Anyone take an exchange server around the world? I maintain a few shipboard servers for the US Navy, and one thing I know (believe) is that Microsoft never intended for exchange servers to change time zones.
Dosn't the USN use UCT for everything? For a long time the "Windows Way" of handing timezones was insist that the hardware clock kept local time. Even now there is stupidity like the XP install which asks you where you are then asks you for the timezone (defaulting to US West Coast). The sensible way to do it is the "unix method". Use GMT/UCT internally and calculate local time on demand. In the case of a ship GPS would appear to be a good solution to knowing location and thus local time.
One would think that if the exchange server doesn't move (it usually doesn't)
Even if it dosn't it's still likely to have to deal with local time changing twice a year,
that outlook would work across time zone changes.
That's assuming that Microsoft understand the mechanics of timezones which they apparently don't...
Proponents of the Bono Act argue that it is necessary given that the life expectancy of humans has risen dramatically since Congress passed the original Copyright Act of 1790,
The US president at that time lived lived to the age of 67. Not far off the "three score and ten" mentioned in The Bible, which appears to date from the Bronze Age. The maximum recorded human lifespan appears to be somewhere between 110-115. The increase in copyright term far excedes either numerically or proportionally any increase in copyright term WRT the times concerned. Linking copyright terms to human lifespan is something of a non sequitur in the first place!
Notable is the submission of Cliff Richard, who began recording at the end of the 1950s, and whose income from levies is to diminish starting in a few years. The public has always kept its end of the deal, which has allowed Sir Cliff to make truckloads of money, but now the time has come to repay the public he wants to break the contract wide open.
If anyone has cause to complain about this "deal" it would be Levies. Being that they have been paying him for work he did 50 years ago.
His reason: he did not realise what the terms of the contract were!
Maybe he should give back his Knighthood too:)
Funny how ignorance of the law is no excuse for anybody, except for some folks in the record industry.
Most people would consider they got a good deal to be (repeatedly) paid for work they did 50 years ago. Especially considering that most people's working life is less than 50 years. It's rather hard to feel sorry for someone who, even after this "loss", is still likely to be earning considerably more than the average person of his age.
* Reference to promoting progress
* Absence of term limits
Does current US IP law actualy promote progress? It's not hard to find examples of it doing the opposite. Once the term is longer than a human lifetime it might as well be infinite.
IMHO it would make much more sense if copyrights lasted for a set number of years after publication of a work. Copyright enables an author to earn money with a work.
Assuming that they havn't transfered the copyright to someone else and that "the market" considers the work worth money.
If an author is incapable of capitalizing on publication of the work within a set amount of time, what use is it to grant him extra time?
Long term copyright may actually cause the author to lose out. In that they can be too busy "flogging a dead horse" to try something else.
The people pushing this are media corporations, and they AREN'T doing it for the artists, nor the artists' children.
They're doing it to be able to reap billions of dollars forever from the work of others and use those billions to buy more politicians in order to pass more laws that criminalize you.
At the same time a huge number of works are likely to end up consigned to oblivian, just because they happen to be contempoary with the tiny proportion which happen to remain profitable for decades. Most creative works do not remain profitable for a long time.
I believe that's even too long. The reason copyright exists is to foster the arts and sciences by providing for a limited time a monopoly on the new work. Then the copyright expires, the public benefits the artist/inventor benefited. And after the expiration the artist/inventor is encouraged to invent/create MORE.
N.B. this requires a copyright term of definite length (no "life plus X years) starting from first publication/performance/etc. Such that it is clear to everyone involved when copyright ends. Possibly a statutory requirement to include a "copyright ends on..." statement would be useful. This would also affect publishers, "record" companies, movie studios, etc. in the same way. In order that they maintain their profits they would need continue to find new works. N.B. a long copyright term means that someone may be discouraged from doing something new whilst they "wait for something they did a while back to become popular".
The moral of the story is.... the European lawmakers are just as big a bunch of dopes as the Americans.
Most likely they are being pushed, bribed and manipulated by the same interests. A stronger term for them would be "traitors" since they are all failing to act in the interests of their people.
In the US I believe this wouldn't be possible, due to the foresight of the Founding Fathers.
These people have been dead for rather a long time. Whilst the US Consitution is a rather nice document, by itself, it has no power to limit the US Government. That power is held by the US public.
Wrong. The sense of entitlement comes from the copyright holders. They're looking for and getting special privileges for their line of work.
In some cases special privileges for being "middle men" even for having a talented ancestor.
And now a lot of them are bitter that they might not get the E! Channel red carpet treatment.
Thus might have to actually do some work, like the "plebs".
And 100 years(more like 295) of legal precedent does not a good law make.
Copyright has been radically reformed once in its history anyway. From a perpetual right granted to publishers into a limited right of authors. Arguably a big part of the problem is that it has drifted back to being the former for many practical purposes.
The 100 years of legal precedent should be on the side of the copyright opponents. Copyrights have always been granted under the condition that they will expire on a definite date.
Some copyrights have definite dates of expirary, others have indefinite dates or dates which will only become definite at some arbitary point in the future.
That's part of the contract between copyright holders and the public, whose taxes finance the institutions that enforce the copyrights. In exchange for doing that, the public is supposed to get full use of the material at a specified time.
One of the instutions which has big problems is that of the "Copyright Library". The idea being that even if a book was a commercial disaster and bankrupted everyone involved in publishing it there would still be somewhere a copy existed when it became public domain. With copyrights of a definite term all a librarian needs do is mark a book and/or catalogue record with a date in the future. With more and more books being published, longer copyright terms and indefinite copyright terms. (Authors cannot be relied up on to put a notification clause in their wills, especially those who are obscure or use psudonyms). Thus librarians are faced with having to guess what they keep and what they throw out.
Actually the founding fathers implied:
That copyright is there to promote science and useful arts, not to reward artists.
Giving the creator "first bite of the cherry" with respect to any commercial profits was intended as a means to make this happen. This was a long time before the idea of anyone having the right to make a profit was in any way popular.
That it should be for a limited time (and they set an example at 14-28 years).
This was in the late 18th century. At that time any "intellectual property" as tightly bound to a physical media and the quickest way of transporting anything was a galloping horse. Quite possibly part of this time was allow for books, etc to be transported to bookshops. We can now send information anywhere on the planet almost trivally as well as being able to move people and freight thousands of miles within hours.
That it should be optionally removed if not necessary (The constitution allows it, does not require it).
The US Constitution dosn't even mandate "copyright". It's perfectly possible that there are different ways of protecting the writings and discoveries of authors and inventors so as to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the 21st century.
Has _anyone_ been able to come up with some solid studies showing that intellectual property actually encourages innovation?
The term "intellectual property" is far to generic to be meaningfully studied. Even when divided into Tradmarks, Patents and Copyrights there are still all sorts of variations which could have highly significent effects. Possibly you might get something like "5-10 years copyright protection encourages authorship, 10-20 years encourages authorship to the same level as 5-10 years, 20+ years discourages authorship". A concept which exists in Europe (and Australasia), but not in North America is "moral right of authorship". Whilst some of the same concepts have been "shoehorned" into current copyright that of "attribution" appears poorly protected.
And I don't mean all of the anecdotes that get thrown around every time the subject is argued...
Note that there are anecdotes both for and against
The purpose of the proposed changes in copyright laws is not to encourage more productivity from the artists. It's just to make sure that the requirement that artists are "found by record companies" as a prerequisite to distribution is met.
Yet in many cases the established "record companies" appear to have hindered, rather than helped, when it comes to new forms of popular music.
At least that whatit seems that this guy is trying to say. Artisits have to be "found", (you agreed with this) and they should be found by "record companies" in a way that wastes money
Wastes money from the POV of the people wanting to listen to the music (and quite often from the POV of the people producing the music too). But happens to line the pockets of a tiny minority, who are anything but poor in the first place.
The Bono Act didn't return anything to copyright; the URAA, passed at the same time did. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38b.html gives a list of what the URAA did; in particular, it only returned certain foreign works to copyright.
The fundermental question here is how can extending existing copyrights, let alone renewing expired copyrights, possibly be in accordance with section 8, clause 1 of the US Consitution? If a government can twist the meaning of a fairly short (even after a few hundred years of ammending) plain language consitution into something diametrically opposed to its original intent. Then the several hundred page, in something like 10 langauges, "EU Consitution" isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.
That may have applied in France, but less so in the Netherlands. The perception there was that it was biased towards the larger countries - like France.
Not that the French wanted it either. The irony here is that the Netherlands is one of the countries which started what was to become the EU off in the first place.
United States Population: 295,734,134 (July 2005 est.)
Canada Population: 32,805,041 (July 2005 est.)*
Thats about 10X, fairly significant. The point is that you don't need to count all of them by hand...
Total populations arn't really relevent here. More meaningful would be the median population of an "electoral district".
With the vast majority of US elections speed isn't an issue. Since the "winner" won't take up office for several months. Whereas in many countries which have ballot papers counted by hand the results take effect within days, even hours.
which requires less volunteers to work.
This isn't a problem anywhere else. Even if it was in the US there'd probably be plenty of Canadians available to help out their "Southern Neighbour".
I just never understood why the US insisted on electronic voting...
Just another example of the US following a meme of avoiding anything "Not Invented Here"
We do it with plain pen & paper up here in Canada, and nobody screams "FRAUD" every election...
In addition having people independent of the candidates conducting the election and an open method of counting the ballots. Under such a system effective vote rigging would require a large conspiracy. Whereas a highly mechanised voting system can be subverted by only a few people.
What prevents the party in power from trawling them, to discover patterns that could be manipulated by the modification of constituency boundaries, or by directing political campaigning to particular streets or even individual addresses?
Any such records are kept by local authorities, rather than by national government. One very important difference between the US and the UK is that the latter has a tradition of an independent civil service. Which responsible for all aspects of conducting of elections.
We've seen what has gone on in Birmingham with the postal voting fiasco.
This is a good example of how changing a system can dramatically compromise its security.
You are only required to register for primary elections. By registering, you tell the gov't "I am going to vote in the primaries". You DO NOT tell them who you voted for.
One of the most obvious problems of the state knowing your likely party affiliation is Gerrymandering.
This is how windows has worked for ages and it's the most common way to own a system - it's so incredibly easy to install something, just click and bang and we own u.
Typically without the "bang" or any indication that the operation of the machine has been changed. One thing Windows often does is to blur the distinction between executables and data. Which has been exploited in the past to trick users into running programs when they though they were opening data files.
If I were an IT admin (I'm not - I'm a developer), I'd want to not allow users to install software for that very reason. They install crap like real player or yahoo toolbar or whatever that bog down their machines, then the whine when their machines bog down.
If they can do this then they can also install actual malware capable of deleteing/corrupting data, sending sensitive data anywhere on the planet, etc.
But for home users it's imperitive that they be able to install software and IMO they should not have to be root to do so.
Even then there is little reason for installing software to happen often. Why should a computer not need to be put into a a different mode in order to change its workings? People can accept this with domestic appliances, so why should computers be different...
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Anyone take an exchange server around the world? I maintain a few shipboard servers for the US Navy, and one thing I know (believe) is that Microsoft never intended for exchange servers to change time zones.
Dosn't the USN use UCT for everything?
For a long time the "Windows Way" of handing timezones was insist that the hardware clock kept local time. Even now there is stupidity like the XP install which asks you where you are then asks you for the timezone (defaulting to US West Coast).
The sensible way to do it is the "unix method". Use GMT/UCT internally and calculate local time on demand. In the case of a ship GPS would appear to be a good solution to knowing location and thus local time.
One would think that if the exchange server doesn't move (it usually doesn't)
Even if it dosn't it's still likely to have to deal with local time changing twice a year,
that outlook would work across time zone changes.
That's assuming that Microsoft understand the mechanics of timezones which they apparently don't...
Proponents of the Bono Act argue that it is necessary given that the life expectancy of humans has risen dramatically since Congress passed the original Copyright Act of 1790,
The US president at that time lived lived to the age of 67. Not far off the "three score and ten" mentioned in The Bible, which appears to date from the Bronze Age. The maximum recorded human lifespan appears to be somewhere between 110-115. The increase in copyright term far excedes either numerically or proportionally any increase in copyright term WRT the times concerned.
Linking copyright terms to human lifespan is something of a non sequitur in the first place!
Notable is the submission of Cliff Richard, who began recording at the end of the 1950s, and whose income from levies is to diminish starting in a few years. The public has always kept its end of the deal, which has allowed Sir Cliff to make truckloads of money, but now the time has come to repay the public he wants to break the contract wide open.
If anyone has cause to complain about this "deal" it would be Levies. Being that they have been paying him for work he did 50 years ago.
His reason: he did not realise what the terms of the contract were!
Maybe he should give back his Knighthood too:)
Funny how ignorance of the law is no excuse for anybody, except for some folks in the record industry.
Most people would consider they got a good deal to be (repeatedly) paid for work they did 50 years ago. Especially considering that most people's working life is less than 50 years. It's rather hard to feel sorry for someone who, even after this "loss", is still likely to be earning considerably more than the average person of his age.
What's missing in the EU version?
* Reference to promoting progress
* Absence of term limits
Does current US IP law actualy promote progress? It's not hard to find examples of it doing the opposite.
Once the term is longer than a human lifetime it might as well be infinite.
IMHO it would make much more sense if copyrights lasted for a set number of years after publication of a work. Copyright enables an author to earn money with a work.
Assuming that they havn't transfered the copyright to someone else and that "the market" considers the work worth money.
If an author is incapable of capitalizing on publication of the work within a set amount of time, what use is it to grant him extra time?
Long term copyright may actually cause the author to lose out. In that they can be too busy "flogging a dead horse" to try something else.
The people pushing this are media corporations, and they AREN'T doing it for the artists, nor the artists' children.
They're doing it to be able to reap billions of dollars forever from the work of others and use those billions to buy more politicians in order to pass more laws that criminalize you.
At the same time a huge number of works are likely to end up consigned to oblivian, just because they happen to be contempoary with the tiny proportion which happen to remain profitable for decades.
Most creative works do not remain profitable for a long time.
I believe that's even too long. The reason copyright exists is to foster the arts and sciences by providing for a limited time a monopoly on the new work. Then the copyright expires, the public benefits the artist/inventor benefited. And after the expiration the artist/inventor is encouraged to invent/create MORE.
N.B. this requires a copyright term of definite length (no "life plus X years) starting from first publication/performance/etc. Such that it is clear to everyone involved when copyright ends. Possibly a statutory requirement to include a "copyright ends on..." statement would be useful. This would also affect publishers, "record" companies, movie studios, etc. in the same way. In order that they maintain their profits they would need continue to find new works.
N.B. a long copyright term means that someone may be discouraged from doing something new whilst they "wait for something they did a while back to become popular".
The moral of the story is.... the European lawmakers are just as big a bunch of dopes as the Americans.
Most likely they are being pushed, bribed and manipulated by the same interests. A stronger term for them would be "traitors" since they are all failing to act in the interests of their people.
In the US I believe this wouldn't be possible, due to the foresight of the Founding Fathers.
These people have been dead for rather a long time. Whilst the US Consitution is a rather nice document, by itself, it has no power to limit the US Government. That power is held by the US public.
Wrong. The sense of entitlement comes from the copyright holders. They're looking for and getting special privileges for their line of work.
In some cases special privileges for being "middle men" even for having a talented ancestor.
And now a lot of them are bitter that they might not get the E! Channel red carpet treatment.
Thus might have to actually do some work, like the "plebs".
And 100 years(more like 295) of legal precedent does not a good law make.
Copyright has been radically reformed once in its history anyway. From a perpetual right granted to publishers into a limited right of authors. Arguably a big part of the problem is that it has drifted back to being the former for many practical purposes.
The 100 years of legal precedent should be on the side of the copyright opponents. Copyrights have always been granted under the condition that they will expire on a definite date.
Some copyrights have definite dates of expirary, others have indefinite dates or dates which will only become definite at some arbitary point in the future.
That's part of the contract between copyright holders and the public, whose taxes finance the institutions that enforce the copyrights. In exchange for doing that, the public is supposed to get full use of the material at a specified time.
One of the instutions which has big problems is that of the "Copyright Library". The idea being that even if a book was a commercial disaster and bankrupted everyone involved in publishing it there would still be somewhere a copy existed when it became public domain. With copyrights of a definite term all a librarian needs do is mark a book and/or catalogue record with a date in the future. With more and more books being published, longer copyright terms and indefinite copyright terms. (Authors cannot be relied up on to put a notification clause in their wills, especially those who are obscure or use psudonyms). Thus librarians are faced with having to guess what they keep and what they throw out.
Actually the founding fathers implied:
That copyright is there to promote science and useful arts, not to reward artists.
Giving the creator "first bite of the cherry" with respect to any commercial profits was intended as a means to make this happen.
This was a long time before the idea of anyone having the right to make a profit was in any way popular.
That it should be for a limited time (and they set an example at 14-28 years).
This was in the late 18th century. At that time any "intellectual property" as tightly bound to a physical media and the quickest way of transporting anything was a galloping horse. Quite possibly part of this time was allow for books, etc to be transported to bookshops. We can now send information anywhere on the planet almost trivally as well as being able to move people and freight thousands of miles within hours.
That it should be optionally removed if not necessary (The constitution allows it, does not require it).
The US Constitution dosn't even mandate "copyright". It's perfectly possible that there are different ways of protecting the writings and discoveries of authors and inventors so as to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the 21st century.
Has _anyone_ been able to come up with some solid studies showing that intellectual property actually encourages innovation?
The term "intellectual property" is far to generic to be meaningfully studied. Even when divided into Tradmarks, Patents and Copyrights there are still all sorts of variations which could have highly significent effects.
Possibly you might get something like "5-10 years copyright protection encourages authorship, 10-20 years encourages authorship to the same level as 5-10 years, 20+ years discourages authorship". A concept which exists in Europe (and Australasia), but not in North America is "moral right of authorship". Whilst some of the same concepts have been "shoehorned" into current copyright that of "attribution" appears poorly protected.
And I don't mean all of the anecdotes that get thrown around every time the subject is argued...
Note that there are anecdotes both for and against
The purpose of the proposed changes in copyright laws is not to encourage more productivity from the artists. It's just to make sure that the requirement that artists are "found by record companies" as a prerequisite to distribution is met.
Yet in many cases the established "record companies" appear to have hindered, rather than helped, when it comes to new forms of popular music.
At least that whatit seems that this guy is trying to say. Artisits have to be "found", (you agreed with this) and they should be found by "record companies" in a way that wastes money
Wastes money from the POV of the people wanting to listen to the music (and quite often from the POV of the people producing the music too). But happens to line the pockets of a tiny minority, who are anything but poor in the first place.
The Bono Act didn't return anything to copyright; the URAA, passed at the same time did. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38b.html gives a list of what the URAA did; in particular, it only returned certain foreign works to copyright.
The fundermental question here is how can extending existing copyrights, let alone renewing expired copyrights, possibly be in accordance with section 8, clause 1 of the US Consitution?
If a government can twist the meaning of a fairly short (even after a few hundred years of ammending) plain language consitution into something diametrically opposed to its original intent. Then the several hundred page, in something like 10 langauges, "EU Consitution" isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.
That may have applied in France, but less so in the Netherlands. The perception there was that it was biased towards the larger countries - like France.
Not that the French wanted it either. The irony here is that the Netherlands is one of the countries which started what was to become the EU off in the first place.
United States Population: 295,734,134 (July 2005 est.)
Canada Population: 32,805,041 (July 2005 est.)*
Thats about 10X, fairly significant. The point is that you don't need to count all of them by hand...
Total populations arn't really relevent here. More meaningful would be the median population of an "electoral district".
You have electronic voting for swift totalling,
With the vast majority of US elections speed isn't an issue. Since the "winner" won't take up office for several months. Whereas in many countries which have ballot papers counted by hand the results take effect within days, even hours.
which requires less volunteers to work.
This isn't a problem anywhere else. Even if it was in the US there'd probably be plenty of Canadians available to help out their "Southern Neighbour".
I just never understood why the US insisted on electronic voting...
Just another example of the US following a meme of avoiding anything "Not Invented Here"
We do it with plain pen & paper up here in Canada, and nobody screams "FRAUD" every election...
In addition having people independent of the candidates conducting the election and an open method of counting the ballots.
Under such a system effective vote rigging would require a large conspiracy. Whereas a highly mechanised voting system can be subverted by only a few people.
What prevents the party in power from trawling them, to discover patterns that could be manipulated by the modification of constituency boundaries, or by directing political campaigning to particular streets or even individual addresses?
Any such records are kept by local authorities, rather than by national government. One very important difference between the US and the UK is that the latter has a tradition of an independent civil service. Which responsible for all aspects of conducting of elections.
We've seen what has gone on in Birmingham with the postal voting fiasco.
This is a good example of how changing a system can dramatically compromise its security.
You are only required to register for primary elections. By registering, you tell the gov't "I am going to vote in the primaries". You DO NOT tell them who you voted for.
One of the most obvious problems of the state knowing your likely party affiliation is Gerrymandering.
Which is a huge flaw. Software installation should be automatic.
Automatic software installation equates to a "malware" problem. Software installation really should be an uncommon task, especially for end users.
No, I don't want a .deb from you. I want a autopackage or a lsb-rpm or something else that will work on any distro.
Including being able to handle a distro which postdates the program in question.
And thats not to much to expect, such a thing should be as normal for a programmer than a tar.gz,
In which case you need to either write one or pay someone to write one...
This is how windows has worked for ages and it's the most common way to own a system - it's so incredibly easy to install something, just click and bang and we own u.
Typically without the "bang" or any indication that the operation of the machine has been changed. One thing Windows often does is to blur the distinction between executables and data. Which has been exploited in the past to trick users into running programs when they though they were opening data files.
If I were an IT admin (I'm not - I'm a developer), I'd want to not allow users to install software for that very reason. They install crap like real player or yahoo toolbar or whatever that bog down their machines, then the whine when their machines bog down.
If they can do this then they can also install actual malware capable of deleteing/corrupting data, sending sensitive data anywhere on the planet, etc.
But for home users it's imperitive that they be able to install software and IMO they should not have to be root to do so.
Even then there is little reason for installing software to happen often. Why should a computer not need to be put into a a different mode in order to change its workings? People can accept this with domestic appliances, so why should computers be different...