"It also requires you provide the source _at_cost_ not for free"
*Huh*? I thought it says that you *may* charge something for the cost of distribution. But that's option. I downloaded several Open Source projects yesterday and didn't pay a dime for the source. How could this be if it was "required"?
Modern society also requires you to do a lot of work-related stuff that isn't really on the company's time. E.g., you have to get to work and back. 1) car 2) gas 3) parking 4) time 5) hassle. Also, you are more and more tethered by this wonderful communications technology. The same technology that allows you to get stock quotes on the latest.com burnout on the toilet allows your company to keep you on alert all the time and grab you when it wants.
The less time you have the worse your health, the more you have to purchase other things like sitters, quick expensive fast food. For most of us, it's not so bad because a lot of us "geeks" are privelaged with a love of our work (we'd do this stuff even if it wasn't our day job). But there are tons of Americans that break their backs chasing a phony circa-50s dream.
It's not even as *legitimate* as that! It would be like the phone company kicking you off if you even *mentioned* any copyrighted work, regardless of whether the content of your discussion infringed on copyright. (ok, that analogy is shearing...)
The guy in the picture has his hands far apart, a good foot and a half or two. So why would you want to take this split keyboard and just stick it together again by forcing both pieces to live in the typical one-piece keyboard tray?
Distributing tablature derived from listening to music? That's outrageous! It's almost as bad as communally deciphering and publishing lyrics! These people need to be thrown in jail, along with softcore drug users, and encryption users.
"The Congress shall have power...to promote the progress of science and useful arts...by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings
and discoveries."
"Because entanglement degrades over time, it's necessary for long-distance communication that a pair be as perfectly entangled as possible to begin with. Zeilinger's proposed mechanism, a polarized beam splitter (PBS), is a little cube of gas that generates highly entangled states in photons that are only weakly entangled, making them robust for long-distance communication."
Whah??? So if you "cook up" an entangled pair of photons, don't you have to then send one to the recipient? How does the recipient get their photon? Or does, through the magic of QM, the entangled photon just "appear" at the other side?
Forget encryption: if we can transmit information simultaneously (in the very physical definition of the term), that itself is an AMAZING feat. You could basically have all the information in the world replicated *instantaneously* everywhere. What's stopping me from generating billions and billions of "bits" of entangled photons, and just using them for massive storage and "free" simultaneous communication?
"Martin Garbus, a lawyer representing the Mitchell estate, said he asked eBay to take the books off the site and asked Houghton Mifflin to get advance copies back from reviewers."
Um, as in the Martin Garbus of the DeCSS trial? How can this guy work as counsel both for defendant in a case like DeCSS, but plaintiff in this case...??
"The agents downloaded the data, but did not view it until they obtained a search warrant from a U.S. federal court, he said."
Am I the only one completely amazed by this statement. Here, these agents plainly admit to *copying* data which may not be legal to have or view. Um, how is this different from copying some piece of music or literature you may or may not be allowed to use, without listening to or reading it? This seems like it could set (or shatter) a big precedent. Imagine that, *copying* digital data may not necessarily be equivalent to "stealing" it. Amazing.
POT appears not to mean that Slashdot will *interpret* your post as POT, but instead that Slashdot *assumes* your post to be text that is not meaningful HTML. They should changed it so any HTML is appropriately escaped (entitied) from POT submissions. Angle brackets, etc, are very annoying to have to fix.
The problem is that Mike said it was OK to use multiple files, but did not specify whether that meant that the actual additional filesystem space that they took up would be counted against Patrick anyway (with the idea that Patrick could use many files, just so long as the eventual information still added up smaller than the original), or whether he meant that it shouldn't make a difference, and didn't care.
The information that could be considered "removed" by the files, would basically be the start and end offsets of the chunks, if they were all in one file...which would naturally add up to more than the original (219 * 2 additional info). The "missing" information escaped into the unix shell and filesystem, through the facility of "cat" being able to print out a block of bytes given a single piece of info.
"Trying to seperate yourself from the mainstream may make you feel superior, but it will get you nowheres."
So then basically you can't do anything. If there is a problem, you cannot protest, because protest would be non-conformant, and non-conformancy is looked down upon. How the hell did we get into this situation. This is not a good thing. This is an AWFUL thing. "Think what we want you to think. Act how we want you to act."
Somebody needs to get a megaphone and shout "THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE MONEY SELLING CONTENT ON THE WEB". I am so going to whine and cry if the big media mega-corps can't turn the web into TV...not. If I wanted to buy the New York Times, I'd go to a newspaper stand and just grab one, and NOT have to sit through 20 seconds of advertising. Independent and niche media organizations probably have a bit of a better time on the web because their dead-tree publications have a higher profit margin (or seem to live without such a high one) anyway. I would much rather have many independent new sites, subsidized by dead-tree versions, than just a handful of MegaCoNews.com with commercials.
You troll, the point is that *this kid DOES NOT need help*. This kid is behaving *normally* to being harrassed every single day. The other kids need to be LARTed severely, preferably with large blunt tools which will leave them crippled or in vegetative states for quite a while. You are accusing the victim ("typical fucked-up kid"). To me, kids who routinely harrass and pick on others are the ones that are "fucked-up" and need to be sent to juvenile detention centers or some third world country where they might gain an appreciation for actually having some smarts.
So what's better...having a secure central cache of personal information that *you* control...or having many many levels of duplication of paperwork of all your personal information scattered over various institutions in the hands of everyday paper pushers?
I'm not in the music biz, but it seems to me record labels should instead be *services* that artists can *employ*. There should be many and they should compete, just like garages compete for your car service dollars. Instead of the other way around, where all the artists are competing and clawing their way up to get noticed by a label which has an steel grip on a physical supply chain of artificial scarcity, which will exploit them, chew them up, and spit them out. "Some of your friends are already this fucked"...
"In the case of intellectual property, why would we treat anything differently?"
Please tell me how someone can have "compensated" any given artist, philosopher, writer, mathemetician, scientist, etc., etc., for something they invent. Markets are based on scarcity. Ideas are infinately duplicatable. Please show me a formula which generates a market value for an idea (no, as shown above, you can't use "effort", as a stupid person who works very hard, very long may create something a smart person could create in a much shorter time with much less effort).
"Who the hell is this Hettinger dweeb to decide that if I make a symphony, that I can't benefit from it monitarily?"
That's not what he's saying. He's just skeptical on the policy of granting a *monopoly* on that thing. A temporary monopoly probably *should* be created to generate incentive. However, total patent and copyright lengths are totally out of wack. What *possible* incentive could be conferred by copyrights which last 70 years **after the creator's death**?
Some people seem to think that a free market is some magic that solves all problems. "We don't *have* to deal with moral/ethical/social issues. The free market will decide!"
I think this is the wrong target to try to take down. Most legitimate companies are ok about not sending junk to you. If all else fails, call them up and have your account terminated. All you've done is kick a dying dog here.
The real people who need to suffer are the assholes who buy mass-mailing software, fish for accounts to hijack, or create fake ones by the dozen, and mass-spam everybody, clogging up ISPs until they are kicked off, then repeat the process. They need to burn, severely. Winning a suit against a poor gasping dot com is not much of a vicotry.
"By clicking I Agree and continuing to install the software"
There are many (legitimate) ways to install or use software without going through a clickwrap installer. If the company suspects all it's customers then it really should be having them sign agreements at time of purchase. Once I own (have in my physical control) a piece of software, they have already given up their rights. They can only hope that I will read their instructions, play nice, jump through their hoops, and rescind rights I already have when I leave the store.
But the perrenial comeback: What if you 1) do not see the license or 2) do not agree with it? Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to agree to it. If you bought a book that had a piece of plastic on it that said "By reading this book you agree to give us your firstborn child", would you really put any credit in it? A contract is only good when BOTH parties agree on it. Now if they had you sign some legal paper *at the time of purchase* that would be another issue...but then they'd deservedly lose many many customers.
Slashdot Mirror
"It also requires you provide the source _at_cost_ not for free"
*Huh*? I thought it says that you *may* charge something for the cost of distribution. But that's option. I downloaded several Open Source projects yesterday and didn't pay a dime for the source. How could this be if it was "required"?
"A generic baked bean manufacturer does not worry a great deal about IPR."
Apparently he is not aware of the Bush's baked beans commercial...(he's Canadian right?)...
Modern society also requires you to do a lot of work-related stuff that isn't really on the company's time. E.g., you have to get to work and back. 1) car 2) gas 3) parking 4) time 5) hassle. Also, you are more and more tethered by this wonderful communications technology. The same technology that allows you to get stock quotes on the latest .com burnout on the toilet allows your company to keep you on alert all the time and grab you when it wants.
The less time you have the worse your health, the more you have to purchase other things like sitters, quick expensive fast food. For most of us, it's not so bad because a lot of us "geeks" are privelaged with a love of our work (we'd do this stuff even if it wasn't our day job). But there are tons of Americans that break their backs chasing a phony circa-50s dream.
It's not even as *legitimate* as that! It would be like the phone company kicking you off if you even *mentioned* any copyrighted work, regardless of whether the content of your discussion infringed on copyright. (ok, that analogy is shearing...)
The guy in the picture has his hands far apart, a good foot and a half or two. So why would you want to take this split keyboard and just stick it together again by forcing both pieces to live in the typical one-piece keyboard tray?
Distributing tablature derived from listening to music? That's outrageous! It's almost as bad as communally deciphering and publishing lyrics! These people need to be thrown in jail, along with softcore drug users, and encryption users.
"The Congress shall have power...to promote the progress of science and useful arts...by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries."
Sad. Sad.
"Because entanglement degrades over time, it's necessary for long-distance communication that a pair be as perfectly entangled as possible to begin with. Zeilinger's proposed mechanism, a polarized beam splitter (PBS), is a little cube of gas that generates highly entangled states in photons that are only weakly entangled, making them robust for long-distance communication."
Whah??? So if you "cook up" an entangled pair of photons, don't you have to then send one to the recipient? How does the recipient get their photon? Or does, through the magic of QM, the entangled photon just "appear" at the other side?
Forget encryption: if we can transmit information simultaneously (in the very physical definition of the term), that itself is an AMAZING feat. You could basically have all the information in the world replicated *instantaneously* everywhere. What's stopping me from generating billions and billions of "bits" of entangled photons, and just using them for massive storage and "free" simultaneous communication?
"Martin Garbus, a lawyer representing the Mitchell estate, said he asked eBay to take the books off the site and asked Houghton Mifflin to get advance copies back from reviewers."
Um, as in the Martin Garbus of the DeCSS trial? How can this guy work as counsel both for defendant in a case like DeCSS, but plaintiff in this case...??
"The agents downloaded the data, but did not view it until they obtained a search warrant from a U.S. federal court, he said."
Am I the only one completely amazed by this statement. Here, these agents plainly admit to *copying* data which may not be legal to have or view. Um, how is this different from copying some piece of music or literature you may or may not be allowed to use, without listening to or reading it? This seems like it could set (or shatter) a big precedent. Imagine that, *copying* digital data may not necessarily be equivalent to "stealing" it. Amazing.
POT appears not to mean that Slashdot will *interpret* your post as POT, but instead that Slashdot *assumes* your post to be text that is not meaningful HTML. They should changed it so any HTML is appropriately escaped (entitied) from POT submissions. Angle brackets, etc, are very annoying to have to fix.
The problem is that Mike said it was OK to use multiple files, but did not specify whether that meant that the actual additional filesystem space that they took up would be counted against Patrick anyway (with the idea that Patrick could use many files, just so long as the eventual information still added up smaller than the original), or whether he meant that it shouldn't make a difference, and didn't care.
The information that could be considered "removed" by the files, would basically be the start and end offsets of the chunks, if they were all in one file...which would naturally add up to more than the original (219 * 2 additional info). The "missing" information escaped into the unix shell and filesystem, through the facility of "cat" being able to print out a block of bytes given a single piece of info.
Bravo!
"Trying to seperate yourself from the mainstream may make you feel superior, but it will get you nowheres."
So then basically you can't do anything. If there is a problem, you cannot protest, because protest would be non-conformant, and non-conformancy is looked down upon. How the hell did we get into this situation. This is not a good thing. This is an AWFUL thing. "Think what we want you to think. Act how we want you to act."
Somebody needs to get a megaphone and shout "THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE MONEY SELLING CONTENT ON THE WEB". I am so going to whine and cry if the big media mega-corps can't turn the web into TV...not. If I wanted to buy the New York Times, I'd go to a newspaper stand and just grab one, and NOT have to sit through 20 seconds of advertising. Independent and niche media organizations probably have a bit of a better time on the web because their dead-tree publications have a higher profit margin (or seem to live without such a high one) anyway. I would much rather have many independent new sites, subsidized by dead-tree versions, than just a handful of MegaCoNews.com with commercials.
You troll, the point is that *this kid DOES NOT need help*. This kid is behaving *normally* to being harrassed every single day. The other kids need to be LARTed severely, preferably with large blunt tools which will leave them crippled or in vegetative states for quite a while. You are accusing the victim ("typical fucked-up kid"). To me, kids who routinely harrass and pick on others are the ones that are "fucked-up" and need to be sent to juvenile detention centers or some third world country where they might gain an appreciation for actually having some smarts.
So what's better...having a secure central cache of personal information that *you* control...or having many many levels of duplication of paperwork of all your personal information scattered over various institutions in the hands of everyday paper pushers?
"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he gets sunk by a nuclear submarine."
HA! Now *that* is funny. Thanks!
I'm not in the music biz, but it seems to me record labels should instead be *services* that artists can *employ*. There should be many and they should compete, just like garages compete for your car service dollars. Instead of the other way around, where all the artists are competing and clawing their way up to get noticed by a label which has an steel grip on a physical supply chain of artificial scarcity, which will exploit them, chew them up, and spit them out. "Some of your friends are already this fucked"...
"In the case of intellectual property, why would we treat anything differently?"
Please tell me how someone can have "compensated" any given artist, philosopher, writer, mathemetician, scientist, etc., etc., for something they invent. Markets are based on scarcity. Ideas are infinately duplicatable. Please show me a formula which generates a market value for an idea (no, as shown above, you can't use "effort", as a stupid person who works very hard, very long may create something a smart person could create in a much shorter time with much less effort).
"Who the hell is this Hettinger dweeb to decide that if I make a symphony, that I can't benefit from it monitarily?"
That's not what he's saying. He's just skeptical on the policy of granting a *monopoly* on that thing. A temporary monopoly probably *should* be created to generate incentive. However, total patent and copyright lengths are totally out of wack. What *possible* incentive could be conferred by copyrights which last 70 years **after the creator's death**?
Some people seem to think that a free market is some magic that solves all problems. "We don't *have* to deal with moral/ethical/social issues. The free market will decide!"
I think this is the wrong target to try to take down. Most legitimate companies are ok about not sending junk to you. If all else fails, call them up and have your account terminated. All you've done is kick a dying dog here.
The real people who need to suffer are the assholes who buy mass-mailing software, fish for accounts to hijack, or create fake ones by the dozen, and mass-spam everybody, clogging up ISPs until they are kicked off, then repeat the process. They need to burn, severely. Winning a suit against a poor gasping dot com is not much of a vicotry.
Ars Technica - Physical Home Networking: An Installation Guide
"By clicking I Agree and continuing to install the software"
There are many (legitimate) ways to install or use software without going through a clickwrap installer. If the company suspects all it's customers then it really should be having them sign agreements at time of purchase. Once I own (have in my physical control) a piece of software, they have already given up their rights. They can only hope that I will read their instructions, play nice, jump through their hoops, and rescind rights I already have when I leave the store.
Damn, where are moderation points when you need them ;)
But the perrenial comeback: What if you 1) do not see the license or 2) do not agree with it? Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to agree to it. If you bought a book that had a piece of plastic on it that said "By reading this book you agree to give us your firstborn child", would you really put any credit in it? A contract is only good when BOTH parties agree on it. Now if they had you sign some legal paper *at the time of purchase* that would be another issue...but then they'd deservedly lose many many customers.