This is why I just get a new unique card every time -- don't recycle the address, or the name, or anything. I pay in cash as well.
It's a minor inconvenience, and I often shop at the one remaining store in the area that doesn't use cards at all because of it. (it was better in Seattle -- only Safeway used cards there, and between the Top and the QFC, I never felt any need to go to the damn Safeway)
I'm a first year law student, and I am very interested personally in computer-related law, copyrights, etc. I hope to specialize in some field along these lines, e.g. copyright litigation, once I finish school. Hopefully, I'll be lucky enough to be able to 'fight the good fight.' Unfortunately, I don't have the background in the hard sciences or engineering I'd need to even take, much less pass, the Patent Bar, which, as I know, is an important requirement of many IP firms. Given this, do you have any suggestions which might be useful in any way?
Thanks very much for your time
(And now, back to exams. Nothin' I like better!)
Well, first, there's Black's Law Dictionary, which is very useful. Secondly, you have to bear in mind that important definitions may have been placed virtually anywhere in the document, possibly without having even been set apart in any significant way from the text. Perhaps even inferred from the the text. And of course, lawyers go to school for three years to learn a lot of doctrines and practices that serve as the foundation for what you're attempting to read, and then work at firms as psuedo-apprentices for a few more years to build up the practical experience necessary to practice law well.
If you're really prepared to give it some study, albiet informally, try picking up some commercial outlines or hornbooks on various subjects (e.g. contracts, torts, etc.) at a law school's bookstore. They're reasonably useful supplemental study aids (like cliff's notes, they're handy but not sufficient) for the students, and might give you all the information you needed... and more.
It's fun, but quite challenging. More so for me -- my first exam is tomorrow and I'm terrified.:/
But you must conceed that it is not within the scope of their duty to act illegally. MS, unfortunately, has run afoul of the law on numerous ocassions.
Sure, this means that MS has to, like everyone else, consider ALL the consequences of their actions, and not act solely for the company's immediate benefit. But those are the ground rules anyway, and it's simply not unusual in the least.
(and of course, who said capitalism was the end-all, be-all of economic systems. It's one of the better ones we've got, if properly restricted and harnessed, but don't get attached to it if there's something better)
Unfortunately, it would be via a crappy-ass operating system. I'm not saying OS X is particularly better than XP, mind you, just that the entire market is stagnating horribly, and such a move would ultimately be detremental.
Vigorous competition between many small companies is a better way to go. Would we even have Windows if not for all of the other companies that brought out GUIs first? MS is proving to be pretty lousy w/o someone to emulate.
Really? I've heard that software piracy is absolutely rampant in Israel, placing it in a similar position as a number of SE Asian countries.
I have some relatives over there... I'll have to ask the next time I get a chance.
Personally, while I agree that the authors deserve the most blame, the programmers who construct systems so fragile that they can be affected by these things don't exactly smell like roses. Security models that don't date back to the 60's would be a good start. ACL has _long_ gone out of date, but the morons keep on using it.
Well, seeking is an intelligent act. Diogenes sought an honest man. Water just happens to flow downhill, 'til it can't flow no more.
Similarly while information obviously cannot bust itself out of someone's mind and spread itself, once it has been spread, it cannot be taken back. If you told me a secret, you have to trust that I won't repeat it. You cannot actually cause me not to do so, and you cannot take away that secret from me, if you think better of it.
Anyway, that's probably the best interpretation of "information wants to be free" that I can provide for you. Not that it tries to become free, but that once having been made free by an outside actor, it stays that way. Information is only exclusively yours for as long as you never ever reveal it. Show it to me, and suddenly it is ours.
On to your second point:
There is an ESSENTIAL difference you're missing. It is true -- a musician may only agree to share his music under certain conditions. However, having done so, he must be cautious. First, as made plain above, once he has shared his music, he cannot unshare it. If another equally skilled musician happened to hear it, then he could reconstruct it. And any member of the audience might remember enough of it to never again need to seek out the services of the original musician in order to enjoy it again. I can remember how plenty of songs go, and I often whistle or sing a bit at times for my own enjoyment.
But more important is the second danger the musician faces. He may find himself unable to enforce the conditions that he imposed! While the courts in the US often are quite liberal with regards to the right to contract between two parties, and let a lot of things slide by, they won't let _everything_ so slide.
Witness the very recent Softman case. Adobe alleged that they licensed distributors to distribute their software under terms set by Adobe. The distributors could only distribute to licensed resellers that were only allowed to resell under terms set by Adobe.
BUT a company or person who bought a copy of the software was under no contract whatsoever. He could resell the product in any manner he chose, even giving it out on the streets for free, in direct competiton with Adobe. (who has already been paid and doesn't really have a leg to stand on) Essentially, the judge ruled that even if dressed up as a license, if a transaction walked like a sale, and quacked like a sale, it was a sale, and NOT a contract.
Your musician may be able to sell people CDs, but unless he is invariably quite cautious about it, he may slip up and lose control.
Of course, where you're hauling in a discussion of contract rights from in a discussion about copyright is a bit beyond me. Copyright provisions are NOT EVER set by the artist. The artist may _waive_ some of his exclusive rights, but he has no ability to control what those rights are, or to whom, or how long they apply.
Copyright is established by LAW. Disney surely would like a copyright quite different from what's actually on the books. For starters, I'm sure they'd like to get rid of that pesky line in the Constitution that requires copyrights to persist only for limited times. Unfortunately, they have a lot of political clout, but they don't get to actually set terms to that extent, bypassing Congress altogether.
Of course, why do we have copyright laws? Well, the answer again lies in the Constitution: to promote the progress of the arts. NOT, I repeat NOT to fatten the wallets of artists, or to protect them in any way.
Instead, we -- the vast majority of people, who happen to generally be consumers of art and not producers -- are willing to circumscribe our own liberties to run wild with creative works once our individual Jeffersonian torches have been lit. We do this because we're self-serving and greedy. We figure that we can obtain even MORE works for our own purposes (which include using them as fodder for another generation of works) by using a carrot instead of a stick.
But we don't just hand over a boundless supply of carrots, or copyrights. We limit them, searching for the optimum point where we bribe artists to create as much as possible, without outweighing the benefits of screwing artists over and taking what we want.
For example, under the original copyright act, we felt that if an author could not recoup enough money to keep him writing after fourteen years from publication, he wasn't worth it. Copyrights had terms that short. And if you weren't writing books or making maps, you didn't deserve copyrights anyway.
Of course, this is the way it should be. I have no sympathy for artists -- and again, I _am_ one -- save that they're useful for my purposes. With property, at _least_ you can make an arguement that by depriving someone of their wheat they can no longer use it. With information, no one could stop the original creator from using it if they wanted. (save perhaps by the ancient Egyptian copyright method of killing him, but I'm not for that)
When people describe the American copyright regime as being utilitarian, they're not whistling Dixie -- it's really a system devised by and for the public, which treats artists as useful tools, deserving of no more reward than we give them of our own free will, period.
At the moment, we're basically spoiling artists. If, for example, Stephen King dropped dead today, you cannot make a single compelling argument that permitting his copyright to last for another NINETY YEARS more past his death will in any way whatsoever stimulate him into writing one more word. Trust me on this; I had hoped that death couldn't stop Vincent Price either, but it seems to have done so.
Confusing property rights and copyrights is a common mistake, and the way that the language around them goes, it's not all that surprising. Lots of people do it. But they share no similarities at all. Mostly people get hung up on this concept: a copyright is itself a piece of property, and the embodiment of a work, e.g a book or a canvas is a piece of property, but the copyrighted WORK, e.g. a story or a picture, is not property at all. Tricky, I know, but this isn't an easy subject.
Your argument that creators of a work should have some say in how it is used can also be attacked through an absurdist argument. James Daly famously is reputed to have invented the nonsense word 'quiz' in Dublin in the late 18th century. (actually he didn't, but let's assume that the story is true) Are you proposing that the heirs and creditors of Daly could, if they chose, PREVENT people from using the word? Should they be able to bill Robert Redford for his movie 'Quiz Show' as well as newspaper reviewers writing about it? Should they be allowed to charge dictionary editors royalty fees for use of it? Making the very very poor argument that authors should be able to treat ideas or works like any other piece of property leads to things like this which can be inarguably said to be quite detremental to encouraging the development of culture.
Don't hand people control over the contents of your mind -- limit copyrights to something very small, something that keeps artists eating, but hungry enough to need to keep at it, and which absolutely doesn't interfere with how you live your life in any meaningful way.
It's grossly unconstitutional to claim that the President and 2/3rds of the Senate could ratify a treaty that established a tax, which of course is something that could only be proposed by the House.
There's a few rays of hope, IIRC, that treaties are unenforcable even if ratified, until the full Congress and the President also enact laws to empower the treaty provisions.
I'm an artist. I create works at times because I personally enjoy doing so. I also used to hold down a job doing other work, and presently am in school. It's nice to get paid for doing something you love, but I'd do it anyway. And I'm for drastic dimunition of copyright, by the way.
Oh, no one's saying that you shouldn't be able to ask for money for your LABOR. Rather that, having been paid once for composing some music, why should you get paid again? It's gratuitous, and is no longer compensatory. Certainly, I don't mind if people nevertheless wanted to pay twice, but I wouldn't insist upon it.
The ability to insist upon it DOESN'T derive from his having created the work. It derives from people's willingness to allow it, which is quite different, particularly when people get fed up.
It's just harmless anthropomorphication. Similarly "water seeks its own level" even though as we all know, water is just this stuff that has no directing intelligence. Information is easily disseminated and difficult to redact; this, I think, is what is meant by "information wants to be free." Not that it strives to be, it just tends to become so quite easily, and tends to stay that way.
As for people being entitled to make money, you couldn't be more wrong. I'd like nothing more than to be paid for reading and posting to/. but that doesn't mean that I should be. Similarly, if people WANT to pay a musician, that's great. But if they do not; if they do not even want to pass laws that permit a musician to assert a copyright, then Mr. Musician is SOL.
He didn't EARN the right for other people to leave his stuff alone. And he's not impovershed by its dissemination, as he is still perfectly entitled to find people willing to pay him as he ever was. (as opposed to if someone took tangible objects, which he could then no longer enjoy the use of) His ability to exclusively legally control the dissemination of his work is not of his own making. It is a GIFT. It is handed to him on a silver platter.
But there are strings attached. For example, when the law says that the period is over, it's over. At one point copyrights lasted 14 years. By that standard, we'd have most of the hits of the 80's in the public domain right about now, and I'd feel fine about it. The musicians got paid enough (if their music was worth getting paid for at all) and no one ever promised them a permanent meal ticket.
Similarly, people might find that certain classes of works aren't entitled to protection. Software wasn't for some time. Nor music. (as sheet music, prior to the development of player piano rolls and phonogram recordings)
You have to remember the fundemental, overarching purpose of copyright. (at least in the US, which has the most sensible version around)
To enrich the public. Authors can go to hell, really, the point is to enrich the public. We accomplish this by dangling a carrot in front of authors to entice the creation of new works, and when they've done so to our satisfaction, making them work again for the next carrot.
When you put authors on one tray of the scale and the public and our common, shared culture on the other, authors HAVE to lose, every damn time.
Particularly since artists directly benefit from being able to reuse each other's work. Should Andy Warhol have been imprisoned for "pirating" the work of the graphic designer who created the Campbell's Soup can label art? Should Shakespeare have been called 'pirate' for rewriting "Hamlet" or "Romeo and Juliet" or virtually anything else he did? (man couldn't think of an original story to save his life) Aren't you saying that we ought to despise Walt Disney for daring to make a cartoon based on "Snow White" which he, gasp, didn't think of himself! You appear to think so; I think you're horrifically short-sighted, and not really all that up to speed on the subject. I.e., I think you're utterly wrong.
And I'm saying this as an _artist_ who finds copyright to generally interfere with and impair the development and progress of the arts, so let's please have none of the labels you'd likely otherwise try to place on your opponents.
Judges have an incredible amount of power with regards to injunctive relief. It's tempered of course by numerous limitations, and clearly the DOI pissed him off, provoking such an extreme response, but this isn't surprising.
No, I'm saying that the feds _couldn't_ mandate a BAL box. They have to have the power to so legislate BEFORE it's put in place. You can't do it the other way and call it interstate, you bonehead.
Furthermore, IIRC, that it is forseeable that something will cross interstate lines is NOT sufficient to put it within the ambit of interstate commerce. (hell, sometimes even crossing the line isn't enough)
IIRC, there is no national standard for DWI. It's not something the federal government has authority over, and merely crossing the device across the line probably isn't interstate commerce.
As it stands standards are presently set by the crappy ass method of the federal government threatening to withdraw funding for interstate highways unless the state does what it wants. This is about as good of a system of government as handing out swords, IMO. I find it difficult to believe anyone would really want to endorse it.
Hm, yes. Fortunately in my 1980's post-apocalyptic fascist dystopia, the national anthem was intended to be reasonably tolerable, and sung to the tune of "My Sharona."
Nope -- IIRC in many places, it's generally legal to violate traffic laws if there is an overriding safety interest. If, for example, a cop waves me through a light, it's insane to imagine that there's any justification for _still_ getting ticketed, and _still_ wasting the time of the person, the cop and the court to waive it.
(not to mention that things like failure to signal couldn't possibly notice people using hand signals, which are legal)
And of course
1) the car will magically know what the current BAL in the state you're driving in is, particularly when you cross borders
2) No one over the BAL in an emergency situation will ever need to drive
3) They'll never, ever malfunction
Bah. As it stands, I'm not even particularly enthralled with using BAL as a standard. (having seen some people over the limit that can take it, and some people under that are dead drunk) I'd rather take my chances, than put up with self-styled do gooders. I don't even drink _at all_ and I find this offensive.
Naw... Macs've had CD drives for a really long time. I remember messing with the CDSC external drive on an SE/30 once. The first model to have an internal CD was the IIvx (I had one) BUT it couldn't boot off of it. The successor to it, the Centris 650, along with the Centris 610, were the first machines that could do that. (and which came out almost immediately after the IIvx, were faster and better and cheaper, making the IIvx owners bitter)
Of course, this was in about 1992-93, so it's been around for a while.
If there's any accuracy to the story, in which they say EULAs aren't enforcable in Germany, then more or less yeah -- all software licenses period, are to be ignored.
It's not as though Jesus is endorsing these things. Hell, there are strong arguments against them _here_.
Yep. Because it's possible to design and conduct tests with meaningful results that provide information as to the ways in which people behave under certain circumstances. I strongly encourage you to read nearly any scholarly work (i.e. not 'design user interfaces in three easy steps and eight hundred hard steps') and you'll see.
It's really less to do with the underlying reasons as to why people behave differently depending on their stimuli as what those behaviors are.
Re:Begging Questions and Urban Planning
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A Segway to get from Overlake _to_ Downtown Bellevue would be good from my perspective. I used to live up by the Walgreen's on NE 8th & 140th. I was lucky to live on a bus route, but waiting around late at night at the Bellevue Transit Center sucked. I often walked back home, so I know all about that.
Besides, I don't know what you're complaining about: you've also got a number of resturants, movie theater, a couple of bookstores, the excellent public library, the QFC by Bel Square... You're doing a lot better than most people in the whole area are. Sure, there's more stuff in Downtown Seattle, but look at all of the areas around it that are just as bad as the rest of the suburbs. Unfortunately, not neighborhood has its own 'downtown' region.
There's actually a lot of science involved in UI design. Cognative psychology has always been a big one. And the testing process is intended to operate under the scientific method.
People who approach it as an art generally don't know much about it, in my experience.
Re:I'm surprised, too.
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Kamen seems like a Heinlein character
Well, that really depends on how many similarly intelligent women he's screwing up there in NH, doesn't it;)
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This is why I just get a new unique card every time -- don't recycle the address, or the name, or anything. I pay in cash as well.
It's a minor inconvenience, and I often shop at the one remaining store in the area that doesn't use cards at all because of it. (it was better in Seattle -- only Safeway used cards there, and between the Top and the QFC, I never felt any need to go to the damn Safeway)
I'm a first year law student, and I am very interested personally in computer-related law, copyrights, etc. I hope to specialize in some field along these lines, e.g. copyright litigation, once I finish school. Hopefully, I'll be lucky enough to be able to 'fight the good fight.' Unfortunately, I don't have the background in the hard sciences or engineering I'd need to even take, much less pass, the Patent Bar, which, as I know, is an important requirement of many IP firms. Given this, do you have any suggestions which might be useful in any way?
Thanks very much for your time
(And now, back to exams. Nothin' I like better!)
Well, first, there's Black's Law Dictionary, which is very useful. Secondly, you have to bear in mind that important definitions may have been placed virtually anywhere in the document, possibly without having even been set apart in any significant way from the text. Perhaps even inferred from the the text. And of course, lawyers go to school for three years to learn a lot of doctrines and practices that serve as the foundation for what you're attempting to read, and then work at firms as psuedo-apprentices for a few more years to build up the practical experience necessary to practice law well.
:/
If you're really prepared to give it some study, albiet informally, try picking up some commercial outlines or hornbooks on various subjects (e.g. contracts, torts, etc.) at a law school's bookstore. They're reasonably useful supplemental study aids (like cliff's notes, they're handy but not sufficient) for the students, and might give you all the information you needed... and more.
It's fun, but quite challenging. More so for me -- my first exam is tomorrow and I'm terrified.
But you must conceed that it is not within the scope of their duty to act illegally. MS, unfortunately, has run afoul of the law on numerous ocassions.
Sure, this means that MS has to, like everyone else, consider ALL the consequences of their actions, and not act solely for the company's immediate benefit. But those are the ground rules anyway, and it's simply not unusual in the least.
(and of course, who said capitalism was the end-all, be-all of economic systems. It's one of the better ones we've got, if properly restricted and harnessed, but don't get attached to it if there's something better)
Unfortunately, it would be via a crappy-ass operating system. I'm not saying OS X is particularly better than XP, mind you, just that the entire market is stagnating horribly, and such a move would ultimately be detremental.
Vigorous competition between many small companies is a better way to go. Would we even have Windows if not for all of the other companies that brought out GUIs first? MS is proving to be pretty lousy w/o someone to emulate.
Yes, but IIRC, the standards are higher in a criminal case. Sounds like a bit of a slam-dunk if you're going from criminal to civil, doesn't it?
Really? I've heard that software piracy is absolutely rampant in Israel, placing it in a similar position as a number of SE Asian countries.
I have some relatives over there... I'll have to ask the next time I get a chance.
Personally, while I agree that the authors deserve the most blame, the programmers who construct systems so fragile that they can be affected by these things don't exactly smell like roses. Security models that don't date back to the 60's would be a good start. ACL has _long_ gone out of date, but the morons keep on using it.
Well, seeking is an intelligent act. Diogenes sought an honest man. Water just happens to flow downhill, 'til it can't flow no more.
Similarly while information obviously cannot bust itself out of someone's mind and spread itself, once it has been spread, it cannot be taken back. If you told me a secret, you have to trust that I won't repeat it. You cannot actually cause me not to do so, and you cannot take away that secret from me, if you think better of it.
Anyway, that's probably the best interpretation of "information wants to be free" that I can provide for you. Not that it tries to become free, but that once having been made free by an outside actor, it stays that way. Information is only exclusively yours for as long as you never ever reveal it. Show it to me, and suddenly it is ours.
On to your second point:
There is an ESSENTIAL difference you're missing. It is true -- a musician may only agree to share his music under certain conditions. However, having done so, he must be cautious. First, as made plain above, once he has shared his music, he cannot unshare it. If another equally skilled musician happened to hear it, then he could reconstruct it. And any member of the audience might remember enough of it to never again need to seek out the services of the original musician in order to enjoy it again. I can remember how plenty of songs go, and I often whistle or sing a bit at times for my own enjoyment.
But more important is the second danger the musician faces. He may find himself unable to enforce the conditions that he imposed! While the courts in the US often are quite liberal with regards to the right to contract between two parties, and let a lot of things slide by, they won't let _everything_ so slide.
Witness the very recent Softman case. Adobe alleged that they licensed distributors to distribute their software under terms set by Adobe. The distributors could only distribute to licensed resellers that were only allowed to resell under terms set by Adobe.
BUT a company or person who bought a copy of the software was under no contract whatsoever. He could resell the product in any manner he chose, even giving it out on the streets for free, in direct competiton with Adobe. (who has already been paid and doesn't really have a leg to stand on) Essentially, the judge ruled that even if dressed up as a license, if a transaction walked like a sale, and quacked like a sale, it was a sale, and NOT a contract.
Your musician may be able to sell people CDs, but unless he is invariably quite cautious about it, he may slip up and lose control.
Of course, where you're hauling in a discussion of contract rights from in a discussion about copyright is a bit beyond me. Copyright provisions are NOT EVER set by the artist. The artist may _waive_ some of his exclusive rights, but he has no ability to control what those rights are, or to whom, or how long they apply.
Copyright is established by LAW. Disney surely would like a copyright quite different from what's actually on the books. For starters, I'm sure they'd like to get rid of that pesky line in the Constitution that requires copyrights to persist only for limited times. Unfortunately, they have a lot of political clout, but they don't get to actually set terms to that extent, bypassing Congress altogether.
Of course, why do we have copyright laws? Well, the answer again lies in the Constitution: to promote the progress of the arts. NOT, I repeat NOT to fatten the wallets of artists, or to protect them in any way.
Instead, we -- the vast majority of people, who happen to generally be consumers of art and not producers -- are willing to circumscribe our own liberties to run wild with creative works once our individual Jeffersonian torches have been lit. We do this because we're self-serving and greedy. We figure that we can obtain even MORE works for our own purposes (which include using them as fodder for another generation of works) by using a carrot instead of a stick.
But we don't just hand over a boundless supply of carrots, or copyrights. We limit them, searching for the optimum point where we bribe artists to create as much as possible, without outweighing the benefits of screwing artists over and taking what we want.
For example, under the original copyright act, we felt that if an author could not recoup enough money to keep him writing after fourteen years from publication, he wasn't worth it. Copyrights had terms that short. And if you weren't writing books or making maps, you didn't deserve copyrights anyway.
Of course, this is the way it should be. I have no sympathy for artists -- and again, I _am_ one -- save that they're useful for my purposes. With property, at _least_ you can make an arguement that by depriving someone of their wheat they can no longer use it. With information, no one could stop the original creator from using it if they wanted. (save perhaps by the ancient Egyptian copyright method of killing him, but I'm not for that)
When people describe the American copyright regime as being utilitarian, they're not whistling Dixie -- it's really a system devised by and for the public, which treats artists as useful tools, deserving of no more reward than we give them of our own free will, period.
At the moment, we're basically spoiling artists. If, for example, Stephen King dropped dead today, you cannot make a single compelling argument that permitting his copyright to last for another NINETY YEARS more past his death will in any way whatsoever stimulate him into writing one more word. Trust me on this; I had hoped that death couldn't stop Vincent Price either, but it seems to have done so.
Confusing property rights and copyrights is a common mistake, and the way that the language around them goes, it's not all that surprising. Lots of people do it. But they share no similarities at all. Mostly people get hung up on this concept: a copyright is itself a piece of property, and the embodiment of a work, e.g a book or a canvas is a piece of property, but the copyrighted WORK, e.g. a story or a picture, is not property at all. Tricky, I know, but this isn't an easy subject.
Your argument that creators of a work should have some say in how it is used can also be attacked through an absurdist argument. James Daly famously is reputed to have invented the nonsense word 'quiz' in Dublin in the late 18th century. (actually he didn't, but let's assume that the story is true) Are you proposing that the heirs and creditors of Daly could, if they chose, PREVENT people from using the word? Should they be able to bill Robert Redford for his movie 'Quiz Show' as well as newspaper reviewers writing about it? Should they be allowed to charge dictionary editors royalty fees for use of it? Making the very very poor argument that authors should be able to treat ideas or works like any other piece of property leads to things like this which can be inarguably said to be quite detremental to encouraging the development of culture.
Don't hand people control over the contents of your mind -- limit copyrights to something very small, something that keeps artists eating, but hungry enough to need to keep at it, and which absolutely doesn't interfere with how you live your life in any meaningful way.
What about the concept of 'enabling legislation'?
It's grossly unconstitutional to claim that the President and 2/3rds of the Senate could ratify a treaty that established a tax, which of course is something that could only be proposed by the House.
There's a few rays of hope, IIRC, that treaties are unenforcable even if ratified, until the full Congress and the President also enact laws to empower the treaty provisions.
I'm an artist. I create works at times because I personally enjoy doing so. I also used to hold down a job doing other work, and presently am in school. It's nice to get paid for doing something you love, but I'd do it anyway. And I'm for drastic dimunition of copyright, by the way.
Oh, no one's saying that you shouldn't be able to ask for money for your LABOR. Rather that, having been paid once for composing some music, why should you get paid again? It's gratuitous, and is no longer compensatory. Certainly, I don't mind if people nevertheless wanted to pay twice, but I wouldn't insist upon it.
The ability to insist upon it DOESN'T derive from his having created the work. It derives from people's willingness to allow it, which is quite different, particularly when people get fed up.
It's just harmless anthropomorphication. Similarly "water seeks its own level" even though as we all know, water is just this stuff that has no directing intelligence. Information is easily disseminated and difficult to redact; this, I think, is what is meant by "information wants to be free." Not that it strives to be, it just tends to become so quite easily, and tends to stay that way.
/. but that doesn't mean that I should be. Similarly, if people WANT to pay a musician, that's great. But if they do not; if they do not even want to pass laws that permit a musician to assert a copyright, then Mr. Musician is SOL.
As for people being entitled to make money, you couldn't be more wrong. I'd like nothing more than to be paid for reading and posting to
He didn't EARN the right for other people to leave his stuff alone. And he's not impovershed by its dissemination, as he is still perfectly entitled to find people willing to pay him as he ever was. (as opposed to if someone took tangible objects, which he could then no longer enjoy the use of) His ability to exclusively legally control the dissemination of his work is not of his own making. It is a GIFT. It is handed to him on a silver platter.
But there are strings attached. For example, when the law says that the period is over, it's over. At one point copyrights lasted 14 years. By that standard, we'd have most of the hits of the 80's in the public domain right about now, and I'd feel fine about it. The musicians got paid enough (if their music was worth getting paid for at all) and no one ever promised them a permanent meal ticket.
Similarly, people might find that certain classes of works aren't entitled to protection. Software wasn't for some time. Nor music. (as sheet music, prior to the development of player piano rolls and phonogram recordings)
You have to remember the fundemental, overarching purpose of copyright. (at least in the US, which has the most sensible version around)
To enrich the public. Authors can go to hell, really, the point is to enrich the public. We accomplish this by dangling a carrot in front of authors to entice the creation of new works, and when they've done so to our satisfaction, making them work again for the next carrot.
When you put authors on one tray of the scale and the public and our common, shared culture on the other, authors HAVE to lose, every damn time.
Particularly since artists directly benefit from being able to reuse each other's work. Should Andy Warhol have been imprisoned for "pirating" the work of the graphic designer who created the Campbell's Soup can label art? Should Shakespeare have been called 'pirate' for rewriting "Hamlet" or "Romeo and Juliet" or virtually anything else he did? (man couldn't think of an original story to save his life) Aren't you saying that we ought to despise Walt Disney for daring to make a cartoon based on "Snow White" which he, gasp, didn't think of himself! You appear to think so; I think you're horrifically short-sighted, and not really all that up to speed on the subject. I.e., I think you're utterly wrong.
And I'm saying this as an _artist_ who finds copyright to generally interfere with and impair the development and progress of the arts, so let's please have none of the labels you'd likely otherwise try to place on your opponents.
Judges have an incredible amount of power with regards to injunctive relief. It's tempered of course by numerous limitations, and clearly the DOI pissed him off, provoking such an extreme response, but this isn't surprising.
No, I'm saying that the feds _couldn't_ mandate a BAL box. They have to have the power to so legislate BEFORE it's put in place. You can't do it the other way and call it interstate, you bonehead.
Furthermore, IIRC, that it is forseeable that something will cross interstate lines is NOT sufficient to put it within the ambit of interstate commerce. (hell, sometimes even crossing the line isn't enough)
IIRC, there is no national standard for DWI. It's not something the federal government has authority over, and merely crossing the device across the line probably isn't interstate commerce.
As it stands standards are presently set by the crappy ass method of the federal government threatening to withdraw funding for interstate highways unless the state does what it wants. This is about as good of a system of government as handing out swords, IMO. I find it difficult to believe anyone would really want to endorse it.
Hm, yes. Fortunately in my 1980's post-apocalyptic fascist dystopia, the national anthem was intended to be reasonably tolerable, and sung to the tune of "My Sharona."
Nope -- IIRC in many places, it's generally legal to violate traffic laws if there is an overriding safety interest. If, for example, a cop waves me through a light, it's insane to imagine that there's any justification for _still_ getting ticketed, and _still_ wasting the time of the person, the cop and the court to waive it.
(not to mention that things like failure to signal couldn't possibly notice people using hand signals, which are legal)
And of course
1) the car will magically know what the current BAL in the state you're driving in is, particularly when you cross borders
2) No one over the BAL in an emergency situation will ever need to drive
3) They'll never, ever malfunction
Bah. As it stands, I'm not even particularly enthralled with using BAL as a standard. (having seen some people over the limit that can take it, and some people under that are dead drunk) I'd rather take my chances, than put up with self-styled do gooders. I don't even drink _at all_ and I find this offensive.
IIRC Firewire was developed jointly by Sony, Apple, and Texas Instruments. Apple just trademarked the FireWire name.
Naw... Macs've had CD drives for a really long time. I remember messing with the CDSC external drive on an SE/30 once. The first model to have an internal CD was the IIvx (I had one) BUT it couldn't boot off of it. The successor to it, the Centris 650, along with the Centris 610, were the first machines that could do that. (and which came out almost immediately after the IIvx, were faster and better and cheaper, making the IIvx owners bitter)
Of course, this was in about 1992-93, so it's been around for a while.
If there's any accuracy to the story, in which they say EULAs aren't enforcable in Germany, then more or less yeah -- all software licenses period, are to be ignored.
It's not as though Jesus is endorsing these things. Hell, there are strong arguments against them _here_.
Yep. Because it's possible to design and conduct tests with meaningful results that provide information as to the ways in which people behave under certain circumstances. I strongly encourage you to read nearly any scholarly work (i.e. not 'design user interfaces in three easy steps and eight hundred hard steps') and you'll see.
It's really less to do with the underlying reasons as to why people behave differently depending on their stimuli as what those behaviors are.
A Segway to get from Overlake _to_ Downtown Bellevue would be good from my perspective. I used to live up by the Walgreen's on NE 8th & 140th. I was lucky to live on a bus route, but waiting around late at night at the Bellevue Transit Center sucked. I often walked back home, so I know all about that.
Besides, I don't know what you're complaining about: you've also got a number of resturants, movie theater, a couple of bookstores, the excellent public library, the QFC by Bel Square... You're doing a lot better than most people in the whole area are. Sure, there's more stuff in Downtown Seattle, but look at all of the areas around it that are just as bad as the rest of the suburbs. Unfortunately, not neighborhood has its own 'downtown' region.
There's actually a lot of science involved in UI design. Cognative psychology has always been a big one. And the testing process is intended to operate under the scientific method.
People who approach it as an art generally don't know much about it, in my experience.
Well, that really depends on how many similarly intelligent women he's screwing up there in NH, doesn't it