Apparently it's not a problem because there are so many "safeguards" in place;-) Quote from the prime minister:
"This data can only be sought if it is judged to be necessary:
in the interests of national security
for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime
preventing disorder
in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the UK
in the interests of public safety
for the purpose of protecting public health
for the purpose of assessing or collecting any tax, duty or levy payable to a government department
for the purpose in an emergency of preventing death or injury, any damage to a person's physical or mental health; or mitigating any injury or damage to a person's physical or mental health
"
Yeah right, Tony. How about this:
"For the purposes of preventing crime and nothing else" -- We don't give a $417 about "preventing disorder", whatever you take that to mean.
Just download files from people you've downloaded "real" music from in the past (or files with the same checksum as the aforementioned) -- P.O.S. advert-songs won't stay long in anyone's share directory.
Perhaps also downloading only from computers with more than one artist in their share area would be a good idea also?
"why should a corporation I dont care about make 5 times the money the writer does"
Because they bought the recording studio, and pay most of the costs?
Re:fifth avenue
on
DRM Helmet
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Most of the facades of the major buildings on New York's fifth avenue are copyrighted"
Probably wouldn't help you in New York, but English copyight law says that incidental use doesn't matter. i.e. if you're interviewing someone in their office and a television's on in the background, nobody will care that you've "copied" the TV signal.
Presumably this applies to building also. I suppose it explains why everybody does their filming in Canada, and why New York is getting screwed of possible income from filming.
"Anybody can devote 1 hour a week to an open source project. But the only way that we will get enough 20 hour a week programmers will be to find some way to recompense them."
Software businesses which employ hundreds of people full-time spend most of that time reinventing wheels, reprogramming things which have been done time and time again by other companies, locked away in their "I'm not sharing" intellectual-property boxes. Free software doesn't need to do that, we just write it once and it's there.
Look at Tex, Latex, gcc, grep. None of those need people to work on them, beyond perhaps a couple hours per year of minor tweaks. They don't need to spend months developing "GCC 2000/XP" just to force another upgrade, because they don't need to. It already works.
Look at Perl. It's a mature language, yet we don't see anything like the "Visual Basic.NET" department of hundreds of professional programmers working on the next release. We see Larry Wall, plus a couple of friends, writing Perl5 because it's fun.
Whenever this question comes up, it's useful to ask if we're trying to create jobs or software -- how labour-intensive do we really want to be? How commercial?
"but is there anywhere a full time non-subsidized open source programmer?"
You might try looking in the Mandrake, Suse, RedFlag and Lycoris offices for a start (although admittedly they are not all "free software" in the true sense)
If an open-source app needs writing, and public wants the software, it makes sense for the programmers to sell the open-source product. Although much is made of the 'charity' aspect of people paying for something which is 'free' ("charity" means something which benefits the community, b.t.w.), anyone who takes a moment to think about it will realise that unless you pay for your free software, you're not gonna get any updates or bugfixes later on!
As for companies programming widgets (device-drivers, PDA apps, productivity tools) which they need anyway, there's often no commerical disadvantage to making it free software. If they just made it open-source, they might have cause for concern, but by going a step further and making it free software, they protect themselves from having to compete with another version of their own software.
Many are starting to say now that governments (who represent the community for its own benefit) ought spend some of their microsoft tax on funding free software, which is a spending decision for each government to make. Good for them if they do buy free software.
The other model of couse, is individual programmers paying themselves (through use of their time) for software that they need. Such programmers may not be getting paid, but they get the money they would have spent on equivalent commercial software!
"Observation: Porn offends a significant portion of the public"
In other news, anti-scientology sites offend a significant portion of the public. Should they also be banned?
That's why countries have laws, so that qualified people can spend time figuring out what's good and what's bad. As soon as some dumb-ass university sysadmin starts developing their own 'laws', then the whole system goes out the window.
I just can't believe that a engine would last as long being started 40-50 times a day normal driving
It'll probably mean that lots of parts need regular replacement by an authorised dealer, and that the car becomes obsolete after 3 years, if current practise is anything to go by...
"where does the electricity for the car come from?"
Power stations. They're a lot more efficient than petrol engines, they use better fuel (no point wasting oil when coal/gas will do), they have emissions monitoring and regulation, they're sited away from cities, and if you live in a civilised country, they're already starting to become solar/wind/nuclear-powered. For example, drive that electric car in norway and you'll be burning 98% hydroelectrric power, rather than 1/30 gallons per mile of 25% efficient petrol which needs mining out of nature reserves.
It sounds weird, but using electricity from a big power station gives you more energy per unit pollution than just burning "concentrated" fuel in your car itself.
"I also do the "advanced hunt and peck", and my wrists never bother me.. "
Won't work on my keyboard: I just spraypainted all the keys blue to match my computer.
Why are we discussing a free energy, err, anti-RSI device anyway? We'll all be getting spammed with adverts for it soon enough. Just get a natural keyboard if you do lots of typing, and good luck getting your work to buy one.
Right. It's not a story about privacy policies, it's a story about credit-card fraud, and how one large credit card handler is destroying evidence even where there is clear proof of fraud.
Their 'privacy' policy is irrelevant, they're laundering money for terrorists and destroying evidence. What does this have to do with privacy?
Even better, I suppose, are the thinkgeek gadgets which store all your passwords, and securely delete them if you try the wrong PIN code too many times...
"If you send poison across the fence to my house, forcing me to abide by your view of how things should be, do I have the right to "kill your ass" to stop you messing with my lifestyle ?"
You don't need to -- he's american, which means that sooner or later he'll be in prison for listening to music, holding an opposing political view, or whatever.
Plus he has a gun, which means that it won't be long before someone in his family gets murdered or accidentally killed, just because having a gun convenient makes it a whole lot easier during domestic rows.
But he'll never read that anyway, someone who makes death threats by anonymous slashdot posting is unlikely to read the replies.
No, the "biggest polluters" are not 3rd world countries, but the US, with 4% of world population, and 25% of world pollution. This is ten times more pollution per capita than it's nearest rival, Britain, and rapidly rising.
Also, your claim that "the U.S. still participates in cutting all forms of pollution" makes little sense while the US is currently drilling for more oil (AK), buying oil, fighting wars over oil, and electing someone from the oil industry as president, while pollution levels rose 8% in the last 5 years, and are predicted to rise another 30%, mainly through the use of millions of high-powered inefficient vehicles for trivial journeys, and a complete cultural anathema to any form of public transport, human-powered transport, or city-design which allows you to walk anywhere.
The problem is, Linux becoming non-GPL. Witness the binaries in this distribution. See RealPlayer and StarOffice in the distribution. A typical linux distro today is not free software, hence why people don't call it GNU/Linux: it's not free to copy.
Read it again and despair. Those who pretend to support free software are prepared to sign EULA's and destroy the free software vision. 10 years time? Pay for everything you touch, linux or microsoft, it won't matter.
Of course, you can say "fuck you" to binary distributions, and actually install GNU/Linux, and we'll continue to have free software.
And how do you propose to get the thieves' photos off the hard-drive once they've stolen your computer?
Get something useful, like a cable-lock to chain your computer to the wall. If you're in a rough area, then get one of those steel cases they use to secure sun-workstations.
Maybe that's why carnivore needs access to so much data... "one copy for me, one copy for you" each time it comes across kiddie-porn on a suspect's data connection...
And on a related point, what questions would you reccommend for UK politicians?
(I've been trying to write some questions for UK MP/MEPs after recent articles on EUCD, but it's difficult to phrase vague concerns into definite questions for non-techincal politicians)
Presumably they are using a PHP/Perl-script to search google for the top-10 results, then do a "google.com?q=link: sitename" for each of those results to see whether any of the pages link to each other.
I wonder if this is of interest to that "big prize for an interesting use of google data" project, because it certainly seems useful.
As for the "many javascript dialogs" problem, it looks like they're checking for "Browser version < 4" and then for "Is browser Internet Explorer?", so goodness knows what it thinks Mozilla is... I'm sure they'll figure something out after being hit with a slew of linux browsers from Slashdot readers...
Sounds like a great idea. The face-recognition sucks, so why not employ a PFY for $3/hour to double-check everything. Someone who typically wouldn't know one muslim from another, simply because "all darkies look the same to me"
"Arrest that man!" why? "because the computer says so!"
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently it's not a problem because there are so many "safeguards" in place ;-) Quote from the prime minister:
"This data can only be sought if it is judged to be necessary:
Yeah right, Tony. How about this: "For the purposes of preventing crime and nothing else " -- We don't give a $417 about "preventing disorder", whatever you take that to mean.
"they should just create the whole thing in a computer and film the action on a blue screen stage"
Yeah, then it would look like Star Wars I (i.e. shite) -- definitely they should use real landscapes whenever they can.
-- Maybe microsoft could provide them with that blue screen you wanted...
There's a solar eclipse every night
... by the Earth
Just download files from people you've downloaded "real" music from in the past (or files with the same checksum as the aforementioned) -- P.O.S. advert-songs won't stay long in anyone's share directory.
Perhaps also downloading only from computers with more than one artist in their share area would be a good idea also?
To prevent the risk of hypocracy, we'd like a net-radio broadcast attached to the home phone of each member of the Australian parliament.
No, I'm actually serious here. That's equivalent to what they want to put on your phone
"why should a corporation I dont care about make 5 times the money the writer does"
Because they bought the recording studio, and pay most of the costs?
"Most of the facades of the major buildings on New York's fifth avenue are copyrighted"
Probably wouldn't help you in New York, but English copyight law says that incidental use doesn't matter. i.e. if you're interviewing someone in their office and a television's on in the background, nobody will care that you've "copied" the TV signal.
Presumably this applies to building also. I suppose it explains why everybody does their filming in Canada, and why New York is getting screwed of possible income from filming.
"Anybody can devote 1 hour a week to an open source project. But the only way that we will get enough 20 hour a week programmers will be to find some way to recompense them."
.NET" department of hundreds of professional programmers working on the next release. We see Larry Wall, plus a couple of friends, writing Perl5 because it's fun.
Software businesses which employ hundreds of people full-time spend most of that time reinventing wheels, reprogramming things which have been done time and time again by other companies, locked away in their "I'm not sharing" intellectual-property boxes. Free software doesn't need to do that, we just write it once and it's there.
Look at Tex, Latex, gcc, grep. None of those need people to work on them, beyond perhaps a couple hours per year of minor tweaks. They don't need to spend months developing "GCC 2000/XP" just to force another upgrade, because they don't need to. It already works.
Look at Perl. It's a mature language, yet we don't see anything like the "Visual Basic
Whenever this question comes up, it's useful to ask if we're trying to create jobs or software -- how labour-intensive do we really want to be? How commercial?
"but is there anywhere a full time non-subsidized open source programmer?"
You might try looking in the Mandrake, Suse, RedFlag and Lycoris offices for a start (although admittedly they are not all "free software" in the true sense)
If an open-source app needs writing, and public wants the software, it makes sense for the programmers to sell the open-source product. Although much is made of the 'charity' aspect of people paying for something which is 'free' ("charity" means something which benefits the community, b.t.w.), anyone who takes a moment to think about it will realise that unless you pay for your free software, you're not gonna get any updates or bugfixes later on!
As for companies programming widgets (device-drivers, PDA apps, productivity tools) which they need anyway, there's often no commerical disadvantage to making it free software. If they just made it open-source, they might have cause for concern, but by going a step further and making it free software, they protect themselves from having to compete with another version of their own software.
Many are starting to say now that governments (who represent the community for its own benefit) ought spend some of their microsoft tax on funding free software, which is a spending decision for each government to make. Good for them if they do buy free software.
The other model of couse, is individual programmers paying themselves (through use of their time) for software that they need. Such programmers may not be getting paid, but they get the money they would have spent on equivalent commercial software!
"Observation: Porn offends a significant portion of the public"
In other news, anti-scientology sites offend a significant portion of the public. Should they also be banned?
That's why countries have laws, so that qualified people can spend time figuring out what's good and what's bad. As soon as some dumb-ass university sysadmin starts developing their own 'laws', then the whole system goes out the window.
I just can't believe that a engine would last as long being started 40-50 times a day normal driving
It'll probably mean that lots of parts need regular replacement by an authorised dealer, and that the car becomes obsolete after 3 years, if current practise is anything to go by...
5. You can run the 'gas' (petrol) engine at constant speed, hence maximum efficiency, regardless of the speed of your car.
(See diesel-train designs for details -- they've been doing this for decades)
"where does the electricity for the car come from?"
Power stations. They're a lot more efficient than petrol engines, they use better fuel (no point wasting oil when coal/gas will do), they have emissions monitoring and regulation, they're sited away from cities, and if you live in a civilised country, they're already starting to become solar/wind/nuclear-powered. For example, drive that electric car in norway and you'll be burning 98% hydroelectrric power, rather than 1/30 gallons per mile of 25% efficient petrol which needs mining out of nature reserves.
It sounds weird, but using electricity from a big power station gives you more energy per unit pollution than just burning "concentrated" fuel in your car itself.
"I also do the "advanced hunt and peck", and my wrists never bother me.. "
Won't work on my keyboard: I just spraypainted all the keys blue to match my computer.
Why are we discussing a free energy, err, anti-RSI device anyway? We'll all be getting spammed with adverts for it soon enough. Just get a natural keyboard if you do lots of typing, and good luck getting your work to buy one.
Right. It's not a story about privacy policies, it's a story about credit-card fraud, and how one large credit card handler is destroying evidence even where there is clear proof of fraud.
Their 'privacy' policy is irrelevant, they're laundering money for terrorists and destroying evidence. What does this have to do with privacy?
Read the story, people
Even better, I suppose, are the thinkgeek gadgets which store all your passwords, and securely delete them if you try the wrong PIN code too many times...
"If you send poison across the fence to my house, forcing me to abide by your view of how things should be, do I have the right to "kill your ass" to stop you messing with my lifestyle ?"
You don't need to -- he's american, which means that sooner or later he'll be in prison for listening to music, holding an opposing political view, or whatever.
Plus he has a gun, which means that it won't be long before someone in his family gets murdered or accidentally killed, just because having a gun convenient makes it a whole lot easier during domestic rows.
But he'll never read that anyway, someone who makes death threats by anonymous slashdot posting is unlikely to read the replies.
No, the "biggest polluters" are not 3rd world countries, but the US, with 4% of world population, and 25% of world pollution. This is ten times more pollution per capita than it's nearest rival, Britain, and rapidly rising.
Also, your claim that "the U.S. still participates in cutting all forms of pollution" makes little sense while the US is currently drilling for more oil (AK), buying oil, fighting wars over oil, and electing someone from the oil industry as president, while pollution levels rose 8% in the last 5 years, and are predicted to rise another 30%, mainly through the use of millions of high-powered inefficient vehicles for trivial journeys, and a complete cultural anathema to any form of public transport, human-powered transport, or city-design which allows you to walk anywhere.
The problem is, Linux becoming non-GPL. Witness the binaries in this distribution. See RealPlayer and StarOffice in the distribution. A typical linux distro today is not free software, hence why people don't call it GNU/Linux: it's not free to copy.
Read it again and despair. Those who pretend to support free software are prepared to sign EULA's and destroy the free software vision. 10 years time? Pay for everything you touch, linux or microsoft, it won't matter.
Of course, you can say "fuck you" to binary distributions, and actually install GNU/Linux, and we'll continue to have free software.
"Beware the dark side"
And how do you propose to get the thieves' photos off the hard-drive once they've stolen your computer?
Get something useful, like a cable-lock to chain your computer to the wall. If you're in a rough area, then get one of those steel cases they use to secure sun-workstations.
--!!
Maybe that's why carnivore needs access to so much data... "one copy for me, one copy for you" each time it comes across kiddie-porn on a suspect's data connection...
And on a related point, what questions would you reccommend for UK politicians?
(I've been trying to write some questions for UK MP/MEPs after recent articles on EUCD, but it's difficult to phrase vague concerns into definite questions for non-techincal politicians)
Presumably they are using a PHP/Perl-script to search google for the top-10 results, then do a "google.com?q=link: sitename" for each of those results to see whether any of the pages link to each other.
I wonder if this is of interest to that "big prize for an interesting use of google data" project, because it certainly seems useful.
As for the "many javascript dialogs" problem, it looks like they're checking for "Browser version < 4" and then for "Is browser Internet Explorer?", so goodness knows what it thinks Mozilla is... I'm sure they'll figure something out after being hit with a slew of linux browsers from Slashdot readers...
" and the main page is Flash galore"
No, the main page is an option to choose between Flash, HTML, and text. Searches take about 5 seconds.
The HTML version does have a javascript bug at the moment though, so it may be worth turning off javascript while you visit.
Sounds like a great idea. The face-recognition sucks, so why not employ a PFY for $3/hour to double-check everything. Someone who typically wouldn't know one muslim from another, simply because "all darkies look the same to me"
"Arrest that man!" why? "because the computer says so!"