What you're missing is the fact that our societies are highly corrupt, even though we tell ourselves that corruption only exists in Africa or China.
Also many people continue to believe this even when faced with evidence otherwise. Consider the way that politicans continue to be trusted even after they have been caught telling lies about virtually everything.
I'd quite like to see George Bush fight the war on terror personally, on the front line, with no more armor and weapons than any other field soldier. Him and every member of his cabinet past and present.
Just them? Why not send every war supporter in the US Govermnent with them...
I'd *LOVE* to see Rumsfeld and Cheney on the streets of Ramallah and Baghdad. I'd love to see the look in their eyes as reason and perspective finally take hold. I'd love to see them suddenly realize their lives, and the lives of over 4000 U.S. soldiers and 700,000+ Iraqi civilians
Ramallah isn't in Iraq...
would have been better spent fighting against malnutrition, disease, and lack of medical care.
Would you trust them to spend this money in a way which did actually make a positive contribution to anything?
The biggest "security implication" perceived by the FAA is interference with air traffic. However, the FAA lumps all UAVs into one category, from the Predator on down to tiny biomimetic dragonflys.
Whilst birds are considered a danger to aviation, a not especially large bird can cause serious damage to an aircraft or engine. I'm unware of an insect causing problems to an aircaft in flight. Indeed the only insect related accident appears to have been due to one building a nest in a pitot.
And contrary to the belief of many, very few UAVs are armed. Only two US UAVs in operation carry payloads. The rest carry cameras.
The glass in a camera is likely to be harder than the bones in a bird. Not healthy for jet engines!
Let's see... if you can buy a UAV or overrun the control station, then you can target anyone within the fuel range. You can easily crash into an airliner in takeoff, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. You cane easily spread chemical weapons, not so easy, but quite plausibly.
You can also do this using a truck...
Consider the glider pilot. Let's say that he has a transponder. He's not required to, but he does. His transponder fails. Now, he's invisible to the the UAV. His airplane is painted the same color as the clouds (white) because fiberglass and heat don't work well together. His fiberglass airplane is invisible to radar.
Such a glider is also going to be invisible to ATC and aircraft with their own radars.
if the UAV's coming out of the sun, he's never going to see it, and it won't see him. A person would have seen him, but the UAV doesn't have a person looking out all the windows.
A human pilot may be able to see a glider. Depending on how it's approaching and if the pilot is looking out of the window.
But the human is very much still in the cab. Believe it or not John Deere's system has an EULA that you have to agree to when you active the system. You have to click "I agree" on the computer screen that you won't sue John Deere when your tractor runs over a house because you were too stupid to steer around it or turn at the end of a row.
That's probably something which general satnav could do with. Especially when truckers use systems with maps which are only suitable for cars omitting such details as road width:)
If you know much about the state of UAVs these days, research and development is going mainly into autonomous vehicles. Human controllers are definitely in the loop, defining waypoints, orbits, and so forth, but they aren't being flown directly by pilots, unlike the current crop of *military* UAVs that are in operation right now. The goal of UAVs is to have the plane take off, fly a particular mission, do something, and then fly back and land. All without a pilot controlling it. This isn't some future thing. This is what UAVs in research labs are doing right now.
There's also likely to be a difference between civil and military UAVs. Military designers might well want to reduce RCS, not have an active transponder and have more autonomy. Since you don't want a UAV to be transmitting over enemy territory. Whereas it might make more sense to fit a civil UAV with a transponder and TCAS.
Those are terrorist acts yes, but invading a country is no way to stop terrorism. Terrorists usually operate in small groups and don't really have idealistic ties to any country, but rather have ties to ideology, religion, or sometimes just money.
There are cases of international terrorists being funded (and otherwise supported) by national governments, but these tend to be governments large military budgets in the first place. e.g. US, UK, Russia, France, Israel, China, etc. Invading a country is, however, a good way to ensure that country has a well motivated militia. Yet militiamen are rarely motivated to "take the fight to the enemy", even when the invaders have travelled only a few hundred miles.
America was doing nothing about all this until it happened to them too,
The US had been doing plenty of things to upset a large proportion of the planet for decades. Indeed the date of the 9/11 attack was more indicative of South American involvement, a connection which would have been even stronger had it taken place 2 years later.
and then they went waaaaay too overboard on upping their security policies.
Except when things have been tested it still appears to be quite easy to smuggle weapons onto passenger aircraft. A lot of the "upping security" appears to be more for show and annoying passengers and aircrews...
Even with a heavy police state there will always be ways of causing problems,
In a police state the obvious thing for trouble makers to do is to join the police.
many that nobody ever really thinks about (like hijacking a plane and doing a suicide run).
Actually plenty of people had though about using airliners as improvised cruise missiles. The earliest example which comes to mind is "The Medusa Touch", a movie made in 1978. There's also the pilot of "The Lone Gunmen", which has a great many points in common with the actual happenings.
You are more likely to catch terrorists early if everyone is being carefully monitored, but what would you rather - live in America of the 90s, or live in a 1984 style "Big Brother is Watching You" dystopia?
Actually you may be less likely to catch any terrorists in such a situation because terrorists are very uncommon. Trying to watch everyone means that most of the time you are unlikely to be watching any terrorists at all.
PS there have been a couple of terrorist attacks in the UK since September the 11th, one even in the place where I was born (Glasgow), and there was at least one in London.
The press is highly selective in what they call "terrorist", e.g. BNP members Robert Cottage and David Jackson tend not to be called "terrorists", even though they were caught will a large amount of explosives and weapons. The mainstream media also appeared reluctant to call Miles Cooper a "terrorist. Though the judge at his trial had no such hesitation when he was found guilty.
LBJ started the War on Poverty back in 1964... We've spent trillions of dollars, and employed millions of "soldiers" (government employees) and by all measures it's been an abject failure.
By the measure of "pointless government exercise" it appears to have been highly sucessful.
My question is- let's say the RIAA downloads a song that has a name like 'all of metallica' but contains something else that they don't have the copyright to; doesn't this make them guilty of illegal downloading as well? Do they contact the copyright holder to inform them when they find such downloads? Do they pay their own extortionist damage amounts?
The RIAA, together with the MPAA, are founder members of the "Hypocrits R Us" club. They are quite happy to enguage in "piracy" themselves, the MPAA's even been caught at least twice in recent years.
I could be wrong but my understanding is the 'piracy' label came from the early days of DRM/copy protection.
The groups that hacked/cracked the DRM had BBS handles that had pirate themes. They added ANSI type graphics, often a picture of a pirate ship or pirate with an eye patch, that said such and such program was cracked by Capt. Cracker and Scruvy crew. I remember those from my Apple II+/Commodore 64 days.
The use of the term "piracy" to refer to copyright infringement is older. These people were just taking the piss out of it's use in that way 20-30 years ago.
Judging from the number of elderly, children, blind people, dead people, etc. that the RIAA labels have targeted, I'd say most likely they do it with a random number generator.
A random number generator might be more accurate. Especially if they didn't filter out "self", "friendlies" & "RFC1918".
you say it was extortion, but I have to ask, *did* she download copyrighted music without paying for it? If the answer is yes, I would not call that 'extortion' but 'getting legitimately caught breaking the law'.
Reading between the lines of the article it appears that the only check file names rather than actual content. Movies and popular music titles frequently use words and terms which are also used in completly different contexts e.g. there is a classical piece of music called "Four Minutes and Thirty Two Seconds", (consisting of 272 minutes of silence) which could easily wind up as a false positive for the song by Madonna mentioned. Similarly we have no way of knowing how accurate the matching of IP addresses to people actually is. It would be more accurate to say that someone has been "accused of breaking the law, without much in the way of actual evidence to support that accusation".
I doubt they are 'targeting' any specific school, but I strongly suspect IPs resolving to unilag.edu.ng are handled differently then those resolving to yale.edu,
Most likely they'd want to avoid a "law school".
where the students are more likely to just pay a settlement rather then wipe their arse with the notices...
With the whole thing being considered a useful "student project":) Effectivly the RIAA would be paying towards the education of these students.
It's considerably damaging to artistic industries as they are now,
The same industries who have a history of "crying wolf" over any new piece of technology which might require them to change some aspect of their business model. Yet after decades of doing this you still have businesses which are highly profitable.
plus to the potential of art to remain economically feasible
People have produced "art", which in many cases actually equates to "popular entertainment" for as long as there have been people. Which is for at least 10's of thousands of years before these industries (or even the concept of copyright) existed. Producing "creative works" appears to be a human trait.
If you were a store owner and you recognised someone who had stolen from you not once, but three times, would you allow him into your store?
But should you be able to bar someone from every store on the planet? Without needing to provide any actual evidence to back up your claim... All too often with these kind of things the actual plan is to have one group who's word will be trusted unconditionally (and who can never be accused of wrongdoing themselves) whilst anyone else will just be ignored. Except when someone outside the trusted group manages to impersonate someone inside it. If it's your store you can generally bar anyone entry for just about any reason anyway.
Proposed legislation like this is based on an out-of-date mindset that internet access is some sort of above-and-beyond privilege to be closely regulated.
If this kind of law were to actually be applied with anything approaching even handedness the first "people" removed from the net wouldn't be individuals trading popular entertainment. Instead it would be a wide variety of commercial entities. (Probably including a fair few in the entertainments business, along with those in the software and even news businesses). The reason being that there are businesses for which copyright infringment is "business as usual", yet even recent draconian versions of copyright laws appear to be ineffective against them.
But if he must give you the source code, and must allow you to redistribute it, then surely there won't be a market willing to pay $10M for a copy when the first person who bought it can simply give it away for free if they like.
It depends if the person paying $10M (or whatever) intends distributing the software in the first place...
It's not different in a legally meaningful way. It doesn't assert any rights that aren't reserved under copyright. It *cannot* do any such thing. It does not "take copyright and turn it inside out." It grants
a distribution license under specific terms that are valid *because* a copyright is valid.
That kind of claim would make more sense in respect of EULAs.
You may *want* the GPL to be "different". Most of the "never been tested in court" crowd seem to want it to be different from other software licenses.
Many "other software licenses" which are something completly different.
The problem with that approach is, if the GPL is somehow invalid, many other publishing licenses will fall to the same argument.
Which would lead to the GPL being supported by some unlikely parties.
The Skype case is in Munich, Germany, a US court does not exactly set any precedent here. But I doubt the decision will be much different to how it would be if it was, as the GPL has been upheld quite often in Germany as well.
Which makes it even stranger that Skype is arguing about "Anti-Trust laws", AFAIK, this is a US concept. As well as why they didn't make this argument to the original judge.
I have a coworker that is very interested in living off grid, and is also an engineer, and cheap to boot. As much as he wanted solar, he couldn't afford it. Why? The payback period (without subsidies) is 100 years! "
What kind of engineer? Sanitation enginneer? That's just utterly rediculous.
Maybe he should have been looking at producing methane from waste:)
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What you're missing is the fact that our societies are highly corrupt, even though we tell ourselves that corruption only exists in Africa or China.
Also many people continue to believe this even when faced with evidence otherwise. Consider the way that politicans continue to be trusted even after they have been caught telling lies about virtually everything.
I'd quite like to see George Bush fight the war on terror personally, on the front line, with no more armor and weapons than any other field soldier. Him and every member of his cabinet past and present.
Just them? Why not send every war supporter in the US Govermnent with them...
I'd *LOVE* to see Rumsfeld and Cheney on the streets of Ramallah and Baghdad. I'd love to see the look in their eyes as reason and perspective finally take hold. I'd love to see them suddenly realize their lives, and the lives of over 4000 U.S. soldiers and 700,000+ Iraqi civilians
Ramallah isn't in Iraq...
would have been better spent fighting against malnutrition, disease, and lack of medical care.
Would you trust them to spend this money in a way which did actually make a positive contribution to anything?
The biggest "security implication" perceived by the FAA is interference with air traffic. However, the FAA lumps all UAVs into one category, from the Predator on down to tiny biomimetic dragonflys.
Whilst birds are considered a danger to aviation, a not especially large bird can cause serious damage to an aircraft or engine. I'm unware of an insect causing problems to an aircaft in flight. Indeed the only insect related accident appears to have been due to one building a nest in a pitot.
And contrary to the belief of many, very few UAVs are armed. Only two US UAVs in operation carry payloads. The rest carry cameras.
The glass in a camera is likely to be harder than the bones in a bird. Not healthy for jet engines!
Fibreglass amd carbon fibre reinforced plastic are so transparent to radar that they have been used to keep radar gear out of the weather for years.
Including radar systems on aircraft. The covering on many aircraft is made of just such materials.
Gliders, birds, lots of things without metal in them don't show up.
Birds will show up in large flocks. But the typical radar system is going to be set up to ignore anything with a small RCS.
Let's see ... if you can buy a UAV or overrun the control station, then you can target anyone within the fuel range. You can easily crash into an airliner in takeoff, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. You cane easily spread chemical weapons, not so easy, but quite plausibly.
You can also do this using a truck...
Consider the glider pilot. Let's say that he has a transponder. He's not required to, but he does. His transponder fails. Now, he's invisible to the the UAV. His airplane is painted the same color as the clouds (white) because fiberglass and heat don't work well together. His fiberglass airplane is invisible to radar.
Such a glider is also going to be invisible to ATC and aircraft with their own radars.
if the UAV's coming out of the sun, he's never going to see it, and it won't see him. A person would have seen him, but the UAV doesn't have a person looking out all the windows.
A human pilot may be able to see a glider. Depending on how it's approaching and if the pilot is looking out of the window.
Localities can regulate them if needed to address local issues, such as flying near power lines
Checking power lines is an obvious application for a UAV.
Most if not all UAV's cannot detect traffic around them, in other words, if the pilot in the control center is not flying then they can't see you.
:)
Unless the UAV carries an appropriate transponder then ATC and other air traffic can't "see" the UAV too easily.
Even with the pilot on the stick the view is very limited and are unable to look around to see what is going on.
Visibility isn't always too good in piloted aircraft either
But the human is very much still in the cab. Believe it or not John Deere's system has an EULA that you have to agree to when you active the system. You have to click "I agree" on the computer screen that you won't sue John Deere when your tractor runs over a house because you were too stupid to steer around it or turn at the end of a row.
:)
That's probably something which general satnav could do with. Especially when truckers use systems with maps which are only suitable for cars omitting such details as road width
If you know much about the state of UAVs these days, research and development is going mainly into autonomous vehicles. Human controllers are definitely in the loop, defining waypoints, orbits, and so forth, but they aren't being flown directly by pilots, unlike the current crop of *military* UAVs that are in operation right now. The goal of UAVs is to have the plane take off, fly a particular mission, do something, and then fly back and land. All without a pilot controlling it. This isn't some future thing. This is what UAVs in research labs are doing right now.
There's also likely to be a difference between civil and military UAVs. Military designers might well want to reduce RCS, not have an active transponder and have more autonomy. Since you don't want a UAV to be transmitting over enemy territory.
Whereas it might make more sense to fit a civil UAV with a transponder and TCAS.
I say make that even simpler. Any cop who uses the Taser receives it afterwards.
Presumably with the person using it on said cop being either the person they used it on or his/her next of kin...
Those are terrorist acts yes, but invading a country is no way to stop terrorism. Terrorists usually operate in small groups and don't really have idealistic ties to any country, but rather have ties to ideology, religion, or sometimes just money.
There are cases of international terrorists being funded (and otherwise supported) by national governments, but these tend to be governments large military budgets in the first place. e.g. US, UK, Russia, France, Israel, China, etc.
Invading a country is, however, a good way to ensure that country has a well motivated militia. Yet militiamen are rarely motivated to "take the fight to the enemy", even when the invaders have travelled only a few hundred miles.
America was doing nothing about all this until it happened to them too,
The US had been doing plenty of things to upset a large proportion of the planet for decades. Indeed the date of the 9/11 attack was more indicative of South American involvement, a connection which would have been even stronger had it taken place 2 years later.
and then they went waaaaay too overboard on upping their security policies.
Except when things have been tested it still appears to be quite easy to smuggle weapons onto passenger aircraft. A lot of the "upping security" appears to be more for show and annoying passengers and aircrews...
Even with a heavy police state there will always be ways of causing problems,
In a police state the obvious thing for trouble makers to do is to join the police.
many that nobody ever really thinks about (like hijacking a plane and doing a suicide run).
Actually plenty of people had though about using airliners as improvised cruise missiles. The earliest example which comes to mind is "The Medusa Touch", a movie made in 1978. There's also the pilot of "The Lone Gunmen", which has a great many points in common with the actual happenings.
You are more likely to catch terrorists early if everyone is being carefully monitored, but what would you rather - live in America of the 90s, or live in a 1984 style "Big Brother is Watching You" dystopia?
Actually you may be less likely to catch any terrorists in such a situation because terrorists are very uncommon. Trying to watch everyone means that most of the time you are unlikely to be watching any terrorists at all.
PS there have been a couple of terrorist attacks in the UK since September the 11th, one even in the place where I was born (Glasgow), and there was at least one in London.
The press is highly selective in what they call "terrorist", e.g. BNP members Robert Cottage and David Jackson tend not to be called "terrorists", even though they were caught will a large amount of explosives and weapons. The mainstream media also appeared reluctant to call Miles Cooper a "terrorist. Though the judge at his trial had no such hesitation when he was found guilty.
I'd quite like to see George Bush fight a war on malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care rather than a war on 'terror'..
Why, arn't these big enough problems now?
LBJ started the War on Poverty back in 1964... We've spent trillions of dollars, and employed millions of "soldiers" (government employees) and by all measures it's been an abject failure.
By the measure of "pointless government exercise" it appears to have been highly sucessful.
My question is- let's say the RIAA downloads a song that has a name like 'all of metallica' but contains something else that they don't have the copyright to; doesn't this make them guilty of illegal downloading as well? Do they contact the copyright holder to inform them when they find such downloads? Do they pay their own extortionist damage amounts?
The RIAA, together with the MPAA, are founder members of the "Hypocrits R Us" club. They are quite happy to enguage in "piracy" themselves, the MPAA's even been caught at least twice in recent years.
I could be wrong but my understanding is the 'piracy' label came from the early days of DRM/copy protection. The groups that hacked/cracked the DRM had BBS handles that had pirate themes. They added ANSI type graphics, often a picture of a pirate ship or pirate with an eye patch, that said such and such program was cracked by Capt. Cracker and Scruvy crew. I remember those from my Apple II+/Commodore 64 days.
The use of the term "piracy" to refer to copyright infringement is older. These people were just taking the piss out of it's use in that way 20-30 years ago.
Judging from the number of elderly, children, blind people, dead people, etc. that the RIAA labels have targeted, I'd say most likely they do it with a random number generator.
A random number generator might be more accurate. Especially if they didn't filter out "self", "friendlies" & "RFC1918".
you say it was extortion, but I have to ask, *did* she download copyrighted music without paying for it? If the answer is yes, I would not call that 'extortion' but 'getting legitimately caught breaking the law'.
Reading between the lines of the article it appears that the only check file names rather than actual content. Movies and popular music titles frequently use words and terms which are also used in completly different contexts e.g. there is a classical piece of music called "Four Minutes and Thirty Two Seconds", (consisting of 272 minutes of silence) which could easily wind up as a false positive for the song by Madonna mentioned. Similarly we have no way of knowing how accurate the matching of IP addresses to people actually is.
It would be more accurate to say that someone has been "accused of breaking the law, without much in the way of actual evidence to support that accusation".
I doubt they are 'targeting' any specific school, but I strongly suspect IPs resolving to unilag.edu.ng are handled differently then those resolving to yale.edu ,
:) Effectivly the RIAA would be paying towards the education of these students.
Most likely they'd want to avoid a "law school".
where the students are more likely to just pay a settlement rather then wipe their arse with the notices...
With the whole thing being considered a useful "student project"
It's considerably damaging to artistic industries as they are now,
The same industries who have a history of "crying wolf" over any new piece of technology which might require them to change some aspect of their business model. Yet after decades of doing this you still have businesses which are highly profitable.
plus to the potential of art to remain economically feasible
People have produced "art", which in many cases actually equates to "popular entertainment" for as long as there have been people. Which is for at least 10's of thousands of years before these industries (or even the concept of copyright) existed. Producing "creative works" appears to be a human trait.
If you were a store owner and you recognised someone who had stolen from you not once, but three times, would you allow him into your store?
But should you be able to bar someone from every store on the planet? Without needing to provide any actual evidence to back up your claim... All too often with these kind of things the actual plan is to have one group who's word will be trusted unconditionally (and who can never be accused of wrongdoing themselves) whilst anyone else will just be ignored. Except when someone outside the trusted group manages to impersonate someone inside it.
If it's your store you can generally bar anyone entry for just about any reason anyway.
Proposed legislation like this is based on an out-of-date mindset that internet access is some sort of above-and-beyond privilege to be closely regulated.
If this kind of law were to actually be applied with anything approaching even handedness the first "people" removed from the net wouldn't be individuals trading popular entertainment. Instead it would be a wide variety of commercial entities. (Probably including a fair few in the entertainments business, along with those in the software and even news businesses). The reason being that there are businesses for which copyright infringment is "business as usual", yet even recent draconian versions of copyright laws appear to be ineffective against them.
But if he must give you the source code, and must allow you to redistribute it, then surely there won't be a market willing to pay $10M for a copy when the first person who bought it can simply give it away for free if they like.
It depends if the person paying $10M (or whatever) intends distributing the software in the first place...
It's not different in a legally meaningful way. It doesn't assert any rights that aren't reserved under copyright. It *cannot* do any such thing. It does not "take copyright and turn it inside out." It grants a distribution license under specific terms that are valid *because* a copyright is valid.
That kind of claim would make more sense in respect of EULAs.
You may *want* the GPL to be "different". Most of the "never been tested in court" crowd seem to want it to be different from other software licenses.
Many "other software licenses" which are something completly different.
The problem with that approach is, if the GPL is somehow invalid, many other publishing licenses will fall to the same argument.
Which would lead to the GPL being supported by some unlikely parties.
The Skype case is in Munich, Germany, a US court does not exactly set any precedent here. But I doubt the decision will be much different to how it would be if it was, as the GPL has been upheld quite often in Germany as well.
Which makes it even stranger that Skype is arguing about "Anti-Trust laws", AFAIK, this is a US concept. As well as why they didn't make this argument to the original judge.
I have a coworker that is very interested in living off grid, and is also an engineer, and cheap to boot. As much as he wanted solar, he couldn't afford it. Why? The payback period (without subsidies) is 100 years! "
:)
What kind of engineer? Sanitation enginneer? That's just utterly rediculous.
Maybe he should have been looking at producing methane from waste