A quick clarification. EU law grants the GOVERNMENTS of the member states the right to grant exemptions. From the article it appears that the exemption given to libraries from the German government does NOT apply to the specific case in question, and everyone is just 'letting things slide' because to do otherwise would take an act of the German Parliament and open the whole can of worms all over again.
and by virtue of that fact they are automatically entitled to break the encryption.
The law as written gives them no such authority, whether the copyright holders allow it or not. You might wish it to work differently, but the copyright holders have no authority to grant anyone the right to break DRM - even their own. It's a criminal offense regardless.
Look up the law in question if you think otherwise.
Very few people believe that the government should be able to just kick people off their land, confiscate their houses, and bulldoze them without compensation (even with compensation, as currently exists under eminent domain laws, this is a very controversial issue).
It's hardly controversial, except to the people the government is stealing from (and yes, I do say "stealing" - current eminent domain laws violate fundamental rights of property ownership). The government has been doing this since before the first tie in the first railroad track was laid. Laws in this regard have only gotten worse (much worse) over the years, not better, but I don't see citizens up in arms over it despite the fact that we've gotten to the point where the government can pretty much do anything it wants to your land at will, or mandate a list of things *you* must do or not to, according to the whim of some government agency.
Most operations in Picasa 2 that call for a web browser will still bring up your default web browser, whether you are using Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera.
Now if only Gmail would support Opera. Wonder how bloody long that's going to take....
So why isn't possible that women are not as proficient in the math's and sciences as men?
And why isn't possible that they're *more* proficient?
Mark my words, if we ever discover that women are just plain smarter than men, and that our testing techniques and societal biases have been royally fucking up the data, men will scream and bitch and moan and whine about the 'evil, prejudicial sexist studies' until hell freezes over. Gods forbid that women should be innately better than men at something other than raising children or cooking!
Not only that, the little losers will insist that THEIR whining is justified, while the comments the 'feminazis' made in the previous century were just the rantings of 'angry lesbians'.
Next you'll be telling us that a super-secret organization known as the "Illuminati" are running the whole shebang. I think you need to watch a little less X-Files.
All true, but the number of real hackers out in the wild is tiny. The overwhelming majority of 'hackers' are just script kiddies using someone else's code to attack unsecured machines. Protect yourself from them and you protect yourself from 99.9% of the people who want to seize your machine for their own use. The odds of your machine coming to the attention of a real hacker are vanishingly small, unless you've got something the hacker wants.
The "little blue box" is usually both a router AND a hub, and uses NAT (not much good to Joe HomeUser otherwise, since he probably bought it to link up his computers in a home network and connect them all to the net through a single i.p. address). This is enough to deter the script kiddies, unless you've gone and left all your services running without restriction or simply port-forwarded everything under the sun to a computer on your home network without thinking about it.
Combine the little blue box with a firewall, however (e.g., ZoneAlarm) and you've just defeated 99.9% of the so-called 'hackers' out there. Because when all is said and done they're nothing more than little brats who've jacked someone else's code and used it, and they themselves have no friggin' clue how any of this works, much less how to write code themselves. In fact, I'm willing to bet if you asked most of these 'hackers' whether the little blue box was a router or hub or both, they'd just stare at you blankly.
All you need to do from this point on is a) DON'T user IE, and b) don't friggin' download crap from an untrusted source! I admit I rarely use my Windows partition (mostly for gaming, or after gaming when I'm too lazy to reboot or haul my ass to one of my other machines, like right now) but I've never had a successful hack of my system despite the fact that nowadays it's almost constantly being scanned for vulnerabilities.
That's crap. Most of us don't mind text ads, google- or opera-style. They aren't annoying, they aren't distracting, they aren't eyesores. It's worked for print media for a couple of centuries, there's no reason to believe it can't work for electronic media as well.
I block all the obnoxious ads - anything that moves, sings, tries to stall out my browser, pops over onto the page obscuring text - whatever. I do not block *any* server that just dishes out text ads. And oddly enough, I sometimes actually read the ads, and (rarely) do more than read them. In fact, it was a text ad that led me to NewEgg, and ultimately resulted in NewEgg getting around a thousand dollars of my hard-earned cash.
I have never followed a non-text ad to a company website, nor have I purchased anything advertised in these ads.
People invested in a particular viewpoint will continue to maintain that viewpoint no matter what they see or hear. You could drop a six-foot stack of studies all refuting some assertion they insist is true and it wouldn't matter for shit; they'll say the studies are wrong, they are right, and that's the end of the story.
People don't see or hear opposing viewpoints and suddenly say "gee! I was wrong! Guess I'll be changing my mind now." If they're set in what they believe then that is what they'll believe, and there's nothing you or anyone else can do to change that. If they aren't heavily invested in a single view then they're probably inclined to do a little investigating on their own anyway, in which case polarization is irrelevent.
It's naive to think that exposure (especially unwilling exposure) to alternate points of view is going to change minds en masse. The only people it'll affect are the ones who haven't yet made a decision, or for whom the decision is of little consequence and therefore doesn't threaten their ego.
Darwinism, for example, is based soundly upon empirical evidence that supports evolutionary theory. Social darwinism is nothing more than pseudoscience, a completely unscientific attempt to extend the principles of biological evolution to the social sciences. Usually favored by those attempting to justify their own privileged position in life, or to explain away social injustices which they themselves profit from.
Who wrote this crap? A 12-year-old with a hard-on for free porn and illegal warez? The quality of the 'manifesto' made me think there should be a "like, dude!" at the end of every sentence.
...for a service provider. However I rarely get anything like the speeds they advertise right now; I suspect that there's a much lower cap than the advertised one, which activates when traffic on the local network gets too high. Makes sense when you consider that 40% of the town's population is college students, and a chunk of those people are putting a strain on the system with illegal downloads. The TOS allows them to do this (speeds aren't set in stone) so I don't have a basis for complaint.
I could also do without the weekly outage. Once a week during the morning the service will cut out and reset, which takes about ten minutes. Sometimes it'll happen more often than once week. It's definitely a planned event but most people don't notice it since they're usually busy getting ready for work, or on their way to work, or doing the same for classes if they're students. But it can interrupt processes I'm running and even abort some of them, which is annoying.
Never got any hate mail from Comcast though, no matter what I was doing, even when I sometimes put a real strain on the system non-stop for days running. Not a single peep. Compared to friends in other parts of the country with other services, Comcast seems to have a "let's not piss off the customers with nasty letters" policy and I really, really like that. I'll happily live with the weekly resets and the occasional reduced speed caps if it means that Comcast will leave me the hell alone and let me do what I want to do (a 'blind eye' attitude).
is that theres something wrong with society when society is breaking laws at such an extent that it requires an automated process to identify and punish those offenders.
Apparently you've forgotten who makes the laws: the people that comprise that society, not their masters (corporate or political).
You've also forgotten who the laws are supposed to serve: the people who make them. That's kinda the point, unless you live in a dictatorship.
That's why you have people called "legislators". They make law. They can also change law, and repeal law, within the restrictions of the Constitution.
It's supposed to be great stuff, but so often the people called "legislators" are willing to whore themselves out for trinkets, hookers, and praise that the system doesn't work as designed. You might, in fact, have to shoot a few of them to get the rest to act in a respectable fashion.
It's what Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin recommended if things got too bad, and I rather trust what those two had to say about politics and government.
What's funny is that people are pointing to this as an example of good software produced by Microsoft. Except that Microsoft didn't produce this software, they just bought it and (apparently) haven't done much at all to change it.
Contrary to the poster's assertion whether or not seed is collected and reused depends on the crop and the preference of the farmer. He makes sweeping generalizations based upon his observations of a single crop (corn) in a single locale.
When I was a kid working on farms in Oregon, for example, it was common to collect seed and replant for most crops. Doing otherwise was thought of as wasteful, sloppy, and lazy. It's more common to buy seed now, but then it's generally more profitable to buy seed for many crops than it is (in man-hours) to collect it yourself. And, of course, if you want GM seed you HAVE to buy it, each and every year.
Even so, there are still plenty of farmers who collect and replant, as has been done since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. The original poster is incorrect in stating otherwise.
So, will Monsanto eventually own rights to, say, all corn?
And this is a great example of why ip law is so miserably fucked up. Because according to the Canadian legal system, and apparently working up to that in the court system here in the U.S., the answer is an unequivocable "yes".
I have no problem with Monsanto reaming farmers who enter into contracts with them. Make a deal with the devil, and all that. But the idea that Monsanto can sue people who have had nothing to do with them for *accidental* cross-pollination is purest bullshit. And yet Monsanto (and the Bush administration) claim this is perfectly acceptable, even if they do indeed ruin farmers who've avoided their products and eventually end up in control of entire U.S. crop types.
Anyone with half a brain should be able to see just how utterly screwed up that is. Well, anyone apart from Slashdot's bevy of corporate whores and managerial knob-polishers, that is.
And once every farmer becomes dependant on them and they decide to charge $500 per seed then what?
How about hanging every politician who sucks Monsanto's corporate cock - or any corporate cock - and rewriting the laws from scratch? People keep predicting doom and gloom, but the simple fact is that if Monsanto ever tried to hold the world hostage we could simply decide to end the insanity with a good dose of directed violence. No doubt there are some who'd wring their hands over the idea and try to convince the rest of us that slavery at any price was better than violence, but I doubt they'd be sufficient in number to stop the house-cleaning.
Slashdot Mirror
Game theory DOES NOT uniformly endorse a specific socioeconomic structure over all others. That's the posters doing and the posters doing alone.
Max
That isn't what either EU or German law says. I've read the text of both and they directly contradict your assertions above.
Max
A quick clarification. EU law grants the GOVERNMENTS of the member states the right to grant exemptions. From the article it appears that the exemption given to libraries from the German government does NOT apply to the specific case in question, and everyone is just 'letting things slide' because to do otherwise would take an act of the German Parliament and open the whole can of worms all over again.
Max
and by virtue of that fact they are automatically entitled to break the encryption.
The law as written gives them no such authority, whether the copyright holders allow it or not. You might wish it to work differently, but the copyright holders have no authority to grant anyone the right to break DRM - even their own. It's a criminal offense regardless.
Look up the law in question if you think otherwise.
Max
Very few people believe that the government should be able to just kick people off their land, confiscate their houses, and bulldoze them without compensation (even with compensation, as currently exists under eminent domain laws, this is a very controversial issue).
It's hardly controversial, except to the people the government is stealing from (and yes, I do say "stealing" - current eminent domain laws violate fundamental rights of property ownership). The government has been doing this since before the first tie in the first railroad track was laid. Laws in this regard have only gotten worse (much worse) over the years, not better, but I don't see citizens up in arms over it despite the fact that we've gotten to the point where the government can pretty much do anything it wants to your land at will, or mandate a list of things *you* must do or not to, according to the whim of some government agency.
Max
Most operations in Picasa 2 that call for a web browser will still bring up your default web browser, whether you are using Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera.
Now if only Gmail would support Opera. Wonder how bloody long that's going to take....
Max
So why isn't possible that women are not as proficient in the math's and sciences as men?
And why isn't possible that they're *more* proficient?
Mark my words, if we ever discover that women are just plain smarter than men, and that our testing techniques and societal biases have been royally fucking up the data, men will scream and bitch and moan and whine about the 'evil, prejudicial sexist studies' until hell freezes over. Gods forbid that women should be innately better than men at something other than raising children or cooking!
Not only that, the little losers will insist that THEIR whining is justified, while the comments the 'feminazis' made in the previous century were just the rantings of 'angry lesbians'.
Max
I have never met a man who is concerned about being able to track all the traffic.
That would explain why they suck so badly when it comes to driving.
Max
unfortunately, at the same time, males were being neglected
And I'm sure you have cites for numerous scientific studies, published in accredited, peer-reviewed journals, to back up this assertion.
Max
Next you'll be telling us that a super-secret organization known as the "Illuminati" are running the whole shebang. I think you need to watch a little less X-Files.
Max
All true, but the number of real hackers out in the wild is tiny. The overwhelming majority of 'hackers' are just script kiddies using someone else's code to attack unsecured machines. Protect yourself from them and you protect yourself from 99.9% of the people who want to seize your machine for their own use. The odds of your machine coming to the attention of a real hacker are vanishingly small, unless you've got something the hacker wants.
Max
The "little blue box" is usually both a router AND a hub, and uses NAT (not much good to Joe HomeUser otherwise, since he probably bought it to link up his computers in a home network and connect them all to the net through a single i.p. address). This is enough to deter the script kiddies, unless you've gone and left all your services running without restriction or simply port-forwarded everything under the sun to a computer on your home network without thinking about it.
Combine the little blue box with a firewall, however (e.g., ZoneAlarm) and you've just defeated 99.9% of the so-called 'hackers' out there. Because when all is said and done they're nothing more than little brats who've jacked someone else's code and used it, and they themselves have no friggin' clue how any of this works, much less how to write code themselves. In fact, I'm willing to bet if you asked most of these 'hackers' whether the little blue box was a router or hub or both, they'd just stare at you blankly.
All you need to do from this point on is a) DON'T user IE, and b) don't friggin' download crap from an untrusted source! I admit I rarely use my Windows partition (mostly for gaming, or after gaming when I'm too lazy to reboot or haul my ass to one of my other machines, like right now) but I've never had a successful hack of my system despite the fact that nowadays it's almost constantly being scanned for vulnerabilities.
Max
That's crap. Most of us don't mind text ads, google- or opera-style. They aren't annoying, they aren't distracting, they aren't eyesores. It's worked for print media for a couple of centuries, there's no reason to believe it can't work for electronic media as well.
I block all the obnoxious ads - anything that moves, sings, tries to stall out my browser, pops over onto the page obscuring text - whatever. I do not block *any* server that just dishes out text ads. And oddly enough, I sometimes actually read the ads, and (rarely) do more than read them. In fact, it was a text ad that led me to NewEgg, and ultimately resulted in NewEgg getting around a thousand dollars of my hard-earned cash.
I have never followed a non-text ad to a company website, nor have I purchased anything advertised in these ads.
Max
People invested in a particular viewpoint will continue to maintain that viewpoint no matter what they see or hear. You could drop a six-foot stack of studies all refuting some assertion they insist is true and it wouldn't matter for shit; they'll say the studies are wrong, they are right, and that's the end of the story.
People don't see or hear opposing viewpoints and suddenly say "gee! I was wrong! Guess I'll be changing my mind now." If they're set in what they believe then that is what they'll believe, and there's nothing you or anyone else can do to change that. If they aren't heavily invested in a single view then they're probably inclined to do a little investigating on their own anyway, in which case polarization is irrelevent.
It's naive to think that exposure (especially unwilling exposure) to alternate points of view is going to change minds en masse. The only people it'll affect are the ones who haven't yet made a decision, or for whom the decision is of little consequence and therefore doesn't threaten their ego.
Max
Darwinism, for example, is based soundly upon empirical evidence that supports evolutionary theory. Social darwinism is nothing more than pseudoscience, a completely unscientific attempt to extend the principles of biological evolution to the social sciences. Usually favored by those attempting to justify their own privileged position in life, or to explain away social injustices which they themselves profit from.
Max
Who wrote this crap? A 12-year-old with a hard-on for free porn and illegal warez? The quality of the 'manifesto' made me think there should be a "like, dude!" at the end of every sentence.
Max
...for a service provider. However I rarely get anything like the speeds they advertise right now; I suspect that there's a much lower cap than the advertised one, which activates when traffic on the local network gets too high. Makes sense when you consider that 40% of the town's population is college students, and a chunk of those people are putting a strain on the system with illegal downloads. The TOS allows them to do this (speeds aren't set in stone) so I don't have a basis for complaint.
I could also do without the weekly outage. Once a week during the morning the service will cut out and reset, which takes about ten minutes. Sometimes it'll happen more often than once week. It's definitely a planned event but most people don't notice it since they're usually busy getting ready for work, or on their way to work, or doing the same for classes if they're students. But it can interrupt processes I'm running and even abort some of them, which is annoying.
Never got any hate mail from Comcast though, no matter what I was doing, even when I sometimes put a real strain on the system non-stop for days running. Not a single peep. Compared to friends in other parts of the country with other services, Comcast seems to have a "let's not piss off the customers with nasty letters" policy and I really, really like that. I'll happily live with the weekly resets and the occasional reduced speed caps if it means that Comcast will leave me the hell alone and let me do what I want to do (a 'blind eye' attitude).
Max
is that theres something wrong with society when society is breaking laws at such an extent that it requires an automated process to identify and punish those offenders.
Apparently you've forgotten who makes the laws: the people that comprise that society, not their masters (corporate or political).
You've also forgotten who the laws are supposed to serve: the people who make them. That's kinda the point, unless you live in a dictatorship.
Max
That's why you have people called "legislators". They make law. They can also change law, and repeal law, within the restrictions of the Constitution.
It's supposed to be great stuff, but so often the people called "legislators" are willing to whore themselves out for trinkets, hookers, and praise that the system doesn't work as designed. You might, in fact, have to shoot a few of them to get the rest to act in a respectable fashion.
It's what Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin recommended if things got too bad, and I rather trust what those two had to say about politics and government.
Max
What's funny is that people are pointing to this as an example of good software produced by Microsoft. Except that Microsoft didn't produce this software, they just bought it and (apparently) haven't done much at all to change it.
Max
In the US, perhaps.
Contrary to the poster's assertion whether or not seed is collected and reused depends on the crop and the preference of the farmer. He makes sweeping generalizations based upon his observations of a single crop (corn) in a single locale.
When I was a kid working on farms in Oregon, for example, it was common to collect seed and replant for most crops. Doing otherwise was thought of as wasteful, sloppy, and lazy. It's more common to buy seed now, but then it's generally more profitable to buy seed for many crops than it is (in man-hours) to collect it yourself. And, of course, if you want GM seed you HAVE to buy it, each and every year.
Even so, there are still plenty of farmers who collect and replant, as has been done since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. The original poster is incorrect in stating otherwise.
Max
So, will Monsanto eventually own rights to, say, all corn?
And this is a great example of why ip law is so miserably fucked up. Because according to the Canadian legal system, and apparently working up to that in the court system here in the U.S., the answer is an unequivocable "yes".
I have no problem with Monsanto reaming farmers who enter into contracts with them. Make a deal with the devil, and all that. But the idea that Monsanto can sue people who have had nothing to do with them for *accidental* cross-pollination is purest bullshit. And yet Monsanto (and the Bush administration) claim this is perfectly acceptable, even if they do indeed ruin farmers who've avoided their products and eventually end up in control of entire U.S. crop types.
Anyone with half a brain should be able to see just how utterly screwed up that is. Well, anyone apart from Slashdot's bevy of corporate whores and managerial knob-polishers, that is.
Max
customers need unions
We already have one. It's called "government". If your union isn't working for you, perhaps it's time to change the leadership.
Max
And once every farmer becomes dependant on them and they decide to charge $500 per seed then what?
How about hanging every politician who sucks Monsanto's corporate cock - or any corporate cock - and rewriting the laws from scratch? People keep predicting doom and gloom, but the simple fact is that if Monsanto ever tried to hold the world hostage we could simply decide to end the insanity with a good dose of directed violence. No doubt there are some who'd wring their hands over the idea and try to convince the rest of us that slavery at any price was better than violence, but I doubt they'd be sufficient in number to stop the house-cleaning.
Max
Yeah, right - blame the whole thing on capitalism. Good call there, Jack.
Max