If, for example, all commercial airlines to tape the insides of their planes and kept the tapes for ten years, there's not much you as an individual you can do about it.
What are the odds that these same airlines would ban passengers from carrying their own cameras too? In the same way that cops often get very upset by members of the public filming them, especially if they happen to be caught breaking the law.
On top of this think about if the plane crashes. Currently we have nearly worthless flight recorders. Having tape of what happened on the plane would be great. One could see if it was an explosion from somes shoes or a fuel tank blowing up or the wing flew off. Eliminate tons of questions.
If that was the reason you don't need to be storing stuff for 10 years. A half hour loop with the recording media in an armoured box, just like a CVR, will be just as useful to crash investigators. Probably more useful would be a video recording of the cockpit and some external cameras to show the position of all the control surfaces.
Sometimes they would tell the driver there was a camera in the bus, sometimes they don't. I think this was to keep the drivers on their toes more than anything else, because the cameras can also record what the driver does.
The article implies that these cameras will only watch passengers. Not pilots, cabin crew, ground crew, freight handlers, etc.
Theoretically, a longer copyright would be worth more to a publisher, and therefore they would pay the creator more for it.
Only if the publisher could be sure, in advance, that the work will still be worth money long term. Most works are only profitable for a period of far less than a decade anyway.
10-1 you think Windows crashes a lot because you run it as administrator and don't know the what the fuck you are doing.
In many cases there can be little choice except to run Windows as administrator. Because far too many Windows apps are written to demand privs they don't actually need. Many Windows programmers appearing to lack any understanding of security.
It's also compelling to note that it appears to be more cost effective to "upgrade" to Linux, spend money on the migration and training, and run VMware (man, all those licenses must cost a ton) - then it is to upgrade to Windows XP and Office XP, even with all of the discounts that Balmer threw in at the last second.
Upgrading to XP still means you need to spend money on training, migration and ensuring that the needed apps still actually work.
Depends on the version of windows. If they're still using Win 3.11 for instance (and there have been references to it though most posting, so I'll assume thats the case), then they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. Licenses didn't start getting nasty til quite a bit after that.
The first thing it depends on in the "law of the land". Since, IIRC, a German court has already ruled that the distinction between "OEM" and "retail" is meaningless it's highly likely that EULAs arn't that enforcable in Germany.
Since I enjoy reading quite a bit, the book publishers are definatley being deprived of income. In the relatively short time that I've had my library card I've already read a couple hundred dollars worth of books without paying a penny for them. Most are books that I would have paid good money for if I couldn't have borrowed them from the library.
The reason libraries exist is that they predate copyright. If they did not exist they probably could not be created with copyright laws as they now exist.
Do I have any good reason to treat so-called "intellectual property" the same as real property? They are completely different and I don't see any reason why we should try to equate one with the other.
At some point in the past it may have made sense to treat IP as though it was physical property. Since in order to reproduce something like a book cheaply required an expensive (and uncommon) machine and a fairly large number of copies to be produced. Things have changed in the last few hundred years though. Copying machines of all sorts are fairly cheap and easily available now.
The average person sees absolutely no benefit from copyright law anymore.
Even the people doing the actual creating are unlikely to see much benefit. There isn't much practical difference here between a copyright which lasts about a decade and one which outlives them by 70 years. If they need to transfer their copyright to a publisher in order to get published in the first place then from their POV there is no benefit to them by having a very long copyright term.
We agree to give them exclusive rights for a limited period of time, and then we get unfettered access to that work once the period has expired.
The idea being to provide an incentive for them to produce and get published.
Then Congress cut the public out of the deal. Nothing becomes public domain anymore, and won't for as long as they keep extending copyright terms.
Even if the extending stopped now it's unlikely that there will be many people who will live long enough to see copyrights expire.
I would happily welcome a return to the original American copyright law which, IIRC, protected a work for 14 years from publication date. In my opinion, such a term protects authors and doesn't create a perpetuity for "Superman" and "Mickey Mouse" and "Tom Clancy" to be "brand names" for 140 years.
The most obvious way to provide additional protection to authors would be to prevent copyright being transferable to publishers. There is no actual reason publishers need to hold copyright, as opposed to a licence, in order to carry out their task.
Modern publishers [i]aren't[/i] taking risks on new material - they're just a) reprinting old stuff with negligable alterations, and b) selling new stuff from sources that'll sell by name alone, immaterial of the quality of the content (and thus taking no risk on that quality). Just ask any new book author, any small band, any new programming team who wants a console development kit.
Thing is that every famous author, musician, band, singer, director, screenwriter was an one time a complete unknown. It's questionable if the idea of life plus the best part of a century actually does that much to encourage the creation of new material.
Without some legal protection, a living could not be made by creators.
There isn't a deity given right to earn a living, let alone earn a living from a specific business model, in the first place. In practice many authors, musicians, etc have some other source of income. With their creative works being conducted evenings/weekends/holidays/etc.
That said, as a published writer myself, the existence of copyright has created a different problem. The problem of publisher monopolies.
This was the whole reason that copyright was changed in the first place.
Writers and artists are so desparate to get their work published, and th law protects the exclusive right to copy, such that all but the most popular (and savvy) authors and musicians are forced into publication deals that favor the publisher to such an extent that the author/musician makes very little if any money on products that make the publishers considerable money.
Or the publisher can end up holding copyrights and never publishing. There is also the question of why the creator wants their work published, it can be just if not more to have their work seen by others as to make money. As well as publishers being reluctant to publish anything out of the ordinary. It is notable that the richest author on the planet was not motivated by the thought of making lots of money and had difficulty getting published.
The dramatic extension of copyright terms also does not (IMHO) favor the artists, but merely those publishers.
Retrospectivly extending the copyright cannot encourage the creation of works which alredy exist. (Without some method of time travel.) The people who want this tend to be those who happen to own the tiny minority of copyrights which continue to make money long term.
I'd certainly like to see copyright terms rolled back to something like 25 years from date of publication, or even less.
Most works make the majority of the money they are ever going to make within a short period of time. With the likes of movies and music the time period where something is considered a "hit" or a "flop" can easily be under a year.
Just because a knife can be used to kill someone, doesn't mean it's a MURDER DEVICE. So why is a smart card programmer a PIRATE DEVICE?
If someone advocated the banning of kitchen knives because they have been used as murder weapons then quite probably his/her sanity would be called into question. "Murder weapons" are not illegal, the definition would probably cover just about every tool ever invented, what is illegal is the action of murder. Yet we have such nonsense as "burglar tools", "pirate devices", etc being considred illegal to posess.
The only Pirate Devices I don't think I could argue the definition of woul be a Parrot, a Wooden Leg, an Eye Patch, a Funny hat with skull and cross bones, a wine bottle wrapped in dried grasses, a sword, potentially a mustache?
A modern pirate is more likely to posess a fast boat and firearms.
Federal statutes prohibit the possession of "Pirate Devices" (see 47 U.S.C. section 521 et. seq. and 18 U.S.C. section 2510 et seq.). There is no question that the items in question are pirate devices. The fact that a small percentage of buyers did use them some people use them for legit purposes does not change the fact that virtually all of the purchasers were stealing signals.
The thing is that this is not a case of law enforement going after people who have bought these devices and confiscating them as illegal to posess. Instead you have a private company getting hold of another company's customer details.
This sounds rather questionable.
Comparing with their own customer list then sending out demands for money where they get a match.
Intentional malice is going to be impossible to prove. Does Directv give a damn about any of these people, except for the information that they uncovered in busting the distributors?
Since they are not law enforcement what business do they have using some other company's customer details. At best they are unethical at worst they are themselves enguaging in IP violations.
Lovely slashbot crying. Everyone is suddenly a legitimate smart card hacker and not a thief.
I tend to agree that the encouragement towards innovation in a short copyright term is a good thing, but it is counterbalanced to me by the fact that it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
What's to stop them taking out a pension, like everyone else. Anyway plenty of creative people have a "day job" as well as there being retired people who write books, music, programs, etc.
Indeed, a lot of people would say that requiring copyright holders to get off their asses and innovate anew every 10 years.
With such a situation you might well find that very few copyrights were renewed at all.
I'm certainly proud of some of the things I wrote and created when I was 20, but I'd hate to justify my lifetime by peddling them no matter how great they were.
Just because you may think they are great does not mean that anyone else agrees or is prepared to ooffer you money for them.
Actually I think that it is closer to a euphemism for "Department for Protection Against Islamist Terrorists," but calling it that would cause obvious political problems.
Whilst bending over backwards to not call other people "terrorists", especially if they target Moslems.
Having a bit of trouble wrapping our hands around the term "suborbital", are we? Suborbital rockets do not burn up and fragment on reentry, because they don't undergo reentry.
It could still fragment if it's recovery system fails.
And as to what would have happened, it's vanishingly unlikely that any significant damage would be done by stuttle fragments that fell on a populated area.
Bits fall off commercial aircraft quite frequently. Yet AFAIK no-one has been hurt by them.
They are simply affraid that someone, somwhere, MIGHT aquire a SAM missile capapble of reaching commercial airline cruising altitudes and that (communist/drug warlord/terrorist/muslim) MIGHT just blow a 747 full of innocent little children out of the sky.
Of course such a terrorist would never think to shoot down a landing aircraft which is flying a lot lower and slower.
Of course, the biggest ceiling of any commonly available (read: soviet runion) SAM system is 8000 meters. (roughly 24000 foot)
Not much good against something flying at 30 odd thousand feet.
The delivery isn't as fast, but container ships would allow an individual to place a nuclear bomb in any port city in the world. Rent a truck and you can place a nuke in (almost) any city in the United States--D.C. and a few other places have sensors.
Sensors detecting what exactly? Anyway can you really see any major city subjecting every vehicle to an inspection.
Missiles are for the movies. Smart terrorists use U-Haul.
Even movies sometimes get this right. e.g. "Sum of all Fears", "True Lies", etc.
One reason that private rocket programs have always hit lots of bureaucratic tangles may be behind-the-scenes interference by the DoW^HD. There is no difference between an ICBM and a suborbital rocket, except maybe what you put in the cargo compartment.
A rocket is about the least stealthy method of delivering anything anywhere.
Interesting though it may be, commercial space flight is a nuclear proliferation nightmare: what if anyone with (say) $50M to spend could put any payload he wanted, anywhere on the planet, reliably?
There are plenty of shipping companies which will do that for rather less anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
If, for example, all commercial airlines to tape the insides of their planes and kept the tapes for ten years, there's not much you as an individual you can do about it.
What are the odds that these same airlines would ban passengers from carrying their own cameras too? In the same way that cops often get very upset by members of the public filming them, especially if they happen to be caught breaking the law.
The US government certainly does not seem to be too concerned with privacy.
Depends who's privacy it is. When it comes to the US Government wanting to keep things secret they appear rather enthusiastic...
As a result, there should be no SSN used by virtually everybody for purposes of identification
Was the SSN ever intended as a purpose of identification. Like many things it appears to have been abused for purposes it was never intended.
On top of this think about if the plane crashes. Currently we have nearly worthless flight recorders. Having tape of what happened on the plane would be great. One could see if it was an explosion from somes shoes or a fuel tank blowing up or the wing flew off. Eliminate tons of questions.
If that was the reason you don't need to be storing stuff for 10 years. A half hour loop with the recording media in an armoured box, just like a CVR, will be just as useful to crash investigators. Probably more useful would be a video recording of the cockpit and some external cameras to show the position of all the control surfaces.
Sometimes they would tell the driver there was a camera in the bus, sometimes they don't. I think this was to keep the drivers on their toes more than anything else, because the cameras can also record what the driver does.
The article implies that these cameras will only watch passengers. Not pilots, cabin crew, ground crew, freight handlers, etc.
Theoretically, a longer copyright would be worth more to a publisher, and therefore they would pay the creator more for it.
Only if the publisher could be sure, in advance, that the work will still be worth money long term. Most works are only profitable for a period of far less than a decade anyway.
10-1 you think Windows crashes a lot because you run it as administrator and don't know the what the fuck you are doing.
In many cases there can be little choice except to run Windows as administrator. Because far too many Windows apps are written to demand privs they don't actually need. Many Windows programmers appearing to lack any understanding of security.
It's also compelling to note that it appears to be more cost effective to "upgrade" to Linux, spend money on the migration and training, and run VMware (man, all those licenses must cost a ton) - then it is to upgrade to Windows XP and Office XP, even with all of the discounts that Balmer threw in at the last second.
Upgrading to XP still means you need to spend money on training, migration and ensuring that the needed apps still actually work.
Depends on the version of windows. If they're still using Win 3.11 for instance (and there have been references to it though most posting, so I'll assume thats the case), then they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. Licenses didn't start getting nasty til quite a bit after that.
The first thing it depends on in the "law of the land". Since, IIRC, a German court has already ruled that the distinction between "OEM" and "retail" is meaningless it's highly likely that EULAs arn't that enforcable in Germany.
Since I enjoy reading quite a bit, the book publishers are definatley being deprived of income. In the relatively short time that I've had my library card I've already read a couple hundred dollars worth of books without paying a penny for them. Most are books that I would have paid good money for if I couldn't have borrowed them from the library.
The reason libraries exist is that they predate copyright. If they did not exist they probably could not be created with copyright laws as they now exist.
Do I have any good reason to treat so-called "intellectual property" the same as real property? They are completely different and I don't see any reason why we should try to equate one with the other.
At some point in the past it may have made sense to treat IP as though it was physical property. Since in order to reproduce something like a book cheaply required an expensive (and uncommon) machine and a fairly large number of copies to be produced. Things have changed in the last few hundred years though. Copying machines of all sorts are fairly cheap and easily available now.
The average person sees absolutely no benefit from copyright law anymore.
Even the people doing the actual creating are unlikely to see much benefit. There isn't much practical difference here between a copyright which lasts about a decade and one which outlives them by 70 years. If they need to transfer their copyright to a publisher in order to get published in the first place then from their POV there is no benefit to them by having a very long copyright term.
We agree to give them exclusive rights for a limited period of time, and then we get unfettered access to that work once the period has expired.
The idea being to provide an incentive for them to produce and get published.
Then Congress cut the public out of the deal. Nothing becomes public domain anymore, and won't for as long as they keep extending copyright terms.
Even if the extending stopped now it's unlikely that there will be many people who will live long enough to see copyrights expire.
I would happily welcome a return to the original American copyright law which, IIRC, protected a work for 14 years from publication date. In my opinion, such a term protects authors and doesn't create a perpetuity for "Superman" and "Mickey Mouse" and "Tom Clancy" to be "brand names" for 140 years.
The most obvious way to provide additional protection to authors would be to prevent copyright being transferable to publishers. There is no actual reason publishers need to hold copyright, as opposed to a licence, in order to carry out their task.
Modern publishers [i]aren't[/i] taking risks on new material - they're just a) reprinting old stuff with negligable alterations, and b) selling new stuff from sources that'll sell by name alone, immaterial of the quality of the content (and thus taking no risk on that quality). Just ask any new book author, any small band, any new programming team who wants a console development kit.
Thing is that every famous author, musician, band, singer, director, screenwriter was an one time a complete unknown. It's questionable if the idea of life plus the best part of a century actually does that much to encourage the creation of new material.
Without some legal protection, a living could not be made by creators.
There isn't a deity given right to earn a living, let alone earn a living from a specific business model, in the first place. In practice many authors, musicians, etc have some other source of income. With their creative works being conducted evenings/weekends/holidays/etc.
That said, as a published writer myself, the existence of copyright has created a different problem. The problem of publisher monopolies.
This was the whole reason that copyright was changed in the first place.
Writers and artists are so desparate to get their work published, and th law protects the exclusive right to copy, such that all but the most popular (and savvy) authors and musicians are forced into publication deals that favor the publisher to such an extent that the author/musician makes very little if any money on products that make the publishers considerable money.
Or the publisher can end up holding copyrights and never publishing. There is also the question of why the creator wants their work published, it can be just if not more to have their work seen by others as to make money. As well as publishers being reluctant to publish anything out of the ordinary.
It is notable that the richest author on the planet was not motivated by the thought of making lots of money and had difficulty getting published.
The dramatic extension of copyright terms also does not (IMHO) favor the artists, but merely those publishers.
Retrospectivly extending the copyright cannot encourage the creation of works which alredy exist. (Without some method of time travel.) The people who want this tend to be those who happen to own the tiny minority of copyrights which continue to make money long term.
I'd certainly like to see copyright terms rolled back to something like 25 years from date of publication, or even less.
Most works make the majority of the money they are ever going to make within a short period of time. With the likes of movies and music the time period where something is considered a "hit" or a "flop" can easily be under a year.
Just because a knife can be used to kill someone, doesn't mean it's a MURDER DEVICE. So why is a smart card programmer a PIRATE DEVICE?
If someone advocated the banning of kitchen knives because they have been used as murder weapons then quite probably his/her sanity would be called into question. "Murder weapons" are not illegal, the definition would probably cover just about every tool ever invented, what is illegal is the action of murder.
Yet we have such nonsense as "burglar tools", "pirate devices", etc being considred illegal to posess.
The only Pirate Devices I don't think I could argue the definition of woul be a Parrot, a Wooden Leg, an Eye Patch, a Funny hat with skull and cross bones, a wine bottle wrapped in dried grasses, a sword, potentially a mustache?
A modern pirate is more likely to posess a fast boat and firearms.
Federal statutes prohibit the possession of "Pirate Devices" (see 47 U.S.C. section 521 et. seq. and 18 U.S.C. section 2510 et seq.). There is no question that the items in question are pirate devices. The fact that a small percentage of buyers did use them some people use them for legit purposes does not change the fact that virtually all of the purchasers were stealing signals.
The thing is that this is not a case of law enforement going after people who have bought these devices and confiscating them as illegal to posess. Instead you have a private company getting hold of another company's customer details.
This sounds rather questionable.
Comparing with their own customer list then sending out demands for money where they get a match.
Intentional malice is going to be impossible to prove. Does Directv give a damn about any of these people, except for the information that they uncovered in busting the distributors?
Since they are not law enforcement what business do they have using some other company's customer details. At best they are unethical at worst they are themselves enguaging in IP violations.
Lovely slashbot crying. Everyone is suddenly a legitimate smart card hacker and not a thief.
It's called "Innocent until proven guilty".
I tend to agree that the encouragement towards innovation in a short copyright term is a good thing, but it is counterbalanced to me by the fact that it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
What's to stop them taking out a pension, like everyone else. Anyway plenty of creative people have a "day job" as well as there being retired people who write books, music, programs, etc.
Indeed, a lot of people would say that requiring copyright holders to get off their asses and innovate anew every 10 years.
With such a situation you might well find that very few copyrights were renewed at all.
I'm certainly proud of some of the things I wrote and created when I was 20, but I'd hate to justify my lifetime by peddling them no matter how great they were.
Just because you may think they are great does not mean that anyone else agrees or is prepared to ooffer you money for them.
Actually I think that it is closer to a euphemism for "Department for Protection Against Islamist Terrorists," but calling it that would cause obvious political problems.
Whilst bending over backwards to not call other people "terrorists", especially if they target Moslems.
Having a bit of trouble wrapping our hands around the term "suborbital", are we? Suborbital rockets do not burn up and fragment on reentry, because they don't undergo reentry.
It could still fragment if it's recovery system fails.
And as to what would have happened, it's vanishingly unlikely that any significant damage would be done by stuttle fragments that fell on a populated area.
Bits fall off commercial aircraft quite frequently. Yet AFAIK no-one has been hurt by them.
They are simply affraid that someone, somwhere, MIGHT aquire a SAM missile capapble of reaching commercial airline cruising altitudes and that (communist/drug warlord/terrorist/muslim) MIGHT just blow a 747 full of innocent little children out of the sky.
Of course such a terrorist would never think to shoot down a landing aircraft which is flying a lot lower and slower.
Of course, the biggest ceiling of any commonly available (read: soviet runion) SAM system is 8000 meters. (roughly 24000 foot)
Not much good against something flying at 30 odd thousand feet.
Just make sure any test craft are equipped with self-destruct mechanisms in case they go off course and endanger commercial aircraft.
In which case some paranoid will realise that such a thing is effectivly a "guided missile".
The delivery isn't as fast, but container ships would allow an individual to place a nuclear bomb in any port city in the world. Rent a truck and you can place a nuke in (almost) any city in the United States--D.C. and a few other places have sensors.
Sensors detecting what exactly? Anyway can you really see any major city subjecting every vehicle to an inspection.
Missiles are for the movies. Smart terrorists use U-Haul.
Even movies sometimes get this right. e.g. "Sum of all Fears", "True Lies", etc.
One reason that private rocket programs have always hit lots of bureaucratic tangles may be behind-the-scenes interference by the DoW^HD. There is no difference between an ICBM and a suborbital rocket, except maybe what you put in the cargo compartment.
A rocket is about the least stealthy method of delivering anything anywhere.
Interesting though it may be, commercial space flight is a nuclear proliferation nightmare: what if anyone with (say) $50M to spend could put any payload he wanted, anywhere on the planet, reliably?
There are plenty of shipping companies which will do that for rather less anyway.
PAVE PAWS et. al is already tracking too much junk as it is..
Why should a system intended to detect SLBMs be tracking objects in orbit? Maybe you mean BMEWS or PARCS...