Other idiocy at random:
"The Union recognizes...the rights of the elderly...to participate in social and cultural life."
You also have things which can be in contradiction. Most obvious would be article 9. "Right to marry and found a family". which han relate interestingly with articles 7 and 10.
individual people, and and not-for-profit groups can not compete with the cash generated by a large corporation.
Some not for profits actually can. If they can "bootstrap" the government into paying them to lobby it. Just about any which can do this are at least as nasty as your average mega-corp.
Regardless, it's not money worship that has reduced our democracy to the mess it is now. It's laziness and disinterest. People generally don't want to take the time to understand political issues.
Which means little competition for professional lobbiests. Representing both corporate self interests and political extremists.
Sure it might be a bit more work to buy laws but I bet it wouldn't be that much more expensive (since each indivitual state would cost less money than congress did
It might not cost them more in terms of actual bribe money, but it might well cost a lot more in terms of the cost of the logistics of actually doing the bribary and lobbying. Maybe some of the current lobbying groups simply wouldn't be able to handle the logistics of lobbying in 50 places at once.
Cutting out the source of evil, i.e. lobbies and companies "buying" influence (when that influence should come from the citizens alone if representative democracy is to be, well, democratic) by putting severe caps on campaign contribution is the simplest yet most efficient way to clean up Washington of its grimy layer of corruption.
However it is a non trivial problem to have a representative democracy which allows the government to be petitioned by the public. Without making it very easy for professional lobbying groups to effectivly drown out anything ordinary people might be concerned about.
That's roughly 40 times the amount of people. 7 million people voting on a lot of issues may make some sense (this is why many states have similar setups).
Remember that the power of the US federal government is rather restricted anyway, compared with other national governments. Since the US constitution specifically restricts what it can do.
Representative governments (republics) can work, and when they do work, they work more efficiently.
It is however non trivial how you make them work and what mechanisms need to be in place to miminise corruption.
I live in Switzerland which is a true democracy. In Switzerland every person has the right to vote yes or no to certain decisions. The government is only there for the details. Sure Swiss vote quite a bit, but the power is with the Swiss people and only the Swiss people.
The difference is that the Swiss people are perfectly prepared to use that power. In other parts of the world, certainly the US, most people have been too used to leaving things to the "experts". Whilst it may only take a few hundred people to pass a law which violates a written constitution it takes a good portion of the population to actually enforce that law. If laws which violated the US constitution were simply ignored (as in no lawyer would write a threatening letter, no police officer would arrest anyone, no judge would even hear a case, etc) in the US how long do you think the US congress would keep passing them for? Whatever the level of political lobbying involved....
Even more important is that if I make a copy of the CD for myself, for personal use only, no-one has lost any money, not even a potential sale.
Actually they have lost potential sales. Those from selling you the same thing on different media and replacement copies if the original media breaks. The problem is that here they are playing "have cake and eat it". Since they like to claim thay have really sold you a licence to use the content...
"That's why I'm stunned that so many kinds of sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft."
Odds on that once people are used to the idea of an E-book not being sharable publishers will attempt to "harmonise" the law so that paper books are also unsharable.
By contrast, the phonograph record was in use for over 70 years before anything really began to render it obsolete.
It wasn't so much "rendered obsolete" as killed off by the manufactures. At least they tried, but club DJ's wouldn't accept the "subsitute" as an alternative.
My father's 30 year old record player still works like a charm, only few of today's DVD players will work in 30 years. Why? Because today cheapness always wins over quality and because with digital devices, shoddy manufacturing doesn't imply bad function.
Also the device is expected to be obsolete in a few years (or a few months in the case of Japan), so what's the point of building it to last.
I do live in the UK, and a bit over half of my DVDs are imported from the USA. Partly because of the cost, but mostly because I'm not prepared to wait for six months for them to release a film here, assuming they bother at all.
Probably most DVD players sold throughout the EU are or can be altered to be region free. The irony is that Phillips isn't a US company, their head office is in Amsterdam.
I don't know if it made it to slashdot - probably not - but a week or two ago there was a High Court judge over here who declared that playing an imported PS2 game infringed the copyright because it was licenced for another region and kept a temporary copy in memory. (I'm getting sick of this temporary copy rubbish - it's really a bit of a stretch).
The "temporary copy" argument does appear to convince legal professionals. The world over, in the UK it actually made it into statute. In other parts of the world it is actual case law.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find their respect for the law lessens every day? I'm going home shortly and will probably infringe copyright.
The way the law is actually written it's virtually impossible not to infringe it. IIRC there is an interview with a law lord who more or less says this...
The bottom line, corporations shouldn't be allowed to control law enforcement. Period. As soon as you do, the corporations ARE the government
Problem is that in places like the US corporate interests have been controlling government actions for a long time. You have the BSA using federal "law enforcement" as another example. Let alone that most of the time agents of the US government has enguaged in terrorism against other governments there has been a corporate interest (sugar, fruit or oil) involved.
The point is that the innovation is stimulated by patents.
The aim of patents is to encourage publication and use of inventions.
They invested time and money in a new product, because of the guarantee the patenet gave them that they would be able to profit from any resultant inventions.
Investing time and money in something does not guarentee that anyone will make money out of it. What a patent does mean that if money can be made on a certain invention the patent holder gets "first dibs".
The only solution I can imagine is somehow preventing it at the receiving end, because of the number of mail servers (something like 5%, IIRC) that allow relaying. Till that becomes 0%, there won't be much relief there.
Actually it's considerably more. Since quite a bit of software requires a third party relay just about every ISP on the planet offers one by default. Including ISPs who offer "free trials" and no subscription based services.
Is the GPL better than normal copyright? Sure, in the sense that it gives you the right to modify and distribute the software.
The GPL is "normal copyright". Normal copyright allows the copyright holder to licence a third party to carry out distribution and publication. Simply that the consideration for the copyright holder allowing distribution is of a form different from that which you'd typically find in commercial publication deal.
Others have said it better - but it bears repeating, because so many people seem to miss this point: The GPL has the opposite function to a typical EULA: it gives additional rights, rather than purporting to take rights away.
Also the GPL is not an EULA. It's a licence for the terms and conditions pertaining to the distribution of copyright material.
Companies pay a good portion of the taxes that pay for publicly-funded software. Governments should be encouraged to fund/use/get software that doesn't exclude use in closed-source software.
On this basis they should probably automatically exclude Microsoft, since they are expert at tax avoidance...
the UK's commercial wing of DERA (Defense Evaluation and Research Agency) produced this report: QinetiQ_OSS_rep.pdf [govtalk.gov.uk]. Which is the most pro-OSS report I've read.
Considering what these people do "Blue Screen of Death" takes on an all together more serious meaning... IIRC DERA did evaluate some Windows based battlefield systems, not sure how they actually performed.
But guess what? This isn't even an issue with Windows! I don't have to know what hardware I'm running (and don't give me any flames about how a user should know his hardware - it's not like I can bust open my laptop and read the numbers on the video adapter chips - nor should I have to, for that matter).
Guess what there are plenty of anecdotes about Linux just working, whilst Windows required all sorts of fun. Starting with the old favourate of trying to install drivers for a CDROM drive from a CDROM... Knowing what the hardware is is a matter for the installer/maintainer. Which isn any corporate/government type setting is not the user.
Slashdot Mirror
Other idiocy at random:
"The Union recognizes...the rights of the elderly...to participate in social and cultural life."
You also have things which can be in contradiction. Most obvious would be article 9. "Right to marry and found a family". which han relate interestingly with articles 7 and 10.
Sure computers did exist, but Bill Gates brought them to the people.
I think you will find that Clive Sinclair is more worthy of such a claim... Or the people at Acron, Commodore, Atari, Apple, etc.
individual people, and and not-for-profit groups can not compete with the cash generated by a large corporation.
Some not for profits actually can. If they can "bootstrap" the government into paying them to lobby it. Just about any which can do this are at least as nasty as your average mega-corp.
Regardless, it's not money worship that has reduced our democracy to the mess it is now. It's laziness and disinterest. People generally don't want to take the time to understand political issues.
Which means little competition for professional lobbiests. Representing both corporate self interests and political extremists.
Sure it might be a bit more work to buy laws but I bet it wouldn't be that much more expensive (since each indivitual state would cost less money than congress did
It might not cost them more in terms of actual bribe money, but it might well cost a lot more in terms of the cost of the logistics of actually doing the bribary and lobbying.
Maybe some of the current lobbying groups simply wouldn't be able to handle the logistics of lobbying in 50 places at once.
Cutting out the source of evil, i.e. lobbies and companies "buying" influence (when that influence should come from the citizens alone if representative democracy is to be, well, democratic) by putting severe caps on campaign contribution is the simplest yet most efficient way to clean up Washington of its grimy layer of corruption.
However it is a non trivial problem to have a representative democracy which allows the government to be petitioned by the public. Without making it very easy for professional lobbying groups to effectivly drown out anything ordinary people might be concerned about.
That's roughly 40 times the amount of people. 7 million people voting on a lot of issues may make some sense (this is why many states have similar setups).
Remember that the power of the US federal government is rather restricted anyway, compared with other national governments. Since the US constitution specifically restricts what it can do.
Representative governments (republics) can work, and when they do work, they work more efficiently.
It is however non trivial how you make them work and what mechanisms need to be in place to miminise corruption.
I live in Switzerland which is a true democracy. In Switzerland every person has the right to vote yes or no to certain decisions. The government is only there for the details. Sure Swiss vote quite a bit, but the power is with the Swiss people and only the Swiss people.
The difference is that the Swiss people are perfectly prepared to use that power. In other parts of the world, certainly the US, most people have been too used to leaving things to the "experts".
Whilst it may only take a few hundred people to pass a law which violates a written constitution it takes a good portion of the population to actually enforce that law.
If laws which violated the US constitution were simply ignored (as in no lawyer would write a threatening letter, no police officer would arrest anyone, no judge would even hear a case, etc) in the US how long do you think the US congress would keep passing them for? Whatever the level of political lobbying involved....
The funny thing about copying is you can't predict the loss in sales.
Indeed you can't even predict that the next effect will be a loss...
Even more important is that if I make a copy of the CD for myself, for personal use only, no-one has lost any money, not even a potential sale.
Actually they have lost potential sales. Those from selling you the same thing on different media and replacement copies if the original media breaks.
The problem is that here they are playing "have cake and eat it". Since they like to claim thay have really sold you a licence to use the content...
"That's why I'm stunned that so many kinds of sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft."
Odds on that once people are used to the idea of an E-book not being sharable publishers will attempt to "harmonise" the law so that paper books are also unsharable.
By contrast, the phonograph record was in use for over 70 years before anything really began to render it obsolete.
It wasn't so much "rendered obsolete" as killed off by the manufactures. At least they tried, but club DJ's wouldn't accept the "subsitute" as an alternative.
My father's 30 year old record player still works like a charm, only few of today's DVD players will work in 30 years. Why? Because today cheapness always wins over quality and because with digital devices, shoddy manufacturing doesn't imply bad function.
Also the device is expected to be obsolete in a few years (or a few months in the case of Japan), so what's the point of building it to last.
Region 1 gets most titles all ready.
When it comes to films. With things such as US produced television programmes things appear to work differently.
I do live in the UK, and a bit over half of my DVDs are imported from the USA. Partly because of the cost, but mostly because I'm not prepared to wait for six months for them to release a film here, assuming they bother at all.
Probably most DVD players sold throughout the EU are or can be altered to be region free. The irony is that Phillips isn't a US company, their head office is in Amsterdam.
I don't know if it made it to slashdot - probably not - but a week or two ago there was a High Court judge over here who declared that playing an imported PS2 game infringed the copyright because it was licenced for another region and kept a temporary copy in memory. (I'm getting sick of this temporary copy rubbish - it's really a bit of a stretch).
The "temporary copy" argument does appear to convince legal professionals. The world over, in the UK it actually made it into statute. In other parts of the world it is actual case law.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find their respect for the law lessens every day? I'm going home shortly and will probably infringe copyright.
The way the law is actually written it's virtually impossible not to infringe it. IIRC there is an interview with a law lord who more or less says this...
The bottom line, corporations shouldn't be allowed to control law enforcement. Period. As soon as you do, the corporations ARE the government
Problem is that in places like the US corporate interests have been controlling government actions for a long time. You have the BSA using federal "law enforcement" as another example. Let alone that most of the time agents of the US government has enguaged in terrorism against other governments there has been a corporate interest (sugar, fruit or oil) involved.
The point is that the innovation is stimulated by patents.
The aim of patents is to encourage publication and use of inventions.
They invested time and money in a new product, because of the guarantee the patenet gave them that they would be able to profit from any resultant inventions.
Investing time and money in something does not guarentee that anyone will make money out of it. What a patent does mean that if money can be made on a certain invention the patent holder gets "first dibs".
The only solution I can imagine is somehow preventing it at the receiving end, because of the number of mail servers (something like 5%, IIRC) that allow relaying. Till that becomes 0%, there won't be much relief there.
Actually it's considerably more. Since quite a bit of software requires a third party relay just about every ISP on the planet offers one by default. Including ISPs who offer "free trials" and no subscription based services.
The point of the GPL is to grant particular freedoms to all software users, yes: freedoms to read, learn from, and improve the software they use.
Also the freedom not to be tied to any specific supplier or maintainer.
Is the GPL better than normal copyright? Sure, in the sense that it gives you the right to modify and distribute the software.
The GPL is "normal copyright". Normal copyright allows the copyright holder to licence a third party to carry out distribution and publication. Simply that the consideration for the copyright holder allowing distribution is of a form different from that which you'd typically find in commercial publication deal.
Others have said it better - but it bears repeating, because so many people seem to miss this point: The GPL has the opposite function to a typical EULA: it gives additional rights, rather than purporting to take rights away.
Also the GPL is not an EULA. It's a licence for the terms and conditions pertaining to the distribution of copyright material.
GOVERNMENT ABUSES POWERS - Film at 11!
But getting caught at it looks like carelessness...
Companies pay a good portion of the taxes that pay for publicly-funded software. Governments should be encouraged to fund/use/get software that doesn't exclude use in closed-source software.
On this basis they should probably automatically exclude Microsoft, since they are expert at tax avoidance...
the UK's commercial wing of DERA (Defense Evaluation and Research Agency) produced this report: QinetiQ_OSS_rep.pdf [govtalk.gov.uk]. Which is the most pro-OSS report I've read.
Considering what these people do "Blue Screen of Death" takes on an all together more serious meaning...
IIRC DERA did evaluate some Windows based battlefield systems, not sure how they actually performed.
But guess what? This isn't even an issue with Windows! I don't have to know what hardware I'm running (and don't give me any flames about how a user should know his hardware - it's not like I can bust open my laptop and read the numbers on the video adapter chips - nor should I have to, for that matter).
Guess what there are plenty of anecdotes about Linux just working, whilst Windows required all sorts of fun. Starting with the old favourate of trying to install drivers for a CDROM drive from a CDROM...
Knowing what the hardware is is a matter for the installer/maintainer. Which isn any corporate/government type setting is not the user.