the vast majority of their time asleep, while cats spend a good 75% of their time asleep. When you get up to human sized creatures, you expect to see them spend about a third of their life asleep. Elephants sleep about four hours a night. What they do with all those long, dark hours is anybody's guess.
The question of why we sleep is still a bit of a mystery to me, but if you're simply looking at it as "defense from predators", you're going to fundamentally misunderstand the phenomenon.
Now, if I were a spammer, instead of trying to randomly generate content with scripts, I would have the script copy entries from other blogs, and insert links throughout. I would also use CSS to make the links look like normal text. Finally, I'd get one of those "makepovertyhistory.org" banners on the top right hand corner of the screen, because they seem to disable clicks to the button that flags inappropriate content.
Also, check out this nifty trick. Way to get all the benefits of a spamful blog, but make people skittish about reporting it.
Slashdot Mirror
If briggster took actions which were intended to damage Fuddruckers' image, and they can show damages, the fact that Fudd's actions were also illegal probably won't save Briggster.
Imagine if, every night after you went to bed, I stole your car to go joyriding. There are lots of legal responses, from calling the police to putting a boot on your car to hiding your car so that I can't find it. But if, instead, you respond by cutting your own brakes before I steal it again, you would very likely be brought up on murder charges.
It's true that nobody is required to guarantee that a piece of information will always be hosted in the same place. But if this incident ever goes to court, Briggster can't use it. It's clear that what happened wasn't just a wacky coincidence that resulted from incidental site maintenance. His actions specifically targeted Fuddruckers, as evidenced by the fact that only people coming from the Fuddruckers home page saw the images.
Now, if the Fuddrucker's management is wise, they'll severely discipline the webmaster (I wouldn't go so far as firing him) and slink away, cursing the day they heard the name Briggster.com. But if they're litigious bastards, this may not be the end of things, especially once their lawyers explain that Briggster's actions have really hurt his ability to wage an effective countersuit.
See, this is exactly why people have been using this incident to question this guy's employability. You mishandle a situation like this, and soon your company is up to its eyeballs in litigation.
There is much more to consider when you're hiring an employee than whether he is exceptional at performing 'the job' in the absolute narrowest sense of the word. For example, say that I hire an "exceptional" coder to write software for me. However, he insists on writing himself backdoors into every application, obfuscating all his code so that only he can understand and maintain it, being verbally abusive to coworkers and customers alike, etc.
Or say I hire a network administrator who one day discovers that somebody has been hotlinking a picture on the corporate website for their own personal use, then decides to go on a crusade against the linker, replacing the image with embarassing pornography, writing hateful, threatening letters, and generally making my company look like it's staffed entirely by petulant five-year-olds.
When you go to hire a person, you have to decide not only whether they have the technical chops to do the job, but also the judgment and temperament to "do the right thing" when difficult situations arise. In the Fuddrucker's case, the game creator showed acceptable technical prowess, but also the sort of bad judgment, unwillingness to pursue nondestructive solutions, and borderline sociopathy that would make any sane boss worry about how the guy would represent his company.
Then the game would be called "Tofu Time".
"Talmudic"? That would imply that I'm drawing all my conclusions from the article itself. I've actually read a couple of Lessig's books and occasionally visited his blog, so in reality I'm merely summarizing arguments Lessig has made in other forums. Further, this was only necessary because your retort showed that you didn't grasp the full implications of what he was saying.
Now, if you were unfamiliar with Lessig's work before, his op-ed piece was far too terse, so I'm not holding that against you. However, he has done a masterful job explaining and defending his ideas in other forums. Maybe he had more pressing things to do, maybe the magazine sprung the request on him, or maybe six paragraphs is what they actually wanted. While I wasn't impressed by this particular piece either, the one thing you can't blame its quality on is a lack of ideas or understanding in Lessig himself.
Here
I call shenanigans on your bullshit.
Trusted Computing measures won't simply allow copyright holders to "enforce their copyright." It will allow them the ability to decide whether to permit any given use of a work, whether requiring such permission makes sense under copyright law or not. They can deny uses that would normally be covered under fair use, and continue their complete control long after copyright expires.
I also deny your second premise: that such a state of affairs wouldn't diminish the value of the public domain which currently exists. In order for the public domain to remain relevant, it has to be continually refreshed with new ideas. Back when works only fifteen years old could be taken and profitably used, the public domain was an extremely valuable tool. Now the only works in the public domain (excluding a handful that were explicitly put into the public domain by the owners) are decrepit and don't interact well with the most powerful ideas in our society. The public domain meant to be a pool of ideas that fed our society, not just a nostalgic trip down memory lane.
Software really should have a separate copyright system. If we were still under the "fourteen years" copyright rule that existed when the U.S. was founded, we would right now be right around the time when Linux 0.0.1, Windows 3.1, and Word 5.5 fell into the public domain. It's hard to argue that these products have any commercial value, but under current copyright law, they don't fall to the public domain for another... well, some godawful long time.
The commercial utility of software simply erodes too quickly. Long copyright terms (more than 30 years) on software just don't make sense.
Okay, I'll admit that the follow-on "problem" has always existed. When a truly innovative game became a huge commercial success, people copied and remixed ruthlessly. Some of the follow-ons could even be described as innovative in their own right: the creators took the genre in a slightly different direction, or simply added the sort of polish that turned the game into an outstanding example of what the genre could be.
But the fact that the problem has always existed, and has given rise to some creativity in its own right, doesn't mean that there isn't a downside. Every time a publisher decides, "Our most promising route to commercial success is a quick Starcraft knockoff," it takes the time and energy that could otherwise have gone into exploring a more innovative idea.
You're missing the point, as evidenced by your Holodeck reference. When people complain about the lack of creativity in games, it's usually the case that "more realistic graphics" is the last thing on their list. Katamari Damacy is often listed as one of the really innovative games, despite having among the most primitive graphics I've ever seen on the PS2. For other examples, check out the Indy Gaming Jam, a small event held each year where a group of developers come together and churn out a bunch of games over the course of a few days.
Each year has a different technology focus. For example, the first one focused on sprites in gameplay, and led to a series of games where the player controls thousands upon thousands of units. The most recent Jam, subtitled, "Physics must be good for something besides ragdolls and exploding crates!" led to one game where your goal was to help a yoga master maintain increasingly difficult positions.
None of these games is intended to be a runaway blockbuster. But it's a good indication of just how tiny a fraction of potential gaming ideas actually get commercial attention.
I'm not sure that makes sense. Sure, a diverse infrastructure is harder to crack (though also requires more expertise to maintain). But then turning around and saying, "That's why everything should be cross-platform" is worrisome, because it undercuts the diversity that you're relying on for security.
Simple answer #1: Because barring a thorough IQ testing of the New Orleans population that shows them to be basically dumber than the people who chose to live elsewhere, I reject your assertion of stupidity. We do things for all manner of reasons. Some people probably chose to live there because they were born and raised. Others saw all the other people living there and just assumed it was "safe enough". Still others were aware of the problem, but figured, "Hey, that's why my tax dollars are going towards building levees." Finally, some might have been eager to move to a safer location, but were waiting until they could afford to make the move.
These are the sorts of thought processes you and I use to make our own decisions. Individuals are notoriously bad at gauging risk, and while it might gratify your ego to think how much smarter you are than every one of the citizen of New Orleans who just lost their homes, the simple fact is that you and I have both made unwitting decisions in our lives that may come back to bite us.
Simple answer #2: Because everyone does stupid things at one time or another, or suffers the consequences of the stupid or greedy actions of others. Since it isn't possible to choose correctly in every decision we make, why is it a moral good to demand that everyone receive the full consequences of their bad decisions?
Government intervention can be a wonderful thing. The government programs we've created have given us cleaner drinking water, safer food, medicine, and workplaces, and emergency relief when the vagaries of life overwhelm local resources.
If things ever get bad in your neck of the woods, I'm happy that my tax dollars will protect you from the full logical consequences of your philosophy of rugged individualism.
If we were just talking about New Orleans, I might agree with you. Building a city below sea level, that close to the sea, is asking for trouble. But you cannot seriously be considering abandoning the entire coast south of Virginia.
The first obvious problem is that people need to live there to run the ports. More important, most of the trouble caused by hurricanes can be mitigated by having proper building codes and early warning systems. For example, 2004 was a very bad year for hurricanes, but only resulted in about twenty deaths in the United States.
Where we choose to live has much less effect on our mortality rate than what we choose for occupations, what we choose to eat, how we choose to drive, and whether we choose to smoke. People cannot be written off as irredeemably stupid just because they chose to live in a major metropolitan area within fifty miles of the coast. If you want to talk about magnets for stupidity, McDonalds is an ideal candidate.
Taxes aren't taken at gunpoint. They're taken because of the decisions of your elected representatives, who have been duly authorized to make such decisions.
Now, maybe Nawlins is just one of those places where it doesn't make economic sense to put a city. But name one area of the country that is fundamentally safe from major disasters. So when things overwhelm a local population, the rest of us pitch in. Why do you find that idea so threatening?
Okay, why whould you want to do this? I did it because Ubuntu's sudo system turns my everyday password into a root password. That struck me as a security risk. As the sole administrator of my personal boxes, I'm quite sure that if the logs say that root did something, it was me what done it.
Okay, I'm coming around a bit. I don't have time for a full response, but I don't see a simple percentage working, because the percent you can demand is very much a function of how the source work is used. For example, somebody uses a song of mine in a movie. Is it the full song, or just a few seconds? Is it playing in the background, or is it the audience's main focus? Is it the second song on the end credits (presumably to be heard after everyone has left the theater and turned off the VCR)?
I guess I can see a use for a dual license, where a work is licensed both under CC-NC and CC-RoyaltyScheme. And I guess there is something compelling about letting people define a full-fledged system within the confines of traditional copyright law.
This is a bit unnerving. I came to Slashdot, and actually had to reconsider my original opinion. I'm feeling a bit lightheaded.
Apparently, Toone is one of the handful of people willing to provide Orlowski with deliciously inflammatory quotes at a moment's notice. From this article:Sure, Wikipedia has been an unmitigated economic disaster, chewing up hundreds of millions in startup capital while providing no benefit to anybody... no, wait. That was pets.com.
When Toone says, "[geeks think] that the geek experience somehow supplants all previous culture and creative expression," it's clear that he is either making stuff up to get under peoples' skins, or is basing his impressions on the extreme fringe. Either way, he and Orlowski both seem to feel personally threatened by the idea of open culture. My theory is that they've both got too much invested in the idea that "quality is paid for". For Orlowski, the fact that he gets paid to write his drivel is the very thing that raises it above the drivel unpaid masses to the level of "Good Culture". So if a significant number of people prefer the work of "amateurs", then what is it that gives him a right to a paycheck?
Okay, nothing good comes from armchair psychoanalysis. But if you saw the hatchet job he did on Lessig, well, the bastard deserves far worse.
I hope that in your attempts to bring enlightenment to the musical masses, you don't go overboard and turn musicians away from a powerful promotional tool. I really don't see how the people at Creative Commons could be any clearer about how their license works. I'm sorry if "many artists" jumped onto the bandwagon without understanding the details, but they shouldn't be blaming anyone but themselves.
Nor do I see that the CC would be improved by adding your licenses into the mix. The CC is about letting people say, "Here's what you can do with this work, without involving me in any way." I don't see how a license that took pages of legalese to say, "Ask me first" would serve anybody, including the people who wanted to be asked first. Nor do I see any hope for the royalties license. Since everybody is going to have a slightly different idea of what constitutes a proper royalty formula, the end result will be so complicated and error prone that you probably ought to bring a lawyer in anyways. But above and beyond that, these additional licenses simply fly in the face of the goals of the Creative Commons.
If you think a series of royalties boilerplates would be useful to the world, have a lawyer draw them up, and publish them for anyone to use. In essence, that's all CC is doing.
[delete rant about proper spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, along with a WTF regarding your use of the "double period".]
1) A Creative Commons license is not an EULA. The Creative Commons licenses does not say anything about how the end user can use the work being licensed. Like the GPL, the CC licenses only grant additional rights to potential redistributors, which is a distinct group.
2) Not all EULAs are equally enforceable. For example, good luck trying to enforce mine.
3) An EULA is NOT necessary for enforcing copyright. Quite the contrary, EULAs are generally where people shove stuff that they know damned well wouldn't be enforceable under simple copyright.
4) Okay, I have to know. What is it with those double-periods?
The problem you cite (and, come to think of it, Orlowski cites as well) doesn't exist, because the Creative Commons offers both "commercial-ok" and "non-commercial-only" versions of its license. If you're not okay with commercial entities picking up your work, it's pretty obvious which one to use.
You can also choose whether or not the license is "GPL-like", in that you can say that anyone republishing or modifying your work must make the work available to others under the same terms and in an editable format. If a corporation can pick up your work and improve it, but can't demand exclusive rights to those improvements, it's a huge check on their power.
In essence, there is no single license, even though the author of the article gives no indication that such fine-grained control exists.
I really can't imagine it being profitable for them to buy thousands of a song to increase its ranking. Remember that Apple keeps a cut of the profits. Buying the songs wouldn't cost them nothing.
That's not the way this sort of research usually works. Rather than "fixing the gene", their likely goal is to figure out what protein it codes for, then figure out the metabolic pathways that the protein is involved in, and then see what sort of drugs can be formulated to make those processes work the way they'd like.
My alternative proposal: The Kid-a-pult 5000! Improvements over the Kid-a-pult 4500 include:
* Interface with NOAA for more accurate wind speed predictions.
* Computerized targeting system that interfaces with Google Maps.
* Increased payload capacity for the Mickey D's generation. Now you can launch your kid and her backpack at the same time.
* $200,000 in death and dismemberment coverage.
Biodiesel, sheesh. You people just don't know how to think big.
5) Talk to the guy, explain in a constructive way how you think his managing could be improved, ask him why he does the things he does, and try to understand that it will be difficult to change.
Maybe I'm being wildly naive to think that a friendly chat with your boss is anywhere near as fun or satisfying as setting him up for failure. But it seems to me that when everyone is swearing that your options are "abandon ship," "destroy him," "cover your ears and pretend the problem will go away by itself," and "spend five years earning a business degree so you can have his job," then people are suffering from an odd sort of tunnel vision.
Slashdot, as we well know, is both frequented almost entirely by males, and the last remaining bastion of erudite conversation and higher discourse on the Internet.
If you need proof of the intellectual superiority of the Male, look no further than Slashdot.org.
Two words: Vi. Oxx.
We live in a shamelessly corporate age, and you simply cannot trust that the drugs the FDA approves are actually safe. IANAD(octor), but my advice would to take only those drugs which you absolutely need, and give new drugs five or six years on the market unless the benefits are just too important to pass up. Somehow, I don't consider "eliminating sleep from my life" to be a medical necessity.
You read wrong. The problem is, there is a direct, linear correlation between body size and amount of time spent sleeping, that has nothing to do with whether one is predator or prey. For example, mice spend the vast majority of their time asleep, while cats spend a good 75% of their time asleep. When you get up to human sized creatures, you expect to see them spend about a third of their life asleep. Elephants sleep about four hours a night. What they do with all those long, dark hours is anybody's guess.
The question of why we sleep is still a bit of a mystery to me, but if you're simply looking at it as "defense from predators", you're going to fundamentally misunderstand the phenomenon.
Now, if I were a spammer, instead of trying to randomly generate content with scripts, I would have the script copy entries from other blogs, and insert links throughout. I would also use CSS to make the links look like normal text. Finally, I'd get one of those "makepovertyhistory.org" banners on the top right hand corner of the screen, because they seem to disable clicks to the button that flags inappropriate content.
Also, check out this nifty trick. Way to get all the benefits of a spamful blog, but make people skittish about reporting it.