I don't have a valid bank account. Instead, whenever I receive a check, I read on the check which bank it's drawn on, drive down to that bank and cash it. Slightly inconvenient, certainly. But until my old bank and I agree on how much money I owe them, this is what I'm stuck with.;(
The idea behind copyright is to stimulate creative work, yes, but it's not part of the law.
The law is the implementation of the idea. The idea is inseparable from the law.
I think that most of the current problems with IP law, and indeed all the stupid frivolous lawsuits in general, is that our society has gotten away from the fact that law is supposed to be an implementation of ideas, and when a better implementation comes up, or it is determined the law doesn't properly implement the idea, it should be discarded. But the idea should guide all decisions based on the law, and is an integral part of any court case.
If you separate law from ideal, what's the point of law?
IN order ot give a tax break, you either have to create an arbitrary amount to break, or you have to value the work. If, as you say, the work is officially valueless, then you would have to create an arbitrary amount for the break. This would create a way for people to lower their tax burden by making frivolous copyrightable things that are valueless in the market.
I think the idea of licensing it to give money misses the point. We are talking about copyrights which no one wants to spend money to license. If people are willing to spend money to license it, it shouldn't be abandoned.
The biggest problem MAME faces right now is that there are sooooo many arcade console games that the owners have disappeared completely that they (MAME) can't clear the copyright on them. Now there's a market for the games again, thanks to MAME and the combination of 80s retro gaming. Had your PDF been in existence when some of these businesses went under or whatever else happened, they could've given the games to the PDF. Hopefully receiving a tax break (which I didn't rule out in my previous post and I'm not ruling out now, just mentioning it's complicated) would have reduced the burden on their bankruptcy proceedings or whatever. Maybe not by much, but hopefully enough to make it worthwhile to them immediately, and since the PDF guys are going to try to license the thing to other interested parties, the original producers can claim the satisfaction of knowing their castaway work might help someone or even save someone's life. Might.
It's obvious where I"m going with this.
So years later, 80s retro gaming comes into style and a company organizes itself to distribute the games. First place they look for games they can license for distribution? You guessed it, the PDF. Since the PDF is a non-profit group, they can license the stuff for pennies on the dollar what it would be worth if a commercial organization (like Atari, who's still kicking in one form or other) were doing the licensing, the startup business can have lower costs. In exchange for his lower costs, the PDF guys are using the money they get to support various charities, acting as a middleman for distributing a new revenue source to charities that badly need it.
Or we can have what we have now, which is abandonware left and right and submarine copyright lawsuits.
I thought your basic idea was very good, and was just trying to add to it.:)
The answer was obviously intended to make you think of Christmas season and lose.:) The first question you should have asked about it is "Are there any other seasonal businesses that aren't Christmas and employ white-collar workers?"
I don't know that I would have wound up with H&R block, but I would have been safely out of Christmas territory almost immediately.:) (And no, I didn't watch the show, I do not have a TV, I don't even know why I'm reading this discussion)
I think you are wrong. Progress is subjective phrase.
That is exactly what makes this a court issue rather than a legislative issue. The court gets to reinterpret "progress" as often as needed because times change. So by using a subjective phrase in the framework, objective laws can be passed from time to time using updated definitions of the subjective language in the framework. And the courts can strike down obsolete laws that were totally constitutional when written because they get to redefine the subjective language that made them constitutional in order to update the laws with the times.
At least, that's what the Massachussets court did when they made it legal for gays to get married.
That's not a bad idea, but instead of having your magical PDF place the work in public domain, how about having them license it cheap until the copyright expires and using the money to benefit other charities? A little to EFF, a little to Red Cross, etc. That would be an incentive for people to give their copyrighted work to the PDF instead of jsut saying "This work is public domain".
Otherwise, what's the point? I could give my work to your PDF, go through the effort of transferring copyright in a legally binding fashion, so they can declare it public domain, OR I could just declare it public domain. What's the incentive for me to give it to them?
I just wanted to point out that Mattel has started doing the same thing with Barbie. They're picking up public domain stories, casting Barbie in the leading female role, Ken in the leading male role, and making CG movies. Not good ones, but not bad ones either. Not as bad as some of the shit that's come out of Disney...
So they're taking Disney on more or less head-on, I'm thinking. I don't know, maybe they're having Pixar make the movies (doubtful, Pixar does better work than what comprises Barbie movies). So Mattel and Barbie are kinda 'good guys' here, bringing public domain stories (mostly old ballets) back into entertainment and encroaching what has traditionally been Disney's territory.
Cos 'god' implies all-knowing and all-powerful, so it's better to be on their side than not. And if (a) god doesn't exist, then you haven't really lost much (except a bit of effort) by worshipping.
'god' doesn't imply any of that. The only reason we 'know' this is because it's in all his marketing material (the Bible). Since I trust marketing material just as far as I can throw it...
So it is actually _logical_ to be religious...
Nope, it's not. Not unless you can answer what the war in hell was about and why God's enemies have been suppressed so completely that we never get to hear their side. Who knows? Maybe they have real grievances against him? Maybe God really isn't all-knowing and all-powerful and he's been lying all this time?
So, yeah, if you choose to worship God so you can go to heaven under the reasoning that "If he does exist, I'd rather be there because all of his PR people tell me so", you could wind up spending eternity living a fate worse than death.
Terrorists need money to buy explosives and fake passports...stolen property can be sold for money without having to have paid for it...they were going to be sold on the black market...more than likely sold to a second-world country...
Which they typically get from a sponsoring government.
Of course I'm not saying they were terrorsits, I obviously have way too little information to make such an ascertion...but to put those pieces together and think there is no way they can be terrorists, that's just plain ignorance.
Um, you picked the word, not I.
In any case, what I was objecting to was that they made this big deal about "it's not terrorists". Why? Why does every time something happen we first figure out if it's terrorists, and *then* get on the real problem? Not only is it just more scaredy-cat press, it's inefficient because the first step taken for 99% of crimes committed in this country is a wasted step. Instead, if the investigation should point to terrorism, then it's a valid question to ask.
Not that I've ever done any investigative work, it just seems procedurally inefficient to ask the same question for everything, knowing that 99% of the time the question is irrelevant to the case.
It was so obviously not terrorists. I mean, come on, the guys were stealing stuff. If they were terrorists, they'd have just blown themselves up when they got next to the boards in the building.
Hey look, a snake! Oh, sorry, I guess it was just a plain rope.
(It's pissing me off too that every time someone yells fire there's immediately a discussion about whether or not the fire is terrorism, and when it turns out there's no fire, whether or not the person yelling fire is a terrorist. Jeez, we had regular crime before 9/11, we still have it)
As an added bonus, there's no more geothermal energy to gain from the planet and it's too far away from the sun to farm a significant amount of solar energy, so one could say definitively that mars is here and forevermore useless.
Well, each family member could be a distro. The father could be Fedora, or perhaps RHEL. The mother could be SuSE, the teenage boy could be Gentoo, the daughter could be skolelinux and the baby could be Damn Small Linux...
Because the world really needs another stupid sitcom about another dysfunctional family.
A significant number of 'exploits' on IE are due to users stupidly agreeing to install components that they shouldn't. While there are arguments about how easy it should be for a user to do something stupid -- download, find, and execute vs. click on the wrong button -- I think it is sensible to cast these aside.
Social exploits are the largest class of security holes and the most damaging. I don't think it is at all sensible to cast these aside. Your whole security model crumbles immediately upon doing so.
Re:Elena was debunked a while ago.
on
A New Elena Story
·
· Score: 1
Heh, I'm not disagreeing, just pointing out how I was disappointed by it. Some of these other people are wanting to tar and feather her or something. Kinky, but a tad extreme.
Re:Elena was debunked a while ago.
on
A New Elena Story
·
· Score: 1
And note that Elena didn't ask for this publicity when the published the photos. It was just a little personal photo gallery for friends (and fellow motorcycle riders), nothing more. I've been in Berlin a few weeks ago and took some photos. My friends took some photos too. If I copy one of their pics (of a building or a monument that I didn't have a chance to photograph) and include it in my album, which I then post online for my other friends and relatives, would that be unethical? Would that be misleading? Now if that album was picked up by Slashdot and major media outlets, would it be right to call me a fake and a liar? I don't think so.
Well, she does generally mark a picture as not hers often enough to lend credibility to pictures she doesn't say she didn't take.
I would prefer that if something isn't true, to the best of the author's ability to determine, that they include something saying so. Like "Some of these pictures I took on the tour, some of them are from this photo album or that photo album". Or "This is the story as I remember it", which automatically means it's wrong if I remember it wrong.
Now, in your specific example, how you present the photo of the monument you saw but didn't get a chance to take yourself is the kicker. Do you say "I saw this monument" and leave it at that? Generally ok if the person looking at the album is already aware that you didn't take every photo in the album (a common question, I hear, when looking at someone's photo album. I don't know, though, because I neither keep a photo album nor look at other people's photo albums). But if you collect a bunch of photos from a bunch of different sources, say you took them all on a motorcycle ride through the zone, and present it as fact, then it is a lie.
I'm a little disappointed her motorcycle story isn't true, and I did suspect she wasn't being completely honest with the story. What actually irritates me about it isn't that it wasn't true, it's that she turns out to be my age and formerly/currently married to a con-man, and that another researcher turned up the fact that she had posed some of the pictures, but in her photo journal (at least the version that I read) she said she didn't touch anything, she'd left it as it was, and that it appeared to the tour guide woman that Elena had been intentionally posing the pictures for shock value.
Reason? She could have said all the same things without dressing it up. The event was bad enough. So she had it in her power to be completely honest without burdening the story down with disclaimers, and still say the same thing. Given the choice being saying something and doing it honestly and saying the same thing and doing it dishonestly, what would you prefer?
I hear that in the director's cut, David and Goliath shoot at the same time
Dammit, I'm not getting that. David shot first. David always shot first. They'd make a lot more money if the just reissue the originals, since so many people want those.
If I recall correctly, in the radio play and tv series, the characters went to Milliways before they got to Magrathea. In the books, Milliways happened in the second book, with Magrathea happening in the first. Definite contradiction there. In the books, Trillian is clearly described as being brunette and extremely intelligent. In the tv series she was a dumb ditzy blonde. In the movie, Ford Prefect is black. In the tv series, he was white.
ready for extreme pedanticism?
Ford's color was never given, or I'm mistaken. We just assumed he was white.
I don't recall Trillian being described physically in the books, but in the TV show she was smart but everyone else thought she was a dumb ditzy blonde.
And the shoe. You mentioned that everything was different, but in all three "differences" you cited, the Heart of Gold was shaped like a shoe.
If the guy that worked on the screenplay shows up with words from the Man himself saying he wanted to change the Heart of Gold, I'll be fine with it. In the meantime, I consider it highly unlikely the Man himself would have made that particular choice.
And the Magrathea thing. Oh yeah. Let's see if I remember this correctly, huh? It has been a little while since I read the books. Let's see, Ford and Arthur get picked up and they go to Magrathea. Then, while they're trying to escape the psycho Vogons that are after Arthur, they have the seance and the old man shrinks the Heart of Gold, sticks it in Zaphod's pocket, and sends him to the offices of the H2G2. Then he gets taken to a Frogstar world, and I don't recall exactly how they get to the Restauraunt. But in the book, the restauraunt was built on the ruins of the Frogstar world rather than Magrathea.
Eh? We *could* get involved in this discussion, but we probably agree for the most part. I was just trying to dismiss homeboy's strawman, is all, without specifically taking a side of my own, just the side that dismissed his strawman.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a valid bank account. Instead, whenever I receive a check, I read on the check which bank it's drawn on, drive down to that bank and cash it. Slightly inconvenient, certainly. But until my old bank and I agree on how much money I owe them, this is what I'm stuck with. ;(
MASTURBATION MASTURBATION MASTURBATION
"Daddy, why did you call yourself 'fuck slashdot'"?
"Becasue intellectual masturbation is dumb. To that I say, fuck slashdot!"
:)
The idea behind copyright is to stimulate creative work, yes, but it's not part of the law.
The law is the implementation of the idea. The idea is inseparable from the law.
I think that most of the current problems with IP law, and indeed all the stupid frivolous lawsuits in general, is that our society has gotten away from the fact that law is supposed to be an implementation of ideas, and when a better implementation comes up, or it is determined the law doesn't properly implement the idea, it should be discarded. But the idea should guide all decisions based on the law, and is an integral part of any court case.
If you separate law from ideal, what's the point of law?
IN order ot give a tax break, you either have to create an arbitrary amount to break, or you have to value the work. If, as you say, the work is officially valueless, then you would have to create an arbitrary amount for the break. This would create a way for people to lower their tax burden by making frivolous copyrightable things that are valueless in the market.
I think the idea of licensing it to give money misses the point. We are talking about copyrights which no one wants to spend money to license. If people are willing to spend money to license it, it shouldn't be abandoned.
The biggest problem MAME faces right now is that there are sooooo many arcade console games that the owners have disappeared completely that they (MAME) can't clear the copyright on them. Now there's a market for the games again, thanks to MAME and the combination of 80s retro gaming. Had your PDF been in existence when some of these businesses went under or whatever else happened, they could've given the games to the PDF. Hopefully receiving a tax break (which I didn't rule out in my previous post and I'm not ruling out now, just mentioning it's complicated) would have reduced the burden on their bankruptcy proceedings or whatever. Maybe not by much, but hopefully enough to make it worthwhile to them immediately, and since the PDF guys are going to try to license the thing to other interested parties, the original producers can claim the satisfaction of knowing their castaway work might help someone or even save someone's life. Might.
It's obvious where I"m going with this.
So years later, 80s retro gaming comes into style and a company organizes itself to distribute the games. First place they look for games they can license for distribution? You guessed it, the PDF. Since the PDF is a non-profit group, they can license the stuff for pennies on the dollar what it would be worth if a commercial organization (like Atari, who's still kicking in one form or other) were doing the licensing, the startup business can have lower costs. In exchange for his lower costs, the PDF guys are using the money they get to support various charities, acting as a middleman for distributing a new revenue source to charities that badly need it.
Or we can have what we have now, which is abandonware left and right and submarine copyright lawsuits.
I thought your basic idea was very good, and was just trying to add to it. :)
The answer was obviously intended to make you think of Christmas season and lose. :) The first question you should have asked about it is "Are there any other seasonal businesses that aren't Christmas and employ white-collar workers?"
I don't know that I would have wound up with H&R block, but I would have been safely out of Christmas territory almost immediately. :) (And no, I didn't watch the show, I do not have a TV, I don't even know why I'm reading this discussion)
I think you are wrong. Progress is subjective phrase.
That is exactly what makes this a court issue rather than a legislative issue. The court gets to reinterpret "progress" as often as needed because times change. So by using a subjective phrase in the framework, objective laws can be passed from time to time using updated definitions of the subjective language in the framework. And the courts can strike down obsolete laws that were totally constitutional when written because they get to redefine the subjective language that made them constitutional in order to update the laws with the times.
At least, that's what the Massachussets court did when they made it legal for gays to get married.
That's not a bad idea, but instead of having your magical PDF place the work in public domain, how about having them license it cheap until the copyright expires and using the money to benefit other charities? A little to EFF, a little to Red Cross, etc. That would be an incentive for people to give their copyrighted work to the PDF instead of jsut saying "This work is public domain".
Otherwise, what's the point? I could give my work to your PDF, go through the effort of transferring copyright in a legally binding fashion, so they can declare it public domain, OR I could just declare it public domain. What's the incentive for me to give it to them?
I just wanted to point out that Mattel has started doing the same thing with Barbie. They're picking up public domain stories, casting Barbie in the leading female role, Ken in the leading male role, and making CG movies. Not good ones, but not bad ones either. Not as bad as some of the shit that's come out of Disney...
So they're taking Disney on more or less head-on, I'm thinking. I don't know, maybe they're having Pixar make the movies (doubtful, Pixar does better work than what comprises Barbie movies). So Mattel and Barbie are kinda 'good guys' here, bringing public domain stories (mostly old ballets) back into entertainment and encroaching what has traditionally been Disney's territory.
Um, the author has to agree to copyright or find his own way of protecting distribution of the work, and that's the deal copyright offers.
Idiot. Haven't you ever heard of Wisconsin?
Oh, all right.
Cos 'god' implies all-knowing and all-powerful, so it's better to be on their side than not. And if (a) god doesn't exist, then you haven't really lost much (except a bit of effort) by worshipping.
'god' doesn't imply any of that. The only reason we 'know' this is because it's in all his marketing material (the Bible). Since I trust marketing material just as far as I can throw it...
So it is actually _logical_ to be religious...
Nope, it's not. Not unless you can answer what the war in hell was about and why God's enemies have been suppressed so completely that we never get to hear their side. Who knows? Maybe they have real grievances against him? Maybe God really isn't all-knowing and all-powerful and he's been lying all this time?
So, yeah, if you choose to worship God so you can go to heaven under the reasoning that "If he does exist, I'd rather be there because all of his PR people tell me so", you could wind up spending eternity living a fate worse than death.
Terrorists need money to buy explosives and fake passports...stolen property can be sold for money without having to have paid for it...they were going to be sold on the black market...more than likely sold to a second-world country...
Which they typically get from a sponsoring government.
Of course I'm not saying they were terrorsits, I obviously have way too little information to make such an ascertion...but to put those pieces together and think there is no way they can be terrorists, that's just plain ignorance.
Um, you picked the word, not I.
In any case, what I was objecting to was that they made this big deal about "it's not terrorists". Why? Why does every time something happen we first figure out if it's terrorists, and *then* get on the real problem? Not only is it just more scaredy-cat press, it's inefficient because the first step taken for 99% of crimes committed in this country is a wasted step. Instead, if the investigation should point to terrorism, then it's a valid question to ask.
Not that I've ever done any investigative work, it just seems procedurally inefficient to ask the same question for everything, knowing that 99% of the time the question is irrelevant to the case.
It was so obviously not terrorists. I mean, come on, the guys were stealing stuff. If they were terrorists, they'd have just blown themselves up when they got next to the boards in the building.
Hey look, a snake! Oh, sorry, I guess it was just a plain rope.
(It's pissing me off too that every time someone yells fire there's immediately a discussion about whether or not the fire is terrorism, and when it turns out there's no fire, whether or not the person yelling fire is a terrorist. Jeez, we had regular crime before 9/11, we still have it)
Actually, it's a perfect half-assed plot.
"What'll we do if someone figures out we're here?"
"Nothing, who are they going to call anyway? We're taking down 911!"
"That's brilliant!"
Heh heh.
As an added bonus, there's no more geothermal energy to gain from the planet and it's too far away from the sun to farm a significant amount of solar energy, so one could say definitively that mars is here and forevermore useless.
Did you forget about strip mining?
This sounds more like sysadmins instead of applying to a custom collection applying to the "All Systems" container.
Dumbfuck: Hey boss, you want me to apply this patch to All Systems or Custom Systems?
Boss: All 6 custom systems.
Dumbfuck: So that's all systems, then, is it?
Boss: Yes, All 6 systems.
Dumbfuck: Ok, it's done.
*phones ring*
Damn, I thought it was short for Military Police.
Oh wait, what's the difference?
God save the queen! She ain't no human being...
Well, each family member could be a distro. The father could be Fedora, or perhaps RHEL. The mother could be SuSE, the teenage boy could be Gentoo, the daughter could be skolelinux and the baby could be Damn Small Linux...
Because the world really needs another stupid sitcom about another dysfunctional family.
A significant number of 'exploits' on IE are due to users stupidly agreeing to install components that they shouldn't. While there are arguments about how easy it should be for a user to do something stupid -- download, find, and execute vs. click on the wrong button -- I think it is sensible to cast these aside.
Social exploits are the largest class of security holes and the most damaging. I don't think it is at all sensible to cast these aside. Your whole security model crumbles immediately upon doing so.
Heh, I'm not disagreeing, just pointing out how I was disappointed by it. Some of these other people are wanting to tar and feather her or something. Kinky, but a tad extreme.
And note that Elena didn't ask for this publicity when the published the photos. It was just a little personal photo gallery for friends (and fellow motorcycle riders), nothing more. I've been in Berlin a few weeks ago and took some photos. My friends took some photos too. If I copy one of their pics (of a building or a monument that I didn't have a chance to photograph) and include it in my album, which I then post online for my other friends and relatives, would that be unethical? Would that be misleading? Now if that album was picked up by Slashdot and major media outlets, would it be right to call me a fake and a liar? I don't think so.
Well, she does generally mark a picture as not hers often enough to lend credibility to pictures she doesn't say she didn't take.
I would prefer that if something isn't true, to the best of the author's ability to determine, that they include something saying so. Like "Some of these pictures I took on the tour, some of them are from this photo album or that photo album". Or "This is the story as I remember it", which automatically means it's wrong if I remember it wrong.
Now, in your specific example, how you present the photo of the monument you saw but didn't get a chance to take yourself is the kicker. Do you say "I saw this monument" and leave it at that? Generally ok if the person looking at the album is already aware that you didn't take every photo in the album (a common question, I hear, when looking at someone's photo album. I don't know, though, because I neither keep a photo album nor look at other people's photo albums). But if you collect a bunch of photos from a bunch of different sources, say you took them all on a motorcycle ride through the zone, and present it as fact, then it is a lie.
I'm a little disappointed her motorcycle story isn't true, and I did suspect she wasn't being completely honest with the story. What actually irritates me about it isn't that it wasn't true, it's that she turns out to be my age and formerly/currently married to a con-man, and that another researcher turned up the fact that she had posed some of the pictures, but in her photo journal (at least the version that I read) she said she didn't touch anything, she'd left it as it was, and that it appeared to the tour guide woman that Elena had been intentionally posing the pictures for shock value.
Reason? She could have said all the same things without dressing it up. The event was bad enough. So she had it in her power to be completely honest without burdening the story down with disclaimers, and still say the same thing. Given the choice being saying something and doing it honestly and saying the same thing and doing it dishonestly, what would you prefer?
I hear that in the director's cut, David and Goliath shoot at the same time
Dammit, I'm not getting that. David shot first. David always shot first. They'd make a lot more money if the just reissue the originals, since so many people want those.
If I recall correctly, in the radio play and tv series, the characters went to Milliways before they got to Magrathea. In the books, Milliways happened in the second book, with Magrathea happening in the first. Definite contradiction there. In the books, Trillian is clearly described as being brunette and extremely intelligent. In the tv series she was a dumb ditzy blonde. In the movie, Ford Prefect is black. In the tv series, he was white.
ready for extreme pedanticism?
Ford's color was never given, or I'm mistaken. We just assumed he was white.
I don't recall Trillian being described physically in the books, but in the TV show she was smart but everyone else thought she was a dumb ditzy blonde.
And the shoe. You mentioned that everything was different, but in all three "differences" you cited, the Heart of Gold was shaped like a shoe.
If the guy that worked on the screenplay shows up with words from the Man himself saying he wanted to change the Heart of Gold, I'll be fine with it. In the meantime, I consider it highly unlikely the Man himself would have made that particular choice.
And the Magrathea thing. Oh yeah. Let's see if I remember this correctly, huh? It has been a little while since I read the books. Let's see, Ford and Arthur get picked up and they go to Magrathea. Then, while they're trying to escape the psycho Vogons that are after Arthur, they have the seance and the old man shrinks the Heart of Gold, sticks it in Zaphod's pocket, and sends him to the offices of the H2G2. Then he gets taken to a Frogstar world, and I don't recall exactly how they get to the Restauraunt. But in the book, the restauraunt was built on the ruins of the Frogstar world rather than Magrathea.
damn I'm sleepy. 'night.
Eh? We *could* get involved in this discussion, but we probably agree for the most part. I was just trying to dismiss homeboy's strawman, is all, without specifically taking a side of my own, just the side that dismissed his strawman. :)
Bah, both are for woosies. REAL men strap scuba gear AND Satrurn IVs to their arses!
I can't believe this is on-topic.