Here at a state university, I frequently watch people as they use computers to whatever serves their purposes. And what do I see? LEGIONS, dozens, nay, *hundreds* of students, who use these computers only to do what they absolutely have to, who use the computers strictly to surf porn, chat, and do email. It sickens me to watch as these students never learn to do more, and they use the non-SSL webCGI to do their email, because it's pretty and "easy to use." These people are the ones that just close the browser instead of clicking the "logout" button, leave ICQ registered to them and save their password, leave 1-click shopping turned on at Amazon (in a public lab)
and often walk away and forget to logout of the terminal, because "I don't have to do that on the one in my room!" Sure, "easy to use" interfaces cause the mainstream public to flock to computers, but these people never do learn to do more with a computer than these simple operations.
Amen, brother! I'm tech support at a large, Midwestern University, and I see the exact same things. You forgot to mention people who leave their email running -- I've lost count of how many times I've shut down email or Hotmail and emailed the person a warning about leaving their email running. I ask them to consider the fact that someone else, less ethical than I, could use their email account (pine from a shell on a Sun box) to do a number of illicit things, not to mention devnulling all their files. The ones that bother to write back and thank me are just *shocked* to discover this!
On the other side, there are the students who know just enough to do damage. My favorite was the person who thought he'd format a disk under Windows NT. Since all the public computers were in use, and it was late at night, he'd thought he'd just "borrow" one of the staff computers (that happened to be accessible by going behind the counter) -- couldn't hurt, right?
At that point in time, staff computers didn't have supervisor passwords on them (they do now;-), so he just booted up, ran command.com and was at the C: Prompt. He put in his floppy, typed "format a" and sat back, secure in the knowledge that he was going to end up with a formatted disc. Yup -- a formatted HARD disk -- idiot. He'd forgotten the colon after the "a", and DOS was "smart" enough to 1) reject the "a" without a colon and 2) STUPID enough to run format ANYWAY -- on the *C* drive! Aarghhh!!!
Needless to say, there was a great deal of staff wonderment the next morning at that particular computer -- what could have possibly happened? Gee, computers are *so* complicated, etc.:-P The only good thing that came out of all this is that I decided to quit this sorry-ass job cleaning up after L-users and do something more interesting with my life and skills. Final freedom occurs in 431 hours!!! =8-D
Very often I see a lot of arguments that "information has no scarcity", and I reel back in horror at that inaccuracy. Raw, unfiltered data has no scarcity. It's just bits. Information, however, is a specific configuration of bits that adds value. The fact that there is a lack of "valuable information" (i.e. good music, good software, good books) implies that there is a form of scarcity involved -- a scarcity of skill and talent to create valuable information. Information creation is a scarce service.
Not only is information *creation* a talented service, so is the *organization* of information. The usefulness of information is directly propotional to the ease with which it can be accessed; therefore, organized information is more valuable than unorganized information.
Another way to put this is that creating *meta*-information is a valuable service as well. That's why Yahoo's stock is so high: people recognize the value of someone organizing information using meta-information.
It follows that someone who created a way to organize *any* kind of information in such a way as to enable users to grasp it without having to go all the way through it has a valuable business at hand. One rather trivial example, for example, is the photographic thumbnail. At a glance one sees all the information in a reduced form, but simply by clicking on it, one can easily access *all* the information contained therein. It seems to me that what we need is some kind of "text thumbnail".
According to this copyright law, any copyright
ownership would be in the hands of long dead artists.
You are confused on several fronts here; let's see if I can help you out.
Firstly, let me point out that this copyright law only covers US artists. Secondly, since the rewriting of the Copyright Act in 1976, the US has *not* been in compliance with the Berne Convention regarding international copyright: copyright terms are far too long. Thirdly, you are actually talking about *2* different kinds of copyright: artist's copyright and performer's copyright.
Copyright was originally established as a government-granted monopoly of *limited* duration (28 years + one-time renewal of same for another 28 years). The idea was that, after a period of time for the author to gain monies from the sale of the copyrighted material, it would go into the public domain and anyone could then freely make a copy, sell it, etc.
Up until 1976, this was the case and the US was in compliance with the Berne Convention, which assured conformity with copyright law around the world. So, regarding pre-twentieth classical composers, you are, in a certain sense, correct. Those composers have now lost their copyright -- as artists. You could sit down, play on your keyboard your own version of, say, the 1812 Overture, rip it into a MP3, and sell it over the net.
BUT: a recording from, say 1964, of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic playing that same piece is still protected by *performer's copyright*. You could not, for example, take a CD of that work, rip it, and post it for sale without inccurring the wrath of the copyright gods.
Now, in 1976, things changed. The Disney corporation realized that Mickey Mouse was about to go out of copyright (I am not making this up) and pressured the House of Representatives to rewrite the copyright laws so as to extend the term limit, to the term of creator's life plus 50 years. Since Walt Disney died in 1968, Mickey Mouse was now safe until 2018. Besides badly abusing the original intent of copyright laws, the US fell out of compliance with the Berne Convention, causing a rift with Europe.
Things actually got worse in 1996, when the Copyright laws were again rewritten. Besides extending copyrights to life of creator plus *75* years (MM safe until 2043), the law tightened up the "fair use" provision. ("Fair use" enabled, for example, reviewers to quote part of a work without being prosecuted under copyright laws.) Another thing that the rewrite did was to *illegalize* reverse engineering -- a common software practice. Plus it tilted the playing field in the direction of copyright owners in a number of other ways.
The bottom line, from your perspective is this: It's probably OK to trade classical music that was *recorded* before about 1920 -- that's out of both artists' and performer's copyright. Anything *since* then, however, *might* still be in performer's copyright, or had its copyright extended. Up to about 1950, there is probably a fair amount of music that *did not* have its copyright renewed. You're probably OK with that, but tread carefully. After 1950, your safest course, if you're not sure, is *don't*.
There are clearinghouses -- ASCAP and BMI come to mind -- whose sole job it is to collect royalties on recorded music. They would be able to tell you if a given piece by a given artist is still within copyright or not. You might also check with the Library of Congress, which is the official copyright depository for the United States.
Actually, pretty much any art or literature that was produced before, say, 1600 was a product of someone working in a non-capitalist system.
Errr...perhaps we have different definitions of what "capitalism" is. I find capitalism to have three irreducible elements: investment (of capital), risk (of loss of capital) and profit (return on capital). Thus, to me, "trading" *is* capitalism, and that goes back into the Stone Age. (For example the trade in amber and silk along the Silk Road goes back *at least* 10,000 years.) If you are restricting yourself to Europe, then you have to go back at least to the Hanseatic League around the 13th Century in Northern Germany.
On the other hand, some people mark the start of "capitalism" with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800's. Your notation of "1600's" makes me think that you see the start of "capitalism" with the first granting of corporate charters, while I would argue that that marks the start of "corporatism", which I see as merely a variant of capitalism (although -- with its legal shift of liability away from the individuals comprising the enterprise and onto the enterprise itself -- clearly an important one).
However, for art to last beyond the immediate requires societal involvement, generally from a broad segment of society. If a particular piece of art's appeal is confined to an individual or a small segment of society, it is far more susceptible to being forgotten or lost. Without a greater society to 'approve' and preserve works of art, we'd have an awfully empty culture.
Again, I beg to differ. Art is what the *artist* says it is, not society. By your definition, Robert Mapplethorpe and Vincent van Gogh (in his lifetime) were not really artists, and neither were the Sex Pistols (or Elvis Presley in 1956). Ironically, sometimes the first mark of a great artist is a society united *against* his works. (It was only later that society came to appreciate the works of the above-named artists.) And what about "folk" art or "outsider" art? I'm not trying to excuse "junk" as art; I just don't agree that a "society" MUST validate art before it *is* art.
By your definition, the turgid, sentimental works produced under the Nazi regime *were* art and the "decadent" art that they reviled was *not* (by the standards of German society at that point in time). Today, the opposite is generally felt to be true. Similarly, the dreary works of "social realism" under Stalin and Mao were enthusiastically received at the time; today they are seen as little more than anachronistic embarassments.
Bottom line: society's judgement is irrelevant; the artist's judgement is irreplaceable. Society's standards change, because there is not -- and can never be -- any objective standard for judging what is art and what isn't. The soul of the artist is the final arbitrar.
That, as a whole, we are being lulled into an unconscious slumber, that powerful unaccountable forces are subtley, but greatly, shaping our perception is very scary.
"Most people on this planet are asleep; it is our job to awaken them." -- Gurdjieff, sometime in the 19th Century (paraphrased)
Some of the best cultural, literatary, and artistic work, and cultural progress in general, has been accomplished under non-capitalist systems.
Oh yeah? Name even one. "The East is Red", maybe? 8-P
The problem is that capitalism measures everything by market value, by how much an *individual* values something, not by what a *society* values.
Every artist I have ever known has created their art with no regard to its market value or what society thinks about it. And they were each individuals. They would rather *stop* doing art altogether than submit to some kind of "social-valuing* system.
The trick is that near a black hole, sometimes these particle pairs sap energy from the black hole, and at least one of the particles becomes "real". You could imagine the other particle falls into the hole or something...
Weelll...not exactly. IIRC, one of the virtual particles crosses over the event horizon; if it happens to be an anti-matter particle, then a matter particle "appears" near the edge of the black hole.
I was wondering about quantum entanglement. It appears these days that two particles can be "entangled" even though they are an arbitrary distance apart, and that measuring the state of one collapses the state of the other. Now: what would happen if you started off with 2 entangled particles and one went into the black hole before you measured the state of the other. Since the masive gravitational forces at the event horizon would presumably "destroy" the first particle (i.e. strip away its identity) before you measured the second one, what would be the result? Would the second particle change in any particular way -- say, be a fermion when it started out a boson, for example? What if they were photons? This is just a Gedankenexperiment, but I'd like to hear someone speculate on this.
I'm on it. I've already registered the name Polidot.com (wanted Polydot.com, but it was taken.)
While I respect the/. tarball, I won't be using it. I have some ideas on how to make moderation more efficient that are discongruent with the/. model.
Polidot.com will not be interested in collecting information about users and then selling it to advertisers. I'm more interested in implementing an interesting "collaborative filtering" model than making a lot of money. However, I do have some interesting ideas about funding the site.
(And to answer the obvious question -- yes, the model will be open-sourced.)
Better put: what if your OS and Software had to be approved for Internet use before you could put it on the 'net? Put the onus on the OS/Email/Services programmers.
OK, I like this a little better. Ideally, the marketplace will winnow out buggy and insecure programs. BUT -- there will always be people who will write software and just put it in their FTP directories for anyone to download. And there will be people who will use it just because the cost = $0.
I guess as I consider this topic I am becoming aware of our responsibility toward others on the Internet. Perhaps I should be repremanded if I leave my system open and it is used as part of a DDoS attack.
What is ironic is this: in the old days on the Net (before '95), *everyone* would leave their system open so as to facilitate email forwarding. The idea that people would DDOS was simply unthinkable. I'd say that there is nothing wrong with leaving your system open -- providing you monitor it carefully. Most DDOSing is done using server farm machines that are only loosely monitored (the rationale being: "Well, all this machine does is serve pages and there aren't any user accounts on it, so we won't bother with checking it unless it goes down."). But you are right about one thing: personal responsibility is important. The only thing I disagree on is the theory that people need to be monitored, checked and licensed to make sure that they are being responsible. Children may need such strictures -- but adults aren't children.
How about a license to connect to the Information Super Highway?
Your blue-sky proposal is ridiculous. Who is going to set up the "test"; who is going to administer it; what penalties will there be for "driving without a license", etc. Do you really want to install *yet another* bureaucracy over us?
Furthermore: requiring everyone to have a license because *some* people are irresponsible is, in essence, saying "Everyone is guilty until proven otherwise." Go back to France: that's where that bass-ackwards system of "justice" originated. Here in America we have a fundamental principle that people are "innocent until proven guilty".
There is a reason for having a driving test: you have to prove that you can adequately handle a ton-and-a-half vehicle at high speeds before you actually get on the road. A computer is not a car; if you crash your computer, no one else is affected. If you drink while programming, you'll just produce bad code, but it won't affect anyone else. Using your computer to design and upload a virus is using a tool in a weapon-like way. People *have* used cars as weapons, but I don't recall any questions on the Driver's Ed test about "Will you be using your vehicle to commit a homicide?" That's just as strange as asking someone "Will you be using your computer to commit a crime?" -- and who is going to answer *that* question in the affirmative anyway?
I realize the law says "intentionally" but what if a more proactive stance was adopted?
The reason that the law says "intentionally" is because for a crime to be proved there are 3 irreducible elements: Means, motive and opportunity. If a virus comes into your computer and uses the copy of Outlook you have installed to perpetuate itself, the means is there, the opportunity is there, but YOUR MOTIVE is not. Therefore YOU cannot be accused of propagating the virus. (Perhaps you could be prosecuted for maintaining an "attractive nuisance", but if you installed it in a manner so as to leave it in the default condition, then the software manufacturer is just as -- if not more so -- liable).
A more "pro-active" stance would only apply two of the three conditions -- perhaps your motive is irrelevant. Then you could be thrown in jail -- perhaps without even realizing that your computer passed the virus along -- just because a computer log somewhere had your IP address as the (from its point of view) origin. How would you feel about *that*?
...we were seeing the rise of another Adolf Hitler.
Let me be the first to point out that we are *RIGHT NOW* seeing the rise of another Hitler in Vladimir Putin [new President of Russia, for the politically unaware].
Same rhetoric of "bringing back the glory of the state",
same supression of the independent media,
same demonization of the "decadent" West,
same cozy links with the oligarchs while calling for an end to "corruption",
same unqualified support for the military,
same bringing into the government his unknown and unqualified 'associates',
same saber-rattling,
many of the same economic problems, etc.
He's even sent troops to Ethiopia: maybe he'll be Mussolini as well. I just wonder who his "internal enemies" are going to be. I've got half my money on "the liberals" and the other half on "the Jews". [I'd advise members of both groups to leave before the purges and pogroms start up].And, also, who will be Putin's Neville Chamberlain: "I believe it is peace in our time."
MARK MY WORDS -- you saw it here first.
Abraham Lincoln on "Polk's [Mexican] War"
on
Virtual War
·
· Score: 2
Sure there are a lot of Mexicans in Texas, but I don't remember too many of them being gunned down systematically by the Texas Rangers.
"The marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly ambiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure, but it does not appear so to us..."
--A. Lincoln, c. 1847, when he was a member of the House of Representatives.
The "Mexican War" was precisely the "gunning down systematically... by Texas Rangers" of Mexicans. James A. Polk: "It was clear that in making war we would if practicable obtain California and...other portions of the Mexican territory..."
Of course, back then, human rights were not exactly an issue.
The Serbs have the government they deserve. If they don't get rid of it, by any means nessesary, then they are just as culpable...
And what about the Americans? Our government was democratically elected -- just like theirs. (Oh yes it was -- look it up.) Should *we* get rid of it 'by any means necessary', since the United States had to break *FOUR* international treaties in order to engage in this undeclared "war"?
But in the cesium experiment, the outcome is particularly strange because backward light waves can, in effect, borrow energy from the excited cesium atoms before giving it back a short time later.
This reminds me very much of those cloud chamber pictures that show virtual particles appearing before they are supposed to. The explanation is that these particles are "borrowing" energy from the vacuum and returning it later: the energies balance eventually. (This is related to the phase-transition problem and the electron tunneling phenomenon as well.) What's interesting here is that this "borrowing" effect appears to be happening at a macro (i.e. non-atomic-scale) level: that alone could win the authors of this experiment a Nobel Prize.
You've never heard of FortRes?? We use it on some of our WinBloze boxen, and, while it doesn't stop users from trying to install stuff, they get screwed when they try to reboot, because they don't know the box pword OR the FortRes pword. Ha! Plus of course we use (constantly updated) McAfee antiviral software AND we don't run any M$ email programs (on the public boxen).
We run 50 win boxen (half and half public / staff) and the only place I saw the virus was on/. when someone posted the code. (My staff is educated enough not to open unsolicited attachments, even though some of them use Outlook. I took the time to explain the whole thing very carefully at a staff meeting after the Melissa fiasco.) So education *does* work, but only for motivated users.
I certainly agree with your last point: you can't ignore user ignorance.
A precis program which will condense long websites or discussions.
Quick Algorithm:
1) Rank all words in a selection by frequency of occurrance. 2) Throw all out pronouns, connectors, prepositions and other too-frequent words that are not nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. 3) You now have the gist of the article, still organized by word frequency. 4) Go back and find the sentences in the article that contain a large number of high-frequency terms. Print them. 5) You will find that you have just effectively summarized the article.
Actually you will find that you have merely listed a bunch of sentences with high-frequency terms. Use your AI skills to determine how to arrange these sentences so that the top ones *do indeed* summarize the article. (Directed graphs? Semantic nets? Internal references?)
Check out "Swarm Smarts" in the March 2000 issue of Scientific American (unfortunately not on the Web). Check your local library.
IIRC, it's about *exactly* what these guys are doing -- using simulated biologic agents (ants) to solve complex mathematical problems such as the Traveling Salesman problem and Internet network routing.
By their nature, individualists are discontented: persistent, obnoxious and unpopular, from the scoolkid who challenges a teacher in school, to the employee who irritates the senior veep. Individualism demands that its followers become critics.They raise questions many people don't want to hear, confront the growing conformity in our cultural and educational institutions, and put themselves at risk of losing positions and promotions and opportunities. Their only reward is to join a proud community of other dissatisfied people, a community of social discontents. They are free to speak and think their minds. They are independent in an increasingly dependent world. They are affirming a long and glorious human struggle, from the Enlightenment to the American Revolution, to achieve autonomy and individual liberty. They are seeking a moral way to live in the world beyond simply fattening their portfolios. They can sometimes rise, and help other people to rise above the great levelling that corporatism imposes.
Search for "quantum teleportation" on your favorite search engine. (I found 2400 refs on Google.) Or search your local library for the past couple years of Scientific American, Nature, Science etc.
reporting on a bill before the US House Of Reps. that would declare ALL published artistic musical work "work for hire"
The comment is flamebait. If you actually go (like I did) and read the bill (go to Thomas, search for S. 1948, then look at Sec.1011), then go and look at the actual US Code which it references, you will see the following:
A ''work made for hire'' is - [...] (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work [the change incorporated from S. 1948: as a sound recording], as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire [my emphasis].
This does *not* mean what the author of this comment alleges that it means. No copyrights are ripped away from any artists. It still requires that an artist agrees that the work that he or she is doing *is* a work for hire.
The 1976 updating of the Copyright Act holds that the mere creation of a work of art confers copyrightholder status on the creator. A significant legal action is required to transfer copyright to anyone else. A further legal action is required to certify that a work is being done "for hire".
This really *was* a technical amendment updating Title 17, Sec. 101, Para. 2 to include sound recordings as an area in which work for hire *might* be done. It is *not* a wholesale taking of intellectual property as was alleged by the author of this comment.
If this were to really happen you would run the risk of moving into an arms race between website designers trying to squeeze their banners past the checks (in order to gain ad-revenue) and the browser hackers trying to eliminate them.
In every dynamic ecology, you have an "arms race" between the 'prey' and the 'predator'. However, as Tom Ray points out, the rise of parasites (a form of non-lethal predator) leads, in the long run, to a more stable and diverse ecology.
In this example, banner ads are the parasite. They 'eat' attention (which Howard Rheingold pointed out is the irreducible resource on the Net) without giving anything back. (Of course, they *promise* to, but promising sybiosis and delivering parasitism is an old, old trick...) Therefore, it is logical for 'eyeballs' ('prey') to evolve various methods for protecting themselves, such as "tuning them out" (not paying attention) or developing devices that strip out images (a bit of an overkill, methinks, since you are ignoring anything that *might* be a parasite).
The counter I expect that will next be used by the parasites is 'mimicry': ads will try to pretend to be something that they are not.
The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer-operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said.
IIRC, there was a case many years ago involving two phone companies. Company 1 invested a great deal of time in putting together a list of phone subscribers. Company 2 "borrowed" the same list and made it available under their imprint. Company 1 sued them for copyright violation. Who won?
Company 2!! It was ruled fair use. They did not add any value to the list, merely reprinting it.
The name of the case escapes me at the moment; however, it was a precedent-setting case and any capable lawyer out there could probably come up with it in a few minutes.
I think the judge's ruling will be overturned on appeal because of the case that I have cited above.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen, brother! I'm tech support at a large, Midwestern University, and I see the exact same things. You forgot to mention people who leave their email running -- I've lost count of how many times I've shut down email or Hotmail and emailed the person a warning about leaving their email running. I ask them to consider the fact that someone else, less ethical than I, could use their email account (pine from a shell on a Sun box) to do a number of illicit things, not to mention devnulling all their files. The ones that bother to write back and thank me are just *shocked* to discover this!
On the other side, there are the students who know just enough to do damage. My favorite was the person who thought he'd format a disk under Windows NT. Since all the public computers were in use, and it was late at night, he'd thought he'd just "borrow" one of the staff computers (that happened to be accessible by going behind the counter) -- couldn't hurt, right?
At that point in time, staff computers didn't have supervisor passwords on them (they do now ;-), so he just booted up, ran command.com and was at the C: Prompt. He put in his floppy, typed "format a" and sat back, secure in the knowledge that he was going to end up with a formatted disc. Yup -- a formatted HARD disk -- idiot. He'd forgotten the colon after the "a", and DOS was "smart" enough to 1) reject the "a" without a colon and 2) STUPID enough to run format ANYWAY -- on the *C* drive! Aarghhh!!!
Needless to say, there was a great deal of staff wonderment the next morning at that particular computer -- what could have possibly happened? Gee, computers are *so* complicated, etc. :-P The only good thing that came out of all this is that I decided to quit this sorry-ass job cleaning up after L-users and do something more interesting with my life and skills. Final freedom occurs in 431 hours!!! =8-D
Not only is information *creation* a talented service, so is the *organization* of information. The usefulness of information is directly propotional to the ease with which it can be accessed; therefore, organized information is more valuable than unorganized information.
Another way to put this is that creating *meta*-information is a valuable service as well. That's why Yahoo's stock is so high: people recognize the value of someone organizing information using meta-information.
It follows that someone who created a way to organize *any* kind of information in such a way as to enable users to grasp it without having to go all the way through it has a valuable business at hand. One rather trivial example, for example, is the photographic thumbnail. At a glance one sees all the information in a reduced form, but simply by clicking on it, one can easily access *all* the information contained therein. It seems to me that what we need is some kind of "text thumbnail".
You are confused on several fronts here; let's see if I can help you out.
Firstly, let me point out that this copyright law only covers US artists. Secondly, since the rewriting of the Copyright Act in 1976, the US has *not* been in compliance with the Berne Convention regarding international copyright: copyright terms are far too long. Thirdly, you are actually talking about *2* different kinds of copyright: artist's copyright and performer's copyright.
Copyright was originally established as a government-granted monopoly of *limited* duration (28 years + one-time renewal of same for another 28 years). The idea was that, after a period of time for the author to gain monies from the sale of the copyrighted material, it would go into the public domain and anyone could then freely make a copy, sell it, etc.
Up until 1976, this was the case and the US was in compliance with the Berne Convention, which assured conformity with copyright law around the world. So, regarding pre-twentieth classical composers, you are, in a certain sense, correct. Those composers have now lost their copyright -- as artists. You could sit down, play on your keyboard your own version of, say, the 1812 Overture, rip it into a MP3, and sell it over the net.
BUT: a recording from, say 1964, of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic playing that same piece is still protected by *performer's copyright*. You could not, for example, take a CD of that work, rip it, and post it for sale without inccurring the wrath of the copyright gods.
Now, in 1976, things changed. The Disney corporation realized that Mickey Mouse was about to go out of copyright (I am not making this up) and pressured the House of Representatives to rewrite the copyright laws so as to extend the term limit, to the term of creator's life plus 50 years. Since Walt Disney died in 1968, Mickey Mouse was now safe until 2018. Besides badly abusing the original intent of copyright laws, the US fell out of compliance with the Berne Convention, causing a rift with Europe.
Things actually got worse in 1996, when the Copyright laws were again rewritten. Besides extending copyrights to life of creator plus *75* years (MM safe until 2043), the law tightened up the "fair use" provision. ("Fair use" enabled, for example, reviewers to quote part of a work without being prosecuted under copyright laws.) Another thing that the rewrite did was to *illegalize* reverse engineering -- a common software practice. Plus it tilted the playing field in the direction of copyright owners in a number of other ways.
The bottom line, from your perspective is this: It's probably OK to trade classical music that was *recorded* before about 1920 -- that's out of both artists' and performer's copyright. Anything *since* then, however, *might* still be in performer's copyright, or had its copyright extended. Up to about 1950, there is probably a fair amount of music that *did not* have its copyright renewed. You're probably OK with that, but tread carefully. After 1950, your safest course, if you're not sure, is *don't*.
There are clearinghouses -- ASCAP and BMI come to mind -- whose sole job it is to collect royalties on recorded music. They would be able to tell you if a given piece by a given artist is still within copyright or not. You might also check with the Library of Congress, which is the official copyright depository for the United States.
Good luck!
Errr...perhaps we have different definitions of what "capitalism" is. I find capitalism to have three irreducible elements: investment (of capital), risk (of loss of capital) and profit (return on capital). Thus, to me, "trading" *is* capitalism, and that goes back into the Stone Age. (For example the trade in amber and silk along the Silk Road goes back *at least* 10,000 years.) If you are restricting yourself to Europe, then you have to go back at least to the Hanseatic League around the 13th Century in Northern Germany.
On the other hand, some people mark the start of "capitalism" with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800's. Your notation of "1600's" makes me think that you see the start of "capitalism" with the first granting of corporate charters, while I would argue that that marks the start of "corporatism", which I see as merely a variant of capitalism (although -- with its legal shift of liability away from the individuals comprising the enterprise and onto the enterprise itself -- clearly an important one).
However, for art to last beyond the immediate requires societal involvement, generally from a broad segment of society. If a particular piece of art's appeal is confined to an individual or a small segment of society, it is far more susceptible to being forgotten or lost. Without a greater society to 'approve' and preserve works of art, we'd have an awfully empty culture.
Again, I beg to differ. Art is what the *artist* says it is, not society. By your definition, Robert Mapplethorpe and Vincent van Gogh (in his lifetime) were not really artists, and neither were the Sex Pistols (or Elvis Presley in 1956). Ironically, sometimes the first mark of a great artist is a society united *against* his works. (It was only later that society came to appreciate the works of the above-named artists.) And what about "folk" art or "outsider" art? I'm not trying to excuse "junk" as art; I just don't agree that a "society" MUST validate art before it *is* art.
By your definition, the turgid, sentimental works produced under the Nazi regime *were* art and the "decadent" art that they reviled was *not* (by the standards of German society at that point in time). Today, the opposite is generally felt to be true. Similarly, the dreary works of "social realism" under Stalin and Mao were enthusiastically received at the time; today they are seen as little more than anachronistic embarassments.
Bottom line: society's judgement is irrelevant; the artist's judgement is irreplaceable. Society's standards change, because there is not -- and can never be -- any objective standard for judging what is art and what isn't. The soul of the artist is the final arbitrar.
"Most people on this planet are asleep; it is our job to awaken them." -- Gurdjieff, sometime in the 19th Century (paraphrased)
Some of the best cultural, literatary, and artistic work, and cultural progress in general, has been accomplished under non-capitalist systems.
Oh yeah? Name even one. "The East is Red", maybe? 8-P
The problem is that capitalism measures everything by market value, by how much an *individual* values something, not by what a *society* values.
Every artist I have ever known has created their art with no regard to its market value or what society thinks about it. And they were each individuals. They would rather *stop* doing art altogether than submit to some kind of "social-valuing* system.
BTW -- *excellent* quote from Lindsay.
What do you mean -- *theory*? Haven't you heard of the KatzBot?
I thought everyone already *knew* that /.'ers were beta testers for the KatzBot.
Weelll...not exactly. IIRC, one of the virtual particles crosses over the event horizon; if it happens to be an anti-matter particle, then a matter particle "appears" near the edge of the black hole.
I was wondering about quantum entanglement. It appears these days that two particles can be "entangled" even though they are an arbitrary distance apart, and that measuring the state of one collapses the state of the other. Now: what would happen if you started off with 2 entangled particles and one went into the black hole before you measured the state of the other. Since the masive gravitational forces at the event horizon would presumably "destroy" the first particle (i.e. strip away its identity) before you measured the second one, what would be the result? Would the second particle change in any particular way -- say, be a fermion when it started out a boson, for example? What if they were photons? This is just a Gedankenexperiment, but I'd like to hear someone speculate on this.
I'm on it. I've already registered the name Polidot.com (wanted Polydot.com, but it was taken.)
While I respect the /. tarball, I won't be using it. I have some ideas on how to make moderation more efficient that are discongruent with the /. model.
Polidot.com will not be interested in collecting information about users and then selling it to advertisers. I'm more interested in implementing an interesting "collaborative filtering" model than making a lot of money. However, I do have some interesting ideas about funding the site.
(And to answer the obvious question -- yes, the model will be open-sourced.)
OK, I like this a little better. Ideally, the marketplace will winnow out buggy and insecure programs. BUT -- there will always be people who will write software and just put it in their FTP directories for anyone to download. And there will be people who will use it just because the cost = $0.
I guess as I consider this topic I am becoming aware of our responsibility toward others on the Internet. Perhaps I should be repremanded if I leave my system open and it is used as part of a DDoS attack.
What is ironic is this: in the old days on the Net (before '95), *everyone* would leave their system open so as to facilitate email forwarding. The idea that people would DDOS was simply unthinkable. I'd say that there is nothing wrong with leaving your system open -- providing you monitor it carefully. Most DDOSing is done using server farm machines that are only loosely monitored (the rationale being: "Well, all this machine does is serve pages and there aren't any user accounts on it, so we won't bother with checking it unless it goes down."). But you are right about one thing: personal responsibility is important. The only thing I disagree on is the theory that people need to be monitored, checked and licensed to make sure that they are being responsible. Children may need such strictures -- but adults aren't children.
Hmmmm. I would say that they could probably be prosecuted under the "attractive nuisance" law.
Prosecutor: So you deliberately left the gate open by default on Outlook, Mr. Gates? Surely you knew that that was attractive to virus-writers?
Your blue-sky proposal is ridiculous. Who is going to set up the "test"; who is going to administer it; what penalties will there be for "driving without a license", etc. Do you really want to install *yet another* bureaucracy over us?
Furthermore: requiring everyone to have a license because *some* people are irresponsible is, in essence, saying "Everyone is guilty until proven otherwise." Go back to France: that's where that bass-ackwards system of "justice" originated. Here in America we have a fundamental principle that people are "innocent until proven guilty".
There is a reason for having a driving test: you have to prove that you can adequately handle a ton-and-a-half vehicle at high speeds before you actually get on the road. A computer is not a car; if you crash your computer, no one else is affected. If you drink while programming, you'll just produce bad code, but it won't affect anyone else. Using your computer to design and upload a virus is using a tool in a weapon-like way. People *have* used cars as weapons, but I don't recall any questions on the Driver's Ed test about "Will you be using your vehicle to commit a homicide?" That's just as strange as asking someone "Will you be using your computer to commit a crime?" -- and who is going to answer *that* question in the affirmative anyway?
I realize the law says "intentionally" but what if a more proactive stance was adopted?
The reason that the law says "intentionally" is because for a crime to be proved there are 3 irreducible elements: Means, motive and opportunity. If a virus comes into your computer and uses the copy of Outlook you have installed to perpetuate itself, the means is there, the opportunity is there, but YOUR MOTIVE is not. Therefore YOU cannot be accused of propagating the virus. (Perhaps you could be prosecuted for maintaining an "attractive nuisance", but if you installed it in a manner so as to leave it in the default condition, then the software manufacturer is just as -- if not more so -- liable).
A more "pro-active" stance would only apply two of the three conditions -- perhaps your motive is irrelevant. Then you could be thrown in jail -- perhaps without even realizing that your computer passed the virus along -- just because a computer log somewhere had your IP address as the (from its point of view) origin. How would you feel about *that*?
Let me be the first to point out that we are *RIGHT NOW* seeing the rise of another Hitler in Vladimir Putin [new President of Russia, for the politically unaware].
- Same rhetoric of "bringing back the glory of the state",
- same supression of the independent media,
- same demonization of the "decadent" West,
- same cozy links with the oligarchs while calling for an end to "corruption",
- same unqualified support for the military,
- same bringing into the government his unknown and unqualified 'associates',
- same saber-rattling,
- many of the same economic problems, etc.
He's even sent troops to Ethiopia: maybe he'll be Mussolini as well. I just wonder who his "internal enemies" are going to be. I've got half my money on "the liberals" and the other half on "the Jews". [I'd advise members of both groups to leave before the purges and pogroms start up].And, also, who will be Putin's Neville Chamberlain: "I believe it is peace in our time."MARK MY WORDS -- you saw it here first.
"The marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly ambiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure, but it does not appear so to us..."
--A. Lincoln, c. 1847, when he was a member of the House of Representatives.
The "Mexican War" was precisely the "gunning down systematically ... by Texas Rangers" of Mexicans. James A. Polk: "It was clear that in making war we would if practicable obtain California and ...other portions of the Mexican territory..."
Of course, back then, human rights were not exactly an issue.
The Serbs have the government they deserve. If they don't get rid of it, by any means nessesary, then they are just as culpable...
And what about the Americans? Our government was democratically elected -- just like theirs. (Oh yes it was -- look it up.) Should *we* get rid of it 'by any means necessary', since the United States had to break *FOUR* international treaties in order to engage in this undeclared "war"?
This reminds me very much of those cloud chamber pictures that show virtual particles appearing before they are supposed to. The explanation is that these particles are "borrowing" energy from the vacuum and returning it later: the energies balance eventually. (This is related to the phase-transition problem and the electron tunneling phenomenon as well.) What's interesting here is that this "borrowing" effect appears to be happening at a macro (i.e. non-atomic-scale) level: that alone could win the authors of this experiment a Nobel Prize.
You've never heard of FortRes?? We use it on some of our WinBloze boxen, and, while it doesn't stop users from trying to install stuff, they get screwed when they try to reboot, because they don't know the box pword OR the FortRes pword. Ha! Plus of course we use (constantly updated) McAfee antiviral software AND we don't run any M$ email programs (on the public boxen).
We run 50 win boxen (half and half public / staff) and the only place I saw the virus was on /. when someone posted the code. (My staff is educated enough not to open unsolicited attachments, even though some of them use Outlook. I took the time to explain the whole thing very carefully at a staff meeting after the Melissa fiasco.) So education *does* work, but only for motivated users.
I certainly agree with your last point: you can't ignore user ignorance.
Quick Algorithm:
1) Rank all words in a selection by frequency of occurrance.
2) Throw all out pronouns, connectors, prepositions and other too-frequent words that are not nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.
3) You now have the gist of the article, still organized by word frequency.
4) Go back and find the sentences in the article that contain a large number of high-frequency terms. Print them.
5) You will find that you have just effectively summarized the article.
Actually you will find that you have merely listed a bunch of sentences with high-frequency terms. Use your AI skills to determine how to arrange these sentences so that the top ones *do indeed* summarize the article. (Directed graphs? Semantic nets? Internal references?)
IIRC, it's about *exactly* what these guys are doing -- using simulated biologic agents (ants) to solve complex mathematical problems such as the Traveling Salesman problem and Internet network routing.
Search for "quantum teleportation" on your favorite search engine. (I found 2400 refs on Google.) Or search your local library for the past couple years of Scientific American, Nature, Science etc.
The comment is flamebait. If you actually go (like I did) and read the bill (go to Thomas, search for S. 1948, then look at Sec.1011), then go and look at the actual US Code which it references, you will see the following:
A ''work made for hire'' is - [...] (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work [the change incorporated from S. 1948: as a sound recording], as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire [my emphasis].
This does *not* mean what the author of this comment alleges that it means. No copyrights are ripped away from any artists. It still requires that an artist agrees that the work that he or she is doing *is* a work for hire.
The 1976 updating of the Copyright Act holds that the mere creation of a work of art confers copyrightholder status on the creator. A significant legal action is required to transfer copyright to anyone else. A further legal action is required to certify that a work is being done "for hire".
This really *was* a technical amendment updating Title 17, Sec. 101, Para. 2 to include sound recordings as an area in which work for hire *might* be done. It is *not* a wholesale taking of intellectual property as was alleged by the author of this comment.
In every dynamic ecology, you have an "arms race" between the 'prey' and the 'predator'. However, as Tom Ray points out, the rise of parasites (a form of non-lethal predator) leads, in the long run, to a more stable and diverse ecology.
In this example, banner ads are the parasite. They 'eat' attention (which Howard Rheingold pointed out is the irreducible resource on the Net) without giving anything back. (Of course, they *promise* to, but promising sybiosis and delivering parasitism is an old, old trick...) Therefore, it is logical for 'eyeballs' ('prey') to evolve various methods for protecting themselves, such as "tuning them out" (not paying attention) or developing devices that strip out images (a bit of an overkill, methinks, since you are ignoring anything that *might* be a parasite).
The counter I expect that will next be used by the parasites is 'mimicry': ads will try to pretend to be something that they are not.
OK, so he didn't endorse it BY NAME...;-)
Baby boomer retirement funds.
IIRC, there was a case many years ago involving two phone companies. Company 1 invested a great deal of time in putting together a list of phone subscribers. Company 2 "borrowed" the same list and made it available under their imprint. Company 1 sued them for copyright violation. Who won?
Company 2!! It was ruled fair use. They did not add any value to the list, merely reprinting it.
The name of the case escapes me at the moment; however, it was a precedent-setting case and any capable lawyer out there could probably come up with it in a few minutes.
I think the judge's ruling will be overturned on appeal because of the case that I have cited above.