Part of it is voluntary compliance. IIRC hard liquor ads on tv more or less vanished, but have been known to pop up now and again. It's not all that uncommon for deals to be struck that limit advertising voluntarily in exchange for something else.
Part of it is because false or misleading advertising, or advertising for illegal activities is not protected by the first amendment. (and while much spam might be of that type, realize that the medium of spam does not dictate the content, which could perfectly well be forthright and lawful)
And part of it is because even when protected by the first amendment, commercial speech has a somewhat lesser degree of protection than noncommercial speech, but ultimately it does still require a more or less intermediate degree of scrutiny; non-misleading commercial speech can ONLY be regulated if the government has a substantial interest in the regulation, the regulation directly advances the government's interest, and the regulation is no more substantial than necessary. Thus it's a lot easier for the government to, say, require lists of ingredients on packaging than it is to ban ads, and bans on ads have been struck down in the past. Others have been upheld; it depends.
The point is that it's a gross mistake to just say that there are no first amendment protections at all for all commercial speech. Even spam, and perhaps to some extent spyware, has to be analyzed properly.
Well, it is cheap, and you can get it in a wide variety of encodings, but sadly it's illegal (at least for people in the US).
Some people will point out that it is -- arguably -- legal in Russia. That's great if you're in Russia. But if you're in the US, you'll find it's as much of a loser as it is to say that since it's okay to smoke grass in Holland that it must therefore be legal to do so here. Laws don't work like that.
No, there are other rights that arise out of penumbras, but privacy is the biggest. Still, several arise out of the First Amendment as being necessary rights for the rights enumerated there to actually be able to function.
So, yes, they have the right to free speech. They just don't have the right to come into my home to exercise it.
That's oversimplified, I think. Broadly, yes, that's correct. The issue is basically whether or not you have given them that right. You may have, even if you don't know it.
For example, the practice of door-to-door soliciting is well known. People enter your property, walk up to the door, knock, and try to sell you something. You can either listen or kick them off your land and prohibit their returning. But, by age-old custom, you automatically give people permission to reasonably engage in this kind of soliciting, merely by the virtue of _being there_. If you want to stop it in advance, it's up to you to provide reasonable notice to solicitors so that they won't even try.
The same deal applies for mail (your mailbox is your property, but it's up to you to revoke the implied permission you grant the world to send you mail) and your phone. It's revokable, but you granted permission by having them.
So why should this be any different for new mediums of communication? I think that it might be good to set up laws that make it clear what methods are reasonable forms of notice to not merely individual solicitors over various media, but also all of them in one go (like putting up a sign in your yard), but otherwise I don't think this is something that's very difficult.
Speech for profit (advertising) is not protected by the first amendment.
Bzt, wrong, but thanks for playing: "The First Amendment, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, protects commercial speech from unwarranted governmental regulation." Central Hudson v. Public Service Comm., 447 U.S. 557 (1980).
Also note that you're not just wrong, you're also sloppy: if I write a book with the sole purpose of selling it to people, and then I do so, I have absolutely engaged in speech for profit, and I get to enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment, you idiot.
And especially not in your own home, on your machine, with your bandwidth being used.
NOW you're getting somewhere interesting. You're right -- the First Amendment doesn't force you to open your home up to advertising. That still doesn't mean that there are no First Amendment protections for ads generally, however. Context is important.
This is not true in the US, by and large. You can buy copies of videos off of Amazon and rent them out as you like. However, it is common for studios to sell copies in advance of the retail release date, at a high markup. Since rental places will want to rent as soon as possible, and before people can easily and cheaply buy the copies, they'll pay extra. This isn't for the right to rent them, which merely runs with the ownership of the copy itself, but for getting them as quickly as possible.
At any rate, little notices like that generally don't mean shit. Think about what it's saying: It says that there _might_ be laws that _might_ prohibit you from doing things. OTOH, there might not be, and what laws there are might let you do some of that stuff, or might prohibit other things not on the list. It's merely a (horribly bad) restatement of something external, not controlling in itself. (e.g. if I sold you sugar, and cautioned you that sugar was a controlled substance, it's still legal to possess it, even though you think it isn't; your confusion doesn't have the force of law) Likewise, while they might authorize home usage, it's likely that they have no power, given the law, to deny you home usage. They can only deny you things that the law lets them deny you. So a denial of non-home usage is itself whittled down to the non-home usage that they have the legal right to prohibit.
Warnings like that are just FUD, basically. If they were serious about it, it'd be much more EULA like (a contract certainly isn't a contract, after all, unless people can tell that you MEAN for it to be a contract, and even then it depends) and you'd be able to tell the difference.
Basically the same thing as is meant by the existing AHRA statutory exemption that makes it legal to copy sound recordings under the correct circumstances. (17 USC 1008, with important definitions at 1001)
Basically, you can't charge money for it, even to cover costs, and probably couldn't use it as a draw for something else (e.g. d/l music for free, but subject to seeing ads, for which the distributor would get paid to display)
OTOH, it obviously would not mean 'lack of economic loss to the copyright holder' or else it would have basically no effect at all. Nor could it be interpreted as to preclude it if the works copied, distributed, etc. themselves are a free substitute to what would otherwise cost money, again for the same reason.
The gist of the proposal is: if you are a human being, and you are not making money, not covering losses, and not getting anything of value other than otherwise infringing materials, then you're free to do anything at all that you want without running afoul of copyright law.
If you want to charge money, however, or if you are not a human being, then you're still subject to copyright law. Thus we would protect file sharers, fan authors, free public performances and displays, but not protect pirates that sell copies, commercial venues that charge admission, or so forth.
It's a big step, I admit. But I can't think of anything better that basically shields the little guy from relatively little acts of infringement, without either a) getting into the world of fair use, where nothing is for certain ok or not ok, or b) having to define every damn little exception, and thus ensuring that something important will be forgotten.
I would rather define the rights of the author narrowly, subject to the danger of forgetting to give them certain rights (e.g. derivative rights took about a century to appear) than to make the public pay for giving sweeping rights to authors.
I would begin by realizing that what you're describing is probably not a work for hire, and thus would result in your being fucked.
17 USC 101 defines a work made for hire, and it is very strict. As a rule of thumb, you should not assume works are works made for hire unless the person making them is your employee, not a contractor, and the works are being made in the scope of the employment. Typically, someone is your employee if they're working for you permanently, you withhold their taxes, and so forth. Commissioned works are hardly ever works made for hire.
So instead, you probably want a copyright assignment clause in a contract with contracted artists. This needs to be in writing, should be very explicit, and must be a proper contract: in exchange for consideration, signed, etc. See 17 USC 204-205. And don't forget to register the copyrights with the US Copyright Office, lest they not be worth shit.
Copyright infringement is traditionally defined by unauthorized distribution - so they really only have the right to go after those who are illegally distributing their content.
Sorry Charlie, but you're flat-out wrong. 17 USC 106 lists some of the rights of copyright holders. Distribution is one, and it is co-equal with copying (i.e. downloading, and on a computer, opening as well), creating derivatives, and public performance and display of some works. And there are other rights besides, those are just the biggies.
Going after uploaders is a tactical decision, because it'll cut off leechers in the process, and thus is a way of killing two birds with one store. Same reason that they went after the P2P services themselves originally; they hoped to shut down the users in the process.
Illegally copying the newest Britney Spear's CD isn't justified. Even under the most progressive copyright schemes, that would still be illegal.
Actual or proposed schemes? I've proposed for a while now that any noncommercial action by natural persons be considered noninfringing, even if it would otherwise have been.
So your hypo would be perfectly legal. (assuming that you meant something other than 'illegally [doing things is] illegal' which is technically what you've posted, but is kind of circular.
Has anyone out there noted that he is not sponsoring legislation to make sure that computer programmers get copyrights and royalties for their work just like musical writers and performers do
They already do. There is no substantial difference.
Writers and performers can get paid salary but they also can get paid royalties based upon some pretty strongly defended copy protection rights under law. The FBI enforces these.
The FBI doesn't usually give a rat's ass about copyright, and when they do they are concerned about large-scale piracy operations -- not how much employers are remitting to employees.
Besides, you're wrong. If you are an employee, and you create a work in the scope of your employment, you NEVER had a copyright to it. The employer is the original copyright holder, and gets everything. The employee gets nothing, because that's part of what comes with being an employee. This is in 17 USC 101 and 201(a),(b). But I'd love to see the laws you're referring to. What precisely are the citations again? Probably you're thinking of 17 USC 203, but if so, you need to reread it, carefully this time.
Computer programmers are more likely to have their work last longer than movie actors and screen writers who most often get royalties for use.
Piffle. How much software do you use that is five years old? Ten years old? Fifty years old? A hundred years old?
Most software is used for a few years -- maybe even a decade or two if it's on a mainframe or something, and works well enough for now. Meanwhile, people still watch movies that are over a hundred years old, and read books, watch plays, dances, look at art, and listen to music that was created hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago.
No one is going to unearth Bill Gates' Tomb full of software and start running it. Most good museums, OTOH, have whole wings of Egyptian artifacts that can be appreciated just as they were originally.
Frankly, this is why software needs to have a much shorter copyright than anything else, and why we need to require that authors seeking a copyright on software deposit enough well commented source so that it can be meaningfully used and adapted by people even a few years down the line. Patents already work similarly, and binaries are so useless in the long run that we'd better shape things up lest we grant copyrights that return no long-lasting benefit to the public.
Regarding Ellison, he's actually done somewhat less than you think. He came up with story ideas on two, count 'em two episodes (admittedly from 1998) but didn't even do the scripts for either.
Frankly, he's been a jerk about this whole deal -- but then, when has he _not_ been jerk?
Ranma 1/2 and Aa! Megamisama are not directed towards female audiences. They just have a lot of important female characters.
While the TV series was a lot better than either, IMO, a good thing to look at would be the Escaflowne manga. There were actually two versions, one shonen, one shoujo, and by comparing them one can get the gist of the differences in the two basic genres. Of course there are crossovers -- Maison Ikkoku is probably a decent example. It's not like this is a hard and fast line either, you know.
Re:Iron oxide, cellulose acetate, and aluminum pow
on
Zeppelin Flies Again
·
· Score: 1
Actually it crash landed anyway, and most of the people on board (62 of 97) survived. Much better odds than an airplane crash!
Of course, there were plenty of _other_ disasters with Zeppelins. But the Hindenburg disaster is overplayed, IMO.
Ok, I've got 241 subfolders in there.. To expand them all, I could write a little apple script, or flip the disclosure triangle for each one...
Or you could select all, then hit command-option-rightarrow and it'll expand the selected folders to the fullest possible extent. It's one of those things that's nice to be able to do, but annoying in that it isn't well-known or documented.
Ok, how many different file types should the finder open and index every time a new one is created? How much space should we give up for indexing?
Any that the user wants -- Apple themselves can set up an API for this (which in fact is how Windows does it) then write plug ins for the common ones -- mp3, jpeg, mov, maybe a few others. Make it easy for third parties to come along and add further metadata reading plugins to supply data for the Finder to display.
As for space -- all that's needed. It's never going to be a lot, and can probably be allocated on demand. I have tens of thousands of mp3s and oggs (for which there is a plugin) on WinXP and it's never had a problem with listing the info, at least so long as they're in an open folder, which would be good for a start.
Maybe what Finder does and doesn't do has something to do with prioritization and limited resources.
No, this is pretty easy to do now IMO. And it's quite important for the future, not that there's been a peep out of Apple as to better filesystems. (n.b. that BeOS was good for this sort of thing, and they have the guy who did their fs design)
I think it's mostly that Apple stopped caring much about user interface not long after Pink died, and that they haven't cared at all -- have even gotten stupid, in fact -- since Steve came back.
It's not that I'm against the GPL; I like it. Nor do I think that the government should be funding development of closed source software or anything.
It's that the government is not motivated by copyright at all, when it does things. Nor does it need to be -- it has the power to tax, and it is intended solely to work for the people. Government works should universally be in the public domain. This lets anyone use them in any way, for any purpose at all. There is not even a trade-off as with the BSD or GPL licenses, where you trade the extra freedoms you get with having to give freedoms to others likewise. There's simply no need for that with the government.
I don't mind if they encourage private persons to release under the GPL, but the government, and projects contracted by the government, should remain in the public domain. This is already partly required by 17 USC 105. I'd go further and force it on states and foreign governments, and extend the scope of who it applies to, but it's the right way to go.
That's funny, because if you have a folder in list view, with all the subfolders expanded, you can do the same thing. Of course, Apple's been dumb as hell not making the Finder more aware of metadata (even Windows can read ID3 tags and display them in the file manager), but the basic idea's there. Better, IMO, since I can have visually distinct groups thanks to the indenting in list view.
Recording from radio is not necessarily legal. Recording via means permitted in AHRA (analog, a few digital methods but they're fairly limited) is legal. And fair uses are legal. But not all home recording is fair use -- each instance has to be considered anew.
And making copies -- such as by infringing recordings -- is just as illegal as infringing distribution.
If Congress had stuck to the 1790 Act, it would also only protect American authors, only books or maps (not music, software, visual art, etc.) and not have important formal requirements.
I'd rather have the terms from that act, rather than the whole thing.
Boston's not that bad. But it does help a lot if you have one of those street map atlases in your car. At any rate, you eventually get used to where things are at.
Meh -- not always. Not all treaties are self executing. Where they're not, you still need an actual law to enact what the treaty wants to do, and it's the law that has to be obeyed, not the treaty. Most treaties aren't a big deal for the individual.
For example, you personally, cannot violate the geneva convention. You need to be an agent of the country to do so, since only then could the violation be imputed to the country, and that's who it has an effect on. Likewise, you're kind of SOL if you suffer a violation, since you can't sue based on that.
International law is somewhat unusual compared to most other law.
Some Slashdotters want to have their cake and eat it, too... copyright control is okay when it means they get stuff free, not okay when it means they can't get stuff free.
What's wrong with that? I _love_ having my cake and eating it too. I'm all for whatever kinds of copyright get me the most stuff for free. What's wrong with you, you don't like getting stuff for free?
They're just establishing that federal laws are superior to state laws. There is also a hierarchy of laws within any particular system -- thus a treaty that violated the first amendment or something, could be overturned (provided someone had standing, of course).
Think of it like this: why would the framers go through the trouble of giving us two methods of amending the constitution -- amendments proposed by congress and approved by the states, or proposed and approved by the states -- when, if treaties were equal to (and thus able to amend) the constitution by as little as presidential and senatorial action? It doesn't even make sense, and that alone ought to be a big clue that treaties can't trump the constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of it is voluntary compliance. IIRC hard liquor ads on tv more or less vanished, but have been known to pop up now and again. It's not all that uncommon for deals to be struck that limit advertising voluntarily in exchange for something else.
Part of it is because false or misleading advertising, or advertising for illegal activities is not protected by the first amendment. (and while much spam might be of that type, realize that the medium of spam does not dictate the content, which could perfectly well be forthright and lawful)
And part of it is because even when protected by the first amendment, commercial speech has a somewhat lesser degree of protection than noncommercial speech, but ultimately it does still require a more or less intermediate degree of scrutiny; non-misleading commercial speech can ONLY be regulated if the government has a substantial interest in the regulation, the regulation directly advances the government's interest, and the regulation is no more substantial than necessary. Thus it's a lot easier for the government to, say, require lists of ingredients on packaging than it is to ban ads, and bans on ads have been struck down in the past. Others have been upheld; it depends.
The point is that it's a gross mistake to just say that there are no first amendment protections at all for all commercial speech. Even spam, and perhaps to some extent spyware, has to be analyzed properly.
Well, it is cheap, and you can get it in a wide variety of encodings, but sadly it's illegal (at least for people in the US).
Some people will point out that it is -- arguably -- legal in Russia. That's great if you're in Russia. But if you're in the US, you'll find it's as much of a loser as it is to say that since it's okay to smoke grass in Holland that it must therefore be legal to do so here. Laws don't work like that.
No, there are other rights that arise out of penumbras, but privacy is the biggest. Still, several arise out of the First Amendment as being necessary rights for the rights enumerated there to actually be able to function.
So, yes, they have the right to free speech. They just don't have the right to come into my home to exercise it.
That's oversimplified, I think. Broadly, yes, that's correct. The issue is basically whether or not you have given them that right. You may have, even if you don't know it.
For example, the practice of door-to-door soliciting is well known. People enter your property, walk up to the door, knock, and try to sell you something. You can either listen or kick them off your land and prohibit their returning. But, by age-old custom, you automatically give people permission to reasonably engage in this kind of soliciting, merely by the virtue of _being there_. If you want to stop it in advance, it's up to you to provide reasonable notice to solicitors so that they won't even try.
The same deal applies for mail (your mailbox is your property, but it's up to you to revoke the implied permission you grant the world to send you mail) and your phone. It's revokable, but you granted permission by having them.
So why should this be any different for new mediums of communication? I think that it might be good to set up laws that make it clear what methods are reasonable forms of notice to not merely individual solicitors over various media, but also all of them in one go (like putting up a sign in your yard), but otherwise I don't think this is something that's very difficult.
Speech for profit (advertising) is not protected by the first amendment.
Bzt, wrong, but thanks for playing: "The First Amendment, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, protects commercial speech from unwarranted governmental regulation." Central Hudson v. Public Service Comm., 447 U.S. 557 (1980).
Also note that you're not just wrong, you're also sloppy: if I write a book with the sole purpose of selling it to people, and then I do so, I have absolutely engaged in speech for profit, and I get to enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment, you idiot.
And especially not in your own home, on your machine, with your bandwidth being used.
NOW you're getting somewhere interesting. You're right -- the First Amendment doesn't force you to open your home up to advertising. That still doesn't mean that there are no First Amendment protections for ads generally, however. Context is important.
This is not true in the US, by and large. You can buy copies of videos off of Amazon and rent them out as you like. However, it is common for studios to sell copies in advance of the retail release date, at a high markup. Since rental places will want to rent as soon as possible, and before people can easily and cheaply buy the copies, they'll pay extra. This isn't for the right to rent them, which merely runs with the ownership of the copy itself, but for getting them as quickly as possible.
At any rate, little notices like that generally don't mean shit. Think about what it's saying: It says that there _might_ be laws that _might_ prohibit you from doing things. OTOH, there might not be, and what laws there are might let you do some of that stuff, or might prohibit other things not on the list. It's merely a (horribly bad) restatement of something external, not controlling in itself. (e.g. if I sold you sugar, and cautioned you that sugar was a controlled substance, it's still legal to possess it, even though you think it isn't; your confusion doesn't have the force of law) Likewise, while they might authorize home usage, it's likely that they have no power, given the law, to deny you home usage. They can only deny you things that the law lets them deny you. So a denial of non-home usage is itself whittled down to the non-home usage that they have the legal right to prohibit.
Warnings like that are just FUD, basically. If they were serious about it, it'd be much more EULA like (a contract certainly isn't a contract, after all, unless people can tell that you MEAN for it to be a contract, and even then it depends) and you'd be able to tell the difference.
What do you mean by noncommercial?
Basically the same thing as is meant by the existing AHRA statutory exemption that makes it legal to copy sound recordings under the correct circumstances. (17 USC 1008, with important definitions at 1001)
Basically, you can't charge money for it, even to cover costs, and probably couldn't use it as a draw for something else (e.g. d/l music for free, but subject to seeing ads, for which the distributor would get paid to display)
OTOH, it obviously would not mean 'lack of economic loss to the copyright holder' or else it would have basically no effect at all. Nor could it be interpreted as to preclude it if the works copied, distributed, etc. themselves are a free substitute to what would otherwise cost money, again for the same reason.
The gist of the proposal is: if you are a human being, and you are not making money, not covering losses, and not getting anything of value other than otherwise infringing materials, then you're free to do anything at all that you want without running afoul of copyright law.
If you want to charge money, however, or if you are not a human being, then you're still subject to copyright law. Thus we would protect file sharers, fan authors, free public performances and displays, but not protect pirates that sell copies, commercial venues that charge admission, or so forth.
It's a big step, I admit. But I can't think of anything better that basically shields the little guy from relatively little acts of infringement, without either a) getting into the world of fair use, where nothing is for certain ok or not ok, or b) having to define every damn little exception, and thus ensuring that something important will be forgotten.
I would rather define the rights of the author narrowly, subject to the danger of forgetting to give them certain rights (e.g. derivative rights took about a century to appear) than to make the public pay for giving sweeping rights to authors.
I would begin by realizing that what you're describing is probably not a work for hire, and thus would result in your being fucked.
17 USC 101 defines a work made for hire, and it is very strict. As a rule of thumb, you should not assume works are works made for hire unless the person making them is your employee, not a contractor, and the works are being made in the scope of the employment. Typically, someone is your employee if they're working for you permanently, you withhold their taxes, and so forth. Commissioned works are hardly ever works made for hire.
So instead, you probably want a copyright assignment clause in a contract with contracted artists. This needs to be in writing, should be very explicit, and must be a proper contract: in exchange for consideration, signed, etc. See 17 USC 204-205. And don't forget to register the copyrights with the US Copyright Office, lest they not be worth shit.
Copyright infringement is traditionally defined by unauthorized distribution - so they really only have the right to go after those who are illegally distributing their content.
Sorry Charlie, but you're flat-out wrong. 17 USC 106 lists some of the rights of copyright holders. Distribution is one, and it is co-equal with copying (i.e. downloading, and on a computer, opening as well), creating derivatives, and public performance and display of some works. And there are other rights besides, those are just the biggies.
Going after uploaders is a tactical decision, because it'll cut off leechers in the process, and thus is a way of killing two birds with one store. Same reason that they went after the P2P services themselves originally; they hoped to shut down the users in the process.
Illegally copying the newest Britney Spear's CD isn't justified. Even under the most progressive copyright schemes, that would still be illegal.
Actual or proposed schemes? I've proposed for a while now that any noncommercial action by natural persons be considered noninfringing, even if it would otherwise have been.
So your hypo would be perfectly legal. (assuming that you meant something other than 'illegally [doing things is] illegal' which is technically what you've posted, but is kind of circular.
Has anyone out there noted that he is not sponsoring legislation to make sure that computer programmers get copyrights and royalties for their work just like musical writers and performers do
They already do. There is no substantial difference.
Writers and performers can get paid salary but they also can get paid royalties based upon some pretty strongly defended copy protection rights under law. The FBI enforces these.
The FBI doesn't usually give a rat's ass about copyright, and when they do they are concerned about large-scale piracy operations -- not how much employers are remitting to employees.
Besides, you're wrong. If you are an employee, and you create a work in the scope of your employment, you NEVER had a copyright to it. The employer is the original copyright holder, and gets everything. The employee gets nothing, because that's part of what comes with being an employee. This is in 17 USC 101 and 201(a),(b). But I'd love to see the laws you're referring to. What precisely are the citations again? Probably you're thinking of 17 USC 203, but if so, you need to reread it, carefully this time.
Computer programmers are more likely to have their work last longer than movie actors and screen writers who most often get royalties for use.
Piffle. How much software do you use that is five years old? Ten years old? Fifty years old? A hundred years old?
Most software is used for a few years -- maybe even a decade or two if it's on a mainframe or something, and works well enough for now. Meanwhile, people still watch movies that are over a hundred years old, and read books, watch plays, dances, look at art, and listen to music that was created hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago.
No one is going to unearth Bill Gates' Tomb full of software and start running it. Most good museums, OTOH, have whole wings of Egyptian artifacts that can be appreciated just as they were originally.
Frankly, this is why software needs to have a much shorter copyright than anything else, and why we need to require that authors seeking a copyright on software deposit enough well commented source so that it can be meaningfully used and adapted by people even a few years down the line. Patents already work similarly, and binaries are so useless in the long run that we'd better shape things up lest we grant copyrights that return no long-lasting benefit to the public.
Regarding Ellison, he's actually done somewhat less than you think. He came up with story ideas on two, count 'em two episodes (admittedly from 1998) but didn't even do the scripts for either.
Frankly, he's been a jerk about this whole deal -- but then, when has he _not_ been jerk?
I've never read "Escape from Pohl Anderson." Is he a terrific bore at parties or something?
Ranma 1/2 and Aa! Megamisama are not directed towards female audiences. They just have a lot of important female characters.
While the TV series was a lot better than either, IMO, a good thing to look at would be the Escaflowne manga. There were actually two versions, one shonen, one shoujo, and by comparing them one can get the gist of the differences in the two basic genres. Of course there are crossovers -- Maison Ikkoku is probably a decent example. It's not like this is a hard and fast line either, you know.
Actually it crash landed anyway, and most of the people on board (62 of 97) survived. Much better odds than an airplane crash!
Of course, there were plenty of _other_ disasters with Zeppelins. But the Hindenburg disaster is overplayed, IMO.
Ok, I've got 241 subfolders in there.. To expand them all, I could write a little apple script, or flip the disclosure triangle for each one...
Or you could select all, then hit command-option-rightarrow and it'll expand the selected folders to the fullest possible extent. It's one of those things that's nice to be able to do, but annoying in that it isn't well-known or documented.
Ok, how many different file types should the finder open and index every time a new one is created? How much space should we give up for indexing?
Any that the user wants -- Apple themselves can set up an API for this (which in fact is how Windows does it) then write plug ins for the common ones -- mp3, jpeg, mov, maybe a few others. Make it easy for third parties to come along and add further metadata reading plugins to supply data for the Finder to display.
As for space -- all that's needed. It's never going to be a lot, and can probably be allocated on demand. I have tens of thousands of mp3s and oggs (for which there is a plugin) on WinXP and it's never had a problem with listing the info, at least so long as they're in an open folder, which would be good for a start.
Maybe what Finder does and doesn't do has something to do with prioritization and limited resources.
No, this is pretty easy to do now IMO. And it's quite important for the future, not that there's been a peep out of Apple as to better filesystems. (n.b. that BeOS was good for this sort of thing, and they have the guy who did their fs design)
I think it's mostly that Apple stopped caring much about user interface not long after Pink died, and that they haven't cared at all -- have even gotten stupid, in fact -- since Steve came back.
It's not that I'm against the GPL; I like it. Nor do I think that the government should be funding development of closed source software or anything.
It's that the government is not motivated by copyright at all, when it does things. Nor does it need to be -- it has the power to tax, and it is intended solely to work for the people. Government works should universally be in the public domain. This lets anyone use them in any way, for any purpose at all. There is not even a trade-off as with the BSD or GPL licenses, where you trade the extra freedoms you get with having to give freedoms to others likewise. There's simply no need for that with the government.
I don't mind if they encourage private persons to release under the GPL, but the government, and projects contracted by the government, should remain in the public domain. This is already partly required by 17 USC 105. I'd go further and force it on states and foreign governments, and extend the scope of who it applies to, but it's the right way to go.
That's funny, because if you have a folder in list view, with all the subfolders expanded, you can do the same thing. Of course, Apple's been dumb as hell not making the Finder more aware of metadata (even Windows can read ID3 tags and display them in the file manager), but the basic idea's there. Better, IMO, since I can have visually distinct groups thanks to the indenting in list view.
Recording from radio is not necessarily legal. Recording via means permitted in AHRA (analog, a few digital methods but they're fairly limited) is legal. And fair uses are legal. But not all home recording is fair use -- each instance has to be considered anew.
And making copies -- such as by infringing recordings -- is just as illegal as infringing distribution.
If Congress had stuck to the 1790 Act, it would also only protect American authors, only books or maps (not music, software, visual art, etc.) and not have important formal requirements.
I'd rather have the terms from that act, rather than the whole thing.
Boston's not that bad. But it does help a lot if you have one of those street map atlases in your car. At any rate, you eventually get used to where things are at.
Pentagon Papers? I didn't realize this was a prior restraint case. I would have thought that Brandenburg would have been the leading case.
Meh -- not always. Not all treaties are self executing. Where they're not, you still need an actual law to enact what the treaty wants to do, and it's the law that has to be obeyed, not the treaty. Most treaties aren't a big deal for the individual.
For example, you personally, cannot violate the geneva convention. You need to be an agent of the country to do so, since only then could the violation be imputed to the country, and that's who it has an effect on. Likewise, you're kind of SOL if you suffer a violation, since you can't sue based on that.
International law is somewhat unusual compared to most other law.
Some Slashdotters want to have their cake and eat it, too... copyright control is okay when it means they get stuff free, not okay when it means they can't get stuff free.
What's wrong with that? I _love_ having my cake and eating it too. I'm all for whatever kinds of copyright get me the most stuff for free. What's wrong with you, you don't like getting stuff for free?
They're just establishing that federal laws are superior to state laws. There is also a hierarchy of laws within any particular system -- thus a treaty that violated the first amendment or something, could be overturned (provided someone had standing, of course).
Think of it like this: why would the framers go through the trouble of giving us two methods of amending the constitution -- amendments proposed by congress and approved by the states, or proposed and approved by the states -- when, if treaties were equal to (and thus able to amend) the constitution by as little as presidential and senatorial action? It doesn't even make sense, and that alone ought to be a big clue that treaties can't trump the constitution.