It's not "yanking away someone's protection" -- I will not let you characterize it so. It isn't, and neither you nor all these trolls I'm arguing with (a population I exclude you from) can make it so. I have a right to speech, and this "protection" muzzles that speech. Protection it may be, but it takes the form of special privilege, and it is taken from me and every other citizen of the United States, and I have the right to question the duration of this privilege and the use to which it is put.
That out of the way? Five, fifteen -- you're no doubt correct about the original fourteen year term -- absent any proof, I see no reason to believe that a fifteen-year term will spur the act of creation any more effectively than a five-year term.
It's really the right to modify that I'm after... I hold that if the general public gets the right to take five-year-old media for their own, modify it as they see fit, and reset the five-year clock on the derived work, we'd see some amazing things... enough to outweigh the loss of the ten years we've narrowed the argument to.
You haven't said a thing other people haven't said better, in fewer words, and without the adolescent hyperbole. Read what they said and what I said to them, and let me know if you've still got questions.
If my salary was because every signatory to the WTO was going to pay me money for the next hundred and twenty years -- that people AS YET UNBORN would be born and die without the right to express certain ideas without writing me a check -- you will allow that perhaps they'd have a point.
Well, if you focus on three words I said you could get that, I guess. Recall that I specifically mentioned "moral and ethical irrelevancy" in the context of these men with their guns. You might hold that murder is immoral; such a law would have a moral underpinning. Now, God might not have much to say about lawyer-client confidentiality, but, on the whole, you could make a case that society does benefit if such protections exist; such a law would have an ethical underpinning.
When you don't have morals, and you don't have a fair balance of interests, you've got... men with guns. The expression serves to highlight the corrupt nature of the affair -- just like the Stamp Act, when you're at the men-with-guns point, the question is no longer "how will I follow this law" but "how will I minimize the damage this law causes me".
Straw man. Doesn't matter how much they might make or what makes me somehow unable to do it; the question is how long they're entitled to exercise their exclusive franchise to all representations of an idea, at the expense of every other citizen bound by such laws. Your attempt to paint me as an idle layabout grasping at a "gravy train" doesn't appear to address that.
Five years essentially says that creative works are near worthless, and leaves creators with very little motivation to create new works if someone else will just snatch them up after that period anyway.
Is there any sort of scale we can measure this by? Plot a graph of average years of copyright protection on one axis and amount of content created on another?
Until somebody comes up with one, my hunch is that five, ten, and fifteen years won't actually have any impact on the creation of works. I'll even go out on a limb and say that there's no difference between five and one hundred years. Nobody's going to pick up a pen, stop, and think, "Five years... wow. Not sure I'm really happy about that."
Yeah, well -- there isn't a really polite way to put this -- suck it up.
Really, that's all I can tell you. Nobody keeps paying ME for the creative work I did a month ago in my job. Far as I'm concerned, this notion that I should be prevented from saying words because another person owns them is repugnant on its face -- five years is the compromise position, not the extreme.
There's an outer limit at which copyright becomes a law I'll agree to obey instead of a moral and ethical irrelevancy backed by nothing but powerful men with guns. "Life plus 70" isn't on the map. I seem to recall that the first act of Congress establishing copyright covered it from 17 years; that still seems awful long to me, but it's in the ballpark where we can start trying to cut a deal. Much past 17, though... and it's back to men with guns.
It's a damn shame Jack's disbarrment hearing wraps up today. The only thing funnier than Jack getting planked is Jack getting planked even though he was right* all along.
* Still a liar too stupid to be an effective bully. But right.
But DRM is understood to be worthless, contemptible, and without value. Now that we've come to an understanding about that, it could be considered worthwhile to compare it to other things that exist, to see if our new understanding about one aspect of our world has any implications on other aspects of it. So the comparison is working in the right direction after all.
Well, no, but the scary "terrorist attacks" aren't exactly something that occupy a lot of my mental attention. Or any, come to it. I'm not sure what the thrust of your complaint is -- yes, they're doing it for money, and in rooting for them I suppose I *am* using precious seconds that could otherwise be supporting our troops or staying the course or accomplishing the mission but... so?
And even acknowledging that nothing more than the pursuit of money (or the indirect pursuit of money through rigorously establishing a reputation for quality merchandise and vigorously punishing those who would fradulently tarnish that reputation, which doesn't really sound all that bad to me)... well, watching an invincible titan tear apart bad people for a good cause is quality entertainment, there's no two ways about it.
It's not greed. IBM doesn't want the money. They don't care who gets the money. You could burn it like leaves, right in front of them, and you couldn't get IBM legal to give less of a damn. Given their billing rates, you wouldn't WANT their legal team to put out a money fire. Cheaper to let it burn.
They don't want money. They want *blood*. This is "holy thunder of God Himself"-level wrath, possibly because this is the first *American* seller of counterfeits they've been able to get their yellowed claws on. That I've heard about, anyways. They're going to make an example out of him worst case, and best case they're going to make an example out of him and learn more about any US assets that can be linked to overseas counterfeiters.
I'm not unaware of remote learning and video tutorials. For the most part, I simply dismiss them -- I've seen examples good and poor, and I'm not impressed. And citing that you learned how to finger a song from a piece of art seems tangental to the main point.
Still... I think we can make a distinction. In each case, opinions aside, you cited *learning* as the profit. They didn't have something to *say*, they had something to *teach*. There's a difference there -- there's overlap, too, but we can draw a line.
So, even acknowledging that they might be useful in an educational context, I persist. If you have something to *say*, and I feel that whining about an eBook reader does not fall within the auspices of education, write it down.
(A) Not *terribly* long, but it's time wasted not communicating. And it's only not that long...
(B) If the server with your enormous rich media extravaganza hasn't been -- perhaps -- linked to from the top story on the front page of Slashdot with the attached promise of seeing a grown man cry about consumer electronics.
If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying. These "video shows" and "podcasts" are nominally entertaining but worthless for conveying any kind of real information. Please don't link to them like they're big-people essays -- it doesn't matter how smart you are, I can read ten documents written by people almost as smart as you are in the time it takes your stupid "veeblog" to buffer, play its stupid intro, and replay the series of meat noises you've encoded the information into.
Err. Yes. That's what happens when you don't know things and can't feasibly learn them before you have to make a decision.
Generally, "they're stupid 'cause when u assume lol" is reserved for thoughtlessly destructive acts. The decision not to sync to peer wasn't one -- it was an informed decision to cut their losses and have merely *one* hospital down, rather than risk having N hospitals down.
Doesn't matter that they know about it. That's the *point*. They may "know" it, but they can't *prove* it.
Remember, you should assume your adversary is fully conversant with every aspect of your encryption system except the key. Any "secret process" it relies on is a good sign that you don't have an encryption system, you have a filing cabinet with a very expensive picture of a padlock painted on the side.
Your friends know about it. That's not the point. What they can *do about it* is the point.
Actually, *I* know that his books have been read by millions and enjoyed by many. This would be the problem. It would be much more impressive had his books been read by millions and enjoyed by millions, possibly including someone who'd give him some kind of literary award.
I'm looking here, counting 12 books over 17 years, and I can't seem to find even a nomination. Now, lack of an award doesn't even correlate with lack of writing ability, so don't waste my time with counter-examples, and it's easily possible I missed what five-minutes-ago-when-I-found-it became the most Important Novel Award Ever... but it'd be a lot easier to soundly squelch criticism of those damn potboilers if somebody in the industry had decided to recognize him as someone besides "someone who sold a bunch of very thick books".
Wait, no, I take it back, I did find one -- on the final check before posting (because who likes to be wrong?), I learned he was nominated for the 2008 Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult award. Well, I'll have to give him that one.
What is it with you and the straw men? Set them up and knock them down; clearly your message was so overwhelming it was all he could do to bluster out a reply and cry about his failures as a human being. Come on here. I believe what I'm saying and not just making things up to sound good, have the courtesy to do the same. Although he's right and it does reflect poorly on you, nobody's really going to care -- unless, of course, you take the time to call him out on it, and ponderously mouth about how "sad" it is. I had to unlock my filter just to see what the big deal was.
America voted for Bush. Twice. I didn't need a majority and a PoliSci degree to be right then, and I don't need a majority and a three-novel book deal to be right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Japanese farmers driving exoskeletons?
Don't I seem to recall something else Japanese farmers are famous for?
Oh, that's right. Ninjas.
Nothing but awesome can come from this.
It's not "yanking away someone's protection" -- I will not let you characterize it so. It isn't, and neither you nor all these trolls I'm arguing with (a population I exclude you from) can make it so. I have a right to speech, and this "protection" muzzles that speech. Protection it may be, but it takes the form of special privilege, and it is taken from me and every other citizen of the United States, and I have the right to question the duration of this privilege and the use to which it is put.
That out of the way? Five, fifteen -- you're no doubt correct about the original fourteen year term -- absent any proof, I see no reason to believe that a fifteen-year term will spur the act of creation any more effectively than a five-year term.
It's really the right to modify that I'm after... I hold that if the general public gets the right to take five-year-old media for their own, modify it as they see fit, and reset the five-year clock on the derived work, we'd see some amazing things... enough to outweigh the loss of the ten years we've narrowed the argument to.
You haven't said a thing other people haven't said better, in fewer words, and without the adolescent hyperbole. Read what they said and what I said to them, and let me know if you've still got questions.
If my salary was because every signatory to the WTO was going to pay me money for the next hundred and twenty years -- that people AS YET UNBORN would be born and die without the right to express certain ideas without writing me a check -- you will allow that perhaps they'd have a point.
Well, if you focus on three words I said you could get that, I guess. Recall that I specifically mentioned "moral and ethical irrelevancy" in the context of these men with their guns. You might hold that murder is immoral; such a law would have a moral underpinning. Now, God might not have much to say about lawyer-client confidentiality, but, on the whole, you could make a case that society does benefit if such protections exist; such a law would have an ethical underpinning.
When you don't have morals, and you don't have a fair balance of interests, you've got... men with guns. The expression serves to highlight the corrupt nature of the affair -- just like the Stamp Act, when you're at the men-with-guns point, the question is no longer "how will I follow this law" but "how will I minimize the damage this law causes me".
Straw man. Doesn't matter how much they might make or what makes me somehow unable to do it; the question is how long they're entitled to exercise their exclusive franchise to all representations of an idea, at the expense of every other citizen bound by such laws. Your attempt to paint me as an idle layabout grasping at a "gravy train" doesn't appear to address that.
Is there any sort of scale we can measure this by? Plot a graph of average years of copyright protection on one axis and amount of content created on another?
Until somebody comes up with one, my hunch is that five, ten, and fifteen years won't actually have any impact on the creation of works. I'll even go out on a limb and say that there's no difference between five and one hundred years. Nobody's going to pick up a pen, stop, and think, "Five years... wow. Not sure I'm really happy about that."
Yeah, well -- there isn't a really polite way to put this -- suck it up.
Really, that's all I can tell you. Nobody keeps paying ME for the creative work I did a month ago in my job. Far as I'm concerned, this notion that I should be prevented from saying words because another person owns them is repugnant on its face -- five years is the compromise position, not the extreme.
There's an outer limit at which copyright becomes a law I'll agree to obey instead of a moral and ethical irrelevancy backed by nothing but powerful men with guns. "Life plus 70" isn't on the map. I seem to recall that the first act of Congress establishing copyright covered it from 17 years; that still seems awful long to me, but it's in the ballpark where we can start trying to cut a deal. Much past 17, though... and it's back to men with guns.
Focus on what was accomplished.
The student's contempt for his teacher (and the process that employs this teacher) is now validated.
How useful.
Of Pandas And People can be found in school libraries too, you know.
He's not the author. But he is *an* author.
I tried filtering kdawson. The homepage went dead. That GreaseMonkey script is probably a better plan.
It's a damn shame Jack's disbarrment hearing wraps up today. The only thing funnier than Jack getting planked is Jack getting planked even though he was right* all along.
* Still a liar too stupid to be an effective bully. But right.
But DRM is understood to be worthless, contemptible, and without value. Now that we've come to an understanding about that, it could be considered worthwhile to compare it to other things that exist, to see if our new understanding about one aspect of our world has any implications on other aspects of it. So the comparison is working in the right direction after all.
Well, no, but the scary "terrorist attacks" aren't exactly something that occupy a lot of my mental attention. Or any, come to it. I'm not sure what the thrust of your complaint is -- yes, they're doing it for money, and in rooting for them I suppose I *am* using precious seconds that could otherwise be supporting our troops or staying the course or accomplishing the mission but... so?
And even acknowledging that nothing more than the pursuit of money (or the indirect pursuit of money through rigorously establishing a reputation for quality merchandise and vigorously punishing those who would fradulently tarnish that reputation, which doesn't really sound all that bad to me)... well, watching an invincible titan tear apart bad people for a good cause is quality entertainment, there's no two ways about it.
It's not greed. IBM doesn't want the money. They don't care who gets the money. You could burn it like leaves, right in front of them, and you couldn't get IBM legal to give less of a damn. Given their billing rates, you wouldn't WANT their legal team to put out a money fire. Cheaper to let it burn.
They don't want money. They want *blood*. This is "holy thunder of God Himself"-level wrath, possibly because this is the first *American* seller of counterfeits they've been able to get their yellowed claws on. That I've heard about, anyways. They're going to make an example out of him worst case, and best case they're going to make an example out of him and learn more about any US assets that can be linked to overseas counterfeiters.
I'm not unaware of remote learning and video tutorials. For the most part, I simply dismiss them -- I've seen examples good and poor, and I'm not impressed. And citing that you learned how to finger a song from a piece of art seems tangental to the main point.
Still... I think we can make a distinction. In each case, opinions aside, you cited *learning* as the profit. They didn't have something to *say*, they had something to *teach*. There's a difference there -- there's overlap, too, but we can draw a line.
So, even acknowledging that they might be useful in an educational context, I persist. If you have something to *say*, and I feel that whining about an eBook reader does not fall within the auspices of education, write it down.
Two good answers.
(A) Not *terribly* long, but it's time wasted not communicating. And it's only not that long...
(B) If the server with your enormous rich media extravaganza hasn't been -- perhaps -- linked to from the top story on the front page of Slashdot with the attached promise of seeing a grown man cry about consumer electronics.
If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying. These "video shows" and "podcasts" are nominally entertaining but worthless for conveying any kind of real information. Please don't link to them like they're big-people essays -- it doesn't matter how smart you are, I can read ten documents written by people almost as smart as you are in the time it takes your stupid "veeblog" to buffer, play its stupid intro, and replay the series of meat noises you've encoded the information into.
Please. Just pass them by.
Err. Yes. That's what happens when you don't know things and can't feasibly learn them before you have to make a decision.
Generally, "they're stupid 'cause when u assume lol" is reserved for thoughtlessly destructive acts. The decision not to sync to peer wasn't one -- it was an informed decision to cut their losses and have merely *one* hospital down, rather than risk having N hospitals down.
Further comment seems superfluous.
Doesn't matter that they know about it. That's the *point*. They may "know" it, but they can't *prove* it.
Remember, you should assume your adversary is fully conversant with every aspect of your encryption system except the key. Any "secret process" it relies on is a good sign that you don't have an encryption system, you have a filing cabinet with a very expensive picture of a padlock painted on the side.
Your friends know about it. That's not the point. What they can *do about it* is the point.
Actually, *I* know that his books have been read by millions and enjoyed by many. This would be the problem. It would be much more impressive had his books been read by millions and enjoyed by millions, possibly including someone who'd give him some kind of literary award.
I'm looking here, counting 12 books over 17 years, and I can't seem to find even a nomination. Now, lack of an award doesn't even correlate with lack of writing ability, so don't waste my time with counter-examples, and it's easily possible I missed what five-minutes-ago-when-I-found-it became the most Important Novel Award Ever... but it'd be a lot easier to soundly squelch criticism of those damn potboilers if somebody in the industry had decided to recognize him as someone besides "someone who sold a bunch of very thick books".
Wait, no, I take it back, I did find one -- on the final check before posting (because who likes to be wrong?), I learned he was nominated for the 2008 Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult award. Well, I'll have to give him that one.
What is it with you and the straw men? Set them up and knock them down; clearly your message was so overwhelming it was all he could do to bluster out a reply and cry about his failures as a human being. Come on here. I believe what I'm saying and not just making things up to sound good, have the courtesy to do the same. Although he's right and it does reflect poorly on you, nobody's really going to care -- unless, of course, you take the time to call him out on it, and ponderously mouth about how "sad" it is. I had to unlock my filter just to see what the big deal was.
America voted for Bush. Twice. I didn't need a majority and a PoliSci degree to be right then, and I don't need a majority and a three-novel book deal to be right now.