If you don't publish your diary, nobody gets to have it, copyrighted or not. This discussion is only about officially published stuff. You know, sent to an editorial and made into a book.
I'll admit that the idea has flaws and things like the family the author supported are a better reason.
However, one would gain an advantage in this case. If Tolkien were still around he could veto the production of a movie or make arbitrary demands. If copyright expired on death, his book would go in the public domain and anybody could make a movie. Sure other people could try, but your version would be copyrighted. The problem would go from not being able to do a movie at all to doing one that is profitable despite the competition. It's a challenge, but a much smaller one.
The way I see copyright is that its point is providing incentives for growing the set of public domain works as fast as possible. Thus we grant a temporary monopoly to make people more likely to create, but after that ends everything becomes free and available to anybody.
Not the Star Wars franchise in general, but each movie considered separately, including each re-release.
So for instance, the copyright of the 1977 original would have expired in 1991, but 1997 special edition would expire just about now. Under a 14 year term he'd probably have been motivated to do a special edition sooner, because after 1991 anybody could do one.
He'd also have more motivation for coming up with something new instead of milking the franchise dry, because after 14 years anybody could make stories set in the universe and everybody would be sick of it much faster.
That said, things like Star Wars are oddities. We shouldn't make rules based exclusively on the rare cases.
The original owner of a work may be dead, but the franchise lives on. Shouldn't the franchise holders be protected from losing their investment to copy-cats?
Why should they be? My idea is simply reducing the length. It would be simply the question of planning to make a profit within 14-30 years. And if you can't make a profit in 14 years they'll probably never make it, anyway.
If George Lucas died today, should Star Wars immediately become public domain, even when there's a huge MMO and lots of movie memorabilia with full licensing and lots of money still to be made by the people who paid for the right to do so?
No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.
Copyright should be much shorter, but it should last the same whether the creator lives or dies.
It seems to me that it's easier to figure out a good time limit than a monetary one.
Say, the $5M. Why precisely that number? How do you adapt to the economy? $5M in 10 years might be $1M today. Also some works are expensive. That would make big movies go out of copyright right in the first week.
I wouldn't want to abolish it, but I'd like to make it much shorter.
My idea is that copyright is supposed to serve society's interests. For that it should aim to maximize the incentive to produce works. And that means it can't be too long. It can't be too short either, as there must be time to make some money. Copyright must allow authors to make money from their work, but avoid providing a perpetual money supply.
I think that the very maximum length of copyright should be 30 years. The number is based on the idea of that an author should have an incentive to publish at least a second work, after their copyright expires. So assuming one published a book at 20, copyright would expire at 50, providing some motivation to write another.
There was research that suggested the optimal length would be around 14 years. That sounds good to me.
Copyright is needed, but it's currently far too long.
Tolkien has been dead and buried for 38 years now. His estate is preventing the translation from being published for what reason exactly? Where's the benefit to society from that?
From an evolutionary standpoint.. no, it's not natural to not want to carry your genes on. That's entirely how evolution as we know it works.
Sure it is. It's certainly not productive, but if you were born like that, it's entirely natural. Again, "natural" doesn't say anything about whether it's good for you or the species. There's no mandate from above to reproduce, it's just that things that do tend to persist.
And again, I siad nothing about in Nature, I said from an evolutionary standpoint.. The rest of your comment is nothing but you listening to yourself because it has little or nothing to do with what I said.
Evolution and nature are quite linked though. And that would be because you have a weird idea of how things work.
Actually, the suggestion is more obvious then that and can be derived without attaching some anthropomorphic altruism to it. If it hasn't been bread out of the gene pool, it's because it's either a choice someone makes and not a genetic mutation, or it's because the mutation occurred as a kill switch in the offspring of two somehow incompatible parents. Your reliance on social behaviors is somewhat disqualified as the vast majority of fathers tend to disown their homosexual offspring as it somehow shows a sign of weakness in them to accept them. And it's societal customs, that seems to be changing that somewhat (it's a learned behavior).
Except for that there being nothing to suggest so far it's a learned behavior, and that you seem to assume that the current state of things is how it's always been.
In ancient Greece for instance, it wasn't a bad thing, and Homo Sapiens existed for a long time before creating anything like a modern society. There still are a few lost tribes that don't know where children come from. We have no clue what the attitude was towards homosexuality through the millions of years of human evolution, and it's misleading to assume it must have been precisely the current one.
And if that queen bee, or one breading female bee, turns gay and stops producing offspring, the entire hive is wiped out. Well actually, no because there are other breading females capable of taker her place. In fact, that's pretty much how the hives spread.
It's more complicated than that. Queen bees are special and raised from birth in a special way. A random female bee can't just start breeding. The colony may breed a new queen when there are too many bees around, or the old queen is not performing.
Did you miss the part about this pertaining to evolution? Yes, organisms hit the kill switch all the time and go extinct in nature.
Right. Or simply don't succeed at reproducing
But it's not natural to want to do so when you know it will happen.
So it's not natural not to want to have children?
Again, if it happens in nature, it's natural. It's perfectly possible for one to be born with a preference for one's own gender, lack of interest in sex at all, lack of ability to have sex due to lack or non-function of required organs, and so on. And all those things can happen perfectly naturally, even if it ultimately leads to not having any descendants, or even to the species collectively committing suicide.
Besides, the fact that homosexuality hasn't been bred out of the gene pool suggests there is some advantage to it. One theory is that since people with a preference for their own gender don't have children, they're available to support the rest of the family. So if say, a father passes the "gay gene" to two children, one of who turns out straight and the other gay, the gay one is fairly likely to end up living alone or at least without children. By doing so, he'll have more money and will be able to support his brother in times of need. By helping his brother survive, he also helps perpetuate the gay gene his brother carries.
Evolution is not about individuals, it's about species, or more exactly, genes (since species are an arbitrary human concept). It's entirely compatible with individuals engaging in acts that are suicidal or leading to no reproduction, so long the overall effect is beneficial.
Also it's funny that you have such a rigid conception of how things are supposed to be, when they vary so much. Look at other organisms, like bees. A hive has a grand total of one breeding female, and is populated entirely by sterile females except during the short time males are needed for breeding. But as weird as that is from a human point of view, it's entirely natural and has been working for bees perfectly fine.
Natural == occurs in nature. That's all it is. It doesn't mean it's optimal, good for the individual or the species, or anything else. Homosexuality occurs in nature, therefore it's natural.
How's if Darwin had intended us to fly he would have evolved us wings? Yea.. something still doesn't sound quite right.
Eh? There's no intention in evolution. There's only genes that get passed on.
Best practice for what, though? That sounds like a rule of thumb for opening a business. If you're going to rent office/shop space, purchase equipment, hire employees and so on and don't expect to be making a profit for a year, then that makes sense.
But this is community based software development we're talking about. Everybody already has their equipment, no office space is needed, and nobody should need to be hired (except if they need a web designer or lawyer temporarily I guess).
The cattle prod man is certainly not going to be happy if he finds encryption, proxies and so on. So the goal would be to make it look like a normal phone with nothing unusual or interesting on it.
And even if you can read this residual magnetism, think of what you must do next:
First, a drive head isn't enough. You have to get the platter under an electron microscope or such incredibly specialized device owned by what, 10 labs in the whole world?
Next, you spend months (from what I heard of the speed you get out of those) copying the platter, generating several times more data than the official disk's capacity.
Once you're done with that you can get to decoding. But, there's a laboratory proof of concept, and there's the real thing. On a real drive, you won't get a laboratory setting of showing you can read sector #1 and then figure out what the previous value was. You'll have to find something interesting in millions of sectors.
On hard disks data doesn't get written in neat tidy ways. Files get fragmented all over the platter, and when deleted their sectors may get reused. So you'll have to find your interesting file by piecing it together. You'll have to make sense of the former filesystem metadata that says where it was, then read the now overwritten file. Both of which are probably not neatly overwritten once, but a different amounts of times on each sector, and you'll have to figure out which of those is the good one.
It has support for OpenVPN, SSH and tor out of the box. There was one guy in #maemo I think that said he succeeded at implementing full disk encryption, you might want to come there and ask. And if you install kernel-power you'll be able to be use iptables, which should help with making sure only what you want gets in and out.
Now, will encryption help you? What is going to happen to you if you're arrested and suspected of accessing something you shouldn't? I'm thinking that in such a place, if they find you have a heavily encrypted phone they're just not going to let you go if they can't get data off the device, and refusing to tell the password might not be a great idea.
Perhaps you should look more at plausible deniability. Try to set up the phone in a manner that is as un-suspicious as possible, make sure nothing incriminating gets logged on the device, and do all your suspicious activities on some remote server, with some panic system that can remove anything suspicious like tor or ssh without leaving a trace if you get in trouble.
For testing what gets stored, you could try using rsync. Sync the entire phone, do something like loading a website, sync again and see what changed.
Again, this is a SSD, not a hard disk. The PCB contains both the interface and the data storage parts. If you microwave that, you've destroyed everything that was important. It's no use to unsolder anything, the flash chips themselves are destroyed by microwaving.
The part you would skip on microwaving is the metal casing, which contains no data.
I'm in favor of change, but not arbitrary change for no good reason.
"Brick" as in to make a device completely non-functional is an useful change, as it creates a way of describing an interesting state that might have formerly taken an entire sentence to explain.
"Brick" as in whatever meaning being used in this article (not very clear to me, but which seems to be "make a device less functional") creates confusion as to what is actually going on.
Bricking normally refers to the device itself. Losing AC power doesn't brick your TV, it will still work if power is restored. Neither does shutting down the analog signal, it will still work if a signal is provided. Installing a firmware update that makes it unable to power on or accept the right firmware would do it though.
According to me:
Creating new words and new meanings for words that condense complex states and meanings in one word, creating more precision in language: good
Giving words meanings that make it hard to determine which exact state is meant, reducing precision in language, making a specialized word mean the same thing as general one: bad
Sure it does. The point of language is to communicate. If you start arbitrarily changing the meaning of words people stop understanding what you mean.
"Bricked" is a very precise metaphor. It means the device is as good as an actual brick -- inert and devoid of functionality other than the physical shape of the thing.
Ah yes, the classical "I refuse to accept that Steam has a 'Go Offline' mode" argument. Learn about it before commenting again please.
Sure, but it still requires a connection at some point, no? Still don't like it.
And grow up. Steam works amazingly well, is unobtrusive and would be an amazing boon for Linux.
Nope. I use Linux in part because it lacks crap like this, so no, I'm not going to appreciate its addition.
You aren't going to get high development cost games that are trivial to copy anymore - fast internet and the dishonesty of a huge number of people put an end to that.
Well, what can I say, they'll have to make do without my money then.
Also, BitTorrent is full of Steam games, so I fail to see the point.
Steam isn't perfect, but it's a damned good compromise - I give up a little (accepting their DRM) and in return I get a RAPID download of any game I own onto any computer I choose whenever I want it.
Nope. No compromise on this point. Mandatory Steam == no money for you, dear developer. Certainly not in exchange for "RAPID download", which I have no clue why you're so impressed with, when every game I bought was very much rapidly downloaded without Steam.
Wine is very unreliable and not officially supported. I might give it a try for a free game, but I'm not paying one cent for that end-user experience.
And no, games don't have to be ported to Linux and its unlikely that many ever would be. Not even OS X gets as many ports as people think - most of them are recompiled Win32 apps linked against Cider which is Transgaming's equivalent to winelib for OS X.
That's different in that it constitutes official support, even if done in a half-assed way. If it breaks you'd expect them to fix it.
Realistically that's the only way you're ever going to ever see commercial games appear in any quantity on Linux - digital download platforms + games running over wine WINE or linked via winelib. If not Steam then Impulse or some other digital download infrastructure.
Nope, no go. Native, no Steam, no Impulse, no crap like that, or no sale.
Companies, e.g. Loki have already tried releasing native Linux ports and the venture failed miserably.
Loki appeared in 1998 and went defunct in 2001. That's a decade ago. Linux was barely starting to become viable for gaming and was nowhere as polished as it is now. I heard the company had management problems as well.
Also, Steam didn't exist back then, yet go figure, games sold for Windows and Mac fine without it. Steam is entirely unnecessary.
Steam DRM is usually never noticeable unless you're one of those weirdos without an internet connection. But feel free to be an ass to prove a point that nobody but you will care about though, we shall nod in your honor.
I'm one of those weirdos with a laptop that's not perpetually hooked to an internet connection, because sometimes it's used in the underground, on a plane, or in a foreign country where I have a hard time getting access everywhere.
But feel free to be an ass to prove a point that nobody but you will care about though, we shall nod in your honor.
No loss. I either spend less money, or spend it on rewarding developers that don't insist on releasing their games with crap attached. Either way, a good thing.
Years after Bill Gates started doing charity work and Jobs started locking down all his new platforms, who is it that's still villainized on/. ? You don't see Steve Jobs as a Borg, do you?
To play commercial games on Linux? Steam already works through WINE but the game support is pretty ropey - some games work others won't even start.
Steam isn't a virtual machine. To have games on Linux they need to be ported to it, and for that Steam is entirely unnecessary.
Steam is a distribution platform and DRM. For distribution it's not needed because there are package managers. For the DRM part, I simply refuse to accept it, and won't buy any game that uses it.
I'll happily buy games on Linux, so long they're native and don't have any crap like Steam attached. Humble Bundle being a nice example of that (got both)
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? What's that got to do with anything?
If you don't publish your diary, nobody gets to have it, copyrighted or not. This discussion is only about officially published stuff. You know, sent to an editorial and made into a book.
I'll admit that the idea has flaws and things like the family the author supported are a better reason.
However, one would gain an advantage in this case. If Tolkien were still around he could veto the production of a movie or make arbitrary demands. If copyright expired on death, his book would go in the public domain and anybody could make a movie. Sure other people could try, but your version would be copyrighted. The problem would go from not being able to do a movie at all to doing one that is profitable despite the competition. It's a challenge, but a much smaller one.
Everything should be free... eventually.
The way I see copyright is that its point is providing incentives for growing the set of public domain works as fast as possible. Thus we grant a temporary monopoly to make people more likely to create, but after that ends everything becomes free and available to anybody.
Not the Star Wars franchise in general, but each movie considered separately, including each re-release.
So for instance, the copyright of the 1977 original would have expired in 1991, but 1997 special edition would expire just about now. Under a 14 year term he'd probably have been motivated to do a special edition sooner, because after 1991 anybody could do one.
He'd also have more motivation for coming up with something new instead of milking the franchise dry, because after 14 years anybody could make stories set in the universe and everybody would be sick of it much faster.
That said, things like Star Wars are oddities. We shouldn't make rules based exclusively on the rare cases.
Why should they be? My idea is simply reducing the length. It would be simply the question of planning to make a profit within 14-30 years. And if you can't make a profit in 14 years they'll probably never make it, anyway.
No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.
Copyright should be much shorter, but it should last the same whether the creator lives or dies.
It seems to me that it's easier to figure out a good time limit than a monetary one.
Say, the $5M. Why precisely that number? How do you adapt to the economy? $5M in 10 years might be $1M today. Also some works are expensive. That would make big movies go out of copyright right in the first week.
I wouldn't want to abolish it, but I'd like to make it much shorter.
My idea is that copyright is supposed to serve society's interests. For that it should aim to maximize the incentive to produce works. And that means it can't be too long. It can't be too short either, as there must be time to make some money. Copyright must allow authors to make money from their work, but avoid providing a perpetual money supply.
I think that the very maximum length of copyright should be 30 years. The number is based on the idea of that an author should have an incentive to publish at least a second work, after their copyright expires. So assuming one published a book at 20, copyright would expire at 50, providing some motivation to write another.
There was research that suggested the optimal length would be around 14 years. That sounds good to me.
Copyright is needed, but it's currently far too long.
Tolkien has been dead and buried for 38 years now. His estate is preventing the translation from being published for what reason exactly? Where's the benefit to society from that?
Sure it is. It's certainly not productive, but if you were born like that, it's entirely natural. Again, "natural" doesn't say anything about whether it's good for you or the species. There's no mandate from above to reproduce, it's just that things that do tend to persist.
Evolution and nature are quite linked though. And that would be because you have a weird idea of how things work.
Except for that there being nothing to suggest so far it's a learned behavior, and that you seem to assume that the current state of things is how it's always been.
In ancient Greece for instance, it wasn't a bad thing, and Homo Sapiens existed for a long time before creating anything like a modern society. There still are a few lost tribes that don't know where children come from. We have no clue what the attitude was towards homosexuality through the millions of years of human evolution, and it's misleading to assume it must have been precisely the current one.
It's more complicated than that. Queen bees are special and raised from birth in a special way. A random female bee can't just start breeding. The colony may breed a new queen when there are too many bees around, or the old queen is not performing.
Right. Or simply don't succeed at reproducing
So it's not natural not to want to have children?
Again, if it happens in nature, it's natural. It's perfectly possible for one to be born with a preference for one's own gender, lack of interest in sex at all, lack of ability to have sex due to lack or non-function of required organs, and so on. And all those things can happen perfectly naturally, even if it ultimately leads to not having any descendants, or even to the species collectively committing suicide.
Besides, the fact that homosexuality hasn't been bred out of the gene pool suggests there is some advantage to it. One theory is that since people with a preference for their own gender don't have children, they're available to support the rest of the family. So if say, a father passes the "gay gene" to two children, one of who turns out straight and the other gay, the gay one is fairly likely to end up living alone or at least without children. By doing so, he'll have more money and will be able to support his brother in times of need. By helping his brother survive, he also helps perpetuate the gay gene his brother carries.
Evolution is not about individuals, it's about species, or more exactly, genes (since species are an arbitrary human concept). It's entirely compatible with individuals engaging in acts that are suicidal or leading to no reproduction, so long the overall effect is beneficial.
Also it's funny that you have such a rigid conception of how things are supposed to be, when they vary so much. Look at other organisms, like bees. A hive has a grand total of one breeding female, and is populated entirely by sterile females except during the short time males are needed for breeding. But as weird as that is from a human point of view, it's entirely natural and has been working for bees perfectly fine.
Natural == occurs in nature. That's all it is. It doesn't mean it's optimal, good for the individual or the species, or anything else. Homosexuality occurs in nature, therefore it's natural.
Eh? There's no intention in evolution. There's only genes that get passed on.
Unfortunately the N900 only supports ~59GB of furry pictures (27GB available on the device + 16GB on SD card)
Best practice for what, though? That sounds like a rule of thumb for opening a business. If you're going to rent office/shop space, purchase equipment, hire employees and so on and don't expect to be making a profit for a year, then that makes sense.
But this is community based software development we're talking about. Everybody already has their equipment, no office space is needed, and nobody should need to be hired (except if they need a web designer or lawyer temporarily I guess).
So what's all that money for?
Yes, exactly.
The cattle prod man is certainly not going to be happy if he finds encryption, proxies and so on. So the goal would be to make it look like a normal phone with nothing unusual or interesting on it.
And even if you can read this residual magnetism, think of what you must do next:
First, a drive head isn't enough. You have to get the platter under an electron microscope or such incredibly specialized device owned by what, 10 labs in the whole world?
Next, you spend months (from what I heard of the speed you get out of those) copying the platter, generating several times more data than the official disk's capacity.
Once you're done with that you can get to decoding. But, there's a laboratory proof of concept, and there's the real thing. On a real drive, you won't get a laboratory setting of showing you can read sector #1 and then figure out what the previous value was. You'll have to find something interesting in millions of sectors.
On hard disks data doesn't get written in neat tidy ways. Files get fragmented all over the platter, and when deleted their sectors may get reused. So you'll have to find your interesting file by piecing it together. You'll have to make sense of the former filesystem metadata that says where it was, then read the now overwritten file. Both of which are probably not neatly overwritten once, but a different amounts of times on each sector, and you'll have to figure out which of those is the good one.
It sounds like way, way too much trouble.
It has support for OpenVPN, SSH and tor out of the box. There was one guy in #maemo I think that said he succeeded at implementing full disk encryption, you might want to come there and ask. And if you install kernel-power you'll be able to be use iptables, which should help with making sure only what you want gets in and out.
Now, will encryption help you? What is going to happen to you if you're arrested and suspected of accessing something you shouldn't? I'm thinking that in such a place, if they find you have a heavily encrypted phone they're just not going to let you go if they can't get data off the device, and refusing to tell the password might not be a great idea.
Perhaps you should look more at plausible deniability. Try to set up the phone in a manner that is as un-suspicious as possible, make sure nothing incriminating gets logged on the device, and do all your suspicious activities on some remote server, with some panic system that can remove anything suspicious like tor or ssh without leaving a trace if you get in trouble.
For testing what gets stored, you could try using rsync. Sync the entire phone, do something like loading a website, sync again and see what changed.
And what good is that?
Again, this is a SSD, not a hard disk. The PCB contains both the interface and the data storage parts. If you microwave that, you've destroyed everything that was important. It's no use to unsolder anything, the flash chips themselves are destroyed by microwaving.
The part you would skip on microwaving is the metal casing, which contains no data.
Because it's a SSD, and on those the data is on flash chips soldered to it.
I'm in favor of change, but not arbitrary change for no good reason.
"Brick" as in to make a device completely non-functional is an useful change, as it creates a way of describing an interesting state that might have formerly taken an entire sentence to explain.
"Brick" as in whatever meaning being used in this article (not very clear to me, but which seems to be "make a device less functional") creates confusion as to what is actually going on.
Bricking normally refers to the device itself. Losing AC power doesn't brick your TV, it will still work if power is restored. Neither does shutting down the analog signal, it will still work if a signal is provided. Installing a firmware update that makes it unable to power on or accept the right firmware would do it though.
According to me:
Creating new words and new meanings for words that condense complex states and meanings in one word, creating more precision in language: good
Giving words meanings that make it hard to determine which exact state is meant, reducing precision in language, making a specialized word mean the same thing as general one: bad
Dates have nothing to do with it.
Sure it does. The point of language is to communicate. If you start arbitrarily changing the meaning of words people stop understanding what you mean.
"Bricked" is a very precise metaphor. It means the device is as good as an actual brick -- inert and devoid of functionality other than the physical shape of the thing.
Sure, but it still requires a connection at some point, no? Still don't like it.
Nope. I use Linux in part because it lacks crap like this, so no, I'm not going to appreciate its addition.
Well, what can I say, they'll have to make do without my money then.
Also, BitTorrent is full of Steam games, so I fail to see the point.
Nope. No compromise on this point. Mandatory Steam == no money for you, dear developer. Certainly not in exchange for "RAPID download", which I have no clue why you're so impressed with, when every game I bought was very much rapidly downloaded without Steam.
Wine is very unreliable and not officially supported. I might give it a try for a free game, but I'm not paying one cent for that end-user experience.
That's different in that it constitutes official support, even if done in a half-assed way. If it breaks you'd expect them to fix it.
Nope, no go. Native, no Steam, no Impulse, no crap like that, or no sale.
Loki appeared in 1998 and went defunct in 2001. That's a decade ago. Linux was barely starting to become viable for gaming and was nowhere as polished as it is now. I heard the company had management problems as well.
Also, Steam didn't exist back then, yet go figure, games sold for Windows and Mac fine without it. Steam is entirely unnecessary.
I'm one of those weirdos with a laptop that's not perpetually hooked to an internet connection, because sometimes it's used in the underground, on a plane, or in a foreign country where I have a hard time getting access everywhere.
No loss. I either spend less money, or spend it on rewarding developers that don't insist on releasing their games with crap attached. Either way, a good thing.
Jobs isn't exactly Borg though.
How about Raven, the elitist asshole for the icon?
Steam isn't a virtual machine. To have games on Linux they need to be ported to it, and for that Steam is entirely unnecessary.
Steam is a distribution platform and DRM. For distribution it's not needed because there are package managers. For the DRM part, I simply refuse to accept it, and won't buy any game that uses it.
I'll happily buy games on Linux, so long they're native and don't have any crap like Steam attached. Humble Bundle being a nice example of that (got both)