Here's an even better idea! DON'T BUY A CAR if you don't want to have tracking devices in it! It says that there is one right there in page 15 of your loan agreement, and big deal if it calls the cops every time you speed! People already know that they're in there and if you're too stupid to have known yourself, tough!
If you are smart enough, you'd buy your own car parts and assemble your own car. But if you're too lazy, then you can't complain when a car company tries to make an extra buck or two from the government...
Moron. I don't build cars for a living and neither do I code.
Re:Is any of this real?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You say, "Newton, Einstein, etc.", but think about the gap between those two theoretical branches. It's huge! Newton was completely unaware of the principles behind Einstein's work and based his model on nothing but observed phenomena, right?
Of course, that doesn't mean that Newton is bunk, just that it's accurate for observed phenomena within a specific range. Einstein's range is much larger, including things that Newton couldn't possibly have measured to note discrepancies.
One must assume that future discoveries will continue to provide larger and larger frames of reference, not supplant what we have. However, the change will be in our understanding of the boundary conditions, not of easily observed things. Heck, how are we doing research now? Particle accelerators! That ain't your everyday environment...
Anybody remember their DMCA homework? Saying "the ISPs must also be held liable" is a specious argument; they could have been held so five years ago, but the DMCA specifically stated that ISPs are never liable in a case where a user infringes on somebody's copyright unless the copyright holder has reported the specific infringement.
This is, by the way, why your ISP dumps you so easily when it gets those reports. So long as it does, it's behind an invulnerable legal wall. The moment it puts its butt on the line, it has to defend itself against costly lawsuits.
You don't understand the legal precedents correctly. The US has an obligation under the treaty to pass laws such that our laws are in compliance with the treaty provisions.
Doesn't mean we'll actually DO that. Hell, the US isn't even compliant with everything in the old Berne treaties, since we lack a lot of the "moral rights" provisions. Didn't matter much. Sure, somebody could complain, but it wouldn't work, and what are they gonna do, kick the US out of the treaty?
Didn't we just have all those articles about tons of programmers out of work in Silicon Valley? How many of them would turn down contract work intended to screw Microsoft? (Talk about incentive for performance!)
I'll tell you my experience with the mandatory British ratings system.
Our company translates Japanese animation for the US. We release stuff over here unrated - virtually none of it is theatrical anyway, and we can go get a rating for stuff that's going into a theater, and why rate it with the MPAA if it's not going to a theater? We also put on a 13+ or 15+ or 17+ for parents who want one, but that's our rating (it takes a LOT of bloody violence or incidental nudity for the last one.)
The UK mandates ratings. So if we want to release something in the UK, we have to send off a couple of copies to the BBFC, their ratings board. We also have to pay them a lot of money. We also have to wait DAMN NEAR FOREVER if nothing goes wrong, and twice that if it doesn't meet their exacting bureaucratic standards. Not moral standards, bureaucratic ones; if you don't do something -exactly- the way that they specify, no matter how inconsequential, they won't rate your show... and thus it's illegal to sell in the UK!
The result is that damn little of our product gets on the shelf in the UK; it's a niche market to start with, and the extra costs are great, and the pain in the ass is highly non-trivial. The implementation of a film review board means mandatory censorship, even if it's because those on the fringe will not release rather than go through the review wringer. Not only that, but it's a censorship that favors large corporations selling mass-market pap, the worst of all results.
Besides, I worked at a Funcoland for years, back when they still called it that. I did ask kids to bring their folks in and told those folks that their kids wanted a bloody game, and it did cost us a few sales (and got us a few parents who refused to shop anywhere else, 'cause they knew we were honest enough to trust!) But I'll be damned if I'd have taken that job at the risk that the next kid would come in, buy a PG game when he was 12, and tell the deputy outside that I needed to be arrested.
They do, but it isn't the -law- here. Remember that the MPAA ratings (and so far, the video game rating as well) are not legal constructs, but voluntary rating systems implemented by the industries so as to avoid legal ratings systems.
Of course, this is doomed from the starting gate. Violent videogames don't make the "clear and present danger" test, nor are they going to be equated with pornography, and the government can't actually restrict much else. Expect it to die horribly upon the first court review.
Except for the biggie - police don't autonomously enforce copyrights like they do with criminal law. If you get pulled over and the cop finds a huge stash of warez in your car, he doesn't haul you into the pokey and contact the BSA!
Police do carry out court orders, which can be issued by courts that receive complaints of copyright infringement, but they're not proactive in this arena AT ALL.
Now, this might not apply to a couple of the various FBI offices, but they're hardly thick on the ground...
Keep in mind that most anime is not theatrical in nature. TV series are much more common; heck, even the straight-to-video market in Japan has more titles even now than the few movies that are produced.
Also, most of the movies that ARE produced are not standalone... they're related to a TV anime series. The Evangelion movies, no matter how brilliantly weird, are totally impenetrable unless you watched the show.
So, yes, please keep buying the DVDs (we're trying to do something about the pricey bit) and showing your friends. And for those of you who say "why would I give money to an evil media company", keep in mind that we're not MPAA members and most of our discs aren't even CSS-coded. Play 'em in Linux! ^_^
Re:Thats the real artistry...
on
NY Times on Anime
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The problem is that comparisons between anime and US animation tend to take average Japanese TV series and compare them to a Disney movie. Sure, the Disney movie looks better... it probably had fifty times the budget to make an hour and a half of movie, whereas the anime is probably 26 episodes long. At a certain level, money has to come in.
So don't require the model to be submitted, just require that the patent holder be able to produce one on legal challenge. Be generous - if you patent a revolutionary turbine system, and it gets challenged, and you're still halfway through development, then take the judge for a tour of the lab where it's being developed. The idea is to prevent vaporware, after all.
All the other suggestions are, of course, not bad ideas of themselves. Add the normal software patent rant somewhere in here too.
Merchants have a good reason to move to gift cards rather than printed voucher GCs... internal theft. It's not particularly hard for a register jockey to grab a stack of GCs and take them home or hand them over the counter to a buddy. Sure, they won't be validated or whatever the store has to do with them.
On the other hand, that's not the thief's problem. If the store doesn't use some kind of verification, he's just jacked a bunch of money. And if it does, it's going to be the fault of the clerk that accepts the unvalidated GCs.
I'm also unsure of whether trying to pass such an invalid GC is a crime, at least in the manner of counterfeiting.
With a gift card that isn't active until it gets run through a register, you eliminate this problem - either the clerk is taking home a bunch of worthless cards, or he runs them through and his till is way short that day.
Did it ever occur to you that saying "I demand a written contract" is something you should do BEFORE subscribing?
People say "I'll vote with my dollars" or "I'll just get this other service"... okay, cool. You're not under contract, you're not obligated to put up with it. Just don't come whining when you discover nobody else wants to give you that contract either.
Businesses get performance contracts because they negotiate the terms. They also pay a HELL of a lot more. You, too, can pay a hell of a lot more, which will allow you to negotiate terms. Or you can NOT pay a hell of a lot more, in which case your leverage is going to be -small-.
You should know why businesses don't usually offer contracts to the consumer... it does them no blippin' good. You're not worth their time to sue, short of physically setting fire to one of their buildings. On the other hand, any customer that sues is going to cost more to defend against than they were ever worth for providing service.
What they did was decide that their current business model was going to cause a collapse... leaving all their customers without service, ala @home. Then, they isolated the portion of their customers that were using the most resources, and decided "to heck with it, we'll cut these people off".
True, if indeed you were running a VPN or dedicated your life to serving Kazaa files, that decision did indeed unilaterally bork your service. These customers have a legitimate beef. OTOH, of course, the ISP could care less; they were the ones who caused the problem above in the first place.
Everybody else got BETTER service. And not only that, but they dropped the price! Sure, the scope of the service is reduced somewhat, but it's cheaper too... that should more than compensate. Goodness knows I wouldn't complain if TW knocked my cable modem bill down 30 percent. 'cos, I don't use P2P file sharing services, so for me it would just be a performance upgrade with a bill drop.
I'm sure that the company would LOVE other ISPs to attract away their P2P users. "Please, take our most expensive resource hogs! Recruit more! We'll even swap you some in exchange for more web browsers or IRC chatters!"
Yeah, but they're not -stashing- warez... it's not like they're sucking all of these things onto a hard drive and hiding it in the basement. They're running warez distribution (and, at that, largely anonymous distribution... if Bill Gates went home and logged in to IRC, I'm sure that he could find hundreds if not thousands of places where he could grab his own software.)
"I'm too poor to ever buy this software" is an argument for use in defending yourself for the copy you have made for yourself, however specious. It is not, however, an argument that even applies to you making copies for other people!
Guys, translations are specifically mentioned as a form of derivative work in US copyright law; I'm not an expert on German law, so things may be different there.
Things get a bit dodgy when you consider that anybody can translate a work into their own language in order to understand it - however, the distribution of that translation is an infringement of copyright law.
Remember, creativity's not all in the code!
Re:Time to stop the madness
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Absolutely in agreement.
At work, we make DVDs. But we don't make MPAA-style DVDs. We told Macrovision that we weren't interested. We don't even use CSS. Our DVD guy wears a DeCSS shirt to work, for goodness sake!
We've done everything that we can to make sure that people can play our discs on whatever platform they like. We don't believe in taking away rights from the user in order to protect ourselves from piracy, because it's rude AND it's ineffective. We go into forums to ask people how to improve our products, and then we go back and make changes. Our production department goes around marketing to find out what people want. We're putting more product per package with a lower price.
And then people go pirate our shows? And say that they're justified, because they're just screwing it to "the Man" before they get screwed themselves? That we're such a corporate monolith that we won't even notice or care?
"We'll pirate what we want until you change your evil, corporate ways" doesn't work when there aren't evil ways to protest against. At that point, you're just making it difficult for me to pay my rent...
Yes, but are you characterizing pre-Bush NASA as a bastion of unfettered scientific creativity, free of bureaucractic red tape?
NASA's structure has been extremely messed up for years - they kill good projects and throw the money away on bad ones. Shuttle ought to be a big red warning sign.
I'm more than sympathetic about basic research problems (shoot, man, spend more! More!), but NASA's current operations are not that.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if it won't init, we must acquit?
I apologize, won't happen again...
Here's an even better idea! DON'T BUY A CAR if you don't want to have tracking devices in it! It says that there is one right there in page 15 of your loan agreement, and big deal if it calls the cops every time you speed! People already know that they're in there and if you're too stupid to have known yourself, tough!
If you are smart enough, you'd buy your own car parts and assemble your own car. But if you're too lazy, then you can't complain when a car company tries to make an extra buck or two from the government...
Moron. I don't build cars for a living and neither do I code.
You say, "Newton, Einstein, etc.", but think about the gap between those two theoretical branches. It's huge! Newton was completely unaware of the principles behind Einstein's work and based his model on nothing but observed phenomena, right? Of course, that doesn't mean that Newton is bunk, just that it's accurate for observed phenomena within a specific range. Einstein's range is much larger, including things that Newton couldn't possibly have measured to note discrepancies. One must assume that future discoveries will continue to provide larger and larger frames of reference, not supplant what we have. However, the change will be in our understanding of the boundary conditions, not of easily observed things. Heck, how are we doing research now? Particle accelerators! That ain't your everyday environment...
What DVD driver revision are they on now? 2.1? Something further than that?
The PS2 is a great game system but stinks as a DVD player...
Anybody remember their DMCA homework? Saying "the ISPs must also be held liable" is a specious argument; they could have been held so five years ago, but the DMCA specifically stated that ISPs are never liable in a case where a user infringes on somebody's copyright unless the copyright holder has reported the specific infringement.
This is, by the way, why your ISP dumps you so easily when it gets those reports. So long as it does, it's behind an invulnerable legal wall. The moment it puts its butt on the line, it has to defend itself against costly lawsuits.
I did this when I moved a few months ago. Cable modem, cellular phone with a long battery life, and life is good.
Then again, it would get expensive really fast if I was one to hang on the phone for hours...
One notes that Yu Yu Hakusho is a Funimation title, not a Bandai title.
Oh, for the day that we can air Evangelion...
You don't understand the legal precedents correctly. The US has an obligation under the treaty to pass laws such that our laws are in compliance with the treaty provisions.
Doesn't mean we'll actually DO that. Hell, the US isn't even compliant with everything in the old Berne treaties, since we lack a lot of the "moral rights" provisions. Didn't matter much. Sure, somebody could complain, but it wouldn't work, and what are they gonna do, kick the US out of the treaty?
Didn't we just have all those articles about tons of programmers out of work in Silicon Valley? How many of them would turn down contract work intended to screw Microsoft? (Talk about incentive for performance!)
I'll tell you my experience with the mandatory British ratings system.
Our company translates Japanese animation for the US. We release stuff over here unrated - virtually none of it is theatrical anyway, and we can go get a rating for stuff that's going into a theater, and why rate it with the MPAA if it's not going to a theater? We also put on a 13+ or 15+ or 17+ for parents who want one, but that's our rating (it takes a LOT of bloody violence or incidental nudity for the last one.)
The UK mandates ratings. So if we want to release something in the UK, we have to send off a couple of copies to the BBFC, their ratings board. We also have to pay them a lot of money. We also have to wait DAMN NEAR FOREVER if nothing goes wrong, and twice that if it doesn't meet their exacting bureaucratic standards. Not moral standards, bureaucratic ones; if you don't do something -exactly- the way that they specify, no matter how inconsequential, they won't rate your show... and thus it's illegal to sell in the UK!
The result is that damn little of our product gets on the shelf in the UK; it's a niche market to start with, and the extra costs are great, and the pain in the ass is highly non-trivial. The implementation of a film review board means mandatory censorship, even if it's because those on the fringe will not release rather than go through the review wringer. Not only that, but it's a censorship that favors large corporations selling mass-market pap, the worst of all results.
Besides, I worked at a Funcoland for years, back when they still called it that. I did ask kids to bring their folks in and told those folks that their kids wanted a bloody game, and it did cost us a few sales (and got us a few parents who refused to shop anywhere else, 'cause they knew we were honest enough to trust!) But I'll be damned if I'd have taken that job at the risk that the next kid would come in, buy a PG game when he was 12, and tell the deputy outside that I needed to be arrested.
They do, but it isn't the -law- here. Remember that the MPAA ratings (and so far, the video game rating as well) are not legal constructs, but voluntary rating systems implemented by the industries so as to avoid legal ratings systems.
Of course, this is doomed from the starting gate. Violent videogames don't make the "clear and present danger" test, nor are they going to be equated with pornography, and the government can't actually restrict much else. Expect it to die horribly upon the first court review.
Except for the biggie - police don't autonomously enforce copyrights like they do with criminal law. If you get pulled over and the cop finds a huge stash of warez in your car, he doesn't haul you into the pokey and contact the BSA! Police do carry out court orders, which can be issued by courts that receive complaints of copyright infringement, but they're not proactive in this arena AT ALL. Now, this might not apply to a couple of the various FBI offices, but they're hardly thick on the ground...
Good thing we're preparing for this by adding a tank capable of accomodating dozens of cloned teenagers in the new corporate offices...
I'll miss Antarctica, though.
Keep in mind that most anime is not theatrical in nature. TV series are much more common; heck, even the straight-to-video market in Japan has more titles even now than the few movies that are produced.
Also, most of the movies that ARE produced are not standalone... they're related to a TV anime series. The Evangelion movies, no matter how brilliantly weird, are totally impenetrable unless you watched the show.
So, yes, please keep buying the DVDs (we're trying to do something about the pricey bit) and showing your friends. And for those of you who say "why would I give money to an evil media company", keep in mind that we're not MPAA members and most of our discs aren't even CSS-coded. Play 'em in Linux! ^_^
The problem is that comparisons between anime and US animation tend to take average Japanese TV series and compare them to a Disney movie. Sure, the Disney movie looks better... it probably had fifty times the budget to make an hour and a half of movie, whereas the anime is probably 26 episodes long. At a certain level, money has to come in.
On the contrary, it weighs heavily on everyone's mind. I get a sinking feeling just thinking of it...
So don't require the model to be submitted, just require that the patent holder be able to produce one on legal challenge. Be generous - if you patent a revolutionary turbine system, and it gets challenged, and you're still halfway through development, then take the judge for a tour of the lab where it's being developed. The idea is to prevent vaporware, after all.
All the other suggestions are, of course, not bad ideas of themselves. Add the normal software patent rant somewhere in here too.
Merchants have a good reason to move to gift cards rather than printed voucher GCs... internal theft. It's not particularly hard for a register jockey to grab a stack of GCs and take them home or hand them over the counter to a buddy. Sure, they won't be validated or whatever the store has to do with them.
On the other hand, that's not the thief's problem. If the store doesn't use some kind of verification, he's just jacked a bunch of money. And if it does, it's going to be the fault of the clerk that accepts the unvalidated GCs.
I'm also unsure of whether trying to pass such an invalid GC is a crime, at least in the manner of counterfeiting.
With a gift card that isn't active until it gets run through a register, you eliminate this problem - either the clerk is taking home a bunch of worthless cards, or he runs them through and his till is way short that day.
Did it ever occur to you that saying "I demand a written contract" is something you should do BEFORE subscribing?
People say "I'll vote with my dollars" or "I'll just get this other service"... okay, cool. You're not under contract, you're not obligated to put up with it. Just don't come whining when you discover nobody else wants to give you that contract either.
Businesses get performance contracts because they negotiate the terms. They also pay a HELL of a lot more. You, too, can pay a hell of a lot more, which will allow you to negotiate terms. Or you can NOT pay a hell of a lot more, in which case your leverage is going to be -small-.
You should know why businesses don't usually offer contracts to the consumer... it does them no blippin' good. You're not worth their time to sue, short of physically setting fire to one of their buildings. On the other hand, any customer that sues is going to cost more to defend against than they were ever worth for providing service.
Did you bother to read his post?
What they did was decide that their current business model was going to cause a collapse... leaving all their customers without service, ala @home. Then, they isolated the portion of their customers that were using the most resources, and decided "to heck with it, we'll cut these people off".
True, if indeed you were running a VPN or dedicated your life to serving Kazaa files, that decision did indeed unilaterally bork your service. These customers have a legitimate beef. OTOH, of course, the ISP could care less; they were the ones who caused the problem above in the first place.
Everybody else got BETTER service. And not only that, but they dropped the price! Sure, the scope of the service is reduced somewhat, but it's cheaper too... that should more than compensate. Goodness knows I wouldn't complain if TW knocked my cable modem bill down 30 percent. 'cos, I don't use P2P file sharing services, so for me it would just be a performance upgrade with a bill drop.
I'm sure that the company would LOVE other ISPs to attract away their P2P users. "Please, take our most expensive resource hogs! Recruit more! We'll even swap you some in exchange for more web browsers or IRC chatters!"
Yeah, but they're not -stashing- warez... it's not like they're sucking all of these things onto a hard drive and hiding it in the basement. They're running warez distribution (and, at that, largely anonymous distribution... if Bill Gates went home and logged in to IRC, I'm sure that he could find hundreds if not thousands of places where he could grab his own software.) "I'm too poor to ever buy this software" is an argument for use in defending yourself for the copy you have made for yourself, however specious. It is not, however, an argument that even applies to you making copies for other people!
Guys, translations are specifically mentioned as a form of derivative work in US copyright law; I'm not an expert on German law, so things may be different there.
Things get a bit dodgy when you consider that anybody can translate a work into their own language in order to understand it - however, the distribution of that translation is an infringement of copyright law.
Remember, creativity's not all in the code!
Absolutely in agreement.
At work, we make DVDs. But we don't make MPAA-style DVDs. We told Macrovision that we weren't interested. We don't even use CSS. Our DVD guy wears a DeCSS shirt to work, for goodness sake!
We've done everything that we can to make sure that people can play our discs on whatever platform they like. We don't believe in taking away rights from the user in order to protect ourselves from piracy, because it's rude AND it's ineffective. We go into forums to ask people how to improve our products, and then we go back and make changes. Our production department goes around marketing to find out what people want. We're putting more product per package with a lower price.
And then people go pirate our shows? And say that they're justified, because they're just screwing it to "the Man" before they get screwed themselves? That we're such a corporate monolith that we won't even notice or care?
"We'll pirate what we want until you change your evil, corporate ways" doesn't work when there aren't evil ways to protest against. At that point, you're just making it difficult for me to pay my rent...
No joke. If I get a wireless head computer connection, I'm going to insist on the firewall of the gods before I go under the knife...
Yes, but are you characterizing pre-Bush NASA as a bastion of unfettered scientific creativity, free of bureaucractic red tape? NASA's structure has been extremely messed up for years - they kill good projects and throw the money away on bad ones. Shuttle ought to be a big red warning sign. I'm more than sympathetic about basic research problems (shoot, man, spend more! More!), but NASA's current operations are not that.