In Noir, K.W. Jeter posits the case that a death penalty for copyright infringement is inevitable, as the crime is easy enough to commit without getting caught that the deterrent must be made exponentially more severe.
It's their plan for when the public gets wise to copyright terms being extended every 20 years: let copyright expire, but expand "common law" to fulfil its function perpetually.
Ultimately, perhaps we'll see copyright, patents and trademarks withering away, replaced by a first-class, perpetual intellectual-property title without these ideas' restrictions.
Funnily enough, there are (minority) elements in the Conservative Party who advocate the UK leaving the EU and joining the FTAA for ideological reasons (i.e., that the UK has more in common with the US tradition of neoliberal capitalism than with Eurosocialist dirigism).
They'd have to rename it to the Free Trade Area of the Atlantic, of course.
Since when do credit card companies prevent American users from subscribing to overseas porn sites? Or do you mean sites dealing in child pornography, snuff video and otherwise grossly illegal things?
Actually, Australia doesn't have a national censorship firewall. It does have a takedown regime for censoring inappropriate materials hosted in Australia, and a religious party who have one seat in the Senate want a national firewall, but it's not on the agenda. At least not until the religiots hold the balance of power and the government need their vote to get some union-busting legislation passed or something.
Britain, however, does have a national firewall. It's currently set up to block only several child porn sites and such. Though, given the British government's fondness for D-notices and such, it's probably a safe bet that the next time an ex-MI6 agent publishes his unexpurgated memoirs online abroad or somesuch, the firewall will be extended to block access to them.
It's interesting to see that Longhorn does one thing that Apple don't do: allows the transparency function to take into account the values of neighbouring pixels on the lower layer (thus allowing blurring, rather than merely fading).
Of course, this takes more computation; I wonder how fast it is.
That's true. Other commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada have broadcasting agencies modelled on the BBC, though don't always have the license fee. In Australia, for example, the ABC (of no relation to the Disney-owned US network of the same name) is 100% government-funded, which allows the government to put pressure on it every time the party in power disagrees with its reporting. The result has been a timid, self-censoring network that's next to useless for critical reporting.
I'll bet that Tony Blair wishes he had this sort of power over that recalcitrant "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation".
Actually, the BBC is intending to use GeoIP-type technologies to discriminate between British users (who are paid for from license fees) and overseas users (who aren't), in the Creative Archive, which will be available in Britain only. (This is due to a management decision; the people actually working on the project wanted it to be available to everyone, but the powers that be said no.)
The RIAA and MPAA get representatives in the Internet 3.0 rebuilding committee, eliminate the pesky peer-to-peer architecture in favour of regulated servers and restricted clients, and build pervasive DRM into it at the protocol level.
Locking out Firefox/Opera/Safari isn't the only option open to MS; they could also subtly degrade the browsing experience on non-IE browsers, as the MSN site does. So, from the user's point of view, Firefox is an inferior browser because Atlas-based sites feel clunkier and have fewer features.
Chances are anything calling itself X12 would be like the MP4 audio format or any programming language named D; most probably having little to recommend it other than its developers' promptness in grabbing a catchy name.
BitTorrent makes no attempt to verify that the tracks are legitimate and involves no rights-management technology. That may not be enough to have it declared illegal, but it could be enough to drag Cohen through the courts until he's either bankrupt or settles out of court on the RIAA/MPAA's terms.
Don't count on the Democrats to help fight corporatism; they're even closer to Hollywood, the RIAA and Big Copyright than the Republicans (who have enough of a suspicion of the coke-snorting hot-tubbing secularists of Hollywood not to give them everything they ask for automatically). Basically, the MPAA/RIAA are to the Democrats what the oil industry is to the Republicans.
When the Democrats next win power, expect DRM mandates and copyright extensions and expansions aplenty.
This could form a legal mandate for rearchitecting the internet to a client-server model, where machines are designated as either clients or servers, the former of which can only connect to servers, and the latter of which are subject to licensing, regulation and auditing.
Bram Cohen did not act in good faith to prevent BT from being used for piracy; therefore, under the SCOTUS decision, the MPAA could sue him.
Whether they'd win, of course, is another matter. Though they'd probably be satisfied with harrassing him into handing over his life savings and serving as a grim warning for anyone else trying something like that.
How hot did your drives run? Hard drives these days have temperature sensors which can be interrogated with software (under Linux, hddtemp does this). If a drive is kept too hot, its lifespan shortens drastically.
If this is a persistent problem, you may want to invest in some hard drive coolers. I got one and my hard drive's temperature dropped from >50C to around 30C. The small cooling units consisting of one fan that sits on the bottom of the drive are sufficient to achieve this, and they're cheap.
Singapore is a democracy only on paper. The people keep voting for the People's Action Party (which has held power continuously since the founding of Singapore as an independent state) because (a) voting is compulsory and (b) electoral districts are drawn to be so small that ones that vote for the opposition can be routinely punished by budgetary allocations. Furthermore, political activism is suppressed under Singaporean laws, ostensibly in the interest of harmony, and opposition politicians who start to look like they could have a chance often end up being sued, and losing the lawsuits.
East Germany was also technically a democracy in the same sense as Singapore; as well as the Socialist Party, there were a number of smaller parties, often sharing the names of West German parties, but deliberately kept far too weak to have any influence.
The commercial realities is that no format without DRM is going to get industry support these days. DRM is the 2005 equivalent of "push media", a buzzword which guarantees investment; enough people in the industry have bought Big Copyright's vision of a new golden age of profit where all rights can be monetised and licenced down to the finest grain that not putting in some steps towards this DRM-topia is commercial suicide.
Look at CPU design, for example. Intel has onerous DRM in their CPUs, and the Cell processor is even worse. And anyone developing anything else for any applications involving the handling of "content" faces a choice: either (a) put in DRM mechanisms or (b) lose market share to competitors who have in the event of (i) new copyright laws/FCC mandates or (ii) the MPAA's lawyers putting the frighteners on hardware makers.
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In Noir, K.W. Jeter posits the case that a death penalty for copyright infringement is inevitable, as the crime is easy enough to commit without getting caught that the deterrent must be made exponentially more severe.
So you are sayin that there is a blanket ban on US subscriptions to porn sites based outside the US?
Is this unofficial, or is there some government legislation behind it, as with gambling?
It's their plan for when the public gets wise to copyright terms being extended every 20 years: let copyright expire, but expand "common law" to fulfil its function perpetually.
Ultimately, perhaps we'll see copyright, patents and trademarks withering away, replaced by a first-class, perpetual intellectual-property title without these ideas' restrictions.
Funnily enough, there are (minority) elements in the Conservative Party who advocate the UK leaving the EU and joining the FTAA for ideological reasons (i.e., that the UK has more in common with the US tradition of neoliberal capitalism than with Eurosocialist dirigism).
They'd have to rename it to the Free Trade Area of the Atlantic, of course.
Since when do credit card companies prevent American users from subscribing to overseas porn sites? Or do you mean sites dealing in child pornography, snuff video and otherwise grossly illegal things?
Actually, Australia doesn't have a national censorship firewall. It does have a takedown regime for censoring inappropriate materials hosted in Australia, and a religious party who have one seat in the Senate want a national firewall, but it's not on the agenda. At least not until the religiots hold the balance of power and the government need their vote to get some union-busting legislation passed or something.
Britain, however, does have a national firewall. It's currently set up to block only several child porn sites and such. Though, given the British government's fondness for D-notices and such, it's probably a safe bet that the next time an ex-MI6 agent publishes his unexpurgated memoirs online abroad or somesuch, the firewall will be extended to block access to them.
It's interesting to see that Longhorn does one thing that Apple don't do: allows the transparency function to take into account the values of neighbouring pixels on the lower layer (thus allowing blurring, rather than merely fading).
Of course, this takes more computation; I wonder how fast it is.
Didn't they have one of those in mediaeval England?
That's true. Other commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada have broadcasting agencies modelled on the BBC, though don't always have the license fee. In Australia, for example, the ABC (of no relation to the Disney-owned US network of the same name) is 100% government-funded, which allows the government to put pressure on it every time the party in power disagrees with its reporting. The result has been a timid, self-censoring network that's next to useless for critical reporting.
I'll bet that Tony Blair wishes he had this sort of power over that recalcitrant "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation".
Actually, the BBC is intending to use GeoIP-type technologies to discriminate between British users (who are paid for from license fees) and overseas users (who aren't), in the Creative Archive, which will be available in Britain only. (This is due to a management decision; the people actually working on the project wanted it to be available to everyone, but the powers that be said no.)
The RIAA and MPAA get representatives in the Internet 3.0 rebuilding committee, eliminate the pesky peer-to-peer architecture in favour of regulated servers and restricted clients, and build pervasive DRM into it at the protocol level.
Locking out Firefox/Opera/Safari isn't the only option open to MS; they could also subtly degrade the browsing experience on non-IE browsers, as the MSN site does. So, from the user's point of view, Firefox is an inferior browser because Atlas-based sites feel clunkier and have fewer features.
Chances are anything calling itself X12 would be like the MP4 audio format or any programming language named D; most probably having little to recommend it other than its developers' promptness in grabbing a catchy name.
What happened to the Y Window System, btw?
Apparently, the Transputer technology is still used in various GPS chipsets, though is no longer available as a general-purpose processor.
BitTorrent makes no attempt to verify that the tracks are legitimate and involves no rights-management technology. That may not be enough to have it declared illegal, but it could be enough to drag Cohen through the courts until he's either bankrupt or settles out of court on the RIAA/MPAA's terms.
Don't count on the Democrats to help fight corporatism; they're even closer to Hollywood, the RIAA and Big Copyright than the Republicans (who have enough of a suspicion of the coke-snorting hot-tubbing secularists of Hollywood not to give them everything they ask for automatically). Basically, the MPAA/RIAA are to the Democrats what the oil industry is to the Republicans.
When the Democrats next win power, expect DRM mandates and copyright extensions and expansions aplenty.
This could form a legal mandate for rearchitecting the internet to a client-server model, where machines are designated as either clients or servers, the former of which can only connect to servers, and the latter of which are subject to licensing, regulation and auditing.
Safe from being successfully sued, perhaps. Safe from being dragged through the courts to bankruptcy, no.
There is more than one way to punish someone by means of the court system.
Bram Cohen did not act in good faith to prevent BT from being used for piracy; therefore, under the SCOTUS decision, the MPAA could sue him.
Whether they'd win, of course, is another matter. Though they'd probably be satisfied with harrassing him into handing over his life savings and serving as a grim warning for anyone else trying something like that.
How hot did your drives run? Hard drives these days have temperature sensors which can be interrogated with software (under Linux, hddtemp does this). If a drive is kept too hot, its lifespan shortens drastically.
If this is a persistent problem, you may want to invest in some hard drive coolers. I got one and my hard drive's temperature dropped from >50C to around 30C. The small cooling units consisting of one fan that sits on the bottom of the drive are sufficient to achieve this, and they're cheap.
50 years into the future, people will be tortured by bad flesh design, in the name of transhuman fashion.
WINE isn't the half of it; we'll probably see a Xen-style hypervisor for OSX/86. A port of VMWare is also not unlikely.
Given that OS9 still uses 68000 machine code in places, it's probably not worth anyone's while to support it.
Singapore is a democracy only on paper. The people keep voting for the People's Action Party (which has held power continuously since the founding of Singapore as an independent state) because (a) voting is compulsory and (b) electoral districts are drawn to be so small that ones that vote for the opposition can be routinely punished by budgetary allocations. Furthermore, political activism is suppressed under Singaporean laws, ostensibly in the interest of harmony, and opposition politicians who start to look like they could have a chance often end up being sued, and losing the lawsuits.
East Germany was also technically a democracy in the same sense as Singapore; as well as the Socialist Party, there were a number of smaller parties, often sharing the names of West German parties, but deliberately kept far too weak to have any influence.
The commercial realities is that no format without DRM is going to get industry support these days. DRM is the 2005 equivalent of "push media", a buzzword which guarantees investment; enough people in the industry have bought Big Copyright's vision of a new golden age of profit where all rights can be monetised and licenced down to the finest grain that not putting in some steps towards this DRM-topia is commercial suicide.
Look at CPU design, for example. Intel has onerous DRM in their CPUs, and the Cell processor is even worse. And anyone developing anything else for any applications involving the handling of "content" faces a choice: either (a) put in DRM mechanisms or (b) lose market share to competitors who have in the event of (i) new copyright laws/FCC mandates or (ii) the MPAA's lawyers putting the frighteners on hardware makers.