I don't know anything about Australian copyright law, but under US law you cannot copyright a fact. A train timetable would certainly qualify. This might be one area where we get things right.
While I don't know about the US/or/ Australia I do know that database clauses have been added to copyright legislation in many countries over the last decade or so. These will tend to make collections of facts copyrightable even when the facts individually are not. In order to get around such legislation one would presumably have to collect all the individual facts oneself rather than just download them from someone else's pre-made collection.
Of course, this whole Crown copyright thing the Empire has going for it I know absolutely nothing about/at all/. It's probably very arcane and very cute and very open for abuse by malicious authorities.
I think a lot of Americans don't realize why America became the superpower it is.
You skipped the part where we landed in a relatively uninhabited continent and exploited its natural resources for 200 years.
And then came largely unscathed out of a war that pretty much obliterated the production capacity of the rest of the world. That sort of thing can really work wonders for competitive advantage.
But that's what Phorrest was saying. Your post is automatically copyrighted, nobody can distribute it unless you give them a license to do so. So either the second line is giving them a license (making the first line false), or the first line is true (making the second line false).
The law is like that in Norway: I can give you any and all rights to my works, no problem whatsoever. The only thing I cannot sign-away, is the right to be considered the author of the work.
You also cannot sign away the right to prevent your work from being altered in a way that is prejudicial to yourself, nor the right to demand that your name be removed from such an alteration, nor the right to demand that such an alteration explain that the alterations are not yours. All of this is in para 3 of Norwegian copyright law.
If you agree publishing rights to your work there are some further specially protected and one non-waivable rights in para 39e. The non-waivable part seems to be that 15 years after initial publication you are allowed to include your work in a collection of your own works but you must give the original publisher a chance to publish this new work before offering it to anyone else.
There are also some non-waivable rights to do with the handling of original copies of artwork. That is, if you produce a painting then you retain some non-waivable rights to that original painting regardless of who you sell it to etc. As far as I can tell, you are entitled to a certain percentage of the resale price when the item is traded via certain channels (para 38).
That's what I could find by a quick search for "waiv" in the English version of the law. I am not a lawyer, I just know how to use Acrobat Reader's search function.
My heart goes out to Nintendo in these difficult times of record profits.
We probably need to institute a rule along the lines of "if you can effectively lobby the govt to help you out then they won't because if you can afford to pull/that/ off effectively you must be doing quite well already".
It may be because somewhere inside my head, I put a value on my free time?
From what I can tell it's common for humans to attach more value to something one pays a lot for than something one gets cheaply or for free, regardless of their actual comparative value or usefulness.
If I were forced at gunpoint to express my amateur speculation I would probably say that it seems like some sort of mental self defense to prevent ourselves from facing up to having dished out big $$$ for something that was less valuable to us than something else we got cheap. That is, we don't want to admit that we've been suckered and our subconscious does the only decent thing and effectively suppresses that idea.
It saddens me to think that so many people are that shallow. It no longer surprises me that people would risk their financial stability to have a baby with a particular hair color. But it does still depress me.
Yeah, such a waste in these financially troubled times when you/know/ that once they're teenagers they're going to cover up your $10,000 eugenic screening with a $5 dye-job anyway.
On a more serious note, I wonder what this is going to do to the child's attitude to its parents. "Yeah honey we made sure you'd have dark hair" - don't kids tend to feel enough dominated and controlled by their parents already? How much of this crap would it take to turn teenage revolt into parricidal mania?
Censorship is an act of whoever is trying to silence you. That could be the govt, it could be your telephone company, it could be your ISP or it could be your next-door neighbour.
Do not confuse the concept of censorship with the specific source of censorship that is addressed by the US Constitution. Some sources of censorship are more nefarious than others but it is not clear that censorship is automatically harmless so long as it doesn't come from a government institution.
Just the fact that the government wants 100% is enough. They may not force ISP's yet, but when they find out that those 5% won't do it (I assume out of principle, there are a few of those ISP's left) they will probably turn to forcing them to comply.
The upside to having it mandated by law is that it can then by challenged on constitutional(*) and human rights grounds. How well this would fare in the UK I do not know but the fact that the govt hasn't already enacted a law along these lines gives hope - they may be in doubt as to whether they could actually get away with it. Much easier to just bully private organizations into doing their dirty work for them.
Don't the inventors of the wireless door have the right stop and say "hey you guys didn't invent this, there was something similar but it's not the same thing, we spent money perfecting the things that in hindsight seem startlingly obvious, don't steal our work"?
No. What they have the right to do is milk the hell out of their first-to-market advantage then use some of the proceeds to come up with the next new thing. If they fail to turn their invention into extra profits then either the invention wasn't all that great after all, or else they're a crappy company in which case no wonder they're having trouble. Competition is/meant/ to be hard.
Here's an excerpt from the BBC article for the benefit of the cynics among us who know the media never gets technical matters right:
BitTorrent is a legal application used by many file-shares to swap content because of the fast and efficient manner it distributes files. No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead the site hosts "torrent" links to TV, film and music files held on its users computers.
If you have access to cheap food (as we do today) and effective loyalty inducement (brainwashing perhaps, or some sort of mind control) then slavery might be quite viable from a purely economic viewpoint.
If you have access to cheap food, you can simply arrange to pay some of the wage as food. It doesn't change the underlying economic situation at all.
Ah, yes, the company store - the civilized man's slavery. Again, if you can manage to pull off this particular variant of slavery light then you might very well find it profitable - so long as you have an inexpensive way of keeping your workers in check (the aforementioned brain washing etc.).
Free workers will tend to want the greenback so they can decide what to buy for food themselves. Any less than this is moving towards serfdom which itself is the penultimate stop on the train ride to slavery.
And then throw that "25 things people don't know about me" thing that was going around a few weeks ago into the mix. Now they have that information, too.
I wonder what the marketers will do with:
14) I will go out of my way not buy anything because of unsolicited marketing.
They will send you promotional material for all their competitors:-)
I hate "internetlackofprivacyphobia" (hey I just made that up.. bush has tought us so much)..no one cares about your life, get over yourself.
Meanwhile, in the real world, one finds that job interviewers/do/, in fact, care about your life.
There is going to be a transition period (it has probably already started) after which job interviewers, and everyone else, has fully grasped the concept that "people do all sorts of shit all the time even people who seem completely normal" and that, actually, this is perfectly normal. Until that transition period is over, exposing one's activities to the extent that many now do is likely to have some negative impact on one's life.
On the plus side, they're the early adopters and act as loss leaders for the rest of us and in the end they probably get lots of good karma for it. Maybe they'll come back as dolphins, or white mice, or something.
What are the odds that two advanced SSBN submarines would collide in a vast ocean accidentally ?
FTFA: "Both navies want quiet areas, deep areas, roughly the same distance from their home ports. So you find these station grounds have got quite a few submarines, not only French and Royal Navy but also from Russia and the United States."
So probably not quite as unlikely as one would have been more comfortable thinking:-)
You should read your Adam Smith. Even without machinery, it usually makes more economic sense to pay for labour than to enslave it. After all, you have to pay for a slave's upkeep, which will not be a dramatically different cost to that of hiring a worker on a living wage.
Surely this must be an equation that changes over time. In the modern West I am sure that if you feed your slaves some nutrient gloop and provide them with highly volume-efficient housing ("2 cubic meters should be enough for anyone") it's going to be a smaller economic outlay than paying modern Western salaries.
On the other hand, if you 'own' the worker then you have to accept all risks associated with them. A free worker is his own problem.
Yes, the invested capital problem probably remains.
Also, from a capitalist viewpoint, the quality of the capitalist system will tend to increase with the number of free actors within the system that contribute their own preferences into the economy. Slaves will presumably have no money, no possessions and have no input into the economy outside of their job assignment. Their lack of contribution to the market place is therefore a cost to the economy as a whole, as compared to a situation in which they were free citizens.
An example of this last is Roman agriculture. It was largely staffed by slaves and remained essentially unchanged through centuries. Had it been staffed by (semi-)free peasants, vastly improved ploughs, mills and irrigation systems may have occurred under the Romans rather than in the subsequent dark ages.
We would like to think that we ended slavery and nasty labor conditions because we've grown more humane and ethical. The reality is that the wind sail put the galley slave out out commission because it was cheaper to buy and maintain the sails than it is to maintain the slaves. It's cheaper to use machines to use slaves or underpaid workers to mine.
An often overlooked downside to slavery is the security issue. Having large numbers of slaves necessitates employing a competent security force to keep them in check. This both costs a lot and it takes workers away from other jobs so they can be troops. There is also the cost of the odd slave revolt to add into the equation.
I always laugh at those star trek or scifi shows where some advanced race is using living slaves to work hard labor. It hadn't occurred to the writers that even in the complete absence of ethics, it just makes no sense to use humans to do brute labor.
It's not impossible that some technological development may make it economically viable to hold slaves. If you have access to cheap food (as we do today) and effective loyalty inducement (brainwashing perhaps, or some sort of mind control) then slavery might be quite viable from a purely economic viewpoint. Slaves simply become highly sophisticated biological machines that eat food instead of oil.
I'll leave it to some sci-fi author to dream up a situation in which one might even argue that slavery is the ethical choice:-)
Well, I hope that the Chinese can overthrow their government with as little bloodshed as possible. I figure it will happen when the party loses the ability to suppress internal communications. They imagine that building the great firewall will help them keep a lid on it, but they're wrong.
There is some reason to hope that Chinese leaders have half a clue and that they're mainly trying to avoid going the way of the former Soviet Union in the early 90's: thrown into chaos by unchecked turbo capitalism. If so then they only need to keep the lid down for/sufficiently long/ that the culture starts getting a grip on the capitalist economy so that the beast can be let loose without risking it tearing everything apart. Land ownership reform has been mentioned time and again as their next potential step along this way, this would be a big one and should help empower the rural population in general.
Of course, China is probably helped by their historical cultural acceptance of large and inefficient state bureaucracies. So long as the populace isn't left completely to fend for itself there's probably a lot of leeway for the Party to make mistakes along the way.
Let's just hope they'll eventually get somewhere decent. A full-scale civil war in a 1G+ country is just too terrible a thought.
We owe them a lot of money, and at any time they could call that debt in on us, and presumably (if they wanted to and probably could) ship us off to China to work in their factories
Presumably what they own is a ginormous quantity of US Treasury bonds. The way in which they could "call in" that debt is by putting them all out for sale on the market but this would depreciate their value to such an extent they would have to be idiots to actually do it. Sure, it would cause some trouble for the US but chances are it would hurt China about as much - they would rather hang on to them and sell them off gradually so they actually get paid something for them. As for debt the US needs to pay out in $$$ when it comes due, well, it's debt in dollars and the recently politicized Federal Reserve will surely be happy to print however many dollar bills are needed to pay off any debt the govt decides it needs to get rid of (perhaps there would even be an Inflation Czar). To call the US' situation wrt international debt "sweet" is a gross understatement. The difficult part isn't to service their debt, the difficult part is to do it in such a way that the USD remains the international currency of choice afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Now count how many comments are specifically about mormons. You just helped. And so did I. Thanks.
If I could tag this subthread "streisandeffect", I would.
I don't know anything about Australian copyright law, but under US law you cannot copyright a fact. A train timetable would certainly qualify. This might be one area where we get things right.
While I don't know about the US /or/ Australia I do know that database clauses have been added to copyright legislation in many countries over the last decade or so. These will tend to make collections of facts copyrightable even when the facts individually are not. In order to get around such legislation one would presumably have to collect all the individual facts oneself rather than just download them from someone else's pre-made collection.
Of course, this whole Crown copyright thing the Empire has going for it I know absolutely nothing about /at all/. It's probably very arcane and very cute and very open for abuse by malicious authorities.
I think a lot of Americans don't realize why America became the superpower it is.
You skipped the part where we landed in a relatively uninhabited continent and exploited its natural resources for 200 years.
And then came largely unscathed out of a war that pretty much obliterated the production capacity of the rest of the world. That sort of thing can really work wonders for competitive advantage.
Zealots of all stripes are equally heinous.
I find your anti-zealot zealotry intriguing :-)
But that's what Phorrest was saying. Your post is automatically copyrighted, nobody can distribute it unless you give them a license to do so. So either the second line is giving them a license (making the first line false), or the first line is true (making the second line false).
itsatrap!
The law is like that in Norway: I can give you any and all rights to my works, no problem whatsoever. The only thing I cannot sign-away, is the right to be considered the author of the work.
You also cannot sign away the right to prevent your work from being altered in a way that is prejudicial to yourself, nor the right to demand that your name be removed from such an alteration, nor the right to demand that such an alteration explain that the alterations are not yours. All of this is in para 3 of Norwegian copyright law.
If you agree publishing rights to your work there are some further specially protected and one non-waivable rights in para 39e. The non-waivable part seems to be that 15 years after initial publication you are allowed to include your work in a collection of your own works but you must give the original publisher a chance to publish this new work before offering it to anyone else.
There are also some non-waivable rights to do with the handling of original copies of artwork. That is, if you produce a painting then you retain some non-waivable rights to that original painting regardless of who you sell it to etc. As far as I can tell, you are entitled to a certain percentage of the resale price when the item is traded via certain channels (para 38).
That's what I could find by a quick search for "waiv" in the English version of the law. I am not a lawyer, I just know how to use Acrobat Reader's search function.
For anyone who is interested, this is the (unofficial) English text of the law:
http://www.regjeringen.no/upload/KKD/Medier/Acts%20and%20regulations/Aandsverkloven_engelsk_versjon_nov2008.pdf
My heart goes out to Nintendo in these difficult times of record profits.
We probably need to institute a rule along the lines of "if you can effectively lobby the govt to help you out then they won't because if you can afford to pull /that/ off effectively you must be doing quite well already".
It may be because somewhere inside my head, I put a value on my free time?
From what I can tell it's common for humans to attach more value to something one pays a lot for than something one gets cheaply or for free, regardless of their actual comparative value or usefulness.
If I were forced at gunpoint to express my amateur speculation I would probably say that it seems like some sort of mental self defense to prevent ourselves from facing up to having dished out big $$$ for something that was less valuable to us than something else we got cheap. That is, we don't want to admit that we've been suckered and our subconscious does the only decent thing and effectively suppresses that idea.
It saddens me to think that so many people are that shallow. It no longer surprises me that people would risk their financial stability to have a baby with a particular hair color. But it does still depress me.
Yeah, such a waste in these financially troubled times when you /know/ that once they're teenagers they're going to cover up your $10,000 eugenic screening with a $5 dye-job anyway.
On a more serious note, I wonder what this is going to do to the child's attitude to its parents. "Yeah honey we made sure you'd have dark hair" - don't kids tend to feel enough dominated and controlled by their parents already? How much of this crap would it take to turn teenage revolt into parricidal mania?
Censorship is an act of government (...)
Censorship is an act of whoever is trying to silence you. That could be the govt, it could be your telephone company, it could be your ISP or it could be your next-door neighbour.
Do not confuse the concept of censorship with the specific source of censorship that is addressed by the US Constitution.
Some sources of censorship are more nefarious than others but it is not clear that censorship is automatically harmless so long as it doesn't come from a government institution.
Just the fact that the government wants 100% is enough. They may not force ISP's yet, but when they find out that those 5% won't do it (I assume out of principle, there are a few of those ISP's left) they will probably turn to forcing them to comply.
The upside to having it mandated by law is that it can then by challenged on constitutional(*) and human rights grounds. How well this would fare in the UK I do not know but the fact that the govt hasn't already enacted a law along these lines gives hope - they may be in doubt as to whether they could actually get away with it. Much easier to just bully private organizations into doing their dirty work for them.
* - Yes, there is such a thing for the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom may or may not be an accurate description.
Don't the inventors of the wireless door have the right stop and say "hey you guys didn't invent this, there was something similar but it's not the same thing, we spent money perfecting the things that in hindsight seem startlingly obvious, don't steal our work"?
No. What they have the right to do is milk the hell out of their first-to-market advantage then use some of the proceeds to come up with the next new thing. If they fail to turn their invention into extra profits then either the invention wasn't all that great after all, or else they're a crappy company in which case no wonder they're having trouble. Competition is /meant/ to be hard.
Here's an excerpt from the BBC article for the benefit of the cynics among us who know the media never gets technical matters right:
BitTorrent is a legal application used by many file-shares to swap content because of the fast and efficient manner it distributes files.
No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead the site hosts "torrent" links to TV, film and music files held on its users computers.
There may be hope for the world yet :-)
It's one of those levels of convenience that seems stupid and shallow(...)
Unfortunately, compatibility is much underrated. Compatibility makes everything easier for everyone. It is certainly neither stupid nor shallow.
So why can I buy one from an overseas seller for less than $3, with free shipping?
They stole it? :-)
If you have access to cheap food (as we do today) and effective loyalty inducement (brainwashing perhaps, or some sort of mind control) then slavery might be quite viable from a purely economic viewpoint.
If you have access to cheap food, you can simply arrange to pay some of the wage as food. It doesn't change the underlying economic situation at all.
Ah, yes, the company store - the civilized man's slavery. Again, if you can manage to pull off this particular variant of slavery light then you might very well find it profitable - so long as you have an inexpensive way of keeping your workers in check (the aforementioned brain washing etc.).
Free workers will tend to want the greenback so they can decide what to buy for food themselves. Any less than this is moving towards serfdom which itself is the penultimate stop on the train ride to slavery.
And then throw that "25 things people don't know about me" thing that was going around a few weeks ago into the mix. Now they have that information, too.
I wonder what the marketers will do with:
14) I will go out of my way not buy anything because of unsolicited marketing.
They will send you promotional material for all their competitors :-)
I hate "internetlackofprivacyphobia" (hey I just made that up.. bush has tought us so much) ..no one cares about your life, get over yourself.
Meanwhile, in the real world, one finds that job interviewers /do/, in fact, care about your life.
There is going to be a transition period (it has probably already started) after which job interviewers, and everyone else, has fully grasped the concept that "people do all sorts of shit all the time even people who seem completely normal" and that, actually, this is perfectly normal. Until that transition period is over, exposing one's activities to the extent that many now do is likely to have some negative impact on one's life.
On the plus side, they're the early adopters and act as loss leaders for the rest of us and in the end they probably get lots of good karma for it. Maybe they'll come back as dolphins, or white mice, or something.
including that picture of you at the beach with your shirt off when you were 17...
I don't think _anyone_ at /. has to worry about that.
Oh, I don't know about that. There are some /very/ disturbing fetishes out there . . .
What are the odds that two advanced SSBN submarines would collide in a vast ocean accidentally ?
FTFA:
"Both navies want quiet areas, deep areas, roughly the same distance from their home ports. So you find these station grounds have got quite a few submarines, not only French and Royal Navy but also from Russia and the United States."
So probably not quite as unlikely as one would have been more comfortable thinking :-)
You should read your Adam Smith. Even without machinery, it usually makes more economic sense to pay for labour than to enslave it. After all, you have to pay for a slave's upkeep, which will not be a dramatically different cost to that of hiring a worker on a living wage.
Surely this must be an equation that changes over time. In the modern West I am sure that if you feed your slaves some nutrient gloop and provide them with highly volume-efficient housing ("2 cubic meters should be enough for anyone") it's going to be a smaller economic outlay than paying modern Western salaries.
On the other hand, if you 'own' the worker then you have to accept all risks associated with them. A free worker is his own problem.
Yes, the invested capital problem probably remains.
Also, from a capitalist viewpoint, the quality of the capitalist system will tend to increase with the number of free actors within the system that contribute their own preferences into the economy. Slaves will presumably have no money, no possessions and have no input into the economy outside of their job assignment. Their lack of contribution to the market place is therefore a cost to the economy as a whole, as compared to a situation in which they were free citizens.
An example of this last is Roman agriculture. It was largely staffed by slaves and remained essentially unchanged through centuries. Had it been staffed by (semi-)free peasants, vastly improved ploughs, mills and irrigation systems may have occurred under the Romans rather than in the subsequent dark ages.
We would like to think that we ended slavery and nasty labor conditions because we've grown more humane and ethical. The reality is that the wind sail put the galley slave out out commission because it was cheaper to buy and maintain the sails than it is to maintain the slaves. It's cheaper to use machines to use slaves or underpaid workers to mine.
An often overlooked downside to slavery is the security issue. Having large numbers of slaves necessitates employing a competent security force to keep them in check. This both costs a lot and it takes workers away from other jobs so they can be troops. There is also the cost of the odd slave revolt to add into the equation.
I always laugh at those star trek or scifi shows where some advanced race is using living slaves to work hard labor. It hadn't occurred to the writers that even in the complete absence of ethics, it just makes no sense to use humans to do brute labor.
It's not impossible that some technological development may make it economically viable to hold slaves. If you have access to cheap food (as we do today) and effective loyalty inducement (brainwashing perhaps, or some sort of mind control) then slavery might be quite viable from a purely economic viewpoint. Slaves simply become highly sophisticated biological machines that eat food instead of oil.
I'll leave it to some sci-fi author to dream up a situation in which one might even argue that slavery is the ethical choice :-)
Well, I hope that the Chinese can overthrow their government with as little bloodshed as possible. I figure it will happen when the party loses the ability to suppress internal communications. They imagine that building the great firewall will help them keep a lid on it, but they're wrong.
There is some reason to hope that Chinese leaders have half a clue and that they're mainly trying to avoid going the way of the former Soviet Union in the early 90's: thrown into chaos by unchecked turbo capitalism. If so then they only need to keep the lid down for /sufficiently long/ that the culture starts getting a grip on the capitalist economy so that the beast can be let loose without risking it tearing everything apart. Land ownership reform has been mentioned time and again as their next potential step along this way, this would be a big one and should help empower the rural population in general.
Of course, China is probably helped by their historical cultural acceptance of large and inefficient state bureaucracies. So long as the populace isn't left completely to fend for itself there's probably a lot of leeway for the Party to make mistakes along the way.
Let's just hope they'll eventually get somewhere decent. A full-scale civil war in a 1G+ country is just too terrible a thought.
We owe them a lot of money, and at any time they could call that debt in on us, and presumably (if they wanted to and probably could) ship us off to China to work in their factories
Presumably what they own is a ginormous quantity of US Treasury bonds. The way in which they could "call in" that debt is by putting them all out for sale on the market but this would depreciate their value to such an extent they would have to be idiots to actually do it. Sure, it would cause some trouble for the US but chances are it would hurt China about as much - they would rather hang on to them and sell them off gradually so they actually get paid something for them. As for debt the US needs to pay out in $$$ when it comes due, well, it's debt in dollars and the recently politicized Federal Reserve will surely be happy to print however many dollar bills are needed to pay off any debt the govt decides it needs to get rid of (perhaps there would even be an Inflation Czar). To call the US' situation wrt international debt "sweet" is a gross understatement. The difficult part isn't to service their debt, the difficult part is to do it in such a way that the USD remains the international currency of choice afterwards.
Microsoft themselves could contribute a lot to the problem of an "insecure Internet" if they just fixed their f'ing OS.
fixing
3: the sterilization of an animal; "they took him to the vet
for neutering" [syn: {neutering}, {altering}]
Yeah, couldn't agree more :-)