is adding citations and references for all articles so knowing if the information is correct or not can easily be seen by the quality of the references. Eventually each fact will be referenced numerious times, and each reference will be double checked by dozens of contributors.
What higher standard of quality assurance in information would you like than this?
"Let me clarify; *if* Person B wishes to use or exploit Person A's original work to any extent (beyond 'fair use' et al) they should be expected to agree the terms of compensation (if any; that's up to A) beforehand."
Agree beforehand? How about: "Sorry, no agreement. If you want to release ideas unto the world, and expect to enforce people to pay for your crap, then your're out of luck bub".
Where is the arguement in forcing me to do anything, especially forcing me to protect something as ephemeral as ideas or expression. Again: you want to force people to "agree [to] terms of compensation" beforehand but make no justification as to how you can force people to do this.
Once you start apply force you better damn well justify it or you might be on the receiving end of force back.
"The *moral* argument is that if someone puts effort into creating something
original which would (in all probability) not otherwise have been created, then
they should be able to reap the rewards"
Efforts = right to rewards? First that is wrong via two counter examples. Second
that isn't an arguement, it is a statement of opinion.
If efforts = right to rewards then I guess then a man/woman courting (putting
effort) into trying to date another man/woman automatically should have a right
to be laid then;). A second closer counter example is that the 'sweat of the
brow'
'effort' arguement was rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States in
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc. in that
creating a list, of phone numbers, is not copyrightable even if effort is put
into compiling it.
In any event I'd need more than a one liner to convince me that effort equals the *RIGHT* to getting laid or paid.
"If nothing else, the authors themselves should have the right to that decision"
I agree with Hatta above, the onus is on the authors to justify using the threat of sanction by government as coercion to limit behaviour. By what right do [un?]limited-term content monopolists have to do this?
Copyright is artifical, it does not exist but for an act of government. It is also a utilitarian agreement that helps (used to help?) society by rewarding content creators to create new ideas. Utilitarian arguements are not moral arguements, I'd need to see a moral arguement that justifies using force which limits the free flow of information.
It seems to be that even a head of business, schools and universities will be the next ones who are most likely to switch over in a big way to FOSS and Linux. The high cost and low government budgets almost force schools to look at any possible alternatives.
IBM can benefit from this by encouraging their exemployee-new-teachers to advocate on behalf of Linux / IBM service contracts to their co-workers and the school board (and of course having them suggest IBM hardware too is just icing on the cake:P ).
Write to your school board and tell them to use Linux, even if they don't at least they will have heard of it if someone else menions it to them.
"Folk who bring libel suits often have something to hide. Robert Maxwell
successfully supressed criticism of his theft-in-progress of the Mirror group
pension fund using libel writs."
I agree that libel suits can mean someone has something to hide and if that is
the case then they should be fought against and people fighting against them
should be encouraged and supported.
Another possibility of being able to comment without being sued into submission
is Freenet. Although I don't like
the idea of hiding, for some people who cannot afford a lawsuit this maybe a
viable option.
"Why should some outmoded businesss model be kept alive via legislation?"
It shouldn't, so let's change it.
It would be probably pretty hard though, all the content monopolists would lobby hard (with a lot of money) to prevent copyright being changed to say 7 years with one extension to 14 for a fee.
And what of the costs of lock-in, and giving up freedom?
I'm not a big company but I often choose slightly 'worse' free/open source software in comparison to closed source simply because I value and put a premium on freedom.
You've got to weigh the pros and cons and be pragmatic - but I'd lean towards the free(dom) choice since it seems freedom is often undervalued.
"The devs are not the sole owners of it, everyone is."
That's right, and lets see the numb nuts president do the coding along with his apointees now that the developers have left.
I doubt this came out of the blue also since when you are dealing with that many developers, 20 on the list from what I count, things are slow to organize and reach a consensus. I am sure there were ample opportunities for the president to recognize that there was not enough input, to realize the developers were displeased, and rechoose a board that was more reflective of the wishes of the developers.
"Wikipedia, while a good general overview, is not supposed to be used for direct referencial evidence, because the information there-in is subject to the next editor's opinion. Try another source."
Perhaps you haven't heard of the WikiProject Fact and Reference Check?
Google it, and notice that all facts are slowly, but surely, being referenced. After the first go though, each fact will be referenced multiple times.
What more valid source of information do you want other than one that is referenced multiple times with other sources of information?
Wikipedia, or something quite similiar, has the potential to become the ultimate authority of human knowledge.
No truly, no one lives forever so if we want RMS's advice we have to / can think...a ha! Here's what he would say in general I believe:
Giving away your freedom for a discount, even a 100% discount so it's free as in beer, is short sited and the product is unethical. Resist the lure of selling your freedom to the digital devil.
I personally agree, and it's interesting to note to see the people who would sell out for a discount of whatever size. An online quiz could be set up with questions like this to see if you belong more to the Free Software or Open Source camps (if you don't take the discount, put your self in the former, if you do the latter:) ).
"I don't see the major media conglomerates getting very far with it....Some companies invariably do such things, but for every one of these another free, open source, or other such somewhat more desirable contender tends to either pop-up or have already existed."
I'm not sure your purpose of the first paragraph then other than stating the obvious. That is the whole point of the story, if nothing is done (say like using FOSS, GNU GPL etc.) then the story will come true. It is a warning.
Do you think RMS just likes writing stories for no reason or do you think he was obviously suggesting people use "these another free, open source, or other such somewhat more desirable" media.
Also tell everyone you know to put their store size to 10+GigaBytes. If you make your store big enough you're surfing most / lot of the content locally.
As well, there should be an 'intergration' box showing the % of your datastore that's filled and it's size, how many open connections you currently have, how many nodes in your routing table. Is there any others?
Can someone explain to me how these bosses get hired in the first place? I am looking for a job and am wondering if looking more incompetent will get me a higher up job faster.
"Under normal copyright law, for someone to take a piece of your work and do
something with it, even if it's post it in their blog, is an infringement of
copyright."
Depends on how small the 'piece' is you mention, quotes are protected by fair
use. In some cases you can copy entire chapters, especially if it is for
educational (and private) use. In the united states, from the United States
Copyright Act of 1976, the amount of
material able to be
used via 'fairuse' depends on :
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work.
Thus copyright isn't an absolute right, it is limited by fair use, educational
provisions, etc.
All I see there, on not4chan.org,
are drawings. In some areas they are illegal I'm sure (along with 'regular'
pornography too). However - at least in the United States - drawings are deemed
legal since no person was harmed in the process.
Pretty good principle, if an action or behaviour by a person harms no one (or
only the person themself) then it should be allowed. I'd call it the harm
principle I'd call it the
harm principle or maybe
negative liberty:).
Why destroy when you can simply have everything be encrypted? It's
cheaper too, in fact there are some free / open source on the fly encryption
programs that can do large partitions:
"EBay is a respected player in the business world."
That's true, if you completely reverse the statement. EBay and, if I may say so,
their satanic 'child' PayPal are a few of the worst companies I've ever had the
displeasure of doing business with.
Starting with the
illegitamate
charge backs (PayPal) I've mentioned on Slashdot on my most recent post,
poor customer service (PayPal & Ebay) in the form of not responding to emails, a
nice little trick of charging for auctions that were canceled (eBay), cancelling
an auction the day before for
selling game box of World of Warcraft (eBay) and more. I really would hate
to be someone who does a lot of business with them.
If eBay really has opened up some code and it is Open enough that you have
the freedom, as you should, to take it and use it as you want then I look
forward to competing products that will result. I'd guess that anyone
could do customer service better then eBay and if they want to give out the
source to tools that can help their competitors (and others) why not:).
I agree with you, I look forward to a viable alternative to paypal. I
am not please with Paypal after having had a false charge back happen against
me, and being pinged for an aditional $10.00 as well as losing the original
money. Paypal sucks has more
horror stories too, and I offer some advice if you have to do business with
paypal:
Make sure your checking account is deposit only. You can
have this specified in writing, but another way is to have the account be
joint co-signed so both parties have to sign to take something out if you
have a significant other. This way paypal cannot take money out of
your account (which in the terms of service last time I saw you give them
permission to take money out of your account to settle balances with them).
Keep a minimum amount of money in your paypal account.
Since google seems to be holding to its 'do not evil' policy they should make
a for good competitor with customers fed up with paypal. I wouldn't mind
seeing a google auction site to compete with ebay (Paypal's owner) as well:).
I'm not really sure of how to fix that then. We'd need opensource chips, and we can't even get the opensource bios working:).
Our only hope is that free/open source platforms (like Linux) have caught on by then. In order for DRM to work you need everyone coluding down the chain (CPU, BIOS, Operating System, Application). Open source prevents that since you'd need to agree to the DRM, it couldn't be forced on you, and no one would agree to frig up their OS with DRM shit, and someone would fork a copy without that crap in it.
"In short, no matter how cool I2P is, stop bloody spreading it around until it's ready."
As you can see people are eager to have unrestricted free(dom) speech and free(dom) information. Freenet dropped the ball by screwing up forward progress for two years and others are taking up the slack.
I2P has made incredible (and forward only, no backsteps) progress lately but if it doesn't want to be left behind then it needs to move even faster. I also think time is running out since, with DRM being put into Intel chips as one example, I'm not sure if we are keeping up with the powers that be.
I also suggest that anonymous p2p developers, including I2P, look at this Rodi (or AntsP2P since it's also Java) application and take the best parts out. In FOSS the team project who reinvents the wheel the least often has the best progress - Although again I must admit that I2P does an excellent job of gathering people into their project and communicating with its users and other developers much more than other anonymous p2p projects.
Also in general, I2P has been covered on infoanarchy, I dont' think I2P will grow fast until some killer applications (good working searchable p2p, a distributed content store, anonymous newsgroups) are included with the package. If that is the case then all the advertising in the world won't move I2P's population up as it doesn't appeal to the so called unwashed masses.
I agree, and if they do try and sue you, you can simply say that you had no knowledge of the transfer.
It's the same reason why the phone company is not held liable when their phonelines are used to deal in organized crime or terrorism - the phone company has no knowledge of what is passing through their network.
Even better in countries where it is a loser pays legal system: RIAA tries and sues you, you say you had nothing to do with the transaction and that their lawyers should have known that due to the nature and design of the network, then you get your lawyer fees back since you win.
Slashdot Mirror
"How does a young student reading an article about something they know nothing about know whether its information is correct or not?"
t _Fact_and_Reference_Check
Because the Wikiproject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjec
is adding citations and references for all articles so knowing if the information is correct or not can easily be seen by the quality of the references. Eventually each fact will be referenced numerious times, and each reference will be double checked by dozens of contributors.
What higher standard of quality assurance in information would you like than this?
" A book in a library is arguably not freely available in the usual sense. It is available for you to read for a limited time..."
Ya, for a limited time for free (gratis). Explain how your idea of free differs from my idea of free so it isn't "in the usual sense".
"Let me clarify; *if* Person B wishes to use or exploit Person A's original work to any extent (beyond 'fair use' et al) they should be expected to agree the terms of compensation (if any; that's up to A) beforehand."
Agree beforehand? How about: "Sorry, no agreement. If you want to release ideas unto the world, and expect to enforce people to pay for your crap, then your're out of luck bub".
Where is the arguement in forcing me to do anything, especially forcing me to protect something as ephemeral as ideas or expression. Again: you want to force people to "agree [to] terms of compensation" beforehand but make no justification as to how you can force people to do this.
Once you start apply force you better damn well justify it or you might be on the receiving end of force back.
"The *moral* argument is that if someone puts effort into creating something original which would (in all probability) not otherwise have been created, then they should be able to reap the rewards"
;). A second closer counter example is that the 'sweat of the
brow'
'effort' arguement was rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States in
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc. in that
creating a list, of phone numbers, is not copyrightable even if effort is put
into compiling it.
Efforts = right to rewards? First that is wrong via two counter examples. Second that isn't an arguement, it is a statement of opinion.
If efforts = right to rewards then I guess then a man/woman courting (putting effort) into trying to date another man/woman automatically should have a right to be laid then
In any event I'd need more than a one liner to convince me that effort equals the *RIGHT* to getting laid or paid.
"If nothing else, the authors themselves should have the right to that decision"
I agree with Hatta above, the onus is on the authors to justify using the threat of sanction by government as coercion to limit behaviour. By what right do [un?]limited-term content monopolists have to do this?
Copyright is artifical, it does not exist but for an act of government. It is also a utilitarian agreement that helps (used to help?) society by rewarding content creators to create new ideas. Utilitarian arguements are not moral arguements, I'd need to see a moral arguement that justifies using force which limits the free flow of information.
"Now if you have a book published, it is usually NOT freely available."
You must be from the future where people are not free to read books at no cost.
You see, here we have something we call a library.
It seems to be that even a head of business, schools and universities will be the next ones who are most likely to switch over in a big way to FOSS and Linux. The high cost and low government budgets almost force schools to look at any possible alternatives.
:P ).
IBM can benefit from this by encouraging their exemployee-new-teachers to advocate on behalf of Linux / IBM service contracts to their co-workers and the school board (and of course having them suggest IBM hardware too is just icing on the cake
Write to your school board and tell them to use Linux, even if they don't at least they will have heard of it if someone else menions it to them.
"Folk who bring libel suits often have something to hide. Robert Maxwell successfully supressed criticism of his theft-in-progress of the Mirror group pension fund using libel writs."
I agree that libel suits can mean someone has something to hide and if that is the case then they should be fought against and people fighting against them should be encouraged and supported.
Another possibility of being able to comment without being sued into submission is Freenet. Although I don't like the idea of hiding, for some people who cannot afford a lawsuit this maybe a viable option.
"Why should some outmoded businesss model be kept alive via legislation?"
It shouldn't, so let's change it.
It would be probably pretty hard though, all the content monopolists would lobby hard (with a lot of money) to prevent copyright being changed to say 7 years with one extension to 14 for a fee.
"That gives them the right to steal whatever they want then, right?"
Let's put the copyright length down to 5 seconds, then no more 'stealing'.
I might compromise and put it to 10 years but not a day more.
"support costs and security issues"
And what of the costs of lock-in, and giving up freedom?
I'm not a big company but I often choose slightly 'worse' free/open source software in comparison to closed source simply because I value and put a premium on freedom.
You've got to weigh the pros and cons and be pragmatic - but I'd lean towards the free(dom) choice since it seems freedom is often undervalued.
"The devs are not the sole owners of it, everyone is."
That's right, and lets see the numb nuts president do the coding along with his apointees now that the developers have left.
I doubt this came out of the blue also since when you are dealing with that many developers, 20 on the list from what I count, things are slow to organize and reach a consensus. I am sure there were ample opportunities for the president to recognize that there was not enough input, to realize the developers were displeased, and rechoose a board that was more reflective of the wishes of the developers.
Good luck to the new Mambo CMS team.
"Wikipedia, while a good general overview, is not supposed to be used for direct referencial evidence, because the information there-in is subject to the next editor's opinion. Try another source."
Perhaps you haven't heard of the WikiProject Fact and Reference Check?
Google it, and notice that all facts are slowly, but surely, being referenced. After the first go though, each fact will be referenced multiple times.
What more valid source of information do you want other than one that is referenced multiple times with other sources of information?
Wikipedia, or something quite similiar, has the potential to become the ultimate authority of human knowledge.
"I'm not sure a 33% discount will be enough."
:) ).
No truly, no one lives forever so if we want RMS's advice we have to / can think...a ha! Here's what he would say in general I believe:
Giving away your freedom for a discount, even a 100% discount so it's free as in beer, is short sited and the product is unethical. Resist the lure of selling your freedom to the digital devil.
I personally agree, and it's interesting to note to see the people who would sell out for a discount of whatever size. An online quiz could be set up with questions like this to see if you belong more to the Free Software or Open Source camps (if you don't take the discount, put your self in the former, if you do the latter
"I don't see the major media conglomerates getting very far with it....Some companies invariably do such things, but for every one of these another free, open source, or other such somewhat more desirable contender tends to either pop-up or have already existed."
I'm not sure your purpose of the first paragraph then other than stating the obvious. That is the whole point of the story, if nothing is done (say like using FOSS, GNU GPL etc.) then the story will come true. It is a warning.
Do you think RMS just likes writing stories for no reason or do you think he was obviously suggesting people use "these another free, open source, or other such somewhat more desirable" media.
Also tell everyone you know to put their store size to 10+GigaBytes. If you make your store big enough you're surfing most / lot of the content locally.
As well, there should be an 'intergration' box showing the % of your datastore that's filled and it's size, how many open connections you currently have, how many nodes in your routing table. Is there any others?
Extremely interesting journal.
Can someone explain to me how these bosses get hired in the first place? I am looking for a job and am wondering if looking more incompetent will get me a higher up job faster.
P.S. I am serious.
"Under normal copyright law, for someone to take a piece of your work and do something with it, even if it's post it in their blog, is an infringement of copyright."
Depends on how small the 'piece' is you mention, quotes are protected by fair use. In some cases you can copy entire chapters, especially if it is for educational (and private) use. In the united states, from the United States Copyright Act of 1976, the amount of material able to be used via 'fairuse' depends on :
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Thus copyright isn't an absolute right, it is limited by fair use, educational provisions, etc.
All I see there, on not4chan.org, are drawings. In some areas they are illegal I'm sure (along with 'regular' pornography too). However - at least in the United States - drawings are deemed legal since no person was harmed in the process.
:).
Pretty good principle, if an action or behaviour by a person harms no one (or only the person themself) then it should be allowed. I'd call it the harm principle I'd call it the harm principle or maybe negative liberty
Why destroy when you can simply have everything be encrypted? It's cheaper too, in fact there are some free / open source on the fly encryption programs that can do large partitions:
Do any of the Linux distributions do encryption, of even full partition/harddrive encryption? That maybe ideal.
"EBay is a respected player in the business world."
That's true, if you completely reverse the statement. EBay and, if I may say so, their satanic 'child' PayPal are a few of the worst companies I've ever had the displeasure of doing business with.
Starting with the illegitamate charge backs (PayPal) I've mentioned on Slashdot on my most recent post, poor customer service (PayPal & Ebay) in the form of not responding to emails, a nice little trick of charging for auctions that were canceled (eBay), cancelling an auction the day before for selling game box of World of Warcraft (eBay) and more. I really would hate to be someone who does a lot of business with them.
If eBay really has opened up some code and it is Open enough that you have the freedom, as you should, to take it and use it as you want then I look forward to competing products that will result. I'd guess that anyone could do customer service better then eBay and if they want to give out the source to tools that can help their competitors (and others) why not :).
I agree with you, I look forward to a viable alternative to paypal. I am not please with Paypal after having had a false charge back happen against me, and being pinged for an aditional $10.00 as well as losing the original money. Paypal sucks has more horror stories too, and I offer some advice if you have to do business with paypal:
Since google seems to be holding to its 'do not evil' policy they should make a for good competitor with customers fed up with paypal. I wouldn't mind seeing a google auction site to compete with ebay (Paypal's owner) as well :).
I'm not really sure of how to fix that then. We'd need opensource chips, and we can't even get the opensource bios working :).
Our only hope is that free/open source platforms (like Linux) have caught on by then. In order for DRM to work you need everyone coluding down the chain (CPU, BIOS, Operating System, Application). Open source prevents that since you'd need to agree to the DRM, it couldn't be forced on you, and no one would agree to frig up their OS with DRM shit, and someone would fork a copy without that crap in it.
"In short, no matter how cool I2P is, stop bloody spreading it around until it's ready."
As you can see people are eager to have unrestricted free(dom) speech and free(dom) information. Freenet dropped the ball by screwing up forward progress for two years and others are taking up the slack.
I2P has made incredible (and forward only, no backsteps) progress lately but if it doesn't want to be left behind then it needs to move even faster. I also think time is running out since, with DRM being put into Intel chips as one example, I'm not sure if we are keeping up with the powers that be.
I also suggest that anonymous p2p developers, including I2P, look at this Rodi (or AntsP2P since it's also Java) application and take the best parts out. In FOSS the team project who reinvents the wheel the least often has the best progress - Although again I must admit that I2P does an excellent job of gathering people into their project and communicating with its users and other developers much more than other anonymous p2p projects.
Also in general, I2P has been covered on infoanarchy, I dont' think I2P will grow fast until some killer applications (good working searchable p2p, a distributed content store, anonymous newsgroups) are included with the package. If that is the case then all the advertising in the world won't move I2P's population up as it doesn't appeal to the so called unwashed masses.
I agree, and if they do try and sue you, you can simply say that you had no knowledge of the transfer.
It's the same reason why the phone company is not held liable when their phonelines are used to deal in organized crime or terrorism - the phone company has no knowledge of what is passing through their network.
Even better in countries where it is a loser pays legal system: RIAA tries and sues you, you say you had nothing to do with the transaction and that their lawyers should have known that due to the nature and design of the network, then you get your lawyer fees back since you win.