Had it not have been for the crack epidemic and influx of latin gangs in the decades the followed, the ban might actually have even had some effect.
Or, "We passed this extremely stringent gun ban, and were sure in our predictions that it would sharply reduce crime. We weren't counting on a bunch of criminals to totally ignore these shiny new laws - who'd have guessed that of crooks?"
The problem is that extending copyrights will likely do nothing to spur creation of new works
It also doesn't allow existing works to become part of the body of art which current and future artists can draw from for inspiration. There's absolutely no good reason that someone shouldn't be able to go out and hack on or cover Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", for instance. The music is more than 30 years old, the group of people that created that artisic work doesn't exist anymore, and sales from that album do absolutely zero to encourage more works at this point - there hasn't been a Floyd album released in almost 13 years, and there aren't too many visible on the horizon.
The ridiculous terms do nothing to benefit the greater good, which should have been the only factor to look at when the extensions were considered. The financial well being of any single artist or company pales in comparison to the cultural damage being done to the rest of society.
I'd doubt there's anything in the settlement that precludes the shareholders themselves from taking action against the responsible parties, so I don't think they're quite off the hook yet. I very much agree with your underlying point that the corporate veil enables people to avoid bearing responsibility for their actions in a great many cases though.
I used to run my own mail on a box at home over a biz-class cable connection until recently when the outages got to be too much of a problem. I switched to a consumer DSL account with a free static IP (no, really!), but unfortunately port 25 is blocked.:-/ My mail now goes to a $20/month VPS which gives me root, 10 GB of space and 150 GB of bandwidth each month, and in conjunction with the DSL service I'm paying less per month than I was for cable while getting better performance and reliability. Having the static IP at home still lets me VPN into the network at home when necessary, so even though I can't use port 25, I don't feel as if I've lost anything.
Or put another way, *you* are ultimately responsible for *your* own safety, which is as it should be in a free society. As a group I think we (US citizens) have lost too much self-reliance in that area and expect the government to keep us safe on a personal level while not understanding that the government has zero legal obligation to do so.
You can use plugins like FuzzyOCR with SpamAssassin to look in the images for spammy text, which mitigates the problem somewhat. However, that takes up cycles and isn't 100% effective. A lot of the spammers are now sending what are effectively captchas to fool the OCR countermeasures.
You also make a nice, bright, shiny target for a taser if you really seem to be resiting the call to leave an area, and wearing a giant conductive suit around tasers seems like one the less bright choices you could make.
On the contrary - it's a whole lot better if you can give the probes a nice electrical path between them that's less conductive than your own tissue.
Yeah, it is. I recently let a few of my domains expire (wasn't using them anymore, so no point in paying for them), and it was no time at all before a scumbag squatter (webnamesolution.com) was trying to sell those very domains back to me for the low, low price of $200 each. For someone that might have accidentally let their registration lapse or had other registration difficulties, that's gonna be a no-brainer because the $200 these shysters are demanding is far less than what it would cost for a WIPO action to get the domain back and less than the expense of a trademark infringement suit if the domain name happens to be trademarked. It sucks that playing ball with these crooks is about the only viable business solution in that situation, and that the current system allows them to profit from that.
I'm not aware of too many sound cards that can generate the ringing voltages needed for the FXS interface, nor many that deal with the incoming ringing voltages and power on the FXO side, nor very many that can do the level and impedance matching needed on both ends without substantial additional hardware.
If you want to change how the RIAA behaves, forget trying to change the RIAA, that's impossible. You have to change the views of the artists and distributors that are funding the RIAA.
The problem there is that the music subsidiaries of the publicly-traded parent companies are usually *not* publicly-owned and their balance sheets get rolled up into the parent's for reporting purposes, so there's really no way to independently verify anything they say.
Country y says, no we don't want to pay that, vendor puts pressure on them through larger more powerful country until they get what they get everywhere else.
That's not a matter of being morally correct, that's the Machiavellian principle of "might makes right". Regarding "buying a guitar", I have many, many thousands of dollars of music gear which includes about 5 or 6 guitars, and I work occasionally as a professional (i.e. I'm good enough to actually get paid for it) musician in my off time, and I disagree with what happened re: AllOfMP3. My full-time work is as an independent software engineer, so I do have a personal stake in what happens regarding copyrights. Does that officially make my opinion better than everyone else's now or something?
And what is it with you people anyway, are you tag teaming me
No one's tag teaming you. You merely are failing to see that yours is the minority opinion in the thread, but judging by the combination of your earlier statements and the criteria you laid down the earlier post about "Russian law being borked", I guess that makes you "morally wrong". Of course I don't really think that, but I do think that those who support copyright law in its current form (specifically the ridiculous term lengths) are morally bereft - they're basically supporting wholesale theft of that which rightfully belongs to society.
Its not the US, its the PROPER LEGAL owners of the content that have a problem here.
The creators don't "own the content". They have a state-granted monopoly on exclusive distribution of the content they create *ONLY* for the purpose of encouraging them to contribute more to society. The current US copyright term and "life + 50 years" term of the Berne Convention totally flies in the face of that, but the real concept of copyright in no way bestows "ownership" of their creations to anyone except society.
Of all those people you listed, almost all are paid in full up front and only the composer and lyricist traditionally get royalties. Even then, a great many groups write their own material anyway.
Not to mention that it's not unreasonable to expect your law-firm employer to be unhappy with you when they find you're actively trying to evade a process service.
Dunno about you, but I think the standard $3-4000 settlement they ask for would cost you less than having a bankruptcy on your credit history for the next 10 years, and you're also assuming that the bankruptcy court would consider it a dischargable debt.
I'll agree that gout sucks the big one. I've dealt with it since I was 22 and unfortunately I've had attacks in a bunch of different joints. It's mostly under control now with *big* doses of allopurinol (and watching my diet, of course), so it only presents very occasional problems now.
I'd recommend one really good gout attack and one bout with kidney stones for folks that want to test their pain threshold.
For many, many years we've been able to use lasers to spot-anneal metals, which produces a very dark (though not totally black) mark on the metal while introducing no change at all dimensionally. One area where this process gets used quite a lot is in artificial limbs/implants where the foreign body to be introduced needs to be permanently marked for identification but can have absolutely no sharp edges or anything else that might irritate or damage the tissue. This new process sounds like something similar, although the femtosecond laser angle is kind of new. I'm curious to see how practical it turns out to be, as the few femtosecond lasers I've worked with were *extremely* sensitive to temperature changes.
For those having difficulty reconciling the "entire power output of the US from a standard AC outlet" thing, understand that you are radiating for a ridiculously short period of time, so you can get a very high peak power in that pulse while still having a very low average power usage if you can unload a decent percentage of the entire duty cycle's worth of power in that one pulse. The Nd:YAG machines that I worked with were only 90 watts or so CW (continuous wave), but when you cranked the Q-switch down to a low enough rate, you could get a peak power in excess of a quarter-million watts in each 10 microsecond pulse. 10 microseconds is 10 *billion* times longer than a femtosecond (same comparison: one second to 317 years), so you have the possibility of having staggeringly large peak powers in these really short pulses.
10 years is a limited time. 50 years is a limited time. "Copyright holder's life plus 70 years" is a limited time. The current state of copyright law in the UK and, as far as I can see, the USA clearly encompasses a limited time.
"Until the Sun becomes a red giant" is a limited time too, but one that obviously doesn't work within the scope of the intended purpose of copyright.
I think the main problem here is not that the U.S. constitution is vague, but rather that the legislature is inhabited by a bunch of non-thinking individuals who are too easily swayed by the arguments (and money) of large copyright holders with the result being laws that benefit said copyright holders at the expense of society in general - Congress has no sense of balance in this matter. I think such ridiculously long copyright terms are nothing more than theft of the public's intellectual property, actually work to hinder the "progress of the useful arts", and are an abrogation of their duty to "provide for the general welfare". If an IP owner can't figure out how to monetize his creation in a reasonable amount of time (and I think 28 years is *more* than reasonable), then why should that become society's problem?
I sure don't see you offering any better solutions given the panoply of measures (not just commercial regulation) that the government uses to discourage and/or eliminate discrimination in various fields.
Here's an off-the-cuff suggestion that hasn't yet been subjected to a lot of critical thought - rather than force those businesses to act in a prescribed manner against the owner's will, let's instead let them conduct business in the manner they see fit (exceptions for pollution, noise, excess water usage, and other similar *quantifiable* problems), but as a part of their local occupational license application they have to make some kind of legally binding statement to the effect of "we discriminate against no one", or "here are the groups we do not want to do business with". Add a provision that they'll be subject to a very large government hammer if they're found to be acting outside that statement, i.e. discriminating where they said they wouldn't. Make those statements easy for the public to get access to, and print them on the occupational license certificates themselves.
This allows the owner to do business as he pleases, and also allows people to determine quickly what the policies of that business are so they can decide whether or not they want to do business with them. I suspect the sensibilities of the local community will handle the rest. I don't think the government has any business telling business owners who their customers can be, but I have no problem with the government telling them that if they're racist, they have to make their views public if they want a business license. I think you'd find that most businesses would willingly claim (and abide by) "no discrimination" status, and those that don't will suffer the consequences in the market. You'd still have the freedom to discriminate however you want, but if you were found to be discriminating where you said you wouldn't it would then be a matter of the government prosecuting a real crime (lying on the license application) instead of an arbitrary thought crime.
The current anti-discrimination laws seem much simpler and cleaner to me.
Making warrantless wiretaps legal is also simpler and cleaner for those who need to conduct surveillance, but that doesn't mean it's the right way to address the problem.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying that racism and discrimination are not a problem that needs to be addressed. I'm simply saying that enforcing one group's civil rights at the expense of another's isn't the way to do it. You still end up with one group of disenfranchised people, but that's okay because their beliefs are just too abhorrent to be acceptable. I'm not a policy-maker and I don't have all the answers, but I just don't believe using the club of government to enforce what essentially is political correctness/acceptable thought is a valid way of dealing with the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Had it not have been for the crack epidemic and influx of latin gangs in the decades the followed, the ban might actually have even had some effect.
Or, "We passed this extremely stringent gun ban, and were sure in our predictions that it would sharply reduce crime. We weren't counting on a bunch of criminals to totally ignore these shiny new laws - who'd have guessed that of crooks?"
The problem is that extending copyrights will likely do nothing to spur creation of new works
It also doesn't allow existing works to become part of the body of art which current and future artists can draw from for inspiration. There's absolutely no good reason that someone shouldn't be able to go out and hack on or cover Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", for instance. The music is more than 30 years old, the group of people that created that artisic work doesn't exist anymore, and sales from that album do absolutely zero to encourage more works at this point - there hasn't been a Floyd album released in almost 13 years, and there aren't too many visible on the horizon.
The ridiculous terms do nothing to benefit the greater good, which should have been the only factor to look at when the extensions were considered. The financial well being of any single artist or company pales in comparison to the cultural damage being done to the rest of society.
I'd doubt there's anything in the settlement that precludes the shareholders themselves from taking action against the responsible parties, so I don't think they're quite off the hook yet. I very much agree with your underlying point that the corporate veil enables people to avoid bearing responsibility for their actions in a great many cases though.
I used to run my own mail on a box at home over a biz-class cable connection until recently when the outages got to be too much of a problem. I switched to a consumer DSL account with a free static IP (no, really!), but unfortunately port 25 is blocked. :-/ My mail now goes to a $20/month VPS which gives me root, 10 GB of space and 150 GB of bandwidth each month, and in conjunction with the DSL service I'm paying less per month than I was for cable while getting better performance and reliability. Having the static IP at home still lets me VPN into the network at home when necessary, so even though I can't use port 25, I don't feel as if I've lost anything.
Or put another way, *you* are ultimately responsible for *your* own safety, which is as it should be in a free society. As a group I think we (US citizens) have lost too much self-reliance in that area and expect the government to keep us safe on a personal level while not understanding that the government has zero legal obligation to do so.
How many computer programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
:-)
Just one. He holds the light bulb and the world revolves around him.
You can use plugins like FuzzyOCR with SpamAssassin to look in the images for spammy text, which mitigates the problem somewhat. However, that takes up cycles and isn't 100% effective. A lot of the spammers are now sending what are effectively captchas to fool the OCR countermeasures.
I think the parent poster is pointing out a very real problem with subjecting a constitutionally-protected right to the permitting process.
You also make a nice, bright, shiny target for a taser if you really seem to be resiting the call to leave an area, and wearing a giant conductive suit around tasers seems like one the less bright choices you could make.
On the contrary - it's a whole lot better if you can give the probes a nice electrical path between them that's less conductive than your own tissue.
Yeah, it is. I recently let a few of my domains expire (wasn't using them anymore, so no point in paying for them), and it was no time at all before a scumbag squatter (webnamesolution.com) was trying to sell those very domains back to me for the low, low price of $200 each. For someone that might have accidentally let their registration lapse or had other registration difficulties, that's gonna be a no-brainer because the $200 these shysters are demanding is far less than what it would cost for a WIPO action to get the domain back and less than the expense of a trademark infringement suit if the domain name happens to be trademarked. It sucks that playing ball with these crooks is about the only viable business solution in that situation, and that the current system allows them to profit from that.
You do have funnel-webs though... ;-)
I'm not aware of too many sound cards that can generate the ringing voltages needed for the FXS interface, nor many that deal with the incoming ringing voltages and power on the FXO side, nor very many that can do the level and impedance matching needed on both ends without substantial additional hardware.
If you want to change how the RIAA behaves, forget trying to change the RIAA, that's impossible. You have to change the views of the artists and distributors that are funding the RIAA.
(Score:5, Profoundly Wise)
The problem there is that the music subsidiaries of the publicly-traded parent companies are usually *not* publicly-owned and their balance sheets get rolled up into the parent's for reporting purposes, so there's really no way to independently verify anything they say.
Country y says, no we don't want to pay that, vendor puts pressure on them through larger more powerful country until they get what they get everywhere else.
That's not a matter of being morally correct, that's the Machiavellian principle of "might makes right". Regarding "buying a guitar", I have many, many thousands of dollars of music gear which includes about 5 or 6 guitars, and I work occasionally as a professional (i.e. I'm good enough to actually get paid for it) musician in my off time, and I disagree with what happened re: AllOfMP3. My full-time work is as an independent software engineer, so I do have a personal stake in what happens regarding copyrights. Does that officially make my opinion better than everyone else's now or something?
And what is it with you people anyway, are you tag teaming me
No one's tag teaming you. You merely are failing to see that yours is the minority opinion in the thread, but judging by the combination of your earlier statements and the criteria you laid down the earlier post about "Russian law being borked", I guess that makes you "morally wrong". Of course I don't really think that, but I do think that those who support copyright law in its current form (specifically the ridiculous term lengths) are morally bereft - they're basically supporting wholesale theft of that which rightfully belongs to society.
Its not the US, its the PROPER LEGAL owners of the content that have a problem here.
The creators don't "own the content". They have a state-granted monopoly on exclusive distribution of the content they create *ONLY* for the purpose of encouraging them to contribute more to society. The current US copyright term and "life + 50 years" term of the Berne Convention totally flies in the face of that, but the real concept of copyright in no way bestows "ownership" of their creations to anyone except society.
Of all those people you listed, almost all are paid in full up front and only the composer and lyricist traditionally get royalties. Even then, a great many groups write their own material anyway.
Not to mention that it's not unreasonable to expect your law-firm employer to be unhappy with you when they find you're actively trying to evade a process service.
The gist of the situation was that they were speaking with the individual to be served, who lied and said he was his long-dead father.
Dunno about you, but I think the standard $3-4000 settlement they ask for would cost you less than having a bankruptcy on your credit history for the next 10 years, and you're also assuming that the bankruptcy court would consider it a dischargable debt.
I'll agree that gout sucks the big one. I've dealt with it since I was 22 and unfortunately I've had attacks in a bunch of different joints. It's mostly under control now with *big* doses of allopurinol (and watching my diet, of course), so it only presents very occasional problems now.
I'd recommend one really good gout attack and one bout with kidney stones for folks that want to test their pain threshold.
For many, many years we've been able to use lasers to spot-anneal metals, which produces a very dark (though not totally black) mark on the metal while introducing no change at all dimensionally. One area where this process gets used quite a lot is in artificial limbs/implants where the foreign body to be introduced needs to be permanently marked for identification but can have absolutely no sharp edges or anything else that might irritate or damage the tissue. This new process sounds like something similar, although the femtosecond laser angle is kind of new. I'm curious to see how practical it turns out to be, as the few femtosecond lasers I've worked with were *extremely* sensitive to temperature changes.
For those having difficulty reconciling the "entire power output of the US from a standard AC outlet" thing, understand that you are radiating for a ridiculously short period of time, so you can get a very high peak power in that pulse while still having a very low average power usage if you can unload a decent percentage of the entire duty cycle's worth of power in that one pulse. The Nd:YAG machines that I worked with were only 90 watts or so CW (continuous wave), but when you cranked the Q-switch down to a low enough rate, you could get a peak power in excess of a quarter-million watts in each 10 microsecond pulse. 10 microseconds is 10 *billion* times longer than a femtosecond (same comparison: one second to 317 years), so you have the possibility of having staggeringly large peak powers in these really short pulses.
10 years is a limited time. 50 years is a limited time. "Copyright holder's life plus 70 years" is a limited time. The current state of copyright law in the UK and, as far as I can see, the USA clearly encompasses a limited time.
"Until the Sun becomes a red giant" is a limited time too, but one that obviously doesn't work within the scope of the intended purpose of copyright.
I think the main problem here is not that the U.S. constitution is vague, but rather that the legislature is inhabited by a bunch of non-thinking individuals who are too easily swayed by the arguments (and money) of large copyright holders with the result being laws that benefit said copyright holders at the expense of society in general - Congress has no sense of balance in this matter. I think such ridiculously long copyright terms are nothing more than theft of the public's intellectual property, actually work to hinder the "progress of the useful arts", and are an abrogation of their duty to "provide for the general welfare". If an IP owner can't figure out how to monetize his creation in a reasonable amount of time (and I think 28 years is *more* than reasonable), then why should that become society's problem?
I sure don't see you offering any better solutions given the panoply of measures (not just commercial regulation) that the government uses to discourage and/or eliminate discrimination in various fields.
Here's an off-the-cuff suggestion that hasn't yet been subjected to a lot of critical thought - rather than force those businesses to act in a prescribed manner against the owner's will, let's instead let them conduct business in the manner they see fit (exceptions for pollution, noise, excess water usage, and other similar *quantifiable* problems), but as a part of their local occupational license application they have to make some kind of legally binding statement to the effect of "we discriminate against no one", or "here are the groups we do not want to do business with". Add a provision that they'll be subject to a very large government hammer if they're found to be acting outside that statement, i.e. discriminating where they said they wouldn't. Make those statements easy for the public to get access to, and print them on the occupational license certificates themselves.
This allows the owner to do business as he pleases, and also allows people to determine quickly what the policies of that business are so they can decide whether or not they want to do business with them. I suspect the sensibilities of the local community will handle the rest. I don't think the government has any business telling business owners who their customers can be, but I have no problem with the government telling them that if they're racist, they have to make their views public if they want a business license. I think you'd find that most businesses would willingly claim (and abide by) "no discrimination" status, and those that don't will suffer the consequences in the market. You'd still have the freedom to discriminate however you want, but if you were found to be discriminating where you said you wouldn't it would then be a matter of the government prosecuting a real crime (lying on the license application) instead of an arbitrary thought crime.
Just an idea.
The current anti-discrimination laws seem much simpler and cleaner to me.
Making warrantless wiretaps legal is also simpler and cleaner for those who need to conduct surveillance, but that doesn't mean it's the right way to address the problem.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying that racism and discrimination are not a problem that needs to be addressed. I'm simply saying that enforcing one group's civil rights at the expense of another's isn't the way to do it. You still end up with one group of disenfranchised people, but that's okay because their beliefs are just too abhorrent to be acceptable. I'm not a policy-maker and I don't have all the answers, but I just don't believe using the club of government to enforce what essentially is political correctness/acceptable thought is a valid way of dealing with the problem.