US Copyright law _used_ to say that any copying would infringe, it now makes a specific exemption for all copying required for the normal functioning of the product.
If you software needs to be copied on the drive to be run, and into ram while run, and swapped out, these copies are all allowed, provided they're transient - limited to the duration of use and that they are removed when you no longer own the original.
This was the basis for EULAs, people thought that since copying wasn't allowed, they'd sell you the software and then sell you the right to use it. In a rare fit of common-sense the copyright law was ammended to allow this. It only makes sense after all, if I sell you something I can't very well say that I didn't intend for you to use it. Why should I be able to with software?
This doesn't apply to music or movies, but it likely will as soon as someone pushes it. They're both just data and temporary copies of at least some of them have to be held in memory to allow for error-checking and buffering (especially with portable players).
1) No, but if you observe the same thing with Janis Ian and many other artists you can be pretty sure that he is right.
2) See above, It's pretty conclusive that small bands frequently gain "airplay" via p2p sharing and that while not everyone buys, the larger mind-share means more sales in the end and more profits, especially since many people go straight to the band to purchase their music, where possible. No studies have made a conclusive link between p2p networks and a lowering on musician income.
3) Wrong. Copyright is granted by the government, it can be taken away or modified by the government. As 'we' are the root of the government's power, we have the right to modify copyright. (Though it should be done through the proper channels.)
In fact, there is a strong precedent for taking away someone's right to determine the use of their copyrighted material. Compulsory licensing is succesfully used in a few areas.
The idea of allowing free copying of copyrighted materials and paying the authors via voluntary surveys of users isn't that unreasonable.
What does it mean to have thousands of photos? I've got thousands of photos of cars, of planes, of naked women, etc. Did I deliberately surf to a thousand different sites and knowingly click 'Save Image As' for each one? Hell no, I'd downloaded zip files of images, naughty and nice, as well as used wget to spider whole sites, downloaded some images specifically, and been surprised by other ones that I've got mostly by accident in spidering other content.
It's even more likely that you'll have thousands of images of porn because if you use P2P networks like Gnutella people tend to zip up packages of smaller files. One download turns into thousands of files, all a specific example of an individual crime to someone looking for naughty content.
Combine this with over-zealous prosecutors that would pursue a Traci Lords photo at the age of 17 with the same fervor as rape-photos of a child and you've got the recipe for a legal railroading.
"But, it's still illegal to download kiddy porn, even only once," you say. Sure, but if you search for standard porn terms on Gnutella or Kazaa, etc, you're going to get a wide variety of results. Anti-porn messages from the religious, "standard" porn, brazilian donkey videos, and likely, child porn. Type in "sex video", download the results without paying attention, and you've probably committed a few felonies, yet without the intent to harm anyone or view illegal content.
Then there's the issue that there's a perfectly legal category of porn called "lolitas" (and other things) which is all 18-25 year old women with pigtails and school uniforms. If you see a magazine in a store this is likely to be all legal, if a bit fetish. If you type these terms into a P2P program you might get the real thing.
Of course, intent isn't required to charge someone with posession of child porn... I really hope the next mainstream windows virus has an illegal payload - it'll make more people realize how dangerous laws like that are and how close they could be to being hauled into prison for child abuse, even if everyone including the judge agrees that you didn't intend to download the offensive material.
Is a twelve year old ready for sex with anyone? How about another twelve year old?
I understand your protectiveness, but wouldn't you be almost as upset at someone older who emotionally screwed with your daughter in a non-sexual context?
And, just to play devil's advocate, who says a nine-year old isn't ready for sex? Do you give her a backrub? Does she ever give you one? That's physical pleasure with someone much older, and a family member... Sounds pretty kinky if you think about it, but few people would say it was a problem. But as soon as it crosses the line to genitals it's suddenly morally wrong?
To me it's an issue of exploitation and coercion, not the body part involved. Our society places a lot of weight on sex, and this means that because a taboo was broken (and the child will know this from the hush-hush way things are discussed) they're more likely, imho, to be damaged by the feeling that they did something wrong, or are somehow unclean, than by the physical act.
Would you trust the US government implicitly if you lived in it?
I mean, it's fine for your average Joe. If you don't care about politics or speak out about anything. If you're white and middle-class. If you don't travel overseas or have relatives with last-names similar to terrorists.
But, it's also a safeguard. If you setup a system that survives corrupt officials by doing everything in the open and limiting how they can gather (create?) evidence it might let a few criminals go, but it also protects the innocent against accidental or malicious false-prosecution.
Obviously you also have no privacy in your own house if you're near a window. But how about if I use a laser-bounce listening device, or deep-IR imaging? At that you're not private anywhere unless you've got sound-proofed interior rooms and concrete walls.
Or, we can go with the legal standard, which is that if a reasonable person based on their observations would believe themselves to have the appropriate level of privacy. In this manner, standing in the middle of a busy courtyard with thousands of people milling around and windows overlooking could be considered to be private if the participants in the conversation believed they could not be overheard and if a judge believes this was a reasonable belief.
This is so that people don't have to act like there's a listening device hidden every five feet. There's enough evidence of government wrongdoing and oppression that this would be an orwellian country if everything you did was recorded and monitored. Even if a private citizen evesdrops on you, presumably they don't have the motivation or resources that the government does and thus the potential harm is less.
If you were capable of reading you'd see that I was being sarcastic. The original poster had used a stupid appeal to emotion instead of a logical argument, I was (and I said this plainly) offering another stupid argument, to the other side, as an example of why emotional arguments are pointless. They aren't evidence based so they can't be countered and they're usually fear-based.
The actual argument against cameras is that they're often hidden, leading to people feeling they are private when in fact they are not. At least an observing police officer is usually visible.
And yes, there are different standards that the police are held to than private citizens.
They won't exactly be the most unbiased. Your argument is nothing but a pathetic retread of "Won't *someone* please think of the children."
Instead, ask the first government whistle-blower who is caught and vanished while trying to meet a reporter, because the FBI could use face-recognition software and a vast network of cameras to find him. Stupid emotionally laden arguments are easy.
It's different to have cameras watch you than police officers in their cars because the patrol car is somewhat more visible. You know if you're being followed and watched.
Or, you only pay to re-register the copyright for an additional term, after an original twenty. The fee could be based on the value of the work. Your grocery list could be renewed for the minimum filing fee, a popular movie could cost a few million dollars - enough that you aren't going to pay if you don't anticipate making more money from it.
I'd support a 20 year term for free, with the creation of the work. Then, three ten-year extensions, all based on the value during the original period, or the average of all periods, whichever is more. Fifty years has to be enough to milk anything, yet short enough that the works you grew up with will be available for you to use to create with before your death. Star Wars *is* part of the culture - to forbid people telling stories based on it is really like not allowing the movie Troy because it infringes on the copyrights of Homer.
Heh, that's a funny way to look at it... "Sorry, you bought 50 years of copyright, the extension doesn't come with it."
The problem with corporations holding copyrights is that they will naturally want to extend them to the lifespan of the corporation; effectively infinite. Creators don't really care much as long as it doesn't go away right when they die; perhaps cheating their family out of their income if they get hit by a car the day after they create the work. A corporation can take a longer-term view and the death of one corporation almost always involves the remains being subsumed by another, thus creating long-term assets like real estate.
However, the flaw comes in where these differing lifespans conflict. Copyright is a balance between "the people" and the holder of the copyright. The people agree to forego the natural right of repeating what they've heard others say, and even fund the enforcement of this, in trade for the creators willfully creating more works that will eventually enrich everyone. Without the eventual enrichment of everyone, and in a timeframe near that of a human life so that it's not just a theoretical benefit, there's absolutely no benefit to the people. No reason for them to to pay for copyright enforcement.
IMHO, even "life + X" is way too long. It also creates an incentive for others to "shorten" the duration by arranging an accident. What we need are fixed terms, perhaps done in the 20 + extensions by author or heirs, to a duration of 50 years, or something. If the extensions process wasn't automatic and involved some cost it wouldn't be done for everything. Only works that were still actively being marketed would be worth extending. Software/ROMs from the 80s would be available for the emulator crowd, movies would be available before the film starts to degrade, etc.
We need to return to our X + y [ + y] to a limit of 2X system. Or some minor variation on it - likely we could find ways to streamline it and encourage early release of popular works with taxpayer funded buyouts or something.
As soon as you want me and the rest of society to foot the bill for enforcing an unnatural monopoly on an idea. You want to be able to tell me something or show me a picture, and keep me from telling that idea to someone else or paint the same picture.
Your copyright is a restriction of my right to speak. Further, you want me to pay for this.
I'll do it, if the term is limited. I don't want to be paying to keep Hamlet protected for the benefit of some long-distant relative. You get to base your creations on the works of other, so I'm not going to pay to deprive others of that right. Had Disney not been the chief user of public-domain works their demands for ever-longer copyrights might not be so ironic.
If he gets turned on and joins in, and then the viewer watches this and gets turned on, maybe he'll think a three-way would be okay. Maybe he'll stop thinking of sex with his wife as a thing he owns and instead see it as something they share with easy other. At this point they'll both be happier, and perhaps will learn to enjoy new types of sex.
The problem with conservatives is that they bring so much baggage to the table. Perhaps if you believe in the bible and the host of rules surrounding it, it would make sense that killing is better than sex. To me, it just suggests that perhaps you should ditch the religion (and get better sex).
It's not that I think my morals are better than others, though I do, rather it's that I think imposing your morals on others is the problem. The only exception here is that enforcing that someone can't enforce their morality on others is on the surface hypocritical, but really is the only way to ensure freedom.
The problem is that the airlines are big backers of the ID requirement. It doesn't do a lot to increase security because fake ID is fairly cheap and all terrorists would have to do would be pick suicide bombers without a record. What it does do is increase revenue by cutting out the ticket resale market.
It used to be that you could sell your ticket if you changed your plans, now you have to try to get a partial refund and the airline can sell a last-minute ticket to someone else at three times the cost. If you had sold the ticket they'd have only been paid once - the horror.
In almost all other areas of our society you are able to buy a service and resell it. If I contract to have your company ship an industrial container across the country you can't refuse later because I resold the left-over space and made a profit. If I buy a book you can't stop me from reselling it, or ripping out the pages and selling them individually if I want. The airlines though saw this great opportunity to, using the bogey-man of terrorism, prevent all resale of their products.
You can't even say the 9/11 terrorists would have been caught had we checked ID because they'd have known about the ID checks and bought fake ID or used someone whose record is clean. Wow, so we cost the terrorists a few hundred dollars for fake ID, we don't prevent the attacks, and we burden everyone with this annoying, useless, and potentially dangerous invasive system.
Sure, sometimes trading liberties for security is a good value, but I'd like to see how they honestly expect to improve security. As is, I think I'm being asked to trade liberties for a placebo, and another government-mandated airline bailout package.
The web is a timeless medium. This post will look the same a year or ten from now, except that links to the NYT will only be freely available for a little time. Given that when I write articles I expect them to be valid for more than a few weeks I can't usefully link to the NYT.
In capitalism you often provide a product or a service than honestly cost a lot to make and is truly of value, and people won't buy it because why it's a very nice gizmo, gizmos of that type simply aren't worth what you're asking, even the best gizmo in the world.
This, imho, is where the NYT is. Their archive might cost a lot, it might save some people much more than the $3 it costs to use, but a huge majority of people are simply going to accept my quick summary of the article and not read it once they hit the 'buy access to this article' page. That article might cost $500 in total to host for a year, but I'm just not willing to pay anything 99.999% of the time. If access was free they'd at least get banner views. Maybe it takes a thousand banner views to equal the $3 payment, but they're going to get very very few $3 payments...
Yes. They should do that, to save me having to register.
Otherwise I won't go there. Not a threat, simply a fact. Someone is going to come up with a system that lets me link to their content without expecting everyone to jump through hoops to view it, that someone is going to get me linking to them. At that point I won't care what the NYT does, they aren't going to be relevant. I also don't care what sort of business model this requires, I'm never going to expect casual readers of my site to register at the NYT just to read an article I casually mention so they either make it easier or they don't get the links.
They're free to say that they don't want my links to them, or my friends who won't bother to register to read an article, but then for better or worse, they've essentially opted out of the web. No links means no search engine rating, no search engine rating means no drop-in traffic, no drop-in traffic means no new readers. No new readers means nobody will see their articles, let alone link to them and encourage others to read them, or boost them in search-engine ratings. Spiral of doom.
What can they do then? Let unregistered people in for free after they sit through a three-frame, full-screen ad. Salon does it and I know I'm not going to have to fill anything out or remember a password so I'll sit through it.
Guess which site I'll link to?
Is it a sense of entitlement? No. I don't feel they owe me anything, but I know I'm not going to pay for the right to link to their article, nor will any of my friends. They have the choice of unpaid drop-ins readings ads or nobody browsing their archives at all. I know what I'd choose, but it's up to them. If they go away there'll be someone else doing what they did, but better.
I don't own any Redhat stock, but I don't think their chances are all that bad. There is a huge market untapped for them to fill. Who else makes a good stable server OS that doesn't require gold-plated, diamond-encrusted special hardware? Who sells a ton of *good* support, has a training program widely believed to be very indicitive of actualy skill, and doesn't try to lock you into their product? (As nice as Redhat is, any Linux guy could migrate a server to another distro in a day.)
The business world is starting to distrust Microsoft for any security purposes (servers), can't afford high-end hardware, and doesn't want to be locked into a bad idea with long-term exclusive contracts and format lock-in.
When this takes off, who's the big-name player in the x86 OS market, with a rep for security, good support, fair play, and good price? As soon as businesses can justify Linux to the board they're going to go with Redhat because they're the ones who will have the history.
Maybe it's not a big market in the sense that it's *only* the server market, not enough for them to become an IBM or Microsoft. Many people recognize that companies can offer good value even if they aren't the largest in the world, or a monopoly.
This is simply like ripping your lottery ticket up as soon as the first two numbers indicate you didn't win - it's not going to stop people from playing the game or the odds, the results are just announced more quickly.
What you need to do is assess huge punative damages on parties who file frivolous lawsuits. Bankrupt these opportunistic lawyers and disbar them. That way there'll be some risk to offset the huge potential wins. Otherwise they'll try again in a week over some other imagined offence.
Of course, to do this you'd need to pierce the corporate veil (I think that's the expression) and go after the people funding these things, otherwise you'd simply bankrupt a shell corporation and another would pop up like a cockroach. But IMHO, that'd be a good thing, there are too many laws letting criminals keep unreasonable ammount of money. Like Florida's law exempting your primary residence from bankruptcy settlements. On the surface it's fine, until you have $50M houses. I feel they should be forced to sell the house and then, from the proceeds, can buy a house more in line with the state average (a trailer in a swamp? It *is* Florida after all...) and the rest of the money could go to creditors.
How's trolling working out for you? Do you actually expect people to believe the stuff you say?
On the off chance that you're serious and seriously misguided, let me explain Slashdot. The are hundreds of thousands of people here, they all have different opinions. It's not hypocritical when two different people believe two different things, let alone hundreds of thousands.
Further, you can be upset with the methods being used to pursue an overall action you agree with. I do think that the RIAA/etc should sue the people doing the trading. That's how the law is intended to be used and it leaves people like me who use BitTorrent for ISOs out of the way. However, I dislike the RIAA trying to blame the ISPs for traffic flowing over their network. Sure, it'd be easy to block Kazaa on known ports, but it establishes a bad precedent and soon you've got the ISPs being responsible for blocking *some* of the https: traffic when it all looks alike. Completely unreasonable. Further, their requested damages are insanely high. They're asking for damages, as in lost money, of tens of thousand per victim. As if anyone would have spent ten thousand dollars on music in the last year or so, that's years worth of spending even for a hardcore music lover. The industry has this broken idea (like the BSA) that every copy is one that would have been paid for.
When SCO attacks Linux they aren't simply making unauthorized use of it, they're trying to say that they own it and nobody else can use it. That seems slightly different than people sending protest email to a company that isn't releasing source code to drivers that contain GPLed code. Protest email vs Shutting down Linux... Can you follow?
My point wasn't the musicians who use amps have no music ability, but that they may be biased towards the equipment they're used to using.
A concert violinist (who theoretically only plays accoustical) would have the same music training and a good ear for distortion, but wouldn't have any preconcieved notion of one type of amp over another.
The problem with just asking a modern recording engineer to test amp by listening to them is that they've been hearing the myths and arguments surrounding tubes and transistors for years. It violates the double-blind ideal because they know what tubes sound like and could tell what any amp they were hearing was, as well as I could if I got to read the label.
Those are precisely the people who would be hung up on tube sound and would have convinced themselves in the 80s that digital meant bad sounding.
Nothing tells me that they base their opinions on double-blind tests, or that they're qualified to comment on the possibilities of 24b/96khz audio.
At an appropriate sampling rate you pick up more of the distortion in the analog signal (media, nonlinearities, etc) than you pick up signal. It's why scanning a photographic negative at 16000dpi isn't going to get any more real photographic data. There are plenty of graphic artists who insist on a 250MB file to print at a given size, instead of asking for a certain source resolution. Ditto, imho, with audio people. They don't really understand the underlying stuff (for good reason, few people who aren't audio engineers really do) and so they make a bunch of half-informed assumptions.
It's like people who rag on lossy formats because they don't like MP3s. They say incredibly imbecilic things like "Lossy encoding will always sound like shit" because they don't understand the difference between a flawed acoustic model (bad MP3 encoders), poor reproduction ability (format, and players) and the class of compression (lossy / non-lossy).
The best person to judge amplifiers would be to take a concert violinist, or someone else who doesn't use amps but requires good hearing and a musical "ear".
I went through the same things, except that I found my schedule rolled by an hour or two each day, as I'd get to sleep later. In school/work this meant sleepless thursday nights and crashes all weekend. When unemployed I didn't even notice the disorder unless I had an appointment.
You could try some work-at-home job. If you don't fight my kind of insomnia you don't even notice it, just go to sleep when tired, when not tired, stay up. It was a bit of an adventure, being up nights is peaceful and I got a lot of hobby stuff done, and studying (though I couldn't take the courses).
If you have the "can't sleep while tired" kind of insomnia, well, sorry. That sucks. I've been there a few nights, especially when sick, and it's hell.
I did everything that guy suggested you try. Waking up at a set time. Painful, but school ensured that. I used bright lights (a specific sun lamp), I took melatonin, I didn't exercise late in the day but tried to walk/bike every day. I used the bedroom for sleep only and moved the computer to the living room. I didn't drink/eat anything with caffeine late in the day. Nothing helped at all.
Then, at 25 it just went away. In a month I stopped the rolling sleep, in another I stopped having any sleep problems. I still take over an hour to get to sleep, but I'm always hyper - busy thinking - and that's not that unusual. I've been sleeping "normally" for almost five years now.
As far as I can tell I didn't do anything to cause it. Maybe it's an age thing.
What's wrong with just creating a file? There are many filesystems optimized for this. Sure, the RDBMS isn't doing everything, but it's not a big deal. You use a volume manager (LVM2, EVMS, both on Linux) that performs snapshots and you freeze the filesystem before backups, at the same time you take a snapshot of the database (they all have a way to do this).
You're never going to "use" the RDBMS anyways, as a user. You'll use some client front-end so you don't need to know that the data being returned is from a select statement or a filesystem. You'll simply enter some metadata and get a clickable download link for the file, or somesuch. When you write this system you'll also write the backup scripts that sync the filesystem and database and create snapshots to backup.
Moreover, if you store the files in a filesystem it's *much* easier to make the files available via a file share - something that's optimized for sending just the parts of the 4GB file you want. The select statement has to atomically return the whole thing, a file share lets you seek through, playing the music in the example given, without having to wait for 4GB to be sent.
Too stupid to read? Awww, didjums get infected? Take the PC to the shop and pay them $100 to fix it - ignore their instructions on how to avoid problems in the future, it's only technical mumbo jumbo.
In the future the Darwin awards will be expanded to include those who have permanently removed themselves from the Internet through overwhelming stupidity.
Yup, you can duplicate it, even for business purposes, to your heart's content. I think you need to provide source code to those who ask, which means providing the original HTML. In most cases, a link to wikipedia would be fine.
To be licensed, software must be sold as such. If it's sold as a sale, it is a sale. US copyright law allows for the use of a copyrighted product, even if it involves making transient copies of the software. This is the point that mandatory licensing hung on - now that unlicensed use isn't automatically illegal the customer doesn't need a license.
But, you are right that the BSA doesn't see it as such - they'll take you to the cleaners for every dollar they can get over the smallest "infraction" so reality doesn't matter much.
Just like SCO though, they're a larger threat to their own customers than to anyone else. I wonder how many Ernie Ball's they'll sue before this occurs to them, and if they'll have any customers left.
Slashdot Mirror
US Copyright law _used_ to say that any copying would infringe, it now makes a specific exemption for all copying required for the normal functioning of the product.
If you software needs to be copied on the drive to be run, and into ram while run, and swapped out, these copies are all allowed, provided they're transient - limited to the duration of use and that they are removed when you no longer own the original.
This was the basis for EULAs, people thought that since copying wasn't allowed, they'd sell you the software and then sell you the right to use it. In a rare fit of common-sense the copyright law was ammended to allow this. It only makes sense after all, if I sell you something I can't very well say that I didn't intend for you to use it. Why should I be able to with software?
This doesn't apply to music or movies, but it likely will as soon as someone pushes it. They're both just data and temporary copies of at least some of them have to be held in memory to allow for error-checking and buffering (especially with portable players).
1) No, but if you observe the same thing with Janis Ian and many other artists you can be pretty sure that he is right.
2) See above, It's pretty conclusive that small bands frequently gain "airplay" via p2p sharing and that while not everyone buys, the larger mind-share means more sales in the end and more profits, especially since many people go straight to the band to purchase their music, where possible. No studies have made a conclusive link between p2p networks and a lowering on musician income.
3) Wrong. Copyright is granted by the government, it can be taken away or modified by the government. As 'we' are the root of the government's power, we have the right to modify copyright. (Though it should be done through the proper channels.)
In fact, there is a strong precedent for taking away someone's right to determine the use of their copyrighted material. Compulsory licensing is succesfully used in a few areas.
The idea of allowing free copying of copyrighted materials and paying the authors via voluntary surveys of users isn't that unreasonable.
What does it mean to have thousands of photos? I've got thousands of photos of cars, of planes, of naked women, etc. Did I deliberately surf to a thousand different sites and knowingly click 'Save Image As' for each one? Hell no, I'd downloaded zip files of images, naughty and nice, as well as used wget to spider whole sites, downloaded some images specifically, and been surprised by other ones that I've got mostly by accident in spidering other content.
It's even more likely that you'll have thousands of images of porn because if you use P2P networks like Gnutella people tend to zip up packages of smaller files. One download turns into thousands of files, all a specific example of an individual crime to someone looking for naughty content.
Combine this with over-zealous prosecutors that would pursue a Traci Lords photo at the age of 17 with the same fervor as rape-photos of a child and you've got the recipe for a legal railroading.
"But, it's still illegal to download kiddy porn, even only once," you say. Sure, but if you search for standard porn terms on Gnutella or Kazaa, etc, you're going to get a wide variety of results. Anti-porn messages from the religious, "standard" porn, brazilian donkey videos, and likely, child porn. Type in "sex video", download the results without paying attention, and you've probably committed a few felonies, yet without the intent to harm anyone or view illegal content.
Then there's the issue that there's a perfectly legal category of porn called "lolitas" (and other things) which is all 18-25 year old women with pigtails and school uniforms. If you see a magazine in a store this is likely to be all legal, if a bit fetish. If you type these terms into a P2P program you might get the real thing.
Of course, intent isn't required to charge someone with posession of child porn... I really hope the next mainstream windows virus has an illegal payload - it'll make more people realize how dangerous laws like that are and how close they could be to being hauled into prison for child abuse, even if everyone including the judge agrees that you didn't intend to download the offensive material.
Is a twelve year old ready for sex with anyone? How about another twelve year old?
I understand your protectiveness, but wouldn't you be almost as upset at someone older who emotionally screwed with your daughter in a non-sexual context?
And, just to play devil's advocate, who says a nine-year old isn't ready for sex? Do you give her a backrub? Does she ever give you one? That's physical pleasure with someone much older, and a family member... Sounds pretty kinky if you think about it, but few people would say it was a problem. But as soon as it crosses the line to genitals it's suddenly morally wrong?
To me it's an issue of exploitation and coercion, not the body part involved. Our society places a lot of weight on sex, and this means that because a taboo was broken (and the child will know this from the hush-hush way things are discussed) they're more likely, imho, to be damaged by the feeling that they did something wrong, or are somehow unclean, than by the physical act.
Would you trust the US government implicitly if you lived in it?
I mean, it's fine for your average Joe. If you don't care about politics or speak out about anything. If you're white and middle-class. If you don't travel overseas or have relatives with last-names similar to terrorists.
But, it's also a safeguard. If you setup a system that survives corrupt officials by doing everything in the open and limiting how they can gather (create?) evidence it might let a few criminals go, but it also protects the innocent against accidental or malicious false-prosecution.
Obviously you also have no privacy in your own house if you're near a window. But how about if I use a laser-bounce listening device, or deep-IR imaging? At that you're not private anywhere unless you've got sound-proofed interior rooms and concrete walls.
Or, we can go with the legal standard, which is that if a reasonable person based on their observations would believe themselves to have the appropriate level of privacy. In this manner, standing in the middle of a busy courtyard with thousands of people milling around and windows overlooking could be considered to be private if the participants in the conversation believed they could not be overheard and if a judge believes this was a reasonable belief.
This is so that people don't have to act like there's a listening device hidden every five feet. There's enough evidence of government wrongdoing and oppression that this would be an orwellian country if everything you did was recorded and monitored. Even if a private citizen evesdrops on you, presumably they don't have the motivation or resources that the government does and thus the potential harm is less.
If you were capable of reading you'd see that I was being sarcastic. The original poster had used a stupid appeal to emotion instead of a logical argument, I was (and I said this plainly) offering another stupid argument, to the other side, as an example of why emotional arguments are pointless. They aren't evidence based so they can't be countered and they're usually fear-based.
The actual argument against cameras is that they're often hidden, leading to people feeling they are private when in fact they are not. At least an observing police officer is usually visible.
And yes, there are different standards that the police are held to than private citizens.
They won't exactly be the most unbiased. Your argument is nothing but a pathetic retread of "Won't *someone* please think of the children."
Instead, ask the first government whistle-blower who is caught and vanished while trying to meet a reporter, because the FBI could use face-recognition software and a vast network of cameras to find him. Stupid emotionally laden arguments are easy.
It's different to have cameras watch you than police officers in their cars because the patrol car is somewhat more visible. You know if you're being followed and watched.
Or, you only pay to re-register the copyright for an additional term, after an original twenty. The fee could be based on the value of the work. Your grocery list could be renewed for the minimum filing fee, a popular movie could cost a few million dollars - enough that you aren't going to pay if you don't anticipate making more money from it.
I'd support a 20 year term for free, with the creation of the work. Then, three ten-year extensions, all based on the value during the original period, or the average of all periods, whichever is more. Fifty years has to be enough to milk anything, yet short enough that the works you grew up with will be available for you to use to create with before your death. Star Wars *is* part of the culture - to forbid people telling stories based on it is really like not allowing the movie Troy because it infringes on the copyrights of Homer.
Heh, that's a funny way to look at it... "Sorry, you bought 50 years of copyright, the extension doesn't come with it."
The problem with corporations holding copyrights is that they will naturally want to extend them to the lifespan of the corporation; effectively infinite. Creators don't really care much as long as it doesn't go away right when they die; perhaps cheating their family out of their income if they get hit by a car the day after they create the work. A corporation can take a longer-term view and the death of one corporation almost always involves the remains being subsumed by another, thus creating long-term assets like real estate.
However, the flaw comes in where these differing lifespans conflict. Copyright is a balance between "the people" and the holder of the copyright. The people agree to forego the natural right of repeating what they've heard others say, and even fund the enforcement of this, in trade for the creators willfully creating more works that will eventually enrich everyone. Without the eventual enrichment of everyone, and in a timeframe near that of a human life so that it's not just a theoretical benefit, there's absolutely no benefit to the people. No reason for them to to pay for copyright enforcement.
IMHO, even "life + X" is way too long. It also creates an incentive for others to "shorten" the duration by arranging an accident. What we need are fixed terms, perhaps done in the 20 + extensions by author or heirs, to a duration of 50 years, or something. If the extensions process wasn't automatic and involved some cost it wouldn't be done for everything. Only works that were still actively being marketed would be worth extending. Software/ROMs from the 80s would be available for the emulator crowd, movies would be available before the film starts to degrade, etc.
We need to return to our X + y [ + y] to a limit of 2X system. Or some minor variation on it - likely we could find ways to streamline it and encourage early release of popular works with taxpayer funded buyouts or something.
As soon as you want me and the rest of society to foot the bill for enforcing an unnatural monopoly on an idea. You want to be able to tell me something or show me a picture, and keep me from telling that idea to someone else or paint the same picture.
Your copyright is a restriction of my right to speak. Further, you want me to pay for this.
I'll do it, if the term is limited. I don't want to be paying to keep Hamlet protected for the benefit of some long-distant relative. You get to base your creations on the works of other, so I'm not going to pay to deprive others of that right. Had Disney not been the chief user of public-domain works their demands for ever-longer copyrights might not be so ironic.
If he gets turned on and joins in, and then the viewer watches this and gets turned on, maybe he'll think a three-way would be okay. Maybe he'll stop thinking of sex with his wife as a thing he owns and instead see it as something they share with easy other. At this point they'll both be happier, and perhaps will learn to enjoy new types of sex.
The problem with conservatives is that they bring so much baggage to the table. Perhaps if you believe in the bible and the host of rules surrounding it, it would make sense that killing is better than sex. To me, it just suggests that perhaps you should ditch the religion (and get better sex).
It's not that I think my morals are better than others, though I do, rather it's that I think imposing your morals on others is the problem. The only exception here is that enforcing that someone can't enforce their morality on others is on the surface hypocritical, but really is the only way to ensure freedom.
The problem is that the airlines are big backers of the ID requirement. It doesn't do a lot to increase security because fake ID is fairly cheap and all terrorists would have to do would be pick suicide bombers without a record. What it does do is increase revenue by cutting out the ticket resale market.
It used to be that you could sell your ticket if you changed your plans, now you have to try to get a partial refund and the airline can sell a last-minute ticket to someone else at three times the cost. If you had sold the ticket they'd have only been paid once - the horror.
In almost all other areas of our society you are able to buy a service and resell it. If I contract to have your company ship an industrial container across the country you can't refuse later because I resold the left-over space and made a profit. If I buy a book you can't stop me from reselling it, or ripping out the pages and selling them individually if I want. The airlines though saw this great opportunity to, using the bogey-man of terrorism, prevent all resale of their products.
You can't even say the 9/11 terrorists would have been caught had we checked ID because they'd have known about the ID checks and bought fake ID or used someone whose record is clean. Wow, so we cost the terrorists a few hundred dollars for fake ID, we don't prevent the attacks, and we burden everyone with this annoying, useless, and potentially dangerous invasive system.
Sure, sometimes trading liberties for security is a good value, but I'd like to see how they honestly expect to improve security. As is, I think I'm being asked to trade liberties for a placebo, and another government-mandated airline bailout package.
The web is a timeless medium. This post will look the same a year or ten from now, except that links to the NYT will only be freely available for a little time. Given that when I write articles I expect them to be valid for more than a few weeks I can't usefully link to the NYT.
In capitalism you often provide a product or a service than honestly cost a lot to make and is truly of value, and people won't buy it because why it's a very nice gizmo, gizmos of that type simply aren't worth what you're asking, even the best gizmo in the world.
This, imho, is where the NYT is. Their archive might cost a lot, it might save some people much more than the $3 it costs to use, but a huge majority of people are simply going to accept my quick summary of the article and not read it once they hit the 'buy access to this article' page. That article might cost $500 in total to host for a year, but I'm just not willing to pay anything 99.999% of the time. If access was free they'd at least get banner views. Maybe it takes a thousand banner views to equal the $3 payment, but they're going to get very very few $3 payments...
Yes. They should do that, to save me having to register.
Otherwise I won't go there. Not a threat, simply a fact. Someone is going to come up with a system that lets me link to their content without expecting everyone to jump through hoops to view it, that someone is going to get me linking to them. At that point I won't care what the NYT does, they aren't going to be relevant. I also don't care what sort of business model this requires, I'm never going to expect casual readers of my site to register at the NYT just to read an article I casually mention so they either make it easier or they don't get the links.
They're free to say that they don't want my links to them, or my friends who won't bother to register to read an article, but then for better or worse, they've essentially opted out of the web. No links means no search engine rating, no search engine rating means no drop-in traffic, no drop-in traffic means no new readers. No new readers means nobody will see their articles, let alone link to them and encourage others to read them, or boost them in search-engine ratings. Spiral of doom.
What can they do then? Let unregistered people in for free after they sit through a three-frame, full-screen ad. Salon does it and I know I'm not going to have to fill anything out or remember a password so I'll sit through it.
Guess which site I'll link to?
Is it a sense of entitlement? No. I don't feel they owe me anything, but I know I'm not going to pay for the right to link to their article, nor will any of my friends. They have the choice of unpaid drop-ins readings ads or nobody browsing their archives at all. I know what I'd choose, but it's up to them. If they go away there'll be someone else doing what they did, but better.
I don't own any Redhat stock, but I don't think their chances are all that bad. There is a huge market untapped for them to fill. Who else makes a good stable server OS that doesn't require gold-plated, diamond-encrusted special hardware? Who sells a ton of *good* support, has a training program widely believed to be very indicitive of actualy skill, and doesn't try to lock you into their product? (As nice as Redhat is, any Linux guy could migrate a server to another distro in a day.)
The business world is starting to distrust Microsoft for any security purposes (servers), can't afford high-end hardware, and doesn't want to be locked into a bad idea with long-term exclusive contracts and format lock-in.
When this takes off, who's the big-name player in the x86 OS market, with a rep for security, good support, fair play, and good price? As soon as businesses can justify Linux to the board they're going to go with Redhat because they're the ones who will have the history.
Maybe it's not a big market in the sense that it's *only* the server market, not enough for them to become an IBM or Microsoft. Many people recognize that companies can offer good value even if they aren't the largest in the world, or a monopoly.
This is simply like ripping your lottery ticket up as soon as the first two numbers indicate you didn't win - it's not going to stop people from playing the game or the odds, the results are just announced more quickly.
What you need to do is assess huge punative damages on parties who file frivolous lawsuits. Bankrupt these opportunistic lawyers and disbar them. That way there'll be some risk to offset the huge potential wins. Otherwise they'll try again in a week over some other imagined offence.
Of course, to do this you'd need to pierce the corporate veil (I think that's the expression) and go after the people funding these things, otherwise you'd simply bankrupt a shell corporation and another would pop up like a cockroach. But IMHO, that'd be a good thing, there are too many laws letting criminals keep unreasonable ammount of money. Like Florida's law exempting your primary residence from bankruptcy settlements. On the surface it's fine, until you have $50M houses. I feel they should be forced to sell the house and then, from the proceeds, can buy a house more in line with the state average (a trailer in a swamp? It *is* Florida after all...) and the rest of the money could go to creditors.
How's trolling working out for you? Do you actually expect people to believe the stuff you say?
On the off chance that you're serious and seriously misguided, let me explain Slashdot. The are hundreds of thousands of people here, they all have different opinions. It's not hypocritical when two different people believe two different things, let alone hundreds of thousands.
Further, you can be upset with the methods being used to pursue an overall action you agree with. I do think that the RIAA/etc should sue the people doing the trading. That's how the law is intended to be used and it leaves people like me who use BitTorrent for ISOs out of the way. However, I dislike the RIAA trying to blame the ISPs for traffic flowing over their network. Sure, it'd be easy to block Kazaa on known ports, but it establishes a bad precedent and soon you've got the ISPs being responsible for blocking *some* of the https: traffic when it all looks alike. Completely unreasonable. Further, their requested damages are insanely high. They're asking for damages, as in lost money, of tens of thousand per victim. As if anyone would have spent ten thousand dollars on music in the last year or so, that's years worth of spending even for a hardcore music lover. The industry has this broken idea (like the BSA) that every copy is one that would have been paid for.
When SCO attacks Linux they aren't simply making unauthorized use of it, they're trying to say that they own it and nobody else can use it. That seems slightly different than people sending protest email to a company that isn't releasing source code to drivers that contain GPLed code. Protest email vs Shutting down Linux... Can you follow?
I think you misunderstood.
My point wasn't the musicians who use amps have no music ability, but that they may be biased towards the equipment they're used to using.
A concert violinist (who theoretically only plays accoustical) would have the same music training and a good ear for distortion, but wouldn't have any preconcieved notion of one type of amp over another.
The problem with just asking a modern recording engineer to test amp by listening to them is that they've been hearing the myths and arguments surrounding tubes and transistors for years. It violates the double-blind ideal because they know what tubes sound like and could tell what any amp they were hearing was, as well as I could if I got to read the label.
Those are precisely the people who would be hung up on tube sound and would have convinced themselves in the 80s that digital meant bad sounding.
Nothing tells me that they base their opinions on double-blind tests, or that they're qualified to comment on the possibilities of 24b/96khz audio.
At an appropriate sampling rate you pick up more of the distortion in the analog signal (media, nonlinearities, etc) than you pick up signal. It's why scanning a photographic negative at 16000dpi isn't going to get any more real photographic data. There are plenty of graphic artists who insist on a 250MB file to print at a given size, instead of asking for a certain source resolution. Ditto, imho, with audio people. They don't really understand the underlying stuff (for good reason, few people who aren't audio engineers really do) and so they make a bunch of half-informed assumptions.
It's like people who rag on lossy formats because they don't like MP3s. They say incredibly imbecilic things like "Lossy encoding will always sound like shit" because they don't understand the difference between a flawed acoustic model (bad MP3 encoders), poor reproduction ability (format, and players) and the class of compression (lossy / non-lossy).
The best person to judge amplifiers would be to take a concert violinist, or someone else who doesn't use amps but requires good hearing and a musical "ear".
I went through the same things, except that I found my schedule rolled by an hour or two each day, as I'd get to sleep later. In school/work this meant sleepless thursday nights and crashes all weekend. When unemployed I didn't even notice the disorder unless I had an appointment.
You could try some work-at-home job. If you don't fight my kind of insomnia you don't even notice it, just go to sleep when tired, when not tired, stay up. It was a bit of an adventure, being up nights is peaceful and I got a lot of hobby stuff done, and studying (though I couldn't take the courses).
If you have the "can't sleep while tired" kind of insomnia, well, sorry. That sucks. I've been there a few nights, especially when sick, and it's hell.
I did everything that guy suggested you try. Waking up at a set time. Painful, but school ensured that. I used bright lights (a specific sun lamp), I took melatonin, I didn't exercise late in the day but tried to walk/bike every day. I used the bedroom for sleep only and moved the computer to the living room. I didn't drink/eat anything with caffeine late in the day. Nothing helped at all.
Then, at 25 it just went away. In a month I stopped the rolling sleep, in another I stopped having any sleep problems. I still take over an hour to get to sleep, but I'm always hyper - busy thinking - and that's not that unusual. I've been sleeping "normally" for almost five years now.
As far as I can tell I didn't do anything to cause it. Maybe it's an age thing.
What's wrong with just creating a file? There are many filesystems optimized for this. Sure, the RDBMS isn't doing everything, but it's not a big deal. You use a volume manager (LVM2, EVMS, both on Linux) that performs snapshots and you freeze the filesystem before backups, at the same time you take a snapshot of the database (they all have a way to do this).
You're never going to "use" the RDBMS anyways, as a user. You'll use some client front-end so you don't need to know that the data being returned is from a select statement or a filesystem. You'll simply enter some metadata and get a clickable download link for the file, or somesuch. When you write this system you'll also write the backup scripts that sync the filesystem and database and create snapshots to backup.
Moreover, if you store the files in a filesystem it's *much* easier to make the files available via a file share - something that's optimized for sending just the parts of the 4GB file you want. The select statement has to atomically return the whole thing, a file share lets you seek through, playing the music in the example given, without having to wait for 4GB to be sent.
Too stupid to read? Awww, didjums get infected? Take the PC to the shop and pay them $100 to fix it - ignore their instructions on how to avoid problems in the future, it's only technical mumbo jumbo.
In the future the Darwin awards will be expanded to include those who have permanently removed themselves from the Internet through overwhelming stupidity.
Yup, you can duplicate it, even for business purposes, to your heart's content. I think you need to provide source code to those who ask, which means providing the original HTML. In most cases, a link to wikipedia would be fine.
To be licensed, software must be sold as such. If it's sold as a sale, it is a sale. US copyright law allows for the use of a copyrighted product, even if it involves making transient copies of the software. This is the point that mandatory licensing hung on - now that unlicensed use isn't automatically illegal the customer doesn't need a license.
But, you are right that the BSA doesn't see it as such - they'll take you to the cleaners for every dollar they can get over the smallest "infraction" so reality doesn't matter much.
Just like SCO though, they're a larger threat to their own customers than to anyone else. I wonder how many Ernie Ball's they'll sue before this occurs to them, and if they'll have any customers left.