"A book was loaned to another monastery, which made a copy."
Similar to the situation where I borrow a friend's CD and copy it, which is no different from them making a copy for me. The effect is the same. I wouldn't argue that this kind of copying should be legalized, but it's going to happen and I think there needs to be some balance. A lot of this 'schoolyard copying' is free promotion, roughly equivalent to radio play. Counting every schoolyard copy as a lost sale is total bullshit.
I agree however that my original posting was less than clear; Back in the early days of copyright, 'private copying' wasn't really considered because it wasn't really practical. Now it is and copyright needs to be clarified.
The record companies would like the power to license and sell every possible use of the content on the basis that when you do anything at all with digital media, it generally involves some kind of copying. I think the law should be adjusted so that only "copying for distribution" is covered.
And I've avoided discussing performance rights, since they're a whole other factor of copyright which I haven't really thought about and don't have strong opinions about, but I am aware that "copying" is only one facet of copyright.
"For me, fair use is being able to backup my cds onto my harddrive and encode them in any format I please for my mp3 player."
You're confused;
Fair use is an exemption that lets you make and distribute copies (for money or not) which would normally be prohibited by copyright. Thus, things like reviews and parody.
Things like backups and media shifting which doesn't involve making copies for other people should never have been the subject of copyright in the first place. They're just "use". Reasonable, ordinary, non-infringing "use" of something you already paid for.
I shouldn't need permission to "copy" a CD onto my mp3 player or recode it in different format, the same way I shouldn't need permission to put it in a regular CD player and have all the bits 'copied' from bumps on the disk to digital signals, to an analog representation of the music.
Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes, this isn't about fair use. This is an attack on just plain "use" and if you let them get away with it this time, the next move will be a fee every time you play the disk.
Granted, you can't completely solve the problem of people who don't read any of the names or instructions and just click through everything as quickly as they can. But you can ask voters to confirm who they think they voted for. But good UI design is important, and apparently lacking in many electronic voting systems. That needs to be fixed too.
As far as the machine itself counting votes, it should be damn close to 100% accurate. Audit trails (internally and on voter-verified paper printouts), journaling filesystems, atomic file operations, stuff that any sensible database admin would demand and that competent programmers have been doing for years. In the worst possible case someone tripping over the power cable at the worst possible second should only result in ONE vote being lost, not one entire flashcard with thousands of votes. In the worst possible case a corrupted memory card should lead to a paper-tape vote count, NOT thousands of lost votes.
There's no good reason for the current level of voting issues. It's not rocket science.
When you add 2+2 on your cheap Taiwanese calculator, how often do you expect an answer different from '4'. Feel free to do this calculation as often as you like and get back to me with a percentage error rate. (errors in entry due to the numbers wearing off the buttons do not qualify.)
Now try something like a computer CPU. If you run several million simple integer additions, what percentage of those will be in error?
Apart from narrowing down the offered 'protection' to almost nobody, Microsoft have given themselves the option of changing the terms at any time, which is surely no different from having the option to sue at any time. An option they already had.
The agreement is 100% FUD, "All hat and no cattle" -- it doesn't violate section 7 of the GPL because, as near as I can tell it doesn't actually, irrevocably grant anybody any rights or protection at all.
Last attempt to clarify; I've wasted far too much time on this already;
NZ has some level of border security, obviously. I'm not aware how much of that is specifically targeted at preventing terrorism. It's mostly to stop traditional hijackings, people smuggling things in or out of the country, and so on.
As for the spending question; actually it wasn't about spending, as much as focus and scale, and there are far too many factors to make an X/Y discussion about spending. Just don't be blinded by 9-11 and forget that there are other problems which need addressing too.
Go vote. If it's an electronic vote, pray it gets counted.
So New Zealand doesn't, for example, monitor incoming shipments to see if they're carrying weapons or explosives? You just rely on the fact that you haven't "pissed anyone off"? I find this extremely hard to believe.
You're an idiot. I never said we had no border security, there's a range of possible values between "nothing at all" and the level of security which you could get from naked, sedated passengers shipped in steel cages. But I guess if you guys continue to insist that everything has to be all or nothing, black or white, "us or the terrorists"... you know where you're heading.
what resources does New Zealand spend to prevent terrorism?
Generally we just try not to piss people off. We don't interfere in other people's elections, assassinate other people's democratically elected leaders, prop up friendly (to us) dictatorships, or even help our allies in questionable military takeovers.
We once had a Greenpeace ship blown up in Auckland harbour and one person died, which was a pretty significant act of terrorism for such a small country and a very direct attack on our anti-nuclear stance. The local police force (using only the resources and powers they already had) tracked down the agents responsible, they were returned to France and got a lot less of a sentence than we felt they deserved, but sometimes that's the cost of good foreign relations. It didn't result in any significant changes of policy.
I often hear Americans say that your loss of freedoms were necessary and justified "because there hasn't been a similar event since". Well, we never gave up any of our freedoms or changed our anti-nuclear stance after "L'affaire Greenpeace" and we haven't had any repeat acts of terrorism either.
I think the point is that 3000 people dying, while unfortunate, is perhaps not that huge a number. Is it worth throwing away hard-earned freedoms that might (or might not) reduce the risk of a similar event happening again? Perhaps the occasional terrorist incident like NYC or Oklahoma is just the cost of being free, having human rights, and not being spied on by your own government. An acceptable risk like the risk of driving your own car or smoking or owning a gun?
Or perhaps if your government put the same amount of focus and money that they're pouring into the "war of terror" and spent it on heart disease and cancer research, they might just save more lives. Because 3,000 people die _every day_ from those things, not just once in.... how do you rate the frequency of an event that's only happened once, ever in the history of a country?!!
For voters to trust the system, they need to be able to verify with their own eyes that the system is reasonably secure. Paper ballots and locked boxes work. People understand physical security.
Don't obfuscate the issue. Secure voting needs a voter verified papertrail and random auditing. The rest of the process will always be a black box to most people because 99% of the voting population don't understand computers, let alone cryptography.
What really annoys me is that Diebold already know this. Banks DEMAND paper-trail audits from their ATM machines, voters need to demand paper-trail audits from their voting machines too.
And on a brand new Ubuntu Dapper install everything worked straight away. No multiverse packages. No repositories. No upgrades.
I'd really like to go somewhere and "download the damn executable" for windows, but first I have to figure out where that somewhere is. In the case of my video capture card and network card, there is no executable to download. One card is no longer supported by it's manufacturer, the other one the manufacturer appears to have gone into a new line of business and completely abandoned all support for their old hardware. Yet both these cards worked perfectly in Linux, right out of the box.
BTW; for your nvidia card; open synaptic, add the universe and multiverse repositories, install the nvidia-glx package.
Then edit your x config (gksudo nano/etc/X11/xorg.conf) and where it says "nv" for the driver, change it to "nvidia" -- the next time you boot up it should be using the binary nvidia drivers.
I get really frustrated when people say Linux needs to support more hardware, this is why Windows is so much better, blah, blah. These people have never re-installed Windows on a slightly old second-hand computer without the OEM drivers disks!!!
As it happens I spent yesterday installing a dual-boot system for a blind friend, Windows XP and Ubuntu Dapper. Here's the breakdown;
Video; Intel 810 - Working perfectly in Linux and Windows (afaik, haven't checked that it's doing 3d)
Onboard ac'97 sound - Working in Linux, needs drivers in Windows
CD Burner - Works perfectly in Linux, not sure if Windows provides any CD burning software? I think it does since SP2
Olicom network card - Working perfectly in Linux, Needs drivers in Windows, but I cannot locate the company to download them. I've had mixed results using sites like driversguide, so I will probably just track down a better-supported (in Windows) network card
BT878 video capture card - Working perfectly in Linux, needs drivers in Windows. Unfortunately this is a fairly old card and no longer supported, only Windows98 drivers are available. I may be able to use the open source bt8x8 drivers on sf.net but I probably won't bother.
That's basically it. Every single component is working perfectly, out of the box, with a fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper. Windows needs drivers for a lot of it, and some components are completely unsuported. Who needs better hardware support?
As for needing antivirus and antispyware, lack of included application software, and so on... that deserves it's own rant!!!
.. Because (to paraphrase) the best way to learn to write great letters is by digging through people's trash and reading their letters, I present the updated Gates Whine;
1) Most of these "users" never bought Windows (less than 10% of all PC owners have bought Windows), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Microsoft Windows worth less than $2 an hour.
Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
PLEASE stay at home and do whatever you need to do, or whatever you can still do, to take back your country.
Because quite honestly the way America is behaving right now scares the shit out of me and most of the people I know. More than Iraq. More than North Korea. More than anywhere else in the world.
America is powerful, nuclear armed, being run by corporate greed and a president who is completely batshit insane, and there's not a god-damn thing we can do about it without risking becoming the next country to be 'liberated' by America.
Chalk this up to a cross-comment reply, I thought I was replying to a comment about plain-text formats being too bloated and inefficient.
I'm not sure what the answer to XSS is; but as a later posting already observed; if you have multiple pages that share the same large chunk of javascript it doesn't make a lot of sense to attach and download it again for every page. I'm not sure what the better solution is, but I'm sure there will be a better solution.
Or perhaps we could have the best of both worlds; plain text markup which makes web design and debugging easier, and some way that the server and browser can agree to deliver the content in a compressed stream.
On top of that, it's 30 feet with the little built-in or PCB-strip antenna. As with WiFi, you can generally get five or ten times the range (300 feet) if you use a cantenna or parabolic dish at one end of the link.. and much much futher with a dish at both ends.
How many updates does Microsoft actually need to keep track of? a few hundred? perhaps a thousand?
When I update here the update software grabs a list of all available software (about 18,000 packages) and compares versions locally. It takes only a few seconds and no information is sent to Canonical, Microsoft, or anywhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
"A book was loaned to another monastery, which made a copy."
Similar to the situation where I borrow a friend's CD and copy it, which is no different from them making a copy for me. The effect is the same. I wouldn't argue that this kind of copying should be legalized, but it's going to happen and I think there needs to be some balance. A lot of this 'schoolyard copying' is free promotion, roughly equivalent to radio play. Counting every schoolyard copy as a lost sale is total bullshit.
I agree however that my original posting was less than clear; Back in the early days of copyright, 'private copying' wasn't really considered because it wasn't really practical. Now it is and copyright needs to be clarified.
The record companies would like the power to license and sell every possible use of the content on the basis that when you do anything at all with digital media, it generally involves some kind of copying. I think the law should be adjusted so that only "copying for distribution" is covered.
And I've avoided discussing performance rights, since they're a whole other factor of copyright which I haven't really thought about and don't have strong opinions about, but I am aware that "copying" is only one facet of copyright.
"For me, fair use is being able to backup my cds onto my harddrive and encode them in any format I please for my mp3 player."
You're confused;
Fair use is an exemption that lets you make and distribute copies (for money or not) which would normally be prohibited by copyright. Thus, things like reviews and parody.
Things like backups and media shifting which doesn't involve making copies for other people should never have been the subject of copyright in the first place. They're just "use". Reasonable, ordinary, non-infringing "use" of something you already paid for.
I shouldn't need permission to "copy" a CD onto my mp3 player or recode it in different format, the same way I shouldn't need permission to put it in a regular CD player and have all the bits 'copied' from bumps on the disk to digital signals, to an analog representation of the music.
Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes, this isn't about fair use. This is an attack on just plain "use" and if you let them get away with it this time, the next move will be a fee every time you play the disk.
Granted, you can't completely solve the problem of people who don't read any of the names or instructions and just click through everything as quickly as they can. But you can ask voters to confirm who they think they voted for. But good UI design is important, and apparently lacking in many electronic voting systems. That needs to be fixed too.
As far as the machine itself counting votes, it should be damn close to 100% accurate. Audit trails (internally and on voter-verified paper printouts), journaling filesystems, atomic file operations, stuff that any sensible database admin would demand and that competent programmers have been doing for years. In the worst possible case someone tripping over the power cable at the worst possible second should only result in ONE vote being lost, not one entire flashcard with thousands of votes. In the worst possible case a corrupted memory card should lead to a paper-tape vote count, NOT thousands of lost votes.
There's no good reason for the current level of voting issues. It's not rocket science.
Why?
When you add 2+2 on your cheap Taiwanese calculator, how often do you expect an answer different from '4'. Feel free to do this calculation as often as you like and get back to me with a percentage error rate. (errors in entry due to the numbers wearing off the buttons do not qualify.)
Now try something like a computer CPU. If you run several million simple integer additions, what percentage of those will be in error?
My kids have been using Linux "with no antivirus" since before they could type (they started with things like tuxpaint and gcompris)
Windows is finally catching up?!!
As I suggested on Groklaw earlier;
Apart from narrowing down the offered 'protection' to almost nobody, Microsoft
have given themselves the option of changing the terms at any time, which is
surely no different from having the option to sue at any time. An option they
already had.
The agreement is 100% FUD, "All hat and no cattle" -- it doesn't
violate section 7 of the GPL because, as near as I can tell it doesn't actually,
irrevocably grant anybody any rights or protection at all.
Last attempt to clarify; I've wasted far too much time on this already;
NZ has some level of border security, obviously. I'm not aware how much of that is specifically targeted at preventing terrorism. It's mostly to stop traditional hijackings, people smuggling things in or out of the country, and so on.
As for the spending question; actually it wasn't about spending, as much as focus and scale, and there are far too many factors to make an X/Y discussion about spending. Just don't be blinded by 9-11 and forget that there are other problems which need addressing too.
Go vote. If it's an electronic vote, pray it gets counted.
So New Zealand doesn't, for example, monitor incoming shipments to see if they're carrying weapons or explosives? You just rely on the fact that you haven't "pissed anyone off"? I find this extremely hard to believe.
... you know where you're heading.
You're an idiot. I never said we had no border security, there's a range of possible values between "nothing at all" and the level of security which you could get from naked, sedated passengers shipped in steel cages. But I guess if you guys continue to insist that everything has to be all or nothing, black or white, "us or the terrorists"
what resources does New Zealand spend to prevent terrorism?
Generally we just try not to piss people off. We don't interfere in other people's elections, assassinate other people's democratically elected leaders, prop up friendly (to us) dictatorships, or even help our allies in questionable military takeovers.
We once had a Greenpeace ship blown up in Auckland harbour and one person died, which was a pretty significant act of terrorism for such a small country and a very direct attack on our anti-nuclear stance. The local police force (using only the resources and powers they already had) tracked down the agents responsible, they were returned to France and got a lot less of a sentence than we felt they deserved, but sometimes that's the cost of good foreign relations. It didn't result in any significant changes of policy.
I often hear Americans say that your loss of freedoms were necessary and justified "because there hasn't been a similar event since". Well, we never gave up any of our freedoms or changed our anti-nuclear stance after "L'affaire Greenpeace" and we haven't had any repeat acts of terrorism either.
I think the point is that 3000 people dying, while unfortunate, is perhaps not that huge a number. Is it worth throwing away hard-earned freedoms that might (or might not) reduce the risk of a similar event happening again? Perhaps the occasional terrorist incident like NYC or Oklahoma is just the cost of being free, having human rights, and not being spied on by your own government. An acceptable risk like the risk of driving your own car or smoking or owning a gun?
.... how do you rate the frequency of an event that's only happened once, ever in the history of a country?!!
Or perhaps if your government put the same amount of focus and money that they're pouring into the "war of terror" and spent it on heart disease and cancer research, they might just save more lives. Because 3,000 people die _every day_ from those things, not just once in
For voters to trust the system, they need to be able to verify with their own eyes that the system is reasonably secure. Paper ballots and locked boxes work. People understand physical security.
Don't obfuscate the issue. Secure voting needs a voter verified papertrail and random auditing. The rest of the process will always be a black box to most people because 99% of the voting population don't understand computers, let alone cryptography.
What really annoys me is that Diebold already know this. Banks DEMAND paper-trail audits from their ATM machines, voters need to demand paper-trail audits from their voting machines too.
I'd like to point out that on the day of September 11th, 2001, over 3,000 Americans died from heart disease and/or cancer.
.. according to various online sources.
In the month of September, almost 4,000 Americans died in car accidents.
This is only a crude approximation, check the facts yourself before you go quoting me.
I totally agree.
/etc/X11/xorg.conf) and where it says "nv" for the driver, change it to "nvidia" -- the next time you boot up it should be using the binary nvidia drivers.
And on a brand new Ubuntu Dapper install everything worked straight away. No multiverse packages. No repositories. No upgrades.
I'd really like to go somewhere and "download the damn executable" for windows, but first I have to figure out where that somewhere is. In the case of my video capture card and network card, there is no executable to download. One card is no longer supported by it's manufacturer, the other one the manufacturer appears to have gone into a new line of business and completely abandoned all support for their old hardware. Yet both these cards worked perfectly in Linux, right out of the box.
BTW; for your nvidia card; open synaptic, add the universe and multiverse repositories, install the nvidia-glx package.
Then edit your x config (gksudo nano
I get really frustrated when people say Linux needs to support more hardware, this is why Windows is so much better, blah, blah. These people have never re-installed Windows on a slightly old second-hand computer without the OEM drivers disks!!!
As it happens I spent yesterday installing a dual-boot system for a blind friend, Windows XP and Ubuntu Dapper. Here's the breakdown;
Video; Intel 810 - Working perfectly in Linux and Windows (afaik, haven't checked that it's doing 3d)
Onboard ac'97 sound - Working in Linux, needs drivers in Windows
CD Burner - Works perfectly in Linux, not sure if Windows provides any CD burning software? I think it does since SP2
Olicom network card - Working perfectly in Linux, Needs drivers in Windows, but I cannot locate the company to download them. I've had mixed results using sites like driversguide, so I will probably just track down a better-supported (in Windows) network card
BT878 video capture card - Working perfectly in Linux, needs drivers in Windows. Unfortunately this is a fairly old card and no longer supported, only Windows98 drivers are available. I may be able to use the open source bt8x8 drivers on sf.net but I probably won't bother.
That's basically it. Every single component is working perfectly, out of the box, with a fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper. Windows needs drivers for a lot of it, and some components are completely unsuported. Who needs better hardware support?
As for needing antivirus and antispyware, lack of included application software, and so on... that deserves it's own rant!!!
It's run by Google now..
They never delete anything, ever.
.. Because (to paraphrase) the best way to learn to write great letters is by digging through people's trash and reading their letters, I present the updated Gates Whine;
1) Most of these "users" never bought Windows (less than 10% of all PC owners have bought Windows), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Microsoft Windows worth less than $2 an hour.
Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
Backports and/or seveas repositories will give you all the new hotness for Dapper.
I got flash9 through seveas a few days after it was released. Firefox2 doesn't seem to be there yet, but I can wait another day or two.
My sources.list, for anyone who wants it:
deb http://nz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://nz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted universe multiverse
# Seveas' packages (packages, GPG key: 1135D466)
deb http://mirror.ubuntulinux.nl/ dapper-seveas all
# Bleeding edge wine packages (packages)
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main
# Quinnstorm beryl
deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ dapper main aiglx
PLEASE stay at home and do whatever you need to do, or whatever you can still do, to take back your country.
Because quite honestly the way America is behaving right now scares the shit out of me and most of the people I know. More than Iraq. More than North Korea. More than anywhere else in the world.
America is powerful, nuclear armed, being run by corporate greed and a president who is completely batshit insane, and there's not a god-damn thing we can do about it without risking becoming the next country to be 'liberated' by America.
Pirated Music ranks about three items below Trash Smuggling?
Funny, I thought they were one and the same thing.
Chalk this up to a cross-comment reply, I thought I was replying to a comment about plain-text formats being too bloated and inefficient.
I'm not sure what the answer to XSS is; but as a later posting already observed; if you have multiple pages that share the same large chunk of javascript it doesn't make a lot of sense to attach and download it again for every page. I'm not sure what the better solution is, but I'm sure there will be a better solution.
Or perhaps we could have the best of both worlds; plain text markup which makes web design and debugging easier, and some way that the server and browser can agree to deliver the content in a compressed stream.
m press/
Like this: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/co
On top of that, it's 30 feet with the little built-in or PCB-strip antenna. As with WiFi, you can generally get five or ten times the range (300 feet) if you use a cantenna or parabolic dish at one end of the link.. and much much futher with a dish at both ends.
You can already buy wireless network cameras. They're a little pricey, but not insanely expensive. And you can get cheap clones if you shop around.
http://www.axis.com/products/cam_207/index.htm
How many updates does Microsoft actually need to keep track of? a few hundred? perhaps a thousand?
When I update here the update software grabs a list of all available software (about 18,000 packages) and compares versions locally. It takes only a few seconds and no information is sent to Canonical, Microsoft, or anywhere else.
They've decided to merge into the Music And Film Industry Association of America(TM), Inc.
You must've missed the announcement back in April...