Do you think that the gradual increases in the length of time that works can remain copyrighted (most recently the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" of the 1990s) will continue every time that the media companies feel that they are about to lose control of some of their "intellectual property"?
Or do you think that the public interest will reassert itself and hold or even turn back some of these copyright extensions?
When a work's copyright is extended, one person (the author or the corporation that owns it) benefits. But when its copyright expires, everyone benefits by being able to copy, modify, expand on and extend it. Can we convince lawmakers with this kind of social and economic argument?
I'm no economist, and can't pretend to have fully understood the technical jargon in this piece. (But that won't stop me from posting about it on Slashdot...;) )
It seems to me there are two factors in the creation of open source projects:
Need/desire, and
Opportunity.
Many open source programmers (Linus, the guy who started PHP, and others) say they set out simply to "scratch an itch." This is the desire/need that underlies so much of what's been done...a small number of individuals who have a burning idea, and who start making it happen for their own reasons.
But not all programmers are free to spend endless time and money on their pet ideas. If you have a very tolerant and generous employer or a lot of free time (and no spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend), I guess that helps. But it also helps if you are working in an environment -- university, gov. agency, etc. -- where the prevailing values support your work.
I.e., in a for-profit company, you are unlikely to get official recognition/resources for your open source work. But in an academic or government setting, where profit is less important than the usefulness of the software, you may well be able to pursue your personal "itch" with the backing of the institution.
This is what I don't understand. Unless it's either a paid-subscription model (pay to join) or a truly, totally distributed and open-source system (there are NO central servers of any kind), I'm not sure how P2P can make money.
Of course not all web sites have to make money. Once upon a time, pre-dot-com-boom, this was common knowledge. P2P networks run by dedicated enthusiasts may have the best chance of survival. Those are the kind of sites I've always liked best anyway...done for love, not money.
First DVD-RAM, then DVD-RW, then DVD+RW... the industry's parade of new and different recordable DVD formats has got to be awfully confusing to consumers. Until this article, I certainly couldn't keep them straight.
The funny thing is that the faster they crank out these new formats, the faster the previous ones become obsolete. We are accumulating dead media at a faster and faster pace. Will anyone own a working DVD-RAM drive in 10 years? Woe to those businesses, individuals or organizations who chose this as their archival medium...
This was a big point in the second movie -- that the future was malleable, based on present choices and actions. So they don't need perfect continuity with previously established "future history." Events have already been (somewhat) altered by what Sarah, John, and Ahnuld have done...
I was laid off from a marketing/"branding"/ad firm in July, b/c they just weren't getting the web development business they once had. Banner ad rates have plummeted, and we are being assaulted by ever-more-maddening varieties of web ads (huge banners, popunders, clickthroughs, and now "shoshkeles"!?). Sites feel they have to give advertisers more for their money, simply in order to bring in the same revenue as during the dot-com boom.
When will this madness stop? Users may flee sites that harass them too strongly. Then again, the general level of advertising in our environment has been slowly but steadily increasing for decades. I doubt this trend will stop anytime soon.
WCBS-2 (local TV station in NYC) is reporting that all bags on this American Airlines flight were screened before being loaded on to the plane. This is not standard operating procedure, but since 9/11, it is being done occasionally on a random basis.
Also, another NYC TV station (not sure which one) said a little while ago that the pilot of this flight DID perform a visual pre-flight inspection -- walking around the plane to look for obvious problems.
Check the CNN story. The state attorneys general are apparently going along with this:
Among the most vocal critics of Windows XP have been the attorneys general from Connecticut and Iowa, two of the states that joined the Justice Department in the antitrust case, which originally was brought in October 1997. Both of them stood by the Justice Department's decision Thursday.
[...]Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal (said) "[...]this course seems the best realistic strategy to secure a remedy that is timely, effective, and certain."
Iowa's Tom Miller said the Justice Department and the states all along have directed their efforts toward finding the quickest and most effective remedy possible. "This decision is consistent with that objective," Miller said.
It's not like it's a paean to the goodness of M$. Is/. afraid to even discuss M$ products?
I am no fan of Gates & co. I just thought my fellow geeks would actually be interested in discussing the successor to Windoze XP. Apparently the/. editors want to squelch any such talk.
Why are they launching disco balls into orbit? The Starshine site never really explains the purpose of the satellites clearly.
I worked in the Empire State Bldg till recently...
on
Return of the Zeppelins
·
· Score: 1, Informative
...and became something of an ESB history buff. They did in fact dock a dirigible at the top of the building -- once. A couple celebrities (including a famous actress, I think) were nearly killed when the wind pushed it around. A huge amount of water ballast was spilled, drenching people on top of the building as well as on the streets below.
It was never a terribly well-thought-out idea, docking a lighter-than-air ship nearly a quarter mile up in the air. Still, it has a retro-cool appeal...a good friend and I are working on a novella about an alternate universe in which the authoritarian US gov't. continues to moor airships to the top of the ESB.
For more on the history of the Empire State Building (including the dirigible mooring mast) see http://www.esbnyc.com.
He seems to think that allowing huge, monopolistic companies to do whatever they want is the same thing as "unleashing the spirit of innovation and creativity."
Did you even read the article's arguments?
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The internet has been around for more than two decades, during which time it has managed to elude being regulated in any meaningful way, anywhere in the world.
That's an unsupportable generalization. Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster, Yahoo! France, and any site ever kicked off an ISP due to outside legal pressure.
The internet stretches across national boundaries. For regulation to be successfully carried out, an international body would need to be involved.
Ever hear of the Hague Convention? It was in the article. International agreements on intellectual property, copyright, etc. are growing day by day, as the economy is globalized and more information moves around the world.
Now that we have web servers in space, even international bodies will be powerless to censor the internet.
The US is embarking on wholesale weaponization of space. I disagree with it, but satellite-killing satellites - built by the US or someone else - will become a reality sooner or later.
The skills of hackers and crackers will summarily overcome any attempts by government to lock-down the internet. If hackers can infiltrate the most secure military computers of the greatest nation on earth, how will the US, but more especially, the rest of the world, ever regulate the internet?
This is about the only variable that I don't think can be controlled. Human ingenuity is pretty amazing. But the hurdles to an open Internet are going to get higher and higher (you didn't mention hardware-based content management, featured prominently in the article), and only an elite few may end up being able to circumvent them.
An earlier poster suggested wearing a clear plastic bag to thwart the cameras. Besides cutting off your oxygen supply, this could actually be illegal. A number of states and cities (including Florida, if I recall...my wife used to practice law there) have laws against wearing masks in public. These are in response to terrorist groups like the KKK, who used their anonymity to perpetrate fear and in some cases real violence.
However, I think one might be able to get away with a hood, mask, veil, etc. by making a religious argument. Some people (e.g. conservative Muslim women) are religiously required to cover most of their faces in public. (GUess this wouldn't defeat the retinal scanners...) Perhaps someone needs to start a First Church of Anonymity and Privacy, whose doctrine asserts the sacred duty to wear shapeless, head-covering, logo-less clothing (and dark sunglasses) in public.
I'm not positive this would be allowed, even if it were found to be a valid religious practice. The KKK may have tried that argument too, and failed. I don't recall for sure...I'll have to ask my wife if she remembers the case law...
I really don't want to have to opt out of Smart Tags. If they want to play that way, I'd just as soon opt out of IE 6.
I plan to edit my browser detect scripts to sniff for IE 6, and then redirect users to a page telling them something like this:
"The browser you are using (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0) may not display this page correctly, due to its non-standard 'Smart Tag' feature. Please visit our site using another browser."
Time, Inc. spokesman Peter Costiglio said[:] "The publishers lose because they have to delete articles; researchers, readers and historians lose because they won't have access to complete archives; and freelancers lose because their pieces won't appear in the archives."
A good friend of mine works at Time Warner in New York, and says that since the recent takeover by AOL, the staff of Time, Inc.'s corporate library -- a world-renowned resource for scholars -- has been fired in order to save money. The archives are being distributed piecemeal among the various offices of the company's publications.
Sounds like they don't give a damn about the "researchers, readers and historians" who have relied on Time's archives for decades. This ruling really won't have a very big impact, by comparison.
...b/c Apple users are very different from Linux users.
I don't see Apple users -- or Adobe, for that matter -- moving to Linux until there is a single robust GUI standard. Apple users like to work with a GUI, not a command line; and Adobe's products obviously require a good GUI.
Several years ago in Gainesville, Florida, I was pulled over. My license tag had expired and I'd forgotten to renew it; subsequently, my license had been suspended, but the notice somehow never reached me. I was informed of this. Then, to my shock, I was frisked, handcuffed and shoved into the back of the cop's car, while they searched MY car. This search included opening a bottle of Tylenol in my backpack, apparently to see if it contained anything illicit.
When they couldn't find anything incriminating, they let me out of the car and contacted someone to come pick me up.
A few years ago, Network Solutions was the only way to go for.com,.net,.org. $70 for 2 years, and a lot of hard-to-understand online forms and unhelpful e-mail autoresponders.
Now there are places that will register your.com,.net, or.org for $60/2 years, or even less. Competition has definitely helped. Why wouldn't it help in the *.au domains (as long as the namespace is properly regulated)?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think that the gradual increases in the length of time that works can remain copyrighted (most recently the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" of the 1990s) will continue every time that the media companies feel that they are about to lose control of some of their "intellectual property"?
Or do you think that the public interest will reassert itself and hold or even turn back some of these copyright extensions?
When a work's copyright is extended, one person (the author or the corporation that owns it) benefits. But when its copyright expires, everyone benefits by being able to copy, modify, expand on and extend it. Can we convince lawmakers with this kind of social and economic argument?
- GNA (Gna's Not American)
Yeah, that's pretty weak, I admit.Other possibilities:
- Russia: Red Square (or Fur Hat)
- France: Red Beret
- Afghanistan: Red Turban
OK, that's enough cheap humor based on national stereotypes for today....when I was young and irresponsible. Oh, such fun! Such sparking and fizzing!
The ketchup packet looked pretty freakish afterward. As for the oven, I don't know...it was at school, and I never went back to check on it...
Why do you think Linus is still plugging away at the Linux kernel? Not because he's absolutely needed, but because he likes to do it.
In other words, he finds it desirable. I would include that under "need/desire."
It seems to me there are two factors in the creation of open source projects:
Many open source programmers (Linus, the guy who started PHP, and others) say they set out simply to "scratch an itch." This is the desire/need that underlies so much of what's been done...a small number of individuals who have a burning idea, and who start making it happen for their own reasons.
But not all programmers are free to spend endless time and money on their pet ideas. If you have a very tolerant and generous employer or a lot of free time (and no spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend), I guess that helps. But it also helps if you are working in an environment -- university, gov. agency, etc. -- where the prevailing values support your work.
I.e., in a for-profit company, you are unlikely to get official recognition/resources for your open source work. But in an academic or government setting, where profit is less important than the usefulness of the software, you may well be able to pursue your personal "itch" with the backing of the institution.
Just my $0.02...
This is what I don't understand. Unless it's either a paid-subscription model (pay to join) or a truly, totally distributed and open-source system (there are NO central servers of any kind), I'm not sure how P2P can make money.
Of course not all web sites have to make money. Once upon a time, pre-dot-com-boom, this was common knowledge. P2P networks run by dedicated enthusiasts may have the best chance of survival. Those are the kind of sites I've always liked best anyway...done for love, not money.
First DVD-RAM, then DVD-RW, then DVD+RW... the industry's parade of new and different recordable DVD formats has got to be awfully confusing to consumers. Until this article, I certainly couldn't keep them straight.
The funny thing is that the faster they crank out these new formats, the faster the previous ones become obsolete. We are accumulating dead media at a faster and faster pace. Will anyone own a working DVD-RAM drive in 10 years? Woe to those businesses, individuals or organizations who chose this as their archival medium...
This was a big point in the second movie -- that the future was malleable, based on present choices and actions. So they don't need perfect continuity with previously established "future history." Events have already been (somewhat) altered by what Sarah, John, and Ahnuld have done...
I was laid off from a marketing/"branding"/ad firm in July, b/c they just weren't getting the web development business they once had. Banner ad rates have plummeted, and we are being assaulted by ever-more-maddening varieties of web ads (huge banners, popunders, clickthroughs, and now "shoshkeles"!?). Sites feel they have to give advertisers more for their money, simply in order to bring in the same revenue as during the dot-com boom.
When will this madness stop? Users may flee sites that harass them too strongly. Then again, the general level of advertising in our environment has been slowly but steadily increasing for decades. I doubt this trend will stop anytime soon.
WCBS-2 (local TV station in NYC) is reporting that all bags on this American Airlines flight were screened before being loaded on to the plane. This is not standard operating procedure, but since 9/11, it is being done occasionally on a random basis.
Also, another NYC TV station (not sure which one) said a little while ago that the pilot of this flight DID perform a visual pre-flight inspection -- walking around the plane to look for obvious problems.
Check the CNN story. The state attorneys general are apparently going along with this:
We'll see what the EU regulators will do.
It's not like it's a paean to the goodness of M$. Is
I am no fan of Gates & co. I just thought my fellow geeks would actually be interested in discussing the successor to Windoze XP. Apparently the
Why are they launching disco balls into orbit? The Starshine site never really explains the purpose of the satellites clearly.
It was never a terribly well-thought-out idea, docking a lighter-than-air ship nearly a quarter mile up in the air. Still, it has a retro-cool appeal...a good friend and I are working on a novella about an alternate universe in which the authoritarian US gov't. continues to moor airships to the top of the ESB.
For more on the history of the Empire State Building (including the dirigible mooring mast) see http://www.esbnyc.com.
He seems to think that allowing huge, monopolistic companies to do whatever they want is the same thing as "unleashing the spirit of innovation and creativity."
That's an unsupportable generalization. Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster, Yahoo! France, and any site ever kicked off an ISP due to outside legal pressure.
The internet stretches across national boundaries. For regulation to be successfully carried out, an international body would need to be involved.
Ever hear of the Hague Convention? It was in the article. International agreements on intellectual property, copyright, etc. are growing day by day, as the economy is globalized and more information moves around the world.
Now that we have web servers in space, even international bodies will be powerless to censor the internet.
The US is embarking on wholesale weaponization of space. I disagree with it, but satellite-killing satellites - built by the US or someone else - will become a reality sooner or later.
The skills of hackers and crackers will summarily overcome any attempts by government to lock-down the internet. If hackers can infiltrate the most secure military computers of the greatest nation on earth, how will the US, but more especially, the rest of the world, ever regulate the internet?
This is about the only variable that I don't think can be controlled. Human ingenuity is pretty amazing. But the hurdles to an open Internet are going to get higher and higher (you didn't mention hardware-based content management, featured prominently in the article), and only an elite few may end up being able to circumvent them.
However, I think one might be able to get away with a hood, mask, veil, etc. by making a religious argument. Some people (e.g. conservative Muslim women) are religiously required to cover most of their faces in public. (GUess this wouldn't defeat the retinal scanners...) Perhaps someone needs to start a First Church of Anonymity and Privacy, whose doctrine asserts the sacred duty to wear shapeless, head-covering, logo-less clothing (and dark sunglasses) in public.
I'm not positive this would be allowed, even if it were found to be a valid religious practice. The KKK may have tried that argument too, and failed. I don't recall for sure...I'll have to ask my wife if she remembers the case law...
I plan to edit my browser detect scripts to sniff for IE 6, and then redirect users to a page telling them something like this:
Time, Inc. spokesman Peter Costiglio said[:] "The publishers lose because they have to delete articles; researchers, readers and historians lose because they won't have access to complete archives; and freelancers lose because their pieces won't appear in the archives."
A good friend of mine works at Time Warner in New York, and says that since the recent takeover by AOL, the staff of Time, Inc.'s corporate library -- a world-renowned resource for scholars -- has been fired in order to save money. The archives are being distributed piecemeal among the various offices of the company's publications.
Sounds like they don't give a damn about the "researchers, readers and historians" who have relied on Time's archives for decades. This ruling really won't have a very big impact, by comparison.
I don't see Apple users -- or Adobe, for that matter -- moving to Linux until there is a single robust GUI standard. Apple users like to work with a GUI, not a command line; and Adobe's products obviously require a good GUI.
...iBrator.com
When they couldn't find anything incriminating, they let me out of the car and contacted someone to come pick me up.
Fourth Amendment? What Fourth Amendment?
Now there are places that will register your .com, .net, or .org for $60/2 years, or even less. Competition has definitely helped. Why wouldn't it help in the *.au domains (as long as the namespace is properly regulated)?
Marketing is better than coding.