Turns out companies like BayTSP (which the media companies employ) will send shutdown notices to ISPs without any evidence of copyright infringment; all they feel they need is an indication that you are reported by the tracker to be in the swarm.
It is quite obvious that the RIAA lawyers and BayTSP understand neither the term "good faith belief" nor the the term "reasonable doubt".
But in the case of vintage aircraft, the owners are legally required to maintain them to manufacturer specifications that the owners cannot legally obtain: an expensive and potentially lethal dilemma.
I guess copyright is more dangerous than we thought . . .
I suppose you do not remember India and those Gates Foundation brib... *cough*... donations that were given to ensure MS software was used instead of FOSS. They also paid the NYTimes to play the whole thing up in a series of sycophantic articles, if I recall correctly.
I really do not understand how MS can be viewed in a good light. They have bribed public officials (how else could their monopoly trial have evaporated), bribed governments (India cannot be an isolated case), misrepresented advertising expenditures as donations (this is technically stealing tax money), supported bad laws (software patents anybody?), robbed schools (audits in Washington state and Licensing 6), and many other objectionable things which are much better documented elsewhere.
That is more or less the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The fact that these people voted MS as the corporation having the best reputation demonstrates one of two things: a) The corporations are right. People are a bunch or stupid sheep and the corporations can lie, cheat, and steal, and then use advertising to repair their image in the mind of the public. b) The survey is carried out on people who have no idea what is going on.
Fortunately or unfortunately, that is how languages are built. There may always be educated people trying to maintain the original or principal meanings of words, but the common or popular meanings will always become legitimate facets of the original words' meanings in the end.
I agree with your general principal, that law enforcement agencies need to work together more easily, but this should be accomplished through IT standards and a legislative agenda. We've got NIST to do this kind of thing. Banks in the U.S. have done this with the guiding hand of the federal gov't behind them, why should law enforcement be any different?
You must be joking. Have you not read the Constitution?
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State [Article 1 Section 10 Subsection 3]
I do not see this State to State communication as being authorized by Congress. This sharing is a violation of each State's citizen's rights. If you have been too indoctrinated by the modern media, I will give you a definition: State = Country; State != Province. Each State is supposed to be an independent country with its own laws. These databases make everyone in them something akin to international criminals. Would you like to become an international criminal over a speeding ticket?
Also, just because the banks have such databases does not mean that the government should as well. The fact that the Federal government keeps files on all individuals in the US is a violation of your right to privacy. That information should be held by the State governments and should only be released with a court order.
The Federal government should be different because their job is to create a single face for the States to the outside world. The Federal government's job is not to police people within the US unless two or more States need someone to investigate multi-State criminals. The reason the Federal government is needed here is that the States are not supposed to work together.
Finally, law enforcement in the US is not supposed to be easy. The Constitution makes proving guilt quite difficult. It errs on the side of innocence, not guilt. This is one of your important freedoms. Erring on the side of guilt will result in a police state, and opinions like "databases are not a bad thing" are just the type of thing that will make everybody a criminal.
On a smaller scale, this happened to a friend of mine. He got stopped for speeding, and they ran his plates and found out that he had an outstanding speeding ticket in the state capitol. They held him for like four hours while the state capitol's police department decided whether or not to send a bus for him. At the time, I thought this was very wrong. Just imagine this for a speeding ticket in Alaska when the person lives in Florida or something. Imagine something like a week in handcuffs on a bus over a US$100 ticket.
What steps would you take to prove that a screenshot is 'authentic'? If I doctored a screenshot to include a list of songs, how would you discover the doctoring? How would establish that the song names contained the correct songs and not something else? Are all screenshots unalterable?
Describe the process of 'proving' that someone's home computer used a given IP address at a given time. Anywhere.
I do not think that the questioning should follow this path. Granted, he could be forced to admit that it is possible that these things were faked, but they have the ISP claiming that that particular username was using that IP address at that time. It is unlikely that the RIAA compelled them to fake it or would even want to. While it is reasonable to assume the RIAA might want to manufacture some evidence in order to win its case, it is doubtful at best that they would choose a victim that they did not believe to be guilty.
In my opinion, the best place to attack this guy is on the law. His resume is 100% geek. It is filled with all of his accomplishments in the world of computers. His beliefs about copyright, however, may be -- indeed, probably are -- grossly erroneous. The best angle to attack this from is to get this guy to look like an idiot with respect to copyright law.
He could be a computer expert, but all his value judgements as to the morality/legality of copyright could be shown to be patently absurd. In this way, all of his opinions would either be suspect or thrown out. And what is an expert witness without his opinions?
To this end, the questions I would ask would center around concepts like "Do you believe people can own information?" or "What is the purpose of copyright and why is there a provision for it in the Constitution?" or "How do you define 'intellectual property'?" or "How does the concept of 'intellectual property' relate to copyright?" or question the legality of many of the RIAA's other practices, such as price fixing or artists contracts. I would also ask him to talk about the morality of specific parts of copyright. He might also be asked what he thinks about things about 1984 and systems like DRM and who owns a user's computer. If he believes a user should have to submit to remote searches or locally installed programs that watch the user's activity, what does he think about the Fourth Amendment? Do corporations have the right to do this when the government does not?
Amendment [IV] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Those are just example questions. I leave to the lawyers to plan a better method of attack.
However, I do not see the need to disqualify him. It seems to me that there has to be a better way to fight the motion to compel. Obviously, this expert believes that no infringing activity to have occurred with that particular hard drive. Could it have been a friend's laptop? Maybe it was an aunt or uncle or kid from the neighborhood. Can the RIAA reasonably subpoena everybody in their neighborhood and all their relations in order to find one possibly infringing device? This sounds like a SCO dragnet to me: "We know you have the evidence! Produce it so we can sue you!"
It seems very odd for lawyers to be asking Slashdot how to defend their client. Right? If your lawyer can't do better than that, you should get a better lawyer.
Wrong. Lawyers understand the law, not technology. You could probably build a ladder to the moon with all the text that is generated on Slashdot alone about stupid lawyers and politicians getting technology wrong. This expert witness is a Geek (yes, with a capital G), or at least he thinks he is. This could not be more completely Slashdot's turf.
Lawyers do not often consult public opinon on any topic. They should be thanked for this.
Also, by the way, the lawyers here are not doing their job, they are doing your job. They are defending your freedom to share information -- which is the modern form of speech. It is every individual's duty to defend freedom. Do not criticize them for giving you a helping hand.
If anything, I am surprised that they are refusing to privatize this information. I would expect any congressthief to jump at the chance of private ownership of the recordings, because that's just one step away from only releasing edited footage. I guess C-SPAN just hasn't hired a lobbyist who can explain that clearly enough.
It appears to me that this is a conflict of two distinct issues. C-SPAN wants to a) copyright the information and b) control the cameras. While the activists are right to object to the first issue, the House clearly refused because of the second issue.
Currently, there are a limited number of cameras in the House, and those cameras are controlled by House staff. C-SPAN sounds like they are trying to put a webcam on every congressman's desk. I imagine congress would be quite a different beast if such a thing were implemented. There are millions of people on the net and quite enough political fanatics among them to watch every congressman during every minute they attend every session. This is obviously not what our Represetatives want. They want us limited to a controlled view while we are led to believe that we actually know what is going on. C-SPAN is seeking to destroy this.
However, as I stated above, C-SPAN is also using this issue to line their pockets at the expense of The People. Corporate ownership of such information would most likely me marginally, if not greatly, worse than the current situation. All information the Legislature generates must be in the public domain. Otherwise, we risk having access to public decisions restricted to those who can afford to pay for it.
Solution (never to be implemented): Congress has a webcam installed on every desk. As many cameras are installed as C-SPAN likes. Cameras can be viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by anybody on the Internet. No editing or tampering is permitted before distribution. Everything is live, and everything is recorded.
Now, let us see who can talk the House and Senate into that.
Federal prosecutors say they don't need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else's computer.
This argument is interesting because, if it succeeds, it has the potential to backfire against copyright. The government is essentially arguing that the owner of the computer is the owner of the message -- and by extension the data. Why not ebooks? Or mp3s? Or any other data obtained in any way?
While we, the computer owners -- We the People, essentially -- all know everything on our computers is ours, Microsoft and the *AAs have been arguing the opposite for years. This would really be a blow to their campaign to remotely own everyone's computers.
Finally, the government is standing up to Microsoft again;)
The problem is: This goes way farther than that. This goes into other people posting photos of you without your knowledge or consent and random people updating information on you without your knowledge or consent.
Been to a wedding in the past year? Look! There you are drinking with the ugliest bridesmaid!
Been on vacation recently? That is not your wife, you dirty dog you!
Fell asleep in front of the TV? Whose nutsack is that hanging out of their undies?
Look ugly one morning? Your husband's lawyer will be contacting you shortly to enquire into the circumstances that led you to be discovered in that particular bed!
These people are talking about context archiving group photos with searches on each individual in each picture. This means your camera has nothing to do with it. Now, any relative with a cell phone can make your privacy disappear.
The worst part is this though: You do not even have to have a net connection or a computer to be archived. You could be a complete luddite, but your relatives or friends will put you there anyway. Any aspect of your private life could be archived on this thing.
Contrast this with blogs or social networking software. In blogs and social networking software, what is up there is up there because you put it up there. However, with Polar Rose, you will be identified if your picture is put up by anyone. No account. No password. No application. No notice. No EULA. You will just be on the list, and there does not appear to be anything on their site about opting out.
This is nothing less than a privacy nightmare. I wonder what the EFF has to say about it...
This article and many others on Groklaw might give you a clue. Microsoft has:
Destroyed Netscape and BEoS.
Bribed government officials in India and other countries to use their operating system.
Funded SCO's litigation against IBM and Linux in general.
Bribed Novell into betraying the Linux community.
Forced entire school systems to audit their computers and pay "non-compliance" fines.
Profited off of Linux and Mac installations without paying royalties by forcing a per computer "tax" on all Licencing 6 customers.
Slowed down the Internet with their virus ridden software.
Made it impossible for me to buy the laptop I choose without paying them, even if I do not use their software. (The guy at the store laughed at me when I asked if I could just get the hardware.)
Supported software patent legislation in Europe.
Created the most DRM restricted operating system in existence with plans to extend the DRM to MY hardware and encrypt MY information on MY hard drive and give control of all that to someone else (read: Hollywood).
. . . and those are just what I can think of off the top of my head. I am sure I missed more than half, and no, I do not have time to provide links to all of those. You are on your own.
For if artists can sign petitions after they've died, then why can't they produce new recordings fifty year ago?
I thought they could. Hasn't 2Pac been producing new songs in the past consistently since his death (or am I wrong about the meaning of "newly discovered archival recordings")? How long has he been dead now? The last time I checked (a few years ago) he had put out and album or double album about every two years since his death. Pretty prolific, huh?
It kind of makes one wonder who copyrights are making money for. Certainly dead artists are not enjoying their profits. Or do spirits really need bribe money like in Chinese ancestral religion?
We have problems about our governments censoring us, but we don't generally censor ourselves. In my opinion this is because the Chinese culture tends to value group cohesion more than individuality. The opposite is true for the West.
This is nothing more than a fallacy. First of all, you assume that all the people writing articles on Chinese Wikipedia were born in or live in Mainland China. If you have walked around town -- anywhere in the world -- recently, you would realize that there are a lot of Chinese people outside of China. Many, if not most, of these Chinese people were born outside of China. Further, there are very large populations of Chinese people all throughout South East Asia. Anybody who has been on IRC would know that nearly every Chinese person in South East Asia has a computer. This is not mentioning massive populations of Chinese people in Canada and Australia. I have heard that Vancouver has many areas where only Chinese can be heard on the street.
In short, there are a lot of Chinese people outside of China. As usual with Chinese society (and many others I suppose), these overseas Chinese have a plethora of differing opinions (in fact, even in Chinese culture, I rarely encounter people with anything but dissimilar viewpoints). All of these people are likely to be contributing to Wikipedia. If they are, and their viewpoints are somewhat of a consensus of Chinese world views, maybe Westerners should be looking upon their own news media derived "knowledge" with some skepticism.
In my opinion, the biggest division is caused by encoding systems. The separation of Chinese writing into Simplified and Traditional, and Wikipedia's initial choice to support Simplified as "Chinese" forced one version of people's perception to dominate. However, even though many articles are now in Traditional Chinese, this artificial separation still affects the exchange of information greatly.
The real solution is that software has got to stop treating Simplified and Traditional Chinese as separate languages. Which glyphs are viewed should be a simple matter of user preference. I should never have to see Simplified or Traditional Characters if I do not want to. This way, virtual borders between "Communist China" and "Traditional China" will not exist. Chinese will be one unifying (and unified) writing system again -- as it has been since 221 BC.
Good point. In fact, the false image that most people associate with China is quite indicative of censorship and misinformation in Western cultures. Just because misinformation is distributed and presented differently in the West than in China does not mean the information is any more accurate, and anybody who has been on the Net for a while can attest to the misrepresentation of tech issues such as DRM and "hacking" -- or more recently, net neutrality -- by the Western media.
However, I must contest one statement in the parent:
Because of a shortage of workers, companies over there are having to offer better and better benefits to attract workers. It takes a massive workforce to supply the rich with everything they want.
Please. Anybody who has been to China has seen the massive amount of unemployed people and the massive amount of over-employment (hiring more people than necessary for a given position). In one hotel I stayed in, they had some ten people behind the reception desk pretending to look busy 24 hours a day. There was an army of maids on each floor -- including a manager with each group -- that assaulted each room. Half of the maids were pretending to work whenever I happened to interrupt them. Department stores were filled with idle clerks.
I am not saying that people are not well off, but there is certainly no shortage of labor in China.
Q: Novell claims to have not acknowledged any patent infringements by Linux. But Novell is now paying a tax to Microsoft on the Linux distributions it ships. What, exactly, is Novell paying for?
Nat Friedman: We're paying for the promise that Microsoft made to our customers not to sue them.
Q: Not to sue them for *what*? For problems you don't acknowledge exist?
Nat Friedman: We put together an agreement with Microsoft to make Linux and Windows work better together. Now, as everyone knows, Microsoft has spent the last 10 years saying negative things about Linux, including implying that there are IP issues in Linux. It didn't make sense for us to do a partnersihp with Microsoft on interoperability issues and still have this patent cloud hanging around for our customers, so Microsoft asked us to put together a patent agreement as well. And so we promise Microsoft's customers that we won't sue them and they promise the same thing to our customers. They pay us for our promise and we pay them for their promise. It doesn't matter if the allegations from MSFT are true or not. People can sue each other anyway, and a patent lawsuit is very expensive to defend against.
This "our customers" language is typical of Novell's statements surrounding this issue. They constantly speak of their customers but do not speak of the wider impact on the FOSS community itself. This might sound like a non-customer asking for a handout, but the fact remains that the majority of Linux developers and users are not associated with SUSE or Novell. The fact also remains that Novell relies on the FOSS community for its development. Therefore, a patent lawsuit that caused, say, X or kernel development to be halted or altered would affect Novell as well, even though MS could claim that they have not violated the agreement.
It goes without saying that Ballmer's statements have caused harm to the FOSS community and that many more people were exposed to Ballmer's statements than Hovespan's.
I think the reason that RMS and Moglen are so incensed about this agreement is obvious. This agreement to create a de facto ownership of Linux by suing anybody who competes with Novell. If MS sues successfully for patent infringement in Application A, Novell can continue to use it without being sued, but no one else can. In this way, they can become the only non-MS people to be able to use it in consequence of their "get out of jail free" card. It is an end run around the GPL.
Both MS and Novell benefit from this. Novell destroys its competition in the Linux arena and becomes the only "legitimate" Linux vendor. MS reduces its competitors to one complacent one which it can dispatch at its lesiure or use to prove that MS is not a monopoly.
In light of this, Novell only has two options if it truly believes in FOSS:
Require MS to agree not to sue any FOSS project for patent infringement.
Back out of the deal and admit Novell did not have the consent of all of its developers when it entered this contract.
Whether Novell sees this future or not, it is screwing the Linux community. And garbage like this:
Ubuntu's open week sounds like a really good idea. I'm just surprised that it is done to get users away from openSUSE as Mark Shuttleworth announced on the opensuse mailing lists.
Mark, let me reiterate that the openSUSE community and the Ubuntu communities share the same goals. We might put different emphasis on some of them, so let me speak just about one where I see a different focus.
. ..
Mark, I'd like to invite you to discuss what possibilities we have to work together against the domination of Microsoft on the desktops and servers - instead of fighting against each other.
Now Microsoft can use its software and EULAs to control what patents are issued.
Subsection: The User agrees that s/he will not use the Software to disprove, dispell, reject, invalidate, or otherwise hinder patent applications submitted by Microsoft or Microsoft's affiliates. The User hereby agrees that, in the case of Microsoft's patent applications, prior art does not exist. The creation of documents that claim to show pre-Microsoft prior art with the Software constitutes a violation of this License.
That's expandable by SD/MiniSD/MicroSD, right? And how much working memory is there? Or is this the same memory and do you lose everything when you power down?
Yeah, that was my first reaction, too. When I first glanced at the article, I figured I would almost be able to forgive D-Link for claiming the GPL was invalid. The phone sounded good enough that my convictions would have kept me feeling guilty while I imagined having this thing.
But without expandable storage (1GB minimum), I really cannot imagine even paying one hundred dollars for such a device (even if D-Link did do the honorable thing and apologize publically to the Linux community).
Fortunately, a fewChinesecompanies and one French one have come out with similar things. These others, however, do not come with D-Link's stigma of being the first company to bring the GPL into court. And the "unlocked" thing is irrelevant outside of the US because only US phone companies are so greedy as to "lock" users cellphones from them. This is the same stupid mentality that gave rise to stupid ideas like DRM.
The bigger companies stand to profit MORE off of blu ray.
So? The big companies stood to profit more from things like Divx, and we all know how that turned out. You know, customers do occasionally make choices.
So, in your opinion, reading a book is a more effective method of teaching foreign languages, for instance, than teaching foreign languages through an interactive lecture format?
I am afriad you are missing the point. What, precisely, do you think the word "lecture" means, anyway? "Interactive lecture" is a contradiction in terms. If it is interactive, it is not a lecture. Period. Obviously, they have not been teaching English properly at universities these days.
Even though your post is an off-topic troll, I will respond to the language section. Language cannot be taught in a lecture. My post was not concered with classes where students have to participate. Language classes require this. History lectures do not. Nowhere in my post have I said anything that could imply that teachers are unnecessary. Teachers are very necessary, but they should not be droning mouthpieces at the head of the classroom. In order to be a teacher, one must teach. Lecturing is not teaching.
Perhaps he could be convinced that information replication is the only way to protect our information environment and that DRM would aid "terrorists" or whatever our Eurasia/East Asia is called nowadays. Then he could prosecute the *AAs for treason.
It seems that a DRM system would be a rather powerful weapon in the hands of an attacker. The ability to revoke or alter all instances of a document worldwide and trusted systems in general would be quite useful to someone wanting attack a country's communications, especially if users and administrators were barred from preventing it at the hardware level.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent deserves a 5. Mod him up again.
It is quite obvious that the RIAA lawyers and BayTSP understand neither the term "good faith belief" nor the the term "reasonable doubt".
I guess copyright is more dangerous than we thought . . .
I suppose you do not remember India and those Gates Foundation brib... *cough* ... donations that were given to ensure MS software was used instead of FOSS. They also paid the NYTimes to play the whole thing up in a series of sycophantic articles, if I recall correctly.
I really do not understand how MS can be viewed in a good light. They have bribed public officials (how else could their monopoly trial have evaporated), bribed governments (India cannot be an isolated case), misrepresented advertising expenditures as donations (this is technically stealing tax money), supported bad laws (software patents anybody?), robbed schools (audits in Washington state and Licensing 6), and many other objectionable things which are much better documented elsewhere.
That is more or less the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The fact that these people voted MS as the corporation having the best reputation demonstrates one of two things: a) The corporations are right. People are a bunch or stupid sheep and the corporations can lie, cheat, and steal, and then use advertising to repair their image in the mind of the public. b) The survey is carried out on people who have no idea what is going on.
Fortunately or unfortunately, that is how languages are built. There may always be educated people trying to maintain the original or principal meanings of words, but the common or popular meanings will always become legitimate facets of the original words' meanings in the end.
You must be joking. Have you not read the Constitution?
I do not see this State to State communication as being authorized by Congress. This sharing is a violation of each State's citizen's rights. If you have been too indoctrinated by the modern media, I will give you a definition: State = Country; State != Province. Each State is supposed to be an independent country with its own laws. These databases make everyone in them something akin to international criminals. Would you like to become an international criminal over a speeding ticket?
Also, just because the banks have such databases does not mean that the government should as well. The fact that the Federal government keeps files on all individuals in the US is a violation of your right to privacy. That information should be held by the State governments and should only be released with a court order.
The Federal government should be different because their job is to create a single face for the States to the outside world. The Federal government's job is not to police people within the US unless two or more States need someone to investigate multi-State criminals. The reason the Federal government is needed here is that the States are not supposed to work together.
Finally, law enforcement in the US is not supposed to be easy. The Constitution makes proving guilt quite difficult. It errs on the side of innocence, not guilt. This is one of your important freedoms. Erring on the side of guilt will result in a police state, and opinions like "databases are not a bad thing" are just the type of thing that will make everybody a criminal.
On a smaller scale, this happened to a friend of mine. He got stopped for speeding, and they ran his plates and found out that he had an outstanding speeding ticket in the state capitol. They held him for like four hours while the state capitol's police department decided whether or not to send a bus for him. At the time, I thought this was very wrong. Just imagine this for a speeding ticket in Alaska when the person lives in Florida or something. Imagine something like a week in handcuffs on a bus over a US$100 ticket.
Now we have politically correct acronyms?
Godwin was a Nazi! ;)
I do not think that the questioning should follow this path. Granted, he could be forced to admit that it is possible that these things were faked, but they have the ISP claiming that that particular username was using that IP address at that time. It is unlikely that the RIAA compelled them to fake it or would even want to. While it is reasonable to assume the RIAA might want to manufacture some evidence in order to win its case, it is doubtful at best that they would choose a victim that they did not believe to be guilty.
In my opinion, the best place to attack this guy is on the law. His resume is 100% geek. It is filled with all of his accomplishments in the world of computers. His beliefs about copyright, however, may be -- indeed, probably are -- grossly erroneous. The best angle to attack this from is to get this guy to look like an idiot with respect to copyright law.
He could be a computer expert, but all his value judgements as to the morality/legality of copyright could be shown to be patently absurd. In this way, all of his opinions would either be suspect or thrown out. And what is an expert witness without his opinions?
To this end, the questions I would ask would center around concepts like "Do you believe people can own information?" or "What is the purpose of copyright and why is there a provision for it in the Constitution?" or "How do you define 'intellectual property'?" or "How does the concept of 'intellectual property' relate to copyright?" or question the legality of many of the RIAA's other practices, such as price fixing or artists contracts. I would also ask him to talk about the morality of specific parts of copyright. He might also be asked what he thinks about things about 1984 and systems like DRM and who owns a user's computer. If he believes a user should have to submit to remote searches or locally installed programs that watch the user's activity, what does he think about the Fourth Amendment? Do corporations have the right to do this when the government does not?
Those are just example questions. I leave to the lawyers to plan a better method of attack.
However, I do not see the need to disqualify him. It seems to me that there has to be a better way to fight the motion to compel. Obviously, this expert believes that no infringing activity to have occurred with that particular hard drive. Could it have been a friend's laptop? Maybe it was an aunt or uncle or kid from the neighborhood. Can the RIAA reasonably subpoena everybody in their neighborhood and all their relations in order to find one possibly infringing device? This sounds like a SCO dragnet to me: "We know you have the evidence! Produce it so we can sue you!"
Wrong. Lawyers understand the law, not technology. You could probably build a ladder to the moon with all the text that is generated on Slashdot alone about stupid lawyers and politicians getting technology wrong. This expert witness is a Geek (yes, with a capital G), or at least he thinks he is. This could not be more completely Slashdot's turf.
Lawyers do not often consult public opinon on any topic. They should be thanked for this.
Also, by the way, the lawyers here are not doing their job, they are doing your job. They are defending your freedom to share information -- which is the modern form of speech. It is every individual's duty to defend freedom. Do not criticize them for giving you a helping hand.
It appears to me that this is a conflict of two distinct issues. C-SPAN wants to a) copyright the information and b) control the cameras. While the activists are right to object to the first issue, the House clearly refused because of the second issue.
Currently, there are a limited number of cameras in the House, and those cameras are controlled by House staff. C-SPAN sounds like they are trying to put a webcam on every congressman's desk. I imagine congress would be quite a different beast if such a thing were implemented. There are millions of people on the net and quite enough political fanatics among them to watch every congressman during every minute they attend every session. This is obviously not what our Represetatives want. They want us limited to a controlled view while we are led to believe that we actually know what is going on. C-SPAN is seeking to destroy this.
However, as I stated above, C-SPAN is also using this issue to line their pockets at the expense of The People. Corporate ownership of such information would most likely me marginally, if not greatly, worse than the current situation. All information the Legislature generates must be in the public domain. Otherwise, we risk having access to public decisions restricted to those who can afford to pay for it.
Solution (never to be implemented): Congress has a webcam installed on every desk. As many cameras are installed as C-SPAN likes. Cameras can be viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by anybody on the Internet. No editing or tampering is permitted before distribution. Everything is live, and everything is recorded.
Now, let us see who can talk the House and Senate into that.
This argument is interesting because, if it succeeds, it has the potential to backfire against copyright. The government is essentially arguing that the owner of the computer is the owner of the message -- and by extension the data. Why not ebooks? Or mp3s? Or any other data obtained in any way?
While we, the computer owners -- We the People, essentially -- all know everything on our computers is ours, Microsoft and the *AAs have been arguing the opposite for years. This would really be a blow to their campaign to remotely own everyone's computers.
Finally, the government is standing up to Microsoft again ;)
Don't expect privacy offline, either!
The problem is: This goes way farther than that. This goes into other people posting photos of you without your knowledge or consent and random people updating information on you without your knowledge or consent.
Been to a wedding in the past year? Look! There you are drinking with the ugliest bridesmaid!
Been on vacation recently? That is not your wife, you dirty dog you!
Fell asleep in front of the TV? Whose nutsack is that hanging out of their undies?
Look ugly one morning? Your husband's lawyer will be contacting you shortly to enquire into the circumstances that led you to be discovered in that particular bed!
These people are talking about context archiving group photos with searches on each individual in each picture. This means your camera has nothing to do with it. Now, any relative with a cell phone can make your privacy disappear.
The worst part is this though: You do not even have to have a net connection or a computer to be archived. You could be a complete luddite, but your relatives or friends will put you there anyway. Any aspect of your private life could be archived on this thing.
Contrast this with blogs or social networking software. In blogs and social networking software, what is up there is up there because you put it up there. However, with Polar Rose, you will be identified if your picture is put up by anyone. No account. No password. No application. No notice. No EULA. You will just be on the list, and there does not appear to be anything on their site about opting out.
This is nothing less than a privacy nightmare. I wonder what the EFF has to say about it...
This article and many others on Groklaw might give you a clue. Microsoft has:
- Destroyed Netscape and BEoS.
- Bribed government officials in India and other countries to use their operating system.
- Funded SCO's litigation against IBM and Linux in general.
- Bribed Novell into betraying the Linux community.
- Forced entire school systems to audit their computers and pay "non-compliance" fines.
- Profited off of Linux and Mac installations without paying royalties by forcing a per computer "tax" on all Licencing 6 customers.
- Slowed down the Internet with their virus ridden software.
- Made it impossible for me to buy the laptop I choose without paying them, even if I do not use their software. (The guy at the store laughed at me when I asked if I could just get the hardware.)
- Supported software patent legislation in Europe.
- Created the most DRM restricted operating system in existence with plans to extend the DRM to MY hardware and encrypt MY information on MY hard drive and give control of all that to someone else (read: Hollywood).
. . . and those are just what I can think of off the top of my head. I am sure I missed more than half, and no, I do not have time to provide links to all of those. You are on your own.I thought they could. Hasn't 2Pac been producing new songs in the past consistently since his death (or am I wrong about the meaning of "newly discovered archival recordings")? How long has he been dead now? The last time I checked (a few years ago) he had put out and album or double album about every two years since his death. Pretty prolific, huh?
It kind of makes one wonder who copyrights are making money for. Certainly dead artists are not enjoying their profits. Or do spirits really need bribe money like in Chinese ancestral religion?
Whether you believe it or not, the future quality of Linux is related to -- although not completely dependent upon -- its popularity.
This is nothing more than a fallacy. First of all, you assume that all the people writing articles on Chinese Wikipedia were born in or live in Mainland China. If you have walked around town -- anywhere in the world -- recently, you would realize that there are a lot of Chinese people outside of China. Many, if not most, of these Chinese people were born outside of China. Further, there are very large populations of Chinese people all throughout South East Asia. Anybody who has been on IRC would know that nearly every Chinese person in South East Asia has a computer. This is not mentioning massive populations of Chinese people in Canada and Australia. I have heard that Vancouver has many areas where only Chinese can be heard on the street.
In short, there are a lot of Chinese people outside of China. As usual with Chinese society (and many others I suppose), these overseas Chinese have a plethora of differing opinions (in fact, even in Chinese culture, I rarely encounter people with anything but dissimilar viewpoints). All of these people are likely to be contributing to Wikipedia. If they are, and their viewpoints are somewhat of a consensus of Chinese world views, maybe Westerners should be looking upon their own news media derived "knowledge" with some skepticism.
In my opinion, the biggest division is caused by encoding systems. The separation of Chinese writing into Simplified and Traditional, and Wikipedia's initial choice to support Simplified as "Chinese" forced one version of people's perception to dominate. However, even though many articles are now in Traditional Chinese, this artificial separation still affects the exchange of information greatly.
The real solution is that software has got to stop treating Simplified and Traditional Chinese as separate languages. Which glyphs are viewed should be a simple matter of user preference. I should never have to see Simplified or Traditional Characters if I do not want to. This way, virtual borders between "Communist China" and "Traditional China" will not exist. Chinese will be one unifying (and unified) writing system again -- as it has been since 221 BC.
Good point. In fact, the false image that most people associate with China is quite indicative of censorship and misinformation in Western cultures. Just because misinformation is distributed and presented differently in the West than in China does not mean the information is any more accurate, and anybody who has been on the Net for a while can attest to the misrepresentation of tech issues such as DRM and "hacking" -- or more recently, net neutrality -- by the Western media.
However, I must contest one statement in the parent:
Please. Anybody who has been to China has seen the massive amount of unemployed people and the massive amount of over-employment (hiring more people than necessary for a given position). In one hotel I stayed in, they had some ten people behind the reception desk pretending to look busy 24 hours a day. There was an army of maids on each floor -- including a manager with each group -- that assaulted each room. Half of the maids were pretending to work whenever I happened to interrupt them. Department stores were filled with idle clerks.
I am not saying that people are not well off, but there is certainly no shortage of labor in China.
This "our customers" language is typical of Novell's statements surrounding this issue. They constantly speak of their customers but do not speak of the wider impact on the FOSS community itself. This might sound like a non-customer asking for a handout, but the fact remains that the majority of Linux developers and users are not associated with SUSE or Novell. The fact also remains that Novell relies on the FOSS community for its development. Therefore, a patent lawsuit that caused, say, X or kernel development to be halted or altered would affect Novell as well, even though MS could claim that they have not violated the agreement.
It goes without saying that Ballmer's statements have caused harm to the FOSS community and that many more people were exposed to Ballmer's statements than Hovespan's.
I think the reason that RMS and Moglen are so incensed about this agreement is obvious. This agreement to create a de facto ownership of Linux by suing anybody who competes with Novell. If MS sues successfully for patent infringement in Application A, Novell can continue to use it without being sued, but no one else can. In this way, they can become the only non-MS people to be able to use it in consequence of their "get out of jail free" card. It is an end run around the GPL.
Both MS and Novell benefit from this. Novell destroys its competition in the Linux arena and becomes the only "legitimate" Linux vendor. MS reduces its competitors to one complacent one which it can dispatch at its lesiure or use to prove that MS is not a monopoly.
In light of this, Novell only has two options if it truly believes in FOSS:
Whether Novell sees this future or not, it is screwing the Linux community. And garbage like this:
Now Microsoft can use its software and EULAs to control what patents are issued.
Yeah, that was my first reaction, too. When I first glanced at the article, I figured I would almost be able to forgive D-Link for claiming the GPL was invalid . The phone sounded good enough that my convictions would have kept me feeling guilty while I imagined having this thing.
But without expandable storage (1GB minimum), I really cannot imagine even paying one hundred dollars for such a device (even if D-Link did do the honorable thing and apologize publically to the Linux community).
Fortunately, a few Chinese companies and one French one have come out with similar things. These others, however, do not come with D-Link's stigma of being the first company to bring the GPL into court. And the "unlocked" thing is irrelevant outside of the US because only US phone companies are so greedy as to "lock" users cellphones from them. This is the same stupid mentality that gave rise to stupid ideas like DRM.
So? The big companies stood to profit more from things like Divx, and we all know how that turned out. You know, customers do occasionally make choices.
I am afriad you are missing the point. What, precisely, do you think the word "lecture" means, anyway? "Interactive lecture" is a contradiction in terms. If it is interactive, it is not a lecture. Period. Obviously, they have not been teaching English properly at universities these days.
Even though your post is an off-topic troll, I will respond to the language section. Language cannot be taught in a lecture. My post was not concered with classes where students have to participate. Language classes require this. History lectures do not. Nowhere in my post have I said anything that could imply that teachers are unnecessary. Teachers are very necessary, but they should not be droning mouthpieces at the head of the classroom. In order to be a teacher, one must teach. Lecturing is not teaching.
Perhaps he could be convinced that information replication is the only way to protect our information environment and that DRM would aid "terrorists" or whatever our Eurasia/East Asia is called nowadays. Then he could prosecute the *AAs for treason.
It seems that a DRM system would be a rather powerful weapon in the hands of an attacker. The ability to revoke or alter all instances of a document worldwide and trusted systems in general would be quite useful to someone wanting attack a country's communications, especially if users and administrators were barred from preventing it at the hardware level.