Even if the production wasn't funded in conjunction with the CBC, they would presumably have to pay to broadcast it. So I'd say people who fund a broadcaster that's showing it anyway (either through taxes, or because they pay to have that TV service directly) are entitled to download it to. (All of the stuff I download is either BBC programmes that I pay for via the licence fee, or they're showing on the cable channels that I pay money for - downloading simply means I don't have to worry about when it's on, but the producers still get the same amount of money from me.)
To be pedantic, it was that Gordon Brown gave up power to the House of Commons - of which the Government have a majority vote. So whatever quibbles we make of the Commons versus the Government, it's still not an example of the Government giving up power.
(And yes, the rest of the Commons has an influence if Government MPs rebel, but in this situation, the Government does not have a single agreed opinion on the issue, so it does not make sense to talk about whether the "Government" has kept control or not, because there is no longer a single opinion coming out of the Government.)
But I see plenty of other people have posted better examples in reply to the OP
Other people have posted counter-examples, yes, I never suggested otherwise. Yours is not a counter-example, however.
.because you'll get a pension when you retire and aging musicians don't
Why don't aging musicians get a pension? Is there some reason why they are exempt?
As songwriters royalties are protected for 75 years as of year of death, it makes sense to bring sound-recording up to where they might still be able to benefit.
It may or may have not made sense, but that is not an argument for retroactively changing the law. And if we want to make things the same, why not make it all 50 years?
But the 50-year expiry on recordings was a legal anomaly, legal advice in the industry was notoriously bad
So we shouldn't care about the programmer, no matter how unfair his situation might be, because he signed a contract - but it's different for musicians because the system is an "anomaly", and the legal advice was bad? I don't recall anyone offering any legal advice when I went to get a job!
1960s music isn't exactly obsolete.
Works that are hundreds of years old aren't obsolete. I hope that's not an argument for keeping material out of the public domain.
If you think that that's a wonderful deal, then you're quite free to quit your job and try getting a loan to set up your own software company, or a chain of shops, or some other similar high-risk enterprise.
Sure, and equally, if they think that the current copyright terms are such a bad deal, then they are free to get a job instead.
The problem is that they make the choice to do this, but then years later whine about it, and demand the system to be retroactively changed. Which is no better than someone choosing to be employed, and then 50 years later whining that he should get more money.
The "employer" who will do that is you.
Right, and copyright extensions mean that the employer will unfairly get control over material that someone else wrote for longer. Does the employee retroactively get a pay increase? Of course not.
Oh yes, people watched these movies for the deep seeded moral of the story, not the action or special effects...
Irrelevant - your claim was that people wouldn't touch sci-fi with a barge pole, which evidently isn't true.
Sure, people don't usually watch movies for the moral message (sci fi or otherwise), but no one claimed that. He simply proposed a sci-fi for people to read.
Gordon Brown isn't the Government. And it was the Government that decided to take these powers, not give it up.
Whilst it's good to see, that doesn't negate the OP's claim about Governments giving up power. The Government have a majority in the Commons (by definition), therefore the Government still have the power to declare war and so on. What's changed is that it isn't in the hands of a single person anymore.
Moreover, whilst it happened that Brown proposed this, it was the Government that had to vote it in. So in fact, yours in an example where the Government took extra power (taken from the Prime Minister), and certainly not one where the Government decided to give up power.
Why don't you, especially as an American, stop the right-wing scaremongering over the politics of a country which you have no more intimate an understanding of than your daily newspaper?
As a British citizen, I suggest that you understand how your own country works with respect to Governments and Prime Ministers, before launching into a rant about Americans.
Let me say it again: in a market with billions of products - do you think I am making that up, or do you seriously think that they are all Iphones?
Is the best that can be said of the Iphone that it's more popular than an only just released phone? I thought it was bad that Apple fans seemed to think that the Iphone is the only phone in existence, but now they acknowledge one other niche platform, so they can say "Look, it's more popular than that, look how great it is!" It's like OS/2 or classic Mac fans saying how they're at least still more popular than BeOS.
The awesome thing is that Apple's one phone is going to sell more than all the Android phones combined.
Even if that were true, all it means is that one niche phone manufacturer manages to sell more phones with its entire product range, compared with Android phones. Big deal - some manufacturer's have sold more of just a single product in their range, than Apple's entire product phone range. (I'm not sure what you mean by "Apple's one phone", as if somehow they deserve better treatment in the statistics because they only offer one option - if we compare entire companies, the difference is even more significant compared with the major players.)
And if you're right that no one cares about open source, then why do we even have this story? "Should one random mobile phone company do something to their phone that no one cares about?" - if that's what the story is, it doesn't look very newsworthy...
And you seem to have invented a point that didn't exist.
It's the ones disagree with the OP who are inventing points. The OP said nothing about telescopes and so on. It's unclear what exactly he meant, but why not ask before inventing straw men in order to stand on your soapbox?
Sure - so let's start with you. You might have done something wrong, and since we are evidently in agreement that we don't those pesky courts, report yourelf to Guantanamo for indefinite detention, and listening to music. According to you, that's no hardship at all.
I don't think they have Internet access in Guantanamo btw, so I don't expect to see you posting here again.
What does that mean? Yes, obviously by their lights they behaved correctly. (One might as well say that "by China's lights", their censorship is correct...) The point is that people don't agree with the system as it has been implemented.
I don't disagree with your points about problems with the law, but there is still the point that it should be a court's job to decide the legality, and not for the IWF to block anything "potentially" illegal - not to mention that they actually blocked text, not images, and text is clearly legal.
It's a combination of both bad laws, and blocking anything that might "potentially" come under those bad laws. (And it'll be much worse from January when possession of "extreme" images are criminalised.)
The thing that's so hilariously funny about this whole episode is that the IWF are in the right.... The problem is NOT with the IWF, the problem is with the LAW. Current legislation criminalises almost every aspect of life, and sex is just one of the areas of oppression.
Whilst the law may or may not be overly broad, you can't say that this is illegal - that's up to the court to decide. And that is the problem with the IWF - they don't just censor illegal content, they censor "potentially" illegal content.
Not to mention that they didn't actually block the image at all, they blocked HTML webpages which are clearly legal.
Still, whether it's the IWF, the police, or the Government who are at fault, it's still good for people to oppose it.
I do wonder what would happen with compulsory ID cards, if the person is unable to stop smiling. E.g., with the UK's proposed compulsory national ID card and database scheme.
Now that would be an interesting protest - people getting arrested for "refusing to stop smiling". It'd be like that scene out of Life of Brian...
I think being able to prove that a model is 18 is usually quite a good defence against an accusation that they are 15.
Well this is the point - that works fine all the while the law criminalises actual images, but as soon as it starts dealing with what an image merely appears to depict, it's a slippery slope, and it doesn't matter how the image actually produced.
How do you prove the age of a fictional cartoon character?
Well, dunno about Australia, but it _might_ be in the UK which beat them to the finishing line when it comes to criminalizing stuff that might look like the real thing. To be fair, though, they didn't stop at child porn. You can also go to jail for "extreme porn", if I understand that right.
This is correct - or rather, the law comes into force on 26 January. Even if it's between consenting adults, a staged/faked image, or an image from a legal film.
They have also proposed criminalising all sexual non-realistic images of under-18s, as seems to be the case in Australia. I guess the next step will be to criminalise possession of "extreme" cartoons depicting adults...
Just because many societies have "gender roles" doesn't mean that we can determine biological changes by whether boys play with dolls or not, or whatever other gender stereotype we want to use.
By this logic, we should be saying that something has "destroyed femininity" over the last century, because now women wear trousers, and have jobs, rather than wearing pretty dresses and staying in the kitchen!
Whether or not these things have any biological influence, they clearly are affected also by social factors, and there are far too many factors to conclude that a boy doing something that someone else considers OMG-unmanly is suffering from some chemical pollution.
It is also a one-sided argument. Women breaking out of their gender role is generally more socially acceptable than men doing so, in that they are not accused of "turning into men" (or assumed to be gay, or whatever other bigotted statements that I do not expect to see alleged scientific research to rely on).
And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.
The qualifier "traditionally" shows how is is flawed. It admits they aren't inherently "male". But who defines what is "traditionally" male? If lots of boys start playing with dolls and tea sets, then surely these toys are now "traditionally male"?
Brilliant - actually, I'm glad they allowed him to keep his hat. Saying people aren't allowed to do things, but then making an exemption for religious reasons is pointless (as now the rule doesn't apply to everyone), and discriminatory against those who have other reasons. But it's particularly annoying when they make judgements and claim that some religious reasons are acceptable, whilst some religious reasons are not. Whilst I accept that this guy probably had different intentions, in general, who's to say that someone's belief that they must wear a hat because they think they're the Joker, is any less legitimate that someone's belief they must wear headwear because they think God told them to?
As for UK passports not allowing smiles - I'm amused that most of the photo machines still have photos on the outside showing people with smiles (not to mention with dogs in the pictures, or random "fun" backgrounds added in...)
Well that's settled then - apparently we don't need the courts, we can just ask some guy on Slashdot to tell us if someone's guilty or not.
and the art director should have been arrested for photographing that little girl, not to mention her parents
Well that's just it - why aren't they being prosecuted, if that little girl (who must now be in her 40s, btw, we could always ask her what she thinks) was really abused in the production of the image?
You may joke, but read major newspapers these days about Mumbai. Gone are the word "terrorists." They are replaced by "militants", "practitioners", "gunmen", "alleged gunmen" despite the photo to prove it.
The BBC avoid the use of the word "terrorist" in some cases because it is a can of worms. Sure, 9/11 may obviously and reasonably referred to as terrorism, but it gets sticky when you are reporting about bombings and fighting around the world, where it is not clear about the legitimacy or justification of such acts. Not everything is black and white. As stated at http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/terrorismlanguage/ourapproach.shtml : "The use of the words can imply judgement where there is no clear consensus about the legitimacy of militant political groups."
BBC even admits their bias for Islam.
I might have more respect if you weren't referencing the Daily Mail, who whinge that atheists criticise and upset Christians. As an atheist, I'll gladly criticise religious beliefs equally, but the Daily Mail think that offending Muslims is fine, but heaven forbid you say something that Christians don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the production wasn't funded in conjunction with the CBC, they would presumably have to pay to broadcast it. So I'd say people who fund a broadcaster that's showing it anyway (either through taxes, or because they pay to have that TV service directly) are entitled to download it to. (All of the stuff I download is either BBC programmes that I pay for via the licence fee, or they're showing on the cable channels that I pay money for - downloading simply means I don't have to worry about when it's on, but the producers still get the same amount of money from me.)
To be pedantic, it was that Gordon Brown gave up power to the House of Commons - of which the Government have a majority vote. So whatever quibbles we make of the Commons versus the Government, it's still not an example of the Government giving up power.
(And yes, the rest of the Commons has an influence if Government MPs rebel, but in this situation, the Government does not have a single agreed opinion on the issue, so it does not make sense to talk about whether the "Government" has kept control or not, because there is no longer a single opinion coming out of the Government.)
But I see plenty of other people have posted better examples in reply to the OP
Other people have posted counter-examples, yes, I never suggested otherwise. Yours is not a counter-example, however.
.because you'll get a pension when you retire and aging musicians don't
Why don't aging musicians get a pension? Is there some reason why they are exempt?
As songwriters royalties are protected for 75 years as of year of death, it makes sense to bring sound-recording up to where they might still be able to benefit.
It may or may have not made sense, but that is not an argument for retroactively changing the law. And if we want to make things the same, why not make it all 50 years?
But the 50-year expiry on recordings was a legal anomaly, legal advice in the industry was notoriously bad
So we shouldn't care about the programmer, no matter how unfair his situation might be, because he signed a contract - but it's different for musicians because the system is an "anomaly", and the legal advice was bad? I don't recall anyone offering any legal advice when I went to get a job!
1960s music isn't exactly obsolete.
Works that are hundreds of years old aren't obsolete. I hope that's not an argument for keeping material out of the public domain.
If you think that that's a wonderful deal, then you're quite free to quit your job and try getting a loan to set up your own software company, or a chain of shops, or some other similar high-risk enterprise.
Sure, and equally, if they think that the current copyright terms are such a bad deal, then they are free to get a job instead.
The problem is that they make the choice to do this, but then years later whine about it, and demand the system to be retroactively changed. Which is no better than someone choosing to be employed, and then 50 years later whining that he should get more money.
The "employer" who will do that is you.
Right, and copyright extensions mean that the employer will unfairly get control over material that someone else wrote for longer. Does the employee retroactively get a pay increase? Of course not.
Oh yes, people watched these movies for the deep seeded moral of the story, not the action or special effects...
Irrelevant - your claim was that people wouldn't touch sci-fi with a barge pole, which evidently isn't true.
Sure, people don't usually watch movies for the moral message (sci fi or otherwise), but no one claimed that. He simply proposed a sci-fi for people to read.
Gordon Brown isn't the Government. And it was the Government that decided to take these powers, not give it up.
Whilst it's good to see, that doesn't negate the OP's claim about Governments giving up power. The Government have a majority in the Commons (by definition), therefore the Government still have the power to declare war and so on. What's changed is that it isn't in the hands of a single person anymore.
Moreover, whilst it happened that Brown proposed this, it was the Government that had to vote it in. So in fact, yours in an example where the Government took extra power (taken from the Prime Minister), and certainly not one where the Government decided to give up power.
Why don't you, especially as an American, stop the right-wing scaremongering over the politics of a country which you have no more intimate an understanding of than your daily newspaper?
As a British citizen, I suggest that you understand how your own country works with respect to Governments and Prime Ministers, before launching into a rant about Americans.
I'm fully aware that the iPhone doesn't have 100% of the cellphone market.
That's an understatement.
But you can't argue that the iPhone is not more popular than the Android.
Where did I say that?
As I already pointed out in another reply to you, there are more phones than just the Iphone, and Android phones.
Let me say it again: in a market with billions of products - do you think I am making that up, or do you seriously think that they are all Iphones?
Is the best that can be said of the Iphone that it's more popular than an only just released phone? I thought it was bad that Apple fans seemed to think that the Iphone is the only phone in existence, but now they acknowledge one other niche platform, so they can say "Look, it's more popular than that, look how great it is!" It's like OS/2 or classic Mac fans saying how they're at least still more popular than BeOS.
Already a couple of million! Wow, they've got the phone market cornered!
I was wondering how Android would fare in a market with billions of products, but now I guess they've got no chance.
The awesome thing is that Apple's one phone is going to sell more than all the Android phones combined.
Even if that were true, all it means is that one niche phone manufacturer manages to sell more phones with its entire product range, compared with Android phones. Big deal - some manufacturer's have sold more of just a single product in their range, than Apple's entire product phone range. (I'm not sure what you mean by "Apple's one phone", as if somehow they deserve better treatment in the statistics because they only offer one option - if we compare entire companies, the difference is even more significant compared with the major players.)
And if you're right that no one cares about open source, then why do we even have this story? "Should one random mobile phone company do something to their phone that no one cares about?" - if that's what the story is, it doesn't look very newsworthy...
Really?
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}
I'm not sure how you get 4x the lines compared with C, nor do I see how all the lines in the C version are easily understood.
But if that's the most important thing, then I take it that BASIC is the best beginner language?
10 PRINT "Hello World"
And you seem to have invented a point that didn't exist.
It's the ones disagree with the OP who are inventing points. The OP said nothing about telescopes and so on. It's unclear what exactly he meant, but why not ask before inventing straw men in order to stand on your soapbox?
Sure - so let's start with you. You might have done something wrong, and since we are evidently in agreement that we don't those pesky courts, report yourelf to Guantanamo for indefinite detention, and listening to music. According to you, that's no hardship at all.
I don't think they have Internet access in Guantanamo btw, so I don't expect to see you posting here again.
but by their lights they have behaved correctly.
What does that mean? Yes, obviously by their lights they behaved correctly. (One might as well say that "by China's lights", their censorship is correct...) The point is that people don't agree with the system as it has been implemented.
I don't disagree with your points about problems with the law, but there is still the point that it should be a court's job to decide the legality, and not for the IWF to block anything "potentially" illegal - not to mention that they actually blocked text, not images, and text is clearly legal.
It's a combination of both bad laws, and blocking anything that might "potentially" come under those bad laws. (And it'll be much worse from January when possession of "extreme" images are criminalised.)
The thing that's so hilariously funny about this whole episode is that the IWF are in the right. ... The problem is NOT with the IWF, the problem is with the LAW. Current legislation criminalises almost every aspect of life, and sex is just one of the areas of oppression.
Whilst the law may or may not be overly broad, you can't say that this is illegal - that's up to the court to decide. And that is the problem with the IWF - they don't just censor illegal content, they censor "potentially" illegal content.
Not to mention that they didn't actually block the image at all, they blocked HTML webpages which are clearly legal.
Still, whether it's the IWF, the police, or the Government who are at fault, it's still good for people to oppose it.
Probably not, but whatever it includes, it's still rather worrying all the same.
I do wonder what would happen with compulsory ID cards, if the person is unable to stop smiling. E.g., with the UK's proposed compulsory national ID card and database scheme.
Now that would be an interesting protest - people getting arrested for "refusing to stop smiling". It'd be like that scene out of Life of Brian...
I think being able to prove that a model is 18 is usually quite a good defence against an accusation that they are 15.
Well this is the point - that works fine all the while the law criminalises actual images, but as soon as it starts dealing with what an image merely appears to depict, it's a slippery slope, and it doesn't matter how the image actually produced.
How do you prove the age of a fictional cartoon character?
Well, dunno about Australia, but it _might_ be in the UK which beat them to the finishing line when it comes to criminalizing stuff that might look like the real thing. To be fair, though, they didn't stop at child porn. You can also go to jail for "extreme porn", if I understand that right.
This is correct - or rather, the law comes into force on 26 January. Even if it's between consenting adults, a staged/faked image, or an image from a legal film.
They have also proposed criminalising all sexual non-realistic images of under-18s, as seems to be the case in Australia. I guess the next step will be to criminalise possession of "extreme" cartoons depicting adults...
Just because many societies have "gender roles" doesn't mean that we can determine biological changes by whether boys play with dolls or not, or whatever other gender stereotype we want to use.
By this logic, we should be saying that something has "destroyed femininity" over the last century, because now women wear trousers, and have jobs, rather than wearing pretty dresses and staying in the kitchen!
Whether or not these things have any biological influence, they clearly are affected also by social factors, and there are far too many factors to conclude that a boy doing something that someone else considers OMG-unmanly is suffering from some chemical pollution.
It is also a one-sided argument. Women breaking out of their gender role is generally more socially acceptable than men doing so, in that they are not accused of "turning into men" (or assumed to be gay, or whatever other bigotted statements that I do not expect to see alleged scientific research to rely on).
And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.
The qualifier "traditionally" shows how is is flawed. It admits they aren't inherently "male". But who defines what is "traditionally" male? If lots of boys start playing with dolls and tea sets, then surely these toys are now "traditionally male"?
It also follows hard on the heels
Ho ho.
Not a problem with the Government's planned ID card scheme. This will require you to notify the Government of "drastic" appearance changes, or face a £1,000 fine.
I don't know if big bushy beards and long hair would count, but it's worrying nonetheless.
Brilliant - actually, I'm glad they allowed him to keep his hat. Saying people aren't allowed to do things, but then making an exemption for religious reasons is pointless (as now the rule doesn't apply to everyone), and discriminatory against those who have other reasons. But it's particularly annoying when they make judgements and claim that some religious reasons are acceptable, whilst some religious reasons are not. Whilst I accept that this guy probably had different intentions, in general, who's to say that someone's belief that they must wear a hat because they think they're the Joker, is any less legitimate that someone's belief they must wear headwear because they think God told them to?
As for UK passports not allowing smiles - I'm amused that most of the photo machines still have photos on the outside showing people with smiles (not to mention with dogs in the pictures, or random "fun" backgrounds added in...)
Well that's settled then - apparently we don't need the courts, we can just ask some guy on Slashdot to tell us if someone's guilty or not.
and the art director should have been arrested for photographing that little girl, not to mention her parents
Well that's just it - why aren't they being prosecuted, if that little girl (who must now be in her 40s, btw, we could always ask her what she thinks) was really abused in the production of the image?
Because once you keeps changing the definition
Who's changing the definition?
You may joke, but read major newspapers these days about Mumbai. Gone are the word "terrorists." They are replaced by "militants", "practitioners", "gunmen", "alleged gunmen" despite the photo to prove it.
The BBC avoid the use of the word "terrorist" in some cases because it is a can of worms. Sure, 9/11 may obviously and reasonably referred to as terrorism, but it gets sticky when you are reporting about bombings and fighting around the world, where it is not clear about the legitimacy or justification of such acts. Not everything is black and white. As stated at http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/terrorismlanguage/ourapproach.shtml : "The use of the words can imply judgement where there is no clear consensus about the legitimacy of militant political groups."
BBC even admits their bias for Islam.
I might have more respect if you weren't referencing the Daily Mail, who whinge that atheists criticise and upset Christians. As an atheist, I'll gladly criticise religious beliefs equally, but the Daily Mail think that offending Muslims is fine, but heaven forbid you say something that Christians don't like.