You make the point that money itself is not wealth. Wealth is the products and services you aquire with money. You hold onto this philosophy until you get to taxes and copyrights.
you don't get anything when you spend money to pay your taxes.
So having roads to travel on, schools for your children, and armed forces to defend your nation count as nothing?
Copyrights are (in general) good, because they cause more money to be spent more times.
You're saying copyright is good because it will cause people to spend money. That may make sense if people would not otherwise spend that money. In reality, if people could acquire copyrighted content for free, they would spend their money on something else. Furthermore, without copyright, anyone who wants the content could get it; whereas with copyright, only those willing to spend the demanded fee will obtain the content. Thus copyright holds back the distribution of wealth (content).
You argue that copyright is good because it encourages people to spend money. Your argument is flawed. Spending money is only good in that it can encourage the creation of wealth. When you buy a sandwich at McDonalds, you pay McDonalds to serve you a quick, convenient meal, so wealth has been created. McDonalds pays someone to process your order (which is really just overhead), someone to make your sandwich, and a farmer to grow the food. In each case (except for the overhead), McDonalds pays for the creation of wealth.
As another example, suppose I sell my car to a high school student. The student can't afford a new car, so she won't pay anyone to create a car for her. I can't afford a new car, so I won't pay anyone to create one. However, since I gave up my car in return for money, the student has acquired wealth, and I have enough money to buy a new car, thus creating wealth.
Copyright increases wealth only insomuch as it encourages the creation of wealth (content). Without copyright, artists would presumably not bother creating content and no one would get anything. If copyright lasts longer than is necessary, it prohibits people from acquiring wealth, and allows the publisher to collect money for doing nothing.
Spending money for nothing is pointless. It allows some people to collect money for doing nothing, when they should be out creating wealth.
Voting blind is counter-productive
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
It would also help to get your ass up on election day and go vote.
How is this going to help? Most people go to the polls and vote for the most popular (according to polls) candidate running against their most hated political party. These people aren't helping at all. They are simply reinforcing the two-party status quo. These people won't make a difference until they:
Become educated about the candidates.
Put aside their prejudices against the party they most hate.
Are willing to vote for a third party when the two major parties don't represent them.
As long as people vote blind, they are devaluing the influence of educated voters.
You're seriously misinformed
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
As a student of political science
You've got a lot to learn. Keep studying...
most of these freedoms we take for granted were never intended to be
freedoms at the level they are, but rather issues left to the individual
states!
That may have been true when the Bill of Rights was written, but as
others have pointed out, the 14th amendment overturned that intent. The
14th amendment ensures that state governments may not infringe
constitutional rights.
it has been inferred that any kind of prayer in public schools is
unconstitutional,
The high-profile cases which bandied about that myth all involved school
officials either telling students to pray, or school officials handing
students a microphone and encouraging them to pray. Those cases were not
about freedom of religion, but rather separation of church and state (you
may have noticed that the first amendment has two parts regarding
religion, the establishment clause, and the exercise clause).
Despite what you may have read in religious-right propaganda, students still
have the right to pray all they want, it's just that public schools may not
encourage it. Interestingly, if a student's actions interferes with the
learning environment, the school may stop that student from praying, or
speaking, etc.
that putting the 10 Commandments on public property is
unconstitutional,
Again, this involves the establishment clause. It is unconstitutional
for the government to use public resources to promote Christianity (or any other religion).
This protects popular religions just as much as unpopular religions.
You do not want the government holding power over churches. How far
would many of our nation's major social changes (civil rights movement,
women's sufferage, end of slavery) have gotten if the government could
pull the purse strings of churches that offered support for those changes?
Churches may still hold an occasional service in public parks, display the ten commandments for public presentations, etc. There has been some conflict when the government attempts to run around the first amendment by allowing churches to build religious monuments on public land (essentially giving the church a monopoly on that plot of land), or by selling land to a specific church so that they can build a religious monument. Since no one else was given the same opportunity, I believe those issues were resolved by addressing the 14th amendment's equal protection clause.
that pr0n is legal,
The Supreme Court has ruled that most forms of pornography are
protected by the first amendment. If pornography bothers you, you should
ask your congresscritters why they promote pornography with copyrights.
that a woman has the right to privacy and, consequently, the right to
terminate pregnancy,
This has nothing to do with the first amendment.
that public libraries may not filter web sites,
Quite to the contrary, the Supreme Court has simply ruled that congress
may not require libraries to filter web sites. The court noted that
every available filter censored a great deal of speech that the law never
intended to censor. Libraries still have the right to filter web sites if
they choose to.
If you spell out exceptions in the license, you simply create loopholes.
Consider your example:
The boundary for the copyright should probably be at an API that is
explicitly designated as an interface to separate works, such as the kernel
system call interface.
What is to stop someone from modifying that API to make it exploitable?
Certainly, if one were to "embrace and extend" ext3 so that every file
has two forks, the result would be a derivative of ext3.
Suppose someone adds a new plug-in API to the ext3 module. They'll call
it ext4 with plug-ins. They then sell a plug-in that allows people to have
two forks for their files. In my opinion, this is a derivative work, but
under your definition (and the paper's definition) it is not.
The same situation comes up with communication protocols and file
formats. I think it's best to let a court decide what is not a derivative
work. It would be nice, however, if the GPL gave examples of things that
do and do not constitute derivative works.
Personally I think anything that breaks compatibility should count as a
derivative work.
As long as you can "use" a copyrighted work wihtout the need to copy (or incorporate in parts) that work, you have not created a derived work.
I can go off and write a completely new novel set in a world where Jedi Knights swing light sabors around, use something called "the force" to telekenetically move objects and influence weak-minded people. I could do this without copying a single screenshot or character from Star Wars, but George Lucas would still sue me for creating a "derived work".
No company is going to invest in technology if they have to wait twenty years for the possibility of making a profit. As the length of a patent increases, the rate of increase in present value for that patent rapidly diminishes.
Too many things can change in twenty years. The patented drug could be obsoleted by a new, cheaper, more effective drug. The entire social climate could change resulting in price controls on medicine. A new medical procedure could make the drug completely worthless. The foreign nations the pharmaceuticals were counting on for revenue could be overthrown and drug patents outlawed.
The only industry I can think of that looks more than twenty years into the future is real estate. Real estate holds solid predictable, generally increasing value. It comes with cost effective insurance. And in the U.S., the government is required to compensate you if they take it away. Even with real estate, mortgages rarely exceed 30 years, and long leases always come with an exit clause.
The cold harsh reality is, pharmaceutical companies really just want to retroactively extend their current patents. Let's hope the Supreme Court does the right thing in Eldred v. Reno this fall.
I never tought that such a thing would be possible, but the court decision is actually a good read.
I've found that most court documents are a good read. The legal profession gets a bad rap because laws in generally are practically unreadable. However, most court briefs are surprisingly well written. They have to be in order to present a clear and convincing argument. Many successful lawyers go on to become judges and they take their writing skills with them.
Exactly what point are you trying to make? What will people think if they see a video clip of 'pirates' not being allowed into a theater, and a parrat that says "polly wanna crack CSS"? Most people will just see a bunch of freeloading hoodlums who were rightfully barred from the theater.
While your little plan may be amusing, it is counter-productive. Next time an activist speaks out against copyright legislation, people will associate that activist with the 'pirates' who tried to get into a theater. People will then summarily disregard everything that activist has to say.
At the same time they have horrible poverty, overpopulation, and religious strife.
During the US-USSR space race, the United States had massive protests against racism, sexism, the draft, and the vietnam war. Does that mean we should have dropped everything to focus on those issues?
The fact is, there will always be domestic problems. No matter how hard we try, there will be crime. Under capitalism, there will always be poverty. If India waited until they solved all of their domestic problems, they would never get into space. Besides, a good space program could help lift some Indians out of poverty.
No, they're not. Because the thing they still *can't* do, as you pointed out earlier in your post, is track organizational membership.
If they keep a record of every place you travel, and you just happen to be in the vicinity of most Athiests United gatherings, they can conclude with a fairly large degree of certainty, that your planned trip to Washington DC is to attend the planned Athiests United protest. They could block you and most other Athiests United members while blocking only a few people who are not associated with Athiests United.
They can't do that without breaking their own laws and throwing even (especially?) the right-wingers into a tizzy.
The last paragraph was to illustrate that our government has no qualms about breaking its own laws. As another example, suppose you're a government agency, and a gourt issues an order which you disagree with. Normally, you would file an appeal. In an unprecedented move earlier this week, the Bush administration simply refused to comply with a court order. I don't see any right-wingers going into a 'tizzy' over it.
John Gilmore is suing for the right to fly anonymously. Many of the questions brought up in his FAQ have a direct parallel to this issue.
Q. Why is anonymity so important to the right to travel?
Most travel is for meeting other people. I fly to see my family, you fly on business, she flies to meet her best friend, he flies for a romantic vacation with his sweetheart, she flies to a conference, they fly to a political event. Meeting with people is part of "free association", which just means being free to associate with whoever you want to.
Undemocratic governments traditionally try to prevent people from associating anonymously, because most credible challenges to government policies occur from groups of people who meet and agree to work together. Racist Southern states passed laws 50 years ago to require the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to give its membership list to the state -- so that the members could be harassed or killed by Ku Klux Klan members who were often local racist politicians and law enforcement officers. The Supreme Court struck down those laws. The NAACP was able to gather broad support for changing our racial policies, and we had a relatively peaceful transition to a much less racist society. These racist governments wanted to scare people away from joining the reform movements, either by harassing existing members, or by making people afraid to join. If they had gotten their way, we would still have terrible racial policies, or the people most affected by those policies would have had to resort to violence to get the policies changed. If the government had a database tracking the movements of NAACP leaders and those who attended its rallies and events, then the government could harass the organization without ever getting the membership list.
In addition, the First Amendment gives us the right to petition our government for redress of grievances. We can petition anonymously, and sometimes we must, when seeking to change draconian laws that the government would like to apply to us. A small number of the people who protested the WTO in Seattle were violent, but that is no excuse for seeking to identify WTO protesters in general, or to prevent them from traveling to the next anti-WTO protest. If the government could track everyone who flew to Seattle that week, and mark them as suspected terrorists, then their freedom to anonymously petition would be violated.
As Americans, we are pretty smug about our freedom; we don't even think about how we would take it back if suddenly a planned demonstration or political meeting was "canceled" because 90% of the attendees had been mysteriously stopped from flying or driving or taking the train or bus to attend. But the "transportation security" system and the profiling and databases behind it are all poised and ready to do exactly that. All it will take is a bureaucrat or politician who says "Do it", because all the mechanisms will already be built. It was only 60 years ago that hundreds of thousands of Americans were imprisoned solely for their Japanese cultural heritage. Only 40 years ago that anti-war and civil rights protesters were bugged, followed, smeared, arrested, impersonated, and disrupted by the supposedly lawful government. Only 30 years ago that a Republican President was bugging the Democratic National Committee. Only ten years ago that our prison population was half what it is today, with the increase coming from imprisoning black and Latino innocents over victimless crimes like drug use. Only two years ago that a Presidential election was stolen. I'm not talking about a banana republic somewhere else; I'm talking about our own country. Abuse of government surveillance, and suppresison of unpopular minorities, are documented facts right here in the US, not unrealistic or remote fears.
The case involved someone growing
pot in their attic, or whatnot, and
the law enforcement authorities
used some long wavelength IR gear
to try to see what was going on...
The Supreme Court ruled on the Kyllo case last year and threw out the search warrant. The court defined a new "bright line" rule for using technology. The bright line rule says basically that the police can not monitor you with tools that are "not in general public use."
Incidently, where I live, the police were given a couple thermal imagers by the federal government a few months after that ruling.
You are GUARANTEED that all the sources your downloading from are in fact the same file, because they have the same hash (SHa1).
It is entirely possible that two different files can have the same hash. SHa1 produces a 160-bit signature. If you have 2^161 unique documents, you are guaranteed to have at least 2^160 duplicate hashes. Hashing algorithms are meant to detect malicious tampering of files, and random errors. They are not meant to guarantee the uniqueness of a file.
Of course 2^161 is around 3x10^48, so the network won't have that many documents for a long, long time. However, the odds of finding a duplicate are much higher than most people would think, ala the birthday paradox (if you have a room of 23 people, there is over a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday). Similarily, if you have a hashing algorithm that maps into one quadrillion unique numbers (50 bits), you need around 40 million documents before the chance of a duplicate exceeds 50% (and 110 million documents before it exceeds 99%). I'm not going to calculate it for 160 bits (with 2 billion documents, the odds of a duplicate are less than 1x10-9, and I'd have to write a new program to go higher than that).
That's whats getting the RIAA so scared:P No longer can they infect files and make them the same file size/file name.
The RIAA can certainly claim that their file has the same size, name, and hash. You won't know for sure until you download the entire file and calculate its hash.
With conventional radio, the record companies pay the radio stations (via indies) more than the radio stations pay in royalties. Live streams are simply advertisements for music. The record companies don't want those advertisements shut off, and they don't care about the royalties.
This is all about control. The record companies want internet radio to pay royalties, so the stations will have no choice but to accept payola from the record companies. The fact that internet radio stations tend to play independent music further threatens the RIAA.
I will say it again. This issue is not about royalties. It is about controlling the market and silencing the competition.
Mathematicians don't like to call 1 prime. Consider the prime factorization theorem, which says than any number can be uniquely broken down into its prime factors:
35 = 5 x 7
144 = 2^4 x 3^2
12,636 = 2^2 x 3^5 x 13
If you consider 1 prime, there are infinate possible ways to represent the prime factors:
35 = 1 x 5 x 7
35 = 1^3456 x 5 x 7
There are a number of proofs that assume the prime factorization theorem is true, and the prime factorization theorem assumes that 1 is not prime. If you go off and assume that 1 is prime, you have to re-evaluate all proofs that depend on the prime factorization theorem. Would it make a difference? I don't know, but it brings a whole lot of math into question.
If RedHat said on their box "the new SAMBA 3 will allow you to add a Linux box to a Windows 2000 domain" then SAMBA 3 as shipped by RedHat would need to provide that functionality.
This brings up an interesting point. Suppose the next service pack to Windows 2000 comes out which:
fixes a few security holes, and
completely changes the protocol.
Is RedHat now obligated to make Samba compatible with the new Windows domain protocol? The user pretty much has to install the service pack. Who do they blame when things don't work? This is the United States, they're going to blame someone.
On one condition: as long as the protocols for implementing the restrictions remain *OPEN*, *DOCUMENTED*, and *WELL DEFINED*.
That could actually be done. Using the system layed out by the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, you could construct a system that would only work if the code is authenticated by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). All of the code could be open sourced, but only certain implementations would be signed. If your code isn't signed, the computer will refuse to run it.
The protocol could encrypt all communications so no one can 'sniff' the contents. The protocol could also require you to cryptographically authenticate that you are running trusted code before it lets you access content.
I have a problem with this. It means that you have to get permission from whoever holds the master key(s) in order to create a compatible client. The key holder will dictate the terms under which you may develop your client. It's kind of like the british government deciding who may or may not use a printing press.
g is a measure of acceleration. It is specifically defined as the acceleration due to the Earth's gravitational pull, so it is a constant of 9.80(m/s)/s.
An object with 10.0kg of mass would apply a force of 98 (kgm/s)/s at the surface of the earth, which is 98.0 newtons. An object with 20.0kg of mass would weigh 196 newtons. On the moon, a 20.0kg object would weight 32.7 newtons.
1000g is 9800(m/s)/s. In a gravitational field of 1000g, a 10.0kg object would apply a force of 98,000 newtons. That's 22,000 pounds.
On a more positive note, people with this gene could be made aware of it, and they could learn how to manage their aggression, much like parapalegics learn to live with a wheelchair, and schizophrenics learn to recognize when they are are holucinating.
If hacker H writes a comment on Slashdot, making public an exploit against some software made by vendor V, and does not notify V in advance (say, 2...4 weeks in advance), and then V sues H, then who's right?
Let it be known. Advance warning is a courtesy, not a right.
H is within his/her rights, even if s/he isn't very nice. H has a constitutional right to criticize a product. If V doesn't like it, they should have developed a secure product in the first place. H is not wrong, s/he is simply holding V accountable for their flawed product. Furthermore, public disclosure encourages V to hurry up and fix the exploit, rather than waiting to integrate it into the next service pack.
V is wrong. V does not have the right to sue someone for truthfully criticising their product; nor should they. V is not right, because their product is still left at the mercy of professional crackers while their customers are left in the dark about what to watch out for.
Only if the vendor does nothing in these weeks, only then the report/exploit/whatever should be made public.
The report should be made public even if the vendor does fix the exploit. If a vendor sells a product with hundreds of security holes, and fixes them one-by-one as reports come in, the public should know about it. I would certainly like to know if the system I'm buying has had 300 security holes discovered in the past year.
Don't we have laws requiring advertisments to be obvious? If an ad is not obvious, isn't it required to specifically state "paid advertisement"? This certainly takes the role of a paid advertisement.
Those are almost all good ideas (highlighting the whole license red when the terms allow changes is a bad idea). You could further enhance this plan by copying an idea from Creative Commons. They use five symbols to represent different characteristics of a license.
You could apply a similar system to ordinary EULAs. If the license grants you new rights, use a picture of lady liberty. If the license restricts you more than copyright alone, use a picture of lady liberty in hand cuffs. If the license allows spying, use a picture of someone in the shower as seen through binoculars. If the license allows the copyright holder to change the terms, use a picture of the devil holding up the contract.
Usually, the Supreme Court is the defining authority on whether or not a law is constitutional. The Supreme Court reached this conclusion during Thomas Jefferson's presidency. Jefferson, disagreed. He felt that each branch should decide for itself what the constitution says. In practice when it comes to outlawing things, the Supreme Court has the ultimate say in whether or not to enforce the law. If congress passes an unconstitutional law, the courts just say, this is unconstitutional, we won't enforce it.
How will this work for a letter of marquee? This law basically states, "this action is legal". The courts can't throw someone in jail for doing something the law specifically permits. If the Supreme Court refuses to enforce this law, they have accomplished nothing.
It would seem to me, that in order for the Supreme Court to rule this law unconstitutional, they would have to rule the entire computer hacking code unconstitutional.
I do not think Mr. Perens will be breaking the law. The law forbids trafficking in a circumvention device. Speech is not a device except when that 'speech' can function, such as with software (or so the court ruled in the DeCSS case). Simply telling someone how to circumvent region coding does not violate the DMCA, unless you 'tell' someone by providing software that can do it.
It is true that Felton was threatened with a law suit if he were to present non-functional speech on weaknesses in SDMI, but the RIAA would have gotten no where with a law suit, because Felton's speech would not function on its own.
Sklyarov was not arrested for speaking at DefCon. He was arrested because his company sold a copy of its DMCA violating software in the United States, and because he held the copyright on that software.
You can read section 1201 for yourselves. It says:
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any
technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
By the same token, you can publish specs on how to circumvent macrovision. You just can't traffic in the device itself.
I am not a lawyer. If you plan on taking my advice, talk to a lawyer first.
Slashdot Mirror
you don't get anything when you spend money to pay your taxes.
So having roads to travel on, schools for your children, and armed forces to defend your nation count as nothing?
Copyrights are (in general) good, because they cause more money to be spent more times.
You're saying copyright is good because it will cause people to spend money. That may make sense if people would not otherwise spend that money. In reality, if people could acquire copyrighted content for free, they would spend their money on something else. Furthermore, without copyright, anyone who wants the content could get it; whereas with copyright, only those willing to spend the demanded fee will obtain the content. Thus copyright holds back the distribution of wealth (content).
You argue that copyright is good because it encourages people to spend money. Your argument is flawed. Spending money is only good in that it can encourage the creation of wealth. When you buy a sandwich at McDonalds, you pay McDonalds to serve you a quick, convenient meal, so wealth has been created. McDonalds pays someone to process your order (which is really just overhead), someone to make your sandwich, and a farmer to grow the food. In each case (except for the overhead), McDonalds pays for the creation of wealth.
As another example, suppose I sell my car to a high school student. The student can't afford a new car, so she won't pay anyone to create a car for her. I can't afford a new car, so I won't pay anyone to create one. However, since I gave up my car in return for money, the student has acquired wealth, and I have enough money to buy a new car, thus creating wealth.
Copyright increases wealth only insomuch as it encourages the creation of wealth (content). Without copyright, artists would presumably not bother creating content and no one would get anything. If copyright lasts longer than is necessary, it prohibits people from acquiring wealth, and allows the publisher to collect money for doing nothing.
Spending money for nothing is pointless. It allows some people to collect money for doing nothing, when they should be out creating wealth.
How is this going to help? Most people go to the polls and vote for the most popular (according to polls) candidate running against their most hated political party. These people aren't helping at all. They are simply reinforcing the two-party status quo. These people won't make a difference until they:
As long as people vote blind, they are devaluing the influence of educated voters.
You've got a lot to learn. Keep studying...
most of these freedoms we take for granted were never intended to be freedoms at the level they are, but rather issues left to the individual states!
That may have been true when the Bill of Rights was written, but as others have pointed out, the 14th amendment overturned that intent. The 14th amendment ensures that state governments may not infringe constitutional rights.
it has been inferred that any kind of prayer in public schools is unconstitutional,
The high-profile cases which bandied about that myth all involved school officials either telling students to pray, or school officials handing students a microphone and encouraging them to pray. Those cases were not about freedom of religion, but rather separation of church and state (you may have noticed that the first amendment has two parts regarding religion, the establishment clause, and the exercise clause).
Despite what you may have read in religious-right propaganda, students still have the right to pray all they want, it's just that public schools may not encourage it. Interestingly, if a student's actions interferes with the learning environment, the school may stop that student from praying, or speaking, etc.
that putting the 10 Commandments on public property is unconstitutional,
Again, this involves the establishment clause. It is unconstitutional for the government to use public resources to promote Christianity (or any other religion). This protects popular religions just as much as unpopular religions. You do not want the government holding power over churches. How far would many of our nation's major social changes (civil rights movement, women's sufferage, end of slavery) have gotten if the government could pull the purse strings of churches that offered support for those changes?
Churches may still hold an occasional service in public parks, display the ten commandments for public presentations, etc. There has been some conflict when the government attempts to run around the first amendment by allowing churches to build religious monuments on public land (essentially giving the church a monopoly on that plot of land), or by selling land to a specific church so that they can build a religious monument. Since no one else was given the same opportunity, I believe those issues were resolved by addressing the 14th amendment's equal protection clause.
that pr0n is legal,
The Supreme Court has ruled that most forms of pornography are protected by the first amendment. If pornography bothers you, you should ask your congresscritters why they promote pornography with copyrights.
that a woman has the right to privacy and, consequently, the right to terminate pregnancy,
This has nothing to do with the first amendment.
that public libraries may not filter web sites,
Quite to the contrary, the Supreme Court has simply ruled that congress may not require libraries to filter web sites. The court noted that every available filter censored a great deal of speech that the law never intended to censor. Libraries still have the right to filter web sites if they choose to.
If you spell out exceptions in the license, you simply create loopholes. Consider your example:
What is to stop someone from modifying that API to make it exploitable? Certainly, if one were to "embrace and extend" ext3 so that every file has two forks, the result would be a derivative of ext3.
Suppose someone adds a new plug-in API to the ext3 module. They'll call it ext4 with plug-ins. They then sell a plug-in that allows people to have two forks for their files. In my opinion, this is a derivative work, but under your definition (and the paper's definition) it is not.
The same situation comes up with communication protocols and file formats. I think it's best to let a court decide what is not a derivative work. It would be nice, however, if the GPL gave examples of things that do and do not constitute derivative works.
Personally I think anything that breaks compatibility should count as a derivative work.
I can go off and write a completely new novel set in a world where Jedi Knights swing light sabors around, use something called "the force" to telekenetically move objects and influence weak-minded people. I could do this without copying a single screenshot or character from Star Wars, but George Lucas would still sue me for creating a "derived work".
Too many things can change in twenty years. The patented drug could be obsoleted by a new, cheaper, more effective drug. The entire social climate could change resulting in price controls on medicine. A new medical procedure could make the drug completely worthless. The foreign nations the pharmaceuticals were counting on for revenue could be overthrown and drug patents outlawed.
The only industry I can think of that looks more than twenty years into the future is real estate. Real estate holds solid predictable, generally increasing value. It comes with cost effective insurance. And in the U.S., the government is required to compensate you if they take it away. Even with real estate, mortgages rarely exceed 30 years, and long leases always come with an exit clause.
The cold harsh reality is, pharmaceutical companies really just want to retroactively extend their current patents. Let's hope the Supreme Court does the right thing in Eldred v. Reno this fall.
I've found that most court documents are a good read. The legal profession gets a bad rap because laws in generally are practically unreadable. However, most court briefs are surprisingly well written. They have to be in order to present a clear and convincing argument. Many successful lawyers go on to become judges and they take their writing skills with them.
While your little plan may be amusing, it is counter-productive. Next time an activist speaks out against copyright legislation, people will associate that activist with the 'pirates' who tried to get into a theater. People will then summarily disregard everything that activist has to say.
During the US-USSR space race, the United States had massive protests against racism, sexism, the draft, and the vietnam war. Does that mean we should have dropped everything to focus on those issues?
The fact is, there will always be domestic problems. No matter how hard we try, there will be crime. Under capitalism, there will always be poverty. If India waited until they solved all of their domestic problems, they would never get into space. Besides, a good space program could help lift some Indians out of poverty.
If they keep a record of every place you travel, and you just happen to be in the vicinity of most Athiests United gatherings, they can conclude with a fairly large degree of certainty, that your planned trip to Washington DC is to attend the planned Athiests United protest. They could block you and most other Athiests United members while blocking only a few people who are not associated with Athiests United.
They can't do that without breaking their own laws and throwing even (especially?) the right-wingers into a tizzy.
The last paragraph was to illustrate that our government has no qualms about breaking its own laws. As another example, suppose you're a government agency, and a gourt issues an order which you disagree with. Normally, you would file an appeal. In an unprecedented move earlier this week, the Bush administration simply refused to comply with a court order. I don't see any right-wingers going into a 'tizzy' over it.
The Supreme Court ruled on the Kyllo case last year and threw out the search warrant. The court defined a new "bright line" rule for using technology. The bright line rule says basically that the police can not monitor you with tools that are "not in general public use."
Incidently, where I live, the police were given a couple thermal imagers by the federal government a few months after that ruling.
It is entirely possible that two different files can have the same hash. SHa1 produces a 160-bit signature. If you have 2^161 unique documents, you are guaranteed to have at least 2^160 duplicate hashes. Hashing algorithms are meant to detect malicious tampering of files, and random errors. They are not meant to guarantee the uniqueness of a file.
Of course 2^161 is around 3x10^48, so the network won't have that many documents for a long, long time. However, the odds of finding a duplicate are much higher than most people would think, ala the birthday paradox (if you have a room of 23 people, there is over a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday). Similarily, if you have a hashing algorithm that maps into one quadrillion unique numbers (50 bits), you need around 40 million documents before the chance of a duplicate exceeds 50% (and 110 million documents before it exceeds 99%). I'm not going to calculate it for 160 bits (with 2 billion documents, the odds of a duplicate are less than 1x10-9, and I'd have to write a new program to go higher than that).
That's whats getting the RIAA so scared:P No longer can they infect files and make them the same file size/file name.
The RIAA can certainly claim that their file has the same size, name, and hash. You won't know for sure until you download the entire file and calculate its hash.
This is all about control. The record companies want internet radio to pay royalties, so the stations will have no choice but to accept payola from the record companies. The fact that internet radio stations tend to play independent music further threatens the RIAA.
I will say it again. This issue is not about royalties. It is about controlling the market and silencing the competition.
35 = 5 x 7
144 = 2^4 x 3^2
12,636 = 2^2 x 3^5 x 13
If you consider 1 prime, there are infinate possible ways to represent the prime factors:
35 = 1 x 5 x 7
35 = 1^3456 x 5 x 7
There are a number of proofs that assume the prime factorization theorem is true, and the prime factorization theorem assumes that 1 is not prime. If you go off and assume that 1 is prime, you have to re-evaluate all proofs that depend on the prime factorization theorem. Would it make a difference? I don't know, but it brings a whole lot of math into question.
This brings up an interesting point. Suppose the next service pack to Windows 2000 comes out which:
Is RedHat now obligated to make Samba compatible with the new Windows domain protocol? The user pretty much has to install the service pack. Who do they blame when things don't work? This is the United States, they're going to blame someone.
That will stop the RIAA and MPAA for sure! Oh wait, they're both non-profit organizations.
That could actually be done. Using the system layed out by the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, you could construct a system that would only work if the code is authenticated by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). All of the code could be open sourced, but only certain implementations would be signed. If your code isn't signed, the computer will refuse to run it.
The protocol could encrypt all communications so no one can 'sniff' the contents. The protocol could also require you to cryptographically authenticate that you are running trusted code before it lets you access content.
I have a problem with this. It means that you have to get permission from whoever holds the master key(s) in order to create a compatible client. The key holder will dictate the terms under which you may develop your client. It's kind of like the british government deciding who may or may not use a printing press.
An object with 10.0kg of mass would apply a force of 98 (kgm/s)/s at the surface of the earth, which is 98.0 newtons. An object with 20.0kg of mass would weigh 196 newtons. On the moon, a 20.0kg object would weight 32.7 newtons.
1000g is 9800(m/s)/s. In a gravitational field of 1000g, a 10.0kg object would apply a force of 98,000 newtons. That's 22,000 pounds.
On a more positive note, people with this gene could be made aware of it, and they could learn how to manage their aggression, much like parapalegics learn to live with a wheelchair, and schizophrenics learn to recognize when they are are holucinating.
Let it be known. Advance warning is a courtesy, not a right.
H is within his/her rights, even if s/he isn't very nice. H has a constitutional right to criticize a product. If V doesn't like it, they should have developed a secure product in the first place. H is not wrong, s/he is simply holding V accountable for their flawed product. Furthermore, public disclosure encourages V to hurry up and fix the exploit, rather than waiting to integrate it into the next service pack.
V is wrong. V does not have the right to sue someone for truthfully criticising their product; nor should they. V is not right, because their product is still left at the mercy of professional crackers while their customers are left in the dark about what to watch out for.
Only if the vendor does nothing in these weeks, only then the report/exploit/whatever should be made public.
The report should be made public even if the vendor does fix the exploit. If a vendor sells a product with hundreds of security holes, and fixes them one-by-one as reports come in, the public should know about it. I would certainly like to know if the system I'm buying has had 300 security holes discovered in the past year.
Don't we have laws requiring advertisments to be obvious? If an ad is not obvious, isn't it required to specifically state "paid advertisement"? This certainly takes the role of a paid advertisement.
You could apply a similar system to ordinary EULAs. If the license grants you new rights, use a picture of lady liberty. If the license restricts you more than copyright alone, use a picture of lady liberty in hand cuffs. If the license allows spying, use a picture of someone in the shower as seen through binoculars. If the license allows the copyright holder to change the terms, use a picture of the devil holding up the contract.
How will this work for a letter of marquee? This law basically states, "this action is legal". The courts can't throw someone in jail for doing something the law specifically permits. If the Supreme Court refuses to enforce this law, they have accomplished nothing.
It would seem to me, that in order for the Supreme Court to rule this law unconstitutional, they would have to rule the entire computer hacking code unconstitutional.
I am not a lawyer. I may be way off base here.
It is true that Felton was threatened with a law suit if he were to present non-functional speech on weaknesses in SDMI, but the RIAA would have gotten no where with a law suit, because Felton's speech would not function on its own.
Sklyarov was not arrested for speaking at DefCon. He was arrested because his company sold a copy of its DMCA violating software in the United States, and because he held the copyright on that software.
You can read section 1201 for yourselves. It says:
By the same token, you can publish specs on how to circumvent macrovision. You just can't traffic in the device itself.
I am not a lawyer. If you plan on taking my advice, talk to a lawyer first.