Another interesting aspect of copyright is religion. Religion is one of the fundamental aspects of society. Religious texts are published, copies, and scrutinized by both true believers and critics. Can you imagine the Roman Catholic Church claiming copyright over the Bible?
Interestingly, the Authorised Version (or "King James Bible", as many people call it informally), which is the basis of most Bibles currently available in English, is under perpetual copyright in the UK*, though I believe no other jurisdiction recognises this, and it is made available at no charge by the Church Commissioners who administer the copyright on behalf of the Crown.
* - Technically, not perpetual; the author it deemed to be the Throne (i.e., the meta-physical "human" embodiment of the Sovereign - a natural person), rather than James I himself, so it has the copyright of life+70; until and unless the UK becomes a republic, the author is deemed to still be 'alive'. Who said IPR wasn't intruiging?;-).
London also needs to understand the idea of running their subway all night. It was insane that I had to take a taxi to St. Pancras because the train to Paris was boarding before the tube started running for the day.
Yes, well, the network was built without track redundancy (for all but a negligible part of the network, there's exactly one set of tracks in each direction). It's stupid, and we (Humanity) learnt to do it better in later subways (like New York). That's what you get for being first in the world.
There's not much that could be done about it. I recall seeing a guesstimate price for "fixing" the problem - that is, building an entire secondary network - at US$50 billion. Not exactly in reach.
Back on-topic, I did find this story somewhat surprising; I certainly don't find there to be WiFi APs everywhere I go. Maybe I'm just unlucky.:-)
As someone who ended up talking to Rob on IRC every couple of days for over a year, and several times by 'phone, I can attest to this absolutely; his help to me in running the Wikimedia IRC channels was both invaluable and amazingly forth-coming - he was seemingly always available, and never anything other than friendly and massively helpful, even for the most tiresome and stupid of questions that I managed to come up with.
Good bye, Rob. We will miss you.
James F.
Wikimedia GC.
excluded liability for oral representations not confirmed in writing,
No contract is worth anything if it is not in writing so I can't see how this is a problem
Gah, this simply isn't true, although oft-repeated; "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on" and other witticisms aside, if, in the development of a contractual agreement (which doesn't have to be written in the first place, of course), one party makes representations that are taken and are relied upon by the other party as part of the contract, then they can be tortiously liable.
In this particular case, AIUI, Dell sought to disclaim liability if one of its sales force lied to misled a potential customer to secure in attempting to agree a sale, and the customer's decision to purchase was in part or whole based on this, unless the contract made specific mention of this - e.g., a customer asking if some software is installed on the machine, being told that it is, and, on purchasing, finding this not to be the case.
In fact, what's rather surprising is that Dell even tried to pull this off - it's a rather-obviously illegal clause to jam into a contract without due consideration (which a 'phone-sales generic contract doesn't really enjoy in non-standard elements).
I'm really quite astonishingly disappointed that the summary made no reference to the priceless phrase "unknown knows" to describe data left 'buried' in the dross, presumably from sources left, as it were, under-mined.
1) Not getting your screen all scratched up by your keys or change.
Removeable covers. They cost next to nothing; I replace the screen cover every 6 months or so (so, about once per 'phone).
2) Not having your other pocket items randomly dialing numbers for you, or not having to punch in a knock code to allow you to dial.
Have you heard of keylock? It's not a "knock code", nor even a "lock code"; it's a combination of two keys, of which one is the key you'd press anyway to start finding a number.
3) A microphone that's somewhere in the vicinity of your mouth instead of pressed against your cheekbone.
Umm. Whut? They put some lovely DSPs in there so it doesn't matter. I speak very softly into the 'phone, but it still picks up everything I say. We're not living in the 1950s.
3a) Smaller when folded, bigger when open.
Since when is bigger better? And every clamshell I've ever seen is larger even when folded than my Nokia, so...
4) If it's good enough for the Federation, it's good enough for me.
Quite.
I've had a mobile since '97, getting a new one every 12-18 months or so; Nokia monoblocks all the way. I seriously doubt you're going to convince me to switch.;-) The format I intend to switch to is a chip implant, and that's quite a way off.
Actually, the term is "monoblock". And they're far better. Can't understand the appeal of breakable 'phones at all; no-one I know has them, and for good reason (OK, two good reasons - the primary one is probably that they're not Nokias;-)).
The Great British have different Trademark law, and I think because they are much smaller geographically than the US (and have fewer businesses) they don't allow confusingly similar business names even across different industries.
No, that's not true. And we don't normally call ourselves "the Great British"; though the adjective is nice of you to use to describe us (with a lower-case 'G', please;-)), given that Brittany no longer has autonomy, there's no need to disambiguate between the inhabitents of our isles and those of a part of France - we use "British" as the adjective and sometimes the noun, and "Briton" (not "Breton", but etymologically related) as the noun, though the latter is sometimes used with overtones of racial reference.
I think thats part of why Apple Records Vs. Apple Computer was such a big hubbub, they sued in the UK multiple times, under UK law which gives more rights to Apple to protect their Trademark.
Actually, the problem is that Apple Records's trademark covers the use of the term "apple" as a brand related to the creation and retail of music. The first was something that Apple Computers's computers became able to be involved with in the late '80s (hence the original case); the second case was related to the creation of the iTunes Music Store for the UK, which was thus trading in the UK using Apple Records's trademark in the retail of music. Quite simple, really.
In the US Acme Auto Parts is going to have a hard time suing Acme Clothes Pins (unless they steal their logo or something).
... and in the UK, too.
Re:you seem to think that J.K. Rowling is an Ameri
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
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there is nothing that ties us to England
Well, of course there's bugger-all to tie you to a country that hasn't exist for 400 years (or, if you mean what most people mean by "England", for 900 years).:-)
Re:you seem to think that J.K. Rowling is an Ameri
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The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 2, Informative
But, the Queen rules over several kingdoms.
Correct.
England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Places like that. Combined they are the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
No, sorry, that's wrong. The Queen has 16 different kingdoms, known as the Commonwealth Realms. The United Kingdom is just one of these, a single kingdom; the name comes from the fact that it used to be 2 kingdoms before 1801 (the Kingdoms of Ireland and of Great Britain), and before that, since 1607, 3 (Ireland, Scotland, and England), though all three were in personal union for a few hundred years. Note that Wales hasn't been a kingdom for a rather long time - about 900 years or so; it's currently a principality (which is more than can be said for Northern Ireland, Scotland, or England).
Note that that's not a budget, merely a proposed budget - given the significant short-fall in donation income, it will have to be scaled back somewhat (and another donation drive run quite soon). The reason the items aren't split down further is that the money hasn't been spent yet.
What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?
It's money to fund the start-up costs of the local chapters - legal costs, primarily, and capped at US$500 or so per chapter, IIRC; we currently have chapters in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Serbia and Montenegro, and are working on founding ones for Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Local chapters work locally as ground-roots organisations, and form tax-friendly donation conduits.
Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?
The list of domains is quite extensive, which might give you some clue; also, remember that some TLDs and especially SLDs within CCTLDs are (significantly) more expensive than a bog-standard.com would.
The Register is published by the UK company, and hosted by another one (IIRC). And publishing such information may, I believe, lead to charges of conspiracy to disclose privileged information or even conspiracy to commit treason, even in the US. But that's another, quite intruiging, matter.
This is a common misunderstanding. The knowing disclosure parts of the Official Secrets Act applies to everyone - see section 5, sub-section 2:
[...] the person into whose possession the information, document or article has come is guilty of an offence if he discloses it without lawful authority knowing, or having reasonable cause to believe, that it is protected against disclosure by the foregoing provisions of this Act and that it has come into his possession as mentioned in subsection (1) above.
Yes, some parts only apply to those who have "signed the Act" (that is, where it can be legally proven that they have been informed of the nature of the Act and its requirements), but it is not the case for the more interesting situations like this.
As to information being ""damaging" w.r.t. the defence of the nation", well, given the current fad in No. 10 to use D-Notices like confetti (Ms. Blair, holiday plans, and other items come to mind).
That's not entirely true. It could quite well be non-classified but privileged information, and so passing it on (and, certainly, publishing it) would be a violation of the Official Secrets Act.
I jumped ship from reading The Register (and by that I mean read every article) to The Inquirer years ago. It has been going (not very) slowly downhill for yonks. L'Inq is how I remember El Reg used to be back in the good old days.:-)
Erm. JET reached break-even about 5 years ago, IIRC. Also, the SPHERE project (also at RAL) was rather exciting (v. small and high yeilds). The continuity and sustainability of reaction is the primary issue, right now.
Indeed. It's a bit crazy here, as Jimbo says. Typical Slashdot reactionism.:-)
Seriously, these kind of mis-translations from language to language happen all the time on a multi-lingual project like Wikimedia. We just have to cope with momentary mis-understandings like this every now and then.
I thought Australia or another country was trying to sue the DVD consortium through the WTO for the practice [of region-splitting]
Well, they won. DVD players can't be sold legally in Australia without being "modded" to be R0. There's a small but lucrative market in shipping Australian PS2s, for instance, to the UK and other places - manufacturer's fitting of the mod-chip, as it were.
The Conservatives [...] when they were in power (when Margaret Thatcher and later John Major were leaders) they very nearly crippled the country with severe mismanagement.
Surely you jest? (Old) Labour are the party of the Winter of Discontent, what with their inability to deal with the unions. The British economy was improved almost immeasurably by the Thatcherite reforms (even if the attempted social reforms left something to be desired). I really can't understand how this myth is perpetuated (except, perhaps, by disgruntled former coal-miners who wrongly feel that the loss of their jobs was neither necessary nor unpreventable); yes, people lost their jobs at the same time that Thatcher was reforming the industry, but there is not a causal link - they were both symptoms of globalisation and so economic competition from the Far East.
And, before you go accusing me of being a Tory, I'm a Lib Dem.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Another interesting aspect of copyright is religion. Religion is one of the fundamental aspects of society. Religious texts are published, copies, and scrutinized by both true believers and critics. Can you imagine the Roman Catholic Church claiming copyright over the Bible?
Interestingly, the Authorised Version (or "King James Bible", as many people call it informally), which is the basis of most Bibles currently available in English, is under perpetual copyright in the UK*, though I believe no other jurisdiction recognises this, and it is made available at no charge by the Church Commissioners who administer the copyright on behalf of the Crown.
* - Technically, not perpetual; the author it deemed to be the Throne (i.e., the meta-physical "human" embodiment of the Sovereign - a natural person), rather than James I himself, so it has the copyright of life+70; until and unless the UK becomes a republic, the author is deemed to still be 'alive'. Who said IPR wasn't intruiging? ;-).
London also needs to understand the idea of running their subway all night. It was insane that I had to take a taxi to St. Pancras because the train to Paris was boarding before the tube started running for the day.
Yes, well, the network was built without track redundancy (for all but a negligible part of the network, there's exactly one set of tracks in each direction). It's stupid, and we (Humanity) learnt to do it better in later subways (like New York). That's what you get for being first in the world.
There's not much that could be done about it. I recall seeing a guesstimate price for "fixing" the problem - that is, building an entire secondary network - at US$50 billion. Not exactly in reach.
Back on-topic, I did find this story somewhat surprising; I certainly don't find there to be WiFi APs everywhere I go. Maybe I'm just unlucky. :-)
As someone who ended up talking to Rob on IRC every couple of days for over a year, and several times by 'phone, I can attest to this absolutely; his help to me in running the Wikimedia IRC channels was both invaluable and amazingly forth-coming - he was seemingly always available, and never anything other than friendly and massively helpful, even for the most tiresome and stupid of questions that I managed to come up with. Good bye, Rob. We will miss you. James F. Wikimedia GC.
Gah, this simply isn't true, although oft-repeated; "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on" and other witticisms aside, if, in the development of a contractual agreement (which doesn't have to be written in the first place, of course), one party makes representations that are taken and are relied upon by the other party as part of the contract, then they can be tortiously liable.
In this particular case, AIUI, Dell sought to disclaim liability if one of its sales force lied to misled a potential customer to secure in attempting to agree a sale, and the customer's decision to purchase was in part or whole based on this, unless the contract made specific mention of this - e.g., a customer asking if some software is installed on the machine, being told that it is, and, on purchasing, finding this not to be the case.
In fact, what's rather surprising is that Dell even tried to pull this off - it's a rather-obviously illegal clause to jam into a contract without due consideration (which a 'phone-sales generic contract doesn't really enjoy in non-standard elements).
I'm really quite astonishingly disappointed that the summary made no reference to the priceless phrase "unknown knows" to describe data left 'buried' in the dross, presumably from sources left, as it were, under-mined.
Damn. I really wanted the email address mon@di.eu!
Removeable covers. They cost next to nothing; I replace the screen cover every 6 months or so (so, about once per 'phone).
Have you heard of keylock? It's not a "knock code", nor even a "lock code"; it's a combination of two keys, of which one is the key you'd press anyway to start finding a number.
Umm. Whut? They put some lovely DSPs in there so it doesn't matter. I speak very softly into the 'phone, but it still picks up everything I say. We're not living in the 1950s.
Since when is bigger better? And every clamshell I've ever seen is larger even when folded than my Nokia, so...
Quite.
I've had a mobile since '97, getting a new one every 12-18 months or so; Nokia monoblocks all the way. I seriously doubt you're going to convince me to switch. ;-) The format I intend to switch to is a chip implant, and that's quite a way off.
Actually, the term is "monoblock". And they're far better. Can't understand the appeal of breakable 'phones at all; no-one I know has them, and for good reason (OK, two good reasons - the primary one is probably that they're not Nokias ;-)).
No, that's not true. And we don't normally call ourselves "the Great British"; though the adjective is nice of you to use to describe us (with a lower-case 'G', please ;-)), given that Brittany no longer has autonomy, there's no need to disambiguate between the inhabitents of our isles and those of a part of France - we use "British" as the adjective and sometimes the noun, and "Briton" (not "Breton", but etymologically related) as the noun, though the latter is sometimes used with overtones of racial reference.
Actually, the problem is that Apple Records's trademark covers the use of the term "apple" as a brand related to the creation and retail of music. The first was something that Apple Computers's computers became able to be involved with in the late '80s (hence the original case); the second case was related to the creation of the iTunes Music Store for the UK, which was thus trading in the UK using Apple Records's trademark in the retail of music. Quite simple, really.
... and in the UK, too.
Well, of course there's bugger-all to tie you to a country that hasn't exist for 400 years (or, if you mean what most people mean by "England", for 900 years). :-)
Correct.
No, sorry, that's wrong. The Queen has 16 different kingdoms, known as the Commonwealth Realms. The United Kingdom is just one of these, a single kingdom; the name comes from the fact that it used to be 2 kingdoms before 1801 (the Kingdoms of Ireland and of Great Britain), and before that, since 1607, 3 (Ireland, Scotland, and England), though all three were in personal union for a few hundred years. Note that Wales hasn't been a kingdom for a rather long time - about 900 years or so; it's currently a principality (which is more than can be said for Northern Ireland, Scotland, or England).
Whoops, yes. That's what I get for not previewing my comments. :-)
Note that that's not a budget, merely a proposed budget - given the significant short-fall in donation income, it will have to be scaled back somewhat (and another donation drive run quite soon). The reason the items aren't split down further is that the money hasn't been spent yet.
It's money to fund the start-up costs of the local chapters - legal costs, primarily, and capped at US$500 or so per chapter, IIRC; we currently have chapters in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Serbia and Montenegro, and are working on founding ones for Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Local chapters work locally as ground-roots organisations, and form tax-friendly donation conduits.
The list of domains is quite extensive, which might give you some clue; also, remember that some TLDs and especially SLDs within CCTLDs are (significantly) more expensive than a bog-standard .com would.
I hope that this answers your questions.
The Register is published by the UK company, and hosted by another one (IIRC). And publishing such information may, I believe, lead to charges of conspiracy to disclose privileged information or even conspiracy to commit treason, even in the US. But that's another, quite intruiging, matter.
This is a common misunderstanding. The knowing disclosure parts of the Official Secrets Act applies to everyone - see section 5, sub-section 2:
Yes, some parts only apply to those who have "signed the Act" (that is, where it can be legally proven that they have been informed of the nature of the Act and its requirements), but it is not the case for the more interesting situations like this.
As to information being ""damaging" w.r.t. the defence of the nation", well, given the current fad in No. 10 to use D-Notices like confetti (Ms. Blair, holiday plans, and other items come to mind).
That's not entirely true. It could quite well be non-classified but privileged information, and so passing it on (and, certainly, publishing it) would be a violation of the Official Secrets Act.
Extra? Extra?! I think someone failed genetics.
:-)
I jumped ship from reading The Register (and by that I mean read every article) to The Inquirer years ago. It has been going (not very) slowly downhill for yonks. L'Inq is how I remember El Reg used to be back in the good old days. :-)
Maybe the break-even that I'm remembering didn't take account of all input power (ignition beam but not magnetic constriction, perhaps?). I dunno.
Erm. JET reached break-even about 5 years ago, IIRC. Also, the SPHERE project (also at RAL) was rather exciting (v. small and high yeilds). The continuity and sustainability of reaction is the primary issue, right now.
The data centre at CERN has a 1 or 2 metre-high void, IIRC. But then, they have rather a lot of cables. It was a deliberate decision.
Seriously, these kind of mis-translations from language to language happen all the time on a multi-lingual project like Wikimedia. We just have to cope with momentary mis-understandings like this every now and then.
Well, they won. DVD players can't be sold legally in Australia without being "modded" to be R0. There's a small but lucrative market in shipping Australian PS2s, for instance, to the UK and other places - manufacturer's fitting of the mod-chip, as it were.
Surely you jest? (Old) Labour are the party of the Winter of Discontent, what with their inability to deal with the unions. The British economy was improved almost immeasurably by the Thatcherite reforms (even if the attempted social reforms left something to be desired). I really can't understand how this myth is perpetuated (except, perhaps, by disgruntled former coal-miners who wrongly feel that the loss of their jobs was neither necessary nor unpreventable); yes, people lost their jobs at the same time that Thatcher was reforming the industry, but there is not a causal link - they were both symptoms of globalisation and so economic competition from the Far East.
And, before you go accusing me of being a Tory, I'm a Lib Dem. :-)
Unicode is assumed for 1.5, so all wikis will be converted as part of the transition process, including the English Wikipedia.