I did a little Googling and while I found reports of announcements from the HD-DVD team that they'd provisionally decided against region encoding, I couldn't find anything similar vis-a-vis Blu-Ray. The latest was that sometime in January they'd said they hadn't decided yet - but it's not even clear about what they're undecided (eg. they said the same thing about DRM, by which they meant they weren't sure which scheme to go for. Region encoding could be gone, DVD style, one-per-country, or all manner of alternatives.)
For all the cases that the RIAA has initiated, I don't know of a single one that actually was decided at trial (someone please correct me if I am in error). They are all settled because the law is being used as a club, and the strategy used by attorneys and their clients is to intimidate the target into submission by claiming huge damages, and offering to settle for a relative pittance. The uses of the DMCA follow a similar pattern.
The law is, however, on the RIAA's side. The reason the vast majority of these cases aren't being decided in court is because of a fairly simple set of facts that line up to prevent that.
Most of the people the RIAA has targetted are completely, 100%, guilty. A handful are "Music wants to be free!" fanatics, but even they recognize it isn't. Another handful is from people incorrectly targetted, or who feel the action is unfair and illegal for other reasons - mostly people whose underage child actually committed the offense, a handful who thought that normal Kazaa use is legal (you actually have to go pretty much out of your way to use Kazaa legally) and are pretty much in denial about the thing, and a tiny minority who honestly, completely, believe there is no way any computer they have control over directly or indirectly could have done this and are challenging the lawsuits on that basis.
Most however saw Kazaa as a way to get music without paying for it. They may have had the best of intentions ("I just want to listen to artists I'd never normally be exposed to, and I'll buy CDs of any music I like"), but they were under no illusions that whether done with the best of intentions, morally or immorally, what they were doing was technically illegal.
This by itself would be a great deal, but the RIAA et al doesn't actually want to drag this many people through court. It's expensive. And the legal penalties are so draconian, that if they demanded the full shot of what a court pretty much has to award on demand, the vast majority of defendents would be bankrupted, and that would result in wholesale copyright reform.
So they offer an alternative, and it's very attractive. For a few thousand dollars, you can avoid actually being taken to court and being bankrupted to the tune of millions of dollars. (Yes, that's right, millions. Because statutory damages are in the tens of thousands per violation, and we're usually talking about hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of provable violations per person if the RIAA really wants to go into the effort.)
It's not surprising the majority of people avoid court. You imagine how many murder cases would be sent to trial if the FBI offered every suspect the chance to avoid prison or death by, say, giving $5,000 to the victim's family. How many people reading this comment actually want to be made bankrupt? Perhaps a handful who have a lot of credit card debt, but generally relatively few of you, right?
For some reason, this bargain is usually represented as nefarious by people on Slashdot. I don't think it is. It would be if the RIAA thought the lawsuits were targetting innocent people, but I don't believe it does, though their "quality control" could do with some cleaning up. The RIAA is walking a fine line between doing something so drastic that legislators sit up and take notice (thousands of people being bankrupted for redistributing music without the copyright holder's permission would certainly result in that) and being seen as toothless and unable to deter what the music industry sees as a major threat to its ability to fund music creation and distribution (eg the core of its business.) Nobody wants to pay thousands of dollars because they downloaded a bunch of Top 10 hits and then redistributed them in a network that makes them available to millions of anonymous strangers. Is my love for anonymous freeloaders so great I'm willing to risk getting heavily into debt for it? Not likely.
It becomes less an issue of due process and more a case of
The De Beers brothers were not Jewish. Neither owned anything more than a mine they were later forced out of. However, the company carying the name was founded by a Jewish person, but was named after the mine, not any Jewish family.
I'm pretty sure Cecil Rhodes wasn't Jewish, but I'm prepared to be proven wrong. (It's possible you're referring to someone other than Rhodes who had a part-involvement in setting up De Beers, but there's little question that Rhodes was the driving force in the creation and early direction of the company we know today under that name. Or you might be referring to the Oppenheimers, but they didn't found De Beers, only bought large stakes in it in the early twentieth century. The Oppenheimers were certainly influential, but they really continued in Rhodes' footsteps for the most part.)
Either way, anyone trying to propose that De Beers was an example of Jewish malevolence, as you say, is way off base.
With the greatest of respect, that's complete rubbish. If you mean a "well researched" piece arguing that, say, blacks are lazy, or a woman's place is in the home, or that gays should be burnt at the stake, will be modded down, then yeah, but you wouldn't have to be "leftist" to do that.
Right now, I can't view a single article without dada21 giving his tuppenceworth, usually to the point of (what appears to me to be) lunacy, modded up to the heavens. Why? He may be right wing, but he's not trying to be offensive and he's clearly not a Nazi.
It amazes me that a group that considers itself the "silent majority" in this country is so convinced it's being persecuted. One mistake by Dan Rather is convincing evidence the entire media has a pro-Democrat slant, despite it goring Gore at the last election, and spending pretty much the entire second half of the nineties trying to find something to impeach Clinton about, finally obsessing itself about a minor affair in a way even mainstream Republicans didn't seem to be.
150 years is the equivalent of 5 generations. What is the moral reason for allowing the IP rights to be held so long?
The fact my generalization - that most businesses will not think more than 20 years into the future when considering what to invest in - is just that, a generalization. If a business really does decide it can justify investing so much money into creating something so valuable to the world that it'd expect revenues far in excess of 5,000GBP a year 150 years from now, then, well, then it's probably worth giving it the chance to do so.
We can fiddle with the figures, perhaps you'd prefer 80 years, and the fee going up to 25,000GBP per year after the 60th, but either way, the principle that someone can reserve long term copyrights for money, rather than for free, strikes me as a system that, compared to the one we use today, would benefit both "the people", and our tax chests.
As an alternative, something like this might work to both Brown and our advantage:
Copyright lasts for twenty years, by default
Copyright can then be renewed for a further twenty years, on payment of, say, a 1,000GBP registration fee each year
Copyright can then be renewed for a maximum of 150 years, on payment of, say, a 5,000GBP registration fee each year
Simple. More money goes into the "public pocket", twenty years is about the most long term any business would consider a return to be worth holding out for so this doesn't stifle innovation, indeed by building a massive base of public domain works, it should encourage it. I would want to add a clause to such an arrangement protecting the moral rights of artists (the right to be credited, the right not to be credited) for the full artist's lifetime + 20 years, to be entirely happy with the system, and for software to require source disclosure to gain the protection of copyright, but in general it ought to make most people happy.
Now, here's the bad news: none of this is compatable with any of the recent global inter-governmental copyright pacts and treaties. Indeed, so far as I can see, most copyright reform would have problems there.
That's an example of sneaky corruption in law-making. It is usually very difficult to know if and when the author died.
Generally, asking a doctor will help, though if a doctor isn't around, poking the author with a stick and seeing what the reaction is might help too. If, after repeatedly being prodded, the author hasn't said "Oi!", "Stop that!", "Get off me!", or in some other way indicated that the stick has been noticed, it would strike me as likely the author's health might be in question. This is particularly the case if the stick passes right through the author's rotten carcass. That's pretty much a "dead" give-away. "Dead" give-away, geddit? Huhuhuhuhuh.
Anyway, my advice is: in the absense of an obituary or some other document letting you know when the author died, find the author and, if it's not obvious he or she's alive, get a doctor to check.
No, the position is inconsistant. Here are the problems with your summary of the position:
"Teach religion as religion, science as science" and "ID is religion".
ID's supporters claim ID is science.
Therefore, don't intrude it into science (because it isn't),
ID's supporters claim ID is science.
don't directly attack it from science class (because the government isn't allowed to pick and choose religions).
...because ID becomes "religious" only when it's being attacked, right?
No, this is double standards from the ID nuts.
Anything taught in science class needs to be treated as science, subject to exactly the same tests as any other theory. If Kansas feels ID should be taught in science classes, it's not "double standards", as the OP claimed, for scientists to attack it as not valid science. It is, however, certainly double standards to pretend otherwise.
Which puts science in an impossible position. Religious nuts get to pretend ID is "science" and have it injected into science classes, but scientists can't debunk it as science in the same forums because such arguments would be inherently about religions.
This certainly underlines the double standards of the ID right. They want religious criticism of evolution put in science classes, and are using the ID trojan horse to do so, while trying to silence those who point this out in those self same classes.
If ID is to be taught as science, it must be subject to the same tests every scientific theory is subjected to. You can't wave your arms and yell "My religion is being oppressed" simply because ID gets the same treatment as any other theory.
Jack Straw is British, so you'd expect someone writing to him to use the British spelling of his title. It's an extension of the same principle that an American English "user" might write to the President of France in French.
No, the lowering of the speed limit in the other lanes would only occur if the company concerned wants everyone not willing to pay to leave and use some other highway.
Let's leave the paranoia out. It's safe to say that unless BellSouth intends to drive its customers away, non-premium content will continue to be delivered at normal quality of service. It's just companies currently struggling to get decent QoS will have the option of paying a little more. That's the only way this proposal can work in a way that will not drive away customers, because the vast bulk of content comes from institutions that'll never be willing to deal with bandwidth issues by calling up every single ISP in existance and negotiating a contract.
Let's hope no highways ever get built that are specifically for going to a particular location!
You people are nuts. Seriously. I have never read such a load of paranoid garbage as I have today reading this. BellSouth's CEO suggests that companies pay a little more to have their packets routed with better priorities, and suddenly this means "discrimination" in some evil way that'll never benefit the rest of us.
Is there a problem with this? No. Now, there are problems with, say, severely reducing quality of service for a large proportion of websites, but, realistically, if they do that, then they'll lose customers for exactly the reasons frequently mentioned. So it's safe to say that far from that being an argument why BellSouth will end as we know it, it's actually an argument for BellSouth not being so stupid as to be planning the most paranoid interpretation of this proposal.
Personally, I love it. Companies that make money from the Internet will pay towards DSL revenues, lowering the proportion that'd have otherwise been payable by ordinary DSL subscribers for the same quality of service. That's not bad, that's great.
Am I reading this correctly: do you consider the Slashdot moderation system to be the key to making an anarcho-capitalist society a practical reality?
Re:If you're trying to make an MPAA!=RIAA comment.
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RIAA vs Linux and DVDs
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Are you sure? DVD Audio discs have a lossless part (for DVD Audio players) and a Dolby Digital part (for compatibility with DVD Video players). The lossless part uses CPPM, while the Dolby Digital part uses CSS.
I stand corrected. Still, as the RIAA doesn't seem to be pushing DVD Audio, I don't think it matters much.
Movie soundtracks aren't distributed on DVD.
O rly?
Yes, really. The fact you can find an instance of a movie soundtrack on DVD Audio (thus proving that DVD Audio exists, but not a lot) doesn't mean that movie soundtracks aren't generally distributed on CD.
Where's the DVD Audio player that runs on Linux?
You're really stretching it here. What, there's no "licensed" application for which only a tiny market exists on GNU/Linux? Really? What a surprise! What lawsuits has the RIAA and its allies filed against unlicensed DVD Audio players and projects? None? The MPAA, I recall, sued DVD Jon, both in the US and, by proxy, in his home country. I don't recall any action taken by the RIAA against the VLC people.
Look, the article author clearly meant MPAA. Not RIAA. RIAA members use CDs for the bulk of their output. As far as DRM is concerned, their output of encrypted online files far outsells and outwieghs their output of DVD Audio disks. They haven't been a pusher of any of the lawsuits concerning DeCSS. They are not the people trying to ban Free Software DVD players. You are being disengenious by pretending that the RIAA was what the author intended to say, or that the RIAA is actually seriously relevent in this fight. The RIAA is not suing people for making programs used to play DVD Audio content. The MPAA has done so in the past, and presumably will continue to do so. The MPAA is lying about why programs like DeCSS exists on its website, the RIAA's anti-piracy fight has limited itself to the unauthorized mass distribution of its products, except for a brief, precedent setting, skirmish about hardware in the late nineties which had nothing to do with DVDs, CSS, or the DMCA.
You can pretend otherwise by trying to find tenuous (and redundant) links between the RIAA and DVD technologies - I never said, after all, that RIAA members never distribute DVDs - but the fact is the RIAA is not the center of the DVD CSS decryption controversy, it has little to do with it, and anyone who writes an entire article about that and talks about the RIAA as if it's the prime mover in the issue is seriously propogating nonsense.
Re:If you're trying to make an MPAA!=RIAA comment.
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RIAA vs Linux and DVDs
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DVD Audio doesn't use CSS. Movie soundtracks aren't distributed on DVD. And whether Sony happens to be a member of both the MPAA and RIAA is neither here nor there. I'm a member of the AAA and PADI, but I wouldn't expect people to talk about PADI campaigning to fix unsafe roads, or AAA to ensure hospitals have more decompression chambers, on that basis.
The original author was an idiot. Or at least, if he wasn't, he was simply spouting buzzwords in a (successful) attempt to make the Slashdot front page. The relevent organization is the MPAA, but it's the RIAA who gets the Slashdot hate at the moment, so that's why the RIAA was used.
Nonsense. The RIAA has no reason care. Its members only put out a few DVDs, interestingly enough the sole one I have (a Talking Head's concert) isn't even CSS encoded to begin with. I'm not even sure the RIAA's members are directly responsible for DVD production, I suspect they outsource it to an independent producer for that kind of thing (Canal and other similar companies.)
The bulk of RIAA member's output comprises of CDs, and they're highly unlikely to switch to DVDs as a base distribution method any time soon.
The RIAA has as much reason to care as Amnesty International has to care about cures for cancer, AAA has to care about Microsoft's monopolies in the PC market, and the GOP has to care about the onion market in Hungary.
Why does the RIAA not provide a free Linux playback device for DVDs? Sure they would have to pay royalties to the MPEG algorithms folks to offer it. But that would be ridiculously cheap. For that matter they could easily push to get a law taxing all bare PCs with a few cents to pay for an MPEG royalty. Put the algorithm right in the BIOS if you want.
It's a nice idea, but I really don't think the RIAA could give a crap whether you can play DVDs on Linux, or any other operating system for that matter. The RIAA's members put out a few music video compilations, but really the bulk of their business revolves around CDs (and, thanks to the iTMS, online music sales.)
Probably the organization that might have an interest in this would be the DVD-CCA. This organization owns the rights to license CSS and region encoding. From their point of view, it's their technology that's being compromised by DVD Jon et al, and it might make sense for them to create a "legal alternative" that makes it unnecessary for programs like VLC to contain CSS decoders. Another group would be the movie studios, or, say, their representative, the MPAA. This institution, at the very least might have an interest in something that would boost the value of the DVDs their members sell.
Probably. But the article made no sense whatsoever anyway. It appeared to be something about Prohibition being difficult to enforce, like the DMCA. It then blathered on about banning mutually beneficial exchanges or something, and collapsed from there.
I don't think the author's intent was to come up with anything but a bunch of buzzwords that would guarantee a front page setting on Slashdot and, thus, lots of ad-revenue generating site hits. In that respect, it's kind of surprising how few ads the article has, and how it isn't split into eleven pages. I mean, look at it: "RIAA" (Booo!) "DMCA!" (Booooooooooooo!) Linux! (YAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!) "It's like Prohibition man, Prohibition! That was also when The Man tried to keep the people down!" (WOOOOOOOOOO!)
Why's the MPAA not in there? Because it's not as big a BUZZWORD as RIAA. We ALL know that the RIAA is evil. I mean, this is practically a satire of a P2P pirate's stream-of-consciousness. The only thing that makes me stop short of thinking that's exactly what it is is the lack of the "word" "Rediculous".
What a load of crap. Bring back Jon Katz! At least his stuff made sense enough to disagree with.
No, the summary's wrong. Like the GP said, the quote is from another review that the article cites. The big clue to this is that the entire paragraph is in quotation marks and proceeded by the words "and yet another review I found on the company:"
The person who wrote the article never got as far as being given any forms to sign. The camera was supposedly "out of stock" (it looks, from the reviews and the author's experience about what happened, that it was only "out of stock" because the author refused to buy the "optional" extras), but they refused to cancel the orders and threatened him instead.
I've written about this earlier, but I think there are two or three points to make here:
1. The issue of his "involvement" is raised without any prompting. There's no apparent way in which someone thinking he might have been involved has had any material affect on his life. Was there a Senate investigation? Did people write books about his "involvement"? Before this appeared on Wikipedia, had it even been mentioned in the press, and had there been any lawsuits?
2. The last line, which you failed to bolden, changes the tone somewhat, wouldn't you say?
3. Your "analogous" statement is poor on several counts. Being thought of as an idiot is not a serious allegation, and happens to people all the time. I'm pretty sure a lot of people think I'm an idiot. You and I wouldn't sue over it because neither of us care - in fact, I'm surprised you're suggesting you'd sue if you heard people saying you're one because someone else said so. A more interesting, and appropriate, statement would be (in the context that a bunch of people on your friends list are dead): "Backslashdot was thought to have been involved in the serial murder of a series of people on his Slashdot friends list. Nothing was ever proven."
Assuming a bunch of people on your friends list were murdered, and assuming there really isn't any reason to think you're the killer (namely, they're actually connected by something completely irrelevent - maybe you befriended them because they'd all posted interesting comments about Quentin Tarantino, which they did because they're members of the Delhi Film Club in India, which had just done a Tarantino marathon, and they'd been murdered by an actual serial killer who operated in their neighbourhood), then that's clearly an attempt to mislead. It doesn't matter that someone obscure may have thought that, it's not true in any serious sense (no investigator is following that route), and "nothing was ever proven" certainly suggests that investigations dried up because of a lack of firm evidence, not because you were eliminated as a suspect or never seriously suspected in the first place.
With Seigenthaler being a friend of the Kennedys, an accusation that he was involved in their murder is taken far more seriously than an accusation that, say, you or I was. Moreover, saying "Nothing was ever proven" suggests, in context, Seigenthaler's involvement isn't ruled out, it's just part of the bigger mystery about who did what on the Grassy Knoll.
There are reasons to defend Wikipedia here. But pretty few, if any, to defend the person who posted this smear job on Seigenthaler. Let's not pretend that he wasn't misleading, or trying to mislead.
Note to mods: Please read beyond the first paragraph before modding, I'm making a point here...
Well the wikipedia article said that he was *briefly* suspected of being involved with the assassination. I hate to tell you, but that statement is most likely 100% accurate.
I'm sorry, but how exactly are we supposed to take a word you say seriously given your long history of being a chronic liar? You have a long history of lying, and it's pretty obvious to anyone reading what you're writing above that you're not exactly interested in the truth right now.
...that was fair, right? I mean - you HAVE lied. Everyone lies. You probably told your mother you were going out to get groceries when you were buying her a birthday present, right? Or have been in a similar situation. That's technically a lie. So it's legitimate for me to raise the issue that you're a chronic liar. Well, it's legitimate to raise it, knowing that, to the majority of readers, it will sound like I'm actually knowledgable about some serious lies you've said of the "No, I never took bribes from this fellow!" level, if it's equally legitimate to raise a dubious allegation of involvement in the Kennedy assassination that has no evidence behind it, no serious backing or backers, and tells us nothing, actually, about anything in Seigenthaler's life.
The issue may have been reasonable to raise if part of a broader picture. If, for example, someone had made the accusation in public, books had been written that had affected Seigenthaler's credibility, or perhaps if Seigenthaler had responded to them, then the story tells us something about Seigenthaler. But a meaningless, unknown, allegation that had no impact whatsoever on Seigenthaler's life until the Wikipedia libeller reported it does not fall into that category. It's presense, like my accusation of you being a liar earlier, is not to inform, but to mislead. It raises questions anew in the mind of the reader, rather than reporting on past events.
Truth, it is often said, is an absolute defense for libel. That's not true in all jurisdictions: just as something being a lie that paints someone in a bad light is occasionally not libel - try accusing Myra Hindley, in Britain (whose defamation laws are infamous), of eating babies for instance and see how far any suit she files against you travels. But, even where it is, I'd be very careful before assuming that Truth is what you think it is. Repeating a clearly false allegation with the intent to deceive isn't going to be looked upon well by a Judge or Jury. Unless the Wikipedia author went out of his or her way to say the allegation was false, which is bizarre, I doubt that it, coupled with the sense I got that the original article said more than just this, and contained a number of provably false points (such as the Soviet Union "connection"), would be seen as anything but an attempt to smear Seigenthaler with a bevy of false accusations and innuendo.
I'm not supporting anyone's rights to extent liability laws to the extent that valuable resources such as Wikipedia should be shut down, but I think he has a reasonable case of libel against the person who posted this article, and, if the facts are as stated, as a juror I'd certainly vote that way in a libel trial.
I admit to being confused by the whole thing. What he wanted, as I understand it, and which is somewhat convoluted, was the right to sue Jimbo and/or BellSouth. This would mean he could issue a subpoena to BellSouth to get the actual libeller. Presumably, though this isn't stated, he'd drop the suit against Jimbo (and BellSouth) at this point.
Seigenthaler's problem seems to be that he has certain information about the person who made the entry on Wikipedia's website - their IP address at the time they logged in, etc, but there's no earthly way to make that person accountable in practice because it's not possible to file a lawsuit against any of the entities that can help.
I'm not sure he's right, but that appeared to be what he was complaining about. If it wasn't what he was complaining about, then I'm not sure where the substory about BellSouth telling him he needed a subpoena came from. I mean, if you want to sue X for publishing Y's work, and consider X's publishing the major offense, why write 90% of your complaint about Y and your difficulty tracking him down?
Or perhaps you are making stupid assumptions. Yes, I deal with alot of shitty code, most of it open source and written by people I have never even met. The people I am surrounded by are not making the comments, the mass of assorted dumbasses all over the world are. But of course, it must be just me and that wacky nut Rob Pike, we're both such shitty programmers that our experiences would be irrelivant.
Sorry, let me repeat myself. I don't come across this kind of thing very often. I work in a company with about fifty programmers (in our area of the business), of varying skills, and it just doesn't happen that often. We come across dumbass comments once every few years, and when they occur, they're emailed around the company much to the amusement of most of us and embarassment of the programmer concerned, assuming they still work here.
I assume all these people are now working with you and Rob Pike. I shall take great comfort in the fact that, apparently, I work for in the greatest company in the world, with the most skilled, intelligent, programmers, and shall wonder why we're not paid a hell of a lot more, and why we're working on database tools for obscure branches of the marketing departments of automotive manufacturers rather than cures for cancer.
As for the rest of your post, you just like to argue it seems. You are reading into his words and mine the intent you would like to see, simply so you can disagree with it. Since you don't actually need anyone else for this, why not just go make up both sides to an argument on your own?
Uh-huh. I read a comment that discourages commenting. I replied to it. You claimed, despite the fact Pike was arguing against commenting and I was arguing for it, that we must be in agreement. Now you're saying "I just like to argue" because I explained it to you.
If you think Pike is for comments, perhaps you can point out what paragraph actually encourages commenting in his article, rather than claiming that we're saying the same thing because we happen to agree that "i++;// increment i" is an inappropriate use of comments.
I see comments EXACTLY like this (...) ALL THE TIME
I don't. I see them occasionally. You're either surrounded by complete idiots, or elite programmers making jokes that are flying above your head.
Oh, you mean kinda like he said he does do, and is what comments should be used for? Did you skip over this part: "But I do comment sometimes.{...}"
No, I didn't skip over it. It doesn't mean what I said. He "sometimes" comments. Sorry to snip at that part, but I think it's the bit you missed and why I disagreed with him. Now, sure, if what he meant was:
I always comment in what follows. Examples: explaining the use of global variables and types (the one thing I always comment in large programs); as an introduction to an unusual or critical procedure; or to mark off sections of a large computation
...then yeah, he'd have been saying something vaguely similar to what I was writing, in some areas, and I'd have not posted a major disagreement. But he didn't. He said he sometimes comments. The general gist of what he writes is you should avoid commenting altogether, and if you comment, you should limit it to a small set of circumstances.
The exceptions should be few and far between, and should be commented as appropriate. Its amazing that you read his statement which could be summed up as "Reasonable, non-excessive, use of comments, describing functionality rather than function", and somehow managed to disagree, and summarize your opposition as "Reasonable, non-excessive, use of comments, describing functionality rather than function".
It's amazing you read his statement, which can be summed up as, "You shouldn't comment, if you do, limit it to explaining certain globals, documenting one or two procedures, or sectioning off complicated code" as being the same as "Reasonable, non-excessive, use of comments, describing functionality rather than function".
Code that's "mostly" self documenting is not self documenting. Regular, non-excessive, commenting, that describes functionality, is important.
Re:Check out Rob Pike's thoughts on code commentin
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How to Write Comments
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I'm not sure I do.
He's used two stupid examples of commenting, examples that are popular jokes, rarely appearing in real life and usually the result of sarcastic nudge-nudging from experienced programmers, and pretended that's what we're talking about when we talk about commenting. When he finally admits they may have a use, the description is so vague it's hard to see what he means - which, if he comments the same way, is probably as true of his code as it is his prose.
It doesn't take much, or add any clutter to code, to put a brief, one or two line, comment before each paragraph of code, that describes the intended functionality of the code block. It makes a massive difference when you revisit your code three years, or even three months, later, or worse have a collegue look at it.
Nor is it a massive imposition to have more obscure decisions you've made be explained in a comment block before the code itself.
Code is not self-documenting. It becomes intensely verbose when you try to make it self-documenting, and it's rare that anyone, no matter how well skilled, can produce something that transmits the intended functionality of the written code in the implemented functionality. This is especially true if you're using an optimal algorithm. Reasonable, non-excessive, use of comments, describing functionality rather than function, are extremely important.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a little Googling and while I found reports of announcements from the HD-DVD team that they'd provisionally decided against region encoding, I couldn't find anything similar vis-a-vis Blu-Ray. The latest was that sometime in January they'd said they hadn't decided yet - but it's not even clear about what they're undecided (eg. they said the same thing about DRM, by which they meant they weren't sure which scheme to go for. Region encoding could be gone, DVD style, one-per-country, or all manner of alternatives.)
The law is, however, on the RIAA's side. The reason the vast majority of these cases aren't being decided in court is because of a fairly simple set of facts that line up to prevent that.
Most of the people the RIAA has targetted are completely, 100%, guilty. A handful are "Music wants to be free!" fanatics, but even they recognize it isn't. Another handful is from people incorrectly targetted, or who feel the action is unfair and illegal for other reasons - mostly people whose underage child actually committed the offense, a handful who thought that normal Kazaa use is legal (you actually have to go pretty much out of your way to use Kazaa legally) and are pretty much in denial about the thing, and a tiny minority who honestly, completely, believe there is no way any computer they have control over directly or indirectly could have done this and are challenging the lawsuits on that basis.
Most however saw Kazaa as a way to get music without paying for it. They may have had the best of intentions ("I just want to listen to artists I'd never normally be exposed to, and I'll buy CDs of any music I like"), but they were under no illusions that whether done with the best of intentions, morally or immorally, what they were doing was technically illegal.
This by itself would be a great deal, but the RIAA et al doesn't actually want to drag this many people through court. It's expensive. And the legal penalties are so draconian, that if they demanded the full shot of what a court pretty much has to award on demand, the vast majority of defendents would be bankrupted, and that would result in wholesale copyright reform.
So they offer an alternative, and it's very attractive. For a few thousand dollars, you can avoid actually being taken to court and being bankrupted to the tune of millions of dollars. (Yes, that's right, millions. Because statutory damages are in the tens of thousands per violation, and we're usually talking about hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of provable violations per person if the RIAA really wants to go into the effort.)
It's not surprising the majority of people avoid court. You imagine how many murder cases would be sent to trial if the FBI offered every suspect the chance to avoid prison or death by, say, giving $5,000 to the victim's family. How many people reading this comment actually want to be made bankrupt? Perhaps a handful who have a lot of credit card debt, but generally relatively few of you, right?
For some reason, this bargain is usually represented as nefarious by people on Slashdot. I don't think it is. It would be if the RIAA thought the lawsuits were targetting innocent people, but I don't believe it does, though their "quality control" could do with some cleaning up. The RIAA is walking a fine line between doing something so drastic that legislators sit up and take notice (thousands of people being bankrupted for redistributing music without the copyright holder's permission would certainly result in that) and being seen as toothless and unable to deter what the music industry sees as a major threat to its ability to fund music creation and distribution (eg the core of its business.) Nobody wants to pay thousands of dollars because they downloaded a bunch of Top 10 hits and then redistributed them in a network that makes them available to millions of anonymous strangers. Is my love for anonymous freeloaders so great I'm willing to risk getting heavily into debt for it? Not likely.
Either way, anyone trying to propose that De Beers was an example of Jewish malevolence, as you say, is way off base.
Right now, I can't view a single article without dada21 giving his tuppenceworth, usually to the point of (what appears to me to be) lunacy, modded up to the heavens. Why? He may be right wing, but he's not trying to be offensive and he's clearly not a Nazi.
It amazes me that a group that considers itself the "silent majority" in this country is so convinced it's being persecuted. One mistake by Dan Rather is convincing evidence the entire media has a pro-Democrat slant, despite it goring Gore at the last election, and spending pretty much the entire second half of the nineties trying to find something to impeach Clinton about, finally obsessing itself about a minor affair in a way even mainstream Republicans didn't seem to be.
We can fiddle with the figures, perhaps you'd prefer 80 years, and the fee going up to 25,000GBP per year after the 60th, but either way, the principle that someone can reserve long term copyrights for money, rather than for free, strikes me as a system that, compared to the one we use today, would benefit both "the people", and our tax chests.
- Copyright lasts for twenty years, by default
- Copyright can then be renewed for a further twenty years, on payment of, say, a 1,000GBP registration fee each year
- Copyright can then be renewed for a maximum of 150 years, on payment of, say, a 5,000GBP registration fee each year
Simple. More money goes into the "public pocket", twenty years is about the most long term any business would consider a return to be worth holding out for so this doesn't stifle innovation, indeed by building a massive base of public domain works, it should encourage it. I would want to add a clause to such an arrangement protecting the moral rights of artists (the right to be credited, the right not to be credited) for the full artist's lifetime + 20 years, to be entirely happy with the system, and for software to require source disclosure to gain the protection of copyright, but in general it ought to make most people happy.Now, here's the bad news: none of this is compatable with any of the recent global inter-governmental copyright pacts and treaties. Indeed, so far as I can see, most copyright reform would have problems there.
Anyway, my advice is: in the absense of an obituary or some other document letting you know when the author died, find the author and, if it's not obvious he or she's alive, get a doctor to check.
No, this is double standards from the ID nuts.
Anything taught in science class needs to be treated as science, subject to exactly the same tests as any other theory. If Kansas feels ID should be taught in science classes, it's not "double standards", as the OP claimed, for scientists to attack it as not valid science. It is, however, certainly double standards to pretend otherwise.
This certainly underlines the double standards of the ID right. They want religious criticism of evolution put in science classes, and are using the ID trojan horse to do so, while trying to silence those who point this out in those self same classes.
If ID is to be taught as science, it must be subject to the same tests every scientific theory is subjected to. You can't wave your arms and yell "My religion is being oppressed" simply because ID gets the same treatment as any other theory.
Jack Straw is British, so you'd expect someone writing to him to use the British spelling of his title. It's an extension of the same principle that an American English "user" might write to the President of France in French.
Let's leave the paranoia out. It's safe to say that unless BellSouth intends to drive its customers away, non-premium content will continue to be delivered at normal quality of service. It's just companies currently struggling to get decent QoS will have the option of paying a little more. That's the only way this proposal can work in a way that will not drive away customers, because the vast bulk of content comes from institutions that'll never be willing to deal with bandwidth issues by calling up every single ISP in existance and negotiating a contract.
You people are nuts. Seriously. I have never read such a load of paranoid garbage as I have today reading this. BellSouth's CEO suggests that companies pay a little more to have their packets routed with better priorities, and suddenly this means "discrimination" in some evil way that'll never benefit the rest of us.
Is there a problem with this? No. Now, there are problems with, say, severely reducing quality of service for a large proportion of websites, but, realistically, if they do that, then they'll lose customers for exactly the reasons frequently mentioned. So it's safe to say that far from that being an argument why BellSouth will end as we know it, it's actually an argument for BellSouth not being so stupid as to be planning the most paranoid interpretation of this proposal.
Personally, I love it. Companies that make money from the Internet will pay towards DSL revenues, lowering the proportion that'd have otherwise been payable by ordinary DSL subscribers for the same quality of service. That's not bad, that's great.
Am I reading this correctly: do you consider the Slashdot moderation system to be the key to making an anarcho-capitalist society a practical reality?
Look, the article author clearly meant MPAA. Not RIAA. RIAA members use CDs for the bulk of their output. As far as DRM is concerned, their output of encrypted online files far outsells and outwieghs their output of DVD Audio disks. They haven't been a pusher of any of the lawsuits concerning DeCSS. They are not the people trying to ban Free Software DVD players. You are being disengenious by pretending that the RIAA was what the author intended to say, or that the RIAA is actually seriously relevent in this fight. The RIAA is not suing people for making programs used to play DVD Audio content. The MPAA has done so in the past, and presumably will continue to do so. The MPAA is lying about why programs like DeCSS exists on its website, the RIAA's anti-piracy fight has limited itself to the unauthorized mass distribution of its products, except for a brief, precedent setting, skirmish about hardware in the late nineties which had nothing to do with DVDs, CSS, or the DMCA.
You can pretend otherwise by trying to find tenuous (and redundant) links between the RIAA and DVD technologies - I never said, after all, that RIAA members never distribute DVDs - but the fact is the RIAA is not the center of the DVD CSS decryption controversy, it has little to do with it, and anyone who writes an entire article about that and talks about the RIAA as if it's the prime mover in the issue is seriously propogating nonsense.
The original author was an idiot. Or at least, if he wasn't, he was simply spouting buzzwords in a (successful) attempt to make the Slashdot front page. The relevent organization is the MPAA, but it's the RIAA who gets the Slashdot hate at the moment, so that's why the RIAA was used.
The bulk of RIAA member's output comprises of CDs, and they're highly unlikely to switch to DVDs as a base distribution method any time soon.
The RIAA has as much reason to care as Amnesty International has to care about cures for cancer, AAA has to care about Microsoft's monopolies in the PC market, and the GOP has to care about the onion market in Hungary.
Probably the organization that might have an interest in this would be the DVD-CCA. This organization owns the rights to license CSS and region encoding. From their point of view, it's their technology that's being compromised by DVD Jon et al, and it might make sense for them to create a "legal alternative" that makes it unnecessary for programs like VLC to contain CSS decoders. Another group would be the movie studios, or, say, their representative, the MPAA. This institution, at the very least might have an interest in something that would boost the value of the DVDs their members sell.
I don't think the author's intent was to come up with anything but a bunch of buzzwords that would guarantee a front page setting on Slashdot and, thus, lots of ad-revenue generating site hits. In that respect, it's kind of surprising how few ads the article has, and how it isn't split into eleven pages. I mean, look at it: "RIAA" (Booo!) "DMCA!" (Booooooooooooo!) Linux! (YAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!) "It's like Prohibition man, Prohibition! That was also when The Man tried to keep the people down!" (WOOOOOOOOOO!)
Why's the MPAA not in there? Because it's not as big a BUZZWORD as RIAA. We ALL know that the RIAA is evil. I mean, this is practically a satire of a P2P pirate's stream-of-consciousness. The only thing that makes me stop short of thinking that's exactly what it is is the lack of the "word" "Rediculous".
What a load of crap. Bring back Jon Katz! At least his stuff made sense enough to disagree with.
The person who wrote the article never got as far as being given any forms to sign. The camera was supposedly "out of stock" (it looks, from the reviews and the author's experience about what happened, that it was only "out of stock" because the author refused to buy the "optional" extras), but they refused to cancel the orders and threatened him instead.
1. The issue of his "involvement" is raised without any prompting. There's no apparent way in which someone thinking he might have been involved has had any material affect on his life. Was there a Senate investigation? Did people write books about his "involvement"? Before this appeared on Wikipedia, had it even been mentioned in the press, and had there been any lawsuits?
2. The last line, which you failed to bolden, changes the tone somewhat, wouldn't you say?
3. Your "analogous" statement is poor on several counts. Being thought of as an idiot is not a serious allegation, and happens to people all the time. I'm pretty sure a lot of people think I'm an idiot. You and I wouldn't sue over it because neither of us care - in fact, I'm surprised you're suggesting you'd sue if you heard people saying you're one because someone else said so. A more interesting, and appropriate, statement would be (in the context that a bunch of people on your friends list are dead): "Backslashdot was thought to have been involved in the serial murder of a series of people on his Slashdot friends list. Nothing was ever proven."
Assuming a bunch of people on your friends list were murdered, and assuming there really isn't any reason to think you're the killer (namely, they're actually connected by something completely irrelevent - maybe you befriended them because they'd all posted interesting comments about Quentin Tarantino, which they did because they're members of the Delhi Film Club in India, which had just done a Tarantino marathon, and they'd been murdered by an actual serial killer who operated in their neighbourhood), then that's clearly an attempt to mislead. It doesn't matter that someone obscure may have thought that, it's not true in any serious sense (no investigator is following that route), and "nothing was ever proven" certainly suggests that investigations dried up because of a lack of firm evidence, not because you were eliminated as a suspect or never seriously suspected in the first place.
With Seigenthaler being a friend of the Kennedys, an accusation that he was involved in their murder is taken far more seriously than an accusation that, say, you or I was. Moreover, saying "Nothing was ever proven" suggests, in context, Seigenthaler's involvement isn't ruled out, it's just part of the bigger mystery about who did what on the Grassy Knoll.
There are reasons to defend Wikipedia here. But pretty few, if any, to defend the person who posted this smear job on Seigenthaler. Let's not pretend that he wasn't misleading, or trying to mislead.
The issue may have been reasonable to raise if part of a broader picture. If, for example, someone had made the accusation in public, books had been written that had affected Seigenthaler's credibility, or perhaps if Seigenthaler had responded to them, then the story tells us something about Seigenthaler. But a meaningless, unknown, allegation that had no impact whatsoever on Seigenthaler's life until the Wikipedia libeller reported it does not fall into that category. It's presense, like my accusation of you being a liar earlier, is not to inform, but to mislead. It raises questions anew in the mind of the reader, rather than reporting on past events.
Truth, it is often said, is an absolute defense for libel. That's not true in all jurisdictions: just as something being a lie that paints someone in a bad light is occasionally not libel - try accusing Myra Hindley, in Britain (whose defamation laws are infamous), of eating babies for instance and see how far any suit she files against you travels. But, even where it is, I'd be very careful before assuming that Truth is what you think it is. Repeating a clearly false allegation with the intent to deceive isn't going to be looked upon well by a Judge or Jury. Unless the Wikipedia author went out of his or her way to say the allegation was false, which is bizarre, I doubt that it, coupled with the sense I got that the original article said more than just this, and contained a number of provably false points (such as the Soviet Union "connection"), would be seen as anything but an attempt to smear Seigenthaler with a bevy of false accusations and innuendo.
I'm not supporting anyone's rights to extent liability laws to the extent that valuable resources such as Wikipedia should be shut down, but I think he has a reasonable case of libel against the person who posted this article, and, if the facts are as stated, as a juror I'd certainly vote that way in a libel trial.
Seigenthaler's problem seems to be that he has certain information about the person who made the entry on Wikipedia's website - their IP address at the time they logged in, etc, but there's no earthly way to make that person accountable in practice because it's not possible to file a lawsuit against any of the entities that can help.
I'm not sure he's right, but that appeared to be what he was complaining about. If it wasn't what he was complaining about, then I'm not sure where the substory about BellSouth telling him he needed a subpoena came from. I mean, if you want to sue X for publishing Y's work, and consider X's publishing the major offense, why write 90% of your complaint about Y and your difficulty tracking him down?
I assume all these people are now working with you and Rob Pike. I shall take great comfort in the fact that, apparently, I work for in the greatest company in the world, with the most skilled, intelligent, programmers, and shall wonder why we're not paid a hell of a lot more, and why we're working on database tools for obscure branches of the marketing departments of automotive manufacturers rather than cures for cancer.
Uh-huh. I read a comment that discourages commenting. I replied to it. You claimed, despite the fact Pike was arguing against commenting and I was arguing for it, that we must be in agreement. Now you're saying "I just like to argue" because I explained it to you.If you think Pike is for comments, perhaps you can point out what paragraph actually encourages commenting in his article, rather than claiming that we're saying the same thing because we happen to agree that "i++; // increment i" is an inappropriate use of comments.
Code that's "mostly" self documenting is not self documenting. Regular, non-excessive, commenting, that describes functionality, is important.
He's used two stupid examples of commenting, examples that are popular jokes, rarely appearing in real life and usually the result of sarcastic nudge-nudging from experienced programmers, and pretended that's what we're talking about when we talk about commenting. When he finally admits they may have a use, the description is so vague it's hard to see what he means - which, if he comments the same way, is probably as true of his code as it is his prose.
It doesn't take much, or add any clutter to code, to put a brief, one or two line, comment before each paragraph of code, that describes the intended functionality of the code block. It makes a massive difference when you revisit your code three years, or even three months, later, or worse have a collegue look at it.
Nor is it a massive imposition to have more obscure decisions you've made be explained in a comment block before the code itself.
Code is not self-documenting. It becomes intensely verbose when you try to make it self-documenting, and it's rare that anyone, no matter how well skilled, can produce something that transmits the intended functionality of the written code in the implemented functionality. This is especially true if you're using an optimal algorithm. Reasonable, non-excessive, use of comments, describing functionality rather than function, are extremely important.