Everyone's "net friend" Lori Drew is likely to get off completely. Now did she directly reach out and kill someone? No, but partly because her obnoxious behavior happened on the Internet she is likely to receive no punishment, fine, saction or anything else.
Lori Drew should get off completely: While her behavior was awful, reprehensible, socially unacceptable, vindictive and destructive, it was not illegal -- and the effort to stretch the laws on the books to make them fit her crime is harmful to society as a whole, but will not undo the events that she started.
Lori Drew, by the way, made a point to people that there actions on the Internet are not necessarily permanently anonymous -- and, at least as importantly, that these actions have real-world consequences; Mz. Drew undoubtably would not have written what she did had she realized it would result in a suicide, even if she had had reason to believe her pseudonymity would be maintained. Perhaps the next person tempted to take actions with potential for similar consequences will think twice.
The Linksys 610N, in addition to being a really nice wireless router, has an external USB port and a huge 64MB(!) of flash. OpenWRT doesn't support it out-of-the-box yet, but (1) if you're adventurous it can be made to work anyhow, and (2) if you're not adventurous, it probably won't be too much waiting.
(Personally, I'm not so adventurous right now -- adding a JTAG or serial port [to fix things up if I make a brick] is a bit beyond my skill level, and I'm no longer owed any favors by my hardware-hacker friends -- but I'm waiting).
This article is wrong. Dell hasn't increased the price for preloading XP; the price difference is there because Microsoft isn't allowing XP to be installed over Vista Home Premium (which these systems ship with by default), and is instead requiring people to upgrade to either Vista Professional or Vista Ultimate to be eligible to use their Vista license to install XP.
Perhaps the systems the article's author saw in the past [and thus used to claim that this charge is a new thing] (which supposedly in the past didn't have this charge) came with Vista Professional or Ultimate as part of the default install, and based the belief that this is a new thing on that -- but Dell certainly doesn't have a $150 surcharge for XP downgrades, and AFAIK was never able to offer XP downgrades without requiring the purchase of a more expensive Vista since Microsoft discontinued offering XP licenses except as a feature of a subset of Vista licenses.
We were talking about whether ARM is successful; a product selling in such massive quantities is doubtless successful -- for it to be otherwise, they'd need to be selling at a price incapable of covering both fixed and marginal costs.
Net neutrality is not about who pays. It is about the pipes that deliver the content being neutral to what the content is. The pricing model should stay the way it is.
Sure, it's about who pays -- almost everything is in the end, after all.
The reason there's a reason for legislation to stop the pipes from favoring certain content providers is that some of the folks who own those pipes have stated (very publicly) that they believe they're owed some of the profits being made by service providers (like Google) "using their network".
So -- the "proposed model" isn't what the bill would do, it's what the content providers are trying to do but which net neutrality legislation is attempting to prevent.
Actually, qemu recently merged in live migration support -- which kvm then adopted in place of its homegrown solution -- so not nearly as much nesting as you suggest is actually needed.
And even though these people might have voted to free the slaves it doesn't mean that they actually saw them as equals. They were still racists who segregated the blacks and gave them little to no rights whatsoever.
Well, of course -- "progressive" views from that era and shortly after are hopelessly conservative today, and many of the quotes people use to paint Lincoln as a racist were statements he made to reinforce that, while seeing slavery as a moral wrong, he wasn't a nutjob whacko (ie. completely out-of-line with the positions held by society as a whole at the time).
Anyway the point I was trying to make is that the North isn't exactly an innocent little angle in all of this like some of you would try to have us believe.
"Innocent" is arguably an absolute; as such, to hold any human being to it is a hopeless cause. That said, after one adjusts for proper historical context, there certainly was a right, and there certainly was a wrong. John Brown -- when given the opportunity to defend himself with his own words, which our history books now frequently deny him -- was seen rightfully by many as a martyr, not a madman.
Even if you're talking about a time near the Civil War you would still be wrong. Most of the north didn't want to get rid of slavery either. Nor did most of the soldiers fighting for the north.
Funny, since the absentee ballots cast by the soldiers and sailors were overwhelmingly in favor of emancipation when Maryland brought it to a vote in 1864. James Loewen put it poetically in Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Just as these soldiers marched into battle with "John Brown's Body" upon their lips, so their minds had changed to favor the freedoms their actions were forging.
New fancy phones are rolled out, but the single feature I am looking for is not a camera, music player, but the capability to *screen* my calls so that I could say that from 9pm till 9am only a list of numbers (family + close friends) could ring my phone. Callers with blocked id-s should never be able to ring my phone, etc.
I'm in the middle of building a Gumstix-based Asterisk box to do just this for my home phone without needing to have a system constantly on. If you don't mind buying your own parts (basically, a netstix 400xm-cf and a Linksys SPA-3000), I'd be happy to publish the image once I've got something I'm happy with. It manages telemarketers and unknown callers appropriately, sorts calls based on who they're for (distinctive ring + individual voicemail boxes + voicemail-to-email; voicemail is stored on a CF card), and if I can get enough performance I'm planning on trying to get iaxmodem working for fax handling. (As there's no FPU, and SpanDSP isn't converted to all-integer yet, that's going to be a stretch).
It'll be interesting to see how much work similar functionality (less the faxing, of course) is to build into an Android-based cellphone.
The Calling Name and Number system can be lied to, as in certain cases (for instance, a telemarketer with a PRI) it's actually the CUSTOMER that provides the information.
Responsible telcos, however, will do some validation -- when I ran the phone system for my last employer, our upstream (Time Warner Telecom) validated outgoing caller ID on our PRI, and blanked it if it didn't match one of the blocks we owned.
Yes, but if the fast-boot version wouldn't let you do everything you needed, you'd need to do a full boot anyhow; it's something you'd do to check your email really quickly, not for a full day's work.
I don't have the article handy, but that scenario was exempted from DMCA in the last year - basically any software that required hardware dongles to use that software, when that software or hardware is no longer marketed.
Good to hear. That said, the consulting gig in question is actually one I had before the DMCA went into effect -- so it was legal when I did it, but something that later made a great example of the unintended effects of poorly-thought-out legislation when the DMCA was young.
(These days the effects that concern me more are along the lines of not being able to build-your-own-TiVO with digital broadcasts and the like).
Several years ago I underclocked my home system (which was initially quite unreliable) and saw a substantial decrease in uncommanded reboots. The issue went away almost entirely (even at full speed) when I upgraded the power supply; I suspect that I was running near the edge of what it could handle, and underclocking (by reducing the CPU's power draw) moved its usage far away enough from that boundary to make a difference.
It's completely different provisions that make the DMCA unpopular.
Shielding service providers as long as they promptly process takedowns and put content back up on counter-notices is a Good Thing; without it YouTube wouldn't exist. Moreover, the DMCA provides for legal penalties if misused -- if a supposed copyright holder has something taken back down after the person who posted it gave a counter-notice, they're on the hook if such was done wrongly.
The McCain campaign is presumably whining about the process because the information they're trying to promulgate is time-sensitive (only relevant up to the election) and they don't want the downtime it takes to provide counter-notices -- but once they do provide counter-notices, CBS/NBC/whoever won't be able to have it taken back down without risking their own necks. It's a good process, though, and I don't see any reason to fill it with loopholes.
The parts of the DMCA that make it illegal to circumvent the dongle check in the 15-year-old piece of accounting software my consulting client's small business uses (company long out of business, dongle recently broken) are complete BS, but the takedown and counter-notice process is reasonable.
McCain voted for a bill (the DMCA) that made service providers responsible for doing an immediate takedown of content alleged to have been improperly posted regardless of the merits of the complaint if they wanted the fullest protections the law could provide. Complaining when a company is complying in full with that law hardly seems fitting.
It's almost a shame the Obama campaign isn't submitting more content (defensible as fair use) that could be mechanically considered to infringe themselves; if this were the case, there would be less perception that YouTube is pushing a political agenda via their takedown process.
Likewise, it is possible, if much less likely, that changing circumstances in the future could result in copyright not being enough of an incentive to ever justify itself. So we ought not to forever forswear abolition. Rather, we ought to leave it on the table as one possible option, should circumstances ever change to make it the best policy. I don't think we're there yet, and we may never be, but let's not arbitrarily get rid of the idea.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post in its entirety; the "by no means whatsoever a copyright abolitionist" statement was intended to communicate only that I do not seek the elimination of copyright as an end in and of itself.
I never said it must be eternal, merely that it must exist. Where to fix the length is another matter altogether.
Then you're arguing with the wrong person. I provided links to extensive economic analysis earlier in this thread, as well as an in-depth discussion of my position; even a cursory review of that discussion, or the references given, would have made it crystal clear that I argue for shorter copyright terms calculated to maximize public welfare, rather than the eternal copyright favored by many of those who see the first and foremost goal being innate rights purportedly owed to those who create.
Making a living is not what I speak of. The artist has the right to attempt his business model free of interference. Many artists choose to attempt to sell copies of their work, and they must be protected from any interference.
Copyright is interference! If I publish books or sing songs written by others, how does the author's or artist's right to "attempt his business model free of interference" outweigh by own? A monopoly of any sort (and copyright and patents undeniably establish monopolies) is by its very nature a restriction on the actions that others can take, and thus impingement on their own rights (of freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom of contract, and the like).
The correct argument here is to calculate that interference in such a way as to maximize the public good (by increasing the amount of material created to be published or performed), rather than to argue that it is an innate right, and thus deserving of maximal protection in all cases -- as the "innate right" argument both fails to benefit the public and fails to take into account the other innate rights with which such a monopoly interferes.
Your rebuttal is, itself, a bogeyman. I made no such argument. I merely said that artists must be able to attempt to sell their work in a manner of their choosing, no more. I don't care if artists are able to make a living under all systems equally well, as my views on copyright stem not from the financial motivation, but the right of the artist to pursue business as he sees fit.
Taking a position that an individual has an exclusive right to sell copies of works they created as necessary to exercise an inherent right to earn income from the sweat of one's brow (which I believe to be an accurate restatement of your explanation of why copyright is an innate right) implies that if one did not have the exclusive right to sell copies of works they created, one could not earn income from one's work; otherwise, the "necessary" clause given above would not apply.
Please read the second line in my previous reply to contain the line "the idea that eternal copyright is necessary", rather than "the idea that copyright is necessary".
Since art is so easily copied, the right of an artist to attempt to sell copies of his work, free from interference, must be protected by law.
I am by no means whatsoever a copyright abolitionist -- but with regard to this line of argument, it bears mention that artists made a living long before copyright existed. The argument that copyright is necessary for a natural right to be implemented is thus bogus. Indeed, the additional faults of this argument are many:
Even were an exclusive monopoly on copies of their work may be necessary for an artist to profit off the sweat of their brow, it does not follow that this exclusivity period must be eternal: A construction worker must create new buildings, no matter how successful one they created in the past has become.
Inasmuch as an economic analysis measures the total compensation an artist receives for their work in present-value dollars as of the time of its creation, that analysis most assuredly takes into account the need of that individual to be compensated.
Moreover, the public-good view of copyright requires that the artist be incentivized to the extent necessary for them to create, as lack of creation is most assuredly to the public detriment; consequently, the straw-man argument that the public-good view of copyright leads to artists being unable to sell their goods and services (and thus unable to live off of their work) is simply a bogeyman, and false on its face.
You're looking at this through the European perspective -- as if the creator's monopoly on their work is a natural right.
Yeah, of course. That's because it is.
But why?
Economic analysis demonstrates provably that the "natural right" view leads to suboptimal results for the public good. What evidence can you offer in opposition?
If the meme you hold is demonstrably harmful to society as a whole, including creators, why would you continue to assist in its propagation?
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I principally code in Python. Fewer curly braces, fewer brackets; Dvorak is thoroughly fit-for-task.
The only thing I find myself still using QWERTY for (other than typing on other peoples' computers) is gaming.
Lori Drew should get off completely: While her behavior was awful, reprehensible, socially unacceptable, vindictive and destructive, it was not illegal -- and the effort to stretch the laws on the books to make them fit her crime is harmful to society as a whole, but will not undo the events that she started.
Lori Drew, by the way, made a point to people that there actions on the Internet are not necessarily permanently anonymous -- and, at least as importantly, that these actions have real-world consequences; Mz. Drew undoubtably would not have written what she did had she realized it would result in a suicide, even if she had had reason to believe her pseudonymity would be maintained. Perhaps the next person tempted to take actions with potential for similar consequences will think twice.
The Linksys 610N, in addition to being a really nice wireless router, has an external USB port and a huge 64MB(!) of flash. OpenWRT doesn't support it out-of-the-box yet, but (1) if you're adventurous it can be made to work anyhow, and (2) if you're not adventurous, it probably won't be too much waiting.
(Personally, I'm not so adventurous right now -- adding a JTAG or serial port [to fix things up if I make a brick] is a bit beyond my skill level, and I'm no longer owed any favors by my hardware-hacker friends -- but I'm waiting).
This article is wrong. Dell hasn't increased the price for preloading XP; the price difference is there because Microsoft isn't allowing XP to be installed over Vista Home Premium (which these systems ship with by default), and is instead requiring people to upgrade to either Vista Professional or Vista Ultimate to be eligible to use their Vista license to install XP.
Perhaps the systems the article's author saw in the past [and thus used to claim that this charge is a new thing] (which supposedly in the past didn't have this charge) came with Vista Professional or Ultimate as part of the default install, and based the belief that this is a new thing on that -- but Dell certainly doesn't have a $150 surcharge for XP downgrades, and AFAIK was never able to offer XP downgrades without requiring the purchase of a more expensive Vista since Microsoft discontinued offering XP licenses except as a feature of a subset of Vista licenses.
He's a smart guy, he just plays a drooling idiot on TV.
(No, seriously).
We were talking about whether ARM is successful; a product selling in such massive quantities is doubtless successful -- for it to be otherwise, they'd need to be selling at a price incapable of covering both fixed and marginal costs.
Relevance?
Sure, it's about who pays -- almost everything is in the end, after all.
The reason there's a reason for legislation to stop the pipes from favoring certain content providers is that some of the folks who own those pipes have stated (very publicly) that they believe they're owed some of the profits being made by service providers (like Google) "using their network".
So -- the "proposed model" isn't what the bill would do, it's what the content providers are trying to do but which net neutrality legislation is attempting to prevent.
You could start by reading other replies in the thread.
Actually, qemu recently merged in live migration support -- which kvm then adopted in place of its homegrown solution -- so not nearly as much nesting as you suggest is actually needed.
Well, of course -- "progressive" views from that era and shortly after are hopelessly conservative today, and many of the quotes people use to paint Lincoln as a racist were statements he made to reinforce that, while seeing slavery as a moral wrong, he wasn't a nutjob whacko (ie. completely out-of-line with the positions held by society as a whole at the time).
"Innocent" is arguably an absolute; as such, to hold any human being to it is a hopeless cause. That said, after one adjusts for proper historical context, there certainly was a right, and there certainly was a wrong. John Brown -- when given the opportunity to defend himself with his own words, which our history books now frequently deny him -- was seen rightfully by many as a martyr, not a madman.
Funny, since the absentee ballots cast by the soldiers and sailors were overwhelmingly in favor of emancipation when Maryland brought it to a vote in 1864. James Loewen put it poetically in Lies My Teacher Told Me:
I'm not likely to remember to come back here and post. I don't hide my email address, though; feel free to drop a line and ask some time!
I'm in the middle of building a Gumstix-based Asterisk box to do just this for my home phone without needing to have a system constantly on. If you don't mind buying your own parts (basically, a netstix 400xm-cf and a Linksys SPA-3000), I'd be happy to publish the image once I've got something I'm happy with. It manages telemarketers and unknown callers appropriately, sorts calls based on who they're for (distinctive ring + individual voicemail boxes + voicemail-to-email; voicemail is stored on a CF card), and if I can get enough performance I'm planning on trying to get iaxmodem working for fax handling. (As there's no FPU, and SpanDSP isn't converted to all-integer yet, that's going to be a stretch).
It'll be interesting to see how much work similar functionality (less the faxing, of course) is to build into an Android-based cellphone.
Responsible telcos, however, will do some validation -- when I ran the phone system for my last employer, our upstream (Time Warner Telecom) validated outgoing caller ID on our PRI, and blanked it if it didn't match one of the blocks we owned.
Yes, but if the fast-boot version wouldn't let you do everything you needed, you'd need to do a full boot anyhow; it's something you'd do to check your email really quickly, not for a full day's work.
Good to hear. That said, the consulting gig in question is actually one I had before the DMCA went into effect -- so it was legal when I did it, but something that later made a great example of the unintended effects of poorly-thought-out legislation when the DMCA was young.
(These days the effects that concern me more are along the lines of not being able to build-your-own-TiVO with digital broadcasts and the like).
Several years ago I underclocked my home system (which was initially quite unreliable) and saw a substantial decrease in uncommanded reboots. The issue went away almost entirely (even at full speed) when I upgraded the power supply; I suspect that I was running near the edge of what it could handle, and underclocking (by reducing the CPU's power draw) moved its usage far away enough from that boundary to make a difference.
It's completely different provisions that make the DMCA unpopular.
Shielding service providers as long as they promptly process takedowns and put content back up on counter-notices is a Good Thing; without it YouTube wouldn't exist. Moreover, the DMCA provides for legal penalties if misused -- if a supposed copyright holder has something taken back down after the person who posted it gave a counter-notice, they're on the hook if such was done wrongly.
The McCain campaign is presumably whining about the process because the information they're trying to promulgate is time-sensitive (only relevant up to the election) and they don't want the downtime it takes to provide counter-notices -- but once they do provide counter-notices, CBS/NBC/whoever won't be able to have it taken back down without risking their own necks. It's a good process, though, and I don't see any reason to fill it with loopholes.
The parts of the DMCA that make it illegal to circumvent the dongle check in the 15-year-old piece of accounting software my consulting client's small business uses (company long out of business, dongle recently broken) are complete BS, but the takedown and counter-notice process is reasonable.
McCain voted for a bill (the DMCA) that made service providers responsible for doing an immediate takedown of content alleged to have been improperly posted regardless of the merits of the complaint if they wanted the fullest protections the law could provide. Complaining when a company is complying in full with that law hardly seems fitting.
It's almost a shame the Obama campaign isn't submitting more content (defensible as fair use) that could be mechanically considered to infringe themselves; if this were the case, there would be less perception that YouTube is pushing a political agenda via their takedown process.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post in its entirety; the "by no means whatsoever a copyright abolitionist" statement was intended to communicate only that I do not seek the elimination of copyright as an end in and of itself.
Then you're arguing with the wrong person. I provided links to extensive economic analysis earlier in this thread, as well as an in-depth discussion of my position; even a cursory review of that discussion, or the references given, would have made it crystal clear that I argue for shorter copyright terms calculated to maximize public welfare, rather than the eternal copyright favored by many of those who see the first and foremost goal being innate rights purportedly owed to those who create.
Copyright is interference! If I publish books or sing songs written by others, how does the author's or artist's right to "attempt his business model free of interference" outweigh by own? A monopoly of any sort (and copyright and patents undeniably establish monopolies) is by its very nature a restriction on the actions that others can take, and thus impingement on their own rights (of freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom of contract, and the like).
The correct argument here is to calculate that interference in such a way as to maximize the public good (by increasing the amount of material created to be published or performed), rather than to argue that it is an innate right, and thus deserving of maximal protection in all cases -- as the "innate right" argument both fails to benefit the public and fails to take into account the other innate rights with which such a monopoly interferes.
Taking a position that an individual has an exclusive right to sell copies of works they created as necessary to exercise an inherent right to earn income from the sweat of one's brow (which I believe to be an accurate restatement of your explanation of why copyright is an innate right) implies that if one did not have the exclusive right to sell copies of works they created, one could not earn income from one's work; otherwise, the "necessary" clause given above would not apply.
Please read the second line in my previous reply to contain the line "the idea that eternal copyright is necessary", rather than "the idea that copyright is necessary".
I am by no means whatsoever a copyright abolitionist -- but with regard to this line of argument, it bears mention that artists made a living long before copyright existed. The argument that copyright is necessary for a natural right to be implemented is thus bogus. Indeed, the additional faults of this argument are many:
But why?
Economic analysis demonstrates provably that the "natural right" view leads to suboptimal results for the public good. What evidence can you offer in opposition?
If the meme you hold is demonstrably harmful to society as a whole, including creators, why would you continue to assist in its propagation?