You can have all that Java-to-Java interoperability using Java/RMI without giving up Java-to-DCOM.
But the main thing is that Allchin is, yet again, defining "interoperable" as "will work with Microsoft's preferred paradigm-du-jour." Which is nearly the opposite of the word's normal meaning.
Years ago. Death March project. I'm the subcontractor. Client is out of control, has unacknowledged turf war between factions that want totally different features. Client management refuses to settle the dispute. Specs change wildly. Primary contractor goes along with client. Many fifteen-hour days ensue. Wife threatens to move in with parents.
I get my part of the code into a decent state, document where I'd fulfilled specs in contract, document where I'd agreed to go beyond original contract, document where some stuff wasn't perfect but was agreed to be out of scope and not to be relied upon.
Another contractor takes a crack at a different part of the system, different set of features. But it's spaghetti code; the other contractor has some need to make changes in my code and does so.
Finally I get the system back again for further features. I see the other contractor's changes in my code. I find reasonably good code... with variable names like "IdiotCatfood" and "CatfoodSucks". Apparently the other contractor doesn't appreciate what I'd left him. (Nobody had told the poor guy that the spaghetti-nature long predated my involvement. He blamed me.)
Anyway, the chosen implementation language doesn't have an option to strip debugging information.
Nothing makes a maintenance programmer want to slit his wrists faster than Hungarian Notation.
Unless.
Your programming language has such weak typing that you have to use it to keep things straight. e.g., Clipper--it lets you declare variables but not their types.
LOCAL sCustomerID
is about the best approximation you'd get to what C++ would call
std::string customer_id
so at least there's an argument for keeping a Hungarian-style type prefix.
If the compiler won't enforce type safety, a convention such as Hungarian might help.
"Graphics art is just an extension of fine art, it's all coming from the same basic knowledge."
It doesn't mean that people graduating school TODAY can take the full range fine art courses and come out excellent graphics artists.
Of course it doesn't. You're expecting the wrong thing from college though.
I used to have this kid neighbor who loved to sing. She wanted to be the next Whitney Houston. Something about how Whitney never went to music school and doesn't know how to read music. (Or it was Christina Aguilera, I don't know, some 90's kid diva-icon.) So kid neighbor was going to be this big star and didn't need to read music...
Well duh, kid neighbor is working at Wal-Mart today.
If you attended and were graduated from a school of fine arts I'd expect you to know some things about color theory, rules of proportion, art history, media, general design principles, that kind of thing. And you should probably have some background in one or two specific media and styles. I would not expect you to be a graphic artist--because that's a vocation, not a scholarly discipline. But it's crazy to think you could become a great graphic artist without, duh, learning something about art. Just like my kid neighbor who wanted to have her own band but duh, couldn't be bothered to learn fundamentals.
They'd have to complete "A" and move on to "B" which would then be learning all the programs and applications that they need to use. It's not practical. They'd be in school for 10 years.
If you think college is about learning "programs and applications" then you have definitely missed the point.
Very few things in computer science have changed in the last couple of decades.
Preach it!
Object-oriented programming was invented in what, the 1980s? And TCP/IP came about in the late 1970s, didn't it?
The Book of Ecclesiastes should be required reading for CompSci courses. ("There is nothing new under the sun.")
So many modern computer geeks and wannabe-geeks are so used to the new! wow! gee-whiz! hype-driven industry that they don't recognize the repackaging that passes for "new technology." COM is more or less warmed-over CORBA. The common language runtime of dot-Net is the same idea as Java's sandbox, which in turn is the same idea as the universal runtime of UCSD Pascal, which I played with in 1985. Linux is just a different implementation of POSIX mashed with the old BSD and SysV standards. And so on.
Computer science concepts that you use every day--recursion, algorithm order analysis for memory size and execution time, search/sort algorithms, pointers, the list goes on--those ideas have hardly changed in at least the last twenty years or so. When you're learning yet another shell or programming language, you're likely to say "Oh, this is just like {Lisp|DECNET|Perl|VMS|MIX} except for <x>" if you paid attention in school.
The rate of fundamental change in computing is incredibly exaggerated in popular perception. You're still copying bits around on a stack, chunking around an instruction pointer, hitting device drivers to talk to hardware, and dressing it up with admin tools or programming languages to abstract away some of the complexity. The basic knowledge stands for decades.
IP threatens creativity like personal property (real estate) threatens mobility (i.e., trespassing forbidden)
That's correct. More correct than you seem to realize.
yet personal real estate exists and isn't likely to go away anytime soon.
Which is why land ownership is also a balance of rights. As it should be.
The difference, economically speaking, between Land and IP is that Land--by definition--exists independently of human effort. (If someone made it, economists don't consider it Land.)
The moral and Constitutional justification for copyright law and other forms of IP is the public interest in promoting the arts and useful sciences; in other words, we need some laws protecting intellectual property to encourage people to keep making it. But no such justification exists for laws protecting Land rights. It's not as though people will stop manufacturing Land.
This is classical economics, going back to the eighteenth-century writings of David Ricardo and Adam Smith and carried forward through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by
Henry George. Private property in Land is an artificial legal construct that in many cases interferes with the free market. Just like overbroad intellectual property protection, Land monopoly causes hoarding, speculation, and underuse.
Most people take Land monopoly for granted, because it's as old as monarchy. But it's just as overreaching and unnecessary as the most draconian intellectual property law, and it's just as much of a taking from the commons--but literally, not metaphorically.
all realnames had was a database that paired together words with webaddresses. this is not innovation. this is novelty at best.
Which amounts to just another second-level namespace. It's no different, in principle and application, from creating a top-level domain called ".realnames" except that you can't delegate it any further, because RealNames had no concept of hierarchy.
Oh yeah, with Unicode-style names. That's nice but not very interesting to most of the Western world.
Whoop-de-doo.
Is it just me seeing this, or was Keith Teare totally oblivious to the utter uselessness of his "technology" to the Western market?
But I think that letting the third-party applications run at all is a decent first step, and as a practical matter it's a lot more than Microsoft lets you do today.
I agree that opening the file formats would be a good thing too, but first things first. It won't matter that CatfoodMediaPlayer can read and write WMP files if Windows XP keeps making it impossible to run CatfoodMediaPlayer to begin with.
Also, supposing Modular Windows does come about, it opens the field for Microsoft's OEM-customers to pick and choose a compatible set of applications. It's a headache for Joe End User, but I've gotta believe IBM and Compaq can figure it out for him.
Wouldn't that be chaotic? If I buy a computer at Dell I might get Opera and Office etc, but if I bought a computer at Gateway I might get Netscape and Star Office. This is a bit of a problem because of the incompatibilities that are bound to arise.
That's begging the question. The whole point of Modular Windows would be that it's an application-neutral platform. If Star Office is "incompatible" with Modular Windows, then something is wrong with the implementation of Modular Windows--or Star Office would have flunked the compatibility test.
You're basically saying, "What if there was Modular Windows but Microsoft treated it just like regular Windows with the built-in incompatibilities we already know about?" That isn't what's being proposed, not at all.
[S]omeone buys a machine from compaq and its running "modular windows" and has the "real audio module" installed in place of the "windows media player module" and a person can't get thier sound file to play. Who will they call? MS for sure and MS will have to give its best effort to solve real's problem in order keep its image of support for windows...
Nonsense. Microsoft won't do that today, even for customers using WMP. Support for the OEM's customers is the OEM's responsibility.
So in your example, Compaq--who chose to ship Modular Windows with Real Player installed--will be stuck supporting Modular Windows with Real Player installed. Life is good.
Alternatively, Microsoft can and will (right now) help you with all kinds of Windows support issues, for a fee. I don't see this getting any better or worse for Microsoft with the proposed Modular Windows product--it's just one more thing to support and get paid for.
.pro will be a premium brand, enabling effective, secure communication between professionals and users for the first time in the history of the Internet....
When will people understand that domain names are just names? When
will they figure out that TLDs are nothing but delegated namespaces?
My phone may be "secure" or "effective," or not. But my phone number is just a number. If they change my area code
it will be annoying because I'm used to the old one, but my
phone will still work exactly the same as it does now.
The only sane way to run a DNS root is to hand out pieces of
namespace (somehow, doesn't matter how) and then wash your
hands of the second level. DNS was designed as a hierarchy.
Let the hierarchy do its thing.
Bottom line, I don't care who or what registers a dot-pro name.
It's nobody's business but the owners of that namespace.
The way people talk you'd think that top-level domains have something
significant to do with security, content, mail handling, and routing.
They don't.
[T]he public sees the absurd "emacs vs. vi" and "KDE vs. GNOME" arguments perpetuated because there is no accepted standards in desktop environments...
What better, more standard, standard could there be? Both EMACS
and vi read and write the universal linefeed-delimited plain ASCII
format by default. That is a hell of a standard!
(I don't know enough about Gnome to comment on KDE vs. Gnome.)
You seem to be using the word "standard" in a Gatesian way, where
a particular application is called "standard" if you can get everyone
to use that application. When Open Source and Free Software people
say "standard" we mean practically the opposite--that you can use
any application you want because they all share the
underlying APIs and file formats!
Gatesian "standards," when properly implemented, mean no choice. OSS
and FS "standards," when properly implemented, mean unlimited
choice. Know the difference.
The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to create equal legal rights for all persons, i.e. freed slaves and their descendants. Hah. That didn't happen for a hundred years. But it took only twenty years for corporations to become "persons."
Nike claims that it is doing sweatshop workers a service because the workers get paid a higher salary than they would get otherwise if they were working in farming. For the most part this is true. The $100/month that Indonesian workers get paid is more than the median national income.
I can't speak directly on the specifics of Nike's facilities and those of its contractors. In general, however, these statistics can be extremely misleading. Yes, the sweatshops tend to pay much more in cash than their workers might make on the farm or in their old villages. But their workers may have to move to a larger (more expensive) town to work there, or they might be required to buy uniforms or tools at prices set by the company, that sort of thing.
More importantly, it's sometimes the case--again speaking very vaguely because I don't know much about this particular company--that the big business interests in poorer countries use illegal (or legal but unethical) means to remove farmers and craftspeople from their farms and villages, where they had lived in a barter or subsistence economy with very little cash.
For example, a young woman in Country X might be earning in the factory ten times the cash she used to make selling eggs from her family's half-dozen chickens; but back home she had nearly free rent, was able to make her own clothes, and had Grandmother nearby to watch the kids. She might have been poor by our standards on the farm but would have had a reasonably stable life, some control, a family network, and the ability to fall back on neighbors and friends when things went wrong.
In the factory, her schedule is dictated, the bosses don't know her or care to, even talking to your fellow workers is punished, and everything costs money. She might not have come there in a truly voluntary way. Perhaps the contractor bought all the local farms from the previous landlord and jacked up the rent just to get cheap labor in the factories. Maybe the government radically increased taxes on small farmers to get the same result. Or, in some countries, she may have been just ordered off the farm by corrupt police or government officials.
I believe that comparing dollars-per-day is dangerously misleading if it's done by the standards of the modern western middle class. Of course you and I know that making ten times as much money per hour is "better." But we're used to paying money for everything, and we don't mind it because of the nice effects of the division of labor that allows. Our job mobility, communication resources, and general ability to control our own lives mean we can hold employers accountable, even in a slow economy. It's not always like that for overseas sweatshop workers--they're far more likely to be evicted from their old villages, and left to work in the factories or starve, than to have freely made a choice to come to the big city for a factory job.
Sure, it may not be as grim all of the time as I'm making it sound. I'm mainly just objecting to the facile proposition that the higher cash wages from the sweatshop system are incompatible with exploitation.
The kind of mindset that says corporations are people is the kind of mindset that says some humans are not people.
The ACLU is supporting an effort to blur the line between humans and legal abstractions. That's terrible, because the effect of what they're saying is that being human or not isn't relevant to having civil rights. Which goes completely against the argument for the civil rights of, say, illegal immigrants or prison inmates.
If you do not read or follow the license terms, you will be in breach of copyright, and can and will be prosecuted for theft.
That's incorrect. You can be sued for civil copyright infringement, and in some cases prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement, but "theft" isn't the legal term for what you're trying to say.
As much as I dislike it, the owners of the copy write do control the distribution of their intellectual property.
No they don't.
They control the copying of that property.
Not that it matters, since in this case the information is being neither copied nor distributed by the potential defendant. Copyright law has no relevance here. Not that I'm a lawyer or anything.
What I said, was that if the linkee doesn't want to be "deep linked" they should absolutely have that perrogative.
But the fact is that they don't. At least not under copyright law.
If that seems unfair to you, oh well, but there's simply nothing
in copyright law that gives you as a copyright holder any control over
how other people talk about your work or point at it.
It's a copyright, emphasis on copy. You get some, but not all, control over how and when the work is copied.
Therefore my question to the slashdot community is what new legislation would you support which would make those who engage in online piracy easier to track?
Start with: What is the problem you are trying to solve?
If your friends on Capitol Hill can't answer that question, they have already given you the appropriate answer.
best buy lies to the police to get customer arrested.
best buy lies to the police for a second time when confronted by the police with the fact they have no basis for charges.
best buy is later warned by the police to stop their behaviour.
Interesting, isn't it? The customer is arrested for the appearance of fraud on the say-so of the manager, but the store manager isn't arrested for making an accusation that is now known to be false--an accusation that he knew was false when he made it. (I'm referring to trespassing, not necessarily the fraud charge. The manager had to know his customer was not guilty of trespassing, and he should have known the fraud accusation was uncertain at best.)
Slashdot Mirror
No big deal.
Sun's Java implementation supports Microsoft's DCOM, uh, protocol.
You can have all that Java-to-Java interoperability using Java/RMI without giving up Java-to-DCOM.
But the main thing is that Allchin is, yet again, defining "interoperable" as "will work with Microsoft's preferred paradigm-du-jour." Which is nearly the opposite of the word's normal meaning.
Years ago. Death March project. I'm the subcontractor. Client is out of control, has unacknowledged turf war between factions that want totally different features. Client management refuses to settle the dispute. Specs change wildly. Primary contractor goes along with client. Many fifteen-hour days ensue. Wife threatens to move in with parents.
I get my part of the code into a decent state, document where I'd fulfilled specs in contract, document where I'd agreed to go beyond original contract, document where some stuff wasn't perfect but was agreed to be out of scope and not to be relied upon.
Another contractor takes a crack at a different part of the system, different set of features. But it's spaghetti code; the other contractor has some need to make changes in my code and does so.
Finally I get the system back again for further features. I see the other contractor's changes in my code. I find reasonably good code... with variable names like "IdiotCatfood" and "CatfoodSucks". Apparently the other contractor doesn't appreciate what I'd left him. (Nobody had told the poor guy that the spaghetti-nature long predated my involvement. He blamed me.)
Anyway, the chosen implementation language doesn't have an option to strip debugging information.
Oops. Other contractor got a talking-to. Heh.
Unless.
Your programming language has such weak typing that you have to use it to keep things straight. e.g., Clipper--it lets you declare variables but not their types.
is about the best approximation you'd get to what C++ would call so at least there's an argument for keeping a Hungarian-style type prefix.If the compiler won't enforce type safety, a convention such as Hungarian might help.
Of course it doesn't. You're expecting the wrong thing from college though.
I used to have this kid neighbor who loved to sing. She wanted to be the next Whitney Houston. Something about how Whitney never went to music school and doesn't know how to read music. (Or it was Christina Aguilera, I don't know, some 90's kid diva-icon.) So kid neighbor was going to be this big star and didn't need to read music...
Well duh, kid neighbor is working at Wal-Mart today.
If you attended and were graduated from a school of fine arts I'd expect you to know some things about color theory, rules of proportion, art history, media, general design principles, that kind of thing. And you should probably have some background in one or two specific media and styles. I would not expect you to be a graphic artist--because that's a vocation, not a scholarly discipline. But it's crazy to think you could become a great graphic artist without, duh, learning something about art. Just like my kid neighbor who wanted to have her own band but duh, couldn't be bothered to learn fundamentals.
If you think college is about learning "programs and applications" then you have definitely missed the point.
Preach it!
Object-oriented programming was invented in what, the 1980s? And TCP/IP came about in the late 1970s, didn't it?
The Book of Ecclesiastes should be required reading for CompSci courses. ("There is nothing new under the sun.")
So many modern computer geeks and wannabe-geeks are so used to the new! wow! gee-whiz! hype-driven industry that they don't recognize the repackaging that passes for "new technology." COM is more or less warmed-over CORBA. The common language runtime of dot-Net is the same idea as Java's sandbox, which in turn is the same idea as the universal runtime of UCSD Pascal, which I played with in 1985. Linux is just a different implementation of POSIX mashed with the old BSD and SysV standards. And so on.
Computer science concepts that you use every day--recursion, algorithm order analysis for memory size and execution time, search/sort algorithms, pointers, the list goes on--those ideas have hardly changed in at least the last twenty years or so. When you're learning yet another shell or programming language, you're likely to say "Oh, this is just like {Lisp|DECNET|Perl|VMS|MIX} except for <x>" if you paid attention in school.
The rate of fundamental change in computing is incredibly exaggerated in popular perception. You're still copying bits around on a stack, chunking around an instruction pointer, hitting device drivers to talk to hardware, and dressing it up with admin tools or programming languages to abstract away some of the complexity. The basic knowledge stands for decades.
If someone made it, economists don't consider it Land. Kansi airport is basically Capital, not Land.
That's correct. More correct than you seem to realize.
Which is why land ownership is also a balance of rights. As it should be.
The difference, economically speaking, between Land and IP is that Land--by definition--exists independently of human effort. (If someone made it, economists don't consider it Land.)
The moral and Constitutional justification for copyright law and other forms of IP is the public interest in promoting the arts and useful sciences; in other words, we need some laws protecting intellectual property to encourage people to keep making it. But no such justification exists for laws protecting Land rights. It's not as though people will stop manufacturing Land.
This is classical economics, going back to the eighteenth-century writings of David Ricardo and Adam Smith and carried forward through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Henry George. Private property in Land is an artificial legal construct that in many cases interferes with the free market. Just like overbroad intellectual property protection, Land monopoly causes hoarding, speculation, and underuse.
Most people take Land monopoly for granted, because it's as old as monarchy. But it's just as overreaching and unnecessary as the most draconian intellectual property law, and it's just as much of a taking from the commons--but literally, not metaphorically.
mod above: troll
Business is about making a profit.
But anti-trust law is about enforcing some limits on business to preserve some fairness. And that is what this is about.
Which amounts to just another second-level namespace. It's no different, in principle and application, from creating a top-level domain called ".realnames" except that you can't delegate it any further, because RealNames had no concept of hierarchy.
Oh yeah, with Unicode-style names. That's nice but not very interesting to most of the Western world.
Whoop-de-doo.
Is it just me seeing this, or was Keith Teare totally oblivious to the utter uselessness of his "technology" to the Western market?
Fair point then.
But I think that letting the third-party applications run at all is a decent first step, and as a practical matter it's a lot more than Microsoft lets you do today.
I agree that opening the file formats would be a good thing too, but first things first. It won't matter that CatfoodMediaPlayer can read and write WMP files if Windows XP keeps making it impossible to run CatfoodMediaPlayer to begin with.
Also, supposing Modular Windows does come about, it opens the field for Microsoft's OEM-customers to pick and choose a compatible set of applications. It's a headache for Joe End User, but I've gotta believe IBM and Compaq can figure it out for him.
That's begging the question. The whole point of Modular Windows would be that it's an application-neutral platform. If Star Office is "incompatible" with Modular Windows, then something is wrong with the implementation of Modular Windows--or Star Office would have flunked the compatibility test.
You're basically saying, "What if there was Modular Windows but Microsoft treated it just like regular Windows with the built-in incompatibilities we already know about?" That isn't what's being proposed, not at all.
Nonsense. Microsoft won't do that today, even for customers using WMP. Support for the OEM's customers is the OEM's responsibility.
So in your example, Compaq--who chose to ship Modular Windows with Real Player installed--will be stuck supporting Modular Windows with Real Player installed. Life is good.
Alternatively, Microsoft can and will (right now) help you with all kinds of Windows support issues, for a fee. I don't see this getting any better or worse for Microsoft with the proposed Modular Windows product--it's just one more thing to support and get paid for.
When will people understand that domain names are just names? When will they figure out that TLDs are nothing but delegated namespaces?
My phone may be "secure" or "effective," or not. But my phone number is just a number. If they change my area code it will be annoying because I'm used to the old one, but my phone will still work exactly the same as it does now.
The only sane way to run a DNS root is to hand out pieces of namespace (somehow, doesn't matter how) and then wash your hands of the second level. DNS was designed as a hierarchy. Let the hierarchy do its thing.
Bottom line, I don't care who or what registers a dot-pro name. It's nobody's business but the owners of that namespace.
The way people talk you'd think that top-level domains have something significant to do with security, content, mail handling, and routing. They don't.
What better, more standard, standard could there be? Both EMACS and vi read and write the universal linefeed-delimited plain ASCII format by default. That is a hell of a standard!
(I don't know enough about Gnome to comment on KDE vs. Gnome.)
You seem to be using the word "standard" in a Gatesian way, where a particular application is called "standard" if you can get everyone to use that application. When Open Source and Free Software people say "standard" we mean practically the opposite--that you can use any application you want because they all share the underlying APIs and file formats!
Gatesian "standards," when properly implemented, mean no choice. OSS and FS "standards," when properly implemented, mean unlimited choice. Know the difference.
Since Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886:
The Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to create equal legal rights for all persons, i.e. freed slaves and their descendants. Hah. That didn't happen for a hundred years. But it took only twenty years for corporations to become "persons."
I can't speak directly on the specifics of Nike's facilities and those of its contractors. In general, however, these statistics can be extremely misleading. Yes, the sweatshops tend to pay much more in cash than their workers might make on the farm or in their old villages. But their workers may have to move to a larger (more expensive) town to work there, or they might be required to buy uniforms or tools at prices set by the company, that sort of thing.
More importantly, it's sometimes the case--again speaking very vaguely because I don't know much about this particular company--that the big business interests in poorer countries use illegal (or legal but unethical) means to remove farmers and craftspeople from their farms and villages, where they had lived in a barter or subsistence economy with very little cash.
For example, a young woman in Country X might be earning in the factory ten times the cash she used to make selling eggs from her family's half-dozen chickens; but back home she had nearly free rent, was able to make her own clothes, and had Grandmother nearby to watch the kids. She might have been poor by our standards on the farm but would have had a reasonably stable life, some control, a family network, and the ability to fall back on neighbors and friends when things went wrong.
In the factory, her schedule is dictated, the bosses don't know her or care to, even talking to your fellow workers is punished, and everything costs money. She might not have come there in a truly voluntary way. Perhaps the contractor bought all the local farms from the previous landlord and jacked up the rent just to get cheap labor in the factories. Maybe the government radically increased taxes on small farmers to get the same result. Or, in some countries, she may have been just ordered off the farm by corrupt police or government officials.
I believe that comparing dollars-per-day is dangerously misleading if it's done by the standards of the modern western middle class. Of course you and I know that making ten times as much money per hour is "better." But we're used to paying money for everything, and we don't mind it because of the nice effects of the division of labor that allows. Our job mobility, communication resources, and general ability to control our own lives mean we can hold employers accountable, even in a slow economy. It's not always like that for overseas sweatshop workers--they're far more likely to be evicted from their old villages, and left to work in the factories or starve, than to have freely made a choice to come to the big city for a factory job.
Sure, it may not be as grim all of the time as I'm making it sound. I'm mainly just objecting to the facile proposition that the higher cash wages from the sweatshop system are incompatible with exploitation.
Typically, yes. Read No Logo by Naomi Klein for many, many details. If you're in a hurry her website has some more general information on sweatshops.
The kind of mindset that says corporations are people is the kind of mindset that says some humans are not people.
The ACLU is supporting an effort to blur the line between humans and legal abstractions. That's terrible, because the effect of what they're saying is that being human or not isn't relevant to having civil rights. Which goes completely against the argument for the civil rights of, say, illegal immigrants or prison inmates.
Tragic and wrong.
Quoting your proposed GPL introduction:
That's incorrect. You can be sued for civil copyright infringement, and in some cases prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement, but "theft" isn't the legal term for what you're trying to say.
Unless your name is Valenti. Heh.
Those are findings. They're not problems.
No they don't.
They control the copying of that property.
Not that it matters, since in this case the information is being neither copied nor distributed by the potential defendant. Copyright law has no relevance here. Not that I'm a lawyer or anything.
But the fact is that they don't. At least not under copyright law. If that seems unfair to you, oh well, but there's simply nothing in copyright law that gives you as a copyright holder any control over how other people talk about your work or point at it.
It's a copyright, emphasis on copy. You get some, but not all, control over how and when the work is copied.
Start with: What is the problem you are trying to solve?
If your friends on Capitol Hill can't answer that question, they have already given you the appropriate answer.
Interesting, isn't it? The customer is arrested for the appearance of fraud on the say-so of the manager, but the store manager isn't arrested for making an accusation that is now known to be false--an accusation that he knew was false when he made it. (I'm referring to trespassing, not necessarily the fraud charge. The manager had to know his customer was not guilty of trespassing, and he should have known the fraud accusation was uncertain at best.)
IANAL either, but you heard wrong.