I remember back in the early nineties when vast ammounts of the US appeared to be about to be bought by Japan, there was an article in one of the US news or science(sorry don't remember which) magazines about the state of the respective economies it discussed the fact that 5 of the top 6 and 8 of the top 10 Chemical companies were European amongst other things. but it ended with this analysis of the situation.
Imagine that the economy of the US is the US soldier in WWII Comics. then the Economy of Japan is roughly the same as the japanese soldier in the same comics. it has roughly the same chance of overwhelming the US soldier. however if you then turn and look at the Economy of Europe as a whole if it was drawn to the same scale it would be in effect a 900 lb Gorrila.
Somehow seems Ironic that the taxes that they were complaining about were duties on the contents of merchant ships, and what is this guy complaining about
European region DVD's usually have much more extensive multi language support, at the expense of losing some of the extra features that are on US region disks. I would say that region coding is anti competetive as it stops me from ordering a DVD with the extra features and forces me to take one with enhanced multi language support.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
perhaps we should say that the Convention of human rights is a better basis for the internet than the US constitution. It at least has the advantage of being international
Isn't this an offence in the UK under the misuse of computers act? Arent you not allowed to alter files or interfere on another person's computer?Be nice to see record company execs up in court on criminal charges designed for use on scriptkiddies
Like there's going to be a huge market for Mickey porn anyway, I can see there would be some but why should there be more proyection for an imaginary character, than for an individual. It would be quite legitimate for someone to make an artistic version of say Prez Clinton's life as a porn film and he would have much less protection. If it's thoroughly legit for me to go out and do that, why should a cartoon mouse get any better protection
So let me get this straight. somehow someone downloaded a film before it has even been released? Before there was even a chance of it being on DVD and somehow this is relevent?
Come on all this says to me is that they have pirates inside their own organisation. which makes the idea that you would need software to crack DVD encoding even less relevent.
If the program is enabled, it communicates with our servers to let them know that a particular product has been installed and retrieves JPEG images for that product if any exist
I don't know about you but if they're forcing me to download jpg's to complete a program that I have on disk, then they are hiding part of the cost of the package. Surely this is at very least immoral if not illegal
They have too many tenured, non-teaching, too worried about publishing, 'professors' who cost too much but are at Harvard only to lend some sort of distinction to the school.
That 'Lending distinction to the school' means that you attract more students so can afford more staff, it's a jungle out there where the modern university has to fight for every single student.
Waste too much time and money on non-productive majors related to ethno-centric, gender specific or social theory and planning. They should give that junk up and produce some money making alums.
OK so there are fools out there who believe that if people are not out there working to improve the state of industry then they're wasting their time. but a lot of arts graduates take up a useful role in society someone has to make the TV programs you watch, someone has to look afetr the homeless (Unless you think it should all be down to policemen with clubs)
Universitys are not First and foremost industries, they mainly exist to educate and enhance the culture of the society in which they are based. narrowing the spectrum of teaching into purely what would be useful for industry and therefore make money would make our institutions a shadow of themselves.
So what happens then? an indipendant body is set up by the rest of the world in a Neutral country and all the other nations with TLD's point their DNS root's at this site rather than the US based ones, and the US idea of the net gradually becomes less and less relevent to what is actually occurring on the world wide scene. Sooner or later the US has to join the rest of the world's system those companies in the US that are based on the control of this data gradually fold.
Seeing as you are so close to the shores of the UK do all of your connections run into the UK, or have you a connection running into a more liberal legal regieme?
Take some account of the future, please
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 1
You cite slavery as immoral, but seem to forget that everone at the time thought it was quite acceptable. isn't this an argument based on 'the notion that any individual can set their own standard'? When we say that we are sinking to thw lowest common denominator, that is only because we are in a process of adjustment. Any time two moral systems collide you are going to get at least a degree of friction. Moral chaos was caused for several hundred years by the introduction of Christian morals to Africa and the Americas. Modern Communications technology enables all cultures and moral systems to impact on each other at once. This does not just provide the individual with choice between moral systems, It in fact shows them that their own societies moral systems are not carved in stone. (If you want to look for a historical precedent for this look at the Sophists, a group of travelling thinkers in ancient Greece they are the first known people to disprove the existence of gods and prove that morals are whatever humansmake up, needless to say they were not very popular)
As our culture is built on the basis of the moral system that we have been using for the last several hundred years. So whatever changes are made to that moral view, it will appear from our viewpoint within the moral society that in fact morality is going downhill because it is going away from the moral standard we think we have.
not directly involved?
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 2
...asking for an agreement that the transcripts and video tapes not be disclosed to persons not directly involved in this litigation...
I'm sure that everyone on the internet is directly involved through them wishing to take away our right to fair use. So therefore they should let us all see the Depositions.
Ive always found serious problems with these huge novels. The 'never mind the quality feel the width' school of SF has always to my mind been severely lacking in redeeming qualities. the Wingrove series looses its pace after about 4 books, Bio of a space tyrant lost its way a little over half way through and the mission earth series is excrement from the very first page. Even though if you look at the writing style the last two books appear to have been written by someone else.(although still a vast improvement over battlefield earth, which would fight hard for the honours in any 'worst book ever written' contest.) I've always been vaguely suspicious of the vast multi-volume set, as this often appears to be more the work of marketing men rather than writers. If you're going to read multi volume stuff then the thing to read is either the Gibson trilogy or the Peter F Hamilton. If you want multi book but don't mind disconnected stories, then it's got to be the Ian Banks.
We suffer from the fact that we have experienced one of the few moral wars in the lifetimes of ourselves or our immediate relations, WWII has the distinction of being one of the few times we can be positively sure that the other side were actually evil. who can say that theactions of their government are any better than that of any other? When someone mentions Sadam gassing the Kurds, should the opponent not reply with comments on Agent orange in Vietnam?
Yes and the moral question is if we can reduce the risk to our own side down to almost zero then is what we are doing still war? If we can destroy our opponents without them having the ability to hit back then is our action really murder? It can be argued that casualties on our own side are a necessity to stop us resorting to military action in all situations, otherwise we can begin to think that we do actually have the ability to solve world problems on the level of a Scwartzenager or Stallone.
History in all countries is modified, comunists do not have a monopoly in this regard. There are always inconvinient details to the truth. as an example several of the units in the first wave of US troops appear to have been British troops in American uniforms. I'm sure that the history before and after the revolution shows significant differences based on who won. for example one of the revolutionary war heroes was hung by his own government for piracy after the war. this fact was not known to the guides at the revolutionary war museum when it was visited by a relative of mine. History is not a solid monolith manipulated by the evil dictators of the world, rather it is a fluid entity, that shapes itself about our memories
I don't think you quite understand the angle I'm coming from, If I get a letter from anyone's lawyers, as a responsible member of staff I have no choice but to inform my employers. they will then order me to take the offending pages off the server, legal or not, thehen I have to take the pages off, after all it is their computer ofr their network, and they don't particularly want to fight. If however I take the pages off and then look at them at some point in the future, when I have time (we are after all running with approximately one third of the staff that are required to run a network of our size.) then when I see that The pages are not in fact a copyright violation (either because i can actually think, or because the pages owner will have come and told me.) then I can take the lawyers letter to my boss and say 'well we got this letter so we took the site off our webserver, but as we have now had time to look at it, it appears that the lawyers that have threatened us don't have the first clue as to what actually constitutes copyright infringement. I think we have no choice but to put it back up.' then he is put in the position where putting the site up is his decision, and so when the lawyers come back at us again ( because he will let me put it back) I can say that the college insists on the page staying up for reasons X Y and Z in the knowledge that I will not have the rug cut out from under me a few minutes later. When they have made a decision, it's hard for them to be seen as having made the wrong one, by doing things this way round, they can't just pull out on me and apologise for rogue decisions made by an underling.
The way I would have looked at it if the same letter had arrived at my site would have been this. When the LKawyers letter arrived I would have straight away, before anything else happened, taken it down. I would then straight away inform the user that this had been done. At the moment following the Demon case this is what we have to do. After this when I could fit the job into my schedule I would get around to looking at the work. If in my opinion it does fall inside that category, then I would have to go to see a representative of the colleges managent committee, explain the legal situation, and see if they wish to let one of their students fight for academic freedom. but I cannot make the decision to place the college in the firing line against a group of large corperations. Looking at what is supposed to be on these pages, the colleges lawyers would then laugh at their lawyers, and we would probably send a bill for our time to whatever organisation had asked for the site to be shut down. It has been said that it is part of my job to deal with Buraucracy and lawyers. My responsibility is to provide a service to more than just one student. If one student placed me in a position where I could loose my service for all the others then I would have to drop his service till I could be sure that the others would be unaffected
Cheapness and Apathy. er no speaking as someone who runs a UK university network we are placed in an impossible position. We have to follow the JANET acceptable use rules. If he was on my machines he would have been booted off under
JANET acceptable use policy 9.7. deliberate activities with any of the following characteristics: wasting staff effort or networked resources, including time on end systems accessible via JANET and the effort of staff involved in the support of those systems;
To my way of thinking anything that gets me involved with Lawyers and the college bureacracy more than necessary falls under that category
according to the BBC the fix is only for Outlook and there will not be a fix for outlook express, where the majority of the clueless lie. seems to be a bit of a waste of time
As a rule of thumb every round of testing cuts bugs by a factor of ten, and costs as much as all the preceding rounds of testing put together. I don't dissagree that it's pragmatically possible to write perfect software, it's just not that affordable within the corporate model of software construction.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember back in the early nineties when vast ammounts of the US appeared to be about to be bought by Japan, there was an article in one of the US news or science(sorry don't remember which) magazines about the state of the respective economies it discussed the fact that 5 of the top 6 and 8 of the top 10 Chemical companies were European amongst other things. but it ended with this analysis of the situation.
Imagine that the economy of the US is the US soldier in WWII Comics. then the Economy of Japan is roughly the same as the japanese soldier in the same comics. it has roughly the same chance of overwhelming the US soldier. however if you then turn and look at the Economy of Europe as a whole if it was drawn to the same scale it would be in effect a 900 lb Gorrila.
Somehow seems Ironic that the taxes that they were complaining about were duties on the contents of merchant ships, and what is this guy complaining about
Import duties!!!!
Makes you think (hopefully)
European region DVD's usually have much more extensive multi language support, at the expense of losing some of the extra features that are on US region disks. I would say that region coding is anti competetive as it stops me from ordering a DVD with the extra features and forces me to take one with enhanced multi language support.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
perhaps we should say that the Convention of human rights is a better basis for the internet than the US constitution. It at least has the advantage of being international
Isn't this an offence in the UK under the misuse of computers act? Arent you not allowed to alter files or interfere on another person's computer?Be nice to see record company execs up in court on criminal charges designed for use on scriptkiddies
But if Mettalica were to put this file up to be downloaded then either
1) They have put it up to be downloaded and hence have voided their copyright or
2)It wasn't copyright material anyway, as it was in fact just a booby trapped file not a copyrighted work
Like there's going to be a huge market for Mickey porn anyway, I can see there would be some but why should there be more proyection for an imaginary character, than for an individual. It would be quite legitimate for someone to make an artistic version of say Prez Clinton's life as a porn film and he would have much less protection. If it's thoroughly legit for me to go out and do that, why should a cartoon mouse get any better protection
So let me get this straight. somehow someone downloaded a film before it has even been released? Before there was even a chance of it being on DVD and somehow this is relevent?
Come on all this says to me is that they have pirates inside their own organisation. which makes the idea that you would need software to crack DVD encoding even less relevent.
Another small detail their spokesperson says
If the program is enabled, it communicates with our servers to let them know that a particular product has been installed and retrieves JPEG images for that product if any exist
I don't know about you but if they're forcing me to download jpg's to complete a program that I have on disk, then they are hiding part of the cost of the package. Surely this is at very least immoral if not illegal
They have too many tenured, non-teaching, too worried about publishing, 'professors' who cost too much but are at Harvard only to lend some sort of distinction to the school.
That 'Lending distinction to the school' means that you attract more students so can afford more staff, it's a jungle out there where the modern university has to fight for every single student.
Waste too much time and money on non-productive majors related to ethno-centric, gender specific or social theory and planning. They should give that junk up and produce some money making alums.
OK so there are fools out there who believe that if people are not out there working to improve the state of industry then they're wasting their time. but a lot of arts graduates take up a useful role in society someone has to make the TV programs you watch, someone has to look afetr the homeless (Unless you think it should all be down to policemen with clubs)
Universitys are not First and foremost industries, they mainly exist to educate and enhance the culture of the society in which they are based. narrowing the spectrum of teaching into purely what would be useful for industry and therefore make money would make our institutions a shadow of themselves.
So what happens then? an indipendant body is set up by the rest of the world in a Neutral country and all the other nations with TLD's point their DNS root's at this site rather than the US based ones, and the US idea of the net gradually becomes less and less relevent to what is actually occurring on the world wide scene.
Sooner or later the US has to join the rest of the world's system those companies in the US that are based on the control of this data gradually fold.
Seeing as you are so close to the shores of the UK do all of your connections run into the UK, or have you a connection running into a more liberal legal regieme?
You cite slavery as immoral, but seem to forget that everone at the time thought it was quite acceptable.
isn't this an argument based on 'the notion that any individual can set their own standard'?
When we say that we are sinking to thw lowest common denominator, that is only because we are in a process of adjustment. Any time two moral systems collide you are going to get at least a degree of friction. Moral chaos was caused for several hundred years by the introduction of Christian morals to Africa and the Americas. Modern Communications technology enables all cultures and moral systems to impact on each other at once. This does not just provide the individual with choice between moral systems, It in fact shows them that their own societies moral systems are not carved in stone. (If you want to look for a historical precedent for this look at the Sophists, a group of travelling thinkers in ancient Greece they are the first known people to disprove the existence of gods and prove that morals are whatever humansmake up, needless to say they were not very popular)
As our culture is built on the basis of the moral system that we have been using for the last several hundred years. So whatever changes are made to that moral view, it will appear from our viewpoint within the moral society that in fact morality is going downhill because it is going away from the moral standard we think we have.
...asking for an agreement that the transcripts and video tapes not be disclosed to persons not directly involved in this litigation...
I'm sure that everyone on the internet is directly involved through them wishing to take away our right to fair use. So therefore they should let us all see the Depositions.
Ive always found serious problems with these huge novels. The 'never mind the quality feel the width' school of SF has always to my mind been severely lacking in redeeming qualities. the Wingrove series looses its pace after about 4 books, Bio of a space tyrant lost its way a little over half way through and the mission earth series is excrement from the very first page. Even though if you look at the writing style the last two books appear to have been written by someone else.(although still a vast improvement over battlefield earth, which would fight hard for the honours in any 'worst book ever written' contest.)
I've always been vaguely suspicious of the vast multi-volume set, as this often appears to be more the work of marketing men rather than writers. If you're going to read multi volume stuff then the thing to read is either the Gibson trilogy or the Peter F Hamilton. If you want multi book but don't mind disconnected stories, then it's got to be the Ian Banks.
We suffer from the fact that we have experienced one of the few moral wars in the lifetimes of ourselves or our immediate relations, WWII has the distinction of being one of the few times we can be positively sure that the other side were actually evil.
who can say that theactions of their government are any better than that of any other? When someone mentions Sadam gassing the Kurds, should the opponent not reply with comments on Agent orange in Vietnam?
Yes and the moral question is if we can reduce the risk to our own side down to almost zero then is what we are doing still war? If we can destroy our opponents without them having the ability to hit back then is our action really murder?
It can be argued that casualties on our own side are a necessity to stop us resorting to military action in all situations, otherwise we can begin to think that we do actually have the ability to solve world problems on the level of a Scwartzenager or Stallone.
History in all countries is modified, comunists do not have a monopoly in this regard. There are always inconvinient details to the truth. as an example several of the units in the first wave of US troops appear to have been British troops in American uniforms.
I'm sure that the history before and after the revolution shows significant differences based on who won. for example one of the revolutionary war heroes was hung by his own government for piracy after the war. this fact was not known to the guides at the revolutionary war museum when it was visited by a relative of mine. History is not a solid monolith manipulated by the evil dictators of the world, rather it is a fluid entity, that shapes itself about our memories
Its not that you'll live forever, It's just that it'll seem like it.
OK so it's an old joke, it just needed saying
I don't think you quite understand the angle I'm coming from, If I get a letter from anyone's lawyers, as a responsible member of staff I have no choice but to inform my employers. they will then order me to take the offending pages off the server, legal or not, thehen I have to take the pages off, after all it is their computer ofr their network, and they don't particularly want to fight.
If however I take the pages off and then look at them at some point in the future, when I have time (we are after all running with approximately one third of the staff that are required to run a network of our size.) then when I see that The pages are not in fact a copyright violation (either because i can actually think, or because the pages owner will have come and told me.) then I can take the lawyers letter to my boss and say 'well we got this letter so we took the site off our webserver, but as we have now had time to look at it, it appears that the lawyers that have threatened us don't have the first clue as to what actually constitutes copyright infringement. I think we have no choice but to put it back up.' then he is put in the position where putting the site up is his decision, and so when the lawyers come back at us again ( because he will let me put it back) I can say that the college insists on the page staying up for reasons X Y and Z in the knowledge that I will not have the rug cut out from under me a few minutes later.
When they have made a decision, it's hard for them to be seen as having made the wrong one, by doing things this way round, they can't just pull out on me and apologise for rogue decisions made by an underling.
The way I would have looked at it if the same letter had arrived at my site would have been this. When the LKawyers letter arrived I would have straight away, before anything else happened, taken it down. I would then straight away inform the user that this had been done. At the moment following the Demon case this is what we have to do. After this when I could fit the job into my schedule I would get around to looking at the work. If in my opinion it does fall inside that category, then I would have to go to see a representative of the colleges managent committee, explain the legal situation, and see if they wish to let one of their students fight for academic freedom. but I cannot make the decision to place the college in the firing line against a group of large corperations. Looking at what is supposed to be on these pages, the colleges lawyers would then laugh at their lawyers, and we would probably send a bill for our time to whatever organisation had asked for the site to be shut down.
It has been said that it is part of my job to deal with Buraucracy and lawyers. My responsibility is to provide a service to more than just one student. If one student placed me in a position where I could loose my service for all the others then I would have to drop his service till I could be sure that the others would be unaffected
Cheapness and Apathy. er no speaking as someone who runs a UK university network we are placed in an impossible position. We have to follow the JANET acceptable use rules.
If he was on my machines he would have been booted off under
JANET acceptable use policy
9.7. deliberate activities with any of the following characteristics:
wasting staff effort or networked resources, including time on end systems accessible via JANET and the effort of staff involved in the support of those systems;
To my way of thinking anything that gets me involved with Lawyers and the college bureacracy more than necessary falls under that category
according to the BBC the fix is only for Outlook and there will not be a fix for outlook express, where the majority of the clueless lie. seems to be a bit of a waste of time
Perhaps they should put a list of these unconnected websites up on the web, then they could quickly and easily disprove their own research.
As a rule of thumb every round of testing cuts bugs by a factor of ten, and costs as much as all the preceding rounds of testing put together. I don't dissagree that it's pragmatically possible to write perfect software, it's just not that affordable within the corporate model of software construction.