I'll never understand that false dichotomy. Saying Apple is primarily a hardware company or Apple is really a software company is like saying that light is primarily a particle or light is really just a wave.
It's both: Apple has a dual nature, and there is no need to oversimplify the situation.
Tools that both sides could use 'equally' would not achieve the desired end. Why not? Ideally, the choosing of a leader should be based on their ideas and contributions to society - not because one side had a better voice for communicating those ideas.
Frankly, if Obama were to fund the development for a tool that could prove useful to others, even competitors, and then release those tools to the public, that would be yet another example of his shining leadership ability and clarity of forethought.
He would be making a contribution to society, and acknowledging that he has better ideas and is not afraid to play on a level field with his opponent, all in one fell swoop.
He argued against infinite copyright in front of the supreme court, against BigMedia's interest.
The majority of works yield no economic benefit whatsoever even just a few decades past their creation. They sit in a vault and age and degrade and are lost forever. Read Lessig's book on copyright for more insight. The economic impact on the studios of limited copyright is much less than its perceived impact. In fact, one might argue that once a work has no more economic benefit to its owner, the owner would do better to license it freely so that it may live on as a derivative work and return some degree of notoriety and prestige to its founding author.
I doubt he'd be electable in a state which contains a large percentage (if not the largest) of content providers.
I disagree. He is strongly anti-piracy, and has the support of major content providers with his Creative Commons initiative. The copyright reforms he seeks to implement are geared mainly towards removing the legal barrier towards creating fair-use derivative works of content and facilitating amateur content creation. This may not be a savory notion for the big studios, but it is not a life-or-death burden on their business models, either.
Thank you for being one of the few people who actually links to the original publication when citing a scientific advance. I can't tell you how aggravating it is to try to look these things up when half the time they don't even tell you the name of the researcher who made the break through.
Temperature is not a measure of the average speed of the particles in a system, but rather their average translational kinetic energy, which is a function of their speed when relativistic effects are not taken into account. However, there is no limit to the kinetic energy as speed increases towards c, and thus no limit to temperature. The story is a bit more complicated, but this is the first thing you overlooked.
There is a wiki on Lawrence Lessig's blog (author of Free Culture and creator of Creative Commons) here. He is proposing that we craft our reply there.
I think that professors should assign students to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their grade. All entries and modifications should be run passed the professor first, of course, and all factual assertions should be cited - but I think that there is an enormous opportunity to increase the value of both the encyclopedia and the students' educational experience. Learning to write articles and express factual information succinctly is just too important a skill to forgo. Also, if Academia were to become more involved in the quality control of the encyclopedia, they might be more apt to use it.
What you should have the right to do is make a backup copy for safekeeping, or for viewing on a device that doesn't have a DVD drive/player (notebook PC, iPod, whatever).
Don't forget having the ability to rip certain parts of the movie to disk to edit and play with, use for presentations (PowerPoint, etc...), and just plain old make parodies of. Making amateur derivative works without charging for them is beneficial to society as a whole. Just look at youtube.com to see countless examples. The real problem is that user-created content is starting to steal the spotlight from Big Media, and DRM is one way to lock out the non-conglomerates from competing.
It really grinds my gears when industry lobbyists and shills use inflammatory rhetoric to exaggerate the impact of mundane, victimless crimes.
It's a semantic point and one not even worth making. If you think that there are no victims when people's identities are assumed by others for nefarious purposes, then it has clearly never happened to you. I'd be curious to see how you felt when you had to spend countless hours of your life in aggrevation trying (perhaps futilely) to restore your credit and repair the possible damage to your reputation when some asshat overseas assumes your identity to purchase $100,000 worth of electronics and registers a kiddie-porn site in your name. These things do happen and are not at all uncommon.
In short, using the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is misleading, but using the word 'theft' to describe those things that are deprived to the victims of identity theft is perfectly acceptable. In the latter case there are often very real victims with very real things that are deprived them.
Actually a peephole reverser is quite easy to make. In most hotels, for instance, the peephole to your door is made of two tubes that thread together. Simply unscrewing the hole from one end allows you to remove it, and when placed head to head with another peephole will allow you to see inside unobstructed. I discovered this once at a hotel that I stayed at when the construction crew had dropped one in the hallway. It's pretty nifty, but the field of view is only a few degrees, so unless the object of interest is standing directly in front of the door, you are not going to see much of the inside.
Not always. I right-click on stuff all the time, but don't get the pop-up -- have to ctrl-click. Don't have an example cause I'm not in front of my Mac right now, but there's definite inconsistencies there.
If you are using a Mighty Mouse, the problem may be that your finger is still touching the left-most side of the mouse. I discovered that right clicking only seems to work when only one finger at a time is resting on top of the mouse, which I personally find ergonomically disadvantageous. Just a thought.
Maybe if advertisers stopped making commercials that are crap, they wouldn't need to lock us out of fast forward during commercials.
I have no problem with commercials, per se. It's just that I can't stand being interrupted from a program to watch them. I'd rather the program start late and end early for the commercials to air, than to be subjected to constant interruption. FWIW, I have a Tivo and so it's not really a problem for me now, but I don't mind the commercials when aired before and after a show like they do on the BBC.
Once they'd idly play solitaire; now they idly click on a porn site. Others, though, succumb to addiction: Most addictions are to do with internal emptiness, wanting to fill up dead space, and addiction is always destructive.
And as everyone knows - solitaire is in no way addicting....
Come clean, apologise publicly, recall products, do whatever you can to ensure that you have supported and looked after your customers.
Like taking down a web page that has false information on it and making sure that nobody else is being misled? Has ATI denied any wrong doing, or are they more likely just in the process of fixing a mistake?
Let's imagine a water company which has two types of customers: some who use water when they need it and some who leave the water running all day, the sprinklers on the lawn all night, etc.
Well, except that in this case, you're not paying the ISP for the water but for the capacity of the pipes. The water is coming from sources outside of the ISP and thus isn't a scarce resource. In fact, when you signed up for your pipe-service, you understood that you were paying for the maintenance and capacity of the pipes, which is often claimed to be "unlimited", but upon having them installed, you notice that the same pipe is feeding both your home and your neighbor's home, and their neighbor's home.
you were the first type of customer, wouldn't you be annoyed if you found out you were paying the same as the second type? Wouldn't you expect them to pay more, or perhpas face some restrictions?
If the first type of customer gets upset at the second type of customer, then they should also get upset at buffets that charge the same amount of money to every customer regardless of the amount that they intend to eat. But then, that is the whole concept of a buffet, isn't it? You enter into an agreement with the provider knowing that you are getting a service that you value appropriately enough to pay for. If you think you should be getting a better deal because some people consume more per unit price than you do, then nothing stops you from trying to make your own arrangements, but if the business is not willing to enter into such an agreement with you, then you are free to find another who will. This is the market place at work, and how other people choose to spend their money has no impact on how you should choose to spend yours.
What is important is that copyrights and trademarks be respected, otherwise there is no incentive to create boardgames that furthur human knowledge, culture, and society.
Please back this statement up with both argument and conclusion based on reason and empirical evidence supported by scientific methods and statistics. I'm a bit skeptical.
The fact that WikiPedia can be used in such a manner, terribly diminishes the worth of WikiPedia's articles. How do you know an article that is based on fact vs. an article that is based on vindictiveness?
WikiPedia is a great concept, but it needs to grow up before it can earn the place in society that so many ascribe to it now. Part of that growing up process will be accountability of its authors and responsibility to its readers.
The worth of Wikipedia and its articles are a function of the person who is using them. The site is up-front and forthcoming about the nature of the articles. They make no claims that every article was written by an expert with credentials. But then again, even "experts with credentials" can be mistaken and/or vindictive - just look at the state of American politics (many experts trying to slant the truth and misinform the public for their own gain).
No, the worth in Wikipedia does come from its openness and ability for anyone to contribute. Every change to an article is documented with a revision history. When articles are vandalized or mistakes are made, it is possible to revert back to the previously more accurate version.
But more importantly than this, there is a lesson to be learned - don't believe what you read just because it is in print, or even merely because an "expert" tells you. Every bit of information that you retain should also be filed along with a credibility rating. An article on Wikipedia with no references or citations isn't very likely to merit a high credibility rating - so don't give it one.
The problem is not that Wikipedia isn't responsible and accountable to its readers - they provide even the source code to operate your own wiki - but rather that it is human nature to retain and assert information as being absolute, or to be gullible, or to be too lazy to do a bit of fact checking. We live in a society where political speeches are being reduced to ten second sound bytes for consumption and politicians argue past one another by playing at semantics. As a people, we must demand more from ourselves. There can be no avoiding deep and laborious thinking on important issues and an air of healthy skepticism when presented with accounts thereof.
So, in a sense you are right - WikiPedia is a great concept, but society needs to grow up before it can claim to utilize it as such. The problem is not in the tool, but in the craftsman.
Exchange of ideas or exchange of currency? I'm not really sure which one they don't want hurt.
Well, anyone can and does publish to the arXiv. There are many free sources of information. If there is a market for their publication to remain offline then so be it. Each falls into its own niche and serves its own purpose. Anyone beg to differ?
Arguably, Sherman is right -- but I enjoy much more the fact that this whole r00tkit fiasco has set DRM back by years. Gogogo poor implementations!
First let's take a look at the claim that Sony was merely trying to add a layer of protection to their IP by using XCP and weren't aware of the potential security flaws.
For starters, if they just wanted to encrypt their data or have a program running in the background that prevented the user from opening a certain application, this is all possible with XCP. In fact, the only reason to use XCP is to bypass the built-in security measures that your computer should have immutably enabled and functioning. That is, they wanted their DRM software to be in a position of ultimate control over your computer. Ordinary security features prevented this, so they install XCP to hijack your computer, to bypass security - and not only that, but they provide that control to any program that prefixes its name with $sys$. That is, XCP is a security flaw by its very nature and it was licensed with just this functionality in mind. There is no other reason to use it, but to circumvent security measures.
Now I'd like to address the seemingly prevalent belief that people are up in arms against this software primarily because it may allow a virus or other undesirable program unfettered access to you system.
People are used to security flaws within windows. They happen all the time and MS releases patches. They are not well loved for it, but for the most part, people continue to use windows and tolerate the seemingly ubiquitous lack of security. Why then, would they make an exception for Sony's case? I believe the answer lies not in the DRM itself, but in Sony's arrogant and anti-consumer attitude that they're right to control their "property" usurps the consumer's right to control the functionality of his or her computer.
One statement that whoever-it-was in this interview made in defense of Sony was that DVD's have been DRMed forever. You can't rip them to disk, you can't copy them, you can't even play them in non-licensed players. CDs, on the other hand, (as manufactured by Sony) are designed not to prevent you from playing them, or copying them, or presumably using them as you see fit, but rather to prevent you from copying in excess and giving too much of Sony's IP away without their consent. The problem with this logic is that for one thing, nobody is giving the movie companies kudos for locking down their DVDs. That I can't legally rip my copy of Spaceballs to my iPod video isn't a fact that gains MGM much love. And secondly, CDs were never designed to be crippled in the first place. When I buy a CD, I expect it to behave like a CD. Sony wants to change the way CDs behave - and the only notice they give you about it is an enigmatic little "CP" icon and the words "content protected". Content protection sounds good to me - does that mean that my CDs will scratch less, or that if I lose the CD, the content will continue to be made available to me, because I paid for the content? I thought not.
Lastly, I'd like to take issue with the notion that the Sony fiasco has set DRM back for years. I don't think it has. In the official release, Sony has only recalled the discs with XCP and has all but promised that future CDs will be released with some form of DRM. As long as the methodology doesn't usurp the functionality of the computer or provide in any egregious way a security risk, Sony will continue to distribute crippled CDs. That is, after all, the reason for the fiasco in the first place. It wasn't the DRM that got them in hot water, it was the way they went about achieving it. There are still many CDs out there with the "CP" logo that Sony hasn't recalled. Santana's newest CD comes to mind.
This is the way that the future is going to go. DRM has more than a foot in the door, it nearly has a whole leg. The Sony fiasco must serve as a wake-up-call for us, or we risk losing the public domain forever. (DRM + DMCA = unlimited copyright terms) We mu
... using only one person and a length of rope, simply bind the bovine's legs with your back agains the beast pull the rope from under your legs while using your back to gain leverage.
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Well, I think Scrabble has been long enough for any patent to expire...
I'll never understand that false dichotomy. Saying Apple is primarily a hardware company or Apple is really a software company is like saying that light is primarily a particle or light is really just a wave.
It's both: Apple has a dual nature, and there is no need to oversimplify the situation.
Frankly, if Obama were to fund the development for a tool that could prove useful to others, even competitors, and then release those tools to the public, that would be yet another example of his shining leadership ability and clarity of forethought.
He would be making a contribution to society, and acknowledging that he has better ideas and is not afraid to play on a level field with his opponent, all in one fell swoop.
He argued against infinite copyright in front of the supreme court, against BigMedia's interest.
The majority of works yield no economic benefit whatsoever even just a few decades past their creation. They sit in a vault and age and degrade and are lost forever. Read Lessig's book on copyright for more insight. The economic impact on the studios of limited copyright is much less than its perceived impact. In fact, one might argue that once a work has no more economic benefit to its owner, the owner would do better to license it freely so that it may live on as a derivative work and return some degree of notoriety and prestige to its founding author.
I doubt he'd be electable in a state which contains a large percentage (if not the largest) of content providers.
I disagree. He is strongly anti-piracy, and has the support of major content providers with his Creative Commons initiative. The copyright reforms he seeks to implement are geared mainly towards removing the legal barrier towards creating fair-use derivative works of content and facilitating amateur content creation. This may not be a savory notion for the big studios, but it is not a life-or-death burden on their business models, either.
Thank you for being one of the few people who actually links to the original publication when citing a scientific advance. I can't tell you how aggravating it is to try to look these things up when half the time they don't even tell you the name of the researcher who made the break through.
Temperature is not a measure of the average speed of the particles in a system, but rather their average translational kinetic energy, which is a function of their speed when relativistic effects are not taken into account. However, there is no limit to the kinetic energy as speed increases towards c, and thus no limit to temperature. The story is a bit more complicated, but this is the first thing you overlooked.
Not to mention the fact that they're likely to charge a premium to give you the ability to do something that you should have the right to do anyway.
It's a real racket, almost like selling "protection".
There is a wiki on Lawrence Lessig's blog (author of Free Culture and creator of Creative Commons) here. He is proposing that we craft our reply there.
I think that professors should assign students to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their grade. All entries and modifications should be run passed the professor first, of course, and all factual assertions should be cited - but I think that there is an enormous opportunity to increase the value of both the encyclopedia and the students' educational experience. Learning to write articles and express factual information succinctly is just too important a skill to forgo. Also, if Academia were to become more involved in the quality control of the encyclopedia, they might be more apt to use it.
What you should have the right to do is make a backup copy for safekeeping, or for viewing on a device that doesn't have a DVD drive/player (notebook PC, iPod, whatever).
Don't forget having the ability to rip certain parts of the movie to disk to edit and play with, use for presentations (PowerPoint, etc...), and just plain old make parodies of. Making amateur derivative works without charging for them is beneficial to society as a whole. Just look at youtube.com to see countless examples. The real problem is that user-created content is starting to steal the spotlight from Big Media, and DRM is one way to lock out the non-conglomerates from competing.
It really grinds my gears when industry lobbyists and shills use inflammatory rhetoric to exaggerate the impact of mundane, victimless crimes.
It's a semantic point and one not even worth making. If you think that there are no victims when people's identities are assumed by others for nefarious purposes, then it has clearly never happened to you. I'd be curious to see how you felt when you had to spend countless hours of your life in aggrevation trying (perhaps futilely) to restore your credit and repair the possible damage to your reputation when some asshat overseas assumes your identity to purchase $100,000 worth of electronics and registers a kiddie-porn site in your name. These things do happen and are not at all uncommon.
In short, using the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is misleading, but using the word 'theft' to describe those things that are deprived to the victims of identity theft is perfectly acceptable. In the latter case there are often very real victims with very real things that are deprived them.
Actually a peephole reverser is quite easy to make. In most hotels, for instance, the peephole to your door is made of two tubes that thread together. Simply unscrewing the hole from one end allows you to remove it, and when placed head to head with another peephole will allow you to see inside unobstructed. I discovered this once at a hotel that I stayed at when the construction crew had dropped one in the hallway. It's pretty nifty, but the field of view is only a few degrees, so unless the object of interest is standing directly in front of the door, you are not going to see much of the inside.
If you are using a Mighty Mouse, the problem may be that your finger is still touching the left-most side of the mouse. I discovered that right clicking only seems to work when only one finger at a time is resting on top of the mouse, which I personally find ergonomically disadvantageous. Just a thought.
I have no problem with commercials, per se. It's just that I can't stand being interrupted from a program to watch them. I'd rather the program start late and end early for the commercials to air, than to be subjected to constant interruption. FWIW, I have a Tivo and so it's not really a problem for me now, but I don't mind the commercials when aired before and after a show like they do on the BBC.
And as everyone knows - solitaire is in no way addicting....
Like taking down a web page that has false information on it and making sure that nobody else is being misled? Has ATI denied any wrong doing, or are they more likely just in the process of fixing a mistake?
You jest, but have you ever seen this episode of Star Trek.
Basically, your cute idea that everyone should just up and switch ISPs is a pipe dream at best.
No pun intended?
Well, except that in this case, you're not paying the ISP for the water but for the capacity of the pipes. The water is coming from sources outside of the ISP and thus isn't a scarce resource. In fact, when you signed up for your pipe-service, you understood that you were paying for the maintenance and capacity of the pipes, which is often claimed to be "unlimited", but upon having them installed, you notice that the same pipe is feeding both your home and your neighbor's home, and their neighbor's home.
you were the first type of customer, wouldn't you be annoyed if you found out you were paying the same as the second type? Wouldn't you expect them to pay more, or perhpas face some restrictions?
If the first type of customer gets upset at the second type of customer, then they should also get upset at buffets that charge the same amount of money to every customer regardless of the amount that they intend to eat. But then, that is the whole concept of a buffet, isn't it? You enter into an agreement with the provider knowing that you are getting a service that you value appropriately enough to pay for. If you think you should be getting a better deal because some people consume more per unit price than you do, then nothing stops you from trying to make your own arrangements, but if the business is not willing to enter into such an agreement with you, then you are free to find another who will. This is the market place at work, and how other people choose to spend their money has no impact on how you should choose to spend yours.
Please back this statement up with both argument and conclusion based on reason and empirical evidence supported by scientific methods and statistics. I'm a bit skeptical.
The fact that WikiPedia can be used in such a manner, terribly diminishes the worth of WikiPedia's articles. How do you know an article that is based on fact vs. an article that is based on vindictiveness?
WikiPedia is a great concept, but it needs to grow up before it can earn the place in society that so many ascribe to it now. Part of that growing up process will be accountability of its authors and responsibility to its readers.
The worth of Wikipedia and its articles are a function of the person who is using them. The site is up-front and forthcoming about the nature of the articles. They make no claims that every article was written by an expert with credentials. But then again, even "experts with credentials" can be mistaken and/or vindictive - just look at the state of American politics (many experts trying to slant the truth and misinform the public for their own gain).
No, the worth in Wikipedia does come from its openness and ability for anyone to contribute. Every change to an article is documented with a revision history. When articles are vandalized or mistakes are made, it is possible to revert back to the previously more accurate version.
But more importantly than this, there is a lesson to be learned - don't believe what you read just because it is in print, or even merely because an "expert" tells you. Every bit of information that you retain should also be filed along with a credibility rating. An article on Wikipedia with no references or citations isn't very likely to merit a high credibility rating - so don't give it one.
The problem is not that Wikipedia isn't responsible and accountable to its readers - they provide even the source code to operate your own wiki - but rather that it is human nature to retain and assert information as being absolute, or to be gullible, or to be too lazy to do a bit of fact checking. We live in a society where political speeches are being reduced to ten second sound bytes for consumption and politicians argue past one another by playing at semantics. As a people, we must demand more from ourselves. There can be no avoiding deep and laborious thinking on important issues and an air of healthy skepticism when presented with accounts thereof.
So, in a sense you are right - WikiPedia is a great concept, but society needs to grow up before it can claim to utilize it as such. The problem is not in the tool, but in the craftsman.
Well, anyone can and does publish to the arXiv. There are many free sources of information. If there is a market for their publication to remain offline then so be it. Each falls into its own niche and serves its own purpose. Anyone beg to differ?
First let's take a look at the claim that Sony was merely trying to add a layer of protection to their IP by using XCP and weren't aware of the potential security flaws.
For starters, if they just wanted to encrypt their data or have a program running in the background that prevented the user from opening a certain application, this is all possible with XCP. In fact, the only reason to use XCP is to bypass the built-in security measures that your computer should have immutably enabled and functioning. That is, they wanted their DRM software to be in a position of ultimate control over your computer. Ordinary security features prevented this, so they install XCP to hijack your computer, to bypass security - and not only that, but they provide that control to any program that prefixes its name with $sys$. That is, XCP is a security flaw by its very nature and it was licensed with just this functionality in mind. There is no other reason to use it, but to circumvent security measures.
Now I'd like to address the seemingly prevalent belief that people are up in arms against this software primarily because it may allow a virus or other undesirable program unfettered access to you system.
People are used to security flaws within windows. They happen all the time and MS releases patches. They are not well loved for it, but for the most part, people continue to use windows and tolerate the seemingly ubiquitous lack of security. Why then, would they make an exception for Sony's case? I believe the answer lies not in the DRM itself, but in Sony's arrogant and anti-consumer attitude that they're right to control their "property" usurps the consumer's right to control the functionality of his or her computer.
One statement that whoever-it-was in this interview made in defense of Sony was that DVD's have been DRMed forever. You can't rip them to disk, you can't copy them, you can't even play them in non-licensed players. CDs, on the other hand, (as manufactured by Sony) are designed not to prevent you from playing them, or copying them, or presumably using them as you see fit, but rather to prevent you from copying in excess and giving too much of Sony's IP away without their consent. The problem with this logic is that for one thing, nobody is giving the movie companies kudos for locking down their DVDs. That I can't legally rip my copy of Spaceballs to my iPod video isn't a fact that gains MGM much love. And secondly, CDs were never designed to be crippled in the first place. When I buy a CD, I expect it to behave like a CD. Sony wants to change the way CDs behave - and the only notice they give you about it is an enigmatic little "CP" icon and the words "content protected". Content protection sounds good to me - does that mean that my CDs will scratch less, or that if I lose the CD, the content will continue to be made available to me, because I paid for the content? I thought not.
Lastly, I'd like to take issue with the notion that the Sony fiasco has set DRM back for years. I don't think it has. In the official release, Sony has only recalled the discs with XCP and has all but promised that future CDs will be released with some form of DRM. As long as the methodology doesn't usurp the functionality of the computer or provide in any egregious way a security risk, Sony will continue to distribute crippled CDs. That is, after all, the reason for the fiasco in the first place. It wasn't the DRM that got them in hot water, it was the way they went about achieving it. There are still many CDs out there with the "CP" logo that Sony hasn't recalled. Santana's newest CD comes to mind.
This is the way that the future is going to go. DRM has more than a foot in the door, it nearly has a whole leg. The Sony fiasco must serve as a wake-up-call for us, or we risk losing the public domain forever. (DRM + DMCA = unlimited copyright terms) We mu
... using only one person and a length of rope, simply bind the bovine's legs with your back agains the beast pull the rope from under your legs while using your back to gain leverage.