Yes, by gum, I couldn't think of a reason why nobody's clamoring to get men into low-paying, non-prestigious jobs the same way they're trying to get women into high-paying, prestigious careers. I mean, it's just a total mystery to me. I mean, where's the cry to get men into housework? Damn it, someone's going to have to pick up my dirty socks!
I'm thinking of setting up Linux for my significant other. I'm a bit worried about the learning curve, but all the applications on the current Windows machine are portable (Firefox, Gaim, Gimp) and really, I'd be quite willing to be local tech support.
It sounds like you'd enjoy the soothing sounds of Dave Sim. At least you're pretty up-front about thinking that ownership of a uterus and tits prevents one from being an intellectual.
Yeah, why should women become engineers? Maybe their inherent biologically-given talents are more suited to pushing a vacuum cleaner, or picking up my dirty socks, or scrubbing pots and pans. Certainly I've never had a burning desire to do any of those things, and women have historically spent a lot of time doing them. I guess women choose to be sock-picker-uppers. Because they're better sock-picker-uppers. I mean, that's an important profession. Whatever. Just so long as I don't have to put up with those goddamn skirts at work. Probably all want to sue me for some sexual harassment PC bullshit.
Shit, did I say that out loud? I meant to say something smugly Dave Sim-ish about "emotional thinking", possibly with reference to the Male Light and the Female Void.
Schools are biased against girls. By all means, let's not do anything to change that; it might hurt boys!
That's a pretty jaundiced, zero-sum view of things, isn't it? Shouldn't it make sense that there might be some sort of compromise? Or perhaps that what you think of as innate differences in learning style might not be so innate?
I hope you'll be kind enough to point out your history of protesting legacy admissions to prestigious universities, as they serve only to fluff the egos of descendants of alumni, and take valuable space away from more talented students who could fill the same spot. Or do you only get all high-horse about discrimination when you sense that you might be losing some of your privilege?
Training evidence combined with the huge individual variation in individual performance, makes it utter trash to say women don't have the same 'potential' in science or engineering as their male counterparts.
Ssh! He was about to conclude that women are inherently superior at tasks like pushing vacuum cleaners, washing dishes and mopping floors, while men are better at being physicists, mathematicians and presidents. He's not saying that men are superior to women; he's just dispassionately reporting the cold, hard scientific facts, and it's not his problem if you interpret it that way. Next up, why black folk are better at basketball than science. I have this excellent study performed by the packing of mustard seeds into skulls, which may shed some light on the scourge of drapetomania...
And it pisses me off to no end when someone can't tell the difference between empirical investigation of a question and making up answers that just so happen to coincide with your prejudices.
Did you even read that link? Sweden hasn't banned any research, not according to that story. What they've done is they've engaged in censorship of research they disapprove of for political reasons. Also, I'm a bit fuzzy on how the county government is threatening "no money and no book". It sounds more like the county was involved in the book's publication, and is threatening to pull support, which is different. (The article is vague, and I don't speak Swedish.)
So, to recap: Sweden bans research! Well, no, but they're censoring a book! Well, no, but they're threatening to cancel a book they were going to publish!
Everyone knows that if your data suggest something that's not PC, massage the data, or at least don't have the nerve to publish, right?
Hey, it's the Massive Conspiracy Involving the Entire Scientific Community! Shouldn't you be out denying climate change or something?
I was sure they'd move from Life+50 to Life+70 before Winnie the Pooh went out of copyright, but no, the works of A. A. Milne (and a hojillion others, including Alfred Kinsey, Jackson Pollock, and H. L. Mencken) are in the public domain in Canada. If they manage to hold out for another year, the public domain will grow to include (for instance) John von Neumann.
At least they've managed to keep their laws reasonable compared to those in the U.S., though that's not saying much. If they keep being an oasis of comparative sanity, I may end up moving there. Here's hoping they'll stay that way for a good long while.
Did you miss the part where I said no DRM is acceptable? Did you miss the part where a dozen other posters said the same thing? What exactly are you waiting for? A parade of tags?
The question is based on a false premise; namely, that DRM is possible which can tell fair use from illicit copying. As innumerable other posters have pointed out, it's impossible by definition. It's like asking, "if I draw you a five-sided triangle in 2-D Euclidean geometry, can I fuck your sister?".
Yes, Slashdot is populated by geeks, and yes, we're all digressing. We're doing this because we're not a bunch of suckers. The question is a trick; it's to get you to agree that some level of DRM is acceptable, when in reality, it's not. How much shit do I want smeared on my pizza? None. "Not even a little?" None. "Even if it's just a tiny bit?" None, goddamnit!
DRM is surrendering ultimate control over your computer to someone else. That is unacceptable. Period.
Doesn't this mean that you can use the broken version of WinDVD and a key-extractor to decrypt any currently-released HD-DVD movie? That's considerably more than just Serenity, isn't it?
You know you'll "ruin the industry" exactly as much by not pirating anything (and not buying anything either, or buying second-hand) as you would by pirating? If you're cheap, say you're cheap. If you loathe playback controls (those fucking unskippable ads), say that. But piracy only hurts the industry if you used to buy scads of DVDs and stopped because you now prefer to pirate them.
It is all monstrously short-sighted, isn't it, though? I mean, how will we copy these films when they leave copyright? Or if a public-domain film is distributed in a DRM'd format? A stopgap solution might be to require an unencrypted version be deposited with the Library of Congress of any commercially distributed work with total sales over $100 or something like that... but any copyright wonkery at this point is simply wishful thinking.
There are presumably a thick raft of consumer-protection laws which prevent the industry from turning your shiny new $500 HD player into a shiny boat anchor because some nitwit cracked the player key. If the industry ever did that sort of thing, I'd expect either a product recall with free replacements/servicing or a class-action lawsuit against either the revoking authority or the manufacturer for not offering replacements.
Come to think of it, who is responsible when a manufacturer makes a product and a revoking authority with which they'd signed a contract turns it into a paperweight? Whose responsibility, whose fault?
I don't think it's the government's prerogative to refine "reasonable profit", except in the cases involving public utilities and the like, which are practically socialized in some ways. I much prefer limiting the time-frame in which profits can be made rather than limiting the amount of profit that can be made. If copyright lengths max out at 28 years even with renewal (and if you add a $1 fee to the renewal, which must be performed in the last two years of the initial copyright period, and only if the owner of the copyright owned it in the first two years, you discourage corporations from locking up never-profitable material Just Because), you don't really have the issues we have here.
Problems with "absolutely obscene levels of profit" don't apply to creative works the same way they apply to pharmaceuticals, or to oil. If they're trying to gouge the public, the public can just wait a few years.
But I still feel strongly that the whole thing idea that there should be a limit in profit instead of in time takes away from the whole incentive structure that's the basis of copyright. There's no compelling reason to institute a ceiling; I can't even see how it would help set lower prices for anything other than the highest-selling works. At worst, if the sales-cap was $10 million, they'd sell $9,999,999 worth of the work and then just refuse to sell or license it, locking it up for the rest of the copyright term; it would be worse than the system we have now. I suppose compulsory licensing could help with that problem, but the whole idea still has the issues listed above; it's a kludge, and there are better, less exploitable ways of achieving the same goal.
Red herring. DRM isn't designed to protect data; it's designed to restrict the ways in which data can be used. It's perfectly possible to encrypt hospital data and, for instance, require doctors to carry around USB fobs with decryption keys on them, attached to their belt loops; walk away with your key and the data turns back into encrypted sludge. Or something of that nature, dealing with the possibility of keys being lost or whatever. The point is, your example is utterly irrelevant to the debate at hand. Just because DRM-pushers use the words "trusted" and "secure" doesn't mean it's at all helpful to you, in any manner at all.
Besides, DRM is about assuming complete control of the user's machine, and making it not really the user's. Asking about a DRM system which allows fair use but prevents infringement is like asking about a five-sided triangle; it's self-contradictory in nature.
How about... for commercially-exploited works, or works that sell more than blah-blah copies, or some such thing, an unencumbered, unencrypted copy must be deposited with the Library of Congress. What's that, you say? Someone might copy it? Tough shit--they have audio CDs and books which anyone with a CD drive or scanner can copy. Require that access be restricted to archivists; whatever. The point is that an unlocked copy exists and is preserved.
This works best with shorter terms; maybe 28, plus 28 with renewal, or 14+14. And while I'm at it, I'd like the government to require source code review/escrow of any software running on systems dealing with high-security data. And a pony, damnit.
You don't have to postulate some magical "moral entitlement" to give creators a temporary monopoly on their works; you only have to posit that people will be more inclined to produce creative work if they have a guaranteed opportunity to profit from them. (Nothing's guaranteed; if nobody buys your CD, your rights under copyright law help you not at all.) Of course, current copyright terms are absurd, and serve to stifle creativity by locking up our culture. Still, it's based on a completely legitimate idea, and I for one don't advocate the abolition of copyright as a whole.
I'd advocate a return to Founder-era copyright terms, heavy protections for fair uses (especially noncommercial and educational ones), and something like for full protection, commercially exploited works must submit to the Library of Congress, to be held in escrow, a fully unencrypted, unencumbered version of the work. But wonky ideas don't count for much when the central question is whether copyright will go from Life+70 to Life+90 in the next few years...
So... you can't tell the difference between criticizing current copyright terms, decrying the rise of grotesquely grabby DRM software and bitching about incredibly harsh penalties for minor copyright infringements, and the pirate-worshipping strawman you've set up there? Man, it must suck to be you.
I've run into some odd problems running Linux software under Cygwin. Nothing insurmountable; the developers just hadn't tried it under that platform. In general, the fixes were pretty straightforward, standards-compliance sorts of things.
It supposedly also runs as part of Sun's Java Desktop System, under Cygwin (which is kind of Linuxy, I suppose), and under a large variety of Unix-like systems. Supposedly. If people were actually using it, there would be portability bug reports, right?
Because we're all somewhat similar, and things would suck mightily if nobody gave a thought to the world after their death. I suppose caring what people think of you is just a reflection of that. It's kind of like the Prisoner's Dilemma; sure, it may profit you to be a dick, but if everyone did it, we'd be in serious trouble.
Those library books don't get handled every day. I've been told by someone who worked in library preservation that regular hardcover bindings are good for (and I'm probably messing up these numbers) about twenty checkout-return cycles, whereas the more expensive library bindings they had done would be good for about a hundred before they needed to be rebound. (The library actually preferred to purchase paperbacks and have them rebound, because the hardcover bindings were expensive and comparatively fragile.)
The point is that library books may not be in constant, daily use; you might be comparing apples to oranges here.
Is a million gallons a lot? Hm. Daily per capita water use in the US is 1400 gallons, though I don't know how much of that is, for instance, water running through a coolant loop and tossed back out into a river. Petroleum usage is 840 million gallons per day, which is about 2.8 daily gallons per capita. Of course, I may be comparing apples to oranges here (fuel is single-use; water isn't), so let's skip that. (Evaporation losses can be cut or eliminated by growing the algae in an enclosed system, as another poster has pointed out.)
Isn't seawater usable for this sort of thing? It's not free to pump a million gallons of seawater over to the farm, but it's certainly not a dealbreaker, is it? Ah, but where do all the salts go? Would they accumulate in the bodies of the algae? If so, it would likely be quite possible to pull out accumulated minerals at the refining stage, wouldn't it?
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Yes, by gum, I couldn't think of a reason why nobody's clamoring to get men into low-paying, non-prestigious jobs the same way they're trying to get women into high-paying, prestigious careers. I mean, it's just a total mystery to me. I mean, where's the cry to get men into housework? Damn it, someone's going to have to pick up my dirty socks!
I'm thinking of setting up Linux for my significant other. I'm a bit worried about the learning curve, but all the applications on the current Windows machine are portable (Firefox, Gaim, Gimp) and really, I'd be quite willing to be local tech support.
It sounds like you'd enjoy the soothing sounds of Dave Sim. At least you're pretty up-front about thinking that ownership of a uterus and tits prevents one from being an intellectual.
Yeah, why should women become engineers? Maybe their inherent biologically-given talents are more suited to pushing a vacuum cleaner, or picking up my dirty socks, or scrubbing pots and pans. Certainly I've never had a burning desire to do any of those things, and women have historically spent a lot of time doing them. I guess women choose to be sock-picker-uppers. Because they're better sock-picker-uppers. I mean, that's an important profession. Whatever. Just so long as I don't have to put up with those goddamn skirts at work. Probably all want to sue me for some sexual harassment PC bullshit.
Shit, did I say that out loud? I meant to say something smugly Dave Sim-ish about "emotional thinking", possibly with reference to the Male Light and the Female Void.
Schools are biased against girls. By all means, let's not do anything to change that; it might hurt boys!
That's a pretty jaundiced, zero-sum view of things, isn't it? Shouldn't it make sense that there might be some sort of compromise? Or perhaps that what you think of as innate differences in learning style might not be so innate?
I hope you'll be kind enough to point out your history of protesting legacy admissions to prestigious universities, as they serve only to fluff the egos of descendants of alumni, and take valuable space away from more talented students who could fill the same spot. Or do you only get all high-horse about discrimination when you sense that you might be losing some of your privilege?
Did you even read that link? Sweden hasn't banned any research, not according to that story. What they've done is they've engaged in censorship of research they disapprove of for political reasons. Also, I'm a bit fuzzy on how the county government is threatening "no money and no book". It sounds more like the county was involved in the book's publication, and is threatening to pull support, which is different. (The article is vague, and I don't speak Swedish.)
So, to recap: Sweden bans research! Well, no, but they're censoring a book! Well, no, but they're threatening to cancel a book they were going to publish!
Hey, it's the Massive Conspiracy Involving the Entire Scientific Community! Shouldn't you be out denying climate change or something?
I was sure they'd move from Life+50 to Life+70 before Winnie the Pooh went out of copyright, but no, the works of A. A. Milne (and a hojillion others, including Alfred Kinsey, Jackson Pollock, and H. L. Mencken) are in the public domain in Canada. If they manage to hold out for another year, the public domain will grow to include (for instance) John von Neumann.
At least they've managed to keep their laws reasonable compared to those in the U.S., though that's not saying much. If they keep being an oasis of comparative sanity, I may end up moving there. Here's hoping they'll stay that way for a good long while.
Did you miss the part where I said no DRM is acceptable? Did you miss the part where a dozen other posters said the same thing? What exactly are you waiting for? A parade of tags?
The question is based on a false premise; namely, that DRM is possible which can tell fair use from illicit copying. As innumerable other posters have pointed out, it's impossible by definition. It's like asking, "if I draw you a five-sided triangle in 2-D Euclidean geometry, can I fuck your sister?".
Yes, Slashdot is populated by geeks, and yes, we're all digressing. We're doing this because we're not a bunch of suckers. The question is a trick; it's to get you to agree that some level of DRM is acceptable, when in reality, it's not. How much shit do I want smeared on my pizza? None. "Not even a little?" None. "Even if it's just a tiny bit?" None, goddamnit!
DRM is surrendering ultimate control over your computer to someone else. That is unacceptable. Period.
Oh, snap! Did you just break the DMCA?
Doesn't this mean that you can use the broken version of WinDVD and a key-extractor to decrypt any currently-released HD-DVD movie? That's considerably more than just Serenity, isn't it?
You know you'll "ruin the industry" exactly as much by not pirating anything (and not buying anything either, or buying second-hand) as you would by pirating? If you're cheap, say you're cheap. If you loathe playback controls (those fucking unskippable ads), say that. But piracy only hurts the industry if you used to buy scads of DVDs and stopped because you now prefer to pirate them.
It is all monstrously short-sighted, isn't it, though? I mean, how will we copy these films when they leave copyright? Or if a public-domain film is distributed in a DRM'd format? A stopgap solution might be to require an unencrypted version be deposited with the Library of Congress of any commercially distributed work with total sales over $100 or something like that... but any copyright wonkery at this point is simply wishful thinking.
I suppose I'll go cry in my beer now.
There are presumably a thick raft of consumer-protection laws which prevent the industry from turning your shiny new $500 HD player into a shiny boat anchor because some nitwit cracked the player key. If the industry ever did that sort of thing, I'd expect either a product recall with free replacements/servicing or a class-action lawsuit against either the revoking authority or the manufacturer for not offering replacements.
Come to think of it, who is responsible when a manufacturer makes a product and a revoking authority with which they'd signed a contract turns it into a paperweight? Whose responsibility, whose fault?
I don't think it's the government's prerogative to refine "reasonable profit", except in the cases involving public utilities and the like, which are practically socialized in some ways. I much prefer limiting the time-frame in which profits can be made rather than limiting the amount of profit that can be made. If copyright lengths max out at 28 years even with renewal (and if you add a $1 fee to the renewal, which must be performed in the last two years of the initial copyright period, and only if the owner of the copyright owned it in the first two years, you discourage corporations from locking up never-profitable material Just Because), you don't really have the issues we have here.
Problems with "absolutely obscene levels of profit" don't apply to creative works the same way they apply to pharmaceuticals, or to oil. If they're trying to gouge the public, the public can just wait a few years.
But I still feel strongly that the whole thing idea that there should be a limit in profit instead of in time takes away from the whole incentive structure that's the basis of copyright. There's no compelling reason to institute a ceiling; I can't even see how it would help set lower prices for anything other than the highest-selling works. At worst, if the sales-cap was $10 million, they'd sell $9,999,999 worth of the work and then just refuse to sell or license it, locking it up for the rest of the copyright term; it would be worse than the system we have now. I suppose compulsory licensing could help with that problem, but the whole idea still has the issues listed above; it's a kludge, and there are better, less exploitable ways of achieving the same goal.
Red herring. DRM isn't designed to protect data; it's designed to restrict the ways in which data can be used. It's perfectly possible to encrypt hospital data and, for instance, require doctors to carry around USB fobs with decryption keys on them, attached to their belt loops; walk away with your key and the data turns back into encrypted sludge. Or something of that nature, dealing with the possibility of keys being lost or whatever. The point is, your example is utterly irrelevant to the debate at hand. Just because DRM-pushers use the words "trusted" and "secure" doesn't mean it's at all helpful to you, in any manner at all.
Besides, DRM is about assuming complete control of the user's machine, and making it not really the user's. Asking about a DRM system which allows fair use but prevents infringement is like asking about a five-sided triangle; it's self-contradictory in nature.
How about... for commercially-exploited works, or works that sell more than blah-blah copies, or some such thing, an unencumbered, unencrypted copy must be deposited with the Library of Congress. What's that, you say? Someone might copy it? Tough shit--they have audio CDs and books which anyone with a CD drive or scanner can copy. Require that access be restricted to archivists; whatever. The point is that an unlocked copy exists and is preserved.
This works best with shorter terms; maybe 28, plus 28 with renewal, or 14+14. And while I'm at it, I'd like the government to require source code review/escrow of any software running on systems dealing with high-security data. And a pony, damnit.
You don't have to postulate some magical "moral entitlement" to give creators a temporary monopoly on their works; you only have to posit that people will be more inclined to produce creative work if they have a guaranteed opportunity to profit from them. (Nothing's guaranteed; if nobody buys your CD, your rights under copyright law help you not at all.) Of course, current copyright terms are absurd, and serve to stifle creativity by locking up our culture. Still, it's based on a completely legitimate idea, and I for one don't advocate the abolition of copyright as a whole.
I'd advocate a return to Founder-era copyright terms, heavy protections for fair uses (especially noncommercial and educational ones), and something like for full protection, commercially exploited works must submit to the Library of Congress, to be held in escrow, a fully unencrypted, unencumbered version of the work. But wonky ideas don't count for much when the central question is whether copyright will go from Life+70 to Life+90 in the next few years...
Bah. I wish we had Public Domain Day in the US.
So... you can't tell the difference between criticizing current copyright terms, decrying the rise of grotesquely grabby DRM software and bitching about incredibly harsh penalties for minor copyright infringements, and the pirate-worshipping strawman you've set up there? Man, it must suck to be you.
I've run into some odd problems running Linux software under Cygwin. Nothing insurmountable; the developers just hadn't tried it under that platform. In general, the fixes were pretty straightforward, standards-compliance sorts of things.
It supposedly also runs as part of Sun's Java Desktop System, under Cygwin (which is kind of Linuxy, I suppose), and under a large variety of Unix-like systems. Supposedly. If people were actually using it, there would be portability bug reports, right?
Sounds like someone needs some deniable encryption. Strong vs court orders and some guy beating the shit out of you with a rubber hose!
Because we're all somewhat similar, and things would suck mightily if nobody gave a thought to the world after their death. I suppose caring what people think of you is just a reflection of that. It's kind of like the Prisoner's Dilemma; sure, it may profit you to be a dick, but if everyone did it, we'd be in serious trouble.
Those library books don't get handled every day. I've been told by someone who worked in library preservation that regular hardcover bindings are good for (and I'm probably messing up these numbers) about twenty checkout-return cycles, whereas the more expensive library bindings they had done would be good for about a hundred before they needed to be rebound. (The library actually preferred to purchase paperbacks and have them rebound, because the hardcover bindings were expensive and comparatively fragile.)
The point is that library books may not be in constant, daily use; you might be comparing apples to oranges here.
Is a million gallons a lot? Hm. Daily per capita water use in the US is 1400 gallons, though I don't know how much of that is, for instance, water running through a coolant loop and tossed back out into a river. Petroleum usage is 840 million gallons per day, which is about 2.8 daily gallons per capita. Of course, I may be comparing apples to oranges here (fuel is single-use; water isn't), so let's skip that. (Evaporation losses can be cut or eliminated by growing the algae in an enclosed system, as another poster has pointed out.)
Isn't seawater usable for this sort of thing? It's not free to pump a million gallons of seawater over to the farm, but it's certainly not a dealbreaker, is it? Ah, but where do all the salts go? Would they accumulate in the bodies of the algae? If so, it would likely be quite possible to pull out accumulated minerals at the refining stage, wouldn't it?