CSS encryption isn't remotely effective at controlling access to films.
Spurious argument, legally. It's already been tried and defeated. See, e.g., Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 346 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
In S.D.N.Y. circuit, in Texas the courts ruled differently when arguing about the same "secret" which was known by everyone who would care to know it, about 5 minutes after the first slashdot story. The Supremes haven't disambiguated this so you would need to go above the head of the S.D.N.Y. if you were in the Southern NY district, but I think it is pretty clear they had their heads up their asses that day. Remember, even conservative rags like the New York Times violated the S.D.N.Y. order as it applied to 2600 magazine, and they tried to influence the court with friend of the court briefs. That case also ended with only 2600 magazine, being prevented from reporting that you could play a DVD on your computer, everyone else is free to do so in the Southern New York district and the papers have repeatedly done that since the ruling came down in 2000. Universal has been to chicken shit to sue the NYT or any other New York publication under the DMCA since.
The Reimerdes case is special because the judges heard "hacker magazine" and didn't listen to anything after that. The judges don't know what a hacker is except for what the media defines it as so to them the case might as well have been "Mothers for Apple Pie vs. Child Rapist HowTo Magazine". Listening to the legal arguements would have been tantamount to finding a loophole for "the bad guys"(TM). These judges are almost all hoping for promotion to the Supremes and would see that as career wrecking move.
No, I meant fix your transmission yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic automotive engineering, it shouldn't be that hard at all. Yup.
No, I meant perform a root canal on yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic orthodontics, some local anesthesia and a mirror, it shouldn't be that hard at all. Haven't done a root canal, but when low on funds I performed some auto-gum-surgery. No anesthesia, [un?]fortunately. Turned out quite well.
I think you underestimate DIY, well at least amoung the engineering type.
I would represent myself in court in a simple an open-and-shut case; fighting evil gives you a really good natural high, and these people don't even use cement booties.
Of course, I can afford legal representation, and don't have enough digits to count the number of lawyers amoung my family and friends. Having the general counsel of [insert random media company] write a letter on your behalf works wonders. The MPAA, Mafia, RIAA and friends are bullies. They only want to extort money from the downtrodden.
Nice job on the cogeneration there. Not really my doing, the builder had a bad relationship with the local electrical utility. But in winter it does provide all the heat for the building, which is a good thing.
I have thought about ways to set up an efficient diesel generator to double as a source of home heating, but nothing has really clicked yet. With diesel around $3/gallon, the power would cost 23 cents per kw/h not counting the heat benefit. Obviously it can not compete by price alone today, but who knows what may change tomorrow?
I am also increasingly tempted to get some experience with solar power. It is still expensive, but it would be nice to have some real world experience in place if and when new technology brings the price down.
The real benefit of local co-generation is that you can use the waste heat for heating the building. If you have cold winters where you are it might be worth it, even at 23 cents a kw/h. But co-generation efficiency depends on the building's size. Bigger is better for efficiency of both heating and electricity generation. Even a smallest gas turbine is too big for the typical home. A steam boiler + turbine can be small, but needs to run continuously.
I'm looking for a small two family building to buy and live in and am toying with the idea of solar power. Mostly for the geek toy reasons, I think they would look very mod on top of a 19th century brownstone. More cost effective is solar preheating of water before it goes into the water heater, and some of the other less sexy green tech. But generating electricy directly from the sun is not just cool but allows for geeky projects like writing software for solar & cloud tracking, weather prediction, electricty generation prediction, and electricity use prediction and electrical control. You know, if the cloud you are tracking with your camera is predicted to drop electricity production in 3 minutes turn on the AC compressor now so we can shut it off when production drops and still maintain a comfortable temperature inside.
ISPs (at least in th UK, and I think in the USA and elsewhere) are required to log which customer was using which IP address at what time for tracability reasons.
FYI In the USA it is possibly legal to track which customer is using which IP, but it is certainly not required.
It would be unconstitutional to require that type of violence against an American's privacy without a warrant. Not that the law has much affect on what actually happens in the USA anymore. But there are still ISPs that use 20 minute DHCP expires as a selling point for privacy reasons.
BTW I would love to see that "evidence" myself. I had my internet cut off for a week after EMI presented laughably fake "evidence" against me. The bastards running these cartels should be imprisoned and the companies dissolved. I would love to see the corprate veil pierced as well and have all the "investors" in these companies have their assets seized as well.
Where I am, the power is just under 4.4 cents per hw/hour from 8AM to 10PM (peak) and 2.4 cents off peak most of the year.
Nuclear or Coal?
I pay about 16 cents per kw/hour in the winter and 18 cents per kw/hour in the summer. The rate actually fluctuates quite a bit, so sometimes at the end of the month it is 13 and other times it is 20. My building generates about 30% of it's own electricity using oil, so it's at the higher end of the range right now. (It doesn't make sense to just turn of the generator when oil is expensive because of long term contracts, god damned flat taxes and the one puny, sometimes smoldering, powerline strung to our end of the island.)
A 4 cent per kw/hour fee would only add about $9.38 to my monthly bill averaged over the year.
Unfortunately, the innocent seem to want to claim innocence as well.
Actually, it is kind of funny [sad] when cartels like the RIAA try to call someone else a criminal. Is there a single member of the RIAA with more than 1% of record sales who hasn't recently settled a case or been found liable for cheating their artists, their consumers and their partnered retailers?
If bribes weren't the norm in the USA, I'm sure the RIAA and a few other organized criminal syndicates would have been shut down years ago.
Not that it would help prices any. When the mob was kicked out of New York garbage hauling a few years back, "Waste Management" moved in on the territory and raised prices considerably.
The solution to the recording industry problem, and many others in our economy (such as "Waste Management") is to break up any company that has more than 5% of any market (music, movies, shues, garbage, etc.) and a $500 mil market cap. The simplest means to do this is to just transfer ownership of a company in excess of this limit from the shareholders to a free market preservation arm of the WTO. This arm of WTO would simply sell off the assets of the company and use the money earned to catch other companies exceeding the cap. This would encourage companies to keep below the cap. If you also allowed shareholders to sue the company directors and management for full restitution whenever this happened, the management and directors would be extra careful. You would also need to ensure that the companies in each sector did not collude to control the prices or coordinate lobbying of companies selling more than 5% of all goods in the segment, the simplest way to do this is to simply consider the two or more companies as one when this happens and apply the 5% test for liquidation of the two or more companies.
The macro effect of this would be to ensure at least 20 competitors in each large market, this would greatly shrink margins and so prices, and it kick the economies of first world countries to China like growth. In fact we could do this for our own companies and leave the WTO out of it; this would require us to withdraw from the WTO however, because we would need to apply a tariff to foreign companies/cartels with too much market power (>5%) in our markets.
Re:"Quick Facts from Wikipedia" ???
on
Ask.com's Rising Star
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Incorrect. When a contributor to Wikipedia risks losing his principal source of income because what she has written in an article is wrong, then that contributor *begins* to approach equal standing with the professional journalists, writers, researchers, and editors of the "traditional" media and encyclopedias.
Hehe, I guess you haven't read a newspaper in the last 300 years, huh?
The last time I picked up a NYT there were about two clear misstatements of facts or worse for every one essentially correct statement.
There is a reason it's called the first draft of history.
The problem with your thinking is that while professional journalist do have money as a motivator they must also produce "content" or lose that income. Since they only get caught after the newspaper gets thousands of complaint letters, the journalist is only forced to fact check stories on controversial topics. Everything else he writes displays the sorry state of our high schools, which graduate these future workers into journalism schools to produce the army of hacks that edit our nation's press releases for brevity for publication in our newspapers.
The average wikipedian is not only immeasurably better educated than our best journalists, but they are also not under the deadline pressure and threat of job loss that forces the journalist to write total schlock on a regular basis. Of course I grant more credence to a peer reviewed article in a serious journal than to a wikipedia article, but the wikipedia has a hell of a lot more accuracy than any daily newspaper!
Note: I say daily newspaper because I have some faith in the Economist and other weeklies. While the Economist is often laughably off, say when the story is on a continent where they have few reporters or on stories where their idealogical beliefs strongly contradict the facts, most articles seem to have had a serious minded fact checker or an editor give them a quick read.
Hmmm, I just did. I think maybe you should have a look at that data past the first few pages. It looks much worse that the media would lead you to believe. Four hours a day of electricity in Baghdad, less than 12 hours in the peaceful areas, less than a billion dollars in oil exports last month. And every indicator of the number of attacks on US troops has been climbing linearly for 3 years.
Even the indicators that look good at first blush, like the fewer attacks on oil infrastructure, reported early in the compilation, look bad later on when you see the graphs that show you why.. The insurgents have managed to criple the oil infrastructure.
I would, but only with a dedicated MythTV distro like Pluto or KnoppMyth. Pluto has an army of programmers dedicated to making the updates always work, and with KnoppMyth you just plonk in the next CD and have it upgrade everything for you.
With the speed things happen today, I would even say 40-50 years is too much. 10 years is plenty. After that time, it goes into the "public domain", where you, the artist, should be able to "buy it back".
I think it makes more sense to have different lengths for different types of creations. For instance, exclusive rights for the following time periods seem reasonable to me:
* 3 hours for a "Live" news event (i.e. press conference)
* 5 days for a news broadcast or written news article
* 3 months on software binaries without source code in the form most usable by a human.
* 6 months for a clothing design or a simple circuit board design
* 1 year for a musical performance (not the song itself).
* 3 years for a complicated cuircuit board (aka CPU chip).
* 5 years for a fact based movie or television show
* 5 years for software with source code in the form most usable by a human.
* 5 years for a song or poem
* 7.5 years for a fact based book
* 14 years for a fictional book
Non-exclusive rights could last longer, a.k.a. royalties, but they should be reasonable and non-exclusive. These taxes could be directly collected by the government and dispursed to the copyright holder. This would avoid all these hidden "licensing" taxes that exist in the current system. It should also be illegal to do "work-for-hire", you could license the copyright to your employer for the length of the exclusive period, but this would require an explicit written contract and you should not be able to assign copyright at all. The non-exclusive thing could be of great benefit to things which are never relicensed today, such as news broadcasts, so a copyright holder should be allowed to place their work in this pool earlier if they so desire.) And these shorter copyrights would probably require some sort of longer term 'moral rights' system to be implemented, since the author would usually outlive the copyright; but this shouldn't extend much further than the author's control over the use of their name, as expressed in a statement in the work's file with the copyright office. (i.e. It could be a statement from the author that they have not read/heard/viewed the reprint/reuse and it may contain material the author finds objectionable.)
Also the whole copyrighted upon creation is silly with today's technology. Instead just require the creator to send a copy to their country's copyright registrar electronically within 2 weeks of creation. Then I can check any piece of writing or video I have against these copyright databases to know it's copyright status. The registrar could employ a small fee per copyright to subsidize the costs of the system, this fee could be refunded on a prorated basis if you donated the work into the public domain.
This system should be phased in slowly (i.e. shorten the terms over the span of 10 years) so that it doesn't shock the system. And a few years should be given for everyone to send in digital forms of their works. I for one would want to do some digging to explicitly register some of my older stuff, and some of it would need digitizing. But for future works it wouldn't be a problem at all.
Some of the stuff I listed, like circuit boards, clothing designs and CPU's are usually not copyrightable under the current system, so these terms should be slowly ramped up from zero over the same 10 years as other terms are shortened.
Unlike copyrights, I don't think patents are worth preserving. But if they were preserved, some form of non-exclusive licensing should be the required immediately for these. And they should probably require a vote of 75% of the people residing in the area where they would be in effect to be granted and renewed each year. So that wouldn't add a lot of questions to our voting ballots, they could be required to get 75% approval by both houses of congress or parliment and the approval of the executive and judicial branches before they could b
really? You had a VCR that lets you watch one tape while recording another show to same tape? I do not think there was a single device with single media that allowed you to do this until tivo.
This new "Democrat Party" is just asking to be sued for trademark infringement from the Democratic Party.
I'm just waiting for someone to start the "Republicratic Party" now, they'll make a killing selling their name when the Democratic and Republican Party finalize their merger.;]
Amendment IV - Search and seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment X - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Also of importance...
Article II. - The Executive Branch Note
Section 1 - The President...
Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Section 4 - Disqualification
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
If the Republicanic held Congress wishes to send the president a message they don't need to impeach Mr. Bush, Jr. They can simply impeach and convict Attorney General Gonzales for advising Mr. Bush, Jr. that breaking the law and shitting on the constiution is ok.
I personally think that any of the living Congresscritters and Justices that passed FISA into law should be tried and executed, and any past or current President that has issued a FISA warrant should be as well. But then I also think the Bushy should have been convicted of bribery many times over by now; the education speakers bribery scandal alone was enough for me. But most Americans accept corruption and lies from their employees.
I've said for years that as the single best thing the US could do for the planet, tax the hell out of fuel oil
Most EU countries are already doing this. Thats why diesel fuel used for heating homes is colored, its not taxed the same way as diesel for automobiles is.
This wouldn't work with a significant tax in the US. Too many Americans respect the law like Germans when someone is watching but make Italians' respect for the law appear German when no one is watching.
What would work is a $10 per gallon phasing up to $40 per gallon tax on both, with a per-person refundable credit on income taxes. A credit would be no different than a deduction for me; but for someone making only $30,000 a year, who might otherwise pay no taxes due to her low income, a credit means she gets a refund which she can use to pay her heating costs. The per-person credit should be pretty high for the adults in the household and pretty low for the children, say $5000 per-adult and $500 per-child, since the adults would of course be the ones responsible for the most trips. But there should be some child credit since they do motivate some trips, like when you drop them off at their friends house, go to the doctor, etc.
Unfortunately this is not going to happen in the USA. We have something like $50,000,000,000,000 coming due soon, which means we have to raise an additional $25,000 per income tax payer per year for 20 years. This means we need lower spending and to raise taxes a great deal and any fuel tax could not be presented as revenue neutral because we can't afford that; the only thing that will get passed is a flat percentage for all income tax payers, this appears 'fair' to the innumerate. Maybe in 50 years, if we make it past the hard times without reverting to a 2nd world country like Argentina has in the last 50 years.
It wouldn't cost millions to defend agaisnt the charges. Thousands, yes -- far more than the RIAA is asking for -- but not millions. Sure, you could spend millions, but you don't have to.
Sometimes all it takes is a little technical knowledge and a sternly worded letter. I was a victim of one of the EMI extortion attempts. It turned out the software they were accusing me of running didn't run on any operating system anyone using my block of IP's used, plus my ISP firewall made it impossible for these first gen P2P networks to function, and the IP address they presented as "evidence" wasn't yet allocated to a computer, nor was it available to DHCP hosts. Either my ISP had been hacked, in a strange and bizarre way, or the "evidence" was completely made up. After a sternly worded letter to both my ISP and EMI I never heard from EMI again and my ISP changed their policy of co-operating with these mobsters.
...to pre-emptively strike the United States with their full nuclear and all other capability before this document goes into effect.
Our fearless leader has adopted the tactics of his chum Osama. I'm just waiting for the announcement, "And then me said to me-self, if you can't find him, become him; then you don't have find him, you see. You see us Texans know you can't BE a terrorist unless you ACT like you are it. See that's some home good wisdom; you can take that to the [pause] savings and loan debacle, you see."
It shouldn't just look at the chaos caused by incorrect information regarding debit cards being handed out. It was a near riot and could have cause a lot of injuries.
You know if they had been on the air already the could have quickly corrected the missinformation spread by Mr. Bush and his gang. And, then the chaos would have been averted.
Barking orders into a bullhorn just makes people want to rip the head off the bastard with the bullhorn.
This is just another example of why we need to destroy our current government at all levels and replace them with a workable democratic one (one with proportional representation to get rid of the Republicrats, assuming former members of the party would be allowed to run eventually). I would also jail the people involved in the scam, but I'm sure most people would rather see the higher officials hanged and then drawn and quartered (now that is reality TV!).
Still they should have just gone pirate and asked for forgiveness later; let that be a lesson to anyone who wants to do good. The government wouldn't have had the balls to order them off-the-air anytime soon.
But these are all really implemetation-specific things. Perhaps I should put my database-filesystem report online somewhere..
Nah, just read up on the rieser4 file system. It is a DB filesystem, but you don't actually need that for the features you are interested in (see rieser3). The problem you are talking about can be solved with bucket allocation (see any high performance malloc implementation).
Patents were supposed to encourage disclosure of innovation so that others can build on it.
Ummm... to build on something, you first need to use said something. But using it means infringing on the patent... which means building on it is either a losing proposition, or an impossibility... at least for 20 years.
Mind explaining what I'm missing here, please?
Patents were originally a means of rewarding favors by a despot. The despots used to take land from people who didn't have the power to resist the theft and give it to those people who did something for him. But once all the land had been given to his warlords he needed something else to give to these people. The idea of granting monopolies on the import or manufacture of stables such as salt then occured to one of these despots and the patent was born. Later when patents were choking the economy, the warlords banded together and forced the despot to limit their granting of patents to goods that were new to commerce and patent legislation was born. When the insurgency in the English colonies wrestled power away from the government and won their independence, the capitalist faction in the new power structure couldn't get patents eliminated completely but won the language in the U.S. constitution today. They believed by restricting patents to those things that would encourage innovation and limit the time a patent could be granted for it would eliminate the threat of patents to the free market. They were wrong, the 'encourage innovation' language has been considered so vague by the courts that they have left it up to the federal legislature to interpret the law. Of course this means that the law is completely meaningless. Combined with the high level of corruption in the U.S. legislative and executive branches this results in laws by and for the patent grantees; essentially the economic leaches are writing the law to maximize their ability to extract every last drop of blood from the productive industries.
Heh, you should travel outside its borders sometime.
You will find that just about every other place you go is much better.
Seriously, I understand you wanting to stay in that shithole: family, sunk-cost-syndrome, etc. But don't get all delusional.
Take a deep breath and look outside the reality distortion field. You will find that your nation is in deep shit of its own making and the rest of the world can't/won't invade to install a democracy (mostly due to the nukes, but also other factors, damn France). You must do it yourselves, if you ever want your children to taste liberty and freedom. We'll be rooting for you.
Psst. Canada, the U.K. and Australia are just as fucked up, look harder.
Psst, Canadians, outside Quebec, like most Europeans, actually pay lower taxes than USians. You should examine their tax system more closely before spouting off on it. It's not that the extra stuff they get, like healthcare, is free. It just costs less than the increment USians have had pay to maintain their police state for the last 50 years.
The main problem with South America is that the climate is not conducive to the long-term survival of organic material. However, that does not make it impossible such material has survived. It just means that we don't have the luxury of time in looking for it. If it exists today, that does not guarantee it'll survive into next week.
This is more true of Mesoamerican rather than South American cultures. But, much of Peru is a desert which gets less than a centimeter of rain per decade. Unless that land is irrigated it is very dry. The post-colonial Peru has never been able to irrigate anywhere near as much land as the cultures that thrived there over the last few thousand years.
There is no lack of 'discovered' ancient cities in Peru, but there is a lack of money to dig any of them up.
This allows you to get a team of archaeologists to a relatively small area, which you can then safeguard against loggers, gold-hunters and slavers.
Ridiculous in Peru, there are no loggers where there are archeological sites, there are no slavers, and the gold-miners are harmless. What there are as a problem is an army of well financed looters from the USA and Europe, these people would probably have access to any such technology years before any archeologist could obtain it. In fact should such a technology exist their makers should cough up a few million dollars per machine to guard sites in Mexico, Peru and Iraq where most of the world's advanced ancient cultures developed.
- Abandon capitalism (though not freedom), it drives consumerism.
- Raise taxes, if taxes are high enough, then no one will have enough money to be consumers... wait, this is kind of like getting rid of capitalism.
You might not have to do either, just shift taxes away from income to and to the resources that cause problems.
If you lowered income taxes 2% a year and shifted it to resources and imports from places that had lower resource taxes in a revenue neutral way then you could slow environmental damage and eventually reverse the process.
There are other solutions, of course. When Japan had depleted wood in their country and that of their closest trading parters they instituded quotas on wood use and began replanting their forests, a few hundred years later they are the most forested industrialized country in the world with forests covering 80% of the islands. But quotas practically freeze an economy until they are removed. This might solve the problem, but would probably add hundreds of years to the time it would take versus a tax based solution.
Not applying the tariffs to already taxed imports would also help to stabilize the governments of our trading parters, as they would logically prefer to tax the resource themselves than have us do it. This means they would have more money to spend on local problems like nutrition, schooling and infrastructure.
I'm not saying this would be easy, resource taxes would effect poor people disportionately, as food and gasoline makes up a larger portion of their income. You would need to lower income taxes quicker on that segment of the population. This would look like you are soaking the rich even if all you were doing was trying to keep tax burdens the same as they are now. It would also disproportionately effect farmers who use a lot of oil and a lot of unforested land, both of which would be taxed more heavily. Helping them with more subsidies would violate a number of WTO treaty obligations. They could be paid to restore forests and donating recovered land to land conservancies which would take several generations, but many would object to that solution.
Food and gasoline prices would increase. But incomes might fall as well because we don't have strong unions, and the lower income taxes would look like raises. As for monetary policy 2% a year is manageable, but would still tax the federal reserves ability to tame inflation with just lending rate control. They might have to be given an additional power such as the ability to raise and lower any tax within a percentage point for monetary control. To limit the feds power they would not be allowed to spend the money, only hold it in reserve for paying out in lower taxes when inflation is low.
Unlike the Maya, the Inca didn't have a written language, which is why these knots are so important a discovery.
They didn't have a written language, but they did have picture books.
Books and illegal book owners were burned by the Christians. Most herecy laws in Spanish Peru did not apply as harshly to native Americans as to Europeans, the ban on books was an exception to the rule.
The khipu were much more numerous and not considered dangerous until later on, so a few survive. But there probably are not enough known khipu to left to decipher them. However, there may be caches of them buried somewhere. There too many unexplored archeological sites in Peru to count. The last remnants of the Inca state set up camp in the Amazon jungle, where any Khipu would have rotted quickly, but there may have been loyal subjects elsewhere in the Kingdom that thought to bury some of their documents.
There was a case some time back where police stopped a bunch of asian students in seattle for about an hour or so, called out a few cars, pretty much did the whole 9 yards because of a jay-walking infraction. I have to admit Seattle is the only city, the abosultly only city where i've seen jay-walking enforced.
If you think that is excessive, I was in Seattle a few years ago and and old man was hit by a car when the light turned green while he was still crossing the street. Thankfully he survived the accident, but the police came to the hospital the next day and wrote him a jaywalking ticket. The reckless driver got off without so much as a ticket.
BTW New York increased the jay-walking fine from $2 to $60 a few years ago, but when they tried to do a crackdown the finees became local celebs, photos of the mayor jay-walking kept showing up in the news. The whole thing made Guiliani look like an idiot. It didn't help that he tried to eliminate taxis as part of the same initiative. His reputation only recovered after 9/11 when other politicians ran away to undisclosed locations while he reacted like a normal person.
Slashdot Mirror
CSS encryption isn't remotely effective at controlling access to films.
Spurious argument, legally. It's already been tried and defeated. See, e.g., Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 346 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
In S.D.N.Y. circuit, in Texas the courts ruled differently when arguing about the same "secret" which was known by everyone who would care to know it, about 5 minutes after the first slashdot story. The Supremes haven't disambiguated this so you would need to go above the head of the S.D.N.Y. if you were in the Southern NY district, but I think it is pretty clear they had their heads up their asses that day. Remember, even conservative rags like the New York Times violated the S.D.N.Y. order as it applied to 2600 magazine, and they tried to influence the court with friend of the court briefs. That case also ended with only 2600 magazine, being prevented from reporting that you could play a DVD on your computer, everyone else is free to do so in the Southern New York district and the papers have repeatedly done that since the ruling came down in 2000. Universal has been to chicken shit to sue the NYT or any other New York publication under the DMCA since.
The Reimerdes case is special because the judges heard "hacker magazine" and didn't listen to anything after that. The judges don't know what a hacker is except for what the media defines it as so to them the case might as well have been "Mothers for Apple Pie vs. Child Rapist HowTo Magazine". Listening to the legal arguements would have been tantamount to finding a loophole for "the bad guys"(TM). These judges are almost all hoping for promotion to the Supremes and would see that as career wrecking move.
No, I meant fix your transmission yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic automotive engineering, it shouldn't be that hard at all.
Yup.
No, I meant perform a root canal on yourself. With a reasonable amount of study on basic orthodontics, some local anesthesia and a mirror, it shouldn't be that hard at all.
Haven't done a root canal, but when low on funds I performed some auto-gum-surgery. No anesthesia, [un?]fortunately. Turned out quite well.
I think you underestimate DIY, well at least amoung the engineering type.
I would represent myself in court in a simple an open-and-shut case; fighting evil gives you a really good natural high, and these people don't even use cement booties.
Of course, I can afford legal representation, and don't have enough digits to count the number of lawyers amoung my family and friends. Having the general counsel of [insert random media company] write a letter on your behalf works wonders. The MPAA, Mafia, RIAA and friends are bullies. They only want to extort money from the downtrodden.
Coal. :-|
Very dirty electricity.
Nice job on the cogeneration there.
Not really my doing, the builder had a bad relationship with the local electrical utility. But in winter it does provide all the heat for the building, which is a good thing.
I have thought about ways to set up an efficient diesel generator to double as a source of home heating, but nothing has really clicked yet. With diesel around $3/gallon, the power would cost 23 cents per kw/h not counting the heat benefit. Obviously it can not compete by price alone today, but who knows what may change tomorrow?
I am also increasingly tempted to get some experience with solar power. It is still expensive, but it would be nice to have some real world experience in place if and when new technology brings the price down.
The real benefit of local co-generation is that you can use the waste heat for heating the building. If you have cold winters where you are it might be worth it, even at 23 cents a kw/h. But co-generation efficiency depends on the building's size. Bigger is better for efficiency of both heating and electricity generation. Even a smallest gas turbine is too big for the typical home. A steam boiler + turbine can be small, but needs to run continuously.
I'm looking for a small two family building to buy and live in and am toying with the idea of solar power. Mostly for the geek toy reasons, I think they would look very mod on top of a 19th century brownstone. More cost effective is solar preheating of water before it goes into the water heater, and some of the other less sexy green tech. But generating electricy directly from the sun is not just cool but allows for geeky projects like writing software for solar & cloud tracking, weather prediction, electricty generation prediction, and electricity use prediction and electrical control. You know, if the cloud you are tracking with your camera is predicted to drop electricity production in 3 minutes turn on the AC compressor now so we can shut it off when production drops and still maintain a comfortable temperature inside.
ISPs (at least in th UK, and I think in the USA and elsewhere) are required to log which customer was using which IP address at what time for tracability reasons.
FYI In the USA it is possibly legal to track which customer is using which IP, but it is certainly not required.
It would be unconstitutional to require that type of violence against an American's privacy without a warrant. Not that the law has much affect on what actually happens in the USA anymore. But there are still ISPs that use 20 minute DHCP expires as a selling point for privacy reasons.
BTW I would love to see that "evidence" myself. I had my internet cut off for a week after EMI presented laughably fake "evidence" against me. The bastards running these cartels should be imprisoned and the companies dissolved. I would love to see the corprate veil pierced as well and have all the "investors" in these companies have their assets seized as well.
Where I am, the power is just under 4.4 cents per hw/hour from 8AM to 10PM (peak) and 2.4 cents off peak most of the year.
Nuclear or Coal?
I pay about 16 cents per kw/hour in the winter and 18 cents per kw/hour in the summer. The rate actually fluctuates quite a bit, so sometimes at the end of the month it is 13 and other times it is 20. My building generates about 30% of it's own electricity using oil, so it's at the higher end of the range right now. (It doesn't make sense to just turn of the generator when oil is expensive because of long term contracts, god damned flat taxes and the one puny, sometimes smoldering, powerline strung to our end of the island.)
A 4 cent per kw/hour fee would only add about $9.38 to my monthly bill averaged over the year.
All criminals claim they are innocent.
Unfortunately, the innocent seem to want to claim innocence as well.
Actually, it is kind of funny [sad] when cartels like the RIAA try to call someone else a criminal. Is there a single member of the RIAA with more than 1% of record sales who hasn't recently settled a case or been found liable for cheating their artists, their consumers and their partnered retailers?
If bribes weren't the norm in the USA, I'm sure the RIAA and a few other organized criminal syndicates would have been shut down years ago.
Not that it would help prices any. When the mob was kicked out of New York garbage hauling a few years back, "Waste Management" moved in on the territory and raised prices considerably.
The solution to the recording industry problem, and many others in our economy (such as "Waste Management") is to break up any company that has more than 5% of any market (music, movies, shues, garbage, etc.) and a $500 mil market cap. The simplest means to do this is to just transfer ownership of a company in excess of this limit from the shareholders to a free market preservation arm of the WTO. This arm of WTO would simply sell off the assets of the company and use the money earned to catch other companies exceeding the cap. This would encourage companies to keep below the cap. If you also allowed shareholders to sue the company directors and management for full restitution whenever this happened, the management and directors would be extra careful. You would also need to ensure that the companies in each sector did not collude to control the prices or coordinate lobbying of companies selling more than 5% of all goods in the segment, the simplest way to do this is to simply consider the two or more companies as one when this happens and apply the 5% test for liquidation of the two or more companies.
The macro effect of this would be to ensure at least 20 competitors in each large market, this would greatly shrink margins and so prices, and it kick the economies of first world countries to China like growth. In fact we could do this for our own companies and leave the WTO out of it; this would require us to withdraw from the WTO however, because we would need to apply a tariff to foreign companies/cartels with too much market power (>5%) in our markets.
Incorrect. When a contributor to Wikipedia risks losing his principal source of income because what she has written in an article is wrong, then that contributor *begins* to approach equal standing with the professional journalists, writers, researchers, and editors of the "traditional" media and encyclopedias.
Hehe, I guess you haven't read a newspaper in the last 300 years, huh?
The last time I picked up a NYT there were about two clear misstatements of facts or worse for every one essentially correct statement.
There is a reason it's called the first draft of history.
The problem with your thinking is that while professional journalist do have money as a motivator they must also produce "content" or lose that income. Since they only get caught after the newspaper gets thousands of complaint letters, the journalist is only forced to fact check stories on controversial topics. Everything else he writes displays the sorry state of our high schools, which graduate these future workers into journalism schools to produce the army of hacks that edit our nation's press releases for brevity for publication in our newspapers.
The average wikipedian is not only immeasurably better educated than our best journalists, but they are also not under the deadline pressure and threat of job loss that forces the journalist to write total schlock on a regular basis. Of course I grant more credence to a peer reviewed article in a serious journal than to a wikipedia article, but the wikipedia has a hell of a lot more accuracy than any daily newspaper!
Note: I say daily newspaper because I have some faith in the Economist and other weeklies. While the Economist is often laughably off, say when the story is on a continent where they have few reporters or on stories where their idealogical beliefs strongly contradict the facts, most articles seem to have had a serious minded fact checker or an editor give them a quick read.
Hmmm, I just did. I think maybe you should have a look at that data past the first few pages. It looks much worse that the media would lead you to believe. Four hours a day of electricity in Baghdad, less than 12 hours in the peaceful areas, less than a billion dollars in oil exports last month. And every indicator of the number of attacks on US troops has been climbing linearly for 3 years.
Even the indicators that look good at first blush, like the fewer attacks on oil infrastructure, reported early in the compilation, look bad later on when you see the graphs that show you why.. The insurgents have managed to criple the oil infrastructure.
I would, but only with a dedicated MythTV distro like Pluto or KnoppMyth. Pluto has an army of programmers dedicated to making the updates always work, and with KnoppMyth you just plonk in the next CD and have it upgrade everything for you.
With the speed things happen today, I would even say 40-50 years is too much. 10 years is plenty. After that time, it goes into the "public domain", where you, the artist, should be able to "buy it back".
I think it makes more sense to have different lengths for different types of creations. For instance, exclusive rights for the following time periods seem reasonable to me:
* 3 hours for a "Live" news event (i.e. press conference)
* 5 days for a news broadcast or written news article
* 3 months on software binaries without source code in the form most usable by a human.
* 6 months for a clothing design or a simple circuit board design
* 1 year for a musical performance (not the song itself).
* 3 years for a complicated cuircuit board (aka CPU chip).
* 5 years for a fact based movie or television show
* 5 years for software with source code in the form most usable by a human.
* 5 years for a song or poem
* 7.5 years for a fact based book
* 14 years for a fictional book
Non-exclusive rights could last longer, a.k.a. royalties, but they should be reasonable and non-exclusive. These taxes could be directly collected by the government and dispursed to the copyright holder. This would avoid all these hidden "licensing" taxes that exist in the current system. It should also be illegal to do "work-for-hire", you could license the copyright to your employer for the length of the exclusive period, but this would require an explicit written contract and you should not be able to assign copyright at all. The non-exclusive thing could be of great benefit to things which are never relicensed today, such as news broadcasts, so a copyright holder should be allowed to place their work in this pool earlier if they so desire.)
And these shorter copyrights would probably require some sort of longer term 'moral rights' system to be implemented, since the author would usually outlive the copyright; but this shouldn't extend much further than the author's control over the use of their name, as expressed in a statement in the work's file with the copyright office. (i.e. It could be a statement from the author that they have not read/heard/viewed the reprint/reuse and it may contain material the author finds objectionable.)
Also the whole copyrighted upon creation is silly with today's technology. Instead just require the creator to send a copy to their country's copyright registrar electronically within 2 weeks of creation. Then I can check any piece of writing or video I have against these copyright databases to know it's copyright status. The registrar could employ a small fee per copyright to subsidize the costs of the system, this fee could be refunded on a prorated basis if you donated the work into the public domain.
This system should be phased in slowly (i.e. shorten the terms over the span of 10 years) so that it doesn't shock the system. And a few years should be given for everyone to send in digital forms of their works. I for one would want to do some digging to explicitly register some of my older stuff, and some of it would need digitizing. But for future works it wouldn't be a problem at all.
Some of the stuff I listed, like circuit boards, clothing designs and CPU's are usually not copyrightable under the current system, so these terms should be slowly ramped up from zero over the same 10 years as other terms are shortened.
Unlike copyrights, I don't think patents are worth preserving. But if they were preserved, some form of non-exclusive licensing should be the required immediately for these. And they should probably require a vote of 75% of the people residing in the area where they would be in effect to be granted and renewed each year. So that wouldn't add a lot of questions to our voting ballots, they could be required to get 75% approval by both houses of congress or parliment and the approval of the executive and judicial branches before they could b
really? You had a VCR that lets you watch one tape while recording another show to same tape? I do not think there was a single device with single media that allowed you to do this until tivo.
It was called "Amiga".
This new "Democrat Party" is just asking to be sued for trademark infringement from the Democratic Party.
I'm just waiting for someone to start the "Republicratic Party" now,
they'll make a killing selling their name when the Democratic and Republican Party finalize their merger.
Amendment IV - Search and seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.
...
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment X - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Also of importance...
Article II. - The Executive Branch Note
Section 1 - The President
Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Section 4 - Disqualification
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
If the Republicanic held Congress wishes to send the president a message they don't need to impeach Mr. Bush, Jr. They can simply impeach and convict Attorney General Gonzales for advising Mr. Bush, Jr. that breaking the law and shitting on the constiution is ok.
I personally think that any of the living Congresscritters and Justices that passed FISA into law should be tried and executed, and any past or current President that has issued a FISA warrant should be as well. But then I also think the Bushy should have been convicted of bribery many times over by now; the education speakers bribery scandal alone was enough for me. But most Americans accept corruption and lies from their employees.
Most EU countries are already doing this. Thats why diesel fuel used for heating homes is colored, its not taxed the same way as diesel for automobiles is.
This wouldn't work with a significant tax in the US. Too many Americans respect the law like Germans when someone is watching but make Italians' respect for the law appear German when no one is watching.
What would work is a $10 per gallon phasing up to $40 per gallon tax on both, with a per-person refundable credit on income taxes. A credit would be no different than a deduction for me; but for someone making only $30,000 a year, who might otherwise pay no taxes due to her low income, a credit means she gets a refund which she can use to pay her heating costs. The per-person credit should be pretty high for the adults in the household and pretty low for the children, say $5000 per-adult and $500 per-child, since the adults would of course be the ones responsible for the most trips. But there should be some child credit since they do motivate some trips, like when you drop them off at their friends house, go to the doctor, etc.
Unfortunately this is not going to happen in the USA. We have something like $50,000,000,000,000 coming due soon, which means we have to raise an additional $25,000 per income tax payer per year for 20 years. This means we need lower spending and to raise taxes a great deal and any fuel tax could not be presented as revenue neutral because we can't afford that; the only thing that will get passed is a flat percentage for all income tax payers, this appears 'fair' to the innumerate. Maybe in 50 years, if we make it past the hard times without reverting to a 2nd world country like Argentina has in the last 50 years.
It wouldn't cost millions to defend agaisnt the charges. Thousands, yes -- far more than the RIAA is asking for -- but not millions. Sure, you could spend millions, but you don't have to.
Sometimes all it takes is a little technical knowledge and a sternly worded letter. I was a victim of one of the EMI extortion attempts. It turned out the software they were accusing me of running didn't run on any operating system anyone using my block of IP's used, plus my ISP firewall made it impossible for these first gen P2P networks to function, and the IP address they presented as "evidence" wasn't yet allocated to a computer, nor was it available to DHCP hosts. Either my ISP had been hacked, in a strange and bizarre way, or the "evidence" was completely made up. After a sternly worded letter to both my ISP and EMI I never heard from EMI again and my ISP changed their policy of co-operating with these mobsters.
Is someone tooting their own horn? Or is this really the best software for A/V production?
It really is the best, but is difficult to install properly and a bear to learn to use.
If you just want to cut clips out of a video and arrange them in the proper order try something like kino.
...to pre-emptively strike the United States with their full nuclear and all other capability before this document goes into effect.
Our fearless leader has adopted the tactics of his chum Osama. I'm just waiting for the announcement, "And then me said to me-self, if you can't find him, become him; then you don't have find him, you see. You see us Texans know you can't BE a terrorist unless you ACT like you are it. See that's some home good wisdom; you can take that to the [pause] savings and loan debacle, you see."
It shouldn't just look at the chaos caused by incorrect information regarding debit cards being handed out. It was a near riot and could have cause a lot of injuries.
You know if they had been on the air already the could have quickly corrected the missinformation spread by Mr. Bush and his gang. And, then the chaos would have been averted.
Barking orders into a bullhorn just makes people want to rip the head off the bastard with the bullhorn.
This is just another example of why we need to destroy our current government at all levels and replace them with a workable democratic one (one with proportional representation to get rid of the Republicrats, assuming former members of the party would be allowed to run eventually). I would also jail the people involved in the scam, but I'm sure most people would rather see the higher officials hanged and then drawn and quartered (now that is reality TV!).
Still they should have just gone pirate and asked for forgiveness later; let that be a lesson to anyone who wants to do good. The government wouldn't have had the balls to order them off-the-air anytime soon.
But these are all really implemetation-specific things. Perhaps I should put my database-filesystem report online somewhere..
Nah, just read up on the rieser4 file system. It is a DB filesystem, but you don't actually need that for the features you are interested in (see rieser3). The problem you are talking about can be solved with bucket allocation (see any high performance malloc implementation).
Patents were supposed to encourage disclosure of innovation so that others can build on it.
Ummm... to build on something, you first need to use said something. But using it means infringing on the patent... which means building on it is either a losing proposition, or an impossibility... at least for 20 years.
Mind explaining what I'm missing here, please?
Patents were originally a means of rewarding favors by a despot. The despots used to take land from people who didn't have the power to resist the theft and give it to those people who did something for him. But once all the land had been given to his warlords he needed something else to give to these people. The idea of granting monopolies on the import or manufacture of stables such as salt then occured to one of these despots and the patent was born. Later when patents were choking the economy, the warlords banded together and forced the despot to limit their granting of patents to goods that were new to commerce and patent legislation was born. When the insurgency in the English colonies wrestled power away from the government and won their independence, the capitalist faction in the new power structure couldn't get patents eliminated completely but won the language in the U.S. constitution today. They believed by restricting patents to those things that would encourage innovation and limit the time a patent could be granted for it would eliminate the threat of patents to the free market. They were wrong, the 'encourage innovation' language has been considered so vague by the courts that they have left it up to the federal legislature to interpret the law. Of course this means that the law is completely meaningless. Combined with the high level of corruption in the U.S. legislative and executive branches this results in laws by and for the patent grantees; essentially the economic leaches are writing the law to maximize their ability to extract every last drop of blood from the productive industries.
U.S. remains the best place on earth
ha haha hahahaha hahahahaha hahahahahahaha
Heh, you should travel outside its borders sometime.
You will find that just about every other place you go is much better.
Seriously, I understand you wanting to stay in that shithole: family, sunk-cost-syndrome, etc. But don't get all delusional.
Take a deep breath and look outside the reality distortion field. You will find that your nation is in deep shit of its own making and the rest of the world can't/won't invade to install a democracy (mostly due to the nukes, but also other factors, damn France). You must do it yourselves, if you ever want your children to taste liberty and freedom. We'll be rooting for you.
Psst. Canada, the U.K. and Australia are just as fucked up, look harder.
Psst, Canadians, outside Quebec, like most Europeans, actually pay lower taxes than USians. You should examine their tax system more closely before spouting off on it. It's not that the extra stuff they get, like healthcare, is free. It just costs less than the increment USians have had pay to maintain their police state for the last 50 years.
The main problem with South America is that the climate is not conducive to the long-term survival of organic material. However, that does not make it impossible such material has survived. It just means that we don't have the luxury of time in looking for it. If it exists today, that does not guarantee it'll survive into next week.
This is more true of Mesoamerican rather than South American cultures. But, much of Peru is a desert which gets less than a centimeter of rain per decade. Unless that land is irrigated it is very dry. The post-colonial Peru has never been able to irrigate anywhere near as much land as the cultures that thrived there over the last few thousand years.
There is no lack of 'discovered' ancient cities in Peru, but there is a lack of money to dig any of them up.
This allows you to get a team of archaeologists to a relatively small area, which you can then safeguard against loggers, gold-hunters and slavers.
Ridiculous in Peru, there are no loggers where there are archeological sites, there are no slavers, and the gold-miners are harmless. What there are as a problem is an army of well financed looters from the USA and Europe, these people would probably have access to any such technology years before any archeologist could obtain it. In fact should such a technology exist their makers should cough up a few million dollars per machine to guard sites in Mexico, Peru and Iraq where most of the world's advanced ancient cultures developed.
- Abandon capitalism (though not freedom), it drives consumerism.
- Raise taxes, if taxes are high enough, then no one will have enough money to be consumers... wait, this is kind of like getting rid of capitalism.
You might not have to do either, just shift taxes away from income to and to the resources that cause problems.
If you lowered income taxes 2% a year and shifted it to resources and imports from places that had lower resource taxes in a revenue neutral way then you could slow environmental damage and eventually reverse the process.
There are other solutions, of course. When Japan had depleted wood in their country and that of their closest trading parters they instituded quotas on wood use and began replanting their forests, a few hundred years later they are the most forested industrialized country in the world with forests covering 80% of the islands. But quotas practically freeze an economy until they are removed. This might solve the problem, but would probably add hundreds of years to the time it would take versus a tax based solution.
Not applying the tariffs to already taxed imports would also help to stabilize the governments of our trading parters, as they would logically prefer to tax the resource themselves than have us do it. This means they would have more money to spend on local problems like nutrition, schooling and infrastructure.
I'm not saying this would be easy, resource taxes would effect poor people disportionately, as food and gasoline makes up a larger portion of their income. You would need to lower income taxes quicker on that segment of the population. This would look like you are soaking the rich even if all you were doing was trying to keep tax burdens the same as they are now. It would also disproportionately effect farmers who use a lot of oil and a lot of unforested land, both of which would be taxed more heavily. Helping them with more subsidies would violate a number of WTO treaty obligations. They could be paid to restore forests and donating recovered land to land conservancies which would take several generations, but many would object to that solution.
Food and gasoline prices would increase. But incomes might fall as well because we don't have strong unions, and the lower income taxes would look like raises. As for monetary policy 2% a year is manageable, but would still tax the federal reserves ability to tame inflation with just lending rate control. They might have to be given an additional power such as the ability to raise and lower any tax within a percentage point for monetary control. To limit the feds power they would not be allowed to spend the money, only hold it in reserve for paying out in lower taxes when inflation is low.
Unlike the Maya, the Inca didn't have a written language, which is why these knots are so important a discovery.
They didn't have a written language, but they did have picture books.
Books and illegal book owners were burned by the Christians. Most herecy laws in Spanish Peru did not apply as harshly to native Americans as to Europeans, the ban on books was an exception to the rule.
The khipu were much more numerous and not considered dangerous until later on, so a few survive. But there probably are not enough known khipu to left to decipher them. However, there may be caches of them buried somewhere. There too many unexplored archeological sites in Peru to count. The last remnants of the Inca state set up camp in the Amazon jungle, where any Khipu would have rotted quickly, but there may have been loyal subjects elsewhere in the Kingdom that thought to bury some of their documents.
There was a case some time back where police stopped a bunch of asian students in seattle for about an hour or so, called out a few cars, pretty much did the whole 9 yards because of a jay-walking infraction. I have to admit Seattle is the only city, the abosultly only city where i've seen jay-walking enforced.
If you think that is excessive, I was in Seattle a few years ago and and old man was hit by a car when the light turned green while he was still crossing the street. Thankfully he survived the accident, but the police came to the hospital the next day and wrote him a jaywalking ticket. The reckless driver got off without so much as a ticket.
BTW New York increased the jay-walking fine from $2 to $60 a few years ago, but when they tried to do a crackdown the finees became local celebs, photos of the mayor jay-walking kept showing up in the news. The whole thing made Guiliani look like an idiot. It didn't help that he tried to eliminate taxis as part of the same initiative. His reputation only recovered after 9/11 when other politicians ran away to undisclosed locations while he reacted like a normal person.