To say that copyright protection for recorded performances is permanent is like saying gasoline engines are forever going to power cars. There was a time before gas engines, and copyright recorded performances, and there will be a time that comes after.
As with gas engines and global warming, if we find that copyright protection for recorded performance amounts to pollution of the law and of the public domain, there is every reason to do away with that aspect of copyright protection.
Copyright is not a fundamental human right. Copyright is a deal: "I'll publish, if the governments protects publications." Unlike natural rights, copyright is a created right, a bargain between governments and publishers, and the bargain can be partially or fully revoked, or the term shortened. There is nothing immoral about revoking or curtailing copyright protection, especially for a relative novelty like recorded performances. It is a decision based on utility.
Hank showed me MATRIX just a few short weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Using law enforcement data and commercial data, all of the commercial data available in the public domain, Asher's query produced [hijacker Mohamed] Atta's photo -- and about 80 others, many of them fellow 9/11 hijackers, many of them associates of the 9/11 hijackers.
A few short weeks after the Kentucky Derby, I devised a database system that predicted the winner. Impressive, no?
This is the first indication of Microsoft actually feeling a bit of pain due to Vista.
Microsoft could afford to misspend the money it took to develop Vista. But Microsoft cannot afford to allow Windows share in the installed base to erode 10 points from the current level. Apple has already taken advantage of that opening, and Linux, mainly Ubuntu, is growing even faster, though from a such a tiny base that the statistics are iffy.
How bad would a 10% decline be? It would leave Microsoft with 80% of all personal computers that access Web sites. That doesn't seem irreversible. But it is worse than it looks for two reasons:
1. That 10% contains a large number of opinion leaders.
2. The momentum would be hard to reverse.
If a 10% decline happens in the next 18 months, before Microsoft has a response, then Microsoft will be in serious trouble.
3 years is far too long for Microsoft not to have a response. Well within 3 years we will know if we have a long-term competitive environment for personal computer OSs, possibly with new entrants other than Mac OS X and Linux.
A few reasons why these numbers do not tell me Apple is "killing" Linux on the desktop:
1. Apple's market share did not quite double. Linux did.
2. Apple and Microsoft products come pre-installed. Linux seldom does.
3. Free-as-in-beer Linux wasn't really fit for consumers until Ubuntu Edgy Eft, and it has improved a lot since then, especially in becoming laptop-friendly. Apple had a head start of several years eroding Windows market share.
That second point is particularly important because aftermarket add-ons seldom have the penetration rate OEM products have. It is a much higher barrier to require installation.
Another important point is that, despite Apple and Linux share growing about as fast as it can, Windows still has 90%+ share in the Internet user population. No other product has yet reached a point where its growth means a sharp decline in Windows share, because the base they are growing from is so small.
Microsoft has at least two years before Apple can take significant share away form Microsoft, and, by then, Linux will not even be where Apple is now, even if it grows as fast as possible. But if Microsoft falls below 80% on an accelerating trend of share erosion, with more than one copmetitor taking share away from then that will be a big crisis for them, even though they still numerically "dominate" the market. Reversing a trend like that is very hard.
Usability testing is something every well-intentioned planner puts on the schedule at the start of a project. But, unless the project manager knows to take opportunities as they come,and can tolerate some sidelong glances about spending money on frivolous things when the project has delays and resource shortages to make up in implementation, it is often cut down or eliminated.
A problem with abbreviated usability testing is that bad test design creeps in because it is cheaper: Why ask if a focus group delivers meaningful results when it surely delivers the appearance of having made an effort. This kind of bad testing can even crowd out inexpensive "bench top" testing: Are the controls sized and spaced correctly? Are the colors and typography right for readability? Why care about that if the focus group testers don't.
Mistakes in designing-in and implementing better usability don't come from lack of effort, but from lack of direction or lack of leadership that can weigh the value of getting it right. If the results of usability testing don't yield more than superficial issues with cheap fixes that don't challenge project priorities, odds are you have traveled the same road as most mediocre products.
Something like the DVD remote's buttons are a pathology that is easy to trace: The product manager, who has no design inputs when he writes the competitive analysis, lists the union of all competitors' features - usually expressed by their surface manifestation in buttons. When did you ever read a bug report that says: "The market requirements, functional spec, and design spec, are all wrong because they never questioned the number of buttons."
Unless you have a group of people determined to break out of that trap, good design can only be accidental. The system is rigged against it. Throwing in a consultant who questions assumptions is a way of adding more rolls of the dice that could, by chance, break out of that trap, but it is not a solution. The only path to a reliable solution is to change the process.
And if you don't want to be killed, you're free to stay indoors. Fortunately, the government is upholding the laws (mostly)...
That is a perfect illustration of how copyright is positioned, incorrectly, as equivalent to a human right.
Antigua and Barbuda has won the right, in an international tribunal, to disregard copyright protection of U.S. recorded performances.
If, instead, they won the "right" to kill Americans, that would be different, no? In reality, no tribunal could grant such a "right." And there you have the difference between copyright and self-ownership.
The right to waive U.S. copyright isn't even as significant as, say, a letter of marque. So copyright is really pretty low on the rights food chain.
When did it become up to people to pay what they feel like paying?
That's no more of an arbitrary way to compensate a copyright holder than the legislated way of doing it that has become disconnected from the stated purpose for the government granted limited monopoly.
By "arbitrary" I mean that copyright and patent monopolies are a creation of government. Government could very well decide that copyright no longer exists and, unlike natural rights, there would be no appeal to a universal notion of human rights. If it became too burdensome to protect copyright for, say, recorded performances, governments could rationally decide to not protect them, or to scale back protection to where infringement would be inconsequential under law. This is very different from the rights government is prohibited from infringing on, and that are presumed to exist with or without a government that is instructed to respect those rights.
So, literally, it is up to people to decide what to pay.
Here's a topic: There is a sense-of-humor deficit out there. On another thread (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=374665&cid=21521813) I posted a comment about how LinkedIn is a MySpace for resume polishers and I actually get a response how that's not completely accurate. At least that comment got modded up. And now this "off topic" thing?
It is a surprisingly common error - you hear it on the news all the time - that the Constitution "gives" you rights that are listed in the Bill of Rights. That simply isn't so, and it says so right in the Bill of Rights:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Which leaves one to ask: If 20%, one fifth, two out of ten of the first ten amendments are devoted to preempting a common but nevertheless illiterate error about the meaning of the Bill of Rights and the sense of the whole of the Constitution, why isn't this error just as painful and potentially lethal as ignoring "Danger, high voltage!" signs?
'Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by 'friend' and 'foe,' with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts.'
Show me the yachts of the Symbian ISVs and I'll believe that Symbian's long history is an advantage for software developers. Mobile applications has been a mug's game because it is hard for end-users to get and use applications due to carriers' "walled gardens," app signing, and locked-down APIs. Arguing for a continuation of the status quo will not improve that situation.
Google may or may not succeed, but they have moved the industry - the OHA members in particular - a long way in the right direction.
Even the question is nonsense. You don't actually have "constitutional rights." At least not with the way the U.S. Constitution is worded. The founding principle of the U.S. government is that you simply have rights. The constitution of the federal government "fences in" that government to keep it from infringing your rights. It lists all the things government is legitimately allowed to do, and specifically prohibits a few things (The Bill of Rights). But it says right in the BoR that your rights are not enumerated, and the rights that are mentioned in the BoR have no higher standing than any other rights.
The Founders also never meant to make the Constitution a crutch. You have a right to privacy. God, or nature, or mathematicians - as you prefer - gave you the ability to encrypt and store and securely pass deniable messages. That's privacy. That's what a "natural right" looks like.
Trusting "trusted" computing requires trusting hardware makers that can insert exploits. Trusted computing is therefore of limited value to end-users in a world where vendors and service providers are routinely leaned on to allow surveillance back doors.
If you have applications that you need to secure, in order to prevent, for example, misuse of tax filings or medical records, you can do it using Web applications, or other thin client technologies combined with physical security of client computers. There is nothing that can guarantee stopping someone copying data manually from a screen display and smuggling it out of an office, so there are practical limits to securing data beyond which additional technology is pointless.
There are some theoretical cases where trusted computing could benefit individuals. But, in practice, it's all about someone else trusting your hardware to rat you out. Most of the money flowing in to trusted computing comes from those kinds of uses. "Trusted computing" has rightly earned distrust.
I could have been clearer regarding group calendars: They are not a direct replacement for Exchange Server, and they don't integrate with, for example, MSProject as well as Exchange+Outlook does, but you can put an appointment into a shared calendar and subscribe to that calendar in Lightning. For people who use multiple iCal calendars (e.g. Google Calendar) Thunderbird + Lightning is the better choice.
I have been using Open Office and Thunderbird as direct replacements for Office and Outlook for over a year now.
My main tasks are product planning, design, presentations, and documentation for software projects. For these tasks, Open Office is fine - no complaints about missing pieces, and the diagram editor in Open Office is sufficiently better than the diagram editor in MSOffice as to not require a direct replacement for Visio (though Dia is pretty good if you need something Visio-like).
Thunderbird isn't going to make Exchange Server users happy, but that isn't the point. If you use a hosted mail service, as many small companies do, and if you use a shared hosted calendar, Thunderbird, plus a few plug-ins, especially Lightning, is an adequate replacement for Outlook in that context. All, or almost all the functions of Exchange Server and Outlook have equivalents in Thunderbird plus plug-ins.
A year ago, when I started using Thunderbird, it was with some reservations: No Plaxo sync, iffy Webmail integration, Lightning was shakey, etc. In the past year I have found enough plug-ins to fill those gaps. As of now, people using Outlook without an Exchange Server would be better served by Thunderbird.
Some people depend on particular features of the Office/Exchange combination, and that can't be helped, but the 80% that use that software to edit documents and read mail can switch without pain.
For many organizations, the fact they can do all this without buying software, signing up for maintenance plans, and subjecting their budget to the continuous pressure on commercial software vendors to lock in and up-sell, is enough to make the OSS alternative more attractive.
Not convinced? You don't have to be. You probably have an obsolete PC laying around. Put a Linux distro on it and try it.
I'll play angel's advocate and say that that argument is just another form of a set of false arguments that are based on regulation of choices that were not available to the Framers of the U.S. federal constitution, e.g.: "The Internet (or digital cameras, or airplanes, or spandex pants) did not exist in the 18th century, therefore you don't have a constitutionally protected freedom to communicate that way, travel that way, etc."
All these arguments miss the point: The Constitution does not grant freedoms, or rights, or anything. It lists the legitimate powers of government. That means the Constitution is future-proof. If regulating horse travel isn't in there, neither is regulating car travel. States can regulate your car travel, but are explicitly forbidden from setting up internal borders.
Back in the day when networks were all wired, and mail servers were all on the premises, and computers had 80286 CPUs, it might have made sense for mail to be sent and stored in cleartext. Nowadays, storing mail and documents that way, and sending them over unprotected WiFi access points, is a huge privacy and security hole. It's a bit shocking that not even open source mail clients and servers still, by default, don't secure payload with encryption.
As for Webmail, Web-based backup services could not even be sold without encrypting payload. How is it that lack of encryption is still acceptable in Webmail?
I don't think the pluggable security model is the controversial part. The controversy is about whether measures of scheduler performance are universal, or whether responsiveness metrics are different from, say, throughput metrics.
That is the most succinct statement regarding this matter.
The Constitution has a "sense:" The Sense of the U.S. Constitution is that it enumerates the legitimate powers of government. The Constitution is addressed TO the government FROM the people and the states, which are the creators of the national government.
Trying to interpret the Constitution as "not giving you a right" or "not giving a non-citizen a right" is nonsensical.
Read up on the history of privately owned artillery. It's pretty clear the Founders' intent was in the context of that kind of arms ownership in private hands.
Also be aware that the Constitution does not grant rights. The IInd amendment, the whole BoR, and the whole Constitution is written in terms of what the governnment is or is not allowed to do. If it isn't in there as a function of government, it isn't legitimate.
Explicitly in the IXth and Xth Amendments, it is stated that nothing about the Constitution limits or enumerates your rights. You have rights. Period. The Founders understood it is not the government's role to "grant" rights. That is something kings do.
Slashdot Mirror
To say that copyright protection for recorded performances is permanent is like saying gasoline engines are forever going to power cars. There was a time before gas engines, and copyright recorded performances, and there will be a time that comes after.
As with gas engines and global warming, if we find that copyright protection for recorded performance amounts to pollution of the law and of the public domain, there is every reason to do away with that aspect of copyright protection.
Copyright is not a fundamental human right. Copyright is a deal: "I'll publish, if the governments protects publications." Unlike natural rights, copyright is a created right, a bargain between governments and publishers, and the bargain can be partially or fully revoked, or the term shortened. There is nothing immoral about revoking or curtailing copyright protection, especially for a relative novelty like recorded performances. It is a decision based on utility.
A few short weeks after the Kentucky Derby, I devised a database system that predicted the winner. Impressive, no?
This is the first indication of Microsoft actually feeling a bit of pain due to Vista.
Microsoft could afford to misspend the money it took to develop Vista. But Microsoft cannot afford to allow Windows share in the installed base to erode 10 points from the current level. Apple has already taken advantage of that opening, and Linux, mainly Ubuntu, is growing even faster, though from a such a tiny base that the statistics are iffy.
How bad would a 10% decline be? It would leave Microsoft with 80% of all personal computers that access Web sites. That doesn't seem irreversible. But it is worse than it looks for two reasons:
1. That 10% contains a large number of opinion leaders.
2. The momentum would be hard to reverse.
If a 10% decline happens in the next 18 months, before Microsoft has a response, then Microsoft will be in serious trouble.
3 years is far too long for Microsoft not to have a response. Well within 3 years we will know if we have a long-term competitive environment for personal computer OSs, possibly with new entrants other than Mac OS X and Linux.
Under the U.S. constitution, governments do not have inherent rights. They have powers that are listed in the constitution.
Write shorter methods. That is all.
A few reasons why these numbers do not tell me Apple is "killing" Linux on the desktop:
1. Apple's market share did not quite double. Linux did.
2. Apple and Microsoft products come pre-installed. Linux seldom does.
3. Free-as-in-beer Linux wasn't really fit for consumers until Ubuntu Edgy Eft, and it has improved a lot since then, especially in becoming laptop-friendly. Apple had a head start of several years eroding Windows market share.
That second point is particularly important because aftermarket add-ons seldom have the penetration rate OEM products have. It is a much higher barrier to require installation.
Another important point is that, despite Apple and Linux share growing about as fast as it can, Windows still has 90%+ share in the Internet user population. No other product has yet reached a point where its growth means a sharp decline in Windows share, because the base they are growing from is so small.
Microsoft has at least two years before Apple can take significant share away form Microsoft, and, by then, Linux will not even be where Apple is now, even if it grows as fast as possible. But if Microsoft falls below 80% on an accelerating trend of share erosion, with more than one copmetitor taking share away from then that will be a big crisis for them, even though they still numerically "dominate" the market. Reversing a trend like that is very hard.
Usability testing is something every well-intentioned planner puts on the schedule at the start of a project. But, unless the project manager knows to take opportunities as they come,and can tolerate some sidelong glances about spending money on frivolous things when the project has delays and resource shortages to make up in implementation, it is often cut down or eliminated.
A problem with abbreviated usability testing is that bad test design creeps in because it is cheaper: Why ask if a focus group delivers meaningful results when it surely delivers the appearance of having made an effort. This kind of bad testing can even crowd out inexpensive "bench top" testing: Are the controls sized and spaced correctly? Are the colors and typography right for readability? Why care about that if the focus group testers don't.
Mistakes in designing-in and implementing better usability don't come from lack of effort, but from lack of direction or lack of leadership that can weigh the value of getting it right. If the results of usability testing don't yield more than superficial issues with cheap fixes that don't challenge project priorities, odds are you have traveled the same road as most mediocre products.
Something like the DVD remote's buttons are a pathology that is easy to trace: The product manager, who has no design inputs when he writes the competitive analysis, lists the union of all competitors' features - usually expressed by their surface manifestation in buttons. When did you ever read a bug report that says: "The market requirements, functional spec, and design spec, are all wrong because they never questioned the number of buttons."
Unless you have a group of people determined to break out of that trap, good design can only be accidental. The system is rigged against it. Throwing in a consultant who questions assumptions is a way of adding more rolls of the dice that could, by chance, break out of that trap, but it is not a solution. The only path to a reliable solution is to change the process.
That is a perfect illustration of how copyright is positioned, incorrectly, as equivalent to a human right.
Antigua and Barbuda has won the right, in an international tribunal, to disregard copyright protection of U.S. recorded performances.
If, instead, they won the "right" to kill Americans, that would be different, no? In reality, no tribunal could grant such a "right." And there you have the difference between copyright and self-ownership.
The right to waive U.S. copyright isn't even as significant as, say, a letter of marque. So copyright is really pretty low on the rights food chain.
That's no more of an arbitrary way to compensate a copyright holder than the legislated way of doing it that has become disconnected from the stated purpose for the government granted limited monopoly.
By "arbitrary" I mean that copyright and patent monopolies are a creation of government. Government could very well decide that copyright no longer exists and, unlike natural rights, there would be no appeal to a universal notion of human rights. If it became too burdensome to protect copyright for, say, recorded performances, governments could rationally decide to not protect them, or to scale back protection to where infringement would be inconsequential under law. This is very different from the rights government is prohibited from infringing on, and that are presumed to exist with or without a government that is instructed to respect those rights.
So, literally, it is up to people to decide what to pay.
Off topic? Seriously?
Here's a topic: There is a sense-of-humor deficit out there. On another thread (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=374665&cid=21521813) I posted a comment about how LinkedIn is a MySpace for resume polishers and I actually get a response how that's not completely accurate. At least that comment got modded up. And now this "off topic" thing?
I am the Zigurd, ahead of a chess master and a Danish zebra. W00t!
It is a surprisingly common error - you hear it on the news all the time - that the Constitution "gives" you rights that are listed in the Bill of Rights. That simply isn't so, and it says so right in the Bill of Rights:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Which leaves one to ask: If 20%, one fifth, two out of ten of the first ten amendments are devoted to preempting a common but nevertheless illiterate error about the meaning of the Bill of Rights and the sense of the whole of the Constitution, why isn't this error just as painful and potentially lethal as ignoring "Danger, high voltage!" signs?
That would be LinkedIn.
Then give it the perfect name: The Hindenberg TMI Iron Maiden.
Show me the yachts of the Symbian ISVs and I'll believe that Symbian's long history is an advantage for software developers. Mobile applications has been a mug's game because it is hard for end-users to get and use applications due to carriers' "walled gardens," app signing, and locked-down APIs. Arguing for a continuation of the status quo will not improve that situation.
Google may or may not succeed, but they have moved the industry - the OHA members in particular - a long way in the right direction.
Even the question is nonsense. You don't actually have "constitutional rights." At least not with the way the U.S. Constitution is worded. The founding principle of the U.S. government is that you simply have rights. The constitution of the federal government "fences in" that government to keep it from infringing your rights. It lists all the things government is legitimately allowed to do, and specifically prohibits a few things (The Bill of Rights). But it says right in the BoR that your rights are not enumerated, and the rights that are mentioned in the BoR have no higher standing than any other rights.
The Founders also never meant to make the Constitution a crutch. You have a right to privacy. God, or nature, or mathematicians - as you prefer - gave you the ability to encrypt and store and securely pass deniable messages. That's privacy. That's what a "natural right" looks like.
Trusting "trusted" computing requires trusting hardware makers that can insert exploits. Trusted computing is therefore of limited value to end-users in a world where vendors and service providers are routinely leaned on to allow surveillance back doors.
If you have applications that you need to secure, in order to prevent, for example, misuse of tax filings or medical records, you can do it using Web applications, or other thin client technologies combined with physical security of client computers. There is nothing that can guarantee stopping someone copying data manually from a screen display and smuggling it out of an office, so there are practical limits to securing data beyond which additional technology is pointless.
There are some theoretical cases where trusted computing could benefit individuals. But, in practice, it's all about someone else trusting your hardware to rat you out. Most of the money flowing in to trusted computing comes from those kinds of uses. "Trusted computing" has rightly earned distrust.
I could have been clearer regarding group calendars: They are not a direct replacement for Exchange Server, and they don't integrate with, for example, MSProject as well as Exchange+Outlook does, but you can put an appointment into a shared calendar and subscribe to that calendar in Lightning. For people who use multiple iCal calendars (e.g. Google Calendar) Thunderbird + Lightning is the better choice.
I have been using Open Office and Thunderbird as direct replacements for Office and Outlook for over a year now.
My main tasks are product planning, design, presentations, and documentation for software projects. For these tasks, Open Office is fine - no complaints about missing pieces, and the diagram editor in Open Office is sufficiently better than the diagram editor in MSOffice as to not require a direct replacement for Visio (though Dia is pretty good if you need something Visio-like).
Thunderbird isn't going to make Exchange Server users happy, but that isn't the point. If you use a hosted mail service, as many small companies do, and if you use a shared hosted calendar, Thunderbird, plus a few plug-ins, especially Lightning, is an adequate replacement for Outlook in that context. All, or almost all the functions of Exchange Server and Outlook have equivalents in Thunderbird plus plug-ins.
A year ago, when I started using Thunderbird, it was with some reservations: No Plaxo sync, iffy Webmail integration, Lightning was shakey, etc. In the past year I have found enough plug-ins to fill those gaps. As of now, people using Outlook without an Exchange Server would be better served by Thunderbird.
Some people depend on particular features of the Office/Exchange combination, and that can't be helped, but the 80% that use that software to edit documents and read mail can switch without pain.
For many organizations, the fact they can do all this without buying software, signing up for maintenance plans, and subjecting their budget to the continuous pressure on commercial software vendors to lock in and up-sell, is enough to make the OSS alternative more attractive.
Not convinced? You don't have to be. You probably have an obsolete PC laying around. Put a Linux distro on it and try it.
I'll play angel's advocate and say that that argument is just another form of a set of false arguments that are based on regulation of choices that were not available to the Framers of the U.S. federal constitution, e.g.: "The Internet (or digital cameras, or airplanes, or spandex pants) did not exist in the 18th century, therefore you don't have a constitutionally protected freedom to communicate that way, travel that way, etc."
All these arguments miss the point: The Constitution does not grant freedoms, or rights, or anything. It lists the legitimate powers of government. That means the Constitution is future-proof. If regulating horse travel isn't in there, neither is regulating car travel. States can regulate your car travel, but are explicitly forbidden from setting up internal borders.
Back in the day when networks were all wired, and mail servers were all on the premises, and computers had 80286 CPUs, it might have made sense for mail to be sent and stored in cleartext. Nowadays, storing mail and documents that way, and sending them over unprotected WiFi access points, is a huge privacy and security hole. It's a bit shocking that not even open source mail clients and servers still, by default, don't secure payload with encryption.
As for Webmail, Web-based backup services could not even be sold without encrypting payload. How is it that lack of encryption is still acceptable in Webmail?
I don't think the pluggable security model is the controversial part. The controversy is about whether measures of scheduler performance are universal, or whether responsiveness metrics are different from, say, throughput metrics.
That is the most succinct statement regarding this matter.
The Constitution has a "sense:" The Sense of the U.S. Constitution is that it enumerates the legitimate powers of government. The Constitution is addressed TO the government FROM the people and the states, which are the creators of the national government.
Trying to interpret the Constitution as "not giving you a right" or "not giving a non-citizen a right" is nonsensical.
Are 16oz. books too heavy to turn into movies?
Read up on the history of privately owned artillery. It's pretty clear the Founders' intent was in the context of that kind of arms ownership in private hands.
Also be aware that the Constitution does not grant rights. The IInd amendment, the whole BoR, and the whole Constitution is written in terms of what the governnment is or is not allowed to do. If it isn't in there as a function of government, it isn't legitimate.
Explicitly in the IXth and Xth Amendments, it is stated that nothing about the Constitution limits or enumerates your rights. You have rights. Period. The Founders understood it is not the government's role to "grant" rights. That is something kings do.