"IP laws are rapidly getting way out of control, but I think limitted IP - with shorter copyright terms before material passes to the public domain, and patents for genuine invention are a Good Thing[tm]."
Totally. Except with regard to software.
For example, the Amazon single click patent. Although they're unlikely to make an issue of it with the vast majority of people, it described a system whereas a single button click can fulfill the entire ordering process. They won't have been the first to implement this, but who is going to go through the rigmarole of having the searches done on speculative patenting?
The answer to this is IP 'farms' and companies with a cash pot intended for this purpose only.
This brings a dangerous precedent in terms that it makes the system 'top-heavy'. No longer does the patent protect the little guy against the people who would copy a given manufactured design, but instead rewards companies with the ability to puntively stifle competition through licensing. A bad thing[tm].
I have this minor problem with corporations as an entity.
"And now the value of your car and computer is diminished to nothing when it is freely traded with people. Why? Because it was obtained without paying for it."
I'm sure you have a point, but it's been completely lost in the relative upsides of freely available hardware.
I'm guessing that you also feel that there should be subscription model for any content produced as it's all intellectual copyright of some degree or another, but in terms of an 'omega point' of this taken to extremes, who decides what is of a quality to be paid for?
BTW, all my replies are gratis and free to view. I understand this makes them worthless.
"Or maybe you're just clueless about current technology "
Online stores are 'technology' now?
I was referring to something across the board rather than being a few retailers that have taken the initiative and shown that the system _works_. However, this does mean an economic driven model for the music industry because all of a sudden they're having to cope with supply and demand rather than the lifestyle push model that they've relied on.
That's socialogical rather than technological, but I'm assuming that you know people outside of the glare of your monitor.
Idiot.
The first thing to do is check out the available options for visually impaired users. Turn on the text to voice and check out a webpage for a real eyeopener in how difficult this market is to design for. Simulate visual impairment by sitting a way from the screen, and check that demographic directly by checking for the browsers that people use. If you have screen readers in there, consider switching stylesheets for them. View the site in Netscape 4.75 for that real primitive viewpoint of what the site will look like to a more basic piece of software and move away from tabling code.
Visit CSS Zengarden. Play with the stylesheets. Now go back and look at it in Netscape 4.75. Isn't that elegant?
"It's about paying for music that took money to make. The artists whose "culture" your taking from expect you to pay them for the effort they put in to it."
Perhaps a compromise, then? That they allow people to listen to the album tracks before paying for them and possibly even just allow for the payment of the single tracks that they want.
That way people could avoid the padding that the record companies foist onto people as part of an album with say, two decent tracks.
Of course, I can't see the record company being happy with that amount of choice, but it neatly dismantles the idea of people wanting to steal stuff out of pure nihilism and the ramblings of the music industry apologists who seem to think that a cartel is a good thing.
Further to this, we could actually _give_ the copyrights back to the artists, which would make your frothing condemnation slightly closer to reality, after a certain amount of time and allow them to do what they want with the music.
"I will be right over to pick up your car and computer. Please don't be a "barrier" when I get there, I will just ignore you and your door anyway (or perhaps the window would work better?)."
Cool, just make sure that you leave my originals where you found them after you duplicate and dust your footprints off the window sill.
"The RIAA, the trade group for the largest record labels, said it also found other hidden evidence inside the woman's music files suggesting the songs were recorded by other people and distributed across the Internet."
Sh*t! Now they can read ID3 tags!
Is there no end to their devilishly mad PC skillz?
"Why should authors, programmers, musicians, architects, graphic designers, inventors have to give up their creations into the public domain without any compensation?"
They shouldn't. But likewise agencies that may or may not have the best interests in the producers at heart shouldn't be allowed to apply chilling effects to stifle competition, which is what is currently happening.
Patenting software is ludicrous simply because although there are multiple ways of doing things, it all boils down to one simple process. Have you read a patent? They're getting more general and fuzzier by the day, meaning we're heading for a time where everything will be locked down in ownership by someone else.
This _destroys_ competition.
BTW, The abolition of IP was flamebait. Personally I'd want it overhauled into demonstrable invention with a caveat that software can't be patented.
They'd spend billions before realising that it won't work as a concept, car thieves routinely circumvent it and the law hasn't caught up to the idea of RFID tagging as evidence. FWIW, quite a large number of traffic lights in this country are already equipped with cameras, and we have several hundred 'GATSO' cameras by the roadside. Unfortunately they don't provide identification of the driver, just the car and by inference the owner, but they can't prove the driver. A small loophole.
The other problem is that in 2000, they granted the police wide ranging powers to request information of telecommunications providers...we're still waiting for the rules governing the requests to actually be written.
The current labour government has a track record of trying to lever itself into the position of being a data nexus...the largest personal identification database is run by Envision for TV licensing, but it's not actually registered with the Data Protection registrar. As a result, I don't trust the UK government to actually get stuff right.
"Implied: why bother linking to any of their crap?"
I agree, although I find it interesting that the pro-government newspaper (this is a tabloid rag) should be so anti regarding the idea, although it does look like a strawman argument because I can't find references anywhere else.
I get the impression this might be a spun story, but then I'm a cynic.
"didn't think it was possible, but there's a country that has even LESS balls than the US. Does Britain even have elections any more? Maybe the British supreme court picks the parliment, just like the US supreme courts picks the president now.:P"
I'm surprised you haven't been modded down as a troll, but then I suspect people are modding down much more important trolls over the clueless ramblings you made above.
We don't have a supreme court. Parliment is elected based on local elections on a rolling basis for deaths, resignations, etc, and during a general election to decide the 'ruling' party at any particular time.
In terms of our political problems, there is a thread of apathy running through British culture that has it's roots in labouring under a Conservative government that tried to change our economic model to 'more American' with a completely different social psychology, then once we'd got a socialist government, finding the buggers were just as bad as the outgoing lot.
But don't make the mistake, that so many Americans do, that we're Americans with a funny accent. Especially don't make the mistake of applying your political, legal and social structures to other countries. It makes you look silly.
Oh, and I've read 'Stupid White Men'. You're calling Britain retarded?
By 'we', you mean you and the publishers of various UFO magazines?
There are a number of good solid theories about the missing mass that have the small problem of observational scales to deal with, and given that black holes are still theoretical, although observed, the 90% figure you pulled out of your ass is considered a conservative estimate of stuff that don't glow.
"Figuring out the total heat or mass in the universe is still way beyond us."
Hence there being 90% of an unfigurable number being missing? There's a lot of waggly hand estimation and twocking great big error bars involved, but current estimates are pretty good.
"We don't yet have a theory of gravity that works for the galaxy, or fits with electromagnetic and nuclear forces."
No, we don't have a Grand Unified Theory, but we do have something that describes a galaxy. The problem is that there is a discrepancy between the rotational velocity of a galaxy compared with it's luminosity...dark matter is the sum of the difference.
Dark Matter can be rocks (that don't glow), dwarf stars, brown giants, WIMPS, MACHOs, biro world, enormous dyson spheres and/or compacted lumps of odd socks, or a mixture of all the above plus some oddities that we've not even thought of yet, but we're talking about big scales. I'll spare you the Douglas Adams definition of big, but it doesn't do to get complacent about the scale of the universe.
">Video game addition saves lives
Please, it does not save lives."
And slightly more reliable fire detection could be supplied by smoke detectors, which have the advantage of being cheap and rarely off playing Evercrack.
You'd be surprised how many DNS servers are completely misconfigured for this, but I think that a simple ping to the address given could actually show if it _existed_.
Personally I've found that I can reduce my spam by a huge amount by never viewing HTML...which brings a thought about tracking and tracing the webbugs in any given piece of HTML email...
"I don't know about anyone else but I am sick of having incompetent drivers in high powered turbo sports cars trying to kill me and my family every time we venture on the road."
It's something I note with a certain sinking feeling that if you follow global hotspots back a bit, you find a CIA section chief saying, 'That's a wrap boys, good work'...
"And is the US (or any other country, for that matter) supposed to take the same attitude towards each government for eternity, no matter what takes place?"
You mean like Israel? There is a certain amount of concern over using helicopter gunships in police actions, but I'm sure that someone will have a quiet word _any day now_.
I'm by no means naive enough to consider the global political situation as either transparent or fixed, but there are huge numbers of people that do. The minority with a grudge will say to themselves that 'block x' of the world population is evil and should be destroyed by whatever means necessary.
The cute thing is that George Bush firmly aligned himself with the mentality of the west banks settlers and the Jakarta suicide bombers by falling into the naive judgement of 'good' and 'evil' according to his moral structure and belief system. So the wheel keeps turning until someone says, 'Hey, maybe if we stopped supplying the guns to developing nations and controlled the global trade in arms, perhaps, just perhaps, people might stop killing each other on a grand scale.' Just to give you some perspective, US defence spending is around 40% of the _global_ amount spent on 'defence'.
"9/11 and related events are quite enough to make one reconsider their perspective on things..."
Only if you live in a nation that had the luxury of ignoring terrorism or relabelling them 'freedom fighters'. The rest of the world has had to deal with numerous organisations planting bombs on a daily basis since the 1900s, so don't think that the US is anything special simply because you erect a couple of massive targets.
While someone might brand this post 'Anti-American', it's actually from someone who actually likes Americans. They have a proactive attitude that's only blighted by a certain degree of arrogance and a certain uneasyness that they think the rest of the world should be just like America with a different accent.
The major problem is not that Mike Hawash shouldn't be charged with intent, but the means with which he was charged and the relative dichotomy between the sentencing of a man that 'intended' to cause the US harm and the complete ignoring of Kenneth Lay's damage to the US. If you're going to bring up 9/11, consider the number of victims produced by Enron.
"Repeat after me: The CIA never funded Osama bin Laden."
No, they didn't give him used non-sequential bills, but you may have heard about a travelling group of troubadours called the 'Hezbollah' who were quite active during Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during a period in history called 'the cold war'...something that all sides lost because of the number of interested parties that were left holding guns without income. The Hezbollah were supplied and funded from 'the west'.
Which raises an interesting point, who sold arms to Afghanistan?
"Because the Talaban sheltered Al Quaeda, provided them land to build training camps, and refused to give up their leadership even after the attacks of 9/11?"
Guess who gave them $384 million a couple of years before?
"The main problem with the majority of MMO*s is that combat is the main focus of levelling. The game then devolves into a "who can get to the spawn point fastest" competition."
Or camp with the most high levels that protect other players or just make it really difficult to 'steal' the kill.
I reached the point with Anarchy where everyone was going uber and calculating their point score increases to wedge in that one implant, or they were twinking their level 2 characters with millions of credits to ensure that they gained PvP titles at the expense of the newb who decided to give PvP a try.
I'm one of those sad gits that used to do the 'RP' in MMORPG...
The problems stem from more than just xp farming from combat, and the best approach I've seen in a while was Dungeon Siege's vocational training, each skill (okay, there weren't many) levelling as it's used...this would give the more 'peaceful' people some way to get those equipment building and supply skills up so a Doctor could be more than a shotgun caddy with uber heals...
Anarchy also managed to shoot itself in the foot heavily by removing encumberance...cue people carrying backpacks in their inventory...
Lastly I'd personally want to see an economic model worth a damn. Go check out the prices of things like Dragon armour and ask yourself whether the constant spawning of such high items actually devalues the ingame currency.
Note, I'd like to caveat the above by stating that I left the game just before Notum Wars, but the focus of the last two expansions has been to enable and keep interested the level 150-200 characters/players rather than refine the system.
For one thing, I can see that MMORPG is going to be at the mercy of the majority, and unfortunately the majority seem to be mostly interested in bragging rights.
"What the fuck does this have to do with enlightenment?
Or humour, or half the other categories, for that matter?"
God hate me for agreeing with an AC, but it does seem to have limited relevance to hardware and enlightenment. Has moderation become a matter of randomly pushing buttons?
(in anticipation of the irony of being modded down for 'offtopic')
Slashdot Mirror
"IP laws are rapidly getting way out of control, but I think limitted IP - with shorter copyright terms before material passes to the public domain, and patents for genuine invention are a Good Thing[tm]."
Totally. Except with regard to software.
For example, the Amazon single click patent. Although they're unlikely to make an issue of it with the vast majority of people, it described a system whereas a single button click can fulfill the entire ordering process. They won't have been the first to implement this, but who is going to go through the rigmarole of having the searches done on speculative patenting?
The answer to this is IP 'farms' and companies with a cash pot intended for this purpose only.
This brings a dangerous precedent in terms that it makes the system 'top-heavy'. No longer does the patent protect the little guy against the people who would copy a given manufactured design, but instead rewards companies with the ability to puntively stifle competition through licensing. A bad thing[tm].
I have this minor problem with corporations as an entity.
"And now the value of your car and computer is diminished to nothing when it is freely traded with people. Why? Because it was obtained without paying for it."
I'm sure you have a point, but it's been completely lost in the relative upsides of freely available hardware.
I'm guessing that you also feel that there should be subscription model for any content produced as it's all intellectual copyright of some degree or another, but in terms of an 'omega point' of this taken to extremes, who decides what is of a quality to be paid for?
BTW, all my replies are gratis and free to view. I understand this makes them worthless.
"Or maybe you're just clueless about current technology "
Online stores are 'technology' now?
I was referring to something across the board rather than being a few retailers that have taken the initiative and shown that the system _works_. However, this does mean an economic driven model for the music industry because all of a sudden they're having to cope with supply and demand rather than the lifestyle push model that they've relied on.
That's socialogical rather than technological, but I'm assuming that you know people outside of the glare of your monitor.
I could be wrong, however.
"more graphics-oriented"
&
"enable text2voice software"
Idiot. The first thing to do is check out the available options for visually impaired users. Turn on the text to voice and check out a webpage for a real eyeopener in how difficult this market is to design for. Simulate visual impairment by sitting a way from the screen, and check that demographic directly by checking for the browsers that people use. If you have screen readers in there, consider switching stylesheets for them. View the site in Netscape 4.75 for that real primitive viewpoint of what the site will look like to a more basic piece of software and move away from tabling code.
Visit CSS Zengarden. Play with the stylesheets. Now go back and look at it in Netscape 4.75. Isn't that elegant?
"And for all you web designers out there, use EMs for setting your font (and everything else) size."
The EM unit is related to the width of a letter 'M'. So how big is that if you're just using EMs?
"It's about paying for music that took money to make. The artists whose "culture" your taking from expect you to pay them for the effort they put in to it."
Perhaps a compromise, then? That they allow people to listen to the album tracks before paying for them and possibly even just allow for the payment of the single tracks that they want.
That way people could avoid the padding that the record companies foist onto people as part of an album with say, two decent tracks.
Of course, I can't see the record company being happy with that amount of choice, but it neatly dismantles the idea of people wanting to steal stuff out of pure nihilism and the ramblings of the music industry apologists who seem to think that a cartel is a good thing.
Further to this, we could actually _give_ the copyrights back to the artists, which would make your frothing condemnation slightly closer to reality, after a certain amount of time and allow them to do what they want with the music.
"I will be right over to pick up your car and computer. Please don't be a "barrier" when I get there, I will just ignore you and your door anyway (or perhaps the window would work better?)."
Cool, just make sure that you leave my originals where you found them after you duplicate and dust your footprints off the window sill.
"The RIAA, the trade group for the largest record labels, said it also found other hidden evidence inside the woman's music files suggesting the songs were recorded by other people and distributed across the Internet."
Sh*t! Now they can read ID3 tags!
Is there no end to their devilishly mad PC skillz?
" properly configured windows box "
Airgapped and buried, presumably.
"Why should authors, programmers, musicians, architects, graphic designers, inventors have to give up their creations into the public domain without any compensation?"
They shouldn't. But likewise agencies that may or may not have the best interests in the producers at heart shouldn't be allowed to apply chilling effects to stifle competition, which is what is currently happening.
Patenting software is ludicrous simply because although there are multiple ways of doing things, it all boils down to one simple process. Have you read a patent? They're getting more general and fuzzier by the day, meaning we're heading for a time where everything will be locked down in ownership by someone else.
This _destroys_ competition.
BTW, The abolition of IP was flamebait. Personally I'd want it overhauled into demonstrable invention with a caveat that software can't be patented.
"what exactly is wrong with this proposal?"
They'd spend billions before realising that it won't work as a concept, car thieves routinely circumvent it and the law hasn't caught up to the idea of RFID tagging as evidence. FWIW, quite a large number of traffic lights in this country are already equipped with cameras, and we have several hundred 'GATSO' cameras by the roadside. Unfortunately they don't provide identification of the driver, just the car and by inference the owner, but they can't prove the driver. A small loophole.
The other problem is that in 2000, they granted the police wide ranging powers to request information of telecommunications providers...we're still waiting for the rules governing the requests to actually be written.
The current labour government has a track record of trying to lever itself into the position of being a data nexus...the largest personal identification database is run by Envision for TV licensing, but it's not actually registered with the Data Protection registrar. As a result, I don't trust the UK government to actually get stuff right.
"Implied: why bother linking to any of their crap?"
I agree, although I find it interesting that the pro-government newspaper (this is a tabloid rag) should be so anti regarding the idea, although it does look like a strawman argument because I can't find references anywhere else.
I get the impression this might be a spun story, but then I'm a cynic.
"didn't think it was possible, but there's a country that has even LESS balls than the US. Does Britain even have elections any more? Maybe the British supreme court picks the parliment, just like the US supreme courts picks the president now. :P"
I'm surprised you haven't been modded down as a troll, but then I suspect people are modding down much more important trolls over the clueless ramblings you made above.
We don't have a supreme court. Parliment is elected based on local elections on a rolling basis for deaths, resignations, etc, and during a general election to decide the 'ruling' party at any particular time.
In terms of our political problems, there is a thread of apathy running through British culture that has it's roots in labouring under a Conservative government that tried to change our economic model to 'more American' with a completely different social psychology, then once we'd got a socialist government, finding the buggers were just as bad as the outgoing lot.
But don't make the mistake, that so many Americans do, that we're Americans with a funny accent. Especially don't make the mistake of applying your political, legal and social structures to other countries. It makes you look silly.
Oh, and I've read 'Stupid White Men'. You're calling Britain retarded?
"America the Beautiful (God Save the Queen),"
And God save the queen(king) was lifted from a French song celebrating the recovery of one of the Louie's from a case of rectal polyps. I sh*t ye not.
"we can't even account for 90%"
By 'we', you mean you and the publishers of various UFO magazines?
There are a number of good solid theories about the missing mass that have the small problem of observational scales to deal with, and given that black holes are still theoretical, although observed, the 90% figure you pulled out of your ass is considered a conservative estimate of stuff that don't glow.
"Figuring out the total heat or mass in the universe is still way beyond us."
Hence there being 90% of an unfigurable number being missing? There's a lot of waggly hand estimation and twocking great big error bars involved, but current estimates are pretty good.
"We don't yet have a theory of gravity that works for the galaxy, or fits with electromagnetic and nuclear forces."
No, we don't have a Grand Unified Theory, but we do have something that describes a galaxy. The problem is that there is a discrepancy between the rotational velocity of a galaxy compared with it's luminosity...dark matter is the sum of the difference.
Dark Matter can be rocks (that don't glow), dwarf stars, brown giants, WIMPS, MACHOs, biro world, enormous dyson spheres and/or compacted lumps of odd socks, or a mixture of all the above plus some oddities that we've not even thought of yet, but we're talking about big scales. I'll spare you the Douglas Adams definition of big, but it doesn't do to get complacent about the scale of the universe.
">Video game addition saves lives Please, it does not save lives."
And slightly more reliable fire detection could be supplied by smoke detectors, which have the advantage of being cheap and rarely off playing Evercrack.
Slow news day on Slashdot?
"Address doesn't match reverse lookup"
You'd be surprised how many DNS servers are completely misconfigured for this, but I think that a simple ping to the address given could actually show if it _existed_.
Personally I've found that I can reduce my spam by a huge amount by never viewing HTML...which brings a thought about tracking and tracing the webbugs in any given piece of HTML email...
"I don't know about anyone else but I am sick of having incompetent drivers in high powered turbo sports cars trying to kill me and my family every time we venture on the road."
At least they don't mass as much as an SUV.
"If only Nintendo had produced some more innovative games like the PS2 EyeToy"
Yeah, and they should have just put a clock on an existing product...[ObSimpsons]
Seriously, you consider the eyetoy to be innovative? I'm waiting until they flood ebay...
'The CIA did to the "Afghan freedom fighters"'
It's something I note with a certain sinking feeling that if you follow global hotspots back a bit, you find a CIA section chief saying, 'That's a wrap boys, good work'...
Can we add the CIA to the axis of evil?
"And is the US (or any other country, for that matter) supposed to take the same attitude towards each government for eternity, no matter what takes place?"
You mean like Israel? There is a certain amount of concern over using helicopter gunships in police actions, but I'm sure that someone will have a quiet word _any day now_.
I'm by no means naive enough to consider the global political situation as either transparent or fixed, but there are huge numbers of people that do. The minority with a grudge will say to themselves that 'block x' of the world population is evil and should be destroyed by whatever means necessary.
The cute thing is that George Bush firmly aligned himself with the mentality of the west banks settlers and the Jakarta suicide bombers by falling into the naive judgement of 'good' and 'evil' according to his moral structure and belief system. So the wheel keeps turning until someone says, 'Hey, maybe if we stopped supplying the guns to developing nations and controlled the global trade in arms, perhaps, just perhaps, people might stop killing each other on a grand scale.' Just to give you some perspective, US defence spending is around 40% of the _global_ amount spent on 'defence'.
"9/11 and related events are quite enough to make one reconsider their perspective on things..."
Only if you live in a nation that had the luxury of ignoring terrorism or relabelling them 'freedom fighters'. The rest of the world has had to deal with numerous organisations planting bombs on a daily basis since the 1900s, so don't think that the US is anything special simply because you erect a couple of massive targets.
While someone might brand this post 'Anti-American', it's actually from someone who actually likes Americans. They have a proactive attitude that's only blighted by a certain degree of arrogance and a certain uneasyness that they think the rest of the world should be just like America with a different accent.
The major problem is not that Mike Hawash shouldn't be charged with intent, but the means with which he was charged and the relative dichotomy between the sentencing of a man that 'intended' to cause the US harm and the complete ignoring of Kenneth Lay's damage to the US. If you're going to bring up 9/11, consider the number of victims produced by Enron.
"Repeat after me: The CIA never funded Osama bin Laden."
No, they didn't give him used non-sequential bills, but you may have heard about a travelling group of troubadours called the 'Hezbollah' who were quite active during Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during a period in history called 'the cold war'...something that all sides lost because of the number of interested parties that were left holding guns without income. The Hezbollah were supplied and funded from 'the west'.
Which raises an interesting point, who sold arms to Afghanistan?
"Because the Talaban sheltered Al Quaeda, provided them land to build training camps, and refused to give up their leadership even after the attacks of 9/11?"
Guess who gave them $384 million a couple of years before?
Looks like McCarthyism is back
"The main problem with the majority of MMO*s is that combat is the main focus of levelling. The game then devolves into a "who can get to the spawn point fastest" competition."
Or camp with the most high levels that protect other players or just make it really difficult to 'steal' the kill.
I reached the point with Anarchy where everyone was going uber and calculating their point score increases to wedge in that one implant, or they were twinking their level 2 characters with millions of credits to ensure that they gained PvP titles at the expense of the newb who decided to give PvP a try.
I'm one of those sad gits that used to do the 'RP' in MMORPG...
The problems stem from more than just xp farming from combat, and the best approach I've seen in a while was Dungeon Siege's vocational training, each skill (okay, there weren't many) levelling as it's used...this would give the more 'peaceful' people some way to get those equipment building and supply skills up so a Doctor could be more than a shotgun caddy with uber heals...
Anarchy also managed to shoot itself in the foot heavily by removing encumberance...cue people carrying backpacks in their inventory...
Lastly I'd personally want to see an economic model worth a damn. Go check out the prices of things like Dragon armour and ask yourself whether the constant spawning of such high items actually devalues the ingame currency.
Note, I'd like to caveat the above by stating that I left the game just before Notum Wars, but the focus of the last two expansions has been to enable and keep interested the level 150-200 characters/players rather than refine the system.
For one thing, I can see that MMORPG is going to be at the mercy of the majority, and unfortunately the majority seem to be mostly interested in bragging rights.
"What the fuck does this have to do with enlightenment?
Or humour, or half the other categories, for that matter?"
God hate me for agreeing with an AC, but it does seem to have limited relevance to hardware and enlightenment. Has moderation become a matter of randomly pushing buttons?
(in anticipation of the irony of being modded down for 'offtopic')