In response to 2, I'm assuming you are referring to how Cho bought guns legally. Well, guess what, he wasn't a criminal when he bought the guns. He also was not violent, as far as I have heard. So what should stop him from buying a gun that would not stop, say, Stephen King from buying a gun? Both people wrote disturbing and violent stories. Which one is a criminal is only apparent after a criminal act has been committed. The fact that most people who write violent or disturbing stories do not go out and kill people implies that we shouldn't ban selling guns to authors of violent fiction. What the hell do you want, thought police or something?
3. Declaring someone mentally ill doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing state. There is nothing wrong with having a policeman and a psychiatrist present at a gun permit interview and judging that person to be of sound mind, calm disposition and having a legitimate use for the kind of gun they are planning to buy as well as skills to use and safeguard it properly (the last would do something to address black market). If they fail, they walk away with a pepper spray.
There's nothing wrong with a policeman and a psychiatrist waiting at the courthouse to evaluate the personalities of people getting engaged either, is there? They can apply some simple tests and tell them if they can get married or not, based on the statistical likelihood of spousal abuse. Additionally, hospitals should have a policeman and a child services case-worker at the maternity ward to seize children of potential "problem" parents (determined by a simple interview) immediately as well. Additionally, everyone getting married or having children should undergo extensive training in how to be properly married or raise children. Failure just means not getting to be married or procreate, no biggie. After all, way more people are victims of domestic abuse than of gun crime!
What about the FSF? Thanks to the recent change in patent law, anyone can challenge a patent's validity even without being party to an infringement lawsuit. I would personally donate $100 to the FSF just to see one of Microsoft's stupid patents invalidated. If the FSF could bring some kind of group action against all the patents at once and invalidate them on their own grounds in one case, even better.
If Microsoft doesn't disclose their patent list, I would even support the FSF trying to invalidate as many random Microsoft patents as possible in an attempt to force them into disclosing their actual list. At some point, even if Microsoft owns thousands of patents, the probability quickly increases that one of the patents on their "list" will be randomly selected and invalidated. That will almost certainly stir up interest in any company that has paid Microsoft to license an invalid patent.
The other small parties have no idea what they'd do if they actually won.
What needs to be done? What are the really pressing issues that everyone cares about? It seems like half the country wants to be pre-marital genital inspectors and the other half wants free health care and welfare for life. What are third party candidates supposed to do? Sit and do nothing, I'd hope.
Now if only it was that easy to tell the body "All right, I acknowledge your message that something's wrong. However there's nothing I can do about that, SO STOP YELLING."
Analgesics have been known since ancient times. They only get better with additional research.
...unless use is restricted to signed binaries on locked hardware. All of a sudden there's none of the GPL v3 protection, because there's no copyright, so I can happily take your community built code, improve it, make a billion dollars and/or become famous but not give you squat in return.
That locked hardware is working out real good for DRM, isn't it? I don't see that improving any time in the future. Industrial espionage would fix the whole DRM/"trusted" computing thing real fast, too, especially because it would be hard to claim that a hardware/software combination sold to the public contained anything that was a trade secret. Therefore keys and hardware designs are fair game as long as they're included in the final product.
I think GP's point is valid: supporting both GPL-style sharing & copyright abolition is inconsistent, as they're mutually exclusive - if you're a genuine copyright abolitionist, you'd support BSD instead. I don't think it would be possible to enforce the particular flavour of sharing currently enabled by the GPL with no copyright. TFA appears to propose some sort of nebulous copyright replacement legislation which would enforce GPL sharing - I might be missing something obvious, but it seems likely that it would just be copyright by a different name.
If copyright was abolished, reverse engineering and reselling would also be completely legal. Modifications to open source software could legally be released as binary only, but they would quickly be reverse engineered if they were useful. The BSDs would actually gain freedom, because anyone could reverse engineer the additions and improvements that proprietary companies have added to BSD software but released as closed binaries. The GPL would only lose the ability to mandate that modified binary releases included source code, but I think the total legality of reverse engineering and free copying would be a larger benefit for everyone.
The RIAA would not be threatening the students if the students weren't violating copyright. Stop violating copyright, and the RIAA has nothing to go after.
You'd think so, but the MAFIAA has also been threatening people without computers, dead people, and small children. There's really no evidence that any of the threats they've sent would stand up in a trial, since so far the cases that have gone to trial are going rather poorly for the MAFIAA.
Being "relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay" is not justification for violating copyright. I don't have the an attorney on retainer or the means to pay, but that doesn't mean I can speed or violate traffic laws with impunity. "But judge, I can't afford the ticket so I shouldn't be prosecuted" won't fly very far in court. People in this country need to start taking responsibility for themselves.
You may not be able to violate traffic laws with impunity, but police officers, judges, and politicians routinely do so. What does that tell you about the legal system and how people with money and power can abuse it? The MAFIAA has enough lawyers on retainer to simply scare normal people into settlements which cost less than a proper legal defense. It's pure extortion and racketeering.
Posting keys isnt some glamorous civil-rights disobedience its saying "Dude, now I can totally download more hollywood crap now and act righteous!"
FUD. Once movies have been ripped they can be downloaded and played by anyone without needing the AACS keys. The only people who need the decryption keys already have a physical copy of the movie (presumably they bought or rented it, or received it as a gift). The spread of AACS keys is specifically for being able to play movies on non-windows boxes, rip movies to media servers, or make backup copies for kids who can't watch a movie without scratching the hell out of it. Real pirates keep the keys they extract secret so that their players won't be revoked by the MAFIAA.
Most users wouldn't be satisfied with being able to prove mathematically that the movie they wanted to watch really was on the disk, but still have zero knowledge of what it actually looked and sounded like.
The Digg vs. Hex number story is a good example. Digg tried to comply with the law, but its users revolted and forced the site's admins to acquiesce. Even if Digg is shut down by federal authorities, arresting thousands of users for posting a 32bit number is going to prove... difficult.
The first thought that sprang to my mind was the colonists throwing tea into the Boston harbor. A bunch of normal citizens dressed up as digg users and threw the MAFIAA's "intellectual property" into the proverbial ocean of the Internet.
Overhead. Doctors need to hire transcriptionists and billing clerks to do work that could be largely automated. (Our product addresses this).
A good transcriptionist can type a report in an hour or less. That's 30 dollars tops, nothing compared to the $300 or $400 per study radiologists are paid. A billing office of 10 or 15 people can pull in several million dollars of payments every month, and with the complex billing rules required by Medicare and Medicaid, it is difficult to automate and the fines are very harsh for fraudulent claims, including claims that the hospital should have known were fraudulent (e.g. automating things and not checking them religiously). There are still lots of soft skills required like calling people and verifying insurance coverage that really can't be automated. That said, a lot of what I do is helping to automate billing processes and yes there is definitely room for improvement.
Lack of communications (or standardized records formats). There are *some* standards (HL7 is what we use for integration with 3rd-party scheduling and billing systems where possible), but nothing widely accepted and comprehensive enough to be able to give a patient a flash drive with their complete medical history in a format any doctor's EHR product will understand. Worse, a lot of systems won't integrate with anything else without requiring the customer to fork out serious $$$ for the add-on functionality. (As just one small vendor, there's not so much we can do about this right now)
After seeing the different work flows and nursing and business practices, I don't think there is anything like a standard medical record. At best, subsets of information are interchangeable between different clinics and hospitals.
I think it's hard for hospitals and especially clinics to justify big EHR packages because of their cost and additional support staff requirements. From what I've seen people are still just as busy with the EHR systems in place but the support is still an extra cost, so the facility has to justify the benefits of the EHR system against those costs. Big vendors like Cerner, HBOC, and Siemens are not cheap, and way out of the price range of smaller hospitals or clinics.
(That said, there's a lot of poorly-implemented technology in healthcare... but that's a topic for a different, much more anonymous forum).
Every medical product I've seen is riddled with insecurity, and several of them have been downright dangerous. I absolutely *hate* vendors who think they need FDA approval for a documentation system or other ancillary system, and then turn around and claim that because of FDA regulations they will only be patching their Windows based systems once a year. They will not support the systems if we apply the latest patch against an Internet worm, and they certainly won't do it themselves. Basing their medical product on Windows is stupid, but hiding behind the FDA regulations to avoid responsibility for prompt patching is negligent. I'm tempted to file formal safety complaints against vendors with the FDA if they fail to patch their systems, since that's essentially the only thing that will get them to listen.
Another cost I haven't really seen anyone mention yet are the supplies. Medical supply companies know that they can essentially set the price and hospitals and clinics will have to pay them. They make specialty devices with a high cost of entry to the market, never a good situation for customers. Medical device safety issues have probably driven the prices for machinery higher to pay for lawsuit insurance, too. Not all is bad though, there are actually continual improvements in the quality of devices, and some of them are worth the money.
...if they'd just trust people to have a bit more personal responsibility over their own health and not try to make sure that every single step of their treatment is authorized and approved by a limited pool of highly skilled professionals who are much better employed elsewhere.
Have you seen the growth of herbal supplement isles? God forbid normal people get general access to pharmaceuticals. "Gee, I wonder why this drug cocktail simultaneously shut down my internal organs while boosting my blood pressure and breeding a new deadly antibiotic resistant strain of staph-B?"
When we as a culture accept that growing old and dying are natural and that "fighting to the end" is not always the best choice, then the costs of health care in this country can begin to return to reasonable levels.
When we as a culture accept that infant mortality rates naturally rest around 50% and the average lifespan should really be closer to 30, we can get down to the business of working short, happy lives in heavy industry and keeping the healthcare costs down. Besides, when we die that young we will stop getting cancer, heart or lung diseases, parkinsons, and alzheimers!
No, sorry, I'd rather aim for radical life extension. Probably the only thing that will make people actually care about the future is the expectation that they will be around to deal with it.
However, in my home directory I have a lot of large audio and video files that I would never want to be versioned. I wander if Ext3cow keeps extra copies of the files if I move them around, change file named but do not modify the content. Probably I would have to make a new partition and put my text files I am working on there under Ext3cow and leave my media files on ext3.
Since ext3cow uses copy on write (or more realistically, metadata magic to emulate copy on write without the actual copy), unless you are routinely modifying your media files they will only take one file version and no extra space. On the other hand, when you accidentally do rm *mp* without thinking, you can just go back to the old version of the files and restore them. Moving files is just a matter of changing which directory contains a pointer to the file inode (think in terms of creating a new hardlink to the file in the directory you're moving the file to, and then deleting the hardlink in the original directory: no data movement required).
I haven't gotten to the part in the ACM article describing tools to automatically manage the old snapshots, but some sort of exponential decay is probably the most useful: Keep all versions less than 1 day old, then only keep one version between 2 days and one week old, only keep one version between 1 week and 1 month old, etc. That way you have the original version, and then a yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily version of any given file, with just the differential data between each version actually stored to disk. For manipulating lots of files, or very large files, it would be useful to have per directory policies as well (e.g./tmp probably does not need any versioning, and the bin and lib directories might only need one old version at most). When I get home, I am definitely compiling 2.6.20.3 with this patch on my laptop.
Tell me - did you actually READ what I wrote? Because, frankly, you're putting a lot of words in my mouth to spew out your own agenda.
I guess my questions were ill-posed, and my comments inflammatory. Sorry. I think copyright is flawed, but I think for practicality (and even morality) there will have to be some long term laws about information. The fact that I am using Linux and Firefox is ample demonstration that strict copyrights are not necessary for everything, and usually I find myself thinking about copyright in software terms. I have less experience with other forms of copyrighted works.
When did I ever say it did? What I said was: "Copyright is a legal framework that can be boiled down to two functions (I'm going to use book terms, as that's what I'm familiar with). The first, most important, and least noticed, is setting rules for the interactions between the author and the publisher. The second sets rules for the interaction between the publisher and the reader. There is a third role - author and reader, but that really doesn't matter a whole lot in the greater scheme of things, regardless of what the RIAA would have you believe."
When I said that popular culture belonged to publishers and advertisers, I was referring to the fact that copyright owners almost always reserve all rights to their works, making it difficult for elements from their works to be reused in others to further cultural development. You didn't specifically mention anything about this circumstance of modern copyrights, but it is nonetheless a result of it. We watch television, listen to music, and read books that are ultimately all copyrighted and therefore not reusable in new works unless one has permission from a lot of different owners. If an author likes a character or more appropriately a world invented by another author, they generally can't use those same characters or worlds even though the result might be very good. The main reason Shrek was successful was because it incorporated concepts and characters from a large collection of public domain stories. Even the protection given to parodies would not have allowed Shrek to directly use copyrighted characters to the extent that the film used public domain characters. Some of these arguments are concerned with specific implementations of copyright, and not the fundamental nature of copyrights, but the distinction can be fine: Without protection of characters and worlds, it would be very difficult to prevent dishonest publishers from creating cheap knockoffs using entire storylines and the same characters with different names, although from what I have heard this sort of thing gets argued and sued over a lot already even with existing copyright protection.
First of all, if you want to see what you would get in a system free of any feeling of obligation to copyright, I suggest you look at the fanfiction scene - and it isn't pretty. In fact, quality fanfiction is a lot rarer than quality professional fiction. Second, again, did you READ what I wrote? Here's a reminder:
From your sig it looks like you've written "official fanfiction" about Diablo (I haven't read it, so I am not commenting on its quality). Would you have written the book anyway even if it could not be copyrighted, or alternatively if Blizzard had not approved it? I think the biggest limitation on fanfiction is that good authors know they would be sued if it was popular and unapproved. For examples of good fiction, I would look at things like MOPI, Passages in the void, and pretty much the fiction section of k5 in general. It has some crap, true, but also plenty of very interesting short (and long) stories. The voting queue acts much like a publisher that can filter out the absolute garbage. I've also found the winners of the interactive fiction contests to be very good as well. I also enjoy Tolkien, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and l
So, what have you just done by removing copyright? Well:
1. Cultural growth just ground to a crawl, simply because the people who can afford the advertising and infrastructure to get the content out there can't take the risks of bringing out new authors and new material. Think the remake of The Fog was a step in the wrong direction? This is the direction it would go.
2. What's left for innovative creative people is self-publication - now, perhaps the grass-roots movement would help a bit there, but there would be so little money in it that the creative arts would be reduced to the state of a hobby - and that means much slower development than you have now.
Since when has popular culture belonged to publishers and advertisers? I don't recall the Enlightenment requiring copyright laws to get started, in fact it could be argued that the long censorship of knowledge (essentially a totalitarian form of copy protection) delayed it by hundreds of years. Every other modern cultural shift has essentially been caused by a few innovative people being copied or imitated (and improved on) by everyone else. The ability to incorporate existing popular culture into new works is vital to cultural growth, more vital in my opinion than the ability to make money off of it. Disney would be dead if not for its retelling of public domain stories. Popular music would be dead (or consist of very old music) if not for widespread remixing of genres. Tolkien would have still written fiction, and most likely would have published the stories he liked in the manner he wished to publish them instead of shoehorning them into publisher's models of successful literature. Arguably, a completely free culture will produce much richer works because they will be produced out of love for and interest in the subject or medium, not as "products" to be "consumed". The big problem I see with copyright today is that huge swaths of the popular culture are owned by corporations ultimately interested in money, not culture. The pressure of commercialized culture stifles truly innovative works, not only because of mass advertising but because commercial works cannot compete, and the owners know that and actively fight competition.
Self publication is so easy that we're all doing it right now on slashdot. We post our comments, slashdot publishes them for us (with only a tiny disclaimer at the bottom mentioning copyright), and if slashdot ever tried to pretend to own all the comments everyone would just leave. In the long run, it is simply cheaper and easier to post links to original content than to try to claim authorship of someone elses work. When someone copies someone elses post and tries to claim authorship, they're moderated down to -1, solving the stolen authorship problem. If posters litter the Internet with the same things they post to slashdot, no one really cares because it's their choice and slashdot survives on its own culture and environment, not the exclusivity of content. Ultimately people even pay slashdot money for posting/viewing privileges. So clearly there is not a fundamental necessity of copyright in order for a culture to grow and thrive, it is merely one model that worked well in an age of physical distribution an d high production costs.
Obviously a slashdot model doesn't work for every kind of content; it relies on a discussion based model. Nevertheless, other forums deal in pictures, artwork, movies, music, literature, and many others. If you really care about culture, look at those models and the people participating in culture for the advantages it gives them in and of itself. That's how culture has always evolved naturally. I think culture-as-profit was a fluke. Now that modern tools make the creation, manipulation, and publication of art easier, artists are not required to devote their entire lives to trying to get their life's work published without starving. Most artists are normal people devoting some of their time to art they love, and the ability to share it (and to share in the art other people have created) is reward enough. Can you honestly claim that things like P2P filesharing and youtube will cause the growth of popular culture to slow to a crawl?
I don't feel that DVD-video should be treated much differently than software, where the law permits one backup of a given disk. Unless the license says otherwise, you may install the media on one device.
So does RAID5 count as 1 backup or 1 and 1/n backups? Copyright law is silly because it's still concerned with physical copies 50 years after digital computers effectively made copies free.
Certificates have other uses than blob signing. If nothing else, the current infrastructure of "web" certificates would allow you to verify that the mozilla.org you're about to download and run executable code from is mozilla.org and not some leet h4xxor who owned your ISP's DNS server.
Who is mozilla.org? Can you tell me exactly who they are or are supposed to be? What about mozilla.com, mozilla.net, mozilla.tw, mozilla.cx, etc. What about mozilla-browser.com or mozilla-firefox.org? Does any of those names actually mean anything in and of themselves? No, which is the entire problem with DNS based certificates. People trust entities by vague association by name and function, but with nowhere near the certainty that any public key infrastructure provides. What's really needed is a web of trust that lets users see what other people think a public key identity is actually used for, and what comments they have about it. It should look more like myspace than a lock in some website's window: It should be obvious that a whole lot of people think a given public key belongs to the well known Mozilla Foundation.
Penrose said unique thought and intellegence requires cosmic rays firing random neurons. Without this you have a deterministic machine, and not a brain.
Random cosmic rays require a deity (strictly nondeterministic and supernatural) outside the universe bumping the atoms in the sun at the right time. Without this, you have a deterministic universe.
If you're not voting third party, you're wasting your vote.
Sounds good, but first the FEC and CPD need to be fixed. Commission on Presidential Debates sounds like some sort of censorship to me... Almost every argument used in the past election debates could be torn to shreds by a high school debate team. It's a platform for political posturing, and difficult for reasonable third party candidates to take part in.
I think there's more common sense in that essay than I've seen exercised by anyone in a position of power in a whole week.
Whoever arrests an adult for speaking his or her mind should be the one in prison, not the other way around. Disorderly conduct my ass, the school administrators should be fired for incompetence and sued for damages.
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
It displays an amazing ignorance of the scale and nature of the Internet. He is almost certainly not waiting to receive a 10 megabyte email, so the other traffic on the Internet is essentially meaningless. My ping times to anywhere in the world are never above 1 second (except to dialup users), which means that email will not be delayed much longer than the time it takes to transmit it with available bandwidth. There is no "filled" tube for a message to get in line behind, only a great number of packets of roughly the same size with equal priority. The real reason his email took longer to arrive than expected was probably because of busy spam/virus/censorship/echelon filters and spam-clogged email servers.
In fact, he Internet *is* something to just dump things on. It is designed to work that way because it's a packet switched network. It's not like a highway where mac trucks block traffic; the mac trucks and cars get cut up into equal size packets and the packets all go the same speed. The mac trucks still take longer to get where they're going, but none of the cars ever have to wait behind them. At worst, the roads just get too crowded and bandwidth has to be increased.
"I Suck At Math" doesn't usually mean (I hope!) innumerate. People with normal literacy skills are no more equipped to write War and Peace than people with normal numeracy skills are equipped to do differential calculus. However, the ability to compose meaningful email messages with correct grammar does not require the author to have an English degree any more than 99.99% of jobs require mathematical skill beyond basic algebra learned as a 14 year old.
Anyone who can properly understand grammar (especially English) should be perfectly able to handle any mathematical idea, given enough time to learn. They are the same subject for different languages. While English has phrases, mathematics has expressions. Sentences are composed of properly joined phrases, and mathematical equations are composed of expressions connected by relational operators. Pronouns are like variables. The rules governing the ways to put nouns, subjects, and verbs together are analogous to the rules for associativity, commutivity, and transitivity of the algebraic operators. The problem is that mathematics is not taught as a language, but merely as a dictionary or thesaurus. Giving children a dictionary and thesaurus will no more teach them a language than making them plug numbers into equations will teach them mathematics.
Slashdot Mirror
1,2. RTFNEWS
In response to 2, I'm assuming you are referring to how Cho bought guns legally. Well, guess what, he wasn't a criminal when he bought the guns. He also was not violent, as far as I have heard. So what should stop him from buying a gun that would not stop, say, Stephen King from buying a gun? Both people wrote disturbing and violent stories. Which one is a criminal is only apparent after a criminal act has been committed. The fact that most people who write violent or disturbing stories do not go out and kill people implies that we shouldn't ban selling guns to authors of violent fiction. What the hell do you want, thought police or something?
3. Declaring someone mentally ill doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing state. There is nothing wrong with having a policeman and a psychiatrist present at a gun permit interview and judging that person to be of sound mind, calm disposition and having a legitimate use for the kind of gun they are planning to buy as well as skills to use and safeguard it properly (the last would do something to address black market). If they fail, they walk away with a pepper spray.
There's nothing wrong with a policeman and a psychiatrist waiting at the courthouse to evaluate the personalities of people getting engaged either, is there? They can apply some simple tests and tell them if they can get married or not, based on the statistical likelihood of spousal abuse. Additionally, hospitals should have a policeman and a child services case-worker at the maternity ward to seize children of potential "problem" parents (determined by a simple interview) immediately as well. Additionally, everyone getting married or having children should undergo extensive training in how to be properly married or raise children. Failure just means not getting to be married or procreate, no biggie. After all, way more people are victims of domestic abuse than of gun crime!
What about the FSF? Thanks to the recent change in patent law, anyone can challenge a patent's validity even without being party to an infringement lawsuit. I would personally donate $100 to the FSF just to see one of Microsoft's stupid patents invalidated. If the FSF could bring some kind of group action against all the patents at once and invalidate them on their own grounds in one case, even better.
If Microsoft doesn't disclose their patent list, I would even support the FSF trying to invalidate as many random Microsoft patents as possible in an attempt to force them into disclosing their actual list. At some point, even if Microsoft owns thousands of patents, the probability quickly increases that one of the patents on their "list" will be randomly selected and invalidated. That will almost certainly stir up interest in any company that has paid Microsoft to license an invalid patent.
The other small parties have no idea what they'd do if they actually won.
What needs to be done? What are the really pressing issues that everyone cares about? It seems like half the country wants to be pre-marital genital inspectors and the other half wants free health care and welfare for life. What are third party candidates supposed to do? Sit and do nothing, I'd hope.
Now if only it was that easy to tell the body "All right, I acknowledge your message that something's wrong. However there's nothing I can do about that, SO STOP YELLING."
Analgesics have been known since ancient times. They only get better with additional research.
...unless use is restricted to signed binaries on locked hardware. All of a sudden there's none of the GPL v3 protection, because there's no copyright, so I can happily take your community built code, improve it, make a billion dollars and/or become famous but not give you squat in return.
That locked hardware is working out real good for DRM, isn't it? I don't see that improving any time in the future. Industrial espionage would fix the whole DRM/"trusted" computing thing real fast, too, especially because it would be hard to claim that a hardware/software combination sold to the public contained anything that was a trade secret. Therefore keys and hardware designs are fair game as long as they're included in the final product.
I think GP's point is valid: supporting both GPL-style sharing & copyright abolition is inconsistent, as they're mutually exclusive - if you're a genuine copyright abolitionist, you'd support BSD instead. I don't think it would be possible to enforce the particular flavour of sharing currently enabled by the GPL with no copyright. TFA appears to propose some sort of nebulous copyright replacement legislation which would enforce GPL sharing - I might be missing something obvious, but it seems likely that it would just be copyright by a different name.
If copyright was abolished, reverse engineering and reselling would also be completely legal. Modifications to open source software could legally be released as binary only, but they would quickly be reverse engineered if they were useful. The BSDs would actually gain freedom, because anyone could reverse engineer the additions and improvements that proprietary companies have added to BSD software but released as closed binaries. The GPL would only lose the ability to mandate that modified binary releases included source code, but I think the total legality of reverse engineering and free copying would be a larger benefit for everyone.
The RIAA would not be threatening the students if the students weren't violating copyright. Stop violating copyright, and the RIAA has nothing to go after.
You'd think so, but the MAFIAA has also been threatening people without computers, dead people, and small children. There's really no evidence that any of the threats they've sent would stand up in a trial, since so far the cases that have gone to trial are going rather poorly for the MAFIAA.
Being "relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay" is not justification for violating copyright. I don't have the an attorney on retainer or the means to pay, but that doesn't mean I can speed or violate traffic laws with impunity. "But judge, I can't afford the ticket so I shouldn't be prosecuted" won't fly very far in court. People in this country need to start taking responsibility for themselves.
You may not be able to violate traffic laws with impunity, but police officers, judges, and politicians routinely do so. What does that tell you about the legal system and how people with money and power can abuse it? The MAFIAA has enough lawyers on retainer to simply scare normal people into settlements which cost less than a proper legal defense. It's pure extortion and racketeering.
I've heard ethanol can induce some amnesia-like effects, but it might have to be administered during viewing.
Posting keys isnt some glamorous civil-rights disobedience its saying "Dude, now I can totally download more hollywood crap now and act righteous!"
FUD. Once movies have been ripped they can be downloaded and played by anyone without needing the AACS keys. The only people who need the decryption keys already have a physical copy of the movie (presumably they bought or rented it, or received it as a gift). The spread of AACS keys is specifically for being able to play movies on non-windows boxes, rip movies to media servers, or make backup copies for kids who can't watch a movie without scratching the hell out of it. Real pirates keep the keys they extract secret so that their players won't be revoked by the MAFIAA.
i wonder why they didnt use a zero knowledge protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof to defend them disks, bundling the keys with the cds is only delaying the inevitable
Most users wouldn't be satisfied with being able to prove mathematically that the movie they wanted to watch really was on the disk, but still have zero knowledge of what it actually looked and sounded like.
The Digg vs. Hex number story is a good example. Digg tried to comply with the law, but its users revolted and forced the site's admins to acquiesce. Even if Digg is shut down by federal authorities, arresting thousands of users for posting a 32bit number is going to prove... difficult.
The first thought that sprang to my mind was the colonists throwing tea into the Boston harbor. A bunch of normal citizens dressed up as digg users and threw the MAFIAA's "intellectual property" into the proverbial ocean of the Internet.
Overhead. Doctors need to hire transcriptionists and billing clerks to do work that could be largely automated. (Our product addresses this).
A good transcriptionist can type a report in an hour or less. That's 30 dollars tops, nothing compared to the $300 or $400 per study radiologists are paid. A billing office of 10 or 15 people can pull in several million dollars of payments every month, and with the complex billing rules required by Medicare and Medicaid, it is difficult to automate and the fines are very harsh for fraudulent claims, including claims that the hospital should have known were fraudulent (e.g. automating things and not checking them religiously). There are still lots of soft skills required like calling people and verifying insurance coverage that really can't be automated. That said, a lot of what I do is helping to automate billing processes and yes there is definitely room for improvement.
Lack of communications (or standardized records formats). There are *some* standards (HL7 is what we use for integration with 3rd-party scheduling and billing systems where possible), but nothing widely accepted and comprehensive enough to be able to give a patient a flash drive with their complete medical history in a format any doctor's EHR product will understand. Worse, a lot of systems won't integrate with anything else without requiring the customer to fork out serious $$$ for the add-on functionality. (As just one small vendor, there's not so much we can do about this right now)
After seeing the different work flows and nursing and business practices, I don't think there is anything like a standard medical record. At best, subsets of information are interchangeable between different clinics and hospitals.
I think it's hard for hospitals and especially clinics to justify big EHR packages because of their cost and additional support staff requirements. From what I've seen people are still just as busy with the EHR systems in place but the support is still an extra cost, so the facility has to justify the benefits of the EHR system against those costs. Big vendors like Cerner, HBOC, and Siemens are not cheap, and way out of the price range of smaller hospitals or clinics.
(That said, there's a lot of poorly-implemented technology in healthcare... but that's a topic for a different, much more anonymous forum).
Every medical product I've seen is riddled with insecurity, and several of them have been downright dangerous. I absolutely *hate* vendors who think they need FDA approval for a documentation system or other ancillary system, and then turn around and claim that because of FDA regulations they will only be patching their Windows based systems once a year. They will not support the systems if we apply the latest patch against an Internet worm, and they certainly won't do it themselves. Basing their medical product on Windows is stupid, but hiding behind the FDA regulations to avoid responsibility for prompt patching is negligent. I'm tempted to file formal safety complaints against vendors with the FDA if they fail to patch their systems, since that's essentially the only thing that will get them to listen.
Another cost I haven't really seen anyone mention yet are the supplies. Medical supply companies know that they can essentially set the price and hospitals and clinics will have to pay them. They make specialty devices with a high cost of entry to the market, never a good situation for customers. Medical device safety issues have probably driven the prices for machinery higher to pay for lawsuit insurance, too. Not all is bad though, there are actually continual improvements in the quality of devices, and some of them are worth the money.
...if they'd just trust people to have a bit more personal responsibility over their own health and not try to make sure that every single step of their treatment is authorized and approved by a limited pool of highly skilled professionals who are much better employed elsewhere.
Have you seen the growth of herbal supplement isles? God forbid normal people get general access to pharmaceuticals. "Gee, I wonder why this drug cocktail simultaneously shut down my internal organs while boosting my blood pressure and breeding a new deadly antibiotic resistant strain of staph-B?"
When we as a culture accept that growing old and dying are natural and that "fighting to the end" is not always the best choice, then the costs of health care in this country can begin to return to reasonable levels.
When we as a culture accept that infant mortality rates naturally rest around 50% and the average lifespan should really be closer to 30, we can get down to the business of working short, happy lives in heavy industry and keeping the healthcare costs down. Besides, when we die that young we will stop getting cancer, heart or lung diseases, parkinsons, and alzheimers!
No, sorry, I'd rather aim for radical life extension. Probably the only thing that will make people actually care about the future is the expectation that they will be around to deal with it.
However, in my home directory I have a lot of large audio and video files that I would never want to be versioned. I wander if Ext3cow keeps extra copies of the files if I move them around, change file named but do not modify the content. Probably I would have to make a new partition and put my text files I am working on there under Ext3cow and leave my media files on ext3.
/tmp probably does not need any versioning, and the bin and lib directories might only need one old version at most). When I get home, I am definitely compiling 2.6.20.3 with this patch on my laptop.
Since ext3cow uses copy on write (or more realistically, metadata magic to emulate copy on write without the actual copy), unless you are routinely modifying your media files they will only take one file version and no extra space. On the other hand, when you accidentally do rm *mp* without thinking, you can just go back to the old version of the files and restore them. Moving files is just a matter of changing which directory contains a pointer to the file inode (think in terms of creating a new hardlink to the file in the directory you're moving the file to, and then deleting the hardlink in the original directory: no data movement required).
I haven't gotten to the part in the ACM article describing tools to automatically manage the old snapshots, but some sort of exponential decay is probably the most useful: Keep all versions less than 1 day old, then only keep one version between 2 days and one week old, only keep one version between 1 week and 1 month old, etc. That way you have the original version, and then a yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily version of any given file, with just the differential data between each version actually stored to disk. For manipulating lots of files, or very large files, it would be useful to have per directory policies as well (e.g.
Tell me - did you actually READ what I wrote? Because, frankly, you're putting a lot of words in my mouth to spew out your own agenda.
I guess my questions were ill-posed, and my comments inflammatory. Sorry. I think copyright is flawed, but I think for practicality (and even morality) there will have to be some long term laws about information. The fact that I am using Linux and Firefox is ample demonstration that strict copyrights are not necessary for everything, and usually I find myself thinking about copyright in software terms. I have less experience with other forms of copyrighted works.
When did I ever say it did? What I said was: "Copyright is a legal framework that can be boiled down to two functions (I'm going to use book terms, as that's what I'm familiar with). The first, most important, and least noticed, is setting rules for the interactions between the author and the publisher. The second sets rules for the interaction between the publisher and the reader. There is a third role - author and reader, but that really doesn't matter a whole lot in the greater scheme of things, regardless of what the RIAA would have you believe."
When I said that popular culture belonged to publishers and advertisers, I was referring to the fact that copyright owners almost always reserve all rights to their works, making it difficult for elements from their works to be reused in others to further cultural development. You didn't specifically mention anything about this circumstance of modern copyrights, but it is nonetheless a result of it. We watch television, listen to music, and read books that are ultimately all copyrighted and therefore not reusable in new works unless one has permission from a lot of different owners. If an author likes a character or more appropriately a world invented by another author, they generally can't use those same characters or worlds even though the result might be very good. The main reason Shrek was successful was because it incorporated concepts and characters from a large collection of public domain stories. Even the protection given to parodies would not have allowed Shrek to directly use copyrighted characters to the extent that the film used public domain characters. Some of these arguments are concerned with specific implementations of copyright, and not the fundamental nature of copyrights, but the distinction can be fine: Without protection of characters and worlds, it would be very difficult to prevent dishonest publishers from creating cheap knockoffs using entire storylines and the same characters with different names, although from what I have heard this sort of thing gets argued and sued over a lot already even with existing copyright protection.
First of all, if you want to see what you would get in a system free of any feeling of obligation to copyright, I suggest you look at the fanfiction scene - and it isn't pretty. In fact, quality fanfiction is a lot rarer than quality professional fiction. Second, again, did you READ what I wrote? Here's a reminder:
From your sig it looks like you've written "official fanfiction" about Diablo (I haven't read it, so I am not commenting on its quality). Would you have written the book anyway even if it could not be copyrighted, or alternatively if Blizzard had not approved it? I think the biggest limitation on fanfiction is that good authors know they would be sued if it was popular and unapproved. For examples of good fiction, I would look at things like MOPI, Passages in the void, and pretty much the fiction section of k5 in general. It has some crap, true, but also plenty of very interesting short (and long) stories. The voting queue acts much like a publisher that can filter out the absolute garbage. I've also found the winners of the interactive fiction contests to be very good as well. I also enjoy Tolkien, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and l
So, what have you just done by removing copyright? Well:
1. Cultural growth just ground to a crawl, simply because the people who can afford the advertising and infrastructure to get the content out there can't take the risks of bringing out new authors and new material. Think the remake of The Fog was a step in the wrong direction? This is the direction it would go.
2. What's left for innovative creative people is self-publication - now, perhaps the grass-roots movement would help a bit there, but there would be so little money in it that the creative arts would be reduced to the state of a hobby - and that means much slower development than you have now.
Since when has popular culture belonged to publishers and advertisers? I don't recall the Enlightenment requiring copyright laws to get started, in fact it could be argued that the long censorship of knowledge (essentially a totalitarian form of copy protection) delayed it by hundreds of years. Every other modern cultural shift has essentially been caused by a few innovative people being copied or imitated (and improved on) by everyone else. The ability to incorporate existing popular culture into new works is vital to cultural growth, more vital in my opinion than the ability to make money off of it. Disney would be dead if not for its retelling of public domain stories. Popular music would be dead (or consist of very old music) if not for widespread remixing of genres. Tolkien would have still written fiction, and most likely would have published the stories he liked in the manner he wished to publish them instead of shoehorning them into publisher's models of successful literature. Arguably, a completely free culture will produce much richer works because they will be produced out of love for and interest in the subject or medium, not as "products" to be "consumed". The big problem I see with copyright today is that huge swaths of the popular culture are owned by corporations ultimately interested in money, not culture. The pressure of commercialized culture stifles truly innovative works, not only because of mass advertising but because commercial works cannot compete, and the owners know that and actively fight competition.
Self publication is so easy that we're all doing it right now on slashdot. We post our comments, slashdot publishes them for us (with only a tiny disclaimer at the bottom mentioning copyright), and if slashdot ever tried to pretend to own all the comments everyone would just leave. In the long run, it is simply cheaper and easier to post links to original content than to try to claim authorship of someone elses work. When someone copies someone elses post and tries to claim authorship, they're moderated down to -1, solving the stolen authorship problem. If posters litter the Internet with the same things they post to slashdot, no one really cares because it's their choice and slashdot survives on its own culture and environment, not the exclusivity of content. Ultimately people even pay slashdot money for posting/viewing privileges. So clearly there is not a fundamental necessity of copyright in order for a culture to grow and thrive, it is merely one model that worked well in an age of physical distribution an d high production costs.
Obviously a slashdot model doesn't work for every kind of content; it relies on a discussion based model. Nevertheless, other forums deal in pictures, artwork, movies, music, literature, and many others. If you really care about culture, look at those models and the people participating in culture for the advantages it gives them in and of itself. That's how culture has always evolved naturally. I think culture-as-profit was a fluke. Now that modern tools make the creation, manipulation, and publication of art easier, artists are not required to devote their entire lives to trying to get their life's work published without starving. Most artists are normal people devoting some of their time to art they love, and the ability to share it (and to share in the art other people have created) is reward enough. Can you honestly claim that things like P2P filesharing and youtube will cause the growth of popular culture to slow to a crawl?
I don't feel that DVD-video should be treated much differently than software, where the law permits one backup of a given disk. Unless the license says otherwise, you may install the media on one device.
So does RAID5 count as 1 backup or 1 and 1/n backups? Copyright law is silly because it's still concerned with physical copies 50 years after digital computers effectively made copies free.
Certificates have other uses than blob signing. If nothing else, the current infrastructure of "web" certificates would allow you to verify that the mozilla.org you're about to download and run executable code from is mozilla.org and not some leet h4xxor who owned your ISP's DNS server.
Who is mozilla.org? Can you tell me exactly who they are or are supposed to be? What about mozilla.com, mozilla.net, mozilla.tw, mozilla.cx, etc. What about mozilla-browser.com or mozilla-firefox.org? Does any of those names actually mean anything in and of themselves? No, which is the entire problem with DNS based certificates. People trust entities by vague association by name and function, but with nowhere near the certainty that any public key infrastructure provides. What's really needed is a web of trust that lets users see what other people think a public key identity is actually used for, and what comments they have about it. It should look more like myspace than a lock in some website's window: It should be obvious that a whole lot of people think a given public key belongs to the well known Mozilla Foundation.
Look up Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to discover why nuclear decay, cosmic rays, and such are not deterministic.
No less deterministic than the atoms in our brains.
Penrose said unique thought and intellegence requires cosmic rays firing random neurons. Without this you have a deterministic machine, and not a brain.
Random cosmic rays require a deity (strictly nondeterministic and supernatural) outside the universe bumping the atoms in the sun at the right time. Without this, you have a deterministic universe.
If you're not voting third party, you're wasting your vote.
Sounds good, but first the FEC and CPD need to be fixed. Commission on Presidential Debates sounds like some sort of censorship to me... Almost every argument used in the past election debates could be torn to shreds by a high school debate team. It's a platform for political posturing, and difficult for reasonable third party candidates to take part in.
I think there's more common sense in that essay than I've seen exercised by anyone in a position of power in a whole week.
Whoever arrests an adult for speaking his or her mind should be the one in prison, not the other way around. Disorderly conduct my ass, the school administrators should be fired for incompetence and sued for damages.
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
It displays an amazing ignorance of the scale and nature of the Internet. He is almost certainly not waiting to receive a 10 megabyte email, so the other traffic on the Internet is essentially meaningless. My ping times to anywhere in the world are never above 1 second (except to dialup users), which means that email will not be delayed much longer than the time it takes to transmit it with available bandwidth. There is no "filled" tube for a message to get in line behind, only a great number of packets of roughly the same size with equal priority. The real reason his email took longer to arrive than expected was probably because of busy spam/virus/censorship/echelon filters and spam-clogged email servers.
In fact, he Internet *is* something to just dump things on. It is designed to work that way because it's a packet switched network. It's not like a highway where mac trucks block traffic; the mac trucks and cars get cut up into equal size packets and the packets all go the same speed. The mac trucks still take longer to get where they're going, but none of the cars ever have to wait behind them. At worst, the roads just get too crowded and bandwidth has to be increased.
"I Suck At Math" doesn't usually mean (I hope!) innumerate. People with normal literacy skills are no more equipped to write War and Peace than people with normal numeracy skills are equipped to do differential calculus. However, the ability to compose meaningful email messages with correct grammar does not require the author to have an English degree any more than 99.99% of jobs require mathematical skill beyond basic algebra learned as a 14 year old.
Anyone who can properly understand grammar (especially English) should be perfectly able to handle any mathematical idea, given enough time to learn. They are the same subject for different languages. While English has phrases, mathematics has expressions. Sentences are composed of properly joined phrases, and mathematical equations are composed of expressions connected by relational operators. Pronouns are like variables. The rules governing the ways to put nouns, subjects, and verbs together are analogous to the rules for associativity, commutivity, and transitivity of the algebraic operators. The problem is that mathematics is not taught as a language, but merely as a dictionary or thesaurus. Giving children a dictionary and thesaurus will no more teach them a language than making them plug numbers into equations will teach them mathematics.