This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
Because taking the piss is far more amusing to us in our juvenile little minds.
In all seriousness though, the big problem is that GNU Hurd has just been going on too long. You might notice that many people are comparing it to Duke Nukem, this is because they have both been successively over hyped for too many years. It is like people crying wolf, eventually the would be rescuers just stop listening and let you get eaten.
I started reading this thinking that GNU Hurd had finally found some developers an was on course for a stable release in the near future. After looking around the site it seems that you only have 4 or 5 active developers and are in dire need of more people to make the Wheezy release. If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility. You are far more likely to bring developers to the system by that than by simply posting a projected release date which may or may not be achievable.
You are right though when you say the slashdot community has changed a great deal as it certainly has. But some of the people here are still exactly the people you would like to bring to your projects, either GNU Step or Hurd or whatever. The trick is to appeal to them and ignore the mass of immature wanna bees you are so critical of.
The whole problem with hurd has never been a technical shortcoming, it has always been that the people leading the project lacked the people skills needed. Thats certainly not to say that Linus is perfect in this regard, but something certainly made more people throw time at his pet Linux project all those years ago.
Why not just leave the shuttle there? It went up with just 4 astronauts, surely a soyuz capsule can bring them back. Let's just leave the shuttle there as a large-scale escape pod and science area. Why not do that with all the shuttles? Do we really need that many of them showing up in museums? Is the shuttle any less space-worth over the long term than the rest of the ISS?
Because then it might fall into the wrong hands. I bet China would love to get their hands on one even now and in a few years Russia might be the only partner of the ISS consortium keeping their bits up. In that case they could always try sending the docked shuttle back to earth and then selling it to China to fund their continued program.
China would then do what they have been brilliant at lately, they would copy all the technology they could via disassembly and use it to kick start their own project. They would no doubt do it in such a way that they kept as much of the expertise as possible in house.
You must be a card carrying Republicantard, or at least, a bible humper.
Its a shame you used that word to describe Afghanistan, it no doubt gave someone an excuse to down mod your post as flamebait even though you are actually making a very worthy point: The amount we spend on wars far exceeds the amounts we spend on space exploration, especially when you consider that the money spent on Shuttles took 30 years whereas we have spent the money on Afghanistan and Iraq far more quickly.
Also, insulting all republicans probably didn't help your point. Hopefully this post will now actually show up to people browsing at 1 and above so they can still see your post and make up their own minds. In future though, you might want to try and make the same point in a more level headed manner if you actually want to convince anyone that your point has any merit.
This will actually have advantages as the station is currently at a slightly lower altitude than would be ideal in order for the shuttle to reach it. As for beyond 2015, this is not really decided as the station was originally planned for de-orbiting then anyway. Bush was very keen on seeing it down and had planned to remove the US bits then regardless and concentrate on US only ventures. Russia definitely wants to keep it going beyond then and has plans to keep there bits up regardless of if the rest is gone. Obama has now opened up to the idea of keeping the ISS up a little bit longer too.
It seems that delivering supplies to the ISS is not going to be the big problem without the shuttle, the big issue is going to be what the shuttle was really designed for: Ferrying people there and back.
Secondly, there are many of us who rely on producing content protected by copyright in order to put food in our mouths and pay the rent. Take the example of computer games, these take many man hours to produce initially from many different people but can be infinitely copied once they are a finished product. Without the concept of copyright you could buy a computer game, then sell it on as many times as you wanted without sharing any of the vast profits you made with the people who produced the product originally. Since you did not have the overheads of actually producing the game in the first place you could sell it far cheaper than the original authors and so more people would buy it from you than them. This would obviously not be any fairer than the current system.
Firstly, copyright originated as a system of censorship. If your book didn't have a copyright mark, you weren't allowed to publish it. Such marks were only granted to government friendly or neutral works.
Which just means the first few copies could be priced very highly or the game is not released unless a certain number of people pre-order it. It's not like there is just one possible way of doing things. You've made a false dichotomy, the way creative content is sold and supported now in the mainstream or no way. There are other methods that do not require an intellectual monopoly. By having free adaptation and modification, one can argue that a lack of copyright will lead to more creative content being available. The works of Shakespeare and the greatest classical composers were created without the protection of copyright. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote without copyright.
Check out Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine or Against Intellectual Property by Stephan N Kinsella for some very cogent free-market arguments against copyright.
Firstly, I do not care how the system of copyright originated, I care what it evolved into. We started off as sea dwelling microbes but that bares little relation to us now.
Secondly Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote before the printing press so there was far less need for copyright in his time with regard to books. The big thing that has changed recently is the ease with which things can be infinitely copied. You also completely ignored me mentioning computer games, this analogy was chosen specifically because it took more that one person working on them to produce the finished product.
Coincidentally, this is also Stallman's official stance on copyright - he would agree to ditch copyright altogether, but only if the law would enforce copyleft (i.e. source availability) universally instead.
I knew there was a better link regarding copyright and RMS than the one I was posting, thanks for reminding me of it
The original sin was to invent copyright in the first place.
The concept of copyright in itself is not such a bad thing. Firstly it is the cornerstone on top of which the GPL and a large amount of open source software is built:
Without copyright a company could take open source software and utterly violate the GPL without the original author having any remedy what so ever.
Secondly, there are many of us who rely on producing content protected by copyright in order to put food in our mouths and pay the rent. Take the example of computer games, these take many man hours to produce initially from many different people but can be infinitely copied once they are a finished product. Without the concept of copyright you could buy a computer game, then sell it on as many times as you wanted without sharing any of the vast profits you made with the people who produced the product originally. Since you did not have the overheads of actually producing the game in the first place you could sell it far cheaper than the original authors and so more people would buy it from you than them. This would obviously not be any fairer than the current system.
Under a capitalist system without copyright law this is exactly what would happen too since the most ardent capitalists find any way they can of making as much money as possible. The only way to prevent this without some sort of copyright law is to remove money from the equation but that requires the people who made the game in the first place to not need money either and this would only be the case in a pure socialist society.
Since we are not living in a pure Socialist world with no money we need some sort of way to ensure that people can produce content like books, games, music and films and still some sort of reward. What's more, they need to be sure they will get a reward if they produce something popular in order to have an incentive to do it and the means to produce more after the first once is published.
The only argument is therefore if there should be exemptions to copyright law for certain things like books covering medicines and healing and how long copyright should be protected. I am not making any suggestions for either of these, just suggesting that it is not as easy as scrubbing all concepts of copyright from our law books, something you seem to be suggesting by calling copyright an original sin.
I would actually have liked to see certain computer games restricted to adult sale only.
The US, it's true, uses voluntary, industry-created ratings for both movies and video games, but there's no evidence that this system isn't working. (If anything, it's working too well, as there's no legal way to appeal a rating.) The only possible loophole this opens is that a game seller (or theater owner*) taken to court might try to argue that the rating for a specific work was too high, and the specific work should have been made available to children, and that's going to be tough to prove in most cases. I don't know of a single instance where this was tried.
The real problem is that some crazies still think video games are for kids, and logically infer that all mature video games must therefore be an attempt to sell age-inappropriate material to kids. No rating system will satisfy these loonies. If you've got a suggestion for something that will, I'm sure we'd be happy to hear it.
* The US version of a theatre owner.:)
I did make a suggestion, it was making the rating system legally binding then using this to beat the fundamentalists into the concept that certain games are not for kids. At the moment they seem to ignore this very important fact but if the ratings system had legal weight they would have to take it more seriously. It would also allow them to go and file a crime report with the police if their kids bought these adult only games, that would at least give them an outlet for their frustration without them having to set up camp outside wallmart and shout loudly.
The local police could also set up an easy sting operation to find retailers breaching the law and get an easy prosecution to help their crime figures. They might even be able to get a hefty fine out of the retailer to cover the cost of the operation if the law was done right. This is exactly how alcohol sales work in the US if I am not mistaken? The only people who lose are retailers who flout the law.
I would actually have liked to see certain computer games restricted to adult sale only. The average gamer is apparently now 37 years old so why should companies not be able to produce games that are aimed exclusively at adults? If a parent wants to show let their kid play Doom or whatever then let them but force the parent to make the choice by purchasing it for them.
By allowing certain games to be restricted to adults we may get more games that were produced exclusively for adults. Some of them might be quite good. Currently if a game goes too far in this direction then it risks the distributor refusing to distribute it for fear of the moaning minnies demonstrating outside their shops or whatever.
Here in the UK we have a ratings system for both movies and video games. This results in many films and games being rated as unfit for children and not for sale to them. They are still available in shops on the high street and supermarkets, its just that the retailer has to look at the person buying it and make a judgement about their age. If they are unsure they ask for ID and refuse sale if they don't see any. Many countries use a similar system for alcohol, guns and many other things.
While this is by no means perfect it does have advantages. The main one is that if something unwholesome is sold to a minor, then the producer's hands are clean. They just point to the retailer who is clearly in the wrong since all adult only material has to be labelled with the appropriate age in big letters on the cover / box / whatever.
I can't help but feel that the current system helps the fundamentalists who feel that this content should be unavailable to everyone since they can use the think of the children excuse directly against the producers of content. If a decent, legally enforceable age restriction system was in place then they would have to concentrate on people letting minors access the material rather than using the same argument to try and attack everyone having access to it. They would certainly find other avenues to attack the people producing stuff they disliked, but by allowing the producers to say clearly that kids should not have access to this as well then it would make it harder to ban it outright.
The current copyright system is broken, it's ethically bankrupt, so we no longer have an obligation to hold up our end of the social contract.
So am I free to grab an open source program, make a few usability improvements to help it appeal to the masses then flog it for a massive profit without distributing my changes back to the community? The only thing stopping me from doing this at the moment is copyright law. This is one example where copyright is actually a good thing so we need to be a bit careful before we just strike down all IP laws without anything to replace them.
I actually agree with your sig when you say "The free market has failed. Copyright is theft." as I am a socialist at heart. I do no think the solution is to just change the copyright laws, I think we need to re-examine capitalism as a whole but when I say this to most people I know who download large amounts of content from bit torrent sites and such they are usually fairly pro-capitalist except when it comes to music or dvd's they download from the internet.
Well, if it then vaporized the item in front of it, it might be analogous to theft I guess. Theft is really more about depriving something from someone else than gaining it for yourself; in this case, the outlet still has the physical item.
The problem is people seem to think that if it's not theft, it's not "bad". The accurate description for this activity is "copyright infringement". It opens you to civil liability. It can in some circumstances be a criminal offense. Saying something is copyright infringement isn't saying "this is good, go do it", it's an accurate description of the action.
The argument for saying it is theft is because you have "stolen" the money from the copyright holder that they set as being the price to obtain a copy of their work. Not sure if I agree with the strict definition of it being "theft" but like everyone else says, it is certainly immoral.
The defence is that the diagnosis would fail the "cruel and unusual punishment test" element of "extradition". Which is intended to prevent extradition to counties that allow capital punishment or torture.
Wrong person!!!!!! You and the previous poster are both talking about Gary Mckinnon, the guy who went hacking US government computers looking for evidence of UFO's. This discussion is about Ryan Cleary, the guy arrested this week for organising denial of service attacks on the SOCA (our FBI), British Phonographic Institute (our RIAA) and the London based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. There is not currently any talk of extradition as he has already been charged with offences here in the UK.
did you not finish reading the post? It'll be more than made up for in savings elsewhere.
Your post was 2 lines long and you made no mention of where any money would be saved. You did say something about lawyers winning but they are currently paid for by both sides of the patent dispute, not the government.
It is certainly not 100% safe when smoked but breathing fumes from burning anything is bad for you. Just breathing in fumes from burnt paper will probably give you cancer if you do it often enough.
It is on the hand far safer when eaten and since the original poster did not say anything about how it had to be consumed to be 100% safe they might have a point, although they certainly could have put it better.
Perhaps it's time we demanded of these so-called rights holders - "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them - to conclusively prove to us that granting them these copyrights has actually done anything at all to encourage further creativity? If they can't prove that, then we should revoke their rights and let them scratch in the dirt for a living like the rest of us. We've been presuming for far too long that copyrights (and patents) actually function as intended.
Its worth remembering that the enforcement of the GPL and other licences on which open source software is built relies on copyright law:
The IWF work by forced proxying for sites that are on the ban list. Then the proxy can just filter out the individual pages of a site that they object to.
Obviously whatever they do will be possible to bypass, but the idea is just to make this as tricky as you can without causing too much fuss. Most people in this country did not know the IWF existed at all until they made a complete screw up by proxying all traffic to wikipedia through their servers. The idea of this will just be to make it slightly harder to obtain hooky content, not impossible.
If he had a modicum of common sense he would steer very well clear of people engaging in activities that are illegal in the country in which he resided. Alternatively he would realise that just by knowingly providing a place where people could discuss illegal activities english law would consider him an accomplice. The english legal system does not have any decent protection of freedom of speech and we have no bill of rights. The police in this country do not even need to ask a judge before writing themselves a search and seizure warrant any more.
So, you have no more pubs left in the UK?
I see.
We have pubs, but if you open a pub specifically aimed at clients who all flout the law then you will be closed down fairly quickly. Any pub or club that finds itself on a police shitlist will not be open very long before they object to it having a licence to sell alcohol. If the police object at a licensing renewal then usually the license is withdrawn.
The fun thing is, Ryans Role is pretty clear, he was the IRC server host. That's it, so by extension the FBI and UK believe he is now part of Lulzsec.
If he had a modicum of common sense he would steer very well clear of people engaging in activities that are illegal in the country in which he resided. Alternatively he would realise that just by knowingly providing a place where people could discuss illegal activities english law would consider him an accomplice. The english legal system does not have any decent protection of freedom of speech and we have no bill of rights. The police in this country do not even need to ask a judge before writing themselves a search and seizure warrant any more.
The police in the UK also have the power to demand that you decrypt something and if you refuse or have forgotten the key you used then they can throw your arse in prison for up to 5 years. They can even now arrest you under the terrorism act and keep your in prison for a period of 28 days without bothering to charge you with any criminal offence. Anybody can be arrested under the Terrorism Act and it is frequently used against people who are not suspected of any sort of violent crime.
I am not saying any of this is a good thing, but it is the way it is and seemingly not a single one of our political parties is interested in changing it. The only way any British people not liking this can escape these laws is by leaving the country and sending back your passport after you have found another country to take you. We can try and change them, but since Britain is a democracy and the British public keep electing clowns that support these laws what can we do?
In light of all of this most people simply knuckle down and try and steer well clear of any sort of run in with the police. This is by far the most sensible course of action unless you have an infinite source of money to live on. Thanks to that risk of 28 days in prison and obviously the sack from your employer it is a very serious gamble to do anything that would expose you to this, anybody with a family to support simply cannot risk it.
Even before you have a family like this guy there is the problem of having your name and photo plastered all over the papers and hence making many companies view hiring you as a risk. This guy has screwed up an IT career before it had even begun. Unless he can somehow demonstrate to a potential employer that he is head and shoulders above every other person attending an interview for a particular role he is not going to get the job.
Of course, that is assuming he does not get extradited to the US and repeatedly gang raped in prison there for the next 60 years. The only good thing about the UK from his perspective at the moment is that this is less likely to happen in UK jails.
Sooner or later Google will need to do some sort of Quality Control on their store, or they'll just keep making the Marketplace look even less trustworthy and push people to the Amazon store.
Alternatively those of us who do not mind researching apps using the internet before we install them will carry on buying Android phones. I treat my phone like my home PC, I install stuff I trust after some basic research. Since Apple are not infallible I am more willing to trust my own judgement than theirs. If I screw up, I know to blame and can learn from my mistakes, if Apple screw up I just have to trust them learning their lesson on blind faith.
I understand what you're saying, but (despite your snide confidence) I still think you're missing the point: there is no children's section!
Wow, all this over the idea of providing a version of youtube targeted at children... I wonder if Sesame Street met such resistance on/. when it launched (how old is that show?)?
Sesame street did not ask the general public to send in their own clips.
Youtube only exists because Google allow you to publish stuff without them going through a manual approval process. If Google did exercise editorial control in order to make sure a clip was safe for kids then they would also have to make sure that the person posting each clip was the legal copyright holder for all of the content on the clip (including soundtrack). This would turn youtube from a site that required very little human input on Google part, into a site that required a full time staff of thousands, most of them purely engaged in copyright verification. These thousands of staff would kill the ad supported model they use stone dead.
The whole Web 2.0 thing is about user contribution, but there are many things that this is not applicable for and one of them is child safe websites. Any child safe area of youtube would have to be based around a completely different model that has never been one Google has aimed for.
If you want a child safe version of Google or Youtube, then Yahoo would be the people to ask since they launched in the 90's around the idea that human beings exercised editorial control over results and content. Google have always been about NOT exercising any editorial control over search results or crap posted to youtube, so why would they do a 180 now and launch something that can only be done by human beings? There will NEVER be a Google Kids for this reason, it is simply not their business model for anything.
Right, in the library, (hopefully) not in the children's section...
But the someone further up this thread was saying that if a child wanders out of the childrens section of the library then library staff are not supposed to say anything to them, that is why I mentioned it.
The exact words they used in their post were:
"According to the ALA's Freedom to Read statement, librarians should not be censoring what children read, either. If a child you've dropped off at the library wants to wander into young adult or the regular adult stacks and start paging through books, the librarians should only be stepping in if the book is being mishandled. "
That is why they could just come across a book like the one I mentioned. Librarians should not be relied on to enforce parental values, I was actually encouraged to read Lady Chatterleys Lover as a child as I come from a fairly broad minded family . If you have a more traditional view of what children should be exposed to then you need to be the person enforcing it, not your local librarian.
The same things goes for Google, their job is to make information easily accessible to everyone, not make moral judgements on what information should be hidden. YouTube is not the analogous to the childrens section, it is closer to the library as a whole. Maybe youtube should be cut up into different websites like poptube, craptube and kidtube, but this is exactly what would open google to a boat load of litigation from disgruntled parents when their moral compass diverges from the parent in question.
Maybe you should have spent more time in a library yourself to brush up on your reading skills:)
Yes, but at least you don't see "top 100 sex positions to blow your mind" books strewn about the children's aisles, which is analagous to the current situation on youtube and the primary concern of the op.
But in most libraries you will find a copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" which is a very sexually explicit book indeed. I remember reading it as a kid and it was certainly somewhat of an eye opener. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover
I don't trust Google with my sensitive data because I assume it will be analyzed, packaged, and sold to marketers and advertisers. I have some faith that it is anonymized first, but even still I don't like it and you have to wonder how anonymous the data actually is.
I would rather retain 100% control of access to my data.
If you think any company will NOT sell any data they can regarding you on the free market you are living on cloud cuckoo land. Companies all exist to turn a profit, and if data regarding you is profitable then you can be sure they will sell it.
The word "pirate" has been hijacked from the meaning of robbing ships at sea using violent threat to meaning copying a CD. This hijacking is convenient to the record industry, but I object to its use here. I do think that robbing ships at sea using violent threats is wrong.
And the word "hacker" has been hijacked to only mean someone who breaks into computers without the owners permission, but fighting against this is like pissing into the wind. Once a critical mass (majority) of people start using a particular word a particular way it has entered common use and there is nothing that can be done. Providing all parties to a particular conversation know what is actually being meant, the specifics of the words being used do not really matter.
Since slashdot is a very geeky website I generally assume that most people here feel the same way about the words "hacker" and "pirate" so it does not really matter. It is like moaning about other peoples poor grammar because that is the only way you can say anything against the argument they are putting forward.
Slashdot Mirror
This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
Because taking the piss is far more amusing to us in our juvenile little minds.
In all seriousness though, the big problem is that GNU Hurd has just been going on too long. You might notice that many people are comparing it to Duke Nukem, this is because they have both been successively over hyped for too many years. It is like people crying wolf, eventually the would be rescuers just stop listening and let you get eaten.
I started reading this thinking that GNU Hurd had finally found some developers an was on course for a stable release in the near future. After looking around the site it seems that you only have 4 or 5 active developers and are in dire need of more people to make the Wheezy release. If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility. You are far more likely to bring developers to the system by that than by simply posting a projected release date which may or may not be achievable.
You are right though when you say the slashdot community has changed a great deal as it certainly has. But some of the people here are still exactly the people you would like to bring to your projects, either GNU Step or Hurd or whatever. The trick is to appeal to them and ignore the mass of immature wanna bees you are so critical of.
The whole problem with hurd has never been a technical shortcoming, it has always been that the people leading the project lacked the people skills needed. Thats certainly not to say that Linus is perfect in this regard, but something certainly made more people throw time at his pet Linux project all those years ago.
Why not just leave the shuttle there? It went up with just 4 astronauts, surely a soyuz capsule can bring them back. Let's just leave the shuttle there as a large-scale escape pod and science area. Why not do that with all the shuttles? Do we really need that many of them showing up in museums? Is the shuttle any less space-worth over the long term than the rest of the ISS?
Because then it might fall into the wrong hands. I bet China would love to get their hands on one even now and in a few years Russia might be the only partner of the ISS consortium keeping their bits up. In that case they could always try sending the docked shuttle back to earth and then selling it to China to fund their continued program.
China would then do what they have been brilliant at lately, they would copy all the technology they could via disassembly and use it to kick start their own project. They would no doubt do it in such a way that they kept as much of the expertise as possible in house.
Taking stock of the 30 years of the shuttle program...how else these dollars could have been used...
The cost of the shuttle program over 30 years ($196 billion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program) could have funded 0.163 wars in Iraq and Bumfuckistan ($1,218 billion - http://costofwar.com/en/). A much worthier cause, killing brown people, no?
There is not much we have benefited.
You must be a card carrying Republicantard, or at least, a bible humper.
Its a shame you used that word to describe Afghanistan, it no doubt gave someone an excuse to down mod your post as flamebait even though you are actually making a very worthy point: The amount we spend on wars far exceeds the amounts we spend on space exploration, especially when you consider that the money spent on Shuttles took 30 years whereas we have spent the money on Afghanistan and Iraq far more quickly.
Also, insulting all republicans probably didn't help your point. Hopefully this post will now actually show up to people browsing at 1 and above so they can still see your post and make up their own minds. In future though, you might want to try and make the same point in a more level headed manner if you actually want to convince anyone that your point has any merit.
how are more supplies going to get there?
The majority are going to be delivered by the ATV for the next 4 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle
This will actually have advantages as the station is currently at a slightly lower altitude than would be ideal in order for the shuttle to reach it. As for beyond 2015, this is not really decided as the station was originally planned for de-orbiting then anyway. Bush was very keen on seeing it down and had planned to remove the US bits then regardless and concentrate on US only ventures. Russia definitely wants to keep it going beyond then and has plans to keep there bits up regardless of if the rest is gone. Obama has now opened up to the idea of keeping the ISS up a little bit longer too.
It seems that delivering supplies to the ISS is not going to be the big problem without the shuttle, the big issue is going to be what the shuttle was really designed for: Ferrying people there and back.
Secondly, there are many of us who rely on producing content protected by copyright in order to put food in our mouths and pay the rent. Take the example of computer games, these take many man hours to produce initially from many different people but can be infinitely copied once they are a finished product. Without the concept of copyright you could buy a computer game, then sell it on as many times as you wanted without sharing any of the vast profits you made with the people who produced the product originally. Since you did not have the overheads of actually producing the game in the first place you could sell it far cheaper than the original authors and so more people would buy it from you than them. This would obviously not be any fairer than the current system.
Firstly, copyright originated as a system of censorship. If your book didn't have a copyright mark, you weren't allowed to publish it. Such marks were only granted to government friendly or neutral works.
Which just means the first few copies could be priced very highly or the game is not released unless a certain number of people pre-order it. It's not like there is just one possible way of doing things. You've made a false dichotomy, the way creative content is sold and supported now in the mainstream or no way. There are other methods that do not require an intellectual monopoly. By having free adaptation and modification, one can argue that a lack of copyright will lead to more creative content being available. The works of Shakespeare and the greatest classical composers were created without the protection of copyright. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote without copyright.
Check out Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine or Against Intellectual Property by Stephan N Kinsella for some very cogent free-market arguments against copyright.
Firstly, I do not care how the system of copyright originated, I care what it evolved into. We started off as sea dwelling microbes but that bares little relation to us now.
Secondly Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote before the printing press so there was far less need for copyright in his time with regard to books. The big thing that has changed recently is the ease with which things can be infinitely copied. You also completely ignored me mentioning computer games, this analogy was chosen specifically because it took more that one person working on them to produce the finished product.
Coincidentally, this is also Stallman's official stance on copyright - he would agree to ditch copyright altogether, but only if the law would enforce copyleft (i.e. source availability) universally instead.
I knew there was a better link regarding copyright and RMS than the one I was posting, thanks for reminding me of it
The original sin was to invent copyright in the first place.
The concept of copyright in itself is not such a bad thing. Firstly it is the cornerstone on top of which the GPL and a large amount of open source software is built:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html
Without copyright a company could take open source software and utterly violate the GPL without the original author having any remedy what so ever.
Secondly, there are many of us who rely on producing content protected by copyright in order to put food in our mouths and pay the rent. Take the example of computer games, these take many man hours to produce initially from many different people but can be infinitely copied once they are a finished product. Without the concept of copyright you could buy a computer game, then sell it on as many times as you wanted without sharing any of the vast profits you made with the people who produced the product originally. Since you did not have the overheads of actually producing the game in the first place you could sell it far cheaper than the original authors and so more people would buy it from you than them. This would obviously not be any fairer than the current system.
Under a capitalist system without copyright law this is exactly what would happen too since the most ardent capitalists find any way they can of making as much money as possible. The only way to prevent this without some sort of copyright law is to remove money from the equation but that requires the people who made the game in the first place to not need money either and this would only be the case in a pure socialist society.
Since we are not living in a pure Socialist world with no money we need some sort of way to ensure that people can produce content like books, games, music and films and still some sort of reward. What's more, they need to be sure they will get a reward if they produce something popular in order to have an incentive to do it and the means to produce more after the first once is published.
The only argument is therefore if there should be exemptions to copyright law for certain things like books covering medicines and healing and how long copyright should be protected. I am not making any suggestions for either of these, just suggesting that it is not as easy as scrubbing all concepts of copyright from our law books, something you seem to be suggesting by calling copyright an original sin.
I would actually have liked to see certain computer games restricted to adult sale only.
The US, it's true, uses voluntary, industry-created ratings for both movies and video games, but there's no evidence that this system isn't working. (If anything, it's working too well, as there's no legal way to appeal a rating.) The only possible loophole this opens is that a game seller (or theater owner*) taken to court might try to argue that the rating for a specific work was too high, and the specific work should have been made available to children, and that's going to be tough to prove in most cases. I don't know of a single instance where this was tried.
The real problem is that some crazies still think video games are for kids, and logically infer that all mature video games must therefore be an attempt to sell age-inappropriate material to kids. No rating system will satisfy these loonies. If you've got a suggestion for something that will, I'm sure we'd be happy to hear it.
* The US version of a theatre owner. :)
I did make a suggestion, it was making the rating system legally binding then using this to beat the fundamentalists into the concept that certain games are not for kids. At the moment they seem to ignore this very important fact but if the ratings system had legal weight they would have to take it more seriously. It would also allow them to go and file a crime report with the police if their kids bought these adult only games, that would at least give them an outlet for their frustration without them having to set up camp outside wallmart and shout loudly.
The local police could also set up an easy sting operation to find retailers breaching the law and get an easy prosecution to help their crime figures. They might even be able to get a hefty fine out of the retailer to cover the cost of the operation if the law was done right. This is exactly how alcohol sales work in the US if I am not mistaken? The only people who lose are retailers who flout the law.
I would actually have liked to see certain computer games restricted to adult sale only. The average gamer is apparently now 37 years old so why should companies not be able to produce games that are aimed exclusively at adults? If a parent wants to show let their kid play Doom or whatever then let them but force the parent to make the choice by purchasing it for them.
By allowing certain games to be restricted to adults we may get more games that were produced exclusively for adults. Some of them might be quite good. Currently if a game goes too far in this direction then it risks the distributor refusing to distribute it for fear of the moaning minnies demonstrating outside their shops or whatever.
Here in the UK we have a ratings system for both movies and video games. This results in many films and games being rated as unfit for children and not for sale to them. They are still available in shops on the high street and supermarkets, its just that the retailer has to look at the person buying it and make a judgement about their age. If they are unsure they ask for ID and refuse sale if they don't see any. Many countries use a similar system for alcohol, guns and many other things.
While this is by no means perfect it does have advantages. The main one is that if something unwholesome is sold to a minor, then the producer's hands are clean. They just point to the retailer who is clearly in the wrong since all adult only material has to be labelled with the appropriate age in big letters on the cover / box / whatever.
I can't help but feel that the current system helps the fundamentalists who feel that this content should be unavailable to everyone since they can use the think of the children excuse directly against the producers of content. If a decent, legally enforceable age restriction system was in place then they would have to concentrate on people letting minors access the material rather than using the same argument to try and attack everyone having access to it. They would certainly find other avenues to attack the people producing stuff they disliked, but by allowing the producers to say clearly that kids should not have access to this as well then it would make it harder to ban it outright.
The current copyright system is broken, it's ethically bankrupt, so we no longer have an obligation to hold up our end of the social contract.
So am I free to grab an open source program, make a few usability improvements to help it appeal to the masses then flog it for a massive profit without distributing my changes back to the community? The only thing stopping me from doing this at the moment is copyright law. This is one example where copyright is actually a good thing so we need to be a bit careful before we just strike down all IP laws without anything to replace them.
I actually agree with your sig when you say "The free market has failed. Copyright is theft." as I am a socialist at heart. I do no think the solution is to just change the copyright laws, I think we need to re-examine capitalism as a whole but when I say this to most people I know who download large amounts of content from bit torrent sites and such they are usually fairly pro-capitalist except when it comes to music or dvd's they download from the internet.
Well, if it then vaporized the item in front of it, it might be analogous to theft I guess. Theft is really more about depriving something from someone else than gaining it for yourself; in this case, the outlet still has the physical item.
The problem is people seem to think that if it's not theft, it's not "bad". The accurate description for this activity is "copyright infringement". It opens you to civil liability. It can in some circumstances be a criminal offense. Saying something is copyright infringement isn't saying "this is good, go do it", it's an accurate description of the action.
The argument for saying it is theft is because you have "stolen" the money from the copyright holder that they set as being the price to obtain a copy of their work. Not sure if I agree with the strict definition of it being "theft" but like everyone else says, it is certainly immoral.
The defence is that the diagnosis would fail the "cruel and unusual punishment test" element of "extradition". Which is intended to prevent extradition to counties that allow capital punishment or torture.
Wrong person!!!!!! You and the previous poster are both talking about Gary Mckinnon, the guy who went hacking US government computers looking for evidence of UFO's. This discussion is about Ryan Cleary, the guy arrested this week for organising denial of service attacks on the SOCA (our FBI), British Phonographic Institute (our RIAA) and the London based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. There is not currently any talk of extradition as he has already been charged with offences here in the UK.
did you not finish reading the post? It'll be more than made up for in savings elsewhere.
Your post was 2 lines long and you made no mention of where any money would be saved. You did say something about lawyers winning but they are currently paid for by both sides of the patent dispute, not the government.
100% Safe? Really? I guess there is some magical property of marijuana smoke that heals your lungs as you inhale it. Awesome.
It is far better for you than the crap they are allowed to put in normal cigarettes:
http://quitsmoking.about.com/cs/nicotineinhaler/a/cigingredients.htm
It is certainly not 100% safe when smoked but breathing fumes from burning anything is bad for you. Just breathing in fumes from burnt paper will probably give you cancer if you do it often enough.
It is on the hand far safer when eaten and since the original poster did not say anything about how it had to be consumed to be 100% safe they might have a point, although they certainly could have put it better.
Pay the PTO examiners $500k Pay them $1M, attract the best and brightest possible.
Since these guys are paid with our taxes I assume you are willing to pay double the amount of income tax to cover this massive pay hike?
Perhaps it's time we demanded of these so-called rights holders - "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them - to conclusively prove to us that granting them these copyrights has actually done anything at all to encourage further creativity? If they can't prove that, then we should revoke their rights and let them scratch in the dirt for a living like the rest of us. We've been presuming for far too long that copyrights (and patents) actually function as intended.
Its worth remembering that the enforcement of the GPL and other licences on which open source software is built relies on copyright law:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html
Maybe you are saying that each copyrighted work should be individually examined but that was not made clear in your post.
As a UK resident I have heard a little more mentioned about this. There is a link below basically saying they are going to use the IWF as a model:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8419812/ISPs-discuss-central-blacklisting-body-for-piracy-sites.html
The IWF work by forced proxying for sites that are on the ban list. Then the proxy can just filter out the individual pages of a site that they object to.
Obviously whatever they do will be possible to bypass, but the idea is just to make this as tricky as you can without causing too much fuss. Most people in this country did not know the IWF existed at all until they made a complete screw up by proxying all traffic to wikipedia through their servers. The idea of this will just be to make it slightly harder to obtain hooky content, not impossible.
If he had a modicum of common sense he would steer very well clear of people engaging in activities that are illegal in the country in which he resided. Alternatively he would realise that just by knowingly providing a place where people could discuss illegal activities english law would consider him an accomplice. The english legal system does not have any decent protection of freedom of speech and we have no bill of rights. The police in this country do not even need to ask a judge before writing themselves a search and seizure warrant any more.
So, you have no more pubs left in the UK?
I see.
We have pubs, but if you open a pub specifically aimed at clients who all flout the law then you will be closed down fairly quickly. Any pub or club that finds itself on a police shitlist will not be open very long before they object to it having a licence to sell alcohol. If the police object at a licensing renewal then usually the license is withdrawn.
The fun thing is, Ryans Role is pretty clear, he was the IRC server host. That's it, so by extension the FBI and UK believe he is now part of Lulzsec.
If he had a modicum of common sense he would steer very well clear of people engaging in activities that are illegal in the country in which he resided. Alternatively he would realise that just by knowingly providing a place where people could discuss illegal activities english law would consider him an accomplice. The english legal system does not have any decent protection of freedom of speech and we have no bill of rights. The police in this country do not even need to ask a judge before writing themselves a search and seizure warrant any more.
The police in the UK also have the power to demand that you decrypt something and if you refuse or have forgotten the key you used then they can throw your arse in prison for up to 5 years. They can even now arrest you under the terrorism act and keep your in prison for a period of 28 days without bothering to charge you with any criminal offence. Anybody can be arrested under the Terrorism Act and it is frequently used against people who are not suspected of any sort of violent crime.
I am not saying any of this is a good thing, but it is the way it is and seemingly not a single one of our political parties is interested in changing it. The only way any British people not liking this can escape these laws is by leaving the country and sending back your passport after you have found another country to take you. We can try and change them, but since Britain is a democracy and the British public keep electing clowns that support these laws what can we do?
In light of all of this most people simply knuckle down and try and steer well clear of any sort of run in with the police. This is by far the most sensible course of action unless you have an infinite source of money to live on. Thanks to that risk of 28 days in prison and obviously the sack from your employer it is a very serious gamble to do anything that would expose you to this, anybody with a family to support simply cannot risk it.
Even before you have a family like this guy there is the problem of having your name and photo plastered all over the papers and hence making many companies view hiring you as a risk. This guy has screwed up an IT career before it had even begun. Unless he can somehow demonstrate to a potential employer that he is head and shoulders above every other person attending an interview for a particular role he is not going to get the job.
Of course, that is assuming he does not get extradited to the US and repeatedly gang raped in prison there for the next 60 years. The only good thing about the UK from his perspective at the moment is that this is less likely to happen in UK jails.
Sooner or later Google will need to do some sort of Quality Control on their store, or they'll just keep making the Marketplace look even less trustworthy and push people to the Amazon store.
Alternatively those of us who do not mind researching apps using the internet before we install them will carry on buying Android phones. I treat my phone like my home PC, I install stuff I trust after some basic research. Since Apple are not infallible I am more willing to trust my own judgement than theirs. If I screw up, I know to blame and can learn from my mistakes, if Apple screw up I just have to trust them learning their lesson on blind faith.
I understand what you're saying, but (despite your snide confidence) I still think you're missing the point: there is no children's section!
Wow, all this over the idea of providing a version of youtube targeted at children... I wonder if Sesame Street met such resistance on /. when it launched (how old is that show?)?
Sesame street did not ask the general public to send in their own clips.
Youtube only exists because Google allow you to publish stuff without them going through a manual approval process. If Google did exercise editorial control in order to make sure a clip was safe for kids then they would also have to make sure that the person posting each clip was the legal copyright holder for all of the content on the clip (including soundtrack). This would turn youtube from a site that required very little human input on Google part, into a site that required a full time staff of thousands, most of them purely engaged in copyright verification. These thousands of staff would kill the ad supported model they use stone dead.
The whole Web 2.0 thing is about user contribution, but there are many things that this is not applicable for and one of them is child safe websites. Any child safe area of youtube would have to be based around a completely different model that has never been one Google has aimed for.
If you want a child safe version of Google or Youtube, then Yahoo would be the people to ask since they launched in the 90's around the idea that human beings exercised editorial control over results and content. Google have always been about NOT exercising any editorial control over search results or crap posted to youtube, so why would they do a 180 now and launch something that can only be done by human beings? There will NEVER be a Google Kids for this reason, it is simply not their business model for anything.
Right, in the library, (hopefully) not in the children's section...
But the someone further up this thread was saying that if a child wanders out of the childrens section of the library then library staff are not supposed to say anything to them, that is why I mentioned it.
The exact words they used in their post were:
"According to the ALA's Freedom to Read statement, librarians should not be censoring what children read, either. If a child you've dropped off at the library wants to wander into young adult or the regular adult stacks and start paging through books, the librarians should only be stepping in if the book is being mishandled. "
That is why they could just come across a book like the one I mentioned. Librarians should not be relied on to enforce parental values, I was actually encouraged to read Lady Chatterleys Lover as a child as I come from a fairly broad minded family . If you have a more traditional view of what children should be exposed to then you need to be the person enforcing it, not your local librarian.
The same things goes for Google, their job is to make information easily accessible to everyone, not make moral judgements on what information should be hidden. YouTube is not the analogous to the childrens section, it is closer to the library as a whole. Maybe youtube should be cut up into different websites like poptube, craptube and kidtube, but this is exactly what would open google to a boat load of litigation from disgruntled parents when their moral compass diverges from the parent in question.
Maybe you should have spent more time in a library yourself to brush up on your reading skills :)
Yes, but at least you don't see "top 100 sex positions to blow your mind" books strewn about the children's aisles, which is analagous to the current situation on youtube and the primary concern of the op.
But in most libraries you will find a copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" which is a very sexually explicit book indeed. I remember reading it as a kid and it was certainly somewhat of an eye opener. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover
I don't trust Google with my sensitive data because I assume it will be analyzed, packaged, and sold to marketers and advertisers. I have some faith that it is anonymized first, but even still I don't like it and you have to wonder how anonymous the data actually is.
I would rather retain 100% control of access to my data.
If you think any company will NOT sell any data they can regarding you on the free market you are living on cloud cuckoo land. Companies all exist to turn a profit, and if data regarding you is profitable then you can be sure they will sell it.
The word "pirate" has been hijacked from the meaning of robbing ships at sea using violent threat to meaning copying a CD. This hijacking is convenient to the record industry, but I object to its use here. I do think that robbing ships at sea using violent threats is wrong.
And the word "hacker" has been hijacked to only mean someone who breaks into computers without the owners permission, but fighting against this is like pissing into the wind. Once a critical mass (majority) of people start using a particular word a particular way it has entered common use and there is nothing that can be done. Providing all parties to a particular conversation know what is actually being meant, the specifics of the words being used do not really matter.
Since slashdot is a very geeky website I generally assume that most people here feel the same way about the words "hacker" and "pirate" so it does not really matter. It is like moaning about other peoples poor grammar because that is the only way you can say anything against the argument they are putting forward.