Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Ah, but if language could change once it can change again, and once the number of people who think "piracy" is a silly term for copyright infringement crosses some magic threshold, it will lose that meaning.
Of course, for this to happen one shall have to find some more convincing argument than "but it didn't have this meaning three centuries ago".
How this handle security? If the signature is sent remotely, it is possible to store ones signature to reproduce it several times afterwards.
Signatures don't handle security, and it's a very very long time since they did. The robo-arm introduces nothing new wrt reproducing signatures that fax machines didn't already bring to the masses several decades ago.
I suspect that signatures, together with other low-security authentication mechanisms such as PINs and credit card numbers etc, are really only there so that when people do falsify or misuse them you can legitimately lock them up for various forms of fraud.
Note that in certain situations involving signatures, you still need for both parties to sign at the same time, with two or more witnesses who also sign the document. This shows us that there is little or no security in the signatures as such, but that the security aspect is handled by having well known eye witnesses to interview should the validity of the contract come under dispute at some point.
It's fairly poignant the fact that she gives everyone the same gift, a silver framed picture of her... Pretty much says, 'you ain't shit better than anyone else, but I am da bomb.'
What it says to me is that the British monarch did at some point stop trying to play Britain's friends up against each other by giving gifts according to how much regard the monarch held for each. Whether this is because the British monarch has become irrelevant (thus making such intrigue pointless) or because Britain would rather not be playing on its friends' rivalries anymore I do not know.
It would be impossible, there are separate achievements for 1-digit UID, 2-digit UID, 3-digit UID, 4-digit UID, and 5-digit UID, since you (and I) are both 6-digit UID's we won't get a chance of those achievements, and even those who do qualify for one of those can't get them all, therefore it's impossible to get all the achievements.
All the more reason to consider it an achievement!
Gah... Get the quote right if you're going to quote something!
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!"
In his defense, the 2004 documentary is called "No Fighting in the War Room or Dr. Strangelove and the Nuclear Threat" according to imdb ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445088/ ). So it's a quote of sorts.
The question isn't "what does a comparably specced machine cost". It's "what does a machine that does what I need cost". I can get a $500-700 PC Laptop that will work great for most of my use. I can't touch that with a Mac.
This isn't a very interesting observation though. If I'm looking for some means of transport to get to work and I can make do with a bicycle since it's within a couple kilometers of my home, then me pointing out that a private helicopter would be overpriced for my use just isn't going to surprise anyone and it certainly doesn't make for a very rewarding debate. When I go on to chastise Bell and Sikorsky for not being in the bicycle price range it just gets silly.
I take the opposite view. I have one album up for sale on iTunes and Amazon and another being uploaded right now - http://tinyurl.com/cdx44l I don't actually want to be represented by the PRS, but I have no choice. There is no opt out. You will collect royalties on my behalf whether or not I want you to. If I wish my music to be available free for streaming on Internet radio, you will not let me. So who's worse, Google for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or the PRS for extortion?
Now,/this/ is what you can rightly call theft of copyright. As far as I am aware, this sort of wholesale misappropriation of artists' rights is fairly common in the West and once again emphasizes the point that copyright was created for the benefit of large organizations, not for the individual creators.
Democracy is not a perfect system, in fact it has many disadvantages when compared to a well run dictatorship, but the fact people can safely and effectively take to the streets in protest makes it the most effective system we've found yet.
Democracy isn't as good as it is because we get to elect our leaders, as such. Whatever leaders we elect are/necessarily/ going to be disappointing ones, not because they are all corrupt but because it is/impossible/ to find a leader that can conform to the aggregate desires of a million+ individual voters.
Democracy is good mostly for the ability it gives us to/not reelect/ a leader/and/ that we get a regular chance at getting rid of the incumbent. A dictatorship doesn't give us this most important aspect. Think of where Zimbabwe is today and where it/might/ have been had they in fact had the ability to get rid of their leader back when his insanity was getting obvious. Almost/anyone/ would be able to do a better job than Mugabe, an election wouldn't be necessary - just pick some guy at random. But first you need to get rid of the current one.
Sure, that we get to collectively choose the next guy at the top is a fine bonus I suppose but it appears to me this is not the most important effect of democracy. The periodic cleansing is more important by far.
Beware of leaders who campaign to extend term limits.
The programmer if a consultant will cost say $100 an hour. Or you need to hire a full time employee, and you will need to keep them there for years, if you are going to be ethical about it. So say it takes 10 days at 8 hours a day to fix a small problem. 8*10*1000 that is $8000 to fix the small problem. Vs. Paying $5000 for the Vendor... That is a $3000 savings. Or if you hire a full time programmer, you will need to find ways to keep him busy after solving the problem. For most companies there isn't a work load for programmers if they are not a programming company. Even if you have a development staff. You will need to take them off possible more profitable projects to fix this problem. So you may delay a program that can make you 1k a day. So you lost $10k of profits to save $5k.
Working out the numbers you may find that being "Stuck" to close source is cheaper then Trying to Maintain Open Source code
The revolutionary bit is when you realize that if you just find three or four other people with the same problem as you have and they agree to chip in, you're now actually saving money.
More likely, if it's a popular piece of software, there will be hundreds or even thousands of people out there who share your problem and with a bit of luck someone else has already solved it and made their fix available.
True. But my browser makes it hard for your malware to cause me to run your version of the bank's client on their website; GP's point is that under RMS's proposal it wouldn't be as difficult to do that.
It's not about you attacking the bank; it's about you attacking me when I try to use the bank's services.
The two are the same problem though. Malicious code could attack the local javascript-repository in an RMS-compliant browser in order to hijack your bank accounts etc. In current browsers, malicious code can achieve the same by attacking your browser directly. The problem only becomes more severe if the RMS-compliant browser has worse security management of its local javascript-repository than it does of its own executable code.
Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
You know, you're not going to get very far around here with woman analogies. You're going to end up having to make analogies to explain your analogies.
The "Entertainment" industry has "contributed" massive sums to the Democrat party for many years. Did anyone think that there would be no reciprocity?
It can be argued that the prez adopting the RIAA lawsuit campaign as his payback is a good thing. Sure, it will draw out the struggle somewhat but the RIAA's position is so fundamentally unreasonable it is unlikely in the extreme that they will ever come out victorious. It would be worse if the prez adopted some other, less unreasonable, pet project of Hollywood to put his weight behind.
Of course, that/is/ easy for me to say seeing as I can just watch the whole thing from the sideline and let others do the fighting for me. It's a bit harder on the people actually getting sued I imagine.
One does wonder why the prez would want to go to this length to alienate large parts of the online community however, after the same community has been touted as an important part to him winning the election. Now, said touting may just largely be propaganda and he may have been getting his/actual/ support from elsewhere but if the online community was important enough to be used for propaganda purposes in this election, chances are it's big enough to actually make political impact in the next one.
These people: the Congress, the President, AIG, are all just a bunch of god damned frat boys, scratching each other's backs and doling out our tax money to each other in such staggering volumes that it WILL be the end of this country if we don't stop right now.
Not just your tax money (doling out your tax money is/so/ last year): with the recent $300B+ "quantitative easing" they're also doling out your savings by generally diluting the value of everyone's dollars. On the plus side, I suppose, the Chinese are very unhappy about this so perhaps it's good for/something/.
I'm just happy I don't actually own any dollars, or any assets that are valued in dollars. Or British pounds. Or Japanese yen. Or Swiss francs. Or any other helicopter currency I suppose:-)
In the context of the U.S., its Founding Fathers were very reluctant to label as treason anything that could be used by a tyrant to strike down on legitimate internal opposition. Therefore, they were left with only two very specific acts that would be considered treason:
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. (...)"
"Conspiracy to rig an election" is just not on that list.
But just getting older I can feel myself slipping away. A little less snap. A little slower reactions. The memory is also not that great (wasn't to start with).
I think our old pal Hal said it best when he said
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.
If this web site thought the law was vague and that they were in the right, they should've told Amazon something similar and left the script up. Stupid laws like this only survive because people crumble in the face of silly threats.
If the summary is correct (article, what article?) then they caved not because of the take-down notice or the DMCA as such but because they want to maintain a good relationship with Amazon. I don't know why their relationship with Amazon is important to them but in such a case one will tend to comply with their requests whether they are rooted in law or not. It's just the opportune thing to do.
That may not mean what you seem to be implying. It could mean they really didn't have anything to arrest him on. More likely it means there were so many different possible charges they didn't know where to start.
It could also be that they were assisting in an arrest where someone else had the lead while they themselves had little idea how the whole thing started or why the guy in question needed to be arrested.
This won't stop money counterfeiters from creating money. Even if you added some kind of barcode that contained the fingerprint of the paper to every bill, the overhead to scan the bill would make it worthwhile only to large bills, so the counterfeiters stick to small bills. Or they reverse the fingerprint process and print valid barcodes on the bills they counterfeit.
Surely there's already perfectly good scanners out there for detecting fake currency. It's just that most establishments that handle money (stores, fast food joints, etc.) can't be bothered with the overhead of purchasing thousands of units to deploy with their cash registers, and also don't want to take the efficiency hit of running the money through a scanner (or just having the tiller look at it in UV or whatever) before putting in the till.
What you could theoretically use this technology for is to trace the fake bill back to the creator but as it stands you would first have to build a humongous database with the fingerprints of every single sheet of blank paper that has been distributed to the buying public, with detailed data on who actually received each of those sheets. Sounds prohibitively expensive both to create and to maintain. What the article doesn't say much about is the false positive rate in such a large population of samples.
Because there's no "value added" by introducing a Value Added Tax.
Well, I don't think anyone is calling it a "value-adding tax".
Why should a business transaction be taxed simply because it happened? Taxes are meant to give the government the bare minimum of income necessary to conduct government business, not to punish people for spending money they received in exchange for their labor.
The govt needs to get its money from somewhere, so someone needs to be "punished" for something and in this case that someone just happens to be people buying stuff.
[I]f one is beholden to continuous payments to a third party, it's a good idea to get [insurance]. This is basic financial disaster management - plenty of businesses will sit down and think, "what would happen if the building caught fire?", but few will think, "what happens if my customers suddenly can't pay?"
Also, many will get business insurance but few will think "what happens if AIG goes bust?":-)
The rights-holder is the sole arbiter of the "conditions of the distribution of their content".
No, the courts are.
If they want to distribute content to you which you are forbidden to use in months which end in "Y" that is their right.
No, it is not. Once the product has been sold to you the rights holder has nothing to say about how you use it so long as you stick to what copyright law allows you to do with it.
But at the end of the day, the copy of the content was given to you, after an exchange of moneys, based on an agreement (the license agreement).
No, it was not. It was sold to you as a product, and it is a product that you can use according to what is permitted by copyright law. You only need a/license/ if you intend to put it to uses that copyright law does not permit.
As for what copyright law allows you to do, it allows you to use the product in the expected manner (that is, listen to music or watch a film) and some jurisdictions even allow you to make backup copies of it. There will tend to be a myriad other things you can also do with it without having to get permission from the rights holder.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Ah, but if language could change once it can change again, and once the number of people who think "piracy" is a silly term for copyright infringement crosses some magic threshold, it will lose that meaning.
Of course, for this to happen one shall have to find some more convincing argument than "but it didn't have this meaning three centuries ago".
How this handle security? If the signature is sent remotely, it is possible to store ones signature to reproduce it several times afterwards.
Signatures don't handle security, and it's a very very long time since they did. The robo-arm introduces nothing new wrt reproducing signatures that fax machines didn't already bring to the masses several decades ago.
I suspect that signatures, together with other low-security authentication mechanisms such as PINs and credit card numbers etc, are really only there so that when people do falsify or misuse them you can legitimately lock them up for various forms of fraud.
Note that in certain situations involving signatures, you still need for both parties to sign at the same time, with two or more witnesses who also sign the document. This shows us that there is little or no security in the signatures as such, but that the security aspect is handled by having well known eye witnesses to interview should the validity of the contract come under dispute at some point.
It's fairly poignant the fact that she gives everyone the same gift, a silver framed picture of her... Pretty much says, 'you ain't shit better than anyone else, but I am da bomb.'
What it says to me is that the British monarch did at some point stop trying to play Britain's friends up against each other by giving gifts according to how much regard the monarch held for each. Whether this is because the British monarch has become irrelevant (thus making such intrigue pointless) or because Britain would rather not be playing on its friends' rivalries anymore I do not know.
Is this the April Fools story so I can get my achievement, as noted in the prior front page story?
There is a "the" April Fools story? From today's summaries there would appear to be quite a number of them.
It would be impossible, there are separate achievements for 1-digit UID, 2-digit UID, 3-digit UID, 4-digit UID, and 5-digit UID, since you (and I) are both 6-digit UID's we won't get a chance of those achievements, and even those who do qualify for one of those can't get them all, therefore it's impossible to get all the achievements.
All the more reason to consider it an achievement!
Gah... Get the quote right if you're going to quote something!
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!"
In his defense, the 2004 documentary is called "No Fighting in the War Room or Dr. Strangelove and the Nuclear Threat" according to imdb ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445088/ ). So it's a quote of sorts.
The question isn't "what does a comparably specced machine cost". It's "what does a machine that does what I need cost". I can get a $500-700 PC Laptop that will work great for most of my use. I can't touch that with a Mac.
This isn't a very interesting observation though. If I'm looking for some means of transport to get to work and I can make do with a bicycle since it's within a couple kilometers of my home, then me pointing out that a private helicopter would be overpriced for my use just isn't going to surprise anyone and it certainly doesn't make for a very rewarding debate. When I go on to chastise Bell and Sikorsky for not being in the bicycle price range it just gets silly.
I take the opposite view. I have one album up for sale on iTunes and Amazon and another being uploaded right now - http://tinyurl.com/cdx44l I don't actually want to be represented by the PRS, but I have no choice. There is no opt out. You will collect royalties on my behalf whether or not I want you to. If I wish my music to be available free for streaming on Internet radio, you will not let me. So who's worse, Google for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or the PRS for extortion?
Now, /this/ is what you can rightly call theft of copyright. As far as I am aware, this sort of wholesale misappropriation of artists' rights is fairly common in the West and once again emphasizes the point that copyright was created for the benefit of large organizations, not for the individual creators.
Democracy is not a perfect system, in fact it has many disadvantages when compared to a well run dictatorship, but the fact people can safely and effectively take to the streets in protest makes it the most effective system we've found yet.
Democracy isn't as good as it is because we get to elect our leaders, as such. Whatever leaders we elect are /necessarily/ going to be disappointing ones, not because they are all corrupt but because it is /impossible/ to find a leader that can conform to the aggregate desires of a million+ individual voters.
Democracy is good mostly for the ability it gives us to /not reelect/ a leader /and/ that we get a regular chance at getting rid of the incumbent. A dictatorship doesn't give us this most important aspect. Think of where Zimbabwe is today and where it /might/ have been had they in fact had the ability to get rid of their leader back when his insanity was getting obvious. Almost /anyone/ would be able to do a better job than Mugabe, an election wouldn't be necessary - just pick some guy at random. But first you need to get rid of the current one.
Sure, that we get to collectively choose the next guy at the top is a fine bonus I suppose but it appears to me this is not the most important effect of democracy. The periodic cleansing is more important by far.
Beware of leaders who campaign to extend term limits.
The programmer if a consultant will cost say $100 an hour. Or you need to hire a full time employee, and you will need to keep them there for years, if you are going to be ethical about it. So say it takes 10 days at 8 hours a day to fix a small problem.
8*10*1000 that is $8000 to fix the small problem. Vs. Paying $5000 for the Vendor... That is a $3000 savings. Or if you hire a full time programmer, you will need to find ways to keep him busy after solving the problem. For most companies there isn't a work load for programmers if they are not a programming company. Even if you have a development staff. You will need to take them off possible more profitable projects to fix this problem. So you may delay a program that can make you 1k a day. So you lost $10k of profits to save $5k.
Working out the numbers you may find that being "Stuck" to close source is cheaper then Trying to Maintain Open Source code
The revolutionary bit is when you realize that if you just find three or four other people with the same problem as you have and they agree to chip in, you're now actually saving money.
More likely, if it's a popular piece of software, there will be hundreds or even thousands of people out there who share your problem and with a bit of luck someone else has already solved it and made their fix available.
True. But my browser makes it hard for your malware to cause me to run your version of the bank's client on their website; GP's point is that under RMS's proposal it wouldn't be as difficult to do that.
It's not about you attacking the bank; it's about you attacking me when I try to use the bank's services.
The two are the same problem though. Malicious code could attack the local javascript-repository in an RMS-compliant browser in order to hijack your bank accounts etc. In current browsers, malicious code can achieve the same by attacking your browser directly. The problem only becomes more severe if the RMS-compliant browser has worse security management of its local javascript-repository than it does of its own executable code.
Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
You know, you're not going to get very far around here with woman analogies. You're going to end up having to make analogies to explain your analogies.
The "Entertainment" industry has "contributed" massive sums to the Democrat party for many years. Did anyone think that there would be no reciprocity?
It can be argued that the prez adopting the RIAA lawsuit campaign as his payback is a good thing. Sure, it will draw out the struggle somewhat but the RIAA's position is so fundamentally unreasonable it is unlikely in the extreme that they will ever come out victorious. It would be worse if the prez adopted some other, less unreasonable, pet project of Hollywood to put his weight behind.
Of course, that /is/ easy for me to say seeing as I can just watch the whole thing from the sideline and let others do the fighting for me. It's a bit harder on the people actually getting sued I imagine.
One does wonder why the prez would want to go to this length to alienate large parts of the online community however, after the same community has been touted as an important part to him winning the election. Now, said touting may just largely be propaganda and he may have been getting his /actual/ support from elsewhere but if the online community was important enough to be used for propaganda purposes in this election, chances are it's big enough to actually make political impact in the next one.
These people: the Congress, the President, AIG, are all just a bunch of god damned frat boys, scratching each other's backs and doling out our tax money to each other in such staggering volumes that it WILL be the end of this country if we don't stop right now.
Not just your tax money (doling out your tax money is /so/ last year): with the recent $300B+ "quantitative easing" they're also doling out your savings by generally diluting the value of everyone's dollars. On the plus side, I suppose, the Chinese are very unhappy about this so perhaps it's good for /something/.
I'm just happy I don't actually own any dollars, or any assets that are valued in dollars. Or British pounds. Or Japanese yen. Or Swiss francs. Or any other helicopter currency I suppose :-)
Seriously. How is this not treason?
In the context of the U.S., its Founding Fathers were very reluctant to label as treason anything that could be used by a tyrant to strike down on legitimate internal opposition. Therefore, they were left with only two very specific acts that would be considered treason:
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. (...)"
"Conspiracy to rig an election" is just not on that list.
But just getting older I can feel myself slipping away. A little less snap. A little slower reactions. The memory is also not that great (wasn't to start with).
I think our old pal Hal said it best when he said
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.
... but perhaps you just had to be there :-)
An excuse to show off about how well travelled he is, and, very incidentally, by the way be buys bags that have straps that cost more than your bag.
It may be veiled criticism of the anti-terrorism effort. Apparently the authorities are letting people fly around Bihn-laden on a routine basis.
If this web site thought the law was vague and that they were in the right, they should've told Amazon something similar and left the script up. Stupid laws like this only survive because people crumble in the face of silly threats.
If the summary is correct (article, what article?) then they caved not because of the take-down notice or the DMCA as such but because they want to maintain a good relationship with Amazon. I don't know why their relationship with Amazon is important to them but in such a case one will tend to comply with their requests whether they are rooted in law or not. It's just the opportune thing to do.
Ok, so, I don't know much about the laws, but it is illegal, isn't it?
Presumably. The press tends to be given a fair amount of leeway in cases such as this though.
That may not mean what you seem to be implying. It could mean they really didn't have anything to arrest him on. More likely it means there were so many different possible charges they didn't know where to start.
It could also be that they were assisting in an arrest where someone else had the lead while they themselves had little idea how the whole thing started or why the guy in question needed to be arrested.
This won't stop money counterfeiters from creating money. Even if you added some kind of barcode that contained the fingerprint of the paper to every bill, the overhead to scan the bill would make it worthwhile only to large bills, so the counterfeiters stick to small bills. Or they reverse the fingerprint process and print valid barcodes on the bills they counterfeit.
Surely there's already perfectly good scanners out there for detecting fake currency. It's just that most establishments that handle money (stores, fast food joints, etc.) can't be bothered with the overhead of purchasing thousands of units to deploy with their cash registers, and also don't want to take the efficiency hit of running the money through a scanner (or just having the tiller look at it in UV or whatever) before putting in the till.
What you could theoretically use this technology for is to trace the fake bill back to the creator but as it stands you would first have to build a humongous database with the fingerprints of every single sheet of blank paper that has been distributed to the buying public, with detailed data on who actually received each of those sheets. Sounds prohibitively expensive both to create and to maintain. What the article doesn't say much about is the false positive rate in such a large population of samples.
Because there's no "value added" by introducing a Value Added Tax.
Well, I don't think anyone is calling it a "value-adding tax".
Why should a business transaction be taxed simply because it happened? Taxes are meant to give the government the bare minimum of income necessary to conduct government business, not to punish people for spending money they received in exchange for their labor.
The govt needs to get its money from somewhere, so someone needs to be "punished" for something and in this case that someone just happens to be people buying stuff.
What about "Life of author or x years, whichever is longer"?
I find it bizarre, grotesque even, that we should create laws that give a direct economic incentive to the murder of authors.
[I]f one is beholden to continuous payments to a third party, it's a good idea to get [insurance]. This is basic financial disaster management - plenty of businesses will sit down and think, "what would happen if the building caught fire?", but few will think, "what happens if my customers suddenly can't pay?"
Also, many will get business insurance but few will think "what happens if AIG goes bust?" :-)
The rights-holder is the sole arbiter of the "conditions of the distribution of their content".
No, the courts are.
If they want to distribute content to you which you are forbidden to use in months which end in "Y" that is their right.
No, it is not. Once the product has been sold to you the rights holder has nothing to say about how you use it so long as you stick to what copyright law allows you to do with it.
But at the end of the day, the copy of the content was given to you, after an exchange of moneys, based on an agreement (the license agreement).
No, it was not. It was sold to you as a product, and it is a product that you can use according to what is permitted by copyright law. You only need a /license/ if you intend to put it to uses that copyright law does not permit.
As for what copyright law allows you to do, it allows you to use the product in the expected manner (that is, listen to music or watch a film) and some jurisdictions even allow you to make backup copies of it. There will tend to be a myriad other things you can also do with it without having to get permission from the rights holder.