DeCSS et al are only illegal in the 2nd Federal Circuit of the United States.
So... does ODP plan to avoid things that are illegal absolutely everywhere in the world? Or only in wherever they're headquartered? (California most likely, which would put them in the 9th Circuit) Or the lowest common denominator, where only things that are legal worldwide are allowed? (which would be great when some petty dictatorship made the web illegal)
The ODP needs to adopt the stance of linking to anything, and letting the actual content providers on the other end worry about legality. Or, establish a global network, so that what's legal in one place can still be accessed from a place where it's illegal, preferably seamlessly.
Not necessarily. You may be protected against anything you put in current census forms, as you had the expectation that the data would remain private. But should census data become open to the entire government you would probably no longer be able to have that expectation, and by filling it out, effectively waive your fifth amendment rights regarding it.
OTOH, perhaps you could simply not fill it out at all, b/c that alone would be incriminating.
Eva is indeed a very good (though extremely weird and difficult to understand) anime. But this doesn't stop them from cheating on their animation all over the place. It's not Speed Racer, but Gainax's difficulty with their deadlines and budget is pretty obvious at times (isn't there one scene where nothing moves at all for a minute and a half or so?)
Oh, buy isn't so bad. I agree, their customer service is awful, but their prices are pretty good (e.g. $17 per Cowboy Bebop DVD) especially when coupled with the coupons that they give out (though $10 off $20 was a lot better than $10 off $50 these days) True, you can only get the more mainstream stuff, but I only buy DVD now anyway, so they're pretty good for that.
The only particularly long wait was 5 months for Escaflowne, but that was b/c Bandai decided to wait for Fox to start airing the show before putting out the DVDs, which have been ready since May.
The rule you're thinking of is that most tv stations won't air a syndicated show if there are less than 65 episodes. That works out to be 13 weeks (a half season) when run on every weekday.
Macross was 36 episodes IIRC, which was great when it was originally aired weekly in Japan, but wasn't so great here, schedule wise. The additional series were picked up to pad things out.
Lately things have been changing a little bit, but it's still unusual AFAIK for a syndicated series running daily to be aired without a fairly large number of episodes. Sailor Moon and Dragonball both have enough episodes to overflow any 32 bit computer that tried to count them all, so they didn't have a hard time getting picked up.
Well, King wasn't actually using the Street Performer Protocol either.
What he did IIRC is to say that 1) Every time someone obtained a copy of the work, they had to pay him a dollar 2) People weren't allowed to make copies themselves (e.g. if you want to read it at work and at home you have to dl two copies for $2) and 3) If less than 75% of the dl's aren't paid for he stops.
The SPP operates differently AFAIK. With it he would have given the work over to a a third party, and set some price for it (let's say, $10,000). If the third party recieves $10,000, it gives the money to King (perhaps minus a fee off of the top) and releases the work into the public domain, where anyone at all can use it, copy it and redistribute it. If the price isn't met, it's never released; maybe King would lower the price instead. Of course, he would never get anything above the original asking price, and the work has to be completed really, before it can be offered.
King might be able to command high prices - people less well known would of course not be able to realistically ask so much.
Heh - although today is pretty nice, we've already started our rainy season, thanks. (although the mayor here is a moron, it wouldn't surprise me if he took you up on your offer;)
Here are two ways to do this. I don't use the GIMP (I'm a professional - I use Photoshop)
The quick and dirty way would be to use a wand tool with a fairly high tolerance (~16-32)
The better way would be to create a silhouette with paths, and once they were done, select the area (or the inverse depending on how you did it) and mask it out.*
*Generally it's a good idea to mask stuff out rather than delete it just in case.
If he modifies engines which are originally built by someone else (which is what he said) then he's A-OK. Building the engines from scratch would be patent infringement. It would never, ever be theft, theft is entirely the wrong term to use here.
As opposed to back in the sixties, when NASA made beautiful, functional and sturdy spacecraft that smashed into the Moon? But worse yet, most of them failed for one reason or another! (e.g. didn't leave Earth orbit, cameras didn't work, and my favorite - missed the Moon entirely;)
That would be Michael Winslow, who the Stonecutters seem to underappreciate;)
Re:Technology's no solution. The problem's more ba
on
SDMI Cracked Too Soon
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And would be in violation of fundemental copyright laws.
Example: I write my Great American Novel and send one million copies to myself via the Internet. Assuming a micropayment of one dollar per copy, I have to pay one million dollars to the ASCAP-esque authority (AEA).
Well, the Constitution says that copyrights shall be secured to the author of the copyrighted work... and this means that unless I grant someone else permission, all revenues from first sales of this work (which it sounds as though micropayments from and to myself would be like) are mine alone. Unless I get every last cent back from the AEA (and how do they know if they don't look at content?) they're guilty of pretty damn significant copyright infringement.
IIRC ASCAP is only able to collect money if you play music copyrighted to people that they represent. And I doubt that they'd work for free, which means that they too would be significant parasites.
Personally, even if a micropayment system existed, I'd still be unhappy. In fact, I'd probably be more unhappy than I currently am, since micropayments assume that it's impossible or difficult to purchase copyrighted material outright... which the RIAA, MPAA et al would love to have come to pass.
Mac Bolo was okay, but I really miss the old (and totally different, aside from being a tank game) Bolo for the Apple II. IIRC it was by Elvyn Software and Synergistic Software. Totally kicked ass, and is worth the hassle of setting up an emulator just to play it.
And now if you don't mind I need to buy some spare wagon wheels, oxen, and ammuntion if I'm gonna make it to Mars. (hope I don't lose anything whilst fording rivers)
Due to some kind of Evil Canadian Conspiracy, both of the programmers at the company where I work (in Seattle) are from Nova Scotia. And they both say 'aboot' with alarming frequency. OTOH they don't say 'eh' and AFAIK neither likes hockey very much.
To even things up a bit though, I'm from the South, and although I don't have an accent (blame TV and radio for the death of interesting American accents) I do use 'y'all' a lot, and am unashamed of it.;)
They may be a neat idea, but Zeppelins don't have a good track record as warships. Of the four US military Zeppelins I can think of, three met ignoble ends:
*USS Shenandoah - Ripped apart in a thunderstorm
*USS Akron - Sank into the ocean (the altimeter didn't work so well in a low pressure area, go figure)
*USS Macon - Also sank - crosswinds tore up the fins, and the debris pierced the gas cells
*USS Los Angeles - Peacefully decommissioned after ~8 years.
They suffer from the problem of being BIG, slow targets. And I shudder to think of how large and tough any kind of aircraft recovery system would have to be to handle jets. And of course, they're pretty susceptible to poor weather conditions, and unlike the wet Navy, any kind of support/escort craft would suffer from similar limitations (other than planes, but fuel is fairly heavy stuff)
Given that it's not difficult to get airplanes anywhere in the world quickly with a network of bases, already-built wet aircraft carriers and mid-air refueling, I don't think that there's much need for Zeppelins.
OTOH, there are still quite a few commercial applications, but it'll be tough anyway given that weather is still a problem (they have to be hangared - masts don't work in storms) and that everyone remembers the stupid Hindenberg.*
*And so do we at my job; one server is Chernobyl. The other is Hindenburg. The theme is, of course, disasters.;)
It is a God-given right. If God didn't want you to have the ability to sell notes that you took, it would be impossible. (nb that other times God desires you to forgo certain rights He granted, like working on the Sabbath)
The issue is whether or not it's legal. Copyrights are not, and never have been natural rights, though monied copyright-holders have been spreading disinformation to that effect for centuries.
I hate to be a numbskull, but even in the current copyright system (at least the American system) no one owns works. Works aren't property, though they're frequently embedded in media which are property. (e.g. statues consist of an intangible shape, which can be reproduced in marble, or plaster or bronze; music can come as notation, records, tapes, cds, performances...)
I'm not even entirely sure at this point if copyrights themselves can be considered property.
It's also interesting that even after the first copyright laws came into effect in the US, they only covered books, maps and pamphlets. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Shakespeare would still have been out of luck. It took quite some time for people to forget about the inbuilt restrictions of the Copyright Clause.
Re:The RIAA's problem began 15 years ago...
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RIAA CEO Speaks
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You're right, you're no lawyer.
When DAT was beginning to hit the scene, the RIAA freaked. They managed to buy enough Congressmen to pass the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) which forms a significant part of Napster's defense.
The AHRA basically states* that audio recording devices which make perfect, digital copies must either 1) have a copy protection system in place that prevents them from copying music already copied once. 2) pay tax to the RIAA. OTOH, analog audio recording devices are totally unrestricted for noncommercial use.
Thus, it is 100% legal to make copies of a copyrighted work and distribute it provided that you do so in a noncommercial manner, and that it's not an identical copy of the original one published by the copyright holder.
And no, I'm not a lawyer, but I am interested enough in the law to study it anyway.
*There are surely tons of little loopholes through which Napster may or may not pass. Go read the law for the precise language - I'm summing up from memory here.
There's this big myth that Apple went to tour PARC, not knowing what they'd see. But this is total bullshit.
The big man AFAIK who started the GUI push at Apple was Jef Raskin. His PhD thesis in the sixties was on GUIs. Some of the stuff they did at PARC was based on his work, and he had interacted with them during the 70s once they opened up.
When he joined up with Apple in 78, he ended up in charge of a low end product that was basically a console. (well, Woz invented Breakout in spite of Steve Jobs, and a lot of the Apple II was designed so that he could play Breakout on that, so it's not too far-fetched) But he gets the project changed to be a radically new machine, which he codenames Macintosh. (meanwhile the Apple II+ just came out, and work is being done on the III and the Lisa, which hasn't got a GUI planned yet) He wants it to be a $500 machine.
His proposals involving GUIs are not well recieved by Jobs or the Woz (the former I suspect because he's an asshole of royal proportions, but I don't like him anyway. I'm more charitable to the Woz, he's probably just more familiar with character mode)
However, the Lisa group is more receptive, and the Lisa is regeared to use a GUI. Raskin steals a couple of guys from other projects as well, since they're good programmers and see the light, as it were.
Finally, in an attempt to avoid interference from Jobs, they haul him, and a couple of other people to PARC, to show him an example of a working GUI system, laser printer, ethernet, smalltalk, etc.
There are two visits to PARC, paid for with a transfer of pre IPO stock to Xerox, and a number of people are hired from PARC for the Lisa and Macintosh projects.
Jobs goes on to oust Raskin, take over the Macintosh project, the III and the Lisa bomb, and the Mac still ends up overpriced and underpowered, but you know the rest.
What's important is that EVERYONE at Apple who was working on this stuff was already extremely familiar with PARC. The entire point of the exercise was to sell the idea to the executives. PARC employees were in fact very suspicious, because the Apple guys were generally not at all surprised and were asking _exactly_ the right kinds of questions to get as much information as possible.
Unfortunately, Jobs seems to have been too impressed with the Alto's UI (which was missing a lot of stuff that the Mac ended up with - overlapping windows was a big one; so was icons as nouns instead of verbs) to notice the other really important stuff.
But the entire thing was a sham from beginning to end. Apple didn't have to steal any ideas during the PARC tours. Just present the illusion that they were to the boss.
I'm still getting over the two machines we have in the other room here at work with 1GB of RAM each.
Admittedly, I have 512MB spread around my systems at home (not that impressive), but it just seems so amazing. Guess it's the round number.
Of course, I remember plugging RAM ICs into memory boards in my youth... in fact I did it a month ago, as I restored an old system. What a pain in the ass memory was before we had SIMMs.
(well at least I never had to string cores by hand...)
Slashdot Mirror
DeCSS et al are only illegal in the 2nd Federal Circuit of the United States.
So... does ODP plan to avoid things that are illegal absolutely everywhere in the world? Or only in wherever they're headquartered? (California most likely, which would put them in the 9th Circuit) Or the lowest common denominator, where only things that are legal worldwide are allowed? (which would be great when some petty dictatorship made the web illegal)
The ODP needs to adopt the stance of linking to anything, and letting the actual content providers on the other end worry about legality. Or, establish a global network, so that what's legal in one place can still be accessed from a place where it's illegal, preferably seamlessly.
Not necessarily. You may be protected against anything you put in current census forms, as you had the expectation that the data would remain private. But should census data become open to the entire government you would probably no longer be able to have that expectation, and by filling it out, effectively waive your fifth amendment rights regarding it.
OTOH, perhaps you could simply not fill it out at all, b/c that alone would be incriminating.
Course, IANAL.
Eva is indeed a very good (though extremely weird and difficult to understand) anime. But this doesn't stop them from cheating on their animation all over the place. It's not Speed Racer, but Gainax's difficulty with their deadlines and budget is pretty obvious at times (isn't there one scene where nothing moves at all for a minute and a half or so?)
Oh, buy isn't so bad. I agree, their customer service is awful, but their prices are pretty good (e.g. $17 per Cowboy Bebop DVD) especially when coupled with the coupons that they give out (though $10 off $20 was a lot better than $10 off $50 these days) True, you can only get the more mainstream stuff, but I only buy DVD now anyway, so they're pretty good for that.
The only particularly long wait was 5 months for Escaflowne, but that was b/c Bandai decided to wait for Fox to start airing the show before putting out the DVDs, which have been ready since May.
The rule you're thinking of is that most tv stations won't air a syndicated show if there are less than 65 episodes. That works out to be 13 weeks (a half season) when run on every weekday.
Macross was 36 episodes IIRC, which was great when it was originally aired weekly in Japan, but wasn't so great here, schedule wise. The additional series were picked up to pad things out.
Lately things have been changing a little bit, but it's still unusual AFAIK for a syndicated series running daily to be aired without a fairly large number of episodes. Sailor Moon and Dragonball both have enough episodes to overflow any 32 bit computer that tried to count them all, so they didn't have a hard time getting picked up.
Well, King wasn't actually using the Street Performer Protocol either.
What he did IIRC is to say that 1) Every time someone obtained a copy of the work, they had to pay him a dollar 2) People weren't allowed to make copies themselves (e.g. if you want to read it at work and at home you have to dl two copies for $2) and 3) If less than 75% of the dl's aren't paid for he stops.
The SPP operates differently AFAIK. With it he would have given the work over to a a third party, and set some price for it (let's say, $10,000). If the third party recieves $10,000, it gives the money to King (perhaps minus a fee off of the top) and releases the work into the public domain, where anyone at all can use it, copy it and redistribute it. If the price isn't met, it's never released; maybe King would lower the price instead. Of course, he would never get anything above the original asking price, and the work has to be completed really, before it can be offered.
King might be able to command high prices - people less well known would of course not be able to realistically ask so much.
Heh - although today is pretty nice, we've already started our rainy season, thanks. (although the mayor here is a moron, it wouldn't surprise me if he took you up on your offer ;)
That would be episode #506: Eegah
Here are two ways to do this. I don't use the GIMP (I'm a professional - I use Photoshop)
The quick and dirty way would be to use a wand tool with a fairly high tolerance (~16-32)
The better way would be to create a silhouette with paths, and once they were done, select the area (or the inverse depending on how you did it) and mask it out.*
*Generally it's a good idea to mask stuff out rather than delete it just in case.
Yeah, I certainly agree. It would be great to get anyone along these lines on the ballot. Too bad that wishes aren't horses.
(besides, the legislative branches of the various governments are better to start with)
Crap! Well... given that I'm preoccupied with work and all, one wrong name out of twenty items isn't bad. (watch a whole slew of errors creep up now ;)
"The Sound of Music"
Assassination of Martin Luther King (Memphis, Tennessee, 1968)
James Meredith shot by a sniper on US Highway 51 (Hernando, Mississippi, 1966)
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shoots a Viet Cong prisioner during the Tet Offensive (Saigon, 1968)
Federal agents sieze Elian Gonzales (Miami, 2000)
Kim Phuc and other Vietnamese flee napalm (Trang Bang, Vietnam, 1972)
Bodies of Anna Nicole Smith and Ronald Goldman (Brentwood, California, 1994)
"The Godfather, Part II"
Jack Ruby murders Lee Harvey Oswald (Dallas, 1963)
"Twelve Angry Men"
Reginald Denny and Damian Williams (Los Angeles, 1992)
Rodney King beaten by LAPD officers (Los Angeles, 1991)
"Mary Poppins"
Quang Duc commits suicide to protest Vietnamese War (Saigon, 1963)
Theodore Kaczynski's cabin (Lincoln, Montana)
Car crash killing Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed (Paris, 1997)
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School Cafeteria (Littleton, Colorado, 1999)
Anonymous man faces down tanks at Tiananmen Square (Beijing, 1989)
Civil Rights protesters attacked with fire hoses (Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)
Fence to which Matthew Shephard was left to die (Laramie, Wyoming, 1998)
IANAL but I think you're wrong.
If he modifies engines which are originally built by someone else (which is what he said) then he's A-OK. Building the engines from scratch would be patent infringement. It would never, ever be theft, theft is entirely the wrong term to use here.
As opposed to back in the sixties, when NASA made beautiful, functional and sturdy spacecraft that smashed into the Moon? But worse yet, most of them failed for one reason or another! (e.g. didn't leave Earth orbit, cameras didn't work, and my favorite - missed the Moon entirely ;)
That would be Michael Winslow, who the Stonecutters seem to underappreciate ;)
And would be in violation of fundemental copyright laws.
Example: I write my Great American Novel and send one million copies to myself via the Internet. Assuming a micropayment of one dollar per copy, I have to pay one million dollars to the ASCAP-esque authority (AEA).
Well, the Constitution says that copyrights shall be secured to the author of the copyrighted work... and this means that unless I grant someone else permission, all revenues from first sales of this work (which it sounds as though micropayments from and to myself would be like) are mine alone. Unless I get every last cent back from the AEA (and how do they know if they don't look at content?) they're guilty of pretty damn significant copyright infringement.
IIRC ASCAP is only able to collect money if you play music copyrighted to people that they represent. And I doubt that they'd work for free, which means that they too would be significant parasites.
Personally, even if a micropayment system existed, I'd still be unhappy. In fact, I'd probably be more unhappy than I currently am, since micropayments assume that it's impossible or difficult to purchase copyrighted material outright... which the RIAA, MPAA et al would love to have come to pass.
Mac Bolo was okay, but I really miss the old (and totally different, aside from being a tank game) Bolo for the Apple II. IIRC it was by Elvyn Software and Synergistic Software. Totally kicked ass, and is worth the hassle of setting up an emulator just to play it.
And now if you don't mind I need to buy some spare wagon wheels, oxen, and ammuntion if I'm gonna make it to Mars. (hope I don't lose anything whilst fording rivers)
Due to some kind of Evil Canadian Conspiracy, both of the programmers at the company where I work (in Seattle) are from Nova Scotia. And they both say 'aboot' with alarming frequency. OTOH they don't say 'eh' and AFAIK neither likes hockey very much.
;)
To even things up a bit though, I'm from the South, and although I don't have an accent (blame TV and radio for the death of interesting American accents) I do use 'y'all' a lot, and am unashamed of it.
They may be a neat idea, but Zeppelins don't have a good track record as warships. Of the four US military Zeppelins I can think of, three met ignoble ends:
;)
*USS Shenandoah - Ripped apart in a thunderstorm
*USS Akron - Sank into the ocean (the altimeter didn't work so well in a low pressure area, go figure)
*USS Macon - Also sank - crosswinds tore up the fins, and the debris pierced the gas cells
*USS Los Angeles - Peacefully decommissioned after ~8 years.
They suffer from the problem of being BIG, slow targets. And I shudder to think of how large and tough any kind of aircraft recovery system would have to be to handle jets. And of course, they're pretty susceptible to poor weather conditions, and unlike the wet Navy, any kind of support/escort craft would suffer from similar limitations (other than planes, but fuel is fairly heavy stuff)
Given that it's not difficult to get airplanes anywhere in the world quickly with a network of bases, already-built wet aircraft carriers and mid-air refueling, I don't think that there's much need for Zeppelins.
OTOH, there are still quite a few commercial applications, but it'll be tough anyway given that weather is still a problem (they have to be hangared - masts don't work in storms) and that everyone remembers the stupid Hindenberg.*
*And so do we at my job; one server is Chernobyl. The other is Hindenburg. The theme is, of course, disasters.
It is a God-given right. If God didn't want you to have the ability to sell notes that you took, it would be impossible. (nb that other times God desires you to forgo certain rights He granted, like working on the Sabbath)
The issue is whether or not it's legal. Copyrights are not, and never have been natural rights, though monied copyright-holders have been spreading disinformation to that effect for centuries.
I hate to be a numbskull, but even in the current copyright system (at least the American system) no one owns works. Works aren't property, though they're frequently embedded in media which are property. (e.g. statues consist of an intangible shape, which can be reproduced in marble, or plaster or bronze; music can come as notation, records, tapes, cds, performances...)
I'm not even entirely sure at this point if copyrights themselves can be considered property.
It's also interesting that even after the first copyright laws came into effect in the US, they only covered books, maps and pamphlets. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Shakespeare would still have been out of luck. It took quite some time for people to forget about the inbuilt restrictions of the Copyright Clause.
You're right, you're no lawyer.
When DAT was beginning to hit the scene, the RIAA freaked. They managed to buy enough Congressmen to pass the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) which forms a significant part of Napster's defense.
The AHRA basically states* that audio recording devices which make perfect, digital copies must either 1) have a copy protection system in place that prevents them from copying music already copied once. 2) pay tax to the RIAA. OTOH, analog audio recording devices are totally unrestricted for noncommercial use.
Thus, it is 100% legal to make copies of a copyrighted work and distribute it provided that you do so in a noncommercial manner, and that it's not an identical copy of the original one published by the copyright holder.
And no, I'm not a lawyer, but I am interested enough in the law to study it anyway.
*There are surely tons of little loopholes through which Napster may or may not pass. Go read the law for the precise language - I'm summing up from memory here.
The answer is yes.
There's this big myth that Apple went to tour PARC, not knowing what they'd see. But this is total bullshit.
The big man AFAIK who started the GUI push at Apple was Jef Raskin. His PhD thesis in the sixties was on GUIs. Some of the stuff they did at PARC was based on his work, and he had interacted with them during the 70s once they opened up.
When he joined up with Apple in 78, he ended up in charge of a low end product that was basically a console. (well, Woz invented Breakout in spite of Steve Jobs, and a lot of the Apple II was designed so that he could play Breakout on that, so it's not too far-fetched) But he gets the project changed to be a radically new machine, which he codenames Macintosh. (meanwhile the Apple II+ just came out, and work is being done on the III and the Lisa, which hasn't got a GUI planned yet) He wants it to be a $500 machine.
His proposals involving GUIs are not well recieved by Jobs or the Woz (the former I suspect because he's an asshole of royal proportions, but I don't like him anyway. I'm more charitable to the Woz, he's probably just more familiar with character mode)
However, the Lisa group is more receptive, and the Lisa is regeared to use a GUI. Raskin steals a couple of guys from other projects as well, since they're good programmers and see the light, as it were.
Finally, in an attempt to avoid interference from Jobs, they haul him, and a couple of other people to PARC, to show him an example of a working GUI system, laser printer, ethernet, smalltalk, etc.
There are two visits to PARC, paid for with a transfer of pre IPO stock to Xerox, and a number of people are hired from PARC for the Lisa and Macintosh projects.
Jobs goes on to oust Raskin, take over the Macintosh project, the III and the Lisa bomb, and the Mac still ends up overpriced and underpowered, but you know the rest.
What's important is that EVERYONE at Apple who was working on this stuff was already extremely familiar with PARC. The entire point of the exercise was to sell the idea to the executives. PARC employees were in fact very suspicious, because the Apple guys were generally not at all surprised and were asking _exactly_ the right kinds of questions to get as much information as possible.
Unfortunately, Jobs seems to have been too impressed with the Alto's UI (which was missing a lot of stuff that the Mac ended up with - overlapping windows was a big one; so was icons as nouns instead of verbs) to notice the other really important stuff.
But the entire thing was a sham from beginning to end. Apple didn't have to steal any ideas during the PARC tours. Just present the illusion that they were to the boss.
I'm still getting over the two machines we have in the other room here at work with 1GB of RAM each.
Admittedly, I have 512MB spread around my systems at home (not that impressive), but it just seems so amazing. Guess it's the round number.
Of course, I remember plugging RAM ICs into memory boards in my youth... in fact I did it a month ago, as I restored an old system. What a pain in the ass memory was before we had SIMMs.
(well at least I never had to string cores by hand...)