I did see your reply, thanks for taking the effort. I've only read digests of David Brin's writing. I don't agree entirely with his thesis, though the caveat of not having read it in it's entirety mods down my response.
That said, my response to the digest is this: Hoover was a cross dresser, but it didn't stop him from using whatever personal information he could find to persecute those people he thought were his enemies.
Further, Clinton was persecuted for his sexual conduct, but it didn't slow that persecution much that his chief inquisitors fell one by one as hypocrites as their personal lives were exposed.
Hypocrisy and bigotry are very familiar bedfellows, unfortunately (or fortunately for those of us with a love of the ironic). It just seems you can't have a crusading moralist who isn't a pervert. But even when exposed they just weep and wail and get back to the inquisition.
But most importantly, those in control of the system will see to it that it is not turned on themselves, just as management is not drug tested while line employees are.
That's my guess. It seems like there are two options:
1) Fight for privacy tooth and nail, fight every invasion as if it means that you will find yourself prosecuted for every bizarre rule on the books in every state you travel through as soon as they can detect that you broke them.
2) Work as hard as possible to make sure that open society has access to as much aggregated information on anyone who is watching society as possible, that every time Bennet bets a quarter, everyone knows, in the hope of forestalling the worst outcome of option 1 by exposing hypocrisy, or, if it comes to it, blackmail.
Prospective employers like to do background checks, current employers often cut employees, stores can collect information that is not personally identifying individually, but aggregators can tie identifications together to high probability hits.
For example: You go to the gap and buy new clothes, pay for them with a credit card. You could be buying them as a gift, or not, the purchaser info and RFIDs are linked and sold to direct marketers and credit aggregators like Equifax.
Equifax (we'll make them the bad guys just for point of argument) binds the sale and the ID in your record.
A few days later someone walks into Wallgreens wearing the clothes and buys a pregnancy test. The person pays cash, say, but the purchase ID enters a data cloud with the clothing ID's, and the batch lot are reported - no personally identifying information is, just a temporally connected cloud of RFID points.
Equifax does a fuzzy search and ties the cloud of clothing points to your SSN, and flags the pregnancy test.
An prospective employer calls for a background check and decides you're a high risk, and rescinds their offer. Too bad you already quit your last job.
Maybe the pregnancy test is for a friend, maybe the clothes were a gift, who cares? You're a risk. Sorry.
Say you buy a 1.5L of JD at the local supermarket. Two of them in a month.
Say you go out to see a band on a Thursday and show up late for work on Friday, sniffling.
Say your company is having a strategic workforce realignment and looking for potentially career limited individuals to pare from the workforce.
Say the alcohol wasn't for you, or the late night out was a one time thing, or the clothes that went past the RFID reader at the bar were on your roommate. Does it matter? Should it matter any way? America is a meritocracy - right? We're all judged on our abilities, not our religion/morals... Can a company dumping 3000 employees out of 30,000 in a week bother with each employees personal story?
I see, Mr. Johnson, that you wear that overcoat on the job and off. I note that you were carrying a Workers Daily on your way home in that coat. Mr. Johnson, this is a conservative company and we have no place for troublemakers like you. These men will escort you out of the building....
In every historical case where records were kept of information that revealed individual's private lives and proclivities, that information has been abused, from the Stasi, to the Nazis, to Hoover.
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
1400x900????? WTF? I have a 15" laptop with a much more useful screen: 210,000 useful little pixels better. And it cost less.
I understand that steve jobs has vision issues and likes his pixels big, but the NEC guys can't all be like that - or at least have accepted vision correction.
Dell has the right idea: 1920x1200 pixels in a 15.1" display. Now that's useful. Pixels.... mmmm pixels. All I want is pixels. More pixels.
By far the most stunning image reproduction I've ever seen, in any format (including large format transparencies) is the 9 megapixel IBM glass (like this)
mmmmm.... more pixels.
It'd be OK for my laptop, but I wouldn't want it in my home.
I wrote a long tract about the economics of the whole thing, zero cost of sale to speakeasy, higher margin product and all but that's really the gist of it and the rest was boring.
Then I read this - and thought I'd answer. My opinion is that if they want to offset the cost of billing by taking 50%, that's cool, but they should let people co-op; after all sharing and working together as a team are those old fashioned American Virtues we learned about in kindergarten (but which have been recently superceeded by the RIAA).
Even so: I have speakeasy. I, too, was very impressed with their competency. And I switched from Worldcom DSL even though my bills went up a bit and I had to buy a couple of hundred $ in new gear. And I'm glad I did. Flawless service except one glitch and instant response then.
They deserve a lot of credit. And all the good accounts (with fixed IP's) are commecial anyway, and this is still a lot cooler than ISP's that will bust you for sharing of any sort.
It's really wonderful to know that the system mostly works.
The problem is it doesn't always work that way. Don't forget Cointelpro, and more recently the Ramparts case in LA and the Riders case in Oakland. As if to disprove that wide-spread, systematic abuse was part of the past, the DOJ brought us their post 9/11 roundup policy.
Getting a warrant is trivial. It is not an impediment to law enforcement and represents only the most inconsequential of protections (no wiretap request was turned down last year). What it does provide is a paper trail a tiny bit of oversight, and that means some recourse for the Abner Louima's of the world, and possibly a moment of reflection for the cops to question their own actions, even if the judge really isn't likely to.
It's right to help law enforcement in their legitimate business, but it's not up to a private company to determine legitimacy, it's up to the courts. That everyone has the right (I think still) to refuse to cooperate without a warrant is our only fig leaf; dropping it voluntarily just encourages abuse. We all owe it to our police forces to make it harder for the bad apples to ruin things for the good cops.
Hopefully some bad cop somewhere will misuse this policy of eBay's and the injured party will file a massive lawsuit against eBay for aiding and abetting the crime and collect a meaningful punitive reward. Probably not, but we can hope. In the mean time, eBay makes it easy for anyone who wants a few credit card numbers to pay their bills.
The RIAA has begun a program of legal action to enforce their copyrights against individuals. They have the legal right to do because of new laws predicated on the assertion that copyright law protects the intellectual property of the inventor.
This is a new formulation that was worked out against the widespread adoption of photocopiers, which publishers incorrectly saw as a threat to their livelihood (and played out over and over again as publishers reacted to each new individually enabling technology from audio tape to DAT to VCRs to the internet and PVRs).
What publishers anticipated was their own irrelevance.
Under the original formulation and purpose of copyright law, "temporary monopolies" are granted to "further the progress of science and the useful arts." An idea is not property and it cannot be owned:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself...Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." - Thomas Jefferson
More than any proceeding technology, the internet obviates the role publishers play in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. And the RIAA and MPAA know they are dying interests, struggling viciously to maintain power, and desperately trying to restructure the argument to protect their lucrative but now irrelevant middleman roles.
The term "intellectual property" is but part of the battle. Other critical elements include the term "theft:" it is not stealing to copy a copyrighted work (or manufacture a patented product), it is technically a copyright or patent violation. But how much more colorful and instructive it is to, in parallel construction, adopt the term "Guerilla Anti-Trust." Similarly those Anti-Trust Guerrillas are not themselves "Pirating" Granted Temporary Monopolies but waging a guerilla war against the Pirates of the Public Domain.
The vast, vast majority of the population has an intuitive understanding that copying a song does not take anything from anyone and is therefore not theft, "as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." They are correct, but it would be ultimately highly unprofitable to the publishing industry were that understanding to remain intuitive. The publishing industry (music, movie, books) face an expensive restructuring as their massive physical plant investment (the printing presses, distribution systems, stores and theaters) is inexorably devalued by emerging information technologies.
They are making a bold attempt to replace by law the value that technology has taken away. It is as if buggy whip manufacturers had passed a law that all cars must have one, or more so as if a manufacturer of patent air got a law passed making it illegal to breathe the free stuff. The first step was easy -- buying new laws, and in our democracy that's relatively straight-forward. They simply pay off the right congress people and hand over verbatim drafts of the laws they want (DMCA, 1976 copyright extension act, NET, etc.) Phase two is the one critically addressed by this question: how to convince the public that everything they've always known to be true about ideas is false. The way to do that is semantics, to reformulate the language of the discussion so the underlying assumptions in the words themselves match their goals. So patents and copyrights become "Intellectual Property" and copying becomes "theft" and "Piracy." Everyone knows it's wrong to "steal property" and so, if a song is property, and copying it is stealing it, copying a song is wrong; it's theft "just like walking into a record store and stealing a CD."
Except it's still obviously not like that at all.
So by repetition, by changing the language, by force they
Replying to a reply, perhaps bad form, but I was just thinking about this today as I was writing up a corporate eval for a company considering a takeover. I carefully avoided the use of "IP" and edited it out of replies. GGTM is a bit tough on the tongue.
I think this is a worthwhile effort, a small point but language guides perception. It was a major victory for GTM/GGTM holders to redefine the discussion.
Actually sharing is now (DMCA, NET) a criminal activity, more harshly punished than murder in some states, and more harshly than first degree assault (without a deadly weapon) in almost all.
Makes you think. We all (most) learned in kindergarten that sharing was the right thing to do. Most people still consider "getting together as a community" a virtue and charging our friends for a beer a vice. Yet finally a technology arrives that lets the whole world share and we decide that doing so is more horrible, more anti-social than beating someone half to death.
If NET and DMCA don't really reflect societies values, they need to be changed. They sure don't reflect the intent of the founding fathers who thought copyright an "embarrassing monopoly" granted by the people for the sole purpose of promoting science and the useful arts. But how is that relevant? Society's values are what Rupert Murdoch says they are, you can tell because you get the exact same message from the radio, the TV, the newspapers, the magazines... everywhere you look. It must be true.
DMCA, NET, etc. were drafted for the sole purpose of propping up the profits of huge, campaign fund contributing corporations by stealing from the public domain and then enforcing that theft with armed marshals. The RIAA and MPAA are the pirates, pirates of the public domain. And they survive legal challenge despite being antithetic to the purpose and spirit and letter of the constitution by giving money to politicians who support judicial activism and constitutional revisionism. But if habeas corpus can be suspended indefinitely and American citizens are now subject to secret arrest, detention, in-absentia secret trial, and secret execution, there's absolutely zero chance of reclaiming the constitutional intent of copyright.
The RIAA can and will do something about offshore networks. They paid good money to buy their congressmen and senators and they expect results or they'll fire the ones they bought and put new ones in who have the balls to do the job. Note that the FBI will now be investigating peer to peer networks since state by state prosecution wasn't working to the RIAA's satisfaction. If P2P moves offshore in any meaningful way, they'll buy the CIA.
Your rights are irrelevant. The constitution is irrelevant. The purpose of copyright is irrelevant. All that matters is how much money the RIAA and MPAA can make. They are seeking to find the right balance between jailed potential customers and free customers to ensure maximum profitability. If that means putting 85% of the population in jail to ensure that the remaining 15% don't use P2P, they'll do it. And unless you've got the cash to outbid them for congressional attention, there's not much you can do, except, I suppose, boycott. But if you even try they might just file charges under GATT.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, because it is a merger of State and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
I read with some dismay Senator Hatch's comments on copyright. Please remind him at the next opportunity of the text of the 8th clause of the constitution:
"The Congress shall have the power.... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
There is a critical point here, carefully obfuscated by the RIAA and it's minions - there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property."
There is a concept in law called a "Natural Right," and it is generally accepted that people have a natural right to propriety. But as Jefferson was explicitly clear on, there is no natural right to "own" an idea:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea..."
Copyright does not protect property, it is not about protecting property; it is about promoting science and the useful arts. Copyright is not a property right; it is a temporary monopoly. Violating copyright is not theft, it is not piracy; it is guerilla anti-trust.
This distinction is quite clear in the constitutional grant of exclusive right, that such grant would not be obviously self-justified as it would be for property, but that such right is justified only in as much as it fulfills the noble social good of "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts."
Larry Lessig's recent supreme court challenge to the CTEA hinged on the second phrase's "limited time." He argued unsuccessfully that the extensions provided by CTEA violated the phrase by establishing essentially perpetual copyright. The court asked if 120 years was not a finite time, and turned the claim down.
It would seem that a more powerful case would be made by asking if the CTEA, DMCA, NET, etc. fulfill the constitutionally required purpose: "to promote science and the useful arts."
Today fear of over-broad laws wielded by greedy institutions has a broad chilling effect on innovation: science and the useful arts. If found thus by the court, such laws would be unconstitutional.
Thomas Jefferson was quite clear on his views of copyright and these views are enshrined in the 8th clause. It is a grant of an "embarrassing monopoly" and not a right; explicitly the fugitive fermentations of a mind cannot be owned.
Senator Hatch needs to hear and understand his words:
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessen
I've done this - it's fun and impresses the girls, but harder in an office/lab than in a well stocked kitchen.
Once my girlfriend was visiting me at work and I was stuck late while I was finishing some experiments. The kitchenette was stocked with only the usual bad coffee gear--ultra-pasteurized cream cups and sugar packets and bad coffee--and she was restless and hungry. I asked if she wanted some ice cream and she thought I was teasing.
So I took one of the vacuum insulated coffee carafes and filled it dramatically with LN2 from roll-around dewar in the lab (any time you crack the liquid feed on one of those things its pretty dramatic with the hissing and the steam and the gurgling and the spattering, dancing beads of LN2). As an aside, vacuum insulated coffee carafes filled with LN2 will hold it for more than a day.
I carried it boiling and fogging back to the kitchenette as she followed at a more than safe distance. I found a plastic bowl in the sink and filled it with the contents of about 100 of those little ultra-pasteurized coffee creamers and about 100 packets of sugar, brewed up a fresh pot of coffee and skimmed the first few seconds worth off - when it actually has some flavor and added it to the bowl. She looked mighty dubious, but the glass liner had cooled enough that the carafe didn't seem dangerous any more so she moved in to watch.
Then while I stirred the mixture with a plastic spoon (and, don't forget - while wearing the bright blue cryogenic safety gloves and full face shields) she poured in the LN2 which filled the bowl with dense fog that poured out, over the counter, and down around our ankles, spreading out across the floor, looking for all the world like a bad sci-fi movie.
In about 30 seconds we had a bowl of half decent coffee ice cream to share.
And, for just a little while, she thought being a geek was really cool...
There is a critical point here, carefully obfuscated by the RIAA and it's minions - there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property."
There is a concept in law called a "Natural Right," and it is generally accepted that people have a natural right to propriety. But as Jefferson was explicitly clear on, there is no natural right to "own" an idea:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea..."
Copyright does not protect property, it is not about protecting property; it is about promoting science and the useful arts. Copyright is not a property right; it is a temporary monopoly. Violating copyright is not theft or piracy; it is guerilla anti-trust.
This distinction is quite clear in the constitutional grant of exclusive right, that such grant would not be obviously self-justified as it would be for property, but that such right is justified only in as much as it fulfills the noble social good of "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts."
Larry Lessig's recent supreme court challenge to the CTEA hinged on the second phrase's "limited time." He argued unsuccessfully that the extensions provided by CTEA violated the phrase by establishing essentially perpetual copyright. The court asked if 120 years was not a finite time, and turned the claim down.
It would seem that a more powerful case would be made by asking if the CTEA, DMCA, NET, etc. fulfill the purpose: "to promote science and the useful arts."
Chia Monkey makes a point I think universal--that fear of over-broad laws wielded by greedy institutions has a broad chilling effect on innovation: science and the useful arts. If found thus by the court, such laws would be unconstitutional.
Write your congress-people and explain how your efforts at innovation have been stifled by inappropriate extension of copyright in a manner entirely contrary to the constitutional mandate. We must take control of the language: the RIAA is a pirate organization, thieving and stealing from the public domain. File traders are freedom fighters and patriots, exploring new technology and pushing forward the progress of science and the useful arts, fulfilling the goals of the constitution bravely despite the threat of extorting pirate organizations like the RIAA and MPAA.
Of course it'd be a bit hard to defend lionizing most warez traders, but no more difficult than defending a billion dollar claim against a college kid.
The antenna is built into the device, about the size of a large grain of salt It's a small copper coil either over passivation or on the back side of a thinned device. The RFIDs can be molded into plastic parts - it doesn't matter where they end up.
Cost is a huge issue as is testing. The price has to be about $0.01. Alien Technologies isn't close yet. Think about how many you need to fab to pay off your EUV lithography equipment. Think about throwing away 80% of your wafer as sawdust...
Wal*Mart may be optimistic.
But they will come unless stopped, if not on silicon then on glass or plastic.
So here are the real concerns I can think of:
1) I don't want to be tracked everywhere I go. Some people don't care, some people do. Personally I think I should have a constitutional right to privacy. I don't think I should have to sacrifice my privacy so walmart can further crater the economies of the unlucky communities the land in by laying off more of their underpaid workers. Those Walton girls have enough money.
People respond to RFID tags viscerally - it's a barcode they can't shake - or can't be sure they've shaken. It's reminiscent of Nazi serial number tattoos. It's reminiscent of revelations and the number of the beast. It's reminiscent of a lot of things and none of the warm or fuzzy. If people are uncomfortable with it, why should they have to be tagged? Isn't "I don't want to be" enough?
(no arguments of "well then don't shop there." Check Wal*Mart's market control. When was the last time you saw an independent pharmacy?)
2) Corporate misuse. What if you go buy a pregnancy test or condoms? Should your boss know? I know people who have serious illnesses they keep under control. They're bright and productive, but have a shorter expected work life than healthy people. Should they be denied jobs based on future availability? How about insurance? These are real privacy concerns and buying habits, especially health care items, can reveal more than current law would otherwise allow to be released without permission. Information that has value to people other than you, that may have negative value to you.
3) Government abuse. Being critical of the bush administration has landed a lot of entirely peaceful and patriotic people fighting for the good of their country on no-fly lists. That is, today, right now, the government is abusing information to commit what are probably unconstitutional acts with impunity. The government has a very bad history of misusing information to prosecute a political agenda in violation of law. There seems to be little urgency in the government having more information about citizens and much risk. It is naive to think the government will not gain access to shopping databases and use ID information to track people. They already collect library and book purchase information to find out what many people are reading, perhaps you. Does that make you feel safe? Or insecure? There are likely people on both sides, but shouldn't such access follow democratic checks and balances before it becomes an inescapable and inseparable part of our economic fabric?
Did you really just buy your second issue of The Nation? Terrorist symp - thinking critical thoughts of the government is the first step toward an Al Queda training camp.
4) Criminal abuse. The obvious answer is fraud - not looking for valuables. Just as con artists use credit information to find wealthy, recently widowed women to scam, so too purchasing info, even more easily accessible, is a data leak that can be exploited. If nothing else, just using a (hypothetical) briefcase scanner to track people who walk out of a pharmacy with home aids tests; married men are likely to be good blackmail targets.
So - crackers - (not hackers of course) you now have access to ID and shopping habits - what can you do to someone?
Will the tags be left "on" - Bennetton planned to, but changed their mind because of public outrage. As
The whole question is moot. The DMCA is unconstitutional because it is contrary to the clear intent of the framers in drafting a clause to grant a temporary and embarrassing monopoly to inventors to further the progress of science and the useful arts. Bill Lockyer's comments indicate his ignorance of constitutional law, and the substitution thereof by media industry tripe: DeCSS cannot be "burglary tool" because there cannot be a "theft" of an idea because an idea cannot be owned, not in these United States.
DeCSS my be illegal, but if such proscription is found to be necessary to promote the progress of science and the useful art, no matter how absurd such a conclusion obviously is, it would be illegal as a guerrilla anti-trust tool, not as a tool of theft.
Contitutional law is guided by the writings of the framers of the contitution, which illuminate their intent in drafting. Thomas Jefferson was our third president, our first Patent Examiner, and the author of the Declaration of American Independence.
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
13 Aug. 1813 Writings 13:333--35
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new an
I disagree: the sole purpose of copyright is to maximize the availability of invention and the useful arts to the people of the United States.
It is a granted temporary monopoly on the commercial reproduction of inventions and useful arts. A gift from We The People to those that create, that they may find incentive to create more and thereby gift us with the further fruits of their labors.
Creators have no intrinsic right to profit from their invention. Ideas cannot be owned, they are, like fire, expansible over all space, that he that lights a taper from mine receives light without darkening me. etc.
Therefore, so long as Dr. Dre did not by his actions cause a net loss in the creative work available to the world, for example by expropriating the income of the sample's source to the point that the original artist was reduced to a regular job, his efforts were entirely in keeping with the constitutional mandate for copyright and he should be applauded, not sued.
Arent' they now legally a terrorist orgainization?
on
RIAA Plans Cyberwar Effort
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
According to Section 2332b of title 18, United States Code as amended by SEC. 808 of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001, it shall be considered an act of terrorism to violate, as the RIAA proposes, title 18, part 1, chapter 47, section 1030, (a) (5) (A) (iii), and thereby causes or intends to cause at least $5,000 in damages (title 18, part 1, chapter 47, section 1030, (5) (c) (i), if such an act involves any transaction across our national boarders (title 18, part 1, chapter 113B, section 2332 b (g) (1).
That is, if the RIAA accidently or intentionally causes damage or inconvenience costing $5,000 or more, or even if their attempt is thwarted but had it succeeded it would have caused $5,000 loss, they have committed the Federal offense of fraud; and if their actions cross our national border, they are international terrorists.
It may be worth VPN-ing your connections through a Canadian ISP.
As terrorists, the RIAA is liable to life in prison, secret detention, trial by secret tribunal, and secret execution. All of the labels supporting the RIAA are guilty of providing material support for a terrorist organization.(Title 18, Part 1, Chater 113B, Section 2339A)
The law abridged to pertinence reads: Whoever... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage... ("damage" means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information)... without authorization, to a protected computer;...(the term "protected computer" means a computer... which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication [do you use ebay? email people in other countries?])... intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or... intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage; and...[by so doing] caused (or, in the case of an attempted offense, would, if completed, have caused)... loss... (the term "loss" means any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring the data, program, system, or information to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption of service)... to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period... aggregating at least $5,000 in value;... [shall be punished by] a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than ten years, or both... [or] a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both [for a second offense].
I practice what I preach here - give money to EFF. Also send money to anyone in congress who has a clue. So far it's Rick Boucher. That's what can be done to help.
I actually once drove through his district. He's very popular there judging by the yard signs, but from appearances it is nothing short of amazing that congress's most technologically enlightened representative comes such a rural region.
You can only give a few hundred dollars a year by law, so everyone needs to contribute, not just a few people. There just aren't that many people who deserve funding, so it's not in total very expensive. EPIC and EFF deserve operating money as well, which in effect serves to pay for lobbyists and to educate future contributors.
Giving money to EPIC and EFF is, as far as I've been able to discern, the best way to get the message out. I write to my papers and my own representatives, but I'm certain I've only managed to educate the circular file.
Sending money to Boucher (and anyone else who gets it) serves two purposes:
First it helps him stay in office. It's not right, it's not democracy, but it's the way things work in this country: the best funded candidate wins, and no candidate has a chance without substantial funds.
Second it sends a message to his co-workers. He's making money by fighting the DMCA and the recording industry and getting reelected without their cash, and so they can do the same. A break in cash flow is suicide for an "elected" representative, they simply won't release the corporate teat unless they're absolutely certain there's another one waiting. WE have to provide it.
The reality of politics is that your representatives are the legislative employees of they that fund their reelection. Their job, what they get paid to do, is pass legislation that's beneficial to the people who fund their election campaigns. They do not have time to understand what they're passing, even the basic text, let alone the ramifications; they go from fund raiser to fund raiser to vote to fund raiser.
If you take the time to write them, some lowly 3 month summer intern in the office might read the first paragraph of your letter to figure out if you're pro or con some swing position the representative is waffling on because they've got money coming in from both sides (cash value being equal, they'll take the more popular side). If you're lucky they won't invert your preference by accident (it's happened to me).
You can vote, but your choices are limited to tweedledee and tweedledum, who can't even get on the ballot without selling out first. You can "vote the bastards out" but there's only different bastards to vote in.
Or you can participate in American Style Democracy and vote with your dollars; the only ballot that's actually counted is green.
For the idealistic out there, it's not entirely a loss of innocence. If everyone paid $100 a year to their representatives, their campaigns would be, in effect, entirely publicly funded, and they'd be beholding only to their constituents, and we'd all be directly voting for the things we care about.
Ultimately we could just count the coffers of the candidates and give the job to the richest, then use the campaign money that would otherwise have gone to the media to pay for a free circus with nascar racing and ultimate fighting and stuff.
Well, it's not exactly - our priorities according to international law and presumptive custom, including Bushian rhetoric, were to strive for a peaceful resolution.
Theoretically, if we Saddam were to choose to leave, we would achieve our goals and end the war - so we're told...
Theoretically, if our efforts to kill Saddam were successful the war would be over (and Bush would be on his way to jail for violating executive order 11905)...
Theoretically. But somehow the corporate gold rush to make a buck in post annihilation Iraq suggest that there was never any real possibility for peace, no matter what Iraq did.
"Oil is too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs." - Henry Kissinger
Global warming as a consequence of climate forcing due to re-reflected radiative heat is not open to question in serious scientific circles. Like the 10 pro-war protesters standing across from 200,000 anti-war protesters who get equal time in the media, so too does Lomborg get substantial coverage as somehow equivalent to the overwhelming majority of climatologists who's research contradicts the censured economist's shallow efforts.
Yet fooling the press and the anti-scientific does not fact make. Those who dispute global warming are like Flat Earth types and creationists, rallying around fallacy and refusing to consider facts they find inconvenient. It's all Cargo Cult Science.
Some/. readers are probably adept enough at math to review the raw data and decide for themselves: solar irradiance data has been tracked and known for many years and is built into climate models that show, unequivocally, the consequences of human induced climate change. Even Bush finally admitted it.
Will the earth survive such changes? Of course it will. Will the human race survive? Probably. Will the long term cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels exceed the short term cost of switching to low carbon-load alternatives? Almost certainly.
But when evaluating the arguments of anti-environmentalists, which seem so utterly out of sync with even basic science, one must remember that, like their spiritual mentor James Watt, those that believe that Armageddon is around the corner will do nothing to protect the rights of future generations.
Re:What's blacker than black... Hubble coating is
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 1
DS Black (Basically "Martin Black" as in Martin Marietta; that is the Hubble Space Telescope) is 35 times blacker than this so-called "blackest black." Forgive the journalist, it's an esoteric subject, but even the more afforadable Epner Technologies EP black is about 20x blacker.
I've used EP black for a project, and it is, indeed, much blacker than Krylon Ultra-Flat black, which is itself not too shabby as black coatings go.
Pixel pitch and dots per inch are different measures, camera pixels are used like display pixels; that is 100dpi monitor looks great, and a camera that can fill that 100dpi monitor 1:1 will also look great, both on screen and in a continuous tone print.
100 dpi binary printers would look pretty horrible. Most inkjet printers and most laser printers are binary, some are continuous tone to various degrees. The easy way to think about it is that each pixel on screen (typically) shows 8 bits of information, whereas each "dot" from a binary printer shows 1 bit (or 24bits per pixel vs. 3 bits per dot since each dot can be C/M/Y (black doesn't really add in this analysis, it's used to replace equal values of CMY which look grey, but should theoretically be black). A 400 dpi continuous tone laser printer makes vastly better looking prints than a 2400 dpi binary color laser printer.
Screen printing combines groups of dots into patterns called rosettes (because of the way they look, except random screening which looks smooth) with various complicated mathematical functions starting with what's known as a screen frequency. The screen frequency is far less than the resolution of the printer: typically a 2400dpi linotype machine can produce a 150lpi screen (but milage varies). Roughly you have a 150 pixel per inch printed color image (that's about what National Geographic uses, for example). One can trade off screen frequency (spatial resolution) for the screen detail (color resolution) in a fashion analogous to having to set a lower bit depth to get a larger frame buffer in a memory limited display card.
So if you want a good continuous tone print, 150 pixels per inch is a good number, meaning roughly 1500x1200 pixels for that 8x10... but wait! It ain't so simple.
The math to construct the screen craps out if the screen frequency is the same as the pixel density, it needs to be far more. The conventional wisdom is to use a pixel pitch between 1.33 and 1.5x higher than the screen frequency, or 3k X 2.4k for the 8x10 print to come out nice and sharp...
BUT that's not all - that's right there's more! Digital cameras (and consumer camcorders) have one detector pixel per output pixel (at best). But each detector pixel is EITHER R, G, or B (maybe a Y thrown in on some). That means that even the best digital camera (except the Foveon) is interpolating data at the very least in the color space, and depending on the image this can be painfully obvious. To eliminate the artifacts thus introduced, one must frequently downsample the image. If the RGB (or RGBY) pattern is approximately 2x2 (it's not usually, but close enough) this requires a 2x downsample to clean up the image.
So that means if you want a print that's (as far as spatial resolution goes) equivalent to ASA 64 Ektachrome shot in a really good camera and printed out at 8x10, you'd need roughly 6k x 5k starting pixels (the ektachrome has about 8k equivalent pixels, though that's debatable: it's definitely more than 4k and almost certainly less than 16k equivalent, the MTF of film decays gracefully without aliasing).
It's still not quite that simple because of the response curve of film vs. the response curve of solid state detectors. Silicon responds almost linearly from the first photo-electron until the detector well is filled to saturation - quite unlike the human eye. Whereas chemical film is more stoichiometric, and responds gradually to increasing light, with increasing response around the optimal reaction rate, and then slowly decreasing to a soft saturation. The result is that details are captured in the shadows, the properly exposed section has good contrast, and there are details captured in the highlights. With digital photography the shadows are filled with electron noise and the highlights are blown out.
So not only do you really want about a 6k+ camera to get good prints, you want it to capture at least 30 bits per pixel. The Kodak captures 36 bits per pixel, 4.6k pixels across, which (remember there's a trade off between color fidelity and spatial fidelity) means that it should print a very nice 8x10, to all but the most arbitrarily anal, as good as any 35mm film.
This subject relates nice to the Atkins diet craze. Not to reopen old wounds, but despite the absurd implication that obesity paralleled the rise in "healthy" eating (avoiding fat), doesn't it seem obvious -- and shouldn't both Atkins fans and those who's diets are based on actual research happily agree -- that increasing the average dose of coke from 10oz bottles to 32oz big gulps (an increase of more than 200 calories) would be expected to cause a dramatic rise in the rate obesity?
Gosh, per capita consumption of soda has doubled since 1974. Not at all surprisingly the obesity rate in the US has risen more or less in synchrony.
On the other hand - the post office is common carriage and they carry, without peeking, porn, political screeds of all sorts, whatever goes into an envelope. The common carriage protection would be well served extended to electronic carriers rather than the reverse. Perhaps it wouldn't have been a disaster to have the post office carry mail and set the standard for content agnosticism.
Not that I don't appreciate choice, but once AOL/Time/worldcom etc is owned by one company, how do I have any more choice? In fact worldcom is my region's only high speed access provider. Is it better that a corporation accountable only to profits and greed handle my data, or a goverment accountable to politics and (in theory, anyway) votes be?
The public mail system works well, has for hundreds of years. They might have reasonably played in the electronic space as well. Though as left leaning as this sounds, the law blocking competition to the post office seems ill-concieved to me.
A fun experiment is to put a polished, hardened steel rod through the spindle hole, then hit it with a jet of compressed air. If you get the bearing effect just right the CD will spin up to a 10-20krpm and will occasionally disintegrate on the spindle. Mostly though if you let it slip off the spindle it'll hit the ground, stand due to gyroscope effect while the edge melts against the ground enough to get traction, then take off across the room and explode on impact with the opposite wall.
You can also make an air bearing with an orange by cupping your hand just right and blowing compressed air between your hand and the orange. Oranges explode good.
Slashdot Mirror
I did see your reply, thanks for taking the effort. I've only read digests of David Brin's writing. I don't agree entirely with his thesis, though the caveat of not having read it in it's entirety mods down my response.
That said, my response to the digest is this: Hoover was a cross dresser, but it didn't stop him from using whatever personal information he could find to persecute those people he thought were his enemies.
Further, Clinton was persecuted for his sexual conduct, but it didn't slow that persecution much that his chief inquisitors fell one by one as hypocrites as their personal lives were exposed.
Hypocrisy and bigotry are very familiar bedfellows, unfortunately (or fortunately for those of us with a love of the ironic). It just seems you can't have a crusading moralist who isn't a pervert. But even when exposed they just weep and wail and get back to the inquisition.
But most importantly, those in control of the system will see to it that it is not turned on themselves, just as management is not drug tested while line employees are.
That's my guess. It seems like there are two options:
1) Fight for privacy tooth and nail, fight every invasion as if it means that you will find yourself prosecuted for every bizarre rule on the books in every state you travel through as soon as they can detect that you broke them.
2) Work as hard as possible to make sure that open society has access to as much aggregated information on anyone who is watching society as possible, that every time Bennet bets a quarter, everyone knows, in the hope of forestalling the worst outcome of option 1 by exposing hypocrisy, or, if it comes to it, blackmail.
3) Both.
Obviously 3.
More applications:
Prospective employers like to do background checks, current employers often cut employees, stores can collect information that is not personally identifying individually, but aggregators can tie identifications together to high probability hits.
For example:
You go to the gap and buy new clothes, pay for them with a credit card. You could be buying them as a gift, or not, the purchaser info and RFIDs are linked and sold to direct marketers and credit aggregators like Equifax.
Equifax (we'll make them the bad guys just for point of argument) binds the sale and the ID in your record.
A few days later someone walks into Wallgreens wearing the clothes and buys a pregnancy test. The person pays cash, say, but the purchase ID enters a data cloud with the clothing ID's, and the batch lot are reported - no personally identifying information is, just a temporally connected cloud of RFID points.
Equifax does a fuzzy search and ties the cloud of clothing points to your SSN, and flags the pregnancy test.
An prospective employer calls for a background check and decides you're a high risk, and rescinds their offer. Too bad you already quit your last job.
Maybe the pregnancy test is for a friend, maybe the clothes were a gift, who cares? You're a risk. Sorry.
Say you buy a 1.5L of JD at the local supermarket. Two of them in a month.
Say you go out to see a band on a Thursday and show up late for work on Friday, sniffling.
Say your company is having a strategic workforce realignment and looking for potentially career limited individuals to pare from the workforce.
Say the alcohol wasn't for you, or the late night out was a one time thing, or the clothes that went past the RFID reader at the bar were on your roommate. Does it matter? Should it matter any way? America is a meritocracy - right? We're all judged on our abilities, not our religion/morals... Can a company dumping 3000 employees out of 30,000 in a week bother with each employees personal story?
I see, Mr. Johnson, that you wear that overcoat on the job and off. I note that you were carrying a Workers Daily on your way home in that coat. Mr. Johnson, this is a conservative company and we have no place for troublemakers like you. These men will escort you out of the building....
In every historical case where records were kept of information that revealed individual's private lives and proclivities, that information has been abused, from the Stasi, to the Nazis, to Hoover.
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
1400x900????? WTF? I have a 15" laptop with a much more useful screen: 210,000 useful little pixels better. And it cost less.
I understand that steve jobs has vision issues and likes his pixels big, but the NEC guys can't all be like that - or at least have accepted vision correction.
Dell has the right idea: 1920x1200 pixels in a 15.1" display. Now that's useful. Pixels.... mmmm pixels. All I want is pixels. More pixels.
By far the most stunning image reproduction I've ever seen, in any format (including large format transparencies) is the 9 megapixel IBM glass (like this)
mmmmm.... more pixels.
It'd be OK for my laptop, but I wouldn't want it in my home.
Well, that's a small minus.
I wrote a long tract about the economics of the whole thing, zero cost of sale to speakeasy, higher margin product and all but that's really the gist of it and the rest was boring.
Then I read this - and thought I'd answer. My opinion is that if they want to offset the cost of billing by taking 50%, that's cool, but they should let people co-op; after all sharing and working together as a team are those old fashioned American Virtues we learned about in kindergarten (but which have been recently superceeded by the RIAA).
Even so: I have speakeasy. I, too, was very impressed with their competency. And I switched from Worldcom DSL even though my bills went up a bit and I had to buy a couple of hundred $ in new gear. And I'm glad I did. Flawless service except one glitch and instant response then.
They deserve a lot of credit. And all the good accounts (with fixed IP's) are commecial anyway, and this is still a lot cooler than ISP's that will bust you for sharing of any sort.
It's really wonderful to know that the system mostly works.
The problem is it doesn't always work that way. Don't forget Cointelpro, and more recently the Ramparts case in LA and the Riders case in Oakland. As if to disprove that wide-spread, systematic abuse was part of the past, the DOJ brought us their post 9/11 roundup policy.
Getting a warrant is trivial. It is not an impediment to law enforcement and represents only the most inconsequential of protections (no wiretap request was turned down last year). What it does provide is a paper trail a tiny bit of oversight, and that means some recourse for the Abner Louima's of the world, and possibly a moment of reflection for the cops to question their own actions, even if the judge really isn't likely to.
It's right to help law enforcement in their legitimate business, but it's not up to a private company to determine legitimacy, it's up to the courts. That everyone has the right (I think still) to refuse to cooperate without a warrant is our only fig leaf; dropping it voluntarily just encourages abuse. We all owe it to our police forces to make it harder for the bad apples to ruin things for the good cops.
Hopefully some bad cop somewhere will misuse this policy of eBay's and the injured party will file a massive lawsuit against eBay for aiding and abetting the crime and collect a meaningful punitive reward. Probably not, but we can hope. In the mean time, eBay makes it easy for anyone who wants a few credit card numbers to pay their bills.
Actually, it matters a lot.
The RIAA has begun a program of legal action to enforce their copyrights against individuals. They have the legal right to do because of new laws predicated on the assertion that copyright law protects the intellectual property of the inventor.
This is a new formulation that was worked out against the widespread adoption of photocopiers, which publishers incorrectly saw as a threat to their livelihood (and played out over and over again as publishers reacted to each new individually enabling technology from audio tape to DAT to VCRs to the internet and PVRs).
What publishers anticipated was their own irrelevance.
Under the original formulation and purpose of copyright law, "temporary monopolies" are granted to "further the progress of science and the useful arts." An idea is not property and it cannot be owned:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself...Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." - Thomas Jefferson
More than any proceeding technology, the internet obviates the role publishers play in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. And the RIAA and MPAA know they are dying interests, struggling viciously to maintain power, and desperately trying to restructure the argument to protect their lucrative but now irrelevant middleman roles.
The term "intellectual property" is but part of the battle. Other critical elements include the term "theft:" it is not stealing to copy a copyrighted work (or manufacture a patented product), it is technically a copyright or patent violation. But how much more colorful and instructive it is to, in parallel construction, adopt the term "Guerilla Anti-Trust." Similarly those Anti-Trust Guerrillas are not themselves "Pirating" Granted Temporary Monopolies but waging a guerilla war against the Pirates of the Public Domain.
The vast, vast majority of the population has an intuitive understanding that copying a song does not take anything from anyone and is therefore not theft, "as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." They are correct, but it would be ultimately highly unprofitable to the publishing industry were that understanding to remain intuitive. The publishing industry (music, movie, books) face an expensive restructuring as their massive physical plant investment (the printing presses, distribution systems, stores and theaters) is inexorably devalued by emerging information technologies.
They are making a bold attempt to replace by law the value that technology has taken away. It is as if buggy whip manufacturers had passed a law that all cars must have one, or more so as if a manufacturer of patent air got a law passed making it illegal to breathe the free stuff. The first step was easy -- buying new laws, and in our democracy that's relatively straight-forward. They simply pay off the right congress people and hand over verbatim drafts of the laws they want (DMCA, 1976 copyright extension act, NET, etc.) Phase two is the one critically addressed by this question: how to convince the public that everything they've always known to be true about ideas is false. The way to do that is semantics, to reformulate the language of the discussion so the underlying assumptions in the words themselves match their goals. So patents and copyrights become "Intellectual Property" and copying becomes "theft" and "Piracy." Everyone knows it's wrong to "steal property" and so, if a song is property, and copying it is stealing it, copying a song is wrong; it's theft "just like walking into a record store and stealing a CD."
Except it's still obviously not like that at all.
So by repetition, by changing the language, by force they
Replying to a reply, perhaps bad form, but I was just thinking about this today as I was writing up a corporate eval for a company considering a takeover. I carefully avoided the use of "IP" and edited it out of replies. GGTM is a bit tough on the tongue.
Temporary Monopolies (TM) is already taken. Granted Monopolies (GM), likewise. GTM isn't bad...
I think this is a worthwhile effort, a small point but language guides perception. It was a major victory for GTM/GGTM holders to redefine the discussion.
Actually sharing is now (DMCA, NET) a criminal activity, more harshly punished than murder in some states, and more harshly than first degree assault (without a deadly weapon) in almost all.
Makes you think. We all (most) learned in kindergarten that sharing was the right thing to do. Most people still consider "getting together as a community" a virtue and charging our friends for a beer a vice. Yet finally a technology arrives that lets the whole world share and we decide that doing so is more horrible, more anti-social than beating someone half to death.
If NET and DMCA don't really reflect societies values, they need to be changed. They sure don't reflect the intent of the founding fathers who thought copyright an "embarrassing monopoly" granted by the people for the sole purpose of promoting science and the useful arts. But how is that relevant? Society's values are what Rupert Murdoch says they are, you can tell because you get the exact same message from the radio, the TV, the newspapers, the magazines... everywhere you look. It must be true.
DMCA, NET, etc. were drafted for the sole purpose of propping up the profits of huge, campaign fund contributing corporations by stealing from the public domain and then enforcing that theft with armed marshals. The RIAA and MPAA are the pirates, pirates of the public domain. And they survive legal challenge despite being antithetic to the purpose and spirit and letter of the constitution by giving money to politicians who support judicial activism and constitutional revisionism. But if habeas corpus can be suspended indefinitely and American citizens are now subject to secret arrest, detention, in-absentia secret trial, and secret execution, there's absolutely zero chance of reclaiming the constitutional intent of copyright.
The RIAA can and will do something about offshore networks. They paid good money to buy their congressmen and senators and they expect results or they'll fire the ones they bought and put new ones in who have the balls to do the job. Note that the FBI will now be investigating peer to peer networks since state by state prosecution wasn't working to the RIAA's satisfaction. If P2P moves offshore in any meaningful way, they'll buy the CIA.
Your rights are irrelevant. The constitution is irrelevant. The purpose of copyright is irrelevant. All that matters is how much money the RIAA and MPAA can make. They are seeking to find the right balance between jailed potential customers and free customers to ensure maximum profitability. If that means putting 85% of the population in jail to ensure that the remaining 15% don't use P2P, they'll do it. And unless you've got the cash to outbid them for congressional attention, there's not much you can do, except, I suppose, boycott. But if you even try they might just file charges under GATT.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, because it is a merger of State and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
I read with some dismay Senator Hatch's comments on copyright. Please remind him at the next opportunity of the text of the 8th clause of the constitution:
"The Congress shall have the power.... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
There is a critical point here, carefully obfuscated by the RIAA and it's minions - there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property."
There is a concept in law called a "Natural Right," and it is generally accepted that people have a natural right to propriety. But as Jefferson was explicitly clear on, there is no natural right to "own" an idea:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea..."
Copyright does not protect property, it is not about protecting property; it is about promoting science and the useful arts. Copyright is not a property right; it is a temporary monopoly. Violating copyright is not theft, it is not piracy; it is guerilla anti-trust.
This distinction is quite clear in the constitutional grant of exclusive right, that such grant would not be obviously self-justified as it would be for property, but that such right is justified only in as much as it fulfills the noble social good of "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts."
Larry Lessig's recent supreme court challenge to the CTEA hinged on the second phrase's "limited time." He argued unsuccessfully that the extensions provided by CTEA violated the phrase by establishing essentially perpetual copyright. The court asked if 120 years was not a finite time, and turned the claim down.
It would seem that a more powerful case would be made by asking if the CTEA, DMCA, NET, etc. fulfill the constitutionally required purpose: "to promote science and the useful arts."
Today fear of over-broad laws wielded by greedy institutions has a broad chilling effect on innovation: science and the useful arts. If found thus by the court, such laws would be unconstitutional.
Thomas Jefferson was quite clear on his views of copyright and these views are enshrined in the 8th clause. It is a grant of an "embarrassing monopoly" and not a right; explicitly the fugitive fermentations of a mind cannot be owned.
Senator Hatch needs to hear and understand his words:
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessen
I've done this - it's fun and impresses the girls, but harder in an office/lab than in a well stocked kitchen.
Once my girlfriend was visiting me at work and I was stuck late while I was finishing some experiments. The kitchenette was stocked with only the usual bad coffee gear--ultra-pasteurized cream cups and sugar packets and bad coffee--and she was restless and hungry. I asked if she wanted some ice cream and she thought I was teasing.
So I took one of the vacuum insulated coffee carafes and filled it dramatically with LN2 from roll-around dewar in the lab (any time you crack the liquid feed on one of those things its pretty dramatic with the hissing and the steam and the gurgling and the spattering, dancing beads of LN2). As an aside, vacuum insulated coffee carafes filled with LN2 will hold it for more than a day.
I carried it boiling and fogging back to the kitchenette as she followed at a more than safe distance. I found a plastic bowl in the sink and filled it with the contents of about 100 of those little ultra-pasteurized coffee creamers and about 100 packets of sugar, brewed up a fresh pot of coffee and skimmed the first few seconds worth off - when it actually has some flavor and added it to the bowl. She looked mighty dubious, but the glass liner had cooled enough that the carafe didn't seem dangerous any more so she moved in to watch.
Then while I stirred the mixture with a plastic spoon (and, don't forget - while wearing the bright blue cryogenic safety gloves and full face shields) she poured in the LN2 which filled the bowl with dense fog that poured out, over the counter, and down around our ankles, spreading out across the floor, looking for all the world like a bad sci-fi movie.
In about 30 seconds we had a bowl of half decent coffee ice cream to share.
And, for just a little while, she thought being a geek was really cool...
This is absolutely the point - and the defense.
"The Congress shall have the power.... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
There is a critical point here, carefully obfuscated by the RIAA and it's minions - there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property."
There is a concept in law called a "Natural Right," and it is generally accepted that people have a natural right to propriety. But as Jefferson was explicitly clear on, there is no natural right to "own" an idea:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea..."
Copyright does not protect property, it is not about protecting property; it is about promoting science and the useful arts. Copyright is not a property right; it is a temporary monopoly. Violating copyright is not theft or piracy; it is guerilla anti-trust.
This distinction is quite clear in the constitutional grant of exclusive right, that such grant would not be obviously self-justified as it would be for property, but that such right is justified only in as much as it fulfills the noble social good of "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts."
Larry Lessig's recent supreme court challenge to the CTEA hinged on the second phrase's "limited time." He argued unsuccessfully that the extensions provided by CTEA violated the phrase by establishing essentially perpetual copyright. The court asked if 120 years was not a finite time, and turned the claim down.
It would seem that a more powerful case would be made by asking if the CTEA, DMCA, NET, etc. fulfill the purpose: "to promote science and the useful arts."
Chia Monkey makes a point I think universal--that fear of over-broad laws wielded by greedy institutions has a broad chilling effect on innovation: science and the useful arts. If found thus by the court, such laws would be unconstitutional.
The RIAA not only holds a monopoly with 90% market share, but wields a monopoly granted by We The People. An "embarrassing monopoly" at that, according to Thomas Jefferson. The exclusive right is not a property right, it is a temporary grant which may be "may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody."
Write your congress-people and explain how your efforts at innovation have been stifled by inappropriate extension of copyright in a manner entirely contrary to the constitutional mandate. We must take control of the language: the RIAA is a pirate organization, thieving and stealing from the public domain. File traders are freedom fighters and patriots, exploring new technology and pushing forward the progress of science and the useful arts, fulfilling the goals of the constitution bravely despite the threat of extorting pirate organizations like the RIAA and MPAA.
Of course it'd be a bit hard to defend lionizing most warez traders, but no more difficult than defending a billion dollar claim against a college kid.
The antenna is built into the device, about the size of a large grain of salt It's a small copper coil either over passivation or on the back side of a thinned device. The RFIDs can be molded into plastic parts - it doesn't matter where they end up.
Cost is a huge issue as is testing. The price has to be about $0.01. Alien Technologies isn't close yet. Think about how many you need to fab to pay off your EUV lithography equipment. Think about throwing away 80% of your wafer as sawdust...
Wal*Mart may be optimistic.
But they will come unless stopped, if not on silicon then on glass or plastic.
So here are the real concerns I can think of:
1) I don't want to be tracked everywhere I go. Some people don't care, some people do. Personally I think I should have a constitutional right to privacy. I don't think I should have to sacrifice my privacy so walmart can further crater the economies of the unlucky communities the land in by laying off more of their underpaid workers. Those Walton girls have enough money.
People respond to RFID tags viscerally - it's a barcode they can't shake - or can't be sure they've shaken. It's reminiscent of Nazi serial number tattoos. It's reminiscent of revelations and the number of the beast. It's reminiscent of a lot of things and none of the warm or fuzzy. If people are uncomfortable with it, why should they have to be tagged? Isn't "I don't want to be" enough?
(no arguments of "well then don't shop there." Check Wal*Mart's market control. When was the last time you saw an independent pharmacy?)
2) Corporate misuse. What if you go buy a pregnancy test or condoms? Should your boss know? I know people who have serious illnesses they keep under control. They're bright and productive, but have a shorter expected work life than healthy people. Should they be denied jobs based on future availability? How about insurance? These are real privacy concerns and buying habits, especially health care items, can reveal more than current law would otherwise allow to be released without permission. Information that has value to people other than you, that may have negative value to you.
3) Government abuse. Being critical of the bush administration has landed a lot of entirely peaceful and patriotic people fighting for the good of their country on no-fly lists. That is, today, right now, the government is abusing information to commit what are probably unconstitutional acts with impunity. The government has a very bad history of misusing information to prosecute a political agenda in violation of law. There seems to be little urgency in the government having more information about citizens and much risk. It is naive to think the government will not gain access to shopping databases and use ID information to track people. They already collect library and book purchase information to find out what many people are reading, perhaps you. Does that make you feel safe? Or insecure? There are likely people on both sides, but shouldn't such access follow democratic checks and balances before it becomes an inescapable and inseparable part of our economic fabric?
Did you really just buy your second issue of The Nation? Terrorist symp - thinking critical thoughts of the government is the first step toward an Al Queda training camp.
4) Criminal abuse. The obvious answer is fraud - not looking for valuables. Just as con artists use credit information to find wealthy, recently widowed women to scam, so too purchasing info, even more easily accessible, is a data leak that can be exploited. If nothing else, just using a (hypothetical) briefcase scanner to track people who walk out of a pharmacy with home aids tests; married men are likely to be good blackmail targets.
So - crackers - (not hackers of course) you now have access to ID and shopping habits - what can you do to someone?
Will the tags be left "on" - Bennetton planned to, but changed their mind because of public outrage. As
The whole question is moot. The DMCA is unconstitutional because it is contrary to the clear intent of the framers in drafting a clause to grant a temporary and embarrassing monopoly to inventors to further the progress of science and the useful arts. Bill Lockyer's comments indicate his ignorance of constitutional law, and the substitution thereof by media industry tripe: DeCSS cannot be "burglary tool" because there cannot be a "theft" of an idea because an idea cannot be owned, not in these United States.
DeCSS my be illegal, but if such proscription is found to be necessary to promote the progress of science and the useful art, no matter how absurd such a conclusion obviously is, it would be illegal as a guerrilla anti-trust tool, not as a tool of theft.
Contitutional law is guided by the writings of the framers of the contitution, which illuminate their intent in drafting. Thomas Jefferson was our third president, our first Patent Examiner, and the author of the Declaration of American Independence.
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
13 Aug. 1813 Writings 13:333--35
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new an
I disagree: the sole purpose of copyright is to maximize the availability of invention and the useful arts to the people of the United States.
It is a granted temporary monopoly on the commercial reproduction of inventions and useful arts. A gift from We The People to those that create, that they may find incentive to create more and thereby gift us with the further fruits of their labors.
Creators have no intrinsic right to profit from their invention. Ideas cannot be owned, they are, like fire, expansible over all space, that he that lights a taper from mine receives light without darkening me. etc.
Therefore, so long as Dr. Dre did not by his actions cause a net loss in the creative work available to the world, for example by expropriating the income of the sample's source to the point that the original artist was reduced to a regular job, his efforts were entirely in keeping with the constitutional mandate for copyright and he should be applauded, not sued.
According to Section 2332b of title 18, United States Code as amended by SEC. 808 of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001, it shall be considered an act of terrorism to violate, as the RIAA proposes, title 18, part 1, chapter 47, section 1030, (a) (5) (A) (iii), and thereby causes or intends to cause at least $5,000 in damages (title 18, part 1, chapter 47, section 1030, (5) (c) (i), if such an act involves any transaction across our national boarders (title 18, part 1, chapter 113B, section 2332 b (g) (1).
And their DOS attack strategy may make them liable under Title 18, part 1, chapter 65, section 1362 as well.
That is, if the RIAA accidently or intentionally causes damage or inconvenience costing $5,000 or more, or even if their attempt is thwarted but had it succeeded it would have caused $5,000 loss, they have committed the Federal offense of fraud; and if their actions cross our national border, they are international terrorists.
It may be worth VPN-ing your connections through a Canadian ISP.
As terrorists, the RIAA is liable to life in prison, secret detention, trial by secret tribunal, and secret execution. All of the labels supporting the RIAA are guilty of providing material support for a terrorist organization.(Title 18, Part 1, Chater 113B, Section 2339A)
The law abridged to pertinence reads:
Whoever... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage... ("damage" means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information)... without authorization, to a protected computer;...(the term "protected computer" means a computer... which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication [do you use ebay? email people in other countries?])... intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or... intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage; and...[by so doing] caused (or, in the case of an attempted offense, would, if completed, have caused)... loss... (the term "loss" means any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring the data, program, system, or information to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption of service)... to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period... aggregating at least $5,000 in value;... [shall be punished by] a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than ten years, or both... [or] a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both [for a second offense].
I practice what I preach here - give money to EFF. Also send money to anyone in congress who has a clue. So far it's Rick Boucher. That's what can be done to help.
I actually once drove through his district. He's very popular there judging by the yard signs, but from appearances it is nothing short of amazing that congress's most technologically enlightened representative comes such a rural region.
You can only give a few hundred dollars a year by law, so everyone needs to contribute, not just a few people. There just aren't that many people who deserve funding, so it's not in total very expensive. EPIC and EFF deserve operating money as well, which in effect serves to pay for lobbyists and to educate future contributors.
Giving money to EPIC and EFF is, as far as I've been able to discern, the best way to get the message out. I write to my papers and my own representatives, but I'm certain I've only managed to educate the circular file.
Sending money to Boucher (and anyone else who gets it) serves two purposes:
First it helps him stay in office. It's not right, it's not democracy, but it's the way things work in this country: the best funded candidate wins, and no candidate has a chance without substantial funds.
Second it sends a message to his co-workers. He's making money by fighting the DMCA and the recording industry and getting reelected without their cash, and so they can do the same. A break in cash flow is suicide for an "elected" representative, they simply won't release the corporate teat unless they're absolutely certain there's another one waiting. WE have to provide it.
The reality of politics is that your representatives are the legislative employees of they that fund their reelection. Their job, what they get paid to do, is pass legislation that's beneficial to the people who fund their election campaigns. They do not have time to understand what they're passing, even the basic text, let alone the ramifications; they go from fund raiser to fund raiser to vote to fund raiser.
If you take the time to write them, some lowly 3 month summer intern in the office might read the first paragraph of your letter to figure out if you're pro or con some swing position the representative is waffling on because they've got money coming in from both sides (cash value being equal, they'll take the more popular side). If you're lucky they won't invert your preference by accident (it's happened to me).
You can vote, but your choices are limited to tweedledee and tweedledum, who can't even get on the ballot without selling out first. You can "vote the bastards out" but there's only different bastards to vote in.
Or you can participate in American Style Democracy and vote with your dollars; the only ballot that's actually counted is green.
For the idealistic out there, it's not entirely a loss of innocence. If everyone paid $100 a year to their representatives, their campaigns would be, in effect, entirely publicly funded, and they'd be beholding only to their constituents, and we'd all be directly voting for the things we care about.
Ultimately we could just count the coffers of the candidates and give the job to the richest, then use the campaign money that would otherwise have gone to the media to pay for a free circus with nascar racing and ultimate fighting and stuff.
Well, it's not exactly - our priorities according to international law and presumptive custom, including Bushian rhetoric, were to strive for a peaceful resolution.
Theoretically, if we Saddam were to choose to leave, we would achieve our goals and end the war - so we're told...
Theoretically, if our efforts to kill Saddam were successful the war would be over (and Bush would be on his way to jail for violating executive order 11905)...
Theoretically. But somehow the corporate gold rush to make a buck in post annihilation Iraq suggest that there was never any real possibility for peace, no matter what Iraq did.
"Oil is too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs." - Henry Kissinger
Yet fooling the press and the anti-scientific does not fact make. Those who dispute global warming are like Flat Earth types and creationists, rallying around fallacy and refusing to consider facts they find inconvenient. It's all Cargo Cult Science.
Some /. readers are probably adept enough at math to review the raw data and decide for themselves: solar irradiance data has been tracked and known for many years and is built into climate models that show, unequivocally, the consequences of human induced climate change. Even Bush finally admitted it.
Will the earth survive such changes? Of course it will. Will the human race survive? Probably. Will the long term cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels exceed the short term cost of switching to low carbon-load alternatives? Almost certainly.
But when evaluating the arguments of anti-environmentalists, which seem so utterly out of sync with even basic science, one must remember that, like their spiritual mentor James Watt, those that believe that Armageddon is around the corner will do nothing to protect the rights of future generations.
DS Black (Basically "Martin Black" as in Martin Marietta; that is the Hubble Space Telescope) is 35 times blacker than this so-called "blackest black." Forgive the journalist, it's an esoteric subject, but even the more afforadable Epner Technologies EP black is about 20x blacker.
- bl ack.html
I've used EP black for a project, and it is, indeed, much blacker than Krylon Ultra-Flat black, which is itself not too shabby as black coatings go.
http://www.aviantechnologies.com/coatings/av-ds
These, like the dendritic coating in the article, are fragile, and not terribly black at all if you touch them.
-David
Slimp3 works really well, exactly the right solution to this problem.
check it out.
Disclaimer - I have friends there, but I wouldn't let it bias my opinion: I use it and it rocks.
Pixel pitch and dots per inch are different measures, camera pixels are used like display pixels; that is 100dpi monitor looks great, and a camera that can fill that 100dpi monitor 1:1 will also look great, both on screen and in a continuous tone print.
100 dpi binary printers would look pretty horrible. Most inkjet printers and most laser printers are binary, some are continuous tone to various degrees. The easy way to think about it is that each pixel on screen (typically) shows 8 bits of information, whereas each "dot" from a binary printer shows 1 bit (or 24bits per pixel vs. 3 bits per dot since each dot can be C/M/Y (black doesn't really add in this analysis, it's used to replace equal values of CMY which look grey, but should theoretically be black). A 400 dpi continuous tone laser printer makes vastly better looking prints than a 2400 dpi binary color laser printer.
Screen printing combines groups of dots into patterns called rosettes (because of the way they look, except random screening which looks smooth) with various complicated mathematical functions starting with what's known as a screen frequency. The screen frequency is far less than the resolution of the printer: typically a 2400dpi linotype machine can produce a 150lpi screen (but milage varies). Roughly you have a 150 pixel per inch printed color image (that's about what National Geographic uses, for example). One can trade off screen frequency (spatial resolution) for the screen detail (color resolution) in a fashion analogous to having to set a lower bit depth to get a larger frame buffer in a memory limited display card.
So if you want a good continuous tone print, 150 pixels per inch is a good number, meaning roughly 1500x1200 pixels for that 8x10... but wait! It ain't so simple.
The math to construct the screen craps out if the screen frequency is the same as the pixel density, it needs to be far more. The conventional wisdom is to use a pixel pitch between 1.33 and 1.5x higher than the screen frequency, or 3k X 2.4k for the 8x10 print to come out nice and sharp...
BUT that's not all - that's right there's more! Digital cameras (and consumer camcorders) have one detector pixel per output pixel (at best). But each detector pixel is EITHER R, G, or B (maybe a Y thrown in on some). That means that even the best digital camera (except the Foveon) is interpolating data at the very least in the color space, and depending on the image this can be painfully obvious. To eliminate the artifacts thus introduced, one must frequently downsample the image. If the RGB (or RGBY) pattern is approximately 2x2 (it's not usually, but close enough) this requires a 2x downsample to clean up the image.
So that means if you want a print that's (as far as spatial resolution goes) equivalent to ASA 64 Ektachrome shot in a really good camera and printed out at 8x10, you'd need roughly 6k x 5k starting pixels (the ektachrome has about 8k equivalent pixels, though that's debatable: it's definitely more than 4k and almost certainly less than 16k equivalent, the MTF of film decays gracefully without aliasing).
It's still not quite that simple because of the response curve of film vs. the response curve of solid state detectors. Silicon responds almost linearly from the first photo-electron until the detector well is filled to saturation - quite unlike the human eye. Whereas chemical film is more stoichiometric, and responds gradually to increasing light, with increasing response around the optimal reaction rate, and then slowly decreasing to a soft saturation. The result is that details are captured in the shadows, the properly exposed section has good contrast, and there are details captured in the highlights. With digital photography the shadows are filled with electron noise and the highlights are blown out.
So not only do you really want about a 6k+ camera to get good prints, you want it to capture at least 30 bits per pixel. The Kodak captures 36 bits per pixel, 4.6k pixels across, which (remember there's a trade off between color fidelity and spatial fidelity) means that it should print a very nice 8x10, to all but the most arbitrarily anal, as good as any 35mm film.
This subject relates nice to the Atkins diet craze. Not to reopen old wounds, but despite the absurd implication that obesity paralleled the rise in "healthy" eating (avoiding fat), doesn't it seem obvious -- and shouldn't both Atkins fans and those who's diets are based on actual research happily agree -- that increasing the average dose of coke from 10oz bottles to 32oz big gulps (an increase of more than 200 calories) would be expected to cause a dramatic rise in the rate obesity?
Gosh, per capita consumption of soda has doubled since 1974. Not at all surprisingly the obesity rate in the US has risen more or less in synchrony.
On the other hand - the post office is common carriage and they carry, without peeking, porn, political screeds of all sorts, whatever goes into an envelope. The common carriage protection would be well served extended to electronic carriers rather than the reverse. Perhaps it wouldn't have been a disaster to have the post office carry mail and set the standard for content agnosticism.
Not that I don't appreciate choice, but once AOL/Time/worldcom etc is owned by one company, how do I have any more choice? In fact worldcom is my region's only high speed access provider. Is it better that a corporation accountable only to profits and greed handle my data, or a goverment accountable to politics and (in theory, anyway) votes be?
The public mail system works well, has for hundreds of years. They might have reasonably played in the electronic space as well. Though as left leaning as this sounds, the law blocking competition to the post office seems ill-concieved to me.
A fun experiment is to put a polished, hardened steel rod through the spindle hole, then hit it with a jet of compressed air. If you get the bearing effect just right the CD will spin up to a 10-20krpm and will occasionally disintegrate on the spindle. Mostly though if you let it slip off the spindle it'll hit the ground, stand due to gyroscope effect while the edge melts against the ground enough to get traction, then take off across the room and explode on impact with the opposite wall.
You can also make an air bearing with an orange by cupping your hand just right and blowing compressed air between your hand and the orange. Oranges explode good.
babelfish it
cool (ha) but I still like the graphics of the fujitsu mobile H.