The only reason that copyright stands out as criminal is because MAFIAA lobbyists pushed hard for the strongest protections that they could wrangle out of congress for their industry, without regard to true justice and indeed out of a sense of malice and a desire for revenge against those whom they saw as costing them even one penny of potential revenue (real or imagined).
It's also cheaper for their members to have copyright be criminal. Another factor is that criminal law tends to be of little use where the perpetrator is a corporation. It's not like you can call the cops and have them haul away Sony Records, the MPAA or even SCO.
The nice thing about civil court is that even if found guilty, the punishment can be adjusted to suit the crime. EG: "Yeah we think she was guilty and we award the defendat $1.00 and all copies of the video."
The same can happen in a criminal court. With someone being sentenced to "time served".
Keep in mind that this guy did a LOT more than just spamming or even selling drugs. He fled the country, was laundering money, and (most egregiously) was trying to hire a hitman to kill one of the children of a witness against him.
Wonder which of these actually prompted the authorities to do something about him. If they can deal with him why can't they deal with other spamming scumbags?
Good old syslog comes to the rescue. Besides logging locally to disk, also add a line to/etc/syslog.conf to log to a remote machine. That's probably enough read-only for you.
A simpler (and older solution) would be to have the syslog file be a printer or paper tape punch. Even have/dev/console be a teletype.
The problem with internet radio and P2P is that the labels can't control it. They want to kill kazaa and bittorrent not because their stuff is on it, but because they can't keep indie stuff off of it like they can the radio.
It isn't just "indie stuff" that they might be concerned about. The likes of a cover version having to compete with the original can also be quite scary to them.
With a rigged two-party system, people like me don't get a candidate that they can vote for, because you get parties which end up with alliances which de facto disallow candidates of particular combinations of positions. So, for instance you won't see a pro-choice and pro-gun rights candidate get nominated for the general election, even though that might be just fine with the general electorate. And you won't see an anti big government candidate from either party because you get the most allies in political party by handing out government paychecks to supporters, their relatives and friends.
Nor would you see an anti drug prohibition candidate or one for reducing copyright terms and scope; since that is indirectly anti "big government".
Bubbleheads on cable TV have sold many of us on the idea that democracy is in crisis somehow if they can't announce a winner within hours of election night- which is totally absurd.
Especially considering that plenty of countries, outside of the US, do manage to return results within hours using completly manual systems for counting ballot papers. This appears to be a way to draw attention away from real problems such as well funded lobby groups, points of view unrepresented by politicans/candidates, politicans who have been politicans "too long", etc.
Recounts are quite cheap
Especially if they are done "there and then" with ballot papers, counters, scrutineers, candidates, etc all in one place.
we have months to get it right
Which is a quite unusual situation. In many places the results of an election take effect within days, even hours.
What you'd rather have as a recount worker is completely irrelevant to me as a voter. This is not being done for your benefit. And it's not like you have to do this all the time. I couldn't care less how much time or sweat it takes you to get it right. I'd much rather see individual batches of votes corrupted in different random ways by numerous temp workers, than see all the votes be corrupted at once in the same way "efficiently" by a single source of error.
The problems in the US run rather deeper than just how votes get recorded and counted. You'd also need to eliminate recording voter's political allegance/party membership on lists of voters, differing nomination rules for different candidates, having officials of political parties conduct elections, etc, etc.
There are now different statistical errors associated with a recount of the deck (along with some fixed errors like voter error).
"Voter error" may actually indicate a problem with the election itself. e.g. no way to indicate "none of the above".
That's because the count errors are random and not systematic (always favoring one outcome). If they were systematic, like a corrupt voting machine or a corrupt recount worker might create, then an efficient recount would only confirm the same error. A "dubious deck of cards" will have to do because I don't trust you to regenerate the deck.
The low tech method of counting by hand with scrutineers present solves a lot of problems. If you use machines it's virtually impossible to find suitably qualified scrutineers...
Are they completely out of touch with technology (it is often a guy in his 60s or 70s proposing the law)
What might be a better guide for how out of touch they are would be how long they have been a politican. Either in total or as a proportion of their life.
The major players are israeli jews and palestinian muslims; the jews have been screwing with the palestinians for rather a long time and have gone so far as to build a wall and make all the palestinians stand in line to cross it (making them 2nd class citizens in their own country). In a very real sense, the (specific) jews did do it.
The heart of the conflict in Palestine isn't religious. It's more a case of invasion by a foreign people who have made up a claim to have more right to be somewhere than the people who were already living there.
Or is it only terrorism when Muslims kill, but "patriotism" when Christians kill?
Or as it is better known "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Which leads to this kind of double standard. Thus you see some terrorists vilified and other terrorists excused, even to the point of making out they are not "terrorists" at all. There have been several non-muslims arrested in both the US and the UK, some of them have even been tried. Whilst their actions fit the dictionary definition of "terrorist" that word rarely if ever appears in the (mainstream) press.
e.g. Robert Cottage and David Jackson.
One thing to remember is the original article isn't "news". What would be news would be if a government were to start using "anti-terrorist" laws exclusivly against actual terrorists (including those they might support or be sympathetic to the aims of)... Were this to actually happen you'd expect to see headlines line "Today's Terrorist Haul: 5 Animal Rights; 4 Anti-Abortionists; 3 Zionists; 2 Anti-Gay; 2 Islamic; 2 IRA; 1 BNP"
The problem is that for the GPL to be at all enforceable, you have to have copyright laws.
The GPL would probably work just fine even if copyright terms were 5-10 years. Just because it needs copyright laws dosn't mean it needs the kind of effectivly infinite copyright laws we have now.
The source is for a Skype VOIP PHONE! It doesn't work if you don't have the Internet!
Even if the Skype protocol is intended for Intenet usage it will probably work on any IP network. Possibly with more trouble than H.323, SIP or IAX2. IIRC Skype is ment to be peer to peer, or does the thing just fail if Skype's servers cannot be connected to?
Hey, here in Australia, It's not really our place or even possible for us to write to U.S. Senators and Congress people about the state of the law in your country!
Assuming they don't try "exporting their laws"...
I completely disagree with what the RIAA is doing, but somehow I think that the members of parliament here will quite happily ignore the state of the 'states, and won't get involved, even if everyone here wrote them about the issue!
So the Australian Parliment won't be changing any Australian laws in the name of "Free Trade" Agreement with the US (or anywhere else for that matter) and all Australian police will point out to any RIAA/MPAA reps that the last A dosn't stand for "Australia" and they should leave before finding themselves locked up for wasting police time.
See all the posts about how piracy is booming at their school? It's largely new stuff. These are teenagers we're talking about -- they're not building their collections of Elvis Presley music or Bing Crosby movies, nor are they trading old Apple ][ warez.
A "pirate" download can fall into 3 catatagories.
A) The downloader would not have bothered with the whatever if they couldn't download it. Which also includes people who couldn't buy it even if they wanted to...
B) They are less likely to buy it because they have downloaded it.
C) They are more likely to buy it because they have downloaded it.
Whilst the RIAA/MPAA/etc would tend to claim that everything is B this self evidently isn't the case. What is most interesting is the ratio between B and C. Only if B is significently more common than C does it make sense to persue downloaders. Indeed if C is more common than B it's actually self destructive to persue downloaders.
The copyright law used to allow copyrights to expire in a reasonable period of time. I felt that before the time of the "Sonny Bono Copyright act" that the period was already longer than was reasonable...so they extended it. Then with the DMCA they extended it again.
The period in the 18th century was 14 years, someone recently cacluated that the optimum length in the 21st century is also 14 years. Thus the equivalent of the 18th century term now is probably something closer to 5 years...
I collect 60's and 70's live concerts- NO ONE OWNS THEM with the possibility of the taper.
Actually all sorts of people could claim ownership over them. Not just the actual musicians and song writers. On the other hand it's unlikely that they know they have possible copyright claims of your recordings.
Off the top of my head, the last time a federally-ordered scientific study was done on the reasons for keeping Cannabis in the same legal bracket as heroin, the recommendation was, as it has systematically been for every study in every country for about 40 years, to decriminalize the substance.
If anything Cannabis is more illegal than heroin. Given that morphine and related alkaloids can be perscription drugs.
The RIAA has a right to sue anyone against whom they have evidence suggesting copyright infringement against one of their members.
Actually anyone can (normally) sue anyone for any reason. If that reason turns out to be bogus and the case goes to court the judge is likely to be rather unimpressed with the plaintiff. If someone does this a lot they might find themselves needing to gain a court's permission to sue.
The RIAA doesn't have a track record of playing fair in their suits. They've sued people using very little evidence, and have persisted in their cases, often driving innocent people to settle to avoid legal fees.
They have also tended to get upset when countersued. I wonder what would happen if they were sued in response to one of these "settlement letters"...
RIAA has a right to sue anyone they think has committed copyright infringement against one of their members. This is because there is a _law_ that was passed by _congress_ supported by the _constitution_ that gives them this right.
Except that they are not suing anyone. What they are doing is sending universities a list of IP addresses and asking that university (for free) to translate those addresses into the name of a person. Note that the university is perfectly entitled to ignore such a request unless it's made through a relevent court order... If the RIAA were interested in enforcing copyright the simplist thing for them to do would be to sue the universities in question (as "corporate people").
exactly! there were a couple of 40's, but the majority were 80GB's...I believe they have faulty heat dissipation, I know the ones I'm running now raised my case temps by almost 20F..had to install 2 80mm fans just for the HDD's.
There are all sorts of possible reasons, including component failure on the board and the formulation of the magnetic coating. No doubt, as with anything else, these get varied for all sorts of reasons.
While it's all fine and good that the feds and others catch the true bad guys,
Assuming this is what they are actually doing. Historically letting "law enforcement" snoop all over the place dosn't have a good record of protecting the public from the "real bad guys". (Even in cases where law enforcement is free of "really bad guys" or not actually helping some of them.)
I can't help but wonder if the net sum of all digital evils would be less if the goal were simply to make everything as absolutely secure as possible from everyone. While that would hamper some cases, the net good of having fewer people exploited elsewhere, and fewer criminals hiding through use of compromised machines, could more than offset that. Our very infrastructure is threatened by vulnerabilities.
Thing is that this threat is both more serious and less visible than a handful of incompetent bomb makers.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason that copyright stands out as criminal is because MAFIAA lobbyists pushed hard for the strongest protections that they could wrangle out of congress for their industry, without regard to true justice and indeed out of a sense of malice and a desire for revenge against those whom they saw as costing them even one penny of potential revenue (real or imagined).
It's also cheaper for their members to have copyright be criminal. Another factor is that criminal law tends to be of little use where the perpetrator is a corporation. It's not like you can call the cops and have them haul away Sony Records, the MPAA or even SCO.
What? Why would she be charged with theft? Did she take anyone's material goods? She did nothing even remotely similar to theft.
If anything she has more claim to be the victim of theft. Unless her ticket was refunded and the camcorder returned.
The nice thing about civil court is that even if found guilty, the punishment can be adjusted to suit the crime. EG: "Yeah we think she was guilty and we award the defendat $1.00 and all copies of the video."
The same can happen in a criminal court. With someone being sentenced to "time served".
Keep in mind that this guy did a LOT more than just spamming or even selling drugs. He fled the country, was laundering money, and (most egregiously) was trying to hire a hitman to kill one of the children of a witness against him.
Wonder which of these actually prompted the authorities to do something about him.
If they can deal with him why can't they deal with other spamming scumbags?
Good old syslog comes to the rescue. Besides logging locally to disk, also add a line to /etc/syslog.conf to log to a remote machine. That's probably enough read-only for you.
/dev/console be a teletype.
A simpler (and older solution) would be to have the syslog file be a printer or paper tape punch. Even have
The problem with internet radio and P2P is that the labels can't control it. They want to kill kazaa and bittorrent not because their stuff is on it, but because they can't keep indie stuff off of it like they can the radio.
It isn't just "indie stuff" that they might be concerned about. The likes of a cover version having to compete with the original can also be quite scary to them.
With a rigged two-party system, people like me don't get a candidate that they can vote for, because you get parties which end up with alliances which de facto disallow candidates of particular combinations of positions. So, for instance you won't see a pro-choice and pro-gun rights candidate get nominated for the general election, even though that might be just fine with the general electorate. And you won't see an anti big government candidate from either party because you get the most allies in political party by handing out government paychecks to supporters, their relatives and friends.
Nor would you see an anti drug prohibition candidate or one for reducing copyright terms and scope; since that is indirectly anti "big government".
Bubbleheads on cable TV have sold many of us on the idea that democracy is in crisis somehow if they can't announce a winner within hours of election night- which is totally absurd.
Especially considering that plenty of countries, outside of the US, do manage to return results within hours using completly manual systems for counting ballot papers.
This appears to be a way to draw attention away from real problems such as well funded lobby groups, points of view unrepresented by politicans/candidates, politicans who have been politicans "too long", etc.
Recounts are quite cheap
Especially if they are done "there and then" with ballot papers, counters, scrutineers, candidates, etc all in one place.
we have months to get it right
Which is a quite unusual situation. In many places the results of an election take effect within days, even hours.
What you'd rather have as a recount worker is completely irrelevant to me as a voter. This is not being done for your benefit. And it's not like you have to do this all the time. I couldn't care less how much time or sweat it takes you to get it right. I'd much rather see individual batches of votes corrupted in different random ways by numerous temp workers, than see all the votes be corrupted at once in the same way "efficiently" by a single source of error.
The problems in the US run rather deeper than just how votes get recorded and counted. You'd also need to eliminate recording voter's political allegance/party membership on lists of voters, differing nomination rules for different candidates, having officials of political parties conduct elections, etc, etc.
There are now different statistical errors associated with a recount of the deck (along with some fixed errors like voter error).
"Voter error" may actually indicate a problem with the election itself. e.g. no way to indicate "none of the above".
That's because the count errors are random and not systematic (always favoring one outcome). If they were systematic, like a corrupt voting machine or a corrupt recount worker might create, then an efficient recount would only confirm the same error. A "dubious deck of cards" will have to do because I don't trust you to regenerate the deck.
The low tech method of counting by hand with scrutineers present solves a lot of problems. If you use machines it's virtually impossible to find suitably qualified scrutineers...
It's that one time you're wrong and lose 800,000 SSNs that comes back to bite you in the ass.
Remembering that if these SSNs were only being used for their intended purpose in the first place there probably wouldn't be a big problem.
Are they completely out of touch with technology (it is often a guy in his 60s or 70s proposing the law)
What might be a better guide for how out of touch they are would be how long they have been a politican. Either in total or as a proportion of their life.
The major players are israeli jews and palestinian muslims; the jews have been screwing with the palestinians for rather a long time and have gone so far as to build a wall and make all the palestinians stand in line to cross it (making them 2nd class citizens in their own country). In a very real sense, the (specific) jews did do it.
The heart of the conflict in Palestine isn't religious. It's more a case of invasion by a foreign people who have made up a claim to have more right to be somewhere than the people who were already living there.
Or is it only terrorism when Muslims kill, but "patriotism" when Christians kill?
Or as it is better known "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Which leads to this kind of double standard. Thus you see some terrorists vilified and other terrorists excused, even to the point of making out they are not "terrorists" at all. There have been several non-muslims arrested in both the US and the UK, some of them have even been tried. Whilst their actions fit the dictionary definition of "terrorist" that word rarely if ever appears in the (mainstream) press. e.g. Robert Cottage and David Jackson.
One thing to remember is the original article isn't "news". What would be news would be if a government were to start using "anti-terrorist" laws exclusivly against actual terrorists (including those they might support or be sympathetic to the aims of)...
Were this to actually happen you'd expect to see headlines line "Today's Terrorist Haul: 5 Animal Rights; 4 Anti-Abortionists; 3 Zionists; 2 Anti-Gay; 2 Islamic; 2 IRA; 1 BNP"
The problem is that for the GPL to be at all enforceable, you have to have copyright laws.
The GPL would probably work just fine even if copyright terms were 5-10 years. Just because it needs copyright laws dosn't mean it needs the kind of effectivly infinite copyright laws we have now.
The source is for a Skype VOIP PHONE! It doesn't work if you don't have the Internet!
Even if the Skype protocol is intended for Intenet usage it will probably work on any IP network. Possibly with more trouble than H.323, SIP or IAX2. IIRC Skype is ment to be peer to peer, or does the thing just fail if Skype's servers cannot be connected to?
Hey, here in Australia, It's not really our place or even possible for us to write to U.S. Senators and Congress people about the state of the law in your country!
Assuming they don't try "exporting their laws"...
I completely disagree with what the RIAA is doing, but somehow I think that the members of parliament here will quite happily ignore the state of the 'states, and won't get involved, even if everyone here wrote them about the issue!
So the Australian Parliment won't be changing any Australian laws in the name of "Free Trade" Agreement with the US (or anywhere else for that matter) and all Australian police will point out to any RIAA/MPAA reps that the last A dosn't stand for "Australia" and they should leave before finding themselves locked up for wasting police time.
See all the posts about how piracy is booming at their school? It's largely new stuff. These are teenagers we're talking about -- they're not building their collections of Elvis Presley music or Bing Crosby movies, nor are they trading old Apple ][ warez.
A "pirate" download can fall into 3 catatagories.
A) The downloader would not have bothered with the whatever if they couldn't download it. Which also includes people who couldn't buy it even if they wanted to...
B) They are less likely to buy it because they have downloaded it.
C) They are more likely to buy it because they have downloaded it.
Whilst the RIAA/MPAA/etc would tend to claim that everything is B this self evidently isn't the case. What is most interesting is the ratio between B and C. Only if B is significently more common than C does it make sense to persue downloaders. Indeed if C is more common than B it's actually self destructive to persue downloaders.
The copyright law used to allow copyrights to expire in a reasonable period of time. I felt that before the time of the "Sonny Bono Copyright act" that the period was already longer than was reasonable...so they extended it. Then with the DMCA they extended it again.
The period in the 18th century was 14 years, someone recently cacluated that the optimum length in the 21st century is also 14 years. Thus the equivalent of the 18th century term now is probably something closer to 5 years...
I collect 60's and 70's live concerts- NO ONE OWNS THEM with the possibility of the taper.
Actually all sorts of people could claim ownership over them. Not just the actual musicians and song writers.
On the other hand it's unlikely that they know they have possible copyright claims of your recordings.
Off the top of my head, the last time a federally-ordered scientific study was done on the reasons for keeping Cannabis in the same legal bracket as heroin, the recommendation was, as it has systematically been for every study in every country for about 40 years, to decriminalize the substance.
If anything Cannabis is more illegal than heroin. Given that morphine and related alkaloids can be perscription drugs.
The RIAA has a right to sue anyone against whom they have evidence suggesting copyright infringement against one of their members.
Actually anyone can (normally) sue anyone for any reason. If that reason turns out to be bogus and the case goes to court the judge is likely to be rather unimpressed with the plaintiff. If someone does this a lot they might find themselves needing to gain a court's permission to sue.
The RIAA doesn't have a track record of playing fair in their suits. They've sued people using very little evidence, and have persisted in their cases, often driving innocent people to settle to avoid legal fees.
They have also tended to get upset when countersued. I wonder what would happen if they were sued in response to one of these "settlement letters"...
RIAA has a right to sue anyone they think has committed copyright infringement against one of their members. This is because there is a _law_ that was passed by _congress_ supported by the _constitution_ that gives them this right.
Except that they are not suing anyone. What they are doing is sending universities a list of IP addresses and asking that university (for free) to translate those addresses into the name of a person. Note that the university is perfectly entitled to ignore such a request unless it's made through a relevent court order...
If the RIAA were interested in enforcing copyright the simplist thing for them to do would be to sue the universities in question (as "corporate people").
exactly! there were a couple of 40's, but the majority were 80GB's...I believe they have faulty heat dissipation, I know the ones I'm running now raised my case temps by almost 20F..had to install 2 80mm fans just for the HDD's.
There are all sorts of possible reasons, including component failure on the board and the formulation of the magnetic coating. No doubt, as with anything else, these get varied for all sorts of reasons.
While it's all fine and good that the feds and others catch the true bad guys,
Assuming this is what they are actually doing. Historically letting "law enforcement" snoop all over the place dosn't have a good record of protecting the public from the "real bad guys". (Even in cases where law enforcement is free of "really bad guys" or not actually helping some of them.)
I can't help but wonder if the net sum of all digital evils would be less if the goal were simply to make everything as absolutely secure as possible from everyone. While that would hamper some cases, the net good of having fewer people exploited elsewhere, and fewer criminals hiding through use of compromised machines, could more than offset that. Our very infrastructure is threatened by vulnerabilities.
Thing is that this threat is both more serious and less visible than a handful of incompetent bomb makers.
Legacy documents should be saved in PDF period.
Or if PDF isn't what's needed maybe someone needs to design Archive Document Format.