The article's author wants to subvert the contract completely in the favor of one side.
I had to stop and think about whether this statement referred to the article or the summary. From the summary:
This community can surely supply a plethora of arguments for the public domain
I resent the implication that the only alternative to a copyright extension is an outright abolishment of copyright. The biggest piece of common sense I've heard for ages on the subject of copyright reform was from the Gowers report: no extensions, no reductions. Leave it as it is.
The basic controls on a computer are standard in the same way as they are in a car. Pedals are clutch-brake-accellerator, left to right. Turning the steering wheel clockwise makes the car turn right. In the same way, a keyboard prints characters on the screen where the cursor is, and the mouse controls the pointer. One mouse button performs clicks, the other brings up a context menu (even on Macs).
Other controls start to differ in placement, but they're all basically there. There's usually a gear shifter of some form, whether manual or automatic and whether between the seats or on the steering column (flappy paddle). In RHD cars, indicators and wiper stalks change sides depending on whether your car is European or Asian. There's a variety of ways to pop the bonnet. And then there's the Citroën CX, where the controls were everywhere but where you expected them.
In the same way, the position of the main menu, menu bar, quick application launcher and task bar are often in different places on different computers. System settings will be in different places. Folders will be arranged differently. But it's all there.
The problem is that it doesn't really matter how good my car's user interface is. I'll still get lost on the roads.
0C and 32F are the same everywhere, too. A freezing point is a freezing point.
Erm, okay, I think you're confusing a couple of issues. My point was that the 0-100F that one person in one part of the world would find intuitive isn't necessarily intuitive to someone in another part of the world, with different climatic conditions. However, having a non-arbitrary number (0) at the freezing point of water is more useful because, as you said, the freezing point is the same everywhere.
...the greater separation is more intuitive for people...
I'd contest this. The greater separation is more intuitive to people that have used Fahrenheit all their lives. To someone that has used Celsius all their life, it's baffling.
Greater separation doesn't do anything for the average person. I would be surprised if anybody could tell the difference between 15C and 16C. Accordingly, decimals are never used in the Celsius scale outside of scientific applications, so this isn't an issue either.
I disagree. For weather purposes, having the freezing point of water at 0 is more useful, both because freezing temperatures make a substantial difference to human behaviour, and because it is the same worldwide. I live in what would be described as a temperate area, and temperatures here have never reached 100F and rarely dip as low as 0F, so the Fahrenheit scale is less useful.
No, abolition of copyright is devoid of worth. It won't benefit anybody. Commercial operators that rely on copyright will go out of business, and those that eschew copyright protection (open source software, creative commons etc) will carry on as normal.
Forgive me if I'm being a spaz, but isn't that line commented out in your example? It also seems to be commented out on my Gentoo box, which leads me to believe that it's commented out by default as it's a file I've never touched.
Furthermore I tried su'ing on that machine with only the first eight characters of my root password, and was denied access. So I'm concluding that it's not a problem in Gentoo by default.
The problem is your ability to communicate this information over the phone. If you're experiencing shortness of breath while phoning for an ambulance, your location is the kind of thing you would want the operator to be able to find automatically.
My flatmates and I had a server running in our living room all through uni. At first we used it to share our ADSL connection, which was accessed with a PCI modem that our ISP provided. We used it as a Quake server and a file and ssh server after that, so when we bought a wireless NAT router we kept it around.
In my last year of uni, I was working in a special lab where we were allowed to bring in our own laptops and connect to the university network. This was all by special provision, and we were behind an additional firewall. POP, SMTP and IMAP were all blocked, so were were unable to access email services not only from the internet, but even from elsewhere in the same department. So we set up an email service on our living room server, that would check all our accounts and provide IMAP access when at home, and Horde webmail access when we were in uni.
It wasn't an ideal solution, because Horde was difficult to set up and use, and very slow, mainly because although we had close to 8mb downstream, we were still on 512mb upstream. If this kind of approach is to take off with ordinary users, there needs to be a slot-in solution, and upstream speeds need to come closer into line with downstream. The other issue was power consumption. In these days where we're being told to consume less energy, an always-on machine in the house isn't going to look attractive.
Google Maps is handy as a quick reference, but as a mapping application it's not the best. It's designed as a road map, and misses out a lot of important information for walkers, cyclists and horse riders.
MultiMap does a bit better as it uses Ordnance Survey maps at certain scales, but I ended up going back to paper OS maps because MM is soooo slow, and you can take a paper map with you.
Credit to Google though, they modified the route planning algorithms fairly recently (a few weeks ago I think). It used to give heavy preference to major roads at the expense of 'minor' ones, with some hilarious consequences. Campbeltown to Glasgow used to recommend two ferry trips, one of which only operates during the summer, instead of the three to four hour drive it recommends now.
In short, what's the point in voting when both parties are equally as corrupt and when the decisions taken there never effect you?
Well on the 3rd of May I'll have the choice of at least seven parties on the regional list, all with a reasonable chance of being elected. But the constituency vote is the same old nonsense where I have to vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out. I think there's room for improvement here...
A politics where issues are not decided based on the party your belong to but what improves the lives of the people of the country.
Basically, I think party allegiances should be banned from the constituency vote, so that those elected have a responsibility to the voters and the voters only.
Think about this for a second, think of one piece of legislation passed in the last ten years that has positively impacted anyone you know in the first world?
You couldn't have thought very hard. Off the top of my head...
Ah, so just because Scottish youths don't put their knives to good use, nobody else should be allowed to have weapons either. That's good politician doublethought if I ever saw it. Is there a way you can rephrase that to include the words "what about the children?"
Just saying that the assertion that weapons are used for the preservation of democracy and not criminal activity is blatantly wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Not true. Have you ever considered that factions within the US government who would have liked to have a Chrystalnacht of their own could not because our citizens are well armed?
Saddam Hussein managed to rule Iraq with an iron grip despite the fact that gun ownership in Iraq is extremely high. What would be different about the US? Considering that the US public were remarkably accepting of whatever Dubya did in the run-up to Iraq, because he was the commander in chief.
European youths taking more of an interest in weaponry would be a good step.
European youths taking more of an interest in voting would be a good step.
With regards to weaponry... well, many Scottish youths have access to knives and carry them on a regular basis. Do they use them for political change? Nope. They use them in muggings and gang fights. If we introduce guns to the mix, how do you think this behaviour will change?
It's not like gun ownership has any effect on US politics except for a desire to keep ownership legal. You still have a two-party system that favours big business.
Uhm, well, European gun laws tend to be a lot tighter, and several EU countries have national ID card systems. And like the other poster said, there are certain limitations on freedom of speech in certain countries, including such things as holocaust denial in Germany. Here in the UK, inciting racial or religious hatred is illegal (something I personally agree with). I would maintain, though, that freedom of speech is more respected here. Nobody gets called a traitor for opposing a war, for example.
Thing is, freedoms are pretty variable from country to country, the European Convention on Human Rights not withstanding. Even in the UK there are different rights in Scotland and England with regard to land access, and this is something I'm quite curious about - what land access rights do USians have?
True, but user education is a major part of phishing prevention, and educating users to look for the.plc.uk should be a relatively simple task. It's also a relatively simple task to redirect genuinebank.co.uk to genuinebank.plc.uk.
Also, although you can't set up a phishing site at, say, bankofscotland.co.uk, you could conceivably set one up at bankofscotalnd.co.uk, which would be easy to miss at a glance. You wouldn't be able to set up bankofscotalnd.plc.uk though, so by looking for the.plc.uk domain (as opposed to subtle typos) you can be sure that you're at the genuine site.
I never claimed that it required a widescreen TV. Scart cables carry information about the aspect ratio of the signal, and most fullscreen TVs in Europe will automatically compensate.
Connecting to a standard-def TV using component cables obviously requires a standard-def TV with component inputs. Don't know about America, but in Europe these are very thin on the ground. You might be able to connect it via a component-to-Scart cable, but this is a non-standard use of Scart and not guaranteed to be supported by your television (although you could buy a converter).
how do we expect that iTV is going to approach HDTV anytime soon?
Because it only has HD outputs on the back. If they'd removed the component outputs on the European model and stuck a Scart output in their place I may have been tempted, but as it stands it just doesn't connect to my standard-def TV.
In effect, Apple has targeted the AppleTV at a non-existent market. You can't connect it to a standard-def TV, and if you connect it to an HDTV you don't get any HD content.
i seriously have not seen a single argument for keeping IP and copyright laws that i can't shoot down.
Well there's the fact that it would be very difficult to commercialise most works that are currently protected by copyright. For instance, I have a favourite author. I have nine of his books. How many of those books wouldn't have been written if he wasn't making money off them, and time spent writing them was cut into by a 9 to 5 job? Music and film making also require equipment, which is usually expensive.
Relaxation of copyright has worked for open source software, because businesses have been able to fall back on the fact that other businesses are a large part of their target market, and they've been able to sell technical support. Music, writing and film are targeted at consumers, and are impossible to sell support for. Bands can tour, but this is usually very expensive and even indie bands tend to sell their albums in order to pay for their tour.
My biggest worry about the removal of copyright is that companies producing IP will resort to more draconian measures in order to protect their content. Sort of like how everybody would hire private security if the police were disbanded. I can see this meaning more DRM, where they are selling an encryption key to let you play their content rather than a licence to play it. Given the choice between DRM and BPI/RIAA lawsuits, I'd choose the lawsuits.
Oh, and let's not forget that the significant factor behind the argument for abolishing copyright is the desire to get something for nothing. People don't want to pay for their music any more, and they want to feel that their behaviour is justified. Unfortunately they're clutching at straws when they trot out the 'cultural value' argument.
Plus, I always find that the text field in Spotlight freezes up after I've typed in a couple of letters. I've downloaded the Mac version of Google Desktop because I'd seen it working on Windows and was jealous of the better performance.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to stop and think about whether this statement referred to the article or the summary. From the summary:
I resent the implication that the only alternative to a copyright extension is an outright abolishment of copyright. The biggest piece of common sense I've heard for ages on the subject of copyright reform was from the Gowers report: no extensions, no reductions. Leave it as it is.
The basic controls on a computer are standard in the same way as they are in a car. Pedals are clutch-brake-accellerator, left to right. Turning the steering wheel clockwise makes the car turn right. In the same way, a keyboard prints characters on the screen where the cursor is, and the mouse controls the pointer. One mouse button performs clicks, the other brings up a context menu (even on Macs).
Other controls start to differ in placement, but they're all basically there. There's usually a gear shifter of some form, whether manual or automatic and whether between the seats or on the steering column (flappy paddle). In RHD cars, indicators and wiper stalks change sides depending on whether your car is European or Asian. There's a variety of ways to pop the bonnet. And then there's the Citroën CX, where the controls were everywhere but where you expected them.
In the same way, the position of the main menu, menu bar, quick application launcher and task bar are often in different places on different computers. System settings will be in different places. Folders will be arranged differently. But it's all there.
The problem is that it doesn't really matter how good my car's user interface is. I'll still get lost on the roads.
Erm, okay, I think you're confusing a couple of issues. My point was that the 0-100F that one person in one part of the world would find intuitive isn't necessarily intuitive to someone in another part of the world, with different climatic conditions. However, having a non-arbitrary number (0) at the freezing point of water is more useful because, as you said, the freezing point is the same everywhere.
I'd contest this. The greater separation is more intuitive to people that have used Fahrenheit all their lives. To someone that has used Celsius all their life, it's baffling.
Greater separation doesn't do anything for the average person. I would be surprised if anybody could tell the difference between 15C and 16C. Accordingly, decimals are never used in the Celsius scale outside of scientific applications, so this isn't an issue either.
I disagree. For weather purposes, having the freezing point of water at 0 is more useful, both because freezing temperatures make a substantial difference to human behaviour, and because it is the same worldwide. I live in what would be described as a temperate area, and temperatures here have never reached 100F and rarely dip as low as 0F, so the Fahrenheit scale is less useful.
Smoking in an enclosed space endangers both yourself and others in the same way as a careless driver using a mobile phone.
I suppose the argument, analogous to the smoking lobby's stance would be, "Don't like the danger? Don't use the roads."
And yes, I do live in one of those places. I think it's great.
Now that's the way to occupy a country!
No, abolition of copyright is devoid of worth. It won't benefit anybody. Commercial operators that rely on copyright will go out of business, and those that eschew copyright protection (open source software, creative commons etc) will carry on as normal.
Forgive me if I'm being a spaz, but isn't that line commented out in your example? It also seems to be commented out on my Gentoo box, which leads me to believe that it's commented out by default as it's a file I've never touched.
Furthermore I tried su'ing on that machine with only the first eight characters of my root password, and was denied access. So I'm concluding that it's not a problem in Gentoo by default.
The problem is your ability to communicate this information over the phone. If you're experiencing shortness of breath while phoning for an ambulance, your location is the kind of thing you would want the operator to be able to find automatically.
I wouldn't be surprised. Directions from Edinburgh to my house involve me committing suicide a quarter of a mile from home.
My flatmates and I had a server running in our living room all through uni. At first we used it to share our ADSL connection, which was accessed with a PCI modem that our ISP provided. We used it as a Quake server and a file and ssh server after that, so when we bought a wireless NAT router we kept it around.
In my last year of uni, I was working in a special lab where we were allowed to bring in our own laptops and connect to the university network. This was all by special provision, and we were behind an additional firewall. POP, SMTP and IMAP were all blocked, so were were unable to access email services not only from the internet, but even from elsewhere in the same department. So we set up an email service on our living room server, that would check all our accounts and provide IMAP access when at home, and Horde webmail access when we were in uni.
It wasn't an ideal solution, because Horde was difficult to set up and use, and very slow, mainly because although we had close to 8mb downstream, we were still on 512mb upstream. If this kind of approach is to take off with ordinary users, there needs to be a slot-in solution, and upstream speeds need to come closer into line with downstream. The other issue was power consumption. In these days where we're being told to consume less energy, an always-on machine in the house isn't going to look attractive.
Google Maps is handy as a quick reference, but as a mapping application it's not the best. It's designed as a road map, and misses out a lot of important information for walkers, cyclists and horse riders.
MultiMap does a bit better as it uses Ordnance Survey maps at certain scales, but I ended up going back to paper OS maps because MM is soooo slow, and you can take a paper map with you.
Credit to Google though, they modified the route planning algorithms fairly recently (a few weeks ago I think). It used to give heavy preference to major roads at the expense of 'minor' ones, with some hilarious consequences. Campbeltown to Glasgow used to recommend two ferry trips, one of which only operates during the summer, instead of the three to four hour drive it recommends now.
The appropriate licence would be attribution-noderivs.
Well on the 3rd of May I'll have the choice of at least seven parties on the regional list, all with a reasonable chance of being elected. But the constituency vote is the same old nonsense where I have to vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out. I think there's room for improvement here...
Basically, I think party allegiances should be banned from the constituency vote, so that those elected have a responsibility to the voters and the voters only.
You couldn't have thought very hard. Off the top of my head...
...have all benefited me personally.
Just saying that the assertion that weapons are used for the preservation of democracy and not criminal activity is blatantly wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Saddam Hussein managed to rule Iraq with an iron grip despite the fact that gun ownership in Iraq is extremely high. What would be different about the US? Considering that the US public were remarkably accepting of whatever Dubya did in the run-up to Iraq, because he was the commander in chief.
European youths taking more of an interest in voting would be a good step.
With regards to weaponry... well, many Scottish youths have access to knives and carry them on a regular basis. Do they use them for political change? Nope. They use them in muggings and gang fights. If we introduce guns to the mix, how do you think this behaviour will change?
It's not like gun ownership has any effect on US politics except for a desire to keep ownership legal. You still have a two-party system that favours big business.
Uhm, well, European gun laws tend to be a lot tighter, and several EU countries have national ID card systems. And like the other poster said, there are certain limitations on freedom of speech in certain countries, including such things as holocaust denial in Germany. Here in the UK, inciting racial or religious hatred is illegal (something I personally agree with). I would maintain, though, that freedom of speech is more respected here. Nobody gets called a traitor for opposing a war, for example.
Thing is, freedoms are pretty variable from country to country, the European Convention on Human Rights not withstanding. Even in the UK there are different rights in Scotland and England with regard to land access, and this is something I'm quite curious about - what land access rights do USians have?
You mean like some sort of constitution?
True, but user education is a major part of phishing prevention, and educating users to look for the .plc.uk should be a relatively simple task. It's also a relatively simple task to redirect genuinebank.co.uk to genuinebank.plc.uk.
Also, although you can't set up a phishing site at, say, bankofscotland.co.uk, you could conceivably set one up at bankofscotalnd.co.uk, which would be easy to miss at a glance. You wouldn't be able to set up bankofscotalnd.plc.uk though, so by looking for the .plc.uk domain (as opposed to subtle typos) you can be sure that you're at the genuine site.
Because there aren't many publicly listed phishers.
I'm actually mystified as to why UK banks don't use the .plc.uk domain, which is reserved for publicly listed companies.
I never claimed that it required a widescreen TV. Scart cables carry information about the aspect ratio of the signal, and most fullscreen TVs in Europe will automatically compensate.
Connecting to a standard-def TV using component cables obviously requires a standard-def TV with component inputs. Don't know about America, but in Europe these are very thin on the ground. You might be able to connect it via a component-to-Scart cable, but this is a non-standard use of Scart and not guaranteed to be supported by your television (although you could buy a converter).
Because it only has HD outputs on the back. If they'd removed the component outputs on the European model and stuck a Scart output in their place I may have been tempted, but as it stands it just doesn't connect to my standard-def TV.
In effect, Apple has targeted the AppleTV at a non-existent market. You can't connect it to a standard-def TV, and if you connect it to an HDTV you don't get any HD content.
Well there's the fact that it would be very difficult to commercialise most works that are currently protected by copyright. For instance, I have a favourite author. I have nine of his books. How many of those books wouldn't have been written if he wasn't making money off them, and time spent writing them was cut into by a 9 to 5 job? Music and film making also require equipment, which is usually expensive.
Relaxation of copyright has worked for open source software, because businesses have been able to fall back on the fact that other businesses are a large part of their target market, and they've been able to sell technical support. Music, writing and film are targeted at consumers, and are impossible to sell support for. Bands can tour, but this is usually very expensive and even indie bands tend to sell their albums in order to pay for their tour.
My biggest worry about the removal of copyright is that companies producing IP will resort to more draconian measures in order to protect their content. Sort of like how everybody would hire private security if the police were disbanded. I can see this meaning more DRM, where they are selling an encryption key to let you play their content rather than a licence to play it. Given the choice between DRM and BPI/RIAA lawsuits, I'd choose the lawsuits.
Oh, and let's not forget that the significant factor behind the argument for abolishing copyright is the desire to get something for nothing. People don't want to pay for their music any more, and they want to feel that their behaviour is justified. Unfortunately they're clutching at straws when they trot out the 'cultural value' argument.
Plus, I always find that the text field in Spotlight freezes up after I've typed in a couple of letters. I've downloaded the Mac version of Google Desktop because I'd seen it working on Windows and was jealous of the better performance.