I don't know if you can count of the Courts to fix this. IANAL, but Courts seem to resist throwing out laws for being stupid. The power to take the necessary corrective action, which is voting the idiots out and installing the wise, resides in the voters. Privacy and Free Speech rights may apply, except that the State may be able to show that due to some quirk regarding their regulatory power over telephone lines, they are entitled to know the source and destination.
Hey, do the Michigan DAs or legislators use NAT and firewalls? Send them an e-mail or visit their web site and perform a citizen's arrest for every packet of every response. Maybe that would clarify the issue for Michigan's elected.
I've been keeping a drawing table pc-free so it can be used for art projects and correspondence/bills. I guess I always knew this whole evil Microsoft thing was really my fault.
The biggest threat is organized crime hijacking, diverting, or counterfeiting product and selling it, because effort is rewarded with revenue.
The thing about digital/P2P networks of non-commerce exchange is that technology merchants can sell to content distributors the possibility of control. Add to that the legislative, judicial, and administrative predilection to fiercely protect property (when owned by large corporations) and you get what may be the most lucrative market for silver bullets today.
Ed Felten's comments are essentially correct from a technical/security point of view. But in the world of politics and public policy, the big threat (millions of free downloads and the necessary loss of AOR jobs and increase in starving artists) is repeated in order to the get the smaller effect: speed bumps for the contemporary equivalent of making a tape for a friend and/or a government collected tax to reimburse the record companies for supposed lost revenues.
For songs already released as recordings, the mechanical reproduction license fees are set by statute. This would be a charge, amounting to pennies, per item pressed. A songwriter or publisher has a right to control who records a song first, so the "here's a song we just wrote during sound check" tune may not make it to the souvenir recording.
Though at that level of the business, I guess no one just writes a song and performs it, because all the lighting and sound board cues haven't been programmed, the keyboard parts are unsequenced, the orchestra doesn't have the arrangement, and the choreographer didn't have time to block the song. And there may be a few performers who would sputter and collapse, like a rogue robot outsmarted by Captain Kirk, when contemplating the "it has to sound like the recording, but there was no recording, but it has to sound.." cycle.
And at UC Santa Barbara, I was enlightened by an anecdote from one of my history professors. He said that on that day the chairman had come by and suggested that the professor go easy this quarter because they needed more history majors in the discipline. I always suspected that friends of mine who were ground down by their sophomore Chaucer classes were part of that department's winnowing process. I also noticed that it seemed easy to get B's in film studies courses, but hard to get A's. I think this was to provide some correction for the general education masses who, perhaps, didn't really need to understand the mise-en-scene concept or have an opinion over the limitations of the auteur theory.
I did well in the history course (about the French Revolution and Napoleon). Grade inflation was a well-trod topic in academia back then, as well.
Okay, besides the ones you mentioned, let's think back to college textbooks and photocopiers, circa 1975. The end result of that was, IIRC, a sign posted above the campus photocopiers (just like Apple's "Don't Steal Music") and some notice to larger off-campus copier companies (like Kinko's, which began off the campus I attended) that suggested they should not sell photocopies of whole textbooks.
It was technically impossible to create a book that would not be photocopied (well, I guess a watermark scheme that reveals a message when photocopied was possible) and, yet, the textbook publishing industry did not collapse! Seems to me that prices continued to escalate, even with the unrestricted ability to buy used textbooks. So, what's to be said? A lot of us college kids in the 70s bought new textbooks even though we could have bought used or, in conjunction with the syllabus, photocopied required readings. I suppose today, college kids could use their pc's scanner and "steal" that intellectual property. Yet, are book publishers in any way concerned with legislating technology for scanners and photocopiers that guarantee that their intellectual property may not be infringed?
Maybe the recording industry has a problem with piracy, but I think they have a bigger problem with competing media, their own price increases (Matthew Gast's Weblog as reproduced at www.oreillynet.com"), a previously noted reduction of rosters, a standard, cyclical generational shift, and a dadgum recession and depressed consumer confidence. There may also be something said about the consolidation of media companies resulting in annual growth expectations that may not be sustainable, which could explain everything or may be a straw man, I don't know. Hollywood, go after people who publish and sell unauthorized copies, but universal schemes to change all technologies so Ted cannot give Carol a copy of last night's Sopranos for viewing at home seems mean and crabby. Hollywood, if you were casting yourself, you'd be Lionel Barrymore.
I wouldn't be so confident that the base axioms are so separate from empirical observation. Euclidean axioms with regards to the sum of angles of triangles and parallel lines were motivated from the experience of the Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians. Certainly since the 19th century, when mathematics became concerned with completeness of axiomatic systems, the results of logic applied to a system of axioms did not require a naturally observed analogue for validation.
Meanwhile, some 17th and 18th century advances in mathematics occurred because observations produced results that required new mathematic techniques to explain. It seems to me that the calculus was initally accepted because it worked for the laws of motion, rather than that there was a unassailable proof that the limit of (x2-x1) as x2 approaches x1 can be divided into the numerator and then once that pesky denominator is gone, we can let x2 = x1. And therefore if f(x) = x^2, f'(x) = 2x
Mathematics is a discipline which may mean it's a craft. I don't think it is an art, because Art allows for idiosyncratic solutions which makes one artist distinguishable from other artists, even when approaching the same subject. As for forging and creating threorems, Godel and Church developed a way of enumerating obtainable results from a set of axioms and this implies that all the provable theorems exist, but like the next prime number, we haven't gotten there yet. Obviously the next theorem is not determined by giving a computation machine a number, such as 42, and waiting for it to expand into a theorem. Intuition and sweat are required, but once applied, the proof must withstand the scrutiny of the learned. The results of an Artist's intuition are accepted without requirements of proof, and sometimes that acceptance or rejection is so subjective as to be arbitrary.
Mathematics is the language of science, and has advanced when science required new "words and sentences" to describe empirical results. By the way, I do completely agree with your comment about the babble of the quoted phrase. All observation have errors of precision -- we repeat experiments and use statistics and probability to interpolate a demonstration that the underlying hypothesis, often described mathematically, is valid. An interesting book I just finished which touches on the issue, and how it changed Philosophy, Education, and Law is "The American Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
I think you are thinking about Generics; this has to do with providing some type checking when an object is added to a Collection and then not needing a cast when an object is returned by a Collection method. As for boxing, I think primitives are and will be primitives and they have parallel classes without overloaded operations. That's java's story and it's sticking to it.
I'll just make a couple of comments. The first is that everyone has problems getting viewers for programs on Friday and Saturday night. That's because those with a social life are not at home watching tv during prime time. So if I had a hip, non-standard show that I wanted to get an audience, I wouldn't put it on Friday night -- because shows like that have a lot of difficulty in finding an audience. If the show can find an audience, then you move it to a night where there are more eyeballs in the demographic to view it. Look at how CBS moved CSI from Friday as soon as it noticed that it was pulling in hip demographics.
BTW, during December, television viewing levels drop because of holiday parties, shopping, showcase movies with Oscar chances, religious observances, etc. This is partly why regularly scheduled programs are repeats and there are so many holiday specials. Has heavy promotion in December ever saved a show? I don't know but I doubt it.
The one wild card to these comments is ownership of the program's production. When a network has a piece (this used to be not allowed) then programs with mediocre ratings stay on the air just long enough to get secondary sales to syndication or cable.
I use the html documentation, especially when I want to get a glimpse of how a method is working, but sometimes just pulling a book off the shelf and looking something up feels like the right approach. I've been a buyer of the Developers' Almanac series since the 1998 edition and will continue to buy future editions. Though, if there are to be future editions, I think the publisher should rethink the division between volume 1 and 2, especially if they are not available at the same time.
(Though if these threads are any indication, the market for these books is disappearing. I think the original concept was for Addison-Wesley to provide annual updates, more like a real almanac, but the api's expanded immensely and stopped progressing on a timetable. It seems to be a lot of work to produce these and I wonder if recent editions sell as much as the ones for jdk 1.1 and jdk 1.2)
Color me old-school, I still go over and look up words in the dead tree dictionary. I also find it easier to take in the whole page when it's portrait format rather than landscape. Certainly, it's my failure to get with the times in this brave new world.
Where you went wrong is by taking it off the showroom without permission. A webcaster is either playing a promotional copy sent by the record company so that it "could be driven around town." Or, it was a record that was purchased.
Where we, joe consumer, give it away is by the shameless display of brands and trademarks for goods we purchase without getting a promotional fee for advertising. So... as you are about to lease the BMW-7, indicate that for a reduction in the fees, you'll refrain from covering up all emblems and trademarks. Everything is negotiable and the worse that happens is they say no, n'est-ce pas?
Like a fox. Jane Legislator has to show the constituents that she's getting things done and preferably things that look good in the newsletter (because there is no significant news coverage of state legislative affairs.) Constituents are worried about their credit cards being stolen over the internet, so what to do? Make it against the law to steal the info? Been done. Make it against the law to enter into the servers? Been done. Make it against the law to not report that you've had a break-in? Bingo!!
So, it sails through committee, the floor, the other house because John and Joe Legislator want to be on record (and show in their newsletters) that they are doing something(tm) about that internet id theft.
After it's on the books, people look at it and realize that it is unclear, misguided, and not enforceable, but that wasn't the ultimate purpose was it? Plus fixing it or adding more practical legislation gives Joe, John, and Jane something to do next year.
Berman (and his brother) have been very influential forces in the Democratic party here in California for years. He represents an urban area which is generally considered liberal. Since his district is tailor-made for generally liberal Democrats, his only opponents are sacrificial Republicans and persons from other parties who cannot get elected because they are from marginal parties and marginal parties are virtually ignored by fundraisers and media outlets. (It's a Catch-22, it isn't right, but that's the way it is.) His constituents, a small percentage of whom work for media companies, are not going to turn this into a make or break issue. While Green or Peace and Freedom or Libertarian candidates may have a different take on DRM than Berman, a standard Republican candidate is going to side with DRM given the current political constellation. (Pardon yet more glibness, but Republicans hear and are very excited by the property part of IP.) I suspect that if fellow generally liberal Democrats (I guess I'd be one) write him to say that giving such unchecked power to big corporations is perhaps against the ideals of genrally liberal Democrats -- well, this may have more impact than saying blindly vote for the opponent. Well, maybe.
Let's accept the premise that Applie is a monopoly for computing devices with PowerPC chips. Where do we go from there? Can you run without Aqua - I think so. Can you use other window managers, that's a definite yes. Does Apple bury its browser in the os so that it cannot be removed. No. Did Apple implement java in such a way that using native gui widgets broke its cross-platform capabilities. Nope. Maybe the Sherlock-Watson thing was bad behavior on Apple's part. Maybe the roping off of Aqua is also. But, the point you are really making is that Microsoft was mistreated by the courts. Fine. Make your arguments on the merits of judcial, anti-trust, economic, and philosophic theories. But only Microsoft has the reach and scope of actions to be compared to Microsoft. Apple isn't in that league.
While the **AA's argue that its bad for people (in the ethics sense) to download unauthorized bits, it isn't against the law, right? Copyright infringement occurs at the upload ("publishing") of unauthorized materials, or am I misunderstanding the finer points of US copyright law in the 21st century?
Let's talk about paintings. Facist regime under Franco buys Guernica, excises critical parts and resells it. Maybe not so good, since there is only one painting -- so let's imagine it was one of Picasso's Franco-critical lithographs. Picasso has no recourse because Franco bought it and the consumer always win?
How about books: Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut, which is always high on the ban in high school library lists, is bought by Clean Books in order to make it palatable to the religious right. So offending parts are excised and the story structure is rearranged to restore narrative balance and then Clean Books sells it. But as what? Do they call it Cleanbooks Slaughterhouse 2 or maybe the Abridged Version of Slaughterhouse 5? Meanwhile, the publisher and the author can't say anything because Clean Books bought a copy and merely acted in place of the agent the buyer could have ultimately hired?
Let's talk about code. You, Jan Developer, wrote Bitchin' App 1.0 and Clean Coders has decided that some functionality is offensive to their target market. So they buy a copy, excise the offending parts, and then sell it to a client as Jan Developer's (Almost) Bitchin' App 1.0. You have no recourse because they bought it? After all, the buyers of AB App 1.0 could have hired their own coders to excise those parts.
I believe it is a false dichotomy to argue consumer rights versus producer rights, in this case. The overriding right is the right of a creator to have his or her creation be what they released. Abridgements and modifications are allowable when the abridger/modifier has received permission from the creator.
It's off-topic, but the reason Hollywood is here in California is because the film producers were trying to get beyond the effective reach of Edison's patent enforcers.
Thus it ever was and ever will be. Every 20 years in show business, there are a group of people who will do everything they can to keep the market as it was when they built their fortunes. And the same thing happens, new people see the new ways to make money and then they become the powerful. You can talk about big band music, radio, television, cassette tapes, vcr's, cable television, vaudeville and the same pattern plays out. "Thin gruel pop music" and scapegoating by the record companies of one consumer pattern of behavior is the evidence that the models are changing. Don't look to the RIAA to figure that one out -- it's just Hollywood, Jake.
"The thing is, some of us don't want our (in my case still hypothetical) children hearing every curse word..."
You could not be suggesting that you'd be all for showing your kids Cinderella Liberty just as long as, among other things, your vendor edits the soundtrack so that the sailor Jack Nicholson portrays doesn't cuss like a, um, sailor? I think the children issue is a bit of a straw man, any way. The real issue is that you, the renter, want to have a vendor offer you the opportunity to view Saving Private Ryan without all the gore, and, by extension, vendors have a right to create derivative works of art to satisfy a perceived market. Would that include the KKK Rentals edit of To Kill A Mockingbird which transforms Atticus Finch into Adolph Hitler? And what about that abomination called colorizing? Should a vendor make Woody Allen's Manhattan in color becaue he/she knows that some customers won't watch black and white movies?
I concede that there are 100 Detroit City Rock's for every Almost Famous, still, one needs to protect the rare movies where the sex, violence, and language are used for purpose and not for commerce. Maybe you agree with this point and suggest that only the gratuitous movies be modifiable. The trouble is that no one, not the government, not film critics, not the audience, have reliably, at the time of release, distinguished the art from the dreck. I say, protect them all and let time sort it out; the rental company should not alter the tapes that they rent without permission of the filmmakers.
[Incidentally, and off-topic, one always sees these Director cuts with extended scenes. Maybe people who would like to see a good story with interesting characters and pass on the gratuitous sex, violence, and language (and I'm one of them) should be offered the "Utah Cut" by Hollywood. These are already produced by the studios for television broadcast, just burn them to DVD and offer.]
Are we accelerating down the slippery slope? Files have to be open for copyright infringement monitoring and national security; files have to be closed because of privacy. One seeming solution is to have everyones' os and hardware enforce "good copyright citizenship", which I suspect is a technological and sociological impossibility. Or some entities could receive a government conferred license to look at everything, which means that some people's copyrights are more precious than others. Welcome to the weirdfest.
The city fonts were approximations of widely used typefaces, designed to work okay on the first 72 dpi dot-matrix printers. I think it was this coarseness, and not licensing issues, that led them to the city name approach.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you can count of the Courts to fix this. IANAL, but Courts seem to resist throwing out laws for being stupid. The power to take the necessary corrective action, which is voting the idiots out and installing the wise, resides in the voters. Privacy and Free Speech rights may apply, except that the State may be able to show that due to some quirk regarding their regulatory power over telephone lines, they are entitled to know the source and destination.
Hey, do the Michigan DAs or legislators use NAT and firewalls? Send them an e-mail or visit their web site and perform a citizen's arrest for every packet of every response. Maybe that would clarify the issue for Michigan's elected.
I've been keeping a drawing table pc-free so it can be used for art projects and correspondence/bills. I guess I always knew this whole evil Microsoft thing was really my fault.
The biggest threat is organized crime hijacking, diverting, or counterfeiting product and selling it, because effort is rewarded with revenue.
The thing about digital/P2P networks of non-commerce exchange is that technology merchants can sell to content distributors the possibility of control. Add to that the legislative, judicial, and administrative predilection to fiercely protect property (when owned by large corporations) and you get what may be the most lucrative market for silver bullets today.
Ed Felten's comments are essentially correct from a technical/security point of view. But in the world of politics and public policy, the big threat (millions of free downloads and the necessary loss of AOR jobs and increase in starving artists) is repeated in order to the get the smaller effect: speed bumps for the contemporary equivalent of making a tape for a friend and/or a government collected tax to reimburse the record companies for supposed lost revenues.
is done well, as well. Hints are that tabs are going to be part of it real soon.
Infinite Trends for the Transient.
We'll collaborate: have your agent get a hold of my people.
For songs already released as recordings, the mechanical reproduction license fees are set by statute. This would be a charge, amounting to pennies, per item pressed. A songwriter or publisher has a right to control who records a song first, so the "here's a song we just wrote during sound check" tune may not make it to the souvenir recording.
Though at that level of the business, I guess no one just writes a song and performs it, because all the lighting and sound board cues haven't been programmed, the keyboard parts are unsequenced, the orchestra doesn't have the arrangement, and the choreographer didn't have time to block the song. And there may be a few performers who would sputter and collapse, like a rogue robot outsmarted by Captain Kirk, when contemplating the "it has to sound like the recording, but there was no recording, but it has to sound.." cycle.
And at UC Santa Barbara, I was enlightened by an anecdote from one of my history professors. He said that on that day the chairman had come by and suggested that the professor go easy this quarter because they needed more history majors in the discipline. I always suspected that friends of mine who were ground down by their sophomore Chaucer classes were part of that department's winnowing process. I also noticed that it seemed easy to get B's in film studies courses, but hard to get A's. I think this was to provide some correction for the general education masses who, perhaps, didn't really need to understand the mise-en-scene concept or have an opinion over the limitations of the auteur theory.
I did well in the history course (about the French Revolution and Napoleon). Grade inflation was a well-trod topic in academia back then, as well.
Okay, besides the ones you mentioned, let's think back to college textbooks and photocopiers, circa 1975. The end result of that was, IIRC, a sign posted above the campus photocopiers (just like Apple's "Don't Steal Music") and some notice to larger off-campus copier companies (like Kinko's, which began off the campus I attended) that suggested they should not sell photocopies of whole textbooks.
It was technically impossible to create a book that would not be photocopied (well, I guess a watermark scheme that reveals a message when photocopied was possible) and, yet, the textbook publishing industry did not collapse! Seems to me that prices continued to escalate, even with the unrestricted ability to buy used textbooks. So, what's to be said? A lot of us college kids in the 70s bought new textbooks even though we could have bought used or, in conjunction with the syllabus, photocopied required readings. I suppose today, college kids could use their pc's scanner and "steal" that intellectual property. Yet, are book publishers in any way concerned with legislating technology for scanners and photocopiers that guarantee that their intellectual property may not be infringed?
Maybe the recording industry has a problem with piracy, but I think they have a bigger problem with competing media, their own price increases (Matthew Gast's Weblog as reproduced at www.oreillynet.com"), a previously noted reduction of rosters, a standard, cyclical generational shift, and a dadgum recession and depressed consumer confidence. There may also be something said about the consolidation of media companies resulting in annual growth expectations that may not be sustainable, which could explain everything or may be a straw man, I don't know. Hollywood, go after people who publish and sell unauthorized copies, but universal schemes to change all technologies so Ted cannot give Carol a copy of last night's Sopranos for viewing at home seems mean and crabby. Hollywood, if you were casting yourself, you'd be Lionel Barrymore.
I wouldn't be so confident that the base axioms are so separate from empirical observation. Euclidean axioms with regards to the sum of angles of triangles and parallel lines were motivated from the experience of the Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians. Certainly since the 19th century, when mathematics became concerned with completeness of axiomatic systems, the results of logic applied to a system of axioms did not require a naturally observed analogue for validation.
Meanwhile, some 17th and 18th century advances in mathematics occurred because observations produced results that required new mathematic techniques to explain. It seems to me that the calculus was initally accepted because it worked for the laws of motion, rather than that there was a unassailable proof that the limit of (x2-x1) as x2 approaches x1 can be divided into the numerator and then once that pesky denominator is gone, we can let x2 = x1. And therefore if f(x) = x^2, f'(x) = 2x
Mathematics is a discipline which may mean it's a craft. I don't think it is an art, because Art allows for idiosyncratic solutions which makes one artist distinguishable from other artists, even when approaching the same subject. As for forging and creating threorems, Godel and Church developed a way of enumerating obtainable results from a set of axioms and this implies that all the provable theorems exist, but like the next prime number, we haven't gotten there yet. Obviously the next theorem is not determined by giving a computation machine a number, such as 42, and waiting for it to expand into a theorem. Intuition and sweat are required, but once applied, the proof must withstand the scrutiny of the learned. The results of an Artist's intuition are accepted without requirements of proof, and sometimes that acceptance or rejection is so subjective as to be arbitrary.
Mathematics is the language of science, and has advanced when science required new "words and sentences" to describe empirical results. By the way, I do completely agree with your comment about the babble of the quoted phrase. All observation have errors of precision -- we repeat experiments and use statistics and probability to interpolate a demonstration that the underlying hypothesis, often described mathematically, is valid. An interesting book I just finished which touches on the issue, and how it changed Philosophy, Education, and Law is "The American Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
I think you are thinking about Generics; this has to do with providing some type checking when an object is added to a Collection and then not needing a cast when an object is returned by a Collection method. As for boxing, I think primitives are and will be primitives and they have parallel classes without overloaded operations. That's java's story and it's sticking to it.
I'll just make a couple of comments. The first is that everyone has problems getting viewers for programs on Friday and Saturday night. That's because those with a social life are not at home watching tv during prime time. So if I had a hip, non-standard show that I wanted to get an audience, I wouldn't put it on Friday night -- because shows like that have a lot of difficulty in finding an audience. If the show can find an audience, then you move it to a night where there are more eyeballs in the demographic to view it. Look at how CBS moved CSI from Friday as soon as it noticed that it was pulling in hip demographics.
BTW, during December, television viewing levels drop because of holiday parties, shopping, showcase movies with Oscar chances, religious observances, etc. This is partly why regularly scheduled programs are repeats and there are so many holiday specials. Has heavy promotion in December ever saved a show? I don't know but I doubt it.
The one wild card to these comments is ownership of the program's production. When a network has a piece (this used to be not allowed) then programs with mediocre ratings stay on the air just long enough to get secondary sales to syndication or cable.
I use the html documentation, especially when I want to get a glimpse of how a method is working, but sometimes just pulling a book off the shelf and looking something up feels like the right approach. I've been a buyer of the Developers' Almanac series since the 1998 edition and will continue to buy future editions. Though, if there are to be future editions, I think the publisher should rethink the division between volume 1 and 2, especially if they are not available at the same time.
(Though if these threads are any indication, the market for these books is disappearing. I think the original concept was for Addison-Wesley to provide annual updates, more like a real almanac, but the api's expanded immensely and stopped progressing on a timetable. It seems to be a lot of work to produce these and I wonder if recent editions sell as much as the ones for jdk 1.1 and jdk 1.2)
Color me old-school, I still go over and look up words in the dead tree dictionary. I also find it easier to take in the whole page when it's portrait format rather than landscape. Certainly, it's my failure to get with the times in this brave new world.
Where you went wrong is by taking it off the showroom without permission. A webcaster is either playing a promotional copy sent by the record company so that it "could be driven around town." Or, it was a record that was purchased.
Where we, joe consumer, give it away is by the shameless display of brands and trademarks for goods we purchase without getting a promotional fee for advertising. So... as you are about to lease the BMW-7, indicate that for a reduction in the fees, you'll refrain from covering up all emblems and trademarks. Everything is negotiable and the worse that happens is they say no, n'est-ce pas?
Like a fox. Jane Legislator has to show the constituents that she's getting things done and preferably things that look good in the newsletter (because there is no significant news coverage of state legislative affairs.) Constituents are worried about their credit cards being stolen over the internet, so what to do? Make it against the law to steal the info? Been done. Make it against the law to enter into the servers? Been done. Make it against the law to not report that you've had a break-in? Bingo!!
So, it sails through committee, the floor, the other house because John and Joe Legislator want to be on record (and show in their newsletters) that they are doing something(tm) about that internet id theft.
After it's on the books, people look at it and realize that it is unclear, misguided, and not enforceable, but that wasn't the ultimate purpose was it? Plus fixing it or adding more practical legislation gives Joe, John, and Jane something to do next year.
Berman (and his brother) have been very influential forces in the Democratic party here in California for years. He represents an urban area which is generally considered liberal. Since his district is tailor-made for generally liberal Democrats, his only opponents are sacrificial Republicans and persons from other parties who cannot get elected because they are from marginal parties and marginal parties are virtually ignored by fundraisers and media outlets. (It's a Catch-22, it isn't right, but that's the way it is.) His constituents, a small percentage of whom work for media companies, are not going to turn this into a make or break issue. While Green or Peace and Freedom or Libertarian candidates may have a different take on DRM than Berman, a standard Republican candidate is going to side with DRM given the current political constellation. (Pardon yet more glibness, but Republicans hear and are very excited by the property part of IP.) I suspect that if fellow generally liberal Democrats (I guess I'd be one) write him to say that giving such unchecked power to big corporations is perhaps against the ideals of genrally liberal Democrats -- well, this may have more impact than saying blindly vote for the opponent. Well, maybe.
Let's accept the premise that Applie is a monopoly for computing devices with PowerPC chips. Where do we go from there? Can you run without Aqua - I think so. Can you use other window managers, that's a definite yes. Does Apple bury its browser in the os so that it cannot be removed. No. Did Apple implement java in such a way that using native gui widgets broke its cross-platform capabilities. Nope. Maybe the Sherlock-Watson thing was bad behavior on Apple's part. Maybe the roping off of Aqua is also. But, the point you are really making is that Microsoft was mistreated by the courts. Fine. Make your arguments on the merits of judcial, anti-trust, economic, and philosophic theories. But only Microsoft has the reach and scope of actions to be compared to Microsoft. Apple isn't in that league.
While the **AA's argue that its bad for people (in the ethics sense) to download unauthorized bits, it isn't against the law, right? Copyright infringement occurs at the upload ("publishing") of unauthorized materials, or am I misunderstanding the finer points of US copyright law in the 21st century?
- Netbeans to code the guts.
- BlueJ to set up the big picture classes.
- JEdit to make quick changes that don't require auto-complete overhead.
- vi when it's really a quick fix.
Over the weekend I grabbed Netbeans 3.4 which features what seems to be improved auto-complete and now floats javadoc notes.Let's talk about paintings. Facist regime under Franco buys Guernica, excises critical parts and resells it. Maybe not so good, since there is only one painting -- so let's imagine it was one of Picasso's Franco-critical lithographs. Picasso has no recourse because Franco bought it and the consumer always win?
How about books: Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut, which is always high on the ban in high school library lists, is bought by Clean Books in order to make it palatable to the religious right. So offending parts are excised and the story structure is rearranged to restore narrative balance and then Clean Books sells it. But as what? Do they call it Cleanbooks Slaughterhouse 2 or maybe the Abridged Version of Slaughterhouse 5? Meanwhile, the publisher and the author can't say anything because Clean Books bought a copy and merely acted in place of the agent the buyer could have ultimately hired?
Let's talk about code. You, Jan Developer, wrote Bitchin' App 1.0 and Clean Coders has decided that some functionality is offensive to their target market. So they buy a copy, excise the offending parts, and then sell it to a client as Jan Developer's (Almost) Bitchin' App 1.0. You have no recourse because they bought it? After all, the buyers of AB App 1.0 could have hired their own coders to excise those parts.
I believe it is a false dichotomy to argue consumer rights versus producer rights, in this case. The overriding right is the right of a creator to have his or her creation be what they released. Abridgements and modifications are allowable when the abridger/modifier has received permission from the creator.
OT, yes, but wasn't dot boom's attraction to the Street about negative flow profitibility?
It's off-topic, but the reason Hollywood is here in California is because the film producers were trying to get beyond the effective reach of Edison's patent enforcers.
Thus it ever was and ever will be. Every 20 years in show business, there are a group of people who will do everything they can to keep the market as it was when they built their fortunes. And the same thing happens, new people see the new ways to make money and then they become the powerful. You can talk about big band music, radio, television, cassette tapes, vcr's, cable television, vaudeville and the same pattern plays out. "Thin gruel pop music" and scapegoating by the record companies of one consumer pattern of behavior is the evidence that the models are changing. Don't look to the RIAA to figure that one out -- it's just Hollywood, Jake.
"The thing is, some of us don't want our (in my case still hypothetical) children hearing every curse word..."
You could not be suggesting that you'd be all for showing your kids Cinderella Liberty just as long as, among other things, your vendor edits the soundtrack so that the sailor Jack Nicholson portrays doesn't cuss like a, um, sailor? I think the children issue is a bit of a straw man, any way. The real issue is that you, the renter, want to have a vendor offer you the opportunity to view Saving Private Ryan without all the gore, and, by extension, vendors have a right to create derivative works of art to satisfy a perceived market. Would that include the KKK Rentals edit of To Kill A Mockingbird which transforms Atticus Finch into Adolph Hitler? And what about that abomination called colorizing? Should a vendor make Woody Allen's Manhattan in color becaue he/she knows that some customers won't watch black and white movies?
I concede that there are 100 Detroit City Rock's for every Almost Famous, still, one needs to protect the rare movies where the sex, violence, and language are used for purpose and not for commerce. Maybe you agree with this point and suggest that only the gratuitous movies be modifiable. The trouble is that no one, not the government, not film critics, not the audience, have reliably, at the time of release, distinguished the art from the dreck. I say, protect them all and let time sort it out; the rental company should not alter the tapes that they rent without permission of the filmmakers.
[Incidentally, and off-topic, one always sees these Director cuts with extended scenes. Maybe people who would like to see a good story with interesting characters and pass on the gratuitous sex, violence, and language (and I'm one of them) should be offered the "Utah Cut" by Hollywood. These are already produced by the studios for television broadcast, just burn them to DVD and offer.]
Are we accelerating down the slippery slope? Files have to be open for copyright infringement monitoring and national security; files have to be closed because of privacy. One seeming solution is to have everyones' os and hardware enforce "good copyright citizenship", which I suspect is a technological and sociological impossibility. Or some entities could receive a government conferred license to look at everything, which means that some people's copyrights are more precious than others. Welcome to the weirdfest.
The city fonts were approximations of widely used typefaces, designed to work okay on the first 72 dpi dot-matrix printers. I think it was this coarseness, and not licensing issues, that led them to the city name approach.