Colossal ignorance should not be excused as a typo. The author of the article has no clue what a gigabit is, and neither does the poster of the story. The slashdot editors do, but they like to let such errors go so as to generate heat.
The judge did not order Yahoo to "remove a link". The judge ordered, whether with or without understanding of the outrageous meaning and far-reaching consequences of his or her action, that Yahoo somehow modify their search engine such that it will simply not do what a search engine properly does. And don't imagine for a moment that the judge's order does not come with the threat of punitive action such as monetary sanction, confiscation of property, or arrest.
The Boston College web page said nothing resembling "you might be a copyright infringer if...". It included "using a wireless router in your dorm room" in a list of "Common Examples of Copyright Infringement".
The fact that one must interpret the whole sentence and not simply discard the part after the semicolon goes without saying. If you imagine that I am guilty of that, your are mistaken. You yourself seem to imagine that rather than parsing the sentence, you can pluck out key phrases and construct an imaginary sentence that differs from the one in question.The sentence as a whole does a couple of things. First, it says that having a wireless router in your dorm room IS copyright infringement. Then it uses a semicolon to set off what ought to be a subsidiary sentence explaining why the first is true. Yet having a wireless router simply is NOT copyright infringement, and the fact that someone else MIGHT use one's wireless router to commit infringement does not make the first part true. In other words, the intent of the sentence as a whole is to say that the fact that someone might use your wireless router to commit infringement makes your possession of the router infringement. If you want to defend that, you are going to have to go beyond grammar into some kind of theory of negligent contribution to infringement. But you did not go there. Even if you had, the fact that the first part of the sentence addressed merely possessing a wireless router, not possessing an open wireless router, would make that a stretch. You need to listen to your own sermon and parse the sentence rather than scanning for keywords, already.
The story characterizes the Boston College webpage content as providing "a list of what might be called 'you might be a copyright infringer if...'. But that is being far, far too kind. If you actually look at the content as displayed in the article, you will see that what is being offered is a list of examples of actual infringing activities, labeled as such ("Common Examples of Copyright Infringement"). Thus the inclusion of possession of a wireless router in the list is not just an error regarding what correlates with infringement (analogous to including "having more than one drink at a party" in a "You might be an alcoholic if..." list). It is flat-out, inexcusably, wrong.
When police are flagrantly violating the 4th amendment to the US constitution, interfering with the freedom of travel on what in Britain is called "the King's highway", and costing drivers time and fuel, and making some late to appointments, surely the citizens have every right to warn each other of where the illegal activity is being conducted so they can simply avoid going there.
releasing sensitive classified documents onto the internet is certainly, in layman's vernacular, "aiding the enemy"
It amazes this layman to learn from you that I would naturally use the phrase "aiding the enemy" to refer to any release of sensitive classified documents. You argue that when the US is at war, there is an enemy, and any violation of US official secrets acts could aid that enemy, and thus does constitute "aiding the enemy". But since the policy of the US's ruling elite is to be perpetually engaged in undeclared or semi-declared (i.e., funded) wars, there is always an enemy. If you are right, then what an added benefit redounds to those rulers from their policy of perpetual warfare! Not only can they abuse the classification system to protect themselves from embarrassment, but they can execute any military official secrets violator.
Ah, where to begin. First, the requirement of protecting one's trademark does not extend to making an ass of oneself by reaching out far beyond the recognized bounds of trademark law. Second, tossing off "These buttons do that" as though it were a simple noncontroversial fact, when it is actually highly debatable, violates the rules of argument. Third, you have an odd definition of "censor" if you think siccing the state on someone to stop them from merely alluding in a marketed product to a relative's being an author is not censorship.
What this sordid tales demonstrates is how easily human beings will become rent-seekers, given half a chance. Another example is what (some of) the family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have done. How sad.
I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
Are you claiming that if, for example, Dell decided to require the use of an unpublished key of a few bytes (which in itself is not a copyrightable work) to install an OS other than Windows on some PC model, the DMCA would prohibit using that key to load Linux on it, and prohibit the publishing of said key? If so, then I submit that such is an extraordinary claim that calls for quotation of the relevant section of the law, and an argument for its applicability to the actions in question.
There is no concept of parity here, so "It's not just parity" is not a meaningful utterance. Which is why DNS-and-BIND used the title "Non-story" for his excellent parable that evidently, as is so often the case with parables, can be understood only by those with ears to hear. Go back and read it again, and think about it a little. Or maybe a lot. Perhaps this additional (longer) tale will help you understand: Suppose tomorrow we began to speak of quantities of US money in terms of cents (0.01 USD), and the US reserve bank were to begin printing $1 bills with "One Hundred Cents" on them instead of "One Dollar". And the NYSE began quoting stock prices in cents rather than dollars, etc. etc. Would Americans hang their heads and say Woe is us, our currency is worth so little? Hardly. It would have no significance, would it? If there were currently some other state-issued currency in the world, say, the Frambonian Kumquat, which happened to trade today for about 0.01 USD on the currency exchange markets, would their newspapers happily trumpet tomorrow that the Kumquat had reached "parity" with the US currency?
You, sir, have either recklessly disregarded the truth by not bothering to click on the link to the tiny one-section bill and taking a few seconds to read it, or you are a troll. Or both.
Too bad I don't have mod points at the moment. What an obvious troll. But since the modders seem to have missed the obvious, you have managed to pull off close to the perfect game in trolling: simultaneously making a fallacious argument that you know sounds so lacking in understanding of the concepts involved that the typical slashdotter will roll his or her eyes over it, and pushing the copyright button, yet still being modded up. Congrats are in order for your exercise of trolling skill.
However, for the benefit of modders, I'll pretend that I am also blind to the obvious, and answer the putative argument: The Feds are not copying bits. They are taking ownership of (stealing) domain names from the parties who own them, without due process.
The US system is engineered such that it is practically impossible for there to be more than two viable parties. It is not a parliamentary democracy; it has no proportional representation, and no forming of a government by a coalition of multiple parties. The executive is chosen by an independent winner-take-all election in which the public feels (rationally or not) compelled to "not waste one's vote" on a candidate unlikely to win.
The public may soon find out that their favorite celebrity, politician or employer doesn't feel responsible to contribute financially to the commonwealth at the expense of privacy.
The public may soon find out that their favorite celebrity, politician or employer takes the responsible action of protecting himself and his family from the criminal syndicate dominant in his locale.
Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it's about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails. So this change shouldn't affect you unless you're a heavy downloader/streamer/etc.
An honest rendering of this would be, "We really only intended for you to do unlimited emailing and web browsing (defined as reading through html pages very slowly, mind you; certainly not as enjoying the kind of content that we all take for granted these days). This won't affect you unless you are a moderately heavy downloader of documents, or you try to watch videos. To give you an idea, you could burn through 5GB by watching just four two-hour movies."
second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size
And how is that supposed to be relevant? Even if brain mass closely correlates with intelligence, that doesn't mean that the ratio of brain mass to body size does.
Take a sabbatical from belittling others' physics understanding, and spend it studying physics, or maybe just contemplating the implications of what you have already been taught. Don't end it until reading your post here embarrasses you.
One need not enjoy it to know which way the wind is blowing -- nay, has blown. Recognizing that the constitution of the old republic has become a meaningless piece of paper is just being realistic, and is more likely to result in constructive change than sticking your head in the sand.
I am well acquainted with the concept of representation in the context of representative democracy. However, my comments, as you will see if you review them, pertained to the lack of actual agency and what that entails for personal responsibility of a person for the actions of elected representatives. It beggars belief that you and some others seem to attribute moral culpability to an individual for what others do that they have neither authorized nor even agree with.
I agree with you that I might well experience an instinctive revulsion. But surely you are not suggesting that that feeling constitutes actual responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Colossal ignorance should not be excused as a typo. The author of the article has no clue what a gigabit is, and neither does the poster of the story. The slashdot editors do, but they like to let such errors go so as to generate heat.
The judge did not order Yahoo to "remove a link". The judge ordered, whether with or without understanding of the outrageous meaning and far-reaching consequences of his or her action, that Yahoo somehow modify their search engine such that it will simply not do what a search engine properly does. And don't imagine for a moment that the judge's order does not come with the threat of punitive action such as monetary sanction, confiscation of property, or arrest.
The Boston College web page said nothing resembling "you might be a copyright infringer if...". It included "using a wireless router in your dorm room" in a list of "Common Examples of Copyright Infringement".
The fact that one must interpret the whole sentence and not simply discard the part after the semicolon goes without saying. If you imagine that I am guilty of that, your are mistaken. You yourself seem to imagine that rather than parsing the sentence, you can pluck out key phrases and construct an imaginary sentence that differs from the one in question.The sentence as a whole does a couple of things. First, it says that having a wireless router in your dorm room IS copyright infringement. Then it uses a semicolon to set off what ought to be a subsidiary sentence explaining why the first is true. Yet having a wireless router simply is NOT copyright infringement, and the fact that someone else MIGHT use one's wireless router to commit infringement does not make the first part true. In other words, the intent of the sentence as a whole is to say that the fact that someone might use your wireless router to commit infringement makes your possession of the router infringement. If you want to defend that, you are going to have to go beyond grammar into some kind of theory of negligent contribution to infringement. But you did not go there. Even if you had, the fact that the first part of the sentence addressed merely possessing a wireless router, not possessing an open wireless router, would make that a stretch. You need to listen to your own sermon and parse the sentence rather than scanning for keywords, already.
The story characterizes the Boston College webpage content as providing "a list of what might be called 'you might be a copyright infringer if...'. But that is being far, far too kind. If you actually look at the content as displayed in the article, you will see that what is being offered is a list of examples of actual infringing activities, labeled as such ("Common Examples of Copyright Infringement"). Thus the inclusion of possession of a wireless router in the list is not just an error regarding what correlates with infringement (analogous to including "having more than one drink at a party" in a "You might be an alcoholic if..." list). It is flat-out, inexcusably, wrong.
When police are flagrantly violating the 4th amendment to the US constitution, interfering with the freedom of travel on what in Britain is called "the King's highway", and costing drivers time and fuel, and making some late to appointments, surely the citizens have every right to warn each other of where the illegal activity is being conducted so they can simply avoid going there.
If technical expertise is the 8th most important among a large number of traits, it is hardly "not important". It is, well, one of the most important.
releasing sensitive classified documents onto the internet is certainly, in layman's vernacular, "aiding the enemy"
It amazes this layman to learn from you that I would naturally use the phrase "aiding the enemy" to refer to any release of sensitive classified documents. You argue that when the US is at war, there is an enemy, and any violation of US official secrets acts could aid that enemy, and thus does constitute "aiding the enemy". But since the policy of the US's ruling elite is to be perpetually engaged in undeclared or semi-declared (i.e., funded) wars, there is always an enemy. If you are right, then what an added benefit redounds to those rulers from their policy of perpetual warfare! Not only can they abuse the classification system to protect themselves from embarrassment, but they can execute any military official secrets violator.
Ah, where to begin. First, the requirement of protecting one's trademark does not extend to making an ass of oneself by reaching out far beyond the recognized bounds of trademark law. Second, tossing off "These buttons do that" as though it were a simple noncontroversial fact, when it is actually highly debatable, violates the rules of argument. Third, you have an odd definition of "censor" if you think siccing the state on someone to stop them from merely alluding in a marketed product to a relative's being an author is not censorship.
What this sordid tales demonstrates is how easily human beings will become rent-seekers, given half a chance. Another example is what (some of) the family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have done. How sad.
Dog bites man. Chris Dodd continues to do evil. This is newsworthy?
I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
George Orwell, 1984
Are you claiming that if, for example, Dell decided to require the use of an unpublished key of a few bytes (which in itself is not a copyrightable work) to install an OS other than Windows on some PC model, the DMCA would prohibit using that key to load Linux on it, and prohibit the publishing of said key? If so, then I submit that such is an extraordinary claim that calls for quotation of the relevant section of the law, and an argument for its applicability to the actions in question.
There is no concept of parity here, so "It's not just parity" is not a meaningful utterance. Which is why DNS-and-BIND used the title "Non-story" for his excellent parable that evidently, as is so often the case with parables, can be understood only by those with ears to hear. Go back and read it again, and think about it a little. Or maybe a lot. Perhaps this additional (longer) tale will help you understand: Suppose tomorrow we began to speak of quantities of US money in terms of cents (0.01 USD), and the US reserve bank were to begin printing $1 bills with "One Hundred Cents" on them instead of "One Dollar". And the NYSE began quoting stock prices in cents rather than dollars, etc. etc. Would Americans hang their heads and say Woe is us, our currency is worth so little? Hardly. It would have no significance, would it? If there were currently some other state-issued currency in the world, say, the Frambonian Kumquat, which happened to trade today for about 0.01 USD on the currency exchange markets, would their newspapers happily trumpet tomorrow that the Kumquat had reached "parity" with the US currency?
You, sir, have either recklessly disregarded the truth by not bothering to click on the link to the tiny one-section bill and taking a few seconds to read it, or you are a troll. Or both.
Too bad I don't have mod points at the moment. What an obvious troll. But since the modders seem to have missed the obvious, you have managed to pull off close to the perfect game in trolling: simultaneously making a fallacious argument that you know sounds so lacking in understanding of the concepts involved that the typical slashdotter will roll his or her eyes over it, and pushing the copyright button, yet still being modded up. Congrats are in order for your exercise of trolling skill.
However, for the benefit of modders, I'll pretend that I am also blind to the obvious, and answer the putative argument: The Feds are not copying bits. They are taking ownership of (stealing) domain names from the parties who own them, without due process.
The US system is engineered such that it is practically impossible for there to be more than two viable parties. It is not a parliamentary democracy; it has no proportional representation, and no forming of a government by a coalition of multiple parties. The executive is chosen by an independent winner-take-all election in which the public feels (rationally or not) compelled to "not waste one's vote" on a candidate unlikely to win.
An interesting move, equating the selling of goods and services to willing buyers with "raping and pillaging".
The public may soon find out that their favorite celebrity, politician or employer doesn't feel responsible to contribute financially to the commonwealth at the expense of privacy.
The public may soon find out that their favorite celebrity, politician or employer takes the responsible action of protecting himself and his family from the criminal syndicate dominant in his locale.
Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it's about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails. So this change shouldn't affect you unless you're a heavy downloader/streamer/etc.
An honest rendering of this would be, "We really only intended for you to do unlimited emailing and web browsing (defined as reading through html pages very slowly, mind you; certainly not as enjoying the kind of content that we all take for granted these days). This won't affect you unless you are a moderately heavy downloader of documents, or you try to watch videos. To give you an idea, you could burn through 5GB by watching just four two-hour movies."
second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size
And how is that supposed to be relevant? Even if brain mass closely correlates with intelligence, that doesn't mean that the ratio of brain mass to body size does.
Take a sabbatical from belittling others' physics understanding, and spend it studying physics, or maybe just contemplating the implications of what you have already been taught. Don't end it until reading your post here embarrasses you.
One need not enjoy it to know which way the wind is blowing -- nay, has blown. Recognizing that the constitution of the old republic has become a meaningless piece of paper is just being realistic, and is more likely to result in constructive change than sticking your head in the sand.
I am well acquainted with the concept of representation in the context of representative democracy. However, my comments, as you will see if you review them, pertained to the lack of actual agency and what that entails for personal responsibility of a person for the actions of elected representatives. It beggars belief that you and some others seem to attribute moral culpability to an individual for what others do that they have neither authorized nor even agree with.
I agree with you that I might well experience an instinctive revulsion. But surely you are not suggesting that that feeling constitutes actual responsibility.
You have stated a conclusion that would follow from my being wrong, but offered no argument.