This story has people complaining that their email addresses are being revealed, and you advocate giving your entire spending history to Visa and its customers?
Should have read the review. According to the review, off-site access through mirra.com isn't required. I just got that impression from reading the mirra.com site.
You can't do restores locally, you *have to* do them through mirra.com. What happens when your Internet connection is down? What happens when they get tired of offering this free service, and start charging subscription fees? What happens when they go out of business?
It's pretty bizarre to have all the negatives of off-site backup without offering any of the positives (i.e. off-site backup!).
I appreciate the answer. But to me, this is still theoretical. The negligible factor of.999998 is theoretical, not actual. There's no way to prove the theory without polling every single individual in a demographic every single time.
The factor of 0.999998 is theoretical, which means it *can* be proved, mathematically. Polling the entire population wouldn't be sufficient to prove it, because it's a claim about a long sequence of polls, not about just one. To prove it empirically you'd need to conduct an infinite number of polls, which is impossible. The only possible proof is theoretical.
Predictions for weather, stock markets or sports generally hover about 50% accuracy...which means ( in my opinion, of course ), that despite all the statistical and analytical evidence, it's all guesswork at best.
That's by design. If you want to make predictions that are correct more often, you just make a less precise prediction, e.g. "Bush will receive between 1% and 99% of the popular vote" is almost certainly true. People just tend to like 50% accuracy (or 95% accuracy if they've been brainwashed in a stats course).
Again, I understand the quality of samples, but even those are based on projections. Population of the United States is estimated, not actually known. So demographics samples gathered by Gallup might be thought to be accurate, but may still be guesses. But I digress...
I don't think this is a digression, this is the main point of the article. Gallup doesn't know how to take random samples from the US population, nobody does. They make various attempts at it, and do various corrections; the point of the article is that cell phones make all of that harder.
If you look over most Gallup polls, the average poll sample is usually 600-1200 people. That's less than 1/100th of 1% of the United States population.
How could it possibly be accurate? Short answer: It isn't remotely accurate.
That's the answer to a different question. The answer to the question you asked is "by using random sampling properly". Read any standard stats text. The standard error of an estimated proportion depends almost entirely on the sample size. The population size hardly matters at all.
If you're interested, when n is the sample size and N is the population size, the standard error is roughly proportional to 1/sqrt(n). A somewhat better approximation includes a factor of
sqrt(1-n/N)
which in your example would be a negligible factor of 0.999998. The kinds of things the article is worrying about (some subpopulations not being sampled properly) are much bigger effects.
It is legal to copy music in Canada (for personal use, not to distribute to others), precisely because of the existence of this levy.
There's all sorts of room for discussion about whether it's being applied to the right things, or at the right rate, or whether the people who really deserve the fees are getting them, but there's really no question about the fact that the recording industry did give up something in order to get this levy.
No, it's a payment for presumed legal activity. Read the Copyright Act. Copying music (whether you own the original or not) is legal in Canada, as long as it's for personal use.
This levy was specifically designed to compensate copyright holders for this private copying right.
If you want a clear, correct discussion of the issue, see this post.
I find it amazing how incorrect information gets modded as "Insightful" on Slashdot.
The Canadian copyright laws only refer to Canadian artists and Canadian contents.
That's not true at all. The Copyright Act applies to material produced internationally in all countries that participate in the Berne Convention, the UCC or the WTO.
People like me, who don't listen to Canadian artists or English-language contents, we're getting screwed. For other Canadians who listen to Canadian artists and contents, they're getting screwed if they want to back up their legally bought CDs.
You're not being screwed, those artists are. You are paying to record their music, but the money is going to Canadians. If there was no levy, they'd still be getting screwed, but it would be by you, not by the CPCC.
Canadians have the right to copy a friend's CD, or to make a CD of downloaded music, or to record music from the radio, all without the permission of the copyright holder. That right that was granted by the 1998 Copyright Act amendments.
Those aren't fair use rights. They are private copying rights, and go beyond fair use rights. As far as I know, Americans don't have those rights; if Americans did those things that would be piracy.
Read some of the links I posted, e.g. this backgrounder or the Copyright Act. If you still disagree with me after doing some research, tell us the basis for your disagreement.
If I don't own the CD, then you are correct, I cannot copy the CD. And in Canada, you cannot make a copy of your friends CD if you don't already own it either.
No. You're wrong. I'm tired of posting the links to the Copyright Board page, or the Copyright Act, and apparently you have no interest in following the links. So I'll just summarize: it is legal for me to make a copy of recorded music for my personal use. It is not a copyright violation to do so.
This is what the levy pays for. It compensates the copyright holder for giving me the right to make copies for personal use.
What other industry get's to collect free money from the government on the chance that someone somewhere might do something illegal??
Copying music for your personal use is not illegal in Canada. The Copyright Act allows it, and puts the levy in place to compensate the copyright holders.
There's a long list of groups who use blank media who are exempt from the levy, but it's probably hard for an individual to get on that list.
In the end, the music industry looses their tax grab (...that they were never getting anyways as the canadian government has not paid out ONE CENT of the money theyve collected in the past few years...),
You should check out this Canadian Copyright Board fact sheet. It is okay to copy music recordings; it's not piracy, it's legal private use. The levy is the way that people who copy recordings pay for their music.
Yes, it's definitely an issue that blank recording media is used for other things besides recording music. But the issue is that the levy may not be targeted as well as it should be, not that it is "welfare to support those who don't feel like they should have to pay for music".
I really do encourage you to read that fact sheet. It is surprisingly clearly written for something coming from the government. For example, can you believe that this was written by a government board?
4. I buy blank CDs regularly to use in my computer. Are they subject to the levy and if so, how much is it?
Both "ordinary" CD-Rs and CD-RWs and their "Audio" counterparts can be used to copy music. Having said this, most CDs used to copy music are "ordinary" CD-Rs and CD-RWs (for which the levy is 21 cents), not "Audio" products (for which the levy is 77 cents).
CD-R Audio and CD-RW Audio products were created at least in part to comply with US legal requirements. They are encoded so as to be recognized as audio products when played on digital audio recording equipment and may not be readable by all CD-ROM drives. Otherwise, they are technologically identical to their non-Audio counterparts.
CD-Rs Audio and CD-RWs Audio are marketed as such, and are sold at a much higher price (sometimes twice as much or more) than "ordinary" CD-Rs and CD-RWs. They also represent less than one per cent of the Canadian recordable CD market.
From a practical perspective, if the package of blank CDs you purchase does not state that they are Audio CDs or "for music use only", then they are subject to a levy of 21 cents.
The use to which a recordable CD is actually being put does not determine whether it is subject or not to the levy. Manufacturers and importers of blank CDs pay royalties on all the CDs they sell blank.
Note that this page is a little old; those rates they state are probably out of date.
Yes, that's the downside. But why make backups, when it's perfectly legal to borrow your friend's CD and copy it? If the CD dies, just borrow it again and make another copy.
It's not a misconception, it's part of the 1998 revisions to the Copyright Act. See the "Private Copying" section of this Copyright Board fact sheet.
Canadians are explicitly allowed to make copies of recordings for private use. Not just backups, recordings of other items too. And the levy is designed to pay for this. To quote:
The amendment to the Act legalized private copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media - i.e., the copying of pre-recorded music for the private use of the person who makes the copy. In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use.
I thought Slashdot users were supposed to be more security conscious than the average. Do you leave all security settings at their default levels, because a big company like Microsoft wouldn't do anything that would put you at risk?
I was explaining (not too clearly) why the sample exploit didn't work for some people.
But in any case, if the buggy link is in regular HTML it will show up correctly in your status bar before you click. If you get sucked in and click on it, the false address will show up in your address bar.
If you don't trust a website, or you get an email from a stranger, don't you look at what will happen before you click?
It only affects people who leave Javascript turned on on untrusted sites. Why would anyone do that? Do they like popup hell?
Re:If you can't understand a law, it is a corrupt
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 1
It is intended to accomplish nada, nothing, zip, nil. It is pre-election hype.
Isn't it a bit early for that? I thought the elections were a year off. A year is plenty of time to see that this law didn't accomplish anything useful.
(I'm not in the USA, so apologies if I've got the date wrong.)
Slashdot Mirror
... is life without privacy.
This story has people complaining that their email addresses are being revealed, and you advocate giving your entire spending history to Visa and its customers?
Money can't come out of nowhere. Someone somewhere is paying for the improved standard of living.
This is nonsense. The world is a much richer place now than it was 100 years ago; it was richer then than 200 years ago.
Invention *does* create money out of nowhere.
Should have read the review. According to the review, off-site access through mirra.com isn't required. I just got that impression from reading the mirra.com site.
You can't do restores locally, you *have to* do them through mirra.com. What happens when your Internet connection is down? What happens when they get tired of offering this free service, and start charging subscription fees? What happens when they go out of business?
It's pretty bizarre to have all the negatives of off-site backup without offering any of the positives (i.e. off-site backup!).
I appreciate the answer. But to me, this is still theoretical. The negligible factor of .999998 is theoretical, not actual. There's no way to prove the theory without polling every single individual in a demographic every single time.
The factor of 0.999998 is theoretical, which means it *can* be proved, mathematically. Polling the entire population wouldn't be sufficient to prove it, because it's a claim about a long sequence of polls, not about just one. To prove it empirically you'd need to conduct an infinite number of polls, which is impossible. The only possible proof is theoretical.
Predictions for weather, stock markets or sports generally hover about 50% accuracy...which means ( in my opinion, of course ), that despite all the statistical and analytical evidence, it's all guesswork at best.
That's by design. If you want to make predictions that are correct more often, you just make a less precise prediction, e.g. "Bush will receive between 1% and 99% of the popular vote" is almost certainly true. People just tend to like 50% accuracy (or 95% accuracy if they've been brainwashed in a stats course).
Again, I understand the quality of samples, but even those are based on projections. Population of the United States is estimated, not actually known. So demographics samples gathered by Gallup might be thought to be accurate, but may still be guesses. But I digress...
I don't think this is a digression, this is the main point of the article. Gallup doesn't know how to take random samples from the US population, nobody does. They make various attempts at it, and do various corrections; the point of the article is that cell phones make all of that harder.
If you look over most Gallup polls, the average poll sample is usually 600-1200 people. That's less than 1/100th of 1% of the United States population.
How could it possibly be accurate? Short answer: It isn't remotely accurate.
That's the answer to a different question. The answer to the question you asked is "by using random sampling properly". Read any standard stats text. The standard error of an estimated proportion depends almost entirely on the sample size. The population size hardly matters at all.
If you're interested, when n is the sample size and N is the population size, the standard error is roughly proportional to 1/sqrt(n). A somewhat better approximation includes a factor of
sqrt(1-n/N)
which in your example would be a negligible factor of 0.999998. The kinds of things the article is worrying about (some subpopulations not being sampled properly) are much bigger effects.
...most Windows people I deal with are ... not willing to learn. God knows I've meant plenty of UNIX bigots ...
:-)
Looks like a Freudian slip to me
She's a spammer. She's lying.
It is legal to copy music in Canada (for personal use, not to distribute to others), precisely because of the existence of this levy.
There's all sorts of room for discussion about whether it's being applied to the right things, or at the right rate, or whether the people who really deserve the fees are getting them, but there's really no question about the fact that the recording industry did give up something in order to get this levy.
No, it's a payment for presumed legal activity. Read the Copyright Act. Copying music (whether you own the original or not) is legal in Canada, as long as it's for personal use.
This levy was specifically designed to compensate copyright holders for this private copying right.
If you want a clear, correct discussion of the issue, see this post.
I find it amazing how incorrect information gets modded as "Insightful" on Slashdot.
The Canadian copyright laws only refer to Canadian artists and Canadian contents.
That's not true at all. The Copyright Act applies to material produced internationally in all countries that participate in the Berne Convention, the UCC or the WTO.
People like me, who don't listen to Canadian artists or English-language contents, we're getting screwed. For other Canadians who listen to Canadian artists and contents, they're getting screwed if they want to back up their legally bought CDs.
You're not being screwed, those artists are. You are paying to record their music, but the money is going to Canadians. If there was no levy, they'd still be getting screwed, but it would be by you, not by the CPCC.
Canadians have the right to copy a friend's CD, or to make a CD of downloaded music, or to record music from the radio, all without the permission of the copyright holder. That right that was granted by the 1998 Copyright Act amendments.
Those aren't fair use rights. They are private copying rights, and go beyond fair use rights. As far as I know, Americans don't have those rights; if Americans did those things that would be piracy.
Read some of the links I posted, e.g. this backgrounder or the Copyright Act. If you still disagree with me after doing some research, tell us the basis for your disagreement.
If I don't own the CD, then you are correct, I cannot copy the CD. And in Canada, you cannot make a copy of your friends CD if you don't already own it either.
No. You're wrong. I'm tired of posting the links to the Copyright Board page, or the Copyright Act, and apparently you have no interest in following the links. So I'll just summarize: it is legal for me to make a copy of recorded music for my personal use. It is not a copyright violation to do so.
This is what the levy pays for. It compensates the copyright holder for giving me the right to make copies for personal use.
... in case you haven't noticed it is the winter.
:-)
Maybe in TB, but not around here for another 10 days.
What other industry get's to collect free money from the government on the chance that someone somewhere might do something illegal??
Copying music for your personal use is not illegal in Canada. The Copyright Act allows it, and puts the levy in place to compensate the copyright holders.
There's a long list of groups who use blank media who are exempt from the levy, but it's probably hard for an individual to get on that list.
In the end, the music industry looses their tax grab (...that they were never getting anyways as the canadian government has not paid out ONE CENT of the money theyve collected in the past few years...),
It was actually the CPCC that collected the money, not the government, and they've paid out about $10M so far.
You should check out this Canadian Copyright Board fact sheet. It is okay to copy music recordings; it's not piracy, it's legal private use. The levy is the way that people who copy recordings pay for their music.
Yes, it's definitely an issue that blank recording media is used for other things besides recording music. But the issue is that the levy may not be targeted as well as it should be, not that it is "welfare to support those who don't feel like they should have to pay for music".
I really do encourage you to read that fact sheet. It is surprisingly clearly written for something coming from the government. For example, can you believe that this was written by a government board?
4. I buy blank CDs regularly to use in my computer. Are they subject to the levy and if so, how much is it?
Both "ordinary" CD-Rs and CD-RWs and their "Audio" counterparts can be used to copy music. Having said this, most CDs used to copy music are "ordinary" CD-Rs and CD-RWs (for which the levy is 21 cents), not "Audio" products (for which the levy is 77 cents).
CD-R Audio and CD-RW Audio products were created at least in part to comply with US legal requirements. They are encoded so as to be recognized as audio products when played on digital audio recording equipment and may not be readable by all CD-ROM drives. Otherwise, they are technologically identical to their non-Audio counterparts.
CD-Rs Audio and CD-RWs Audio are marketed as such, and are sold at a much higher price (sometimes twice as much or more) than "ordinary" CD-Rs and CD-RWs. They also represent less than one per cent of the Canadian recordable CD market.
From a practical perspective, if the package of blank CDs you purchase does not state that they are Audio CDs or "for music use only", then they are subject to a levy of 21 cents.
The use to which a recordable CD is actually being put does not determine whether it is subject or not to the levy. Manufacturers and importers of blank CDs pay royalties on all the CDs they sell blank.
Note that this page is a little old; those rates they state are probably out of date.
Yes, that's the downside. But why make backups, when it's perfectly legal to borrow your friend's CD and copy it? If the CD dies, just borrow it again and make another copy.
That's what's legal in Canada but not in the US.
I prefer living in a country where it's not illegal to make a copy of a CD for my own use.
It's not a misconception, it's part of the 1998 revisions to the Copyright Act. See the "Private Copying" section of this Copyright Board fact sheet.
Canadians are explicitly allowed to make copies of recordings for private use. Not just backups, recordings of other items too. And the levy is designed to pay for this. To quote:
The amendment to the Act legalized private copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media - i.e., the copying of pre-recorded music for the private use of the person who makes the copy. In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use.
Please note however that there's a related bug described here that fools the status bar. So even a careful user could be sucked in.
The new version doesn't fool the address bar, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some combination of characters that does.
Why would anyone do that?
Ummm... because it is enabled by default?
I thought Slashdot users were supposed to be more security conscious than the average. Do you leave all security settings at their default levels, because a big company like Microsoft wouldn't do anything that would put you at risk?
It's your box. Take control of it.
I was explaining (not too clearly) why the sample exploit didn't work for some people.
But in any case, if the buggy link is in regular HTML it will show up correctly in your status bar before you click. If you get sucked in and click on it, the false address will show up in your address bar.
If you don't trust a website, or you get an email from a stranger, don't you look at what will happen before you click?
It only affects people who leave Javascript turned on on untrusted sites. Why would anyone do that? Do they like popup hell?
It is intended to accomplish nada, nothing, zip, nil. It is pre-election hype.
Isn't it a bit early for that? I thought the elections were a year off. A year is plenty of time to see that this law didn't accomplish anything useful.
(I'm not in the USA, so apologies if I've got the date wrong.)