You might note that the motivation is the promotion of useful arts and that a monopoly on an expression is anything but a promotion.
The idea is that the limited monopoly was intended as a means to an end. With the means having become treated as more important than the end. To the point that current laws may be a hinderance rather than a help.
How copyright grew from 14 years to 75 is an inexcusable tale of greed.
Even if it can be shown that 14 years copyright is (or was) a good thing from the POV of encouraging publication (N.B. AFAIK this has yet to be demonstrated.) that dosn't imply anything about 75 year copyrights. Plenty of things are good in moderation but bad in excess.
Surely, the useful arts are not promoted if publication is limited beyond the lifetime of the author and the cultural currency of the work.
These variables are independent. There's also a third variable, the lifetime of the work as a viable commercial entity. (This can sometimes be measured in weeks or months. Not uncommonly it is "never"). A copyright can exist on something which has been out of print for decades (in the extreme copyright can exist on something which no longer exists).
just because you have two carriers doesn't mean their fibers don't run in the same duct, everybody cross-leases dark fiber to everybody else. you need protection from backhoe fade, you have to do the interagency engineering for separate feeds on separate systems from separate directions. will at least triple your cost to bring it up.
Even then you have no idea what happens once the cables leave your land, they could still wind up in the same ducting half a mile away.
An easier way would be to have it centallized in a database. You type in where you want to dig, In GPS coordinates, and it tells you what is located underneath, if anything.
Assuming that whoever originally installed it recorded the relevent GPS datum points in the first place. Underground services predate GPS too. Also that the pipe/ductwork/directly burried cable/etc is still where it was when it was first put in the ground. Then just hope there won't be a fuss made about the risk of terrorists getting at the database...
And is there really much difference between having large sections of the economy run by the state, and large sections of the economy given special treatment by the state for lucrative military contracts as is the case in the USA (Boeing, LM etc) ?
The difference between state ownership and "corporate welfare" of supposedly private companies (especially if it is to the point where they'd otherwise go bankrupt) is that the former is more likely to give public accountability than the latter.
Instead of spending huge amounts of money on social programs, we spend absolutely obscene amounts of money on the military. Money we don't even have... we are borrowing incredibly heavily to finance our war machine.
The US may spend huge amounts of money on the military, but it dosn't appear to buy much. Be it the inability of the USAF/NORAD to react effectivly to the first "live" threat or soldiers being sent to war without basic equiptment.
You are twice as likely to die in a traffic accident than we are to be killed with a gun. Gun-crimes do not worry us; we avoid the crime-ridden inner cities where most gun-crimes occur.
Those being some of the places where the "war" part of the "war on (some) drugs" is taking place.
And if we do go there, we can defend ourselves; we haven't been made impotent by our government and are not defenseless.
At least for the moment, dosn't stop the US Government trying.
However, it is very difficult to avoid places where there are cars...
Especially where you have urban areas apparently designed for the private car first.
True, but they can use techniques to make it very hard for you to do so. Check out spread spectrum communications - they smear out the signal over KHz or MHz instead of at one discrete carrier, making it almost impossible to pick out from background noise and requiring a very wideband jammer to block all of it.
If the signal is already "almost impossible to pick out from background noise" all you need to do is increase the amount of background noise by a fairly small amount. Unless you need to use (very) low power spread spectrum transmissions your own communications will be unaffected no matter how much bandwidth your jammers use. A "wideband jammer" needs only be a source of RF "white noise".
I myself cannot imagine the mental disorder neccesary to consider as information property or
the absence of realism which leads one to believe that it can be controlled.
At a time in the past, when recorded information was tighly bound to a physical object, the fiction of recorded information being like physical property may have made some sense.
That we are even having this debate is quite surreal and fills me with optimism that by the logic of natural law our children will look back at the 'intellectual property' debacle at the start of the 21st century, and piss their pants laughing.
The current concept of "copyright" dates to the printing press. A machine which could produce cheap copies if you wanted many copies. But the machine was also expensive to buy and maintain, thus it made sense for a third party to manage both printing and essential preparation steps. Similar business models also made sense with audio and video recordings, especially on disk, they even applied well to broadcasting. What has changed is copying (and moving) information is now an utterly trivial task even if only one copy is required.
Something which is unlikely to be restricted to either theft or police in the US. Also if this is happening systematically it may not be the police officers who deal directly with the public who are responsible.
Burglary rates for Scotland, Austria, and England and Wales are reported as higher for the entire period of 1980 through 2000. For England and Wales, this difference is as much as 50% higher crime rate per capita than the US after 1993.
Don't believe me. Check the figures yourself. I should also point out that these figures come from a UK authority, not another "American urban legend".
Unless both the rate of people reporting crimes to the police and the mechanisms for compiling the figures are the same you may be making a "apples and oranges" comparison. In some cases even comparing figures for different years from the same country can be of little meaning. You should always take politically sensitive statistics originating from governments with a large pinch of salt.
I suppose the proper countermove then would be to make lots of unmanned jamming devices and spread them around like land mines. Then it would take a lot of missles to get rid of all of them...
Lots of expensive missiles to take out cheap jammers...
In an application requires a specific browser to be set as default then the problem is with that application. However it can be an uphill struggle getting the vendor to accept that this is the case. They'd rather blame everything except the inability of their programmers...
At one point in time I used Symantec Corp. I don't remember all of the details exactly, but I think I was trying to uninstall it because LiveUpdate wasn't working. Anyways, after uninstalling it my computer would not start except to safe mode. It took a couple hours of deleting useless fscking registry keys that Symantec had left behind to get everything to work normally again.
NAV is one of those pieces of Windows software which can get into a state where the installer won't operate, because it thinks the product is already installed, and the uninstaller either refuses to run or can't put the machine into a state where the installer is convinced that it can run. Windows installers really need an option along the lines of "OK I'll try installing this software even though it already appears to be installed/I'll stop trying to second guess what the human wants me to do."
Norton AV, OTOH, despite coming from the same company, is a totally different animal
With corporate mergers/buyouts, subcontracting, outsourcing, etc just because two programs have the same branding does not mean they have the same origin. It's perfectly possible to find sets of software which appear to be the same thing with different content but then have a few which turn out to be radically different. It's also possible to find "suites" which have been very obviously stuck together badly.
You need to file in federal court, show that you're affected by that law, and convince the judge that the law is unconstitutional. It costs time and money, and you still need to be able to support your position through the inevitable appeals.
Whilst at the same time avoiding being locked up as a "terrorist"
This just seems like they're throwing a tantrum like an angry 8 year old.
Or like a "corporate person"... Comparing them with the average 8 year old might well be insulting to the child. IIRC when the question was asked "If corporations are people what kind of people are they?" the answer turns out to be along the lines of "The kind of mentally ill people best locked up to protect the public."
God I wish our Federal gov would read and UNDERSTAND the rules that were established that they are REQUIRED to live within.
They will only be required when there is someone enforcing said rules. Otherwise you'll end up with the situation summed up by Mark Twain "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
For those of you who say gee it will be easier to find bad people with this program, ask yourself one question....How many bad people are going to raise their hand and say, "May I please and a bad guy ID"
IIRC there are INS forms which actually ask "are you a terrorist?".
Slashdot Mirror
You might note that the motivation is the promotion of useful arts and that a monopoly on an expression is anything but a promotion.
The idea is that the limited monopoly was intended as a means to an end. With the means having become treated as more important than the end. To the point that current laws may be a hinderance rather than a help.
How copyright grew from 14 years to 75 is an inexcusable tale of greed.
Even if it can be shown that 14 years copyright is (or was) a good thing from the POV of encouraging publication (N.B. AFAIK this has yet to be demonstrated.) that dosn't imply anything about 75 year copyrights. Plenty of things are good in moderation but bad in excess.
Surely, the useful arts are not promoted if publication is limited beyond the lifetime of the author and the cultural currency of the work.
These variables are independent. There's also a third variable, the lifetime of the work as a viable commercial entity. (This can sometimes be measured in weeks or months. Not uncommonly it is "never"). A copyright can exist on something which has been out of print for decades (in the extreme copyright can exist on something which no longer exists).
As others have pointed out, they'll try again and again, and they only have to win once. We have to win every time.
Sounds not unlike fighting terrorists.
just because you have two carriers doesn't mean their fibers don't run in the same duct, everybody cross-leases dark fiber to everybody else.
you need protection from backhoe fade, you have to do the interagency engineering for separate feeds on separate systems from separate directions. will at least triple your cost to bring it up.
Even then you have no idea what happens once the cables leave your land, they could still wind up in the same ducting half a mile away.
An easier way would be to have it centallized in a database. You type in where you want to dig, In GPS coordinates, and it tells you what is located underneath, if anything.
Assuming that whoever originally installed it recorded the relevent GPS datum points in the first place. Underground services predate GPS too. Also that the pipe/ductwork/directly burried cable/etc is still where it was when it was first put in the ground.
Then just hope there won't be a fuss made about the risk of terrorists getting at the database...
I'd like to find the country that has the death penalty for attempted suicide.
Probably the same one which has a "choose how you will die" form of execution and accepts "old age" as a valid answer.
A little more difficult to understand might be the official german site (as its in german...), but easy enough: the word "mord" means "murder",
It might mean "murder" in common usage. But are the legal definitions identical?
Well... how about checking some official and non-propaganda sites?
First you'd need to find a government which didn't use propaganda, good luck. What you need is disinterested third party observations.
And is there really much difference between having large sections of the economy run by the state, and large sections of the economy given special treatment by the state for lucrative military contracts as is the case in the USA (Boeing, LM etc) ?
The difference between state ownership and "corporate welfare" of supposedly private companies (especially if it is to the point where they'd otherwise go bankrupt) is that the former is more likely to give public accountability than the latter.
Instead of spending huge amounts of money on social programs, we spend absolutely obscene amounts of money on the military. Money we don't even have... we are borrowing incredibly heavily to finance our war machine.
The US may spend huge amounts of money on the military, but it dosn't appear to buy much. Be it the inability of the USAF/NORAD to react effectivly to the first "live" threat or soldiers being sent to war without basic equiptment.
You are twice as likely to die in a traffic accident than we are to be killed with a gun. Gun-crimes do not worry us; we avoid the crime-ridden inner cities where most gun-crimes occur.
...
Those being some of the places where the "war" part of the "war on (some) drugs" is taking place.
And if we do go there, we can defend ourselves; we haven't been made impotent by our government and are not defenseless.
At least for the moment, dosn't stop the US Government trying.
However, it is very difficult to avoid places where there are cars
Especially where you have urban areas apparently designed for the private car first.
True, but they can use techniques to make it very hard for you to do so. Check out spread spectrum communications - they smear out the signal over KHz or MHz instead of at one discrete carrier, making it almost impossible to pick out from background noise and requiring a very wideband jammer to block all of it.
If the signal is already "almost impossible to pick out from background noise" all you need to do is increase the amount of background noise by a fairly small amount.
Unless you need to use (very) low power spread spectrum transmissions your own communications will be unaffected no matter how much bandwidth your jammers use. A "wideband jammer" needs only be a source of RF "white noise".
I myself cannot imagine the mental disorder neccesary to consider as information property or the absence of realism which leads one to believe that it can be controlled.
At a time in the past, when recorded information was tighly bound to a physical object, the fiction of recorded information being like physical property may have made some sense.
That we are even having this debate is quite surreal and fills me with optimism that by the logic of natural law our children will look back at the 'intellectual property' debacle at the start of the 21st century, and piss their pants laughing.
The current concept of "copyright" dates to the printing press. A machine which could produce cheap copies if you wanted many copies. But the machine was also expensive to buy and maintain, thus it made sense for a third party to manage both printing and essential preparation steps. Similar business models also made sense with audio and video recordings, especially on disk, they even applied well to broadcasting.
What has changed is copying (and moving) information is now an utterly trivial task even if only one copy is required.
I'm going to file a patent for the standard deviation, and the standard deviation of the mean.
Maybe you should go for a whole set, patenting the mode and median as well...
I bought Avagadro's Constant and the Hubble Constant off eBay, and I own stock in e, pi and the golden ratio.
Where does that leave the electron/proton mass ratio and c?
The UK is very very very different from the rest of Europe... and after years of Thatcherism, can hardly be categorised as a socialist state.
The meaning of political adjectives. Even the apparently simple "left" and "right", is highly dependent on geography.
Something which is unlikely to be restricted to either theft or police in the US.
Also if this is happening systematically it may not be the police officers who deal directly with the public who are responsible.
Burglary rates for Scotland, Austria, and England and Wales are reported as higher for the entire period of 1980 through 2000. For England and Wales, this difference is as much as 50% higher crime rate per capita than the US after 1993.
Don't believe me. Check the figures yourself. I should also point out that these figures come from a UK authority, not another "American urban legend".
Unless both the rate of people reporting crimes to the police and the mechanisms for compiling the figures are the same you may be making a "apples and oranges" comparison. In some cases even comparing figures for different years from the same country can be of little meaning.
You should always take politically sensitive statistics originating from governments with a large pinch of salt.
I suppose the proper countermove then would be to make lots of unmanned jamming devices and spread them around like land mines. Then it would take a lot of missles to get rid of all of them...
Lots of expensive missiles to take out cheap jammers...
Of course jamming civilian GPS isn't the same as jamming military GPS but you get the idea, it can be done.
However much it might wish to the US Military cannot change the laws of physics. If you know the frequency used you can jam any signal.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3640 92&highlight=mcafee
In an application requires a specific browser to be set as default then the problem is with that application. However it can be an uphill struggle getting the vendor to accept that this is the case. They'd rather blame everything except the inability of their programmers...
At one point in time I used Symantec Corp. I don't remember all of the details exactly, but I think I was trying to uninstall it because LiveUpdate wasn't working. Anyways, after uninstalling it my computer would not start except to safe mode. It took a couple hours of deleting useless fscking registry keys that Symantec had left behind to get everything to work normally again.
NAV is one of those pieces of Windows software which can get into a state where the installer won't operate, because it thinks the product is already installed, and the uninstaller either refuses to run or can't put the machine into a state where the installer is convinced that it can run.
Windows installers really need an option along the lines of "OK I'll try installing this software even though it already appears to be installed/I'll stop trying to second guess what the human wants me to do."
Norton AV, OTOH, despite coming from the same company, is a totally different animal
With corporate mergers/buyouts, subcontracting, outsourcing, etc just because two programs have the same branding does not mean they have the same origin. It's perfectly possible to find sets of software which appear to be the same thing with different content but then have a few which turn out to be radically different. It's also possible to find "suites" which have been very obviously stuck together badly.
You need to file in federal court, show that you're affected by that law, and convince the judge that the law is unconstitutional. It costs time and money, and you still need to be able to support your position through the inevitable appeals.
Whilst at the same time avoiding being locked up as a "terrorist"
This just seems like they're throwing a tantrum like an angry 8 year old.
Or like a "corporate person"... Comparing them with the average 8 year old might well be insulting to the child.
IIRC when the question was asked "If corporations are people what kind of people are they?" the answer turns out to be along the lines of "The kind of mentally ill people best locked up to protect the public."
God I wish our Federal gov would read and UNDERSTAND the rules that were established that they are REQUIRED to live within.
They will only be required when there is someone enforcing said rules. Otherwise you'll end up with the situation summed up by Mark Twain "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
For those of you who say gee it will be easier to find bad people with this program, ask yourself one question....How many bad people are going to raise their hand and say, "May I please and a bad guy ID"
IIRC there are INS forms which actually ask "are you a terrorist?".