These are really only temporary shortages. Annoying to you or me, certainly, but from the very long view -- and that's the one I think we need to be taking -- very little information is at stake of being lost forever as a result of Disney's market-manipulation. (Unless some political-correctness Nazi goes after the Song of the South masters, but I doubt this.) There is a big difference between something that's inaccessible but preserved, and something that's inaccessible because it has been permanently lost. It's the difference between imprisonment and execution; one is temporary, the other is forever.
Before we start in on the Songs of the South and others of their ilk -- tucked safely away, but held back from distribution by someone's conscious desire -- we need to acquire and copy all the content that's not being preserved. There is a TON of primary-source material from some of the most significant events in the 20th century -- some which unquestionably have significance to all of humanity -- which is not being preserved due to copyright problems, or simple mismanagement. (And this is only going to get worse in the future, as more of our history is recorded in mediums that aren't traditionally archived, unless we make an effort to do something. Read the Ars article about the problems one guy had just trying to get video clips from a few years ago.)
Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit may be locked away in the Disney Vault, but their situation is significantly less dire than that of the thousands of hours of other material which is not being looked after by billionaire benefactors.
I'd vote for putting research journals and textbooks online.
It's not that I disagree with you precisely, but I really think people are missing the boat by all saying "let's put textbooks online."
Textbooks don't go obsolete from one edition to the next because any new content is really added, they get minor changes added in order to keep people buying new books. If you put the content of one edition online, you're not changing this. They'll just introduce some new content, or write a new book, and then next year that'll be the required text. The "online textbook" that you spent so much time, money, and effort on, will be as obsolete as the 5-year-old paper textbooks that get sent to the furnace or to the shredder, because the problems in the back are numbered differently than in this year's edition. You're not solving any problem by putting them online. Paper textbooks would be cheap and long-lasting and readily available, except for the blatant manipulation that goes on by the publishing companies, in order to keep sales up. Putting a version online isn't going to break this cycle of price manipulation; it's just like making lots of copies of one particular paper edition. Unless you were going to fight them dollar-for-dollar (buying the rights to each new edition of every book) until they eventually just went bankrupt or stopped fighting, they're going to do everything they can to keep the online books from being useful. And given how they manage to keep a perfectly-servicable paper book that just happens to have a few minor differences from being useful, I think your chances of making an online textbook (with all the problems that being an 'online book' entails) useful is basically nil.
Trying to create online textbooks is a financial sinkhole. Unless you had more money to throw at the problem than all the publishing companies who would try to destroy you (and $100M is not nearly enough), you're going to fail. Instead, a better move would be to try to just get all the information online in some non-textbook format. Wikipedia is IMO a response to this; it's an attempt to end-run textbooks, by removing the monopoly they have over informational content. It accomplishes many of the same functions that digitizing textbooks would, in terms of preserving and making information available.
Rather than spending a ton of money to put textbooks online, which basically doesn't preserve any information that's not readily available today anyway, I think we need to take a look at what stuff is floating around, that's going to disappear forever if it's not preserved. There is a lot of primary-source material -- really irreplaceable stuff -- which is going to just cease to exist if we don't move quickly to copy and preserve it. In many cases, such as early film footage, copyrights prevent this process from occurring. This is where a large cash grant could come in handy.
Instead of taking information that's at no risk of disappearing from the world -- I can pretty much guarantee that regardless of what Wikimedia does, basic calculus isn't going to become a lost art -- and disseminating it, we should instead start from the very end of our back catalog and work forwards. Let's start with things that don't have much time left. All the decaying celluloid locked up in studios' vaults, or the original studio tapes of famous musicians that are rotting away due to improper storage. Let's make sure that gets saved first; because if we don't do it now, we won't have a second chance to go back later.
Someone who has a copyrighted item earning $12.50 per year might easily be swayed to release it into the public domain for $200. Almost *nothing* under copyright is actually earning any real money, and thefore may be liberated with a very modest purse.
Perhaps if there was a simple online process in place, individuals could seach for their items of choice, pay up and free them.
This is the best idea I've heard in this thread so far.
There have to be a lot of copyrighted works held by "estates" and descendants of authors or creators, who would readily convert their trickle of income into cash given the opportunity.
I'm thinking of the ads I see all the time for various firms that offer to convert the structured settlements given by many insurance companies into cash payouts. (E.g. these guys run a lot of really obnoxious TV ones in my area.) I could see setting up something like this, but advertising instead to people who are collecting very small royalties on copyrights that they hold.
Especially considering how long copyrights last now, there have got to be lots of people around who are holders of rights that they don't care about or will never use. A straight-up buyout of these works might bring in a lot. Sure, a lot of it might be relatively unimportant, but the more the merrier.
You could create some sort of "base rate" for published works no longer earning any royalties; say $50 for the rights to a novel, $75 for a non-fiction work. There'd have to be standards, to keep people from just trying to flood it with junk (maybe it would need to be works that had more than a few thousand copies published). On works that are still earning royalties, offer to buy the rights according to the same rates that a settlement-buyout company would purchase an annuity. I'm sure you could turn up all kinds of stuff just by running some broadly targeted radio or TV ads.
There are lots of people who would rather have money in their pocket now, than a slow trickle of income for the next century or so. If you wanted to get the biggest "bang for your buck" (or bang for your hundred-mil), those are the folks you need to find.
Gutenberg, atlases, ancient literature and history
I agree that this would be good stuff to have digitized, but most of it is out of copyright anyway. It's not something you'd have to buy, which is the point of this whole discussion.
Project Gutenberg already has a fairly good repository of classic literature; their bias is towards stuff that can be distributed as text (so not so much maps and atlases), but their coverage of classic literature seems pretty good. I can only read English so I've no idea what their coverage in other languages is, but I think the French government has something similar going for their language, so there is at least some stuff out there.
I think the focus of the "$100M Question" is what stuff that's currently under copyright would we want to buy?
My answer to this is another question: 'What is at risk of disappearing if it isn't opened up?' There are a lot of classic movies and news reels that have never been digitized, which need to be preserved; a lot of WWII stuff for instance. That has a certain amount of worldwide interest, so it's not totally American-centric.
I don't think it's really proper to critcize too harshly on a site like Slashdot for having "un-international" responses, though, because you have to consider the audience. The majority of the respondants here are from the U.S., so naturally the preservation of American cultural artifacts is going to be favored. I'm sure if you asked this question in most other countries, you'd get similarly biased results.
Imagine having to have your fingerprints taken just to enter a pub!! WTF
It is a little fascist, I give you that. Here in the U.S., we'd never allow anything so intrusive. Fingerprinting is for foreigners and criminals! We prefer more subtle monitoring. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Here, we'll just mandate that the bars have to check ID by scanning your RFID-enabled, government issued card through a terminal. Your photo pops up on the terminal screen (built by Diebold -- don't ask what's inside!), and they see that you're 21. It's for the children, naturally. Don't want them drinking. Of course, also on file from when you applied for your ID card is your retinal patterns, fingerprints, shoe size, etc. So if they find some suspect fingerprints, it'll be a simple matter to check them against the files for everybody that's been in that pub. Superior to the Brits really, since you don't have to deal with low-grade print scanners at every bar, getting gunked up and unreliable.
From a "citizens" perspective, it's no different than today. Lots of places scan your ID when you buy booze, so most people would never notice. By putting all the changes in the backend, it's far less intrusive. Doesn't make sense to remind people of what's going on -- why not keep things looking the way they "always have?"
Actually taking fingerprints is so 20th century. Honestly... we've moved past that here.
It's been a while, but IIRC in Pennsylvania it's not that you can't buy beer in less than a case, it's just that you have to go to a different store. They have "Beer Stores," which sell beer by the case and only by the case, but then they also have "Six-pack Shops" which sell smaller quantities (and any bar can legally sell you up to two six-packs; bowling alleys that have bars were a favored place to get late-night booze IIRC). I think they have different hours for each. And then there are liquor stores which are actually run by the state, and where you can get your distilled alcohols, and I think wine just comes from the grocery store? (I was never clear on wine there.)
Anyway, just nitpicking. It does have some of the most bizarre liquor laws of anywhere I've ever been to. I can only pity the poor coddled European who might wind up in Pennsylvania, desiring a case of wine on a Sunday, or something similarly impossible.
Canadians, Mexicans who are staying in border areas, and visitors from many European countries that have reciprocal visa agreements with the U.S. are exempt.
Just so you don't think I'm passing U.S. propaganda, here's a quote from a ChinaDaily article:
Under the new rules, travelers press their index fingers onto an inkless scanner and then have their photograph taken as they make their way through customs.
The security checks target foreigners entering the 115 U.S. airports that handle international flights, as well as 14 major seaports. The only exceptions will be visitors from 27 countries -- mostly European nations -- whose citizens are allowed to come to the United States for up to 90 days without visas.
Also exempted will be most Canadians, because they usually are not required to get visas, and Mexicans who are coming into the country for a short time and not venturing far from the border.
It's also not a full fingerprinting, it's just the index finger and it's an electronic scan. Basically it does an "instant check" against the FBI database. But basically, if you're from a major European country and here on a tourist visa, there's no fingerprinting. (Which makes the whole process pretty fucking stupid -- I mean, so now the terrorists need to get false Dutch papers instead of false Egyptian ones; great use of a few million dollars. Why do we do this at all? But I digress.)
I wasn't implying that OS X was any more of a RAM hog than Windows, just that for the stuff that I do, 512 MB seems a little cramped.
You could definitely use a Mac with that and be fine, if you don't like to run a lot of stuff at the simultaneously. Apparently for what the guy does, he's fine with it. However, my point was that if he really has a $3000 Windows PC, even if it's a few years old, it probably has more than 512 MB in it.
I'm actually typing this on an older G3 12" iBook with 128 MB -- so it is possible to run OS X in a very small memory footprint, it just thrashes the disk a lot whenever I try to open more than an application at a time. (It's my backup system; I'm not a masochist.) I can imagine that Windows or even most "maximalist" Linux distros would do the same thing.
Easy solution; don't keep stuff like movies in your home folder. I can't really imagine any reason why those would need to be encrypted, and as you discovered, doing so does carry a large performance penalty.
On my systems, I have symlinks set up between ~/Music and/Users/Shared/Music and ~/Movies and/Users/Shared/Movies; this keeps FileVault from encrypting my iTunes music library or my movie collection. It also means that on a multiuser system, other users can access the movies and music, without me having to enter my password or give them access to the rest of my files. (Actually I now have the movies and music on another drive.)
If you do it this way, FileVault doesn't carry too huge a performance hit. It also has the advantage of allowing you to back up your documents in a secure fashion pretty easily: you log in as a different user, and just back up the File Vault sparseimage as a single file.
The "do you want to recover space" logout screen is fairly obnoxious, agreed; I hate it just because it stops the shutdown process with a dialog that requires human interaction. I wish it had some sort of a 30-second-countdown-to-default timer, so that if I hit "shutdown" and walk away, the process doesn't get hung up and just sit there, unsecured, forever.
Yeah what the fuck is wrong with that video? (Let me count the ways...)
Seriously, I really tried to watch it. It would play for about three seconds, and then stop for "buffering." No surprise there -- I'm on a shared connection. I don't have enough bandwidth to watch something like that live.
So I thought I'd just pause it and let it load -- like any decent system ought to allow me to do -- but oh, no; it had better ideas. As soon as I put it on pause, it stopped buffering. I can tell, because the traffic through my router just abruptly stopped. When I hit play again, then it started buffering again.
How brain-dead is that? Even if I tried to play it through at its stuttering, three-seconds-per-load speed, and then rewind back to the beginning and play it again, it apparently doesn't "buffer" for very long, because it tried to reload the data.
I want to find the person who thought that encapsulating videos inside Flash objects was a good idea, and put their face in a bench vise. They could have just used a good-old streaming video object, but no. They had to do it with Flash. Well, the hell with them.
Based on the article, it's not like his PC was really that old. Given the heavily upgraded, top-of-the-line PC he was using, even if it's was a few years old, and the minimalist Mac (512MB? Jeez...), it's a pretty fair comparison. Actually the hardware edge might go to the PC.
Um, I hate to ask this, but did you read past the first sentence of my post? I pretty much said exactly that in the third paragraph:
Again, it's all about the point of view you take. In the short term, it might seem as though it's in the best interest of a country to invade its neighbor, but in the long run (as with Germany) it could also backfire spectacularly. Thus there are good reasons for not acting according to that short-term impulse.
So yes, it is often in the best interests of a nation to maintain good and peaceful relations with other countries.
Or were you just America-bashing in hopes of picking up some karma? (Which apparently you did -- nice job, mods.)
That's being addressed, though, with a rewrite of "init" (shipping with Ubuntu Edgy Eft).
Didn't Apple basically already do this? They wanted a faster boot time than the traditional init system would give, so they wrote launchd. It's open source, and it replaces init and also some functions of cron.
If the Ubuntu/Debian people are rewriting init and not using launchd, they're seriously reinventing the wheel. The most often stated downside of launchd that I've ever heard is that it uses XML config files, rather than the flat text that's preferred by most people coming from a UNIX background, but I'm sure you could change that.
The purpose of launchd, as I understand it, is that it keeps track of which processes can't start until other ones have started, and which can be started up in parallel. By parellizing the ones that can be run simultaneously, it shortens boot times substantially over the old sequential approach. The first version of OS X that used it was noticably speedier during boots than previous versions.
A while ago -- and maybe it was in the Slashdot discussion about ATI, I'm not sure -- somebody described a cycle in computer design, where various components are built-in monolithically, then broken out as separate components, and then swallowed back up into monolithic designs again.
Graphics chips seem to have done this cycle at least once; perhaps now we're just looking at the next stage in the cycle? We've had graphics as a separate component from the processor for a while, perhaps the next stage in the cycle is for them to combine together into a G/CPU, to take advantage of the design gains in general-purpose processors.
Then at some point down the road, the GPU (or more likely, various GPU-like functional units) might get separated back out onto their own silicon, as more application-specific processors become advantageous once again.
The purpose of a democratically elected government is to represent and advocate for the interests of their constituency. They have no responsibility to anyone outside of that constituency, period.
That said, I think it's fair to say in most cases, that most rational people wouldn't want a government that got them gains at the expense of the rest of humanity. Therefore, an honestly representative government might act in ways that are occasionally not seemingly in the direct best interest of the people they represent.
Again, it's all about the point of view you take. In the short term, it might seem as though it's in the best interest of a country to invade its neighbor, but in the long run (as with Germany) it could also backfire spectacularly. Thus there are good reasons for not acting according to that short-term impulse.
However, if everyone in a certain country really wanted something, and didn't give a damn about the rest of humanity, and elected leaders to pursue this goal, then it would be patently undemocratic for those leaders to put the desires of "humanity" above the desires of their consitutants. If a particular leader felt it morally impossible to continue, due to his own feelings prohbiting him from acting as his voters elected him to do, then he would be correct to resign and step down.
The basis of representative democracy is a somewhat adversarial process. Various elected representatives are tasked with acting as proxies for the people that they represent. Their job is to do whatever the people would do themselves, if they were acting in government directly.
Now, this doesn't prohibit morality in government completely. People elect representatives because, in many cases, of their perceived moral judgement. This might mean that the correct (by which I mean, representative) thing to do, would be to take a course of action that was for the "greater good" rather than the good of the constituency, because that's what the people in the constituency would have done themselves. This is important, because this this is the difference between an actual representative democracy and a theoretical government run by a computer that was just programmed to do the most self-interested thing, all the time.
The job of government is precisely to place the needs of its people above all else; however, the people may then decide to place the needs of the world above themselves, and instruct their leaders to act accordingly. But it is the job of the people, and not a small elite, to make this decision.
Furthermore, based on my understanding of the DMCA, provided that they respond to takedown orders, I think they're protected in doing this, as operators of an Information Service (or whatever the term is in the DMCA for networked services).
As long as they respond to takedown requests and have an address on file with the Copyright Office for those requests, then I think they're pretty safe in doing what they're doing.
Everybody here on Slashdot has been predicting the death of Google by way of YouTube lawsuits, but I think they've probably thought it through a little further than that. The law as it is today seems to be on their side. This doesn't mean that the copyright holders couldn't get enough pet senators together and "fix" that, but at least right now they're living up to their responsibilities.
Of course they could still get sued -- this is America, anyone can sue anyone for anything -- but I'm not sure that they'll necessarily lose. And they have enough money to keep a lawsuit going for a while, it's not the bankruptcy-inducing thing that it would be for a small company.
What does the Southern Poverty Law Center come up as? How about PETA? Because both really ought to fall squarely into that category as well.
If people want to block "Politics and Activism," well then that's their decision to do on their own computers. I'm still not sure it's right to do in public schools, but at home or at a corporation, that's fine.
What I do think is objectionable is if you have a seemingly-apolitical "Politics and Activism" category, and put mostly right-wing sites into it, without their corresponding sites from the left. The problem I have isn't that you're banning a certain point of view -- again, at home or in a private company, that's your decision -- but that the labeling is dishonest. If it contains mostly material of a certain (far right) political view, then it should be labeled as such, and not simply called "Politics and Activism."
It's when people are biased and then are misleading about it, hiding their bias under a facade of even-handedness, that it really irks me. If you want to be biased, do it! (See my comment about "recommendation engine" based censor engines, above.) Just don't pretend like you're not, because it's a tiring charade.
What would make more sense (and provide some legal shelter for blackhole list servers & the like) would be to serve multidimensional karma ratings compiled from a diverse set of viewpoints, and let the clients be the ones to decide what level to browse at on any given indicator.
I think you've got the right idea. Really, we need to make web "censorship" -- if we need to do it at all -- more of a recommendation-based system. Sort of like the reverse of Amazon's "you might like this if..." system. If something offensive snuck through, then you could hit a big red button and it would add it to the block list, while also updating your preferences in its database, so that people similar in preferences to you would automatically share the block. In the same way that Last.FM suggests music based on your previous playlists, this would "suggest" censored sites to you... by just not displaying them at all.
Basically, you could surf and when you hit a site that you find offensive, or maybe when you first ran the site it would give you examples of sites and you could pick which offend you, and it would then match you to various profiles of real people, who had rated sites based on "offensiveness." If you find Fox News particularly repugnant, then Ann Coulter is probably going to be totally off-limits.
The technology to do this seems readily available; 'recommendation engines' that take a person's preferences and extrapolate them out based on similar people are used in everything from music to movies, and they're getting better all the time. If people really want web censorship, than this is better than just turning over authority to some centralized body and letting them possess a giant God-sized rubber "censored" stamp.
The net effect of a system like this, if it were put into wide use, would probably be that people would filter out opinions that were contrary to their own. The internet would, as the software learned about you, become a little bobble-headed yes-man to your every opinion and thought. If you're conservative, than your Internet would be filled with conservatives. If you're a liberal, it'd be full of Liberals (and the occasional Bush gaffe). If you were a pro-life Objectivist anti-gun neo-Stalinist pagan, however hypocritical, as long as the system could find various combinations of preferences to match you to in its database, then you would only see stuff that matched your biases. I'm not saying this would be a good thing -- but hey, it's basically what we have already, just with less senseless screaming at each other in some pathetic attempt at rational discourse.
If we can't have an actual diversity of opinion without trying to take away each others' right to speak freely, then at least let's have a diversity of censorship.
(FYI, tongue is planted firmly in cheek throughout this, although I don't mean it as a total joke. If web censorship is a must, then a system like this would be better than where we're headed. Thus if you think this would really suck, maybe we need to re-evaluate whether we really want to start down the path at all.)
My assumption was that if you were creating such a darknet, you wouldn't leave something quite so obvious as a Path header in place. Or at least not one that contained any personally identifying information of the servers above yours. At each step in the hierarchy, a server would strip out the header entries from the servers above it, and would only pass down information about itself.
Or maybe rather than stripping the Path headers, it could encrypt the Path header before adding itself to it. So if a message came back to the server, it could decrypt the path and get the next server up in the hierarchy. It wouldn't be able to read further up than that, because the remainder of the path is encrypted with the upstream server's key. (This would also have the advantage of not allowing a key compromise of an upstream server to immediately compromise all of the downstream servers, since having an upstream key wouldn't let you take a far downstream message's path and decrypt all of it -- the full path would have layers of encryption on it.)
So if I'm an end-user named Joe, and I get my news from a server called Frank, and he gets his news from a server called Sam, the Path header that I see would be: Path: Frank![encrypted gibberish]
However, if Frank was looking at the same message, he'd be able to decrypt the next level up in the path, so he'd see: Path: Frank!Sam![encrypted gibberish]
But he wouldn't be able to go any higher, because the remainder of the path would be encrypted with Sam's key.
Also, you'd obviously need to transfer all the data between nodes using encryption, and all messages would need digital signatures (since you, an end user, couldn't know how the message would reach its destination readers).
(As a side note, I don't like the government banning medical marijuana, but there is no question that Raich was correctly decided. The same theory is also why landmark civil rights legislation, such as the act which forbids whites-only lunch counters, also applies to lunch counters which only serve local clients. One of the unfortunate things about constitutional law is that you often have to take the bitter with the sweet.)
This is a dangerous attitude to take. Just because some good effects came out of a poorly-reasoned decision, doesn't make the decision good. It means that a whole lot of social good is resting on insecure, poorly-reasoned legal foundations.
I'd argue that a similar situation now exists with abortion and other reproductive and personal rights. Lots of things that many people take for granted rest on a series of court decisions -- Roe v. Wade chief among them -- which are rather delicate logical and jurisprudential constructs. Had Roe not been decided the way it was, political will might have developed in the 1970s to codify an actual right to privacy, rather than relying on the flawed concept of a "pneumbra." Unfortunately, the latter path was taken, and now a whole host of rights ride on a this concept. As soon as people began to take those rights for granted, the opportunity of actually having enough momentum to get an actual codified right disappeared. Today, if a handful of legal scholars can be convinced of the wrongness of Roe and the pneumbra concept, then not only abortion but the whole "right" to privacy could disappear.
Swallowing bad jurisprudence simply because it produces social good in the short term is almost always a bad idea, and it leads to less stability in the long run. It forces you to either run the risk of losing the social gains in order to overturn bad law (as in Roe), or in keeping the bad precedent and subsequent bad judgements in order to keep the social good (as with your example of Raich and civil rights).
"Rights" won on questionable legal arguments can hardly said to be 'won' at all -- they're the social-freedom versions of stock-market bubbles. Pleasant, ephemeral, but apt to cause chaos one way or another whether they burst or remain. Slow growth based on actual legislative action is far better in the long run, painful as it may be in the present. Sometimes extreme pain is what's required to motivate both the people and the Legislative branch into action.
At least one President and a majority in both the Congress and Senate decided that certain types of speech should be against the law. I guess that means hate speech isn't really treated the same way as other forms of speech.
Cite please.
There aren't, that I know of, any Federal laws against hate speech, when it is simply "speech" and not action-producing. It is still protected as political speech, just like anything else. There are certain types of "speech" which are prohibited if they incite particular actions, but they prohibited by virtue of being actions-as-speech rather than speech per se. This has broad historical basis in the prohibitions against inciting riots, and the "fire in a crowded theater" example.
Neither one is really a type of speech being against the law, when the speech is considered independently of the action it provokes. This may seem like an academic point, but it is not. It's the difference between it actually being illegal to say something due to subject matter, and being illegal to say something in a particular time and place, to a particular audience, in order to produce a particular effect. Both situation and motivation play into its prohibition.
There is a very big difference between saying that you can't deny the Holocaust, period, and saying that you can't tell a bunch of people at a white supremacist rally to go out and kill Jews. The second case is clearly an incitement to violence and thus isn't just speech, it's also action-causing in a direct and predictable way. The first case is blatantly censorious and (although it is the case in many European countries,) would not pass Constitutional muster in the U.S. -- even if a simple majority of Congress and the President wanted to make it illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
the memory usage is a problem only when you're displaying pages with lots of large images
... now I see why so many Slashdotters feel this is a very serious issue.
Ah
These are really only temporary shortages. Annoying to you or me, certainly, but from the very long view -- and that's the one I think we need to be taking -- very little information is at stake of being lost forever as a result of Disney's market-manipulation. (Unless some political-correctness Nazi goes after the Song of the South masters, but I doubt this.) There is a big difference between something that's inaccessible but preserved, and something that's inaccessible because it has been permanently lost. It's the difference between imprisonment and execution; one is temporary, the other is forever.
Before we start in on the Songs of the South and others of their ilk -- tucked safely away, but held back from distribution by someone's conscious desire -- we need to acquire and copy all the content that's not being preserved. There is a TON of primary-source material from some of the most significant events in the 20th century -- some which unquestionably have significance to all of humanity -- which is not being preserved due to copyright problems, or simple mismanagement. (And this is only going to get worse in the future, as more of our history is recorded in mediums that aren't traditionally archived, unless we make an effort to do something. Read the Ars article about the problems one guy had just trying to get video clips from a few years ago.)
Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit may be locked away in the Disney Vault, but their situation is significantly less dire than that of the thousands of hours of other material which is not being looked after by billionaire benefactors.
I'd vote for putting research journals and textbooks online.
It's not that I disagree with you precisely, but I really think people are missing the boat by all saying "let's put textbooks online."
Textbooks don't go obsolete from one edition to the next because any new content is really added, they get minor changes added in order to keep people buying new books. If you put the content of one edition online, you're not changing this. They'll just introduce some new content, or write a new book, and then next year that'll be the required text. The "online textbook" that you spent so much time, money, and effort on, will be as obsolete as the 5-year-old paper textbooks that get sent to the furnace or to the shredder, because the problems in the back are numbered differently than in this year's edition. You're not solving any problem by putting them online. Paper textbooks would be cheap and long-lasting and readily available, except for the blatant manipulation that goes on by the publishing companies, in order to keep sales up. Putting a version online isn't going to break this cycle of price manipulation; it's just like making lots of copies of one particular paper edition. Unless you were going to fight them dollar-for-dollar (buying the rights to each new edition of every book) until they eventually just went bankrupt or stopped fighting, they're going to do everything they can to keep the online books from being useful. And given how they manage to keep a perfectly-servicable paper book that just happens to have a few minor differences from being useful, I think your chances of making an online textbook (with all the problems that being an 'online book' entails) useful is basically nil.
Trying to create online textbooks is a financial sinkhole. Unless you had more money to throw at the problem than all the publishing companies who would try to destroy you (and $100M is not nearly enough), you're going to fail. Instead, a better move would be to try to just get all the information online in some non-textbook format. Wikipedia is IMO a response to this; it's an attempt to end-run textbooks, by removing the monopoly they have over informational content. It accomplishes many of the same functions that digitizing textbooks would, in terms of preserving and making information available.
Rather than spending a ton of money to put textbooks online, which basically doesn't preserve any information that's not readily available today anyway, I think we need to take a look at what stuff is floating around, that's going to disappear forever if it's not preserved. There is a lot of primary-source material -- really irreplaceable stuff -- which is going to just cease to exist if we don't move quickly to copy and preserve it. In many cases, such as early film footage, copyrights prevent this process from occurring. This is where a large cash grant could come in handy.
Instead of taking information that's at no risk of disappearing from the world -- I can pretty much guarantee that regardless of what Wikimedia does, basic calculus isn't going to become a lost art -- and disseminating it, we should instead start from the very end of our back catalog and work forwards. Let's start with things that don't have much time left. All the decaying celluloid locked up in studios' vaults, or the original studio tapes of famous musicians that are rotting away due to improper storage. Let's make sure that gets saved first; because if we don't do it now, we won't have a second chance to go back later.
Someone who has a copyrighted item earning $12.50 per year might easily be swayed to release it into the public domain for $200. Almost *nothing* under copyright is actually earning any real money, and thefore may be liberated with a very modest purse.
Perhaps if there was a simple online process in place, individuals could seach for their items of choice, pay up and free them.
This is the best idea I've heard in this thread so far.
There have to be a lot of copyrighted works held by "estates" and descendants of authors or creators, who would readily convert their trickle of income into cash given the opportunity.
I'm thinking of the ads I see all the time for various firms that offer to convert the structured settlements given by many insurance companies into cash payouts. (E.g. these guys run a lot of really obnoxious TV ones in my area.) I could see setting up something like this, but advertising instead to people who are collecting very small royalties on copyrights that they hold.
Especially considering how long copyrights last now, there have got to be lots of people around who are holders of rights that they don't care about or will never use. A straight-up buyout of these works might bring in a lot. Sure, a lot of it might be relatively unimportant, but the more the merrier.
You could create some sort of "base rate" for published works no longer earning any royalties; say $50 for the rights to a novel, $75 for a non-fiction work. There'd have to be standards, to keep people from just trying to flood it with junk (maybe it would need to be works that had more than a few thousand copies published). On works that are still earning royalties, offer to buy the rights according to the same rates that a settlement-buyout company would purchase an annuity. I'm sure you could turn up all kinds of stuff just by running some broadly targeted radio or TV ads.
There are lots of people who would rather have money in their pocket now, than a slow trickle of income for the next century or so. If you wanted to get the biggest "bang for your buck" (or bang for your hundred-mil), those are the folks you need to find.
Gutenberg, atlases, ancient literature and history
I agree that this would be good stuff to have digitized, but most of it is out of copyright anyway. It's not something you'd have to buy, which is the point of this whole discussion.
Project Gutenberg already has a fairly good repository of classic literature; their bias is towards stuff that can be distributed as text (so not so much maps and atlases), but their coverage of classic literature seems pretty good. I can only read English so I've no idea what their coverage in other languages is, but I think the French government has something similar going for their language, so there is at least some stuff out there.
I think the focus of the "$100M Question" is what stuff that's currently under copyright would we want to buy?
My answer to this is another question: 'What is at risk of disappearing if it isn't opened up?' There are a lot of classic movies and news reels that have never been digitized, which need to be preserved; a lot of WWII stuff for instance. That has a certain amount of worldwide interest, so it's not totally American-centric.
I don't think it's really proper to critcize too harshly on a site like Slashdot for having "un-international" responses, though, because you have to consider the audience. The majority of the respondants here are from the U.S., so naturally the preservation of American cultural artifacts is going to be favored. I'm sure if you asked this question in most other countries, you'd get similarly biased results.
I hope to the gods that Americans aren't backward enough to have only male options in parliament
Actually, our options for Parliament are even more limited than that...
Imagine having to have your fingerprints taken just to enter a pub!! WTF
... we've moved past that here.
It is a little fascist, I give you that. Here in the U.S., we'd never allow anything so intrusive. Fingerprinting is for foreigners and criminals! We prefer more subtle monitoring. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Here, we'll just mandate that the bars have to check ID by scanning your RFID-enabled, government issued card through a terminal. Your photo pops up on the terminal screen (built by Diebold -- don't ask what's inside!), and they see that you're 21. It's for the children, naturally. Don't want them drinking. Of course, also on file from when you applied for your ID card is your retinal patterns, fingerprints, shoe size, etc. So if they find some suspect fingerprints, it'll be a simple matter to check them against the files for everybody that's been in that pub. Superior to the Brits really, since you don't have to deal with low-grade print scanners at every bar, getting gunked up and unreliable.
From a "citizens" perspective, it's no different than today. Lots of places scan your ID when you buy booze, so most people would never notice. By putting all the changes in the backend, it's far less intrusive. Doesn't make sense to remind people of what's going on -- why not keep things looking the way they "always have?"
Actually taking fingerprints is so 20th century. Honestly
It's been a while, but IIRC in Pennsylvania it's not that you can't buy beer in less than a case, it's just that you have to go to a different store. They have "Beer Stores," which sell beer by the case and only by the case, but then they also have "Six-pack Shops" which sell smaller quantities (and any bar can legally sell you up to two six-packs; bowling alleys that have bars were a favored place to get late-night booze IIRC). I think they have different hours for each. And then there are liquor stores which are actually run by the state, and where you can get your distilled alcohols, and I think wine just comes from the grocery store? (I was never clear on wine there.)
Anyway, just nitpicking. It does have some of the most bizarre liquor laws of anywhere I've ever been to. I can only pity the poor coddled European who might wind up in Pennsylvania, desiring a case of wine on a Sunday, or something similarly impossible.
Canadians, Mexicans who are staying in border areas, and visitors from many European countries that have reciprocal visa agreements with the U.S. are exempt.
Just so you don't think I'm passing U.S. propaganda, here's a quote from a ChinaDaily article:It's also not a full fingerprinting, it's just the index finger and it's an electronic scan. Basically it does an "instant check" against the FBI database. But basically, if you're from a major European country and here on a tourist visa, there's no fingerprinting. (Which makes the whole process pretty fucking stupid -- I mean, so now the terrorists need to get false Dutch papers instead of false Egyptian ones; great use of a few million dollars. Why do we do this at all? But I digress.)
I wasn't implying that OS X was any more of a RAM hog than Windows, just that for the stuff that I do, 512 MB seems a little cramped.
You could definitely use a Mac with that and be fine, if you don't like to run a lot of stuff at the simultaneously. Apparently for what the guy does, he's fine with it. However, my point was that if he really has a $3000 Windows PC, even if it's a few years old, it probably has more than 512 MB in it.
I'm actually typing this on an older G3 12" iBook with 128 MB -- so it is possible to run OS X in a very small memory footprint, it just thrashes the disk a lot whenever I try to open more than an application at a time. (It's my backup system; I'm not a masochist.) I can imagine that Windows or even most "maximalist" Linux distros would do the same thing.
Easy solution; don't keep stuff like movies in your home folder. I can't really imagine any reason why those would need to be encrypted, and as you discovered, doing so does carry a large performance penalty.
/Users/Shared/Music and ~/Movies and /Users/Shared/Movies; this keeps FileVault from encrypting my iTunes music library or my movie collection. It also means that on a multiuser system, other users can access the movies and music, without me having to enter my password or give them access to the rest of my files. (Actually I now have the movies and music on another drive.)
On my systems, I have symlinks set up between ~/Music and
If you do it this way, FileVault doesn't carry too huge a performance hit. It also has the advantage of allowing you to back up your documents in a secure fashion pretty easily: you log in as a different user, and just back up the File Vault sparseimage as a single file.
The "do you want to recover space" logout screen is fairly obnoxious, agreed; I hate it just because it stops the shutdown process with a dialog that requires human interaction. I wish it had some sort of a 30-second-countdown-to-default timer, so that if I hit "shutdown" and walk away, the process doesn't get hung up and just sit there, unsecured, forever.
Some enterprising person came up with a series of far better ones:
h tm
http://homepage.mac.com/rcareaga/diebold/adworks.
Yeah what the fuck is wrong with that video? (Let me count the ways...)
Seriously, I really tried to watch it. It would play for about three seconds, and then stop for "buffering." No surprise there -- I'm on a shared connection. I don't have enough bandwidth to watch something like that live.
So I thought I'd just pause it and let it load -- like any decent system ought to allow me to do -- but oh, no; it had better ideas. As soon as I put it on pause, it stopped buffering. I can tell, because the traffic through my router just abruptly stopped. When I hit play again, then it started buffering again.
How brain-dead is that? Even if I tried to play it through at its stuttering, three-seconds-per-load speed, and then rewind back to the beginning and play it again, it apparently doesn't "buffer" for very long, because it tried to reload the data.
I want to find the person who thought that encapsulating videos inside Flash objects was a good idea, and put their face in a bench vise. They could have just used a good-old streaming video object, but no. They had to do it with Flash. Well, the hell with them.
Based on the article, it's not like his PC was really that old. Given the heavily upgraded, top-of-the-line PC he was using, even if it's was a few years old, and the minimalist Mac (512MB? Jeez...), it's a pretty fair comparison. Actually the hardware edge might go to the PC.
Or were you just America-bashing in hopes of picking up some karma? (Which apparently you did -- nice job, mods.)
That's being addressed, though, with a rewrite of "init" (shipping with Ubuntu Edgy Eft).
Didn't Apple basically already do this? They wanted a faster boot time than the traditional init system would give, so they wrote launchd. It's open source, and it replaces init and also some functions of cron.
If the Ubuntu/Debian people are rewriting init and not using launchd, they're seriously reinventing the wheel. The most often stated downside of launchd that I've ever heard is that it uses XML config files, rather than the flat text that's preferred by most people coming from a UNIX background, but I'm sure you could change that.
The purpose of launchd, as I understand it, is that it keeps track of which processes can't start until other ones have started, and which can be started up in parallel. By parellizing the ones that can be run simultaneously, it shortens boot times substantially over the old sequential approach. The first version of OS X that used it was noticably speedier during boots than previous versions.
Is Edgy Eft going to use launchd?
A while ago -- and maybe it was in the Slashdot discussion about ATI, I'm not sure -- somebody described a cycle in computer design, where various components are built-in monolithically, then broken out as separate components, and then swallowed back up into monolithic designs again.
Graphics chips seem to have done this cycle at least once; perhaps now we're just looking at the next stage in the cycle? We've had graphics as a separate component from the processor for a while, perhaps the next stage in the cycle is for them to combine together into a G/CPU, to take advantage of the design gains in general-purpose processors.
Then at some point down the road, the GPU (or more likely, various GPU-like functional units) might get separated back out onto their own silicon, as more application-specific processors become advantageous once again.
The purpose of a democratically elected government is to represent and advocate for the interests of their constituency. They have no responsibility to anyone outside of that constituency, period.
That said, I think it's fair to say in most cases, that most rational people wouldn't want a government that got them gains at the expense of the rest of humanity. Therefore, an honestly representative government might act in ways that are occasionally not seemingly in the direct best interest of the people they represent.
Again, it's all about the point of view you take. In the short term, it might seem as though it's in the best interest of a country to invade its neighbor, but in the long run (as with Germany) it could also backfire spectacularly. Thus there are good reasons for not acting according to that short-term impulse.
However, if everyone in a certain country really wanted something, and didn't give a damn about the rest of humanity, and elected leaders to pursue this goal, then it would be patently undemocratic for those leaders to put the desires of "humanity" above the desires of their consitutants. If a particular leader felt it morally impossible to continue, due to his own feelings prohbiting him from acting as his voters elected him to do, then he would be correct to resign and step down.
The basis of representative democracy is a somewhat adversarial process. Various elected representatives are tasked with acting as proxies for the people that they represent. Their job is to do whatever the people would do themselves, if they were acting in government directly.
Now, this doesn't prohibit morality in government completely. People elect representatives because, in many cases, of their perceived moral judgement. This might mean that the correct (by which I mean, representative) thing to do, would be to take a course of action that was for the "greater good" rather than the good of the constituency, because that's what the people in the constituency would have done themselves. This is important, because this this is the difference between an actual representative democracy and a theoretical government run by a computer that was just programmed to do the most self-interested thing, all the time.
The job of government is precisely to place the needs of its people above all else; however, the people may then decide to place the needs of the world above themselves, and instruct their leaders to act accordingly. But it is the job of the people, and not a small elite, to make this decision.
Furthermore, based on my understanding of the DMCA, provided that they respond to takedown orders, I think they're protected in doing this, as operators of an Information Service (or whatever the term is in the DMCA for networked services).
As long as they respond to takedown requests and have an address on file with the Copyright Office for those requests, then I think they're pretty safe in doing what they're doing.
Everybody here on Slashdot has been predicting the death of Google by way of YouTube lawsuits, but I think they've probably thought it through a little further than that. The law as it is today seems to be on their side. This doesn't mean that the copyright holders couldn't get enough pet senators together and "fix" that, but at least right now they're living up to their responsibilities.
Of course they could still get sued -- this is America, anyone can sue anyone for anything -- but I'm not sure that they'll necessarily lose. And they have enough money to keep a lawsuit going for a while, it's not the bankruptcy-inducing thing that it would be for a small company.
What does the Southern Poverty Law Center come up as? How about PETA? Because both really ought to fall squarely into that category as well.
If people want to block "Politics and Activism," well then that's their decision to do on their own computers. I'm still not sure it's right to do in public schools, but at home or at a corporation, that's fine.
What I do think is objectionable is if you have a seemingly-apolitical "Politics and Activism" category, and put mostly right-wing sites into it, without their corresponding sites from the left. The problem I have isn't that you're banning a certain point of view -- again, at home or in a private company, that's your decision -- but that the labeling is dishonest. If it contains mostly material of a certain (far right) political view, then it should be labeled as such, and not simply called "Politics and Activism."
It's when people are biased and then are misleading about it, hiding their bias under a facade of even-handedness, that it really irks me. If you want to be biased, do it! (See my comment about "recommendation engine" based censor engines, above.) Just don't pretend like you're not, because it's a tiring charade.
What would make more sense (and provide some legal shelter for blackhole list servers & the like) would be to serve multidimensional karma ratings compiled from a diverse set of viewpoints, and let the clients be the ones to decide what level to browse at on any given indicator.
... by just not displaying them at all.
I think you've got the right idea. Really, we need to make web "censorship" -- if we need to do it at all -- more of a recommendation-based system. Sort of like the reverse of Amazon's "you might like this if..." system. If something offensive snuck through, then you could hit a big red button and it would add it to the block list, while also updating your preferences in its database, so that people similar in preferences to you would automatically share the block. In the same way that Last.FM suggests music based on your previous playlists, this would "suggest" censored sites to you
Basically, you could surf and when you hit a site that you find offensive, or maybe when you first ran the site it would give you examples of sites and you could pick which offend you, and it would then match you to various profiles of real people, who had rated sites based on "offensiveness." If you find Fox News particularly repugnant, then Ann Coulter is probably going to be totally off-limits.
The technology to do this seems readily available; 'recommendation engines' that take a person's preferences and extrapolate them out based on similar people are used in everything from music to movies, and they're getting better all the time. If people really want web censorship, than this is better than just turning over authority to some centralized body and letting them possess a giant God-sized rubber "censored" stamp.
The net effect of a system like this, if it were put into wide use, would probably be that people would filter out opinions that were contrary to their own. The internet would, as the software learned about you, become a little bobble-headed yes-man to your every opinion and thought. If you're conservative, than your Internet would be filled with conservatives. If you're a liberal, it'd be full of Liberals (and the occasional Bush gaffe). If you were a pro-life Objectivist anti-gun neo-Stalinist pagan, however hypocritical, as long as the system could find various combinations of preferences to match you to in its database, then you would only see stuff that matched your biases. I'm not saying this would be a good thing -- but hey, it's basically what we have already, just with less senseless screaming at each other in some pathetic attempt at rational discourse.
If we can't have an actual diversity of opinion without trying to take away each others' right to speak freely, then at least let's have a diversity of censorship.
(FYI, tongue is planted firmly in cheek throughout this, although I don't mean it as a total joke. If web censorship is a must, then a system like this would be better than where we're headed. Thus if you think this would really suck, maybe we need to re-evaluate whether we really want to start down the path at all.)
That quote does not appear anywhere in the linked article.
It's not even a put-together of various quotes from the article. The word "African" doesn't even occur. It's a complete fabrication.
My assumption was that if you were creating such a darknet, you wouldn't leave something quite so obvious as a Path header in place. Or at least not one that contained any personally identifying information of the servers above yours. At each step in the hierarchy, a server would strip out the header entries from the servers above it, and would only pass down information about itself.
Or maybe rather than stripping the Path headers, it could encrypt the Path header before adding itself to it. So if a message came back to the server, it could decrypt the path and get the next server up in the hierarchy. It wouldn't be able to read further up than that, because the remainder of the path is encrypted with the upstream server's key. (This would also have the advantage of not allowing a key compromise of an upstream server to immediately compromise all of the downstream servers, since having an upstream key wouldn't let you take a far downstream message's path and decrypt all of it -- the full path would have layers of encryption on it.)
So if I'm an end-user named Joe, and I get my news from a server called Frank, and he gets his news from a server called Sam, the Path header that I see would be:
Path: Frank![encrypted gibberish]
However, if Frank was looking at the same message, he'd be able to decrypt the next level up in the path, so he'd see:
Path: Frank!Sam![encrypted gibberish]
But he wouldn't be able to go any higher, because the remainder of the path would be encrypted with Sam's key.
Also, you'd obviously need to transfer all the data between nodes using encryption, and all messages would need digital signatures (since you, an end user, couldn't know how the message would reach its destination readers).
I'd argue that a similar situation now exists with abortion and other reproductive and personal rights. Lots of things that many people take for granted rest on a series of court decisions -- Roe v. Wade chief among them -- which are rather delicate logical and jurisprudential constructs. Had Roe not been decided the way it was, political will might have developed in the 1970s to codify an actual right to privacy, rather than relying on the flawed concept of a "pneumbra." Unfortunately, the latter path was taken, and now a whole host of rights ride on a this concept. As soon as people began to take those rights for granted, the opportunity of actually having enough momentum to get an actual codified right disappeared. Today, if a handful of legal scholars can be convinced of the wrongness of Roe and the pneumbra concept, then not only abortion but the whole "right" to privacy could disappear.
Swallowing bad jurisprudence simply because it produces social good in the short term is almost always a bad idea, and it leads to less stability in the long run. It forces you to either run the risk of losing the social gains in order to overturn bad law (as in Roe), or in keeping the bad precedent and subsequent bad judgements in order to keep the social good (as with your example of Raich and civil rights).
"Rights" won on questionable legal arguments can hardly said to be 'won' at all -- they're the social-freedom versions of stock-market bubbles. Pleasant, ephemeral, but apt to cause chaos one way or another whether they burst or remain. Slow growth based on actual legislative action is far better in the long run, painful as it may be in the present. Sometimes extreme pain is what's required to motivate both the people and the Legislative branch into action.
At least one President and a majority in both the Congress and Senate decided that certain types of speech should be against the law. I guess that means hate speech isn't really treated the same way as other forms of speech.
Cite please.
There aren't, that I know of, any Federal laws against hate speech, when it is simply "speech" and not action-producing. It is still protected as political speech, just like anything else. There are certain types of "speech" which are prohibited if they incite particular actions, but they prohibited by virtue of being actions-as-speech rather than speech per se. This has broad historical basis in the prohibitions against inciting riots, and the "fire in a crowded theater" example.
Neither one is really a type of speech being against the law, when the speech is considered independently of the action it provokes. This may seem like an academic point, but it is not. It's the difference between it actually being illegal to say something due to subject matter, and being illegal to say something in a particular time and place, to a particular audience, in order to produce a particular effect. Both situation and motivation play into its prohibition.
There is a very big difference between saying that you can't deny the Holocaust, period, and saying that you can't tell a bunch of people at a white supremacist rally to go out and kill Jews. The second case is clearly an incitement to violence and thus isn't just speech, it's also action-causing in a direct and predictable way. The first case is blatantly censorious and (although it is the case in many European countries,) would not pass Constitutional muster in the U.S. -- even if a simple majority of Congress and the President wanted to make it illegal.