I'm sorry, but read the article: these so-called "Bounty Hunters" are merely trolling publically available resources looking for people who are basically stating outright that they are trading illegally reproduced copies of copyright protected information. This is illegal, it should be illegal, and if you can't be more circumspect and discreet about doing it then you DESERVE to have your service yanked.
If any of you had a website that earned revenue based on traffic, and someone hacked it so that those hits didn't register with the advertisers, you'd howl bloody murder. There is no f-in difference here.
Everybody has a right to practice civil disobedience. The price is the potential of punishment. Getting your service yanked is a paltry punishment indeed. Get over it.
Does this put anyone else into mind of those old kung fu movies used to run on weekend afternoons, and the young acolyte would always have to pound on this wierd peg-studded contraption to gain mastery of the secret art?
Now give one of THOSE things, and a virtual Shaolin Master to call me "Grasshopper" and give me pithy gems of zen wisdom, and you'll have yourself a customer.
While a free and searchable database is a fine idea, I think the publishers of conventional journals are right to be leery of these demands. Scientific publishing is not exactly the cash cow of the publishing industry. How many university libraries would stop carrying a significant number of journals if their content could bne accessed on-line on demand?
What's missing from these demands is any guarantee for the conventional publishers that they will be protected from the inevitable loss in revenue that will result from having their content freely available. Scientific articles are not like MP3s: a scientist does not read an article, say "that was great" and go buy the journal. For the most part, either a person or institution subscribes or they don't. The demands of this group are unreasonable. Science publishing is a high cost activity requiring a preponderance of expertise in the editorial staff compared to other forms of periodical publishing, and it does not have the same acces to advertising revenue.
I'm usually on the other side of the business versus freedom debate but get real: It's getting hard enough to get industry or the government to pay for actual research. Someone has to pay the cost of publishing scientific articles. The editors made the right choice, and its up to the The Public Library of Science Initiative to prove that journals can be sustainably published under a free content model.
I'd like to know a whole lot more about the basis of this computer simulation, because from the article it sounds like statistics and science are very quickly abandoned in favor of an "oh my god!" societal collapse scenario.
http://www.stimson.org/pubs/cwc/ataxiaexecsum.pdf
The above is a link to a PDF file of a report by the Henry L. Stimson Center that concludes that the threat of chemical and biological terrorism have been represented as much more serious than they actually are. It is the result of 2 years of research. We have many choices to make as a society and we better be damn sure we're making them based on the best information. The doom scenario is scarier and sexier so it gets the press and the alarming books written about it: I recommend this report strongly to anyone that wants to hear the other side. The bottom line is it is far from "easy" to make effective chemical or biological weapons, and their effectiveness is not nearly what some claim.
This being said, it is also true that we should be bolstering our systems to deal with epidemics of infectious diseases in general. This is an area that gets frequently neglected in public funding of science and health care, and by nature it is an issue where when your REALLY need it, it's too late to prepare.
So by all means, lets make an integrated and practical approach to beefing up our defenses to empidemics a national priority, but let's do so with an eye towards the full range of likely and pragmatic scenarios - the preponderance of which have nothing to do with terrorism or warfare.
Mmm, maybe you've got me here. I'm bitching about old news - the AOL/Time Warner merger - and throwing a measly $100 Million at Amazon doesn't really affect things much. So somebody for god's sake moderate my comments out of existence as irrelevant. C'mon, get with the program, people!
Still, as long as we're on the topic, I'm one of those who wasn't too happy to see one of the tiny handful of huge content providers (from books to blockbusters) merging with THE huge ISP, and having the FCC ask a copule questiones about whether Time Warner would still sell cable access through other ISPs and what AOL was up to with instant messenger servicing (suing the phoneme IM into submission, among other things) and then saying, hey, go for it guys.
Once upon a time there was a theory that too much media power concentrated in the hands of a few was a BAD THING because the truth would take a back seat to the private interests of that small group of people. Some of the remedies for this were to limit how many media outlets a single entity can own and to separate the PRODUCTION of content from the DISTRIBUTION of content. Maybe "monopoly" is not the best word to throw around in this context but SOMETHING should be said when the single clearest example of the violation of this principle starts throwing money at (arguably) the most recognized vendor on the web.
One may justifiably ask, are these concerns legitimate? Is there evidence that the media is exercising undue influence? You tell me - I couldn't help but notice that when Congress passed the abhorent 1996 Telecommunications act, there was vanishingly little media converage of the widespread dissent to this legislation. The massive free giveaway of the digital television spectrum barely registered a blip on commercial TV news - although those of us who chose to watch that bad ol' liberal-bias public television got the scoop. One of those mealy-mouthed liberal politicians did take note of the situation, and gravely (and as it turned out, correctly) predicted that the mainstream news would fail to cover the issue. What was that guy's name again? Oh yeah - Bob Dole.
So what exactly is your beef, Zico? Just a stickler for terminology, or do you actually this kind of business is a GOOD thing?
ALthough noone is likely to view this AC post (get an account, be brave), I have to disagree with this commonplace myth. First off, young men are an entirely valid vote. The characterization of them as wanting only to put a "former pro wrestler" into the Governor's mansion is nothing more than your biased opinion, completely unsupported by fact. I can just as easily say that these young men wanted to put a sitting local mayor into office on the basis of his essentially libertarian platform.
But more importantly the reality is that Jesse won by capturing a complex demogaphic based on a campaign that cut across a variety of issues. He won the votes of a large number of conservative women who like GOP fiscal policy but don't want their right to a legal abortion overturned. He captured a lot of pro-hemp and pro-drug law reform votes as a candidate with a better chance than the Green or Grass Roots party candidates. Naturally he secured many Reform Party and other libertarian votes.
Certainly his fame as a former pro-wrestler and B-movie actor was a strong factor in his victory. But so was his success as a local Mayor, his popular radio show, his clever and cost-effective series of radio and television ads, and his relentlessly optimistic stumping - Ralph Nader could learn a thing or two from his "We Will Win" attitude.
Jeeze, do the GOP and DNC pay you people to schmooze around the 'net bad-mouthing minor-party politics? Why don't you shut up and leave political discussions to people who aren't afraid to put a name to their thoughts?
"the partnership of they and Amazon is going to be a pivotal one, complimenting each other very well. "
Yeah, "pivotal..." So you've got Time Warner on content, AOL on internet, Time-Warner/Roadrunner on broadband, Amazon on sales. No monopolies here, no sir, just a little friendly synergy.
This is my absolute favorite part of this press release"
Q: Elcomsoft claims that eBooks in Adobe PDF are insecure and that the encryption is weak, including ROT-13 which is notorious for its lack of security. Are those claims true?
A: Adobe has never sold ROT-13 as a security product. Adobe incorporates sophisticated, industry-standard levels of software encryption to make our products difficult to compromise. However, no software is 100% secure from a determined, illegal attack. When used legally and in its intended fashion, the Acrobat eBook Reader secures eBooks purchased by locking the eBook to the hardware from which it was purchased. The Elcomsoft software circumvents the security afforded by our software to protect copyrighted works."
Parse this logic with me: When used LEGALLY, it's secure. Well, duh: it's ILLEGAL under the DMCA to attempt to circumvent security, so of course it's freakin' secure. "This alarm system works great, sir... as long as noone attempts to enter your house without first ringing the doorbell and being invited in."
Then theres: "the Acrobat eBook Reader secures eBooks purchased by locking the eBook to the hardware from which it was purchased"
Translation:
The Acrobat eBook Reader renders the concept of electronic books nearly worthless by attempting to tie content to a single piece of proprietary hardware.
Gee, I wonder why this e-book thing isn't taking off? I'm an AVID reader - I read hudreds of books every year - and I've never even considered buying one of these things.
"In a Mountain View, California meeting, Ashcroft noted that the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) groups will work in Los Angeles and San Diego, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Boston, Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City; and Alexandria, Virginia."
I'm sure I'll get laughed off the court for this, but I'd point to my MN Governor Jesse Ventura as an example of an alternative. I realize he's considered a joke by many, he's certainly comitted some high profile gaffs... I didn't vote for him (I felt his platform is vague and voted for a different third party choice) and I dson't like all his policies.
BUT...
He got elected, without a big campaign war-chest or corporate support. When he is in the position, he supports issues a lot of us feel strongly about, like campaign finance reform and ending the ridiculous practice of trying to legislate morality, such as whether you prefer to smoke or drink your favorite mind-altering substance.
Our most recent presidential election showed us that the nation's voters find themselves neatly split down the middle of an ideological divide where the difference seems a lot like Coke vs. Pepsi and a lot of people feel like their vote has little meaning. Jesse took a similar situation, found converts on both sides of the fence, brought in a lot of new voters, and took a race the pundits never gave him a chance of winning. At his wackiest, I at least know that his actions are motivated by his own twisted Jesse sense of what's right, not by the latest opinion poll or what his old-boy's power club handlers think he should represent. You may not like the politician, but the model is sound. We can put minor party players in office.
Why should anyone be surprised by this after the massive free giveaway of the digital television spectrum to a handful of media superconglomerates? It's faurly obvious that anyone with a few bucks to throw around can secure valuable public resources without the expense and hassle of paying the American public a dime for the privilege (see, for example, http://www.radiodiversity.com/hiwayrobbery.html for more details on the digital TV scam).
I know there's a lot of support for the "free market" on Slashdot, but somehow I don't think this is what y'all mean. When are people going to stop bickering over meaningless partisan differences and start realizing that most politicians on both sides of the fence are interested in their own political careers and accumulation of power above all else, and are more than willing to sell our interests out for relatively paltry sums? For crying out load, vote for someone that takes a credible stand on campaign finance reform! (Hint: if the phrase "one of the costliest campaigns in history" or something similar shows up nest to their name on a regular basis, then their stand is not credible).
I would argue that the "exclusive rights" referenced are traditionally interpreted as the right to reproduce and distribute. The very heart of what's wrong with the DMCA is that it adds the right to control access to what is already legally distributed by the creator. Is this a constitutional right to grant? Unfortunately Congress and the President chose not to consider this when they passed the DMCA into law. To me, the bottom line is it violates my freedom of expression in interpreting intellectual property that I've legally acquired as I see fit (yes yes I know that isn't guaranteed per se anywhere in the law but it should be). I can walk out during the commercial, fast forward past the preview, read Hamlet backwards. I should be able to watch the bits that comprise a DVD the way I see fit on whatever machine I want, PROVIDED the machine does not violate existing copyrights or patents (ergo I should have the right to watch a DVD on a Linux box running decryption based on a non-proprietary algorithm)
But there's more to it than that. One big constitutional beef with the DMCA is that it looks a lot like prior restraint. Meaning: it restricts expression (to hell with the idea that code isn't expression; if you can copyright it it's damn expression and all you dissentors can just shut up. Shut the hell up!) that is not itself a violation of intellectual property rights on the basis that it COULD be used to violate intellectual property rights (Whether or not it will in fact be used for that purpose).
And although this is not perhaps set out plain and simple in the constitution, DMCA is a redundant law (prior copyright statutes fully protect copyrighted material from unlawful reproduction and distribution, and anyone who is willing to create/distribute/consume bootleg whatever is also going to be willing to use illegal circumvention to serve their cause) which does not add significant protection to intellectual property (The whole DeCSS debacle demonstrates succinctly that the law can only restrict access to circumvention tools in theory) but does come with significant potential for abuse of the freedom of speech. Basic principles tell us that technically constitutional or not, this law doesn't belong on the books as is.
So far, the DMCA hasn't been used to prevent any actual piracy, has it? Napster got legitimately screwed with plain old-fashioned copyright infringement. Academics, Journalists, Researchers are the ones getting screwed by the DMCA. Industry seems mainly focused on reacting with crazy vegeful fury to the continuous revelation that it has guarded its precious intellectual property with gimcrack, laughably weak protection.
I would have no problem with a provision that would make it illegal to circumvent encryption in the service of piracy. This could be a valid law that made it easier to catch and prosecute copyright pirates. But DMCA strives for a world where a few corporations dish up intellectual property and we sit quietly and eat it: with the approved spoon, in the approved order, at their say so. Constitution is just a document, it is the spirit of it that should concern any lover of freedom. I refuse to accept the pay-per-view world the major copyright owners are trying to stuff down my throat. You should too. And I'd like to get it sorted out because I cannot in good conscience make the switch to DVD as long as it is illegal for me to build my own player. That's right, I'm stuck with VHS until this DMCA crap gets reversed. For god's sake, send a letter to your representative RIGHT AWAY.
Relax, I'm just yanking your chain. The US has the most complacent, apathetic electorate of any major democracy and it's a disgrace as far as I'm concerned.
But what the hell're you going to do? You can't FORCE people to vote... Oh, wait a minute. Compulsory voting? I honestly hadn't heard of that one before, so thanks - it's always nice to learn something new. Answer an honest question - it's nice that 90% of your eligible population vote and all, but does it not strike you as ironic that you are compelled by law to participate in the democratic process?
Unless I'm totally off base, Australia's population is pushing 20 million. The United States population is pushing 300 million. That's 15X larger, not 3-5 as this poster states. So I'm afraid I can't accept this person's advice on the subject of counting.
Personally I'd hate to see a wide-scale system adopted where people were voting from home. If you are an able-bodied person and can't be bothered to get off the couch at most a couple times a year to register your desires for government, maybe you don't deserve a say (and yes, yes, yes, we should accomodate those who are restricted in mobility - but you don't need the f*in internet to do that).
The problems in Florida were not an issue of AVAILABLE technology - we mostly use a far from state-of-the-art optical ballot reader in MN that immediately registers an improperly filled out ballot, and they work just fine. Floridians have simply chosen not to pony up the relatively miniscule amounts necessary to upgrade to a decent system. Funny how a lot of governments don't assign much priority to making sure the will of the citizens are properly registered, ain't it?
The other problem of Florida is that our beloved 2-party system offered the nation such boring, lame, uninspiring candidates that the race was nearly a dead heat. Sometimes it's hard to choose the lesser of such luke-warm evils. From a metrics point of view, if you're dealing with a big enough sample there are going to be some errors. No matter how good the system for counting, there is the possibility of a statistical tie, which is more or less what happened in Florida. So these comments about "what if MY vote wasn't counted? The Horror!" are pointless. Democracy is never going to work that way. When you're performing a huge number of "measurements," well, some of them have got to be part of the error. With a decent counting system (i.e. one not based on 19th century loom technology) the factor of error will be small, will generally cancel, and the problem is essentially solved. It just costs a tiny little bit of money, say the cost of not designing a faulty helicopter that crashes and kills people. Priorities.
First off, let me say this post made me think about my assumptions and I think monkeydo has valid points. I don't think it's as black as white as (s)he sets it out to be. But here's the law, Title 17 Chapter 1 on Fair Use:
Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether
such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit
educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in
relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or
value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
To me this neither restricts nor permits personal "back-up" copying. One could argue the whole research/non-commercial angle but that could be a fairly weak argument.
Another poster argues that Monkeydo's rejection of the Betamax case is not fully convincing and I think they have a point.
I think we both misrepresent the Library aspect of limitations to exclusive right, but f- it, if you wanna figure it out go to Monkeydo's link and read it for yourself.
Monkeydo, I'd like to see those legal "precidents," or precedents as I like to call them, that are against me. Don't cite it if you don't have a reference.
I'm arguing that the reproduction, shall we say "discouragement" method they're applying is not illegal.
I agree, you should be able to contravene this method, and this should be legal due to fair use restrictions. I actually question whether the DMCA will hold up under this kind of test.
You right to "train" you computer's CD drive to read this type of CD correctly should be protected by fair use.
I disagree that a copyright owner does not have the right to release their intellectual property in the form they choose. Of course there is no black and white in this arena; but I'm willing to bet that if something of this nature goes to court the copyright owner's point of view will win out. The idea that a copyright holder is legally obligated to produce a work in a form that is compatible to your chosen format of playback is ludicrous and I would humbly submit that "your" the one who is full of shit, although I usually prefer "you're."
However, I completely agree that it is legally questionable to represent a product as a complete audio CD when in fact it is an audio CD interspersed with microbursts of static. That argument might get you your money back, it might get CDs with the SafeAudio treatment labeled... But there's no way in hell it's going to get this technology made illegal.
Fair use is a tricky thing. The Supreme Court has traditionally protected the rights of individuals to make copies for personal use and related uses - students copying articles in the library, that sort of thing. But I don't think there's ever really been any literal statement that a copyright holder has to make it EASY, or that the copy you can make has to be PERFECT.
THEY OWN THE COPYRIGHT. That means they have the right to release the information any way they want to. Up to including music CDs with microbursts of static interspersed with the music. In fact, an attempt to prosecute them on a fair use claim would be in violation of their First Amendment rights.
Fair Use is a real protection - they can't stop you from ripping your non-protected CDs because it's perfectly legal to make copies to shift formats, make it more convenient to use a product, or as a back-up against breakage or degredation. But it doesn't stop anyone from making a product that copies poorly. Your beef in this case is with the creator for producing a less useful product... unfortunately, whoever is responsible for the information on the mystery CD lost control of their product as soon as they signed their contract - making the de facto creator the company, and giving the right to fuck up their product any way they want - including replacing their music with meaningless bursts of noise.
Funny thing, if I were a musician I would object to that. I wouldn't sign with a major label. I'd get a day job and work with really intelligent people on cutting out the middleman of industry entirely, understanding that compressed song-file trading is like free play on the radio, and selling CDs is still a perfectly viable business plan for the independent musician decades to come.
Oh wait, I am... and I do... and I won't... and I do...
None of this means a damn thing as long as the basic obsession is the unauthorized replication and distribution of music that is owned by the major labels. Calling this a "revolution" is about the most ironic hyperbole I've come across in a good long while (anbd that's saying something).
We'll have a "revolution" only when the CREATORS of music start to understand that the transformation to digital information technologies puts the means of production in their hands. As long as the Majors run the labels, own the content, are in cahoots over concerts, tickets, and promotion, and are in bed with the radio and media conglomerates, your file-trading "revolution is about as significant as someone paying for one newspaper, grabbing a stack out of the machine, and passing them out on the bus. It wouldn't make USA Today any less of a corporate fluff propaganda rag, and Gnutella doesn't make music any more free except in the most limited and shallow sense for a very small percentage of the population.
"This would also be the death of smaller ISP's that feed off the free structure of the net"
Only if consumers sit back and take it. The fundamental infrastructure of the net allows for inexpensive access to anyone's content...
And while it makes sense to charge the highest volume content providers to account for the preponderance of bandwidth they consume, the day my ISP starts blocking all content that doesn't pay off is the day I get a new ISP, with a sharp letter to my former provider that I'm not interested in my internet becoming the next homgenized crap fast that is cable TV. Broadcast economics and technologies don't favor somebody that only gets hundreds of "viewers" per day, but the internet allows this, and I'm confident that someone will sell me the kind of internet service I want.
Another real possiblility is for related small content producers to band together into little networks. They could band together to pay fees for access or possibly there could be "premium" internet service - pay a surcharge of 5 or ten bucks a month, access your choice of networks of smaller content providers. The network splits the difference with the ISP, I get enhanced content from the providers I like without the stupidity of trying to figure out how to pay a nickel evry time I want to see the day's Net Comix.
Of course content on the internet is going to be dominated by big business. They have the resources to build the whiz-bang content and to buy bandwidth and access. And as far as IO can tell from the Billboard charts a lot of people really like the "art" they consume after it's been nicely pre-chewed by some fat-cat executive type. Hey, it's a free country. But the beauty of the internet is (or should be) that costs don't spiral out of control when you scale down the way costs in broadcast media do.
Your facts are wrong. First off, Morris is not a community college. It is part of the University of MN system. When I received my report from the National Merit Corporation indicating that I was a National Merit Scholarship finalist (top 1% of SAT scores), that report stated that Morris was at the top level of academic competitiveness - as competitive as private schools like Carlton. Morris' academic standards for admission are significantly higher than those of the main U in the Twin Cities. I think their own resources do a good job of presenting the facts:
http://www.mrs.umn.edu/admissions/why.html
Another resource of interest, as it is an independent assessment:
http://www.collegeprofiles.com/minnesota-morris.ht ml
Morris is small school, it is not the best known school in the world. But it is known for academic excellence.
It was never my intent - I've been clear and accurate about this from the start - to pass myself off as some kind of expert. I merely wanted to place my comments in the context that, unlike most of the people posting here, I had some basis in science from which I was making my judgements of the available evidence. Unlike you I'm not satisfied to ask a few friends and choose a point of view based on what it's convenient for me to believe. You ought to try it some time.
Slashdot Mirror
If any of you had a website that earned revenue based on traffic, and someone hacked it so that those hits didn't register with the advertisers, you'd howl bloody murder. There is no f-in difference here.
Everybody has a right to practice civil disobedience. The price is the potential of punishment. Getting your service yanked is a paltry punishment indeed. Get over it.
Now give one of THOSE things, and a virtual Shaolin Master to call me "Grasshopper" and give me pithy gems of zen wisdom, and you'll have yourself a customer.
What's missing from these demands is any guarantee for the conventional publishers that they will be protected from the inevitable loss in revenue that will result from having their content freely available. Scientific articles are not like MP3s: a scientist does not read an article, say "that was great" and go buy the journal. For the most part, either a person or institution subscribes or they don't. The demands of this group are unreasonable. Science publishing is a high cost activity requiring a preponderance of expertise in the editorial staff compared to other forms of periodical publishing, and it does not have the same acces to advertising revenue.
I'm usually on the other side of the business versus freedom debate but get real: It's getting hard enough to get industry or the government to pay for actual research. Someone has to pay the cost of publishing scientific articles. The editors made the right choice, and its up to the The Public Library of Science Initiative to prove that journals can be sustainably published under a free content model.
Ain't no accountin' for tastes, Jethro.
Dear Posters to Slashdot: I take offense to your particular interests. They are not the same as my own!
On behalf of everyone whose interests aren't exactly the same as Jethro's, allow me to apologize.
http://www.stimson.org/pubs/cwc/ataxiaexecsum.pdf
The above is a link to a PDF file of a report by the Henry L. Stimson Center that concludes that the threat of chemical and biological terrorism have been represented as much more serious than they actually are. It is the result of 2 years of research. We have many choices to make as a society and we better be damn sure we're making them based on the best information. The doom scenario is scarier and sexier so it gets the press and the alarming books written about it: I recommend this report strongly to anyone that wants to hear the other side. The bottom line is it is far from "easy" to make effective chemical or biological weapons, and their effectiveness is not nearly what some claim.
This being said, it is also true that we should be bolstering our systems to deal with epidemics of infectious diseases in general. This is an area that gets frequently neglected in public funding of science and health care, and by nature it is an issue where when your REALLY need it, it's too late to prepare.
So by all means, lets make an integrated and practical approach to beefing up our defenses to empidemics a national priority, but let's do so with an eye towards the full range of likely and pragmatic scenarios - the preponderance of which have nothing to do with terrorism or warfare.
Still, as long as we're on the topic, I'm one of those who wasn't too happy to see one of the tiny handful of huge content providers (from books to blockbusters) merging with THE huge ISP, and having the FCC ask a copule questiones about whether Time Warner would still sell cable access through other ISPs and what AOL was up to with instant messenger servicing (suing the phoneme IM into submission, among other things) and then saying, hey, go for it guys.
Once upon a time there was a theory that too much media power concentrated in the hands of a few was a BAD THING because the truth would take a back seat to the private interests of that small group of people. Some of the remedies for this were to limit how many media outlets a single entity can own and to separate the PRODUCTION of content from the DISTRIBUTION of content. Maybe "monopoly" is not the best word to throw around in this context but SOMETHING should be said when the single clearest example of the violation of this principle starts throwing money at (arguably) the most recognized vendor on the web.
One may justifiably ask, are these concerns legitimate? Is there evidence that the media is exercising undue influence? You tell me - I couldn't help but notice that when Congress passed the abhorent 1996 Telecommunications act, there was vanishingly little media converage of the widespread dissent to this legislation. The massive free giveaway of the digital television spectrum barely registered a blip on commercial TV news - although those of us who chose to watch that bad ol' liberal-bias public television got the scoop. One of those mealy-mouthed liberal politicians did take note of the situation, and gravely (and as it turned out, correctly) predicted that the mainstream news would fail to cover the issue. What was that guy's name again? Oh yeah - Bob Dole.
So what exactly is your beef, Zico? Just a stickler for terminology, or do you actually this kind of business is a GOOD thing?
But more importantly the reality is that Jesse won by capturing a complex demogaphic based on a campaign that cut across a variety of issues. He won the votes of a large number of conservative women who like GOP fiscal policy but don't want their right to a legal abortion overturned. He captured a lot of pro-hemp and pro-drug law reform votes as a candidate with a better chance than the Green or Grass Roots party candidates. Naturally he secured many Reform Party and other libertarian votes.
Certainly his fame as a former pro-wrestler and B-movie actor was a strong factor in his victory. But so was his success as a local Mayor, his popular radio show, his clever and cost-effective series of radio and television ads, and his relentlessly optimistic stumping - Ralph Nader could learn a thing or two from his "We Will Win" attitude.
Jeeze, do the GOP and DNC pay you people to schmooze around the 'net bad-mouthing minor-party politics? Why don't you shut up and leave political discussions to people who aren't afraid to put a name to their thoughts?
Yeah, "pivotal..." So you've got Time Warner on content, AOL on internet, Time-Warner/Roadrunner on broadband, Amazon on sales. No monopolies here, no sir, just a little friendly synergy.
Q: Elcomsoft claims that eBooks in Adobe PDF are insecure and that the encryption is weak, including ROT-13 which is notorious for its lack of security. Are those claims true?
A: Adobe has never sold ROT-13 as a security product. Adobe incorporates sophisticated, industry-standard levels of software encryption to make our products difficult to compromise. However, no software is 100% secure from a determined, illegal attack. When used legally and in its intended fashion, the Acrobat eBook Reader secures eBooks purchased by locking the eBook to the hardware from which it was purchased. The Elcomsoft software circumvents the security afforded by our software to protect copyrighted works."
Parse this logic with me: When used LEGALLY, it's secure. Well, duh: it's ILLEGAL under the DMCA to attempt to circumvent security, so of course it's freakin' secure. "This alarm system works great, sir... as long as noone attempts to enter your house without first ringing the doorbell and being invited in."
Then theres: "the Acrobat eBook Reader secures eBooks purchased by locking the eBook to the hardware from which it was purchased"
Translation:
The Acrobat eBook Reader renders the concept of electronic books nearly worthless by attempting to tie content to a single piece of proprietary hardware.
Gee, I wonder why this e-book thing isn't taking off? I'm an AVID reader - I read hudreds of books every year - and I've never even considered buying one of these things.
"In a Mountain View, California meeting, Ashcroft noted that the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) groups will work in Los Angeles and San Diego, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Boston, Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City; and Alexandria, Virginia."
Well, Erik Estrada DOES need work...
BUT...
He got elected, without a big campaign war-chest or corporate support. When he is in the position, he supports issues a lot of us feel strongly about, like campaign finance reform and ending the ridiculous practice of trying to legislate morality, such as whether you prefer to smoke or drink your favorite mind-altering substance.
Our most recent presidential election showed us that the nation's voters find themselves neatly split down the middle of an ideological divide where the difference seems a lot like Coke vs. Pepsi and a lot of people feel like their vote has little meaning. Jesse took a similar situation, found converts on both sides of the fence, brought in a lot of new voters, and took a race the pundits never gave him a chance of winning. At his wackiest, I at least know that his actions are motivated by his own twisted Jesse sense of what's right, not by the latest opinion poll or what his old-boy's power club handlers think he should represent. You may not like the politician, but the model is sound. We can put minor party players in office.
I know there's a lot of support for the "free market" on Slashdot, but somehow I don't think this is what y'all mean. When are people going to stop bickering over meaningless partisan differences and start realizing that most politicians on both sides of the fence are interested in their own political careers and accumulation of power above all else, and are more than willing to sell our interests out for relatively paltry sums? For crying out load, vote for someone that takes a credible stand on campaign finance reform! (Hint: if the phrase "one of the costliest campaigns in history" or something similar shows up nest to their name on a regular basis, then their stand is not credible).
But there's more to it than that. One big constitutional beef with the DMCA is that it looks a lot like prior restraint. Meaning: it restricts expression (to hell with the idea that code isn't expression; if you can copyright it it's damn expression and all you dissentors can just shut up. Shut the hell up!) that is not itself a violation of intellectual property rights on the basis that it COULD be used to violate intellectual property rights (Whether or not it will in fact be used for that purpose).
And although this is not perhaps set out plain and simple in the constitution, DMCA is a redundant law (prior copyright statutes fully protect copyrighted material from unlawful reproduction and distribution, and anyone who is willing to create/distribute/consume bootleg whatever is also going to be willing to use illegal circumvention to serve their cause) which does not add significant protection to intellectual property (The whole DeCSS debacle demonstrates succinctly that the law can only restrict access to circumvention tools in theory) but does come with significant potential for abuse of the freedom of speech. Basic principles tell us that technically constitutional or not, this law doesn't belong on the books as is.
So far, the DMCA hasn't been used to prevent any actual piracy, has it? Napster got legitimately screwed with plain old-fashioned copyright infringement. Academics, Journalists, Researchers are the ones getting screwed by the DMCA. Industry seems mainly focused on reacting with crazy vegeful fury to the continuous revelation that it has guarded its precious intellectual property with gimcrack, laughably weak protection.
I would have no problem with a provision that would make it illegal to circumvent encryption in the service of piracy. This could be a valid law that made it easier to catch and prosecute copyright pirates. But DMCA strives for a world where a few corporations dish up intellectual property and we sit quietly and eat it: with the approved spoon, in the approved order, at their say so. Constitution is just a document, it is the spirit of it that should concern any lover of freedom. I refuse to accept the pay-per-view world the major copyright owners are trying to stuff down my throat. You should too. And I'd like to get it sorted out because I cannot in good conscience make the switch to DVD as long as it is illegal for me to build my own player. That's right, I'm stuck with VHS until this DMCA crap gets reversed. For god's sake, send a letter to your representative RIGHT AWAY.
Relax, I'm just yanking your chain. The US has the most complacent, apathetic electorate of any major democracy and it's a disgrace as far as I'm concerned.
But what the hell're you going to do? You can't FORCE people to vote... Oh, wait a minute. Compulsory voting? I honestly hadn't heard of that one before, so thanks - it's always nice to learn something new. Answer an honest question - it's nice that 90% of your eligible population vote and all, but does it not strike you as ironic that you are compelled by law to participate in the democratic process?
Unless I'm totally off base, Australia's population is pushing 20 million. The United States population is pushing 300 million. That's 15X larger, not 3-5 as this poster states. So I'm afraid I can't accept this person's advice on the subject of counting.
The problems in Florida were not an issue of AVAILABLE technology - we mostly use a far from state-of-the-art optical ballot reader in MN that immediately registers an improperly filled out ballot, and they work just fine. Floridians have simply chosen not to pony up the relatively miniscule amounts necessary to upgrade to a decent system. Funny how a lot of governments don't assign much priority to making sure the will of the citizens are properly registered, ain't it?
The other problem of Florida is that our beloved 2-party system offered the nation such boring, lame, uninspiring candidates that the race was nearly a dead heat. Sometimes it's hard to choose the lesser of such luke-warm evils. From a metrics point of view, if you're dealing with a big enough sample there are going to be some errors. No matter how good the system for counting, there is the possibility of a statistical tie, which is more or less what happened in Florida. So these comments about "what if MY vote wasn't counted? The Horror!" are pointless. Democracy is never going to work that way. When you're performing a huge number of "measurements," well, some of them have got to be part of the error. With a decent counting system (i.e. one not based on 19th century loom technology) the factor of error will be small, will generally cancel, and the problem is essentially solved. It just costs a tiny little bit of money, say the cost of not designing a faulty helicopter that crashes and kills people. Priorities.
Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include - (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
To me this neither restricts nor permits personal "back-up" copying. One could argue the whole research/non-commercial angle but that could be a fairly weak argument.
Another poster argues that Monkeydo's rejection of the Betamax case is not fully convincing and I think they have a point.
I think we both misrepresent the Library aspect of limitations to exclusive right, but f- it, if you wanna figure it out go to Monkeydo's link and read it for yourself.
Monkeydo, I'd like to see those legal "precidents," or precedents as I like to call them, that are against me. Don't cite it if you don't have a reference.
I agree, you should be able to contravene this method, and this should be legal due to fair use restrictions. I actually question whether the DMCA will hold up under this kind of test.
You right to "train" you computer's CD drive to read this type of CD correctly should be protected by fair use.
However, I completely agree that it is legally questionable to represent a product as a complete audio CD when in fact it is an audio CD interspersed with microbursts of static. That argument might get you your money back, it might get CDs with the SafeAudio treatment labeled... But there's no way in hell it's going to get this technology made illegal.
THEY OWN THE COPYRIGHT. That means they have the right to release the information any way they want to. Up to including music CDs with microbursts of static interspersed with the music. In fact, an attempt to prosecute them on a fair use claim would be in violation of their First Amendment rights.
Fair Use is a real protection - they can't stop you from ripping your non-protected CDs because it's perfectly legal to make copies to shift formats, make it more convenient to use a product, or as a back-up against breakage or degredation. But it doesn't stop anyone from making a product that copies poorly. Your beef in this case is with the creator for producing a less useful product... unfortunately, whoever is responsible for the information on the mystery CD lost control of their product as soon as they signed their contract - making the de facto creator the company, and giving the right to fuck up their product any way they want - including replacing their music with meaningless bursts of noise.
Funny thing, if I were a musician I would object to that. I wouldn't sign with a major label. I'd get a day job and work with really intelligent people on cutting out the middleman of industry entirely, understanding that compressed song-file trading is like free play on the radio, and selling CDs is still a perfectly viable business plan for the independent musician decades to come.
Oh wait, I am... and I do... and I won't... and I do...
Stock comment regarding difference between theft and copyright violation
We'll have a "revolution" only when the CREATORS of music start to understand that the transformation to digital information technologies puts the means of production in their hands. As long as the Majors run the labels, own the content, are in cahoots over concerts, tickets, and promotion, and are in bed with the radio and media conglomerates, your file-trading "revolution is about as significant as someone paying for one newspaper, grabbing a stack out of the machine, and passing them out on the bus. It wouldn't make USA Today any less of a corporate fluff propaganda rag, and Gnutella doesn't make music any more free except in the most limited and shallow sense for a very small percentage of the population.
Only if consumers sit back and take it. The fundamental infrastructure of the net allows for inexpensive access to anyone's content...
And while it makes sense to charge the highest volume content providers to account for the preponderance of bandwidth they consume, the day my ISP starts blocking all content that doesn't pay off is the day I get a new ISP, with a sharp letter to my former provider that I'm not interested in my internet becoming the next homgenized crap fast that is cable TV. Broadcast economics and technologies don't favor somebody that only gets hundreds of "viewers" per day, but the internet allows this, and I'm confident that someone will sell me the kind of internet service I want.
Another real possiblility is for related small content producers to band together into little networks. They could band together to pay fees for access or possibly there could be "premium" internet service - pay a surcharge of 5 or ten bucks a month, access your choice of networks of smaller content providers. The network splits the difference with the ISP, I get enhanced content from the providers I like without the stupidity of trying to figure out how to pay a nickel evry time I want to see the day's Net Comix.
Of course content on the internet is going to be dominated by big business. They have the resources to build the whiz-bang content and to buy bandwidth and access. And as far as IO can tell from the Billboard charts a lot of people really like the "art" they consume after it's been nicely pre-chewed by some fat-cat executive type. Hey, it's a free country. But the beauty of the internet is (or should be) that costs don't spiral out of control when you scale down the way costs in broadcast media do.
http://www.mrs.umn.edu/admissions/why.html
Another resource of interest, as it is an independent assessment:
http://www.collegeprofiles.com/minnesota-morris.ht ml
Morris is small school, it is not the best known school in the world. But it is known for academic excellence.
It was never my intent - I've been clear and accurate about this from the start - to pass myself off as some kind of expert. I merely wanted to place my comments in the context that, unlike most of the people posting here, I had some basis in science from which I was making my judgements of the available evidence. Unlike you I'm not satisfied to ask a few friends and choose a point of view based on what it's convenient for me to believe. You ought to try it some time.