US bills have famous Americans on, and you can use them to buy dipsticks, which is surely just as demeaning as whatever it was you said. Maybe you should give away all your money in protest.
Since the daughter of Hitler's finance minister is suing the publishers in Germany, it's German law that matters.
IANAL, but... While the EU copyright directive allows states to legislate for Fair Use, it seems that German statute law does not include such a provision. However, German courts have in the past relied on provisions in the German Constitution which state that Art and Research are free, to allow some reuse of portions of a work (see paper). However it's not necessarily clear how the court might rule in this case. And besides, there is the issue of the publisher having previously agreed to pay, and then deciding not to. There could be questions of the validity and enforceability of such an agreement. And there is the question of whether the lady concerned is in fact the copyright owner.
So there is plenty for lawyers to fight over.
But I find it quite distasteful that research could be blocked, or charged for in this way. That's why much of the world DOES have [fairly] clear "Fair Use" or "Fair Dealing" exceptions in copyright law.
I don't agree - stupid consumers will get screwed, and unlocking features that were not licensed off the factory will be a new hack-athon...
Like with DRM, it will be a felony to bypass the feature locking mechanism in the USA (and most of the rest of the world, thanks to lobbyists and policy laundering. All consumers will get "screwed".
Hope you DIY enthusiasts aren't living in a state with mandatory life sentences for your third "felony"!
It's just a repackaging of the old net-discrimination ideas that provoked the Net Neutrality debate.
Make data allowances artificially low, and charge content providers to "ensure" they are not throttled. It's not in the interests of consumers, and it's not in the interests of content providers.
Of course most people will say that. It's about Terrorism, after all, and they are not Terrorists, so the government is only spying on Other People, right?
And it's not so bad that other bad people give up a little of their privacy to keep US safer.
Because, of course, it contributes NO greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
We're some way off global, carbon-free energy production, as you point out. But that's not the problem this is solving.
Of course energy from garbage contributes greenhouse gases. But this is not displacing greenhouse-gas-free nuclear or wave power generation - it is reducing the dependency on high-running-cost, greenhouse-gas-producing oil / gas / coal power. So it increases sustainability to that extent. That is a good thing. And less landfill is also a good thing.
It's not about "shiny", so much as improving things where and when we can. But we need to increase reuse and recycling (in that order), and reduce waste caused by built-in obsolescence, excess packaging, and excessive consumption too.
It sounds troubling, but it's hardly even a Government proposal for legislation, never mind a Bill being laid before parliament. And the decision to withhold the draft may still be appealed.
This seems to be an early draft (a bit like the ACTA negotiations, perhaps) since the grounds for withholding are:
the material is still in draft form
the material has not gone through the necessary whole-of-government review and approval processes; and
to release such material at this stage would, in [the bureaucrat's] view, prejudice the current negotiations and decision making processes which are in train
So the Department concerned is probably committed to something like the draft, and they are trying to work out what is feasible, but the rest of the government has not yet had a chance to comment.
The appropriate response at this stage is probably (1) appeal, (2) contact representatives in government and opposition who may oppose any provisions that threaten civil liberties, and (3) use the media (and slashdot) to raise awareness that something is coming in the future.
But it is not normal to release early drafts (that have not yet been thought through properly) to the public - at that stage you could not possibly have a workable policy, and people may get very worked up about errors that the government themselves will address. Surely the time for public scrutiny is when concrete proposals are made?
Though crowdsourcing of bills might be interesting... it worked for the constitution in Iceland, didn't it?
TFA is a bit light. I'm wondering how you review a score? Was it "muse score software didn't display this note properly", or "the music would sound better if you went up instead of down here, or repeated a theme differently"?
Open source music, now there's an idea. Could be like composing by committee...
As I said in an earlier post, the" MAY" clauses are a problem, because the governments / lobbyists who write the legislation required by the treaty will include them! Good luck with teh line-by-line scrutiny of the bills as they pass through your legislatures.
> The parts the EFF seems worried about are, in RFC terms, MAY clauses, not MUST or even SHOULD clauses.
The problem? The ACTA treaty confers powers with dangerously broad and ambiguous language - an example is language to ban:
a device or product, including computer programs, or provision of a service that... has only a limited commercially significant purpose other than circumventing an effective technological measure.
So legitimate purposes that are significant, but can be made out not to be commercially significant, won't protect you. Education and research purposes, and fair use gone, at one stroke!
The international coordination is all about the interests of "intellectual property" owners (mostly distributors, in the content industries), and not about consumers or the broader creative economy. The only stakeholders explicitly mentioned are "rights holders" - if we're lucky, the rest of the world may sneak in as "other relevant stakeholders" - but don't hold your breath - it hasn't happened yet, and isn't happening in the shady negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. And the only measurement or analysis to be done is about how well they tackle the nut of infringement, with no examination of the sledgehammer of social and economic costs of the enforcement regime ACTA requires.
Then there are the optional extras such as:
A Party may exclude from the application of this Section small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in travellers’ personal luggage. [a Good Thing]
and
A Party may provide for the remedies described in this Article to be carried out at the infringer’s expense. [not necessarily A Good Thing]
A good government would implement the protections ACTA says they MAY do, and omit some of the more onerous and opressive powers the lobbyists got into ACTA as optional extras.
Our governments, on the other hand, will use draft legislation written by the same content industry lobbyists who wrote the original ACTA policy shopping list, and will try to omit every inconvenient consumer protection measure some ACTA negotiaters insisted on, and include each of the overreaching powers the negotiators reduced from MUST to MAY in ACTA.
Or we can just stop worrying and hope that the law-faries will bring us cuddly, fair and reasonable legislation that servers the public interest, instead.
Adam and Eve weren't the first humans to exist. They were the first to receive a soul which is what makes humans different from all other animals...
Scary AND incoherent: if the soul makes humans different from animals, how could there be humans [even before Adam] without a soul?
If you think there can be people with souls and people without souls, then you may feel tempted to do or allow sorts of evil to anyone you consider "without soul". Though some so-called musicians clearly don't have soul, and deserve all manner of evil. Get those kids with their walkpods off my lawn.
From what I read here, outside of the USA, where the media are less partisan when covering internal US issues
Are you kidding? Britain in particular is way left-of-center.
By less partisan, I mean not so much dominated by the twin US-centric filters of either "the Democrats are destroying the country" or "the Republicans are destroying the country". Also, the broadcast media in Britain are generally committed to presenting two views (and exactly two views) on any issue. It's almost the same as balance, and a lot more like balance than what Fox / Huf Post do.
As for "Britain is left-of-center", in Global terms Britain is probably a little right-of centre, with privatised industries, private participation in healthcare, and competition in broadband provision . The US is a lot further to the right (except for the competition in broadband provision bit), which may explain why the rest of world looks a bit communist.
Perhaps the "center" is somewhere far to the right of the "CENTRE"?
Democrats want the government to spend more. The TEA Party wants the government to spend less. Who do you think is right here?
A plague on both their houses!
From what I read here, outside of the USA, where the media are less partisan when covering internal US issues, the Democrats want the government to spend LESS, and the Tea Party wants the government to spend LESS too. They disagree a little on which parts of government should have most cuts.
Also, the Democrats want to increase taxes a little, to narrow the gap between government spending and income. The Tea Party DO NOT want to increase taxes to narrow the gap.
Both are proposing that the government spend more than it raises.
This sort of thing is why the EU's half-witted privacy rules on cookies miss the point.
The thing to control is the tracking of users (particularly without their consent), and the storage and onward transmission/sale of user-information - not some particular technology that is being used to do that at any given stage in the evolution of the web.
Of course, if your legislative process is owned by the corporate world, or your voters believe in the rights of corporations, rather than citizens, that is unlikely to happen.
"Pay the fair share of taxes"... What does that even mean?
I'm guessing it means that tax paid as a proportion of income should be similar for the rich and the poor (Or maybe slightly higher for the rich, because they can "afford" a little more). I gather that, at present, the rich tend to pay a much smaller proportion of their income.
If the ratio is massively out of line then something would seem to be rotten with the State of the Union.
I would like to seee credible figures on this though... if gathering them would not make government too big;-)
So spending should be cut. Where should the axe fall?
Corporate welfare would seem to be a good place to start - a really, really good place, in fact - but I'm sure there are other places where money is spent that does not help the country, the people or the economy.
Maybe they should lead by example with an across the board 15% cut in legislators' salaries?
And are not special-interest tax loopholes a form of subsidy, whereby the remaining taxpayers shoulder the burden that is dodged by the lucky (and often rich) few?
But that's just tinkering round the edges. More cuts will be needed. What (else) should be lost?
If I read that correctly, it amounts to - CSS animations - Do Not Track setting can now be found - improved performance & standards, security & bug fixes - some plugins not yet compatible
A good thing, but not as good as a 5.0 version number might imply.
If you are so terrified of a universe humans understand, shed the hypocrisy.
This seems like a straw man argument. While there may be wild-eyed protesters with ill thought out objections to change, it's crazy to pretend that everyone who disagrees with you does so for the poorest of reasons:
Don't like genetics research because it isn't natural?
At least some of the objections are because
the rate of change of genetic material is very high, and genetic interactions are hard to predict, so slow to detect harmful effects seem hard to rule out
the tests are often out in the open, and if there are harmful effects, the pollen will already have escaped into the wild
the eventually produced GM food is not clearly labelled (thanks, lobbyists & industry) so the "market" aka consumers can't really decide.
Unnatural is not the only objection - it's not even a good one.
Don't like stem cell research because it is an affront to God?
At least some of the objections are because
For human embryonic stem cell research, some critics believe that the enbryos which die to produce the stem cells are actual humans. You may not agree with that judgement, but it's about respect for human life, not necessarily what some clergy say.
There is no stopping science.
There can and sometimes must be. During the last world war, scientists performed all sorts of barbaric experiments on those they thought of as less human. In very very few of these cases, useful science was produced. In more recent decades, coloured people in the americas were deliberately infected with diseases by scientists, to "advance medical knowledge". But it is ethically unacceptable to treat humans in that way. In third world countries, drug studies are carried out that would be unethical in the west.
Sometimes scientists need to be stopped. Science is not the supreme good.
It's Yes Minister. As Sir Humphrey said: "You mean that within the context of our overall policy on Open Government, we should adopt a more flexible posture...?"
Libel and slander are something that Google should be held liable for no different than anyone else.
That does not answer the question facing Google and the courts though.
Part of the question (for a rational legal system), is not whether Google originally made the "statement", but whether it is publishing it. And fairly clearly Google is publishing the "statement". So it does not matter that other users typed the search term first. Similar to the way a newspaper can't defend against libel by saying they just reported allegations by someone else that you are... [insert defamatory claim here].
A more important question is whether a list of search terms on a search page, taken as a whole and in its context, can be understood as a statement or allegation of fact. And here the court seems to have strayed far from the realms of reality.
I don't see that such a list could rationally be interpreted as a statement which one might believe. Thus, no libel. Then again, I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm letting commn sense get in the way of a fast buck.
Read the... constitution, from the... Declaration of Independence all the way through the bill of rights. Freedom of speech is the GOVERNMENT being unable to silence our thoughts about the government or speaking our minds.
Freedom of speech does means the ability to state your views (freely, without fear of punishment for holding or expressing those views).
Freedom of speech as it is implemented in the [USA's] constitution refers to the government's inability to restrict you from expressing your views (as well as to related concepts like the ability to compel speech in certain circumstances).
But in real life there is more to freedom of speech than what the US (or any) government may do. Arguably corporations have even more power.
Respect is earned, not inherently given.
Once again, there is a bit of both. Humans are inherently deserving of some respect, and a certain dignity of treatment, by virtue of their humanity. Beyond that, respect can and should be earned, or may be lost.
But however heinous someone's views, they are still worthy of a certain dignity - to accord them less is to diminish yourself.
The telcos own fibre, whose value has been artificially inflated by a government-granted monopoly, so it is perfectly reasonable for the government (or "the People") to demand in return certain standards of behaviour with that monopoly fibre. Behaviour which is in the public interest, rather than the short term economic interest of the Fibre company. Otherwise that would be government welfare, and that's just evil, right?
And even if someone else builds an open network to compete with the local monopolists' highly monetised, high-cost, not-dumb-pipe access network, they still need to connect it to actual customers, right? If you keep the current US local-monopoly regulatory framework, what makes you think that the monopolist will provide a fast and unthrottled connection to their competitors, at a reasonable price? After all, they are not just dumb pipes...
I don't see how things are supposed to get better (for consumers), in the world you advocate.
Slashdot Mirror
US bills have famous Americans on, and you can use them to buy dipsticks, which is surely just as demeaning as whatever it was you said. Maybe you should give away all your money in protest.
Since the daughter of Hitler's finance minister is suing the publishers in Germany, it's German law that matters.
IANAL, but... While the EU copyright directive allows states to legislate for Fair Use, it seems that German statute law does not include such a provision. However, German courts have in the past relied on provisions in the German Constitution which state that Art and Research are free, to allow some reuse of portions of a work (see paper). However it's not necessarily clear how the court might rule in this case. And besides, there is the issue of the publisher having previously agreed to pay, and then deciding not to. There could be questions of the validity and enforceability of such an agreement. And there is the question of whether the lady concerned is in fact the copyright owner.
So there is plenty for lawyers to fight over.
But I find it quite distasteful that research could be blocked, or charged for in this way. That's why much of the world DOES have [fairly] clear "Fair Use" or "Fair Dealing" exceptions in copyright law.
I don't agree - stupid consumers will get screwed, and unlocking features that were not licensed off the factory will be a new hack-athon...
Like with DRM, it will be a felony to bypass the feature locking mechanism in the USA (and most of the rest of the world, thanks to lobbyists and policy laundering. All consumers will get "screwed".
Hope you DIY enthusiasts aren't living in a state with mandatory life sentences for your third "felony"!
It's just a repackaging of the old net-discrimination ideas that provoked the Net Neutrality debate.
Make data allowances artificially low, and charge content providers to "ensure" they are not throttled. It's not in the interests of consumers, and it's not in the interests of content providers.
I can see why AT&T might like it though...
Of course most people will say that. It's about Terrorism, after all, and they are not Terrorists, so the government is only spying on Other People, right?
And it's not so bad that other bad people give up a little of their privacy to keep US safer.
Because, of course, it contributes NO greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
We're some way off global, carbon-free energy production, as you point out. But that's not the problem this is solving.
Of course energy from garbage contributes greenhouse gases. But this is not displacing greenhouse-gas-free nuclear or wave power generation - it is reducing the dependency on high-running-cost, greenhouse-gas-producing oil / gas / coal power. So it increases sustainability to that extent. That is a good thing. And less landfill is also a good thing.
It's not about "shiny", so much as improving things where and when we can. But we need to increase reuse and recycling (in that order), and reduce waste caused by built-in obsolescence, excess packaging, and excessive consumption too.
It sounds troubling, but it's hardly even a Government proposal for legislation, never mind a Bill being laid before parliament. And the decision to withhold the draft may still be appealed.
This seems to be an early draft (a bit like the ACTA negotiations, perhaps) since the grounds for withholding are:
So the Department concerned is probably committed to something like the draft, and they are trying to work out what is feasible, but the rest of the government has not yet had a chance to comment.
The appropriate response at this stage is probably (1) appeal, (2) contact representatives in government and opposition who may oppose any provisions that threaten civil liberties, and (3) use the media (and slashdot) to raise awareness that something is coming in the future.
But it is not normal to release early drafts (that have not yet been thought through properly) to the public - at that stage you could not possibly have a workable policy, and people may get very worked up about errors that the government themselves will address. Surely the time for public scrutiny is when concrete proposals are made?
Though crowdsourcing of bills might be interesting... it worked for the constitution in Iceland, didn't it?
So does this mean that in the war on weather, we can use the drones to shoot down hurricanes and suspected hurricanes before they reach the US?
Great news, I think (clearly I didn't have time to read the summary).
TFA is a bit light. I'm wondering how you review a score? Was it "muse score software didn't display this note properly", or "the music would sound better if you went up instead of down here, or repeated a theme differently"?
Open source music, now there's an idea. Could be like composing by committee...
If it only hit Missouri, it would still be called a US Tour. It happens all the time.
Is that how they named the "World Series"? :)
To be fair, I guess all the teams are actually in "the world"
As I said in an earlier post, the" MAY" clauses are a problem, because the governments / lobbyists who write the legislation required by the treaty will include them! Good luck with teh line-by-line scrutiny of the bills as they pass through your legislatures.
> The parts the EFF seems worried about are, in RFC terms, MAY clauses, not MUST or even SHOULD clauses.
The problem?
The ACTA treaty confers powers with dangerously broad and ambiguous language - an example is language to ban:
So legitimate purposes that are significant, but can be made out not to be commercially significant, won't protect you. Education and research purposes, and fair use gone, at one stroke!
The international coordination is all about the interests of "intellectual property" owners (mostly distributors, in the content industries), and not about consumers or the broader creative economy. The only stakeholders explicitly mentioned are "rights holders" - if we're lucky, the rest of the world may sneak in as "other relevant
stakeholders" - but don't hold your breath - it hasn't happened yet, and isn't happening in the shady negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. And the only measurement or analysis to be done is about how well they tackle the nut of infringement, with no examination of the sledgehammer of social and economic costs of the enforcement regime ACTA requires.
Then there are the optional extras such as:
and
A good government would implement the protections ACTA says they MAY do, and omit some of the more onerous and opressive powers the lobbyists got into ACTA as optional extras.
Our governments, on the other hand, will use draft legislation written by the same content industry lobbyists who wrote the original ACTA policy shopping list, and will try to omit every inconvenient consumer protection measure some ACTA negotiaters insisted on, and include each of the overreaching powers the negotiators reduced from MUST to MAY in ACTA.
Or we can just stop worrying and hope that the law-faries will bring us cuddly, fair and reasonable legislation that servers the public interest, instead.
Adam and Eve weren't the first humans to exist. They were the first to receive a soul which is what makes humans different from all other animals...
Scary AND incoherent: if the soul makes humans different from animals, how could there be humans [even before Adam] without a soul?
If you think there can be people with souls and people without souls, then you may feel tempted to do or allow sorts of evil to anyone you consider "without soul". Though some so-called musicians clearly don't have soul, and deserve all manner of evil. Get those kids with their walkpods off my lawn.
Are you kidding? Britain in particular is way left-of-center.
By less partisan, I mean not so much dominated by the twin US-centric filters of either "the Democrats are destroying the country" or "the Republicans are destroying the country". Also, the broadcast media in Britain are generally committed to presenting two views (and exactly two views) on any issue. It's almost the same as balance, and a lot more like balance than what Fox / Huf Post do.
As for "Britain is left-of-center", in Global terms Britain is probably a little right-of centre, with privatised industries, private participation in healthcare, and competition in broadband provision . The US is a lot further to the right (except for the competition in broadband provision bit), which may explain why the rest of world looks a bit communist.
Perhaps the "center" is somewhere far to the right of the "CENTRE"?
Democrats want the government to spend more. The TEA Party wants the government to spend less. Who do you think is right here?
A plague on both their houses!
From what I read here, outside of the USA, where the media are less partisan when covering internal US issues, the Democrats want the government to spend LESS, and the Tea Party wants the government to spend LESS too. They disagree a little on which parts of government should have most cuts.
Also, the Democrats want to increase taxes a little, to narrow the gap between government spending and income.
The Tea Party DO NOT want to increase taxes to narrow the gap.
Both are proposing that the government spend more than it raises.
Did I miss anything important?
This sort of thing is why the EU's half-witted privacy rules on cookies miss the point.
The thing to control is the tracking of users (particularly without their consent), and the storage and onward transmission/sale of user-information - not some particular technology that is being used to do that at any given stage in the evolution of the web.
Of course, if your legislative process is owned by the corporate world, or your voters believe in the rights of corporations, rather than citizens, that is unlikely to happen.
"Pay the fair share of taxes"... What does that even mean?
I'm guessing it means that tax paid as a proportion of income should be similar for the rich and the poor (Or maybe slightly higher for the rich, because they can "afford" a little more). I gather that, at present, the rich tend to pay a much smaller proportion of their income.
If the ratio is massively out of line then something would seem to be rotten with the State of the Union.
I would like to seee credible figures on this though... if gathering them would not make government too big ;-)
So spending should be cut. Where should the axe fall?
Corporate welfare would seem to be a good place to start - a really, really good place, in fact - but I'm sure there are other places where money is spent that does not help the country, the people or the economy.
Maybe they should lead by example with an across the board 15% cut in legislators' salaries?
And are not special-interest tax loopholes a form of subsidy, whereby the remaining taxpayers shoulder the burden that is dodged by the lucky (and often rich) few?
But that's just tinkering round the edges. More cuts will be needed. What (else) should be lost?
If I read that correctly, it amounts to
- CSS animations
- Do Not Track setting can now be found
- improved performance & standards, security & bug fixes
- some plugins not yet compatible
A good thing, but not as good as a 5.0 version number might imply.
I think they should be acidic.
basic, surely?
This seems like a straw man argument. While there may be wild-eyed protesters with ill thought out objections to change, it's crazy to pretend that everyone who disagrees with you does so for the poorest of reasons:
At least some of the objections are because
Unnatural is not the only objection - it's not even a good one.
At least some of the objections are because
There can and sometimes must be. During the last world war, scientists performed all sorts of barbaric experiments on those they thought of as less human. In very very few of these cases, useful science was produced. In more recent decades, coloured people in the americas were deliberately infected with diseases by scientists, to "advance medical knowledge". But it is ethically unacceptable to treat humans in that way. In third world countries, drug studies are carried out that would be unethical in the west.
Sometimes scientists need to be stopped. Science is not the supreme good.
It's Yes Minister. As Sir Humphrey said: "You mean that within the context of our overall policy on Open Government, we should adopt a more flexible posture...?"
And the Civil Service mantras:
Scarily, at least two of these are true!
That does not answer the question facing Google and the courts though.
Part of the question (for a rational legal system), is not whether Google originally made the "statement", but whether it is publishing it. And fairly clearly Google is publishing the "statement". So it does not matter that other users typed the search term first. Similar to the way a newspaper can't defend against libel by saying they just reported allegations by someone else that you are ... [insert defamatory claim here].
A more important question is whether a list of search terms on a search page, taken as a whole and in its context, can be understood as a statement or allegation of fact. And here the court seems to have strayed far from the realms of reality.
I don't see that such a list could rationally be interpreted as a statement which one might believe. Thus, no libel. Then again, I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm letting commn sense get in the way of a fast buck.
Yes... and no!
Freedom of speech does means the ability to state your views (freely, without fear of punishment for holding or expressing those views).
Freedom of speech as it is implemented in the [USA's] constitution refers to the government's inability to restrict you from expressing your views (as well as to related concepts like the ability to compel speech in certain circumstances).
But in real life there is more to freedom of speech than what the US (or any) government may do. Arguably corporations have even more power.
Once again, there is a bit of both. Humans are inherently deserving of some respect, and a certain dignity of treatment, by virtue of their humanity. Beyond that, respect can and should be earned, or may be lost.
But however heinous someone's views, they are still worthy of a certain dignity - to accord them less is to diminish yourself.
The telcos own fibre, whose value has been artificially inflated by a government-granted monopoly, so it is perfectly reasonable for the government (or "the People") to demand in return certain standards of behaviour with that monopoly fibre. Behaviour which is in the public interest, rather than the short term economic interest of the Fibre company. Otherwise that would be government welfare, and that's just evil, right?
And even if someone else builds an open network to compete with the local monopolists' highly monetised, high-cost, not-dumb-pipe access network, they still need to connect it to actual customers, right? If you keep the current US local-monopoly regulatory framework, what makes you think that the monopolist will provide a fast and unthrottled connection to their competitors, at a reasonable price? After all, they are not just dumb pipes...
I don't see how things are supposed to get better (for consumers), in the world you advocate.