The way I read it, this will be the "official" SW parody site. LucasFilms cannot restrict parody, that fair use right has been upheld by the supreme court. What they can do is work with parodyists whom they like in order to make the "official" website.
LucasFilms gets some advertising money from the deal, so does Atom Films. The parodyists get exposure. No unauthorized or unapproved parodies will be restricted, they just won't be hosted on the "official" site. They are actually throwing their support behind the people who make good parodies. That sounds great to me.
That's kind of the point. Filter software doesn't work. One shouldn't wonder about what the candidates are putting on their sites that get blocked, one should wonder why the filtering software blocks the espousal of political ideas.
I like his comments on the shortage of TLD's. Why the hell is this a problem? Why has ICANN been dragging their feet on setting up new TLD's? To protect trademark holders (read big corporations). And Mueller-Maughan is absolutely right that we should not have to worry about our domains being taken away by a company on the other side of the world that makes a toaster with the same name.
The internet is public space, and the public, the entire world, has a right to it, not just corporations. I hope more of the recently elected representatives on the ICANN boared share his view, and some change is affected soon.
Okay, maybe the redial thing is a legit scam for people who don't understand computers, but these are just the same cons that get perpetrated on people everyday in the non-internet world.
Multi-level marketing, credit card fraud, paying for something and getting either cheap crap or nothing (this is on the list in four different variations), and bullshit investment advice have all been going on for a long time before computers. People don't need the internet to fall for this stuff.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an international organization dedicated to promoting the use and protection of works of the human spirit. These works - intellectual property - are expanding the bounds of science and technology and enriching the world of the arts. Through its work, WIPO plays an important role in enhancing the quality and enjoyment of life, as well as creating real wealth for nations.
With headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, WIPO is one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations system of organizations. It administers 21 international treaties dealing with different aspects of intellectual property protection. The Organization counts 175 nations as member states. Please visit the links below for more information - both general and specific - on WIPO.
I heartily agree. We cant have customers of companies getting pissed off and expressing their opinion. Especially if the company in question has spent a lot of money on advertising that says the company is great. A website saying that the company's product sucked would contradict all that advertising, and the end result would be customer confusion. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world. We have the WIPO to protect us from the evils of non-corporate entities expressing opinions on websites.
Dave Barry said in a column once that the potato cannon was useful in illustrating gender differences.
When he would tell any woman about the device that a friend of his had made, they would all say "What the hell is he thinking? Why would anyone make something like that?" When he would tell men, they would all say "cool!" I've tried Dave's experiment, and my results have been consistent with his.
Sony is spending a ton on advertising for a product that most people won't be able to buy. All their hype will blow over by the time they can actually get units to market in quantity (and maybe by then the word will be out that all the launch games are pretty lackluster). Unless they are stupid, I can't believe this is all part of their plan.
The PS2 has a lot of problems. In Japan, the units are selling, but not the games. They are being purchased as DVD players. This is killing developers. Making a game for the complicated, dual processor machine is very expensive. No one is getting a return on their investment. Perhaps things will improve as developers become familiar with the architecture, but it is not the case now.
And now Sony has screwed up its US launch by not having enough product on the store shelves. I would guess that the problem is not stupidity; Sony didn't want this to happen and tried to avoid it. But the factories couldn't get up to speed in time for Christmas. And in the US, that is the best time for launching a product like this. It is a date that is set by cultural tradition and cannot be pushed back. They were faced with the choice of missing Christmas or launching without enough units, either way they're screwed.
As a parent, I wouldn't mind a filtering product in libraries and other places that blocked only hardcore porn. Unfortunately, no such thing exists. The software blocks lots of non-porn sites and lets through tons of porn sites. To me, that makes the product worse than useless. It creates a false sense of security in parents, who think this will keep their children from seeing porn at the library. It absolutely will not. And it raises free speech issues about what legimate sites are "inadvertantly" blocked.
It took me a while to come around on this issue, but until and unless the technology improves dramatically, filtering is a very bad idea.
There are a lot of problems in the world that need to be addressed, I would agree. But if you are hanging out on/. you are a tech-savvy person (or at least a wannabe tech-savvy person). As such, we are best equipped to fight for issues of which the general public is unaware. We have to be the vigilant ones here, because we are the ones who know of and understand these issues.
You may see this as a fight for access to free pop music, and that may seem trivial. But it is an issue that is defining intellectual property in the digital age (oooh, lots of pretty buzzwords), and it will have important ramifications for free speech in the future. That is not trivial.
As a parent, I at first had some real trouble with this issue. I would not let my child surf the net totally unsupervised at home. I don't want him meeting pedophiles in chat rooms or (much more likely) seeing pictures of Cartman's mom in a german schiza mpeg. So why would I want him to be able to see that kind of stuff unsupervised at the library? Filtering sounds so great in theory: keep out the bad stuff, but let the good stuff through automatically!
The problem is that the implementation can't match the promise. Filtering software lets tons of "bad" stuff through. Having it there doesn't keep pornography out. It only keeps some pornography out. So it really only gives parents a false sense of security. If I didn't understand the limitations of the software, I might let my kid go to the library and surf to his heart's content, not realizing that he still has access to a lot of stuff I don't want him to see. I have to be prepared for the fact that he may be viewing stuff I don't approve of at the library, whether it has software filters or not. I have to have the same vigilance that I have when he visits friends. I have to spend time with my kid, make sure we have open communication, and that he feels he can discuss difficult subjects with me. It puts a burden on me to be a good parent.
And then there is the issue of who decides what is "bad". It's been shown, by groups like peacefire, that filtering software blocks a lot of stuff it shouldn't. It blocks health sites, political sites, sites of people or places whose names sounds dirty (like Cockburn, or Middlesex), sites of people who are critical of the filtering software company. Looking at the whole package, the problems outweigh the benefits.
The reasons why libraries are given contradictory mandates is that in a democracy with diverse constituents, there are frequently competing legislative priorities. We have the courts and the constitution to sort out which ones trump the other, though it can be a long and messy process. Hey, kinda like what we are seeing now.
As for PI, I don't know of any serious attempt to pass a law about this.
The biblical passage used to support the claim that pi==3.0 does not use a degree of accuracy that warrants that allegation. In 1 Kings 7:23, a circumference of a circular object (the basin in front of the Jerusalem Temple) is given as 30 cubits while the diameter is given as 10 cubits. Therefore, PI==3. But the bible does not give the measurements as 30.00000000000... and 10.000000000000..., so I'm not sure why this level of accuracy would be assumed. The bible does not say the basin is perfectly circular, either.
There is plenty of room for even hard core fundamentalists to find flaw with the argument, besides the obvious one about the observed value of PI.
"Just because I give you the Cat scanner, it does not immediately give you the right to go into business against me with my own technology," (Digital Convergence CTO Doug) Davis said.
Yes it does. What the hell is the meaning of the word "give". The cuecat you sent me is mine, and I'll do whatever the hell I please with it, including going into business against you. If you didn't want me to be able to do that, you shouldn't have given me the damn thing.
In order to qualify for the DMCA's exemptions, you have to effectively act as judge, jury and executioner against your users.
Well, that's true, but users have a right to appeal that decision, and if legal action is not taken against them by the copyright holder, you can reinstate the users. This is what Napster did when Metallica handed them 250,000 names. Tens of thousands of people disputed Metallica's claim that they were criminals, and Metallica didn't sue anybody.
This puts the dispute back between the alleged "pirates" and the copyright holders, where it belongs. I agree that the ISP and certainly not some individual website should be put in the position in the first place, but this is a good work around until the old IP business models die their slow, lingering death.
I understand what he meant by reading it with 15 years of hindsight, and why that's important.
Linux can be seen as the next Hacker wave. Hackers hack because they love to do it. When technological trends make this difficult, a new wave pops up in an unexpected direction.
The book, excluding the short chapter on RMS, ends on a depressing note, as hackers who love to write games and play with programming are being replaced by a factory model of programmers churning out code to specification, following the company business plan.
But hackers have found another way. Linux is the new wave. It is how people who love computers can get under the hood without violating an EULA. It may not destroy Microsoft, but it does give us our place to work and play. And if somehow, the Linux movement is stopped, another way will be found.
Everyone in this thread seems to be observing, correctly, that our first amendment rights are being eroded. But, like the recent suck article pointed out, no one is suggesting any action. We are just venting our spleen to like-minded individuals. We need to take action. As the people who understand programming and the internet the best, we need to be the ones stepping up and fighting for our rights in this area. No one will do it for us.
Join the EFF. It is the organization set up specifically for this kind of thing. Call your elected representatives (you can find their office numbers at their websites) and voice your disapproval over the DCMA, UCITA, and the Methamphetamine Anti-proliferation act. Posting rants to/. may be satisfying, but it doesn't accomplish as much as the above suggestions will.
I would be skeptical of whatever name they are calling this thing at this point. The N-64 was supposedly going to be called the Ultra-64 until a couple weeks before it hit store shelves in Japan.
I have studied Japanese, and I have heard this argument, that the Japanese language is "ambiguous" or "unspecific". It is made often, by people who are smarter than me and who have studied Japanese more than I have. Still, I don't think that it is neccessarily true. Those complaints may be more true of the implementation of the Japanese language than the language itself.
Many Japanese sentences omit subjects and objects or other sentence parts, and they are inferred by the context. Japanese can be very specific however, if the speaker chooses to use it in that socially unconventional way. Being a novice speaker, I probably pepper my sentences with more detail than a native speaker would. The point is, you can provide more detail with the language if you want, but it is not the standard practice.
However, it seems to me in a situation, such as a war, where much depends on clarity, the language could be used to communicate as clearly as neccessary.
In the early 90's, something called Tron came out in Japan. Named after the movie, I think it was created at Tokyo University. It was an operating system, and it had it's own programming language. I think the programming language used hiragana characters, but it also used pretty straight-forward translations of English words (for example, it used the hiragana characters for moshi the Japanese translation of if. Tron was a small operating system, and may still be found in some embedded systems.
Maybe because programming languages use such simple words fairly devoid of context, the verbal language in which it was created doesn't really matter.
This is absolutely right. You are working for a company, not a school or a library. It's great that you are all for free speech, but the issue is a lot different when you run a private, for-profit business.
When the government, using taxpayer money to provide internet service to the people, decides that there are some things that citizens shouldn't see, I have a problem with that. But when a business offers a service, it's a different story. When I use a service like yours, if sites I want to see are blocked, I'll complain to the management. If that doesn't work, I'll take my business elsewhere.
You have to do what is right for your bussiness and your customers. If they want freewheeling access to some borderline stuff, than let 'em have it. If they don't use that stuff, and are concerned about the kids in the neighborhood, install some OTS blocking software. Listen to your customers and do what they want.
The FBI has a long history of corruption. J. Edgar Hoover kept secret files on people like JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. People who weren't criminals by any stretch of the imagination had their phones tapped, were followed by the FBI, etc.
People could argue (I wouldn't be on of them) that more recent actions by the FBI demonstrate their willful disregard for the constitution did not end with Hoover. Ruby Ridge and Waco are examples of this.
No organazation should have unchecked power, and in my opinion, carnivore is too much power without enough checking.
Why do they even need the system in the first place? ISP's can provide them with all the information they are legally entitled to when they present the ISP with a court order. Why do they need their own unmonitored access to all email on the ISP?
As stated in the above post, this outside review of the software doesn't prevent the FBI from making changes in the future without notifying anyone. I think the FBI is great and does a great job, but I'm not going to give them the keys to my house because they tell me they won't search it without a really good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I get for skipping law school in favor of watching "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
The way I read it, this will be the "official" SW parody site. LucasFilms cannot restrict parody, that fair use right has been upheld by the supreme court. What they can do is work with parodyists whom they like in order to make the "official" website.
LucasFilms gets some advertising money from the deal, so does Atom Films. The parodyists get exposure. No unauthorized or unapproved parodies will be restricted, they just won't be hosted on the "official" site. They are actually throwing their support behind the people who make good parodies. That sounds great to me.
That's kind of the point. Filter software doesn't work. One shouldn't wonder about what the candidates are putting on their sites that get blocked, one should wonder why the filtering software blocks the espousal of political ideas.
I like his comments on the shortage of TLD's. Why the hell is this a problem? Why has ICANN been dragging their feet on setting up new TLD's? To protect trademark holders (read big corporations). And Mueller-Maughan is absolutely right that we should not have to worry about our domains being taken away by a company on the other side of the world that makes a toaster with the same name.
The internet is public space, and the public, the entire world, has a right to it, not just corporations. I hope more of the recently elected representatives on the ICANN boared share his view, and some change is affected soon.
Okay, maybe the redial thing is a legit scam for people who don't understand computers, but these are just the same cons that get perpetrated on people everyday in the non-internet world.
Multi-level marketing, credit card fraud, paying for something and getting either cheap crap or nothing (this is on the list in four different variations), and bullshit investment advice have all been going on for a long time before computers. People don't need the internet to fall for this stuff.
from the wipo website:
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an international organization dedicated to promoting the use and protection of works of the human spirit. These works - intellectual property - are expanding the bounds of science and technology and enriching the world of the arts. Through its work, WIPO plays an important role in enhancing the quality and enjoyment of life, as well as creating real wealth for nations.
With headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, WIPO is one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations system of organizations. It administers 21 international treaties dealing with different aspects of intellectual property protection. The Organization counts 175 nations as member states. Please visit the links below for more information - both general and specific - on WIPO.
I heartily agree. We cant have customers of companies getting pissed off and expressing their opinion. Especially if the company in question has spent a lot of money on advertising that says the company is great. A website saying that the company's product sucked would contradict all that advertising, and the end result would be customer confusion. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world. We have the WIPO to protect us from the evils of non-corporate entities expressing opinions on websites.
Dave Barry said in a column once that the potato cannon was useful in illustrating gender differences.
When he would tell any woman about the device that a friend of his had made, they would all say "What the hell is he thinking? Why would anyone make something like that?" When he would tell men, they would all say "cool!" I've tried Dave's experiment, and my results have been consistent with his.
Sony is spending a ton on advertising for a product that most people won't be able to buy. All their hype will blow over by the time they can actually get units to market in quantity (and maybe by then the word will be out that all the launch games are pretty lackluster). Unless they are stupid, I can't believe this is all part of their plan.
The PS2 has a lot of problems. In Japan, the units are selling, but not the games. They are being purchased as DVD players. This is killing developers. Making a game for the complicated, dual processor machine is very expensive. No one is getting a return on their investment. Perhaps things will improve as developers become familiar with the architecture, but it is not the case now.
And now Sony has screwed up its US launch by not having enough product on the store shelves. I would guess that the problem is not stupidity; Sony didn't want this to happen and tried to avoid it. But the factories couldn't get up to speed in time for Christmas. And in the US, that is the best time for launching a product like this. It is a date that is set by cultural tradition and cannot be pushed back. They were faced with the choice of missing Christmas or launching without enough units, either way they're screwed.
As a parent, I wouldn't mind a filtering product in libraries and other places that blocked only hardcore porn. Unfortunately, no such thing exists. The software blocks lots of non-porn sites and lets through tons of porn sites. To me, that makes the product worse than useless. It creates a false sense of security in parents, who think this will keep their children from seeing porn at the library. It absolutely will not. And it raises free speech issues about what legimate sites are "inadvertantly" blocked.
It took me a while to come around on this issue, but until and unless the technology improves dramatically, filtering is a very bad idea.
There are a lot of problems in the world that need to be addressed, I would agree. But if you are hanging out on /. you are a tech-savvy person (or at least a wannabe tech-savvy person). As such, we are best equipped to fight for issues of which the general public is unaware. We have to be the vigilant ones here, because we are the ones who know of and understand these issues.
You may see this as a fight for access to free pop music, and that may seem trivial. But it is an issue that is defining intellectual property in the digital age (oooh, lots of pretty buzzwords), and it will have important ramifications for free speech in the future. That is not trivial.
As a parent, I at first had some real trouble with this issue. I would not let my child surf the net totally unsupervised at home. I don't want him meeting pedophiles in chat rooms or (much more likely) seeing pictures of Cartman's mom in a german schiza mpeg. So why would I want him to be able to see that kind of stuff unsupervised at the library? Filtering sounds so great in theory: keep out the bad stuff, but let the good stuff through automatically!
The problem is that the implementation can't match the promise. Filtering software lets tons of "bad" stuff through. Having it there doesn't keep pornography out. It only keeps some pornography out. So it really only gives parents a false sense of security. If I didn't understand the limitations of the software, I might let my kid go to the library and surf to his heart's content, not realizing that he still has access to a lot of stuff I don't want him to see. I have to be prepared for the fact that he may be viewing stuff I don't approve of at the library, whether it has software filters or not. I have to have the same vigilance that I have when he visits friends. I have to spend time with my kid, make sure we have open communication, and that he feels he can discuss difficult subjects with me. It puts a burden on me to be a good parent.
And then there is the issue of who decides what is "bad". It's been shown, by groups like peacefire, that filtering software blocks a lot of stuff it shouldn't. It blocks health sites, political sites, sites of people or places whose names sounds dirty (like Cockburn, or Middlesex), sites of people who are critical of the filtering software company. Looking at the whole package, the problems outweigh the benefits.
The reasons why libraries are given contradictory mandates is that in a democracy with diverse constituents, there are frequently competing legislative priorities. We have the courts and the constitution to sort out which ones trump the other, though it can be a long and messy process. Hey, kinda like what we are seeing now.
As for PI, I don't know of any serious attempt to pass a law about this.
The biblical passage used to support the claim that pi==3.0 does not use a degree of accuracy that warrants that allegation. In 1 Kings 7:23, a circumference of a circular object (the basin in front of the Jerusalem Temple) is given as 30 cubits while the diameter is given as 10 cubits. Therefore, PI==3. But the bible does not give the measurements as 30.00000000000... and 10.000000000000..., so I'm not sure why this level of accuracy would be assumed. The bible does not say the basin is perfectly circular, either.
There is plenty of room for even hard core fundamentalists to find flaw with the argument, besides the obvious one about the observed value of PI.
"Just because I give you the Cat scanner, it does not immediately give you the right to go into business against me with my own technology," (Digital Convergence CTO Doug) Davis said.
Yes it does. What the hell is the meaning of the word "give". The cuecat you sent me is mine, and I'll do whatever the hell I please with it, including going into business against you. If you didn't want me to be able to do that, you shouldn't have given me the damn thing.
In order to qualify for the DMCA's exemptions, you have to effectively act as judge, jury and executioner against your users.
Well, that's true, but users have a right to appeal that decision, and if legal action is not taken against them by the copyright holder, you can reinstate the users. This is what Napster did when Metallica handed them 250,000 names. Tens of thousands of people disputed Metallica's claim that they were criminals, and Metallica didn't sue anybody.
This puts the dispute back between the alleged "pirates" and the copyright holders, where it belongs. I agree that the ISP and certainly not some individual website should be put in the position in the first place, but this is a good work around until the old IP business models die their slow, lingering death.
I understand what he meant by reading it with 15 years of hindsight, and why that's important.
Linux can be seen as the next Hacker wave. Hackers hack because they love to do it. When technological trends make this difficult, a new wave pops up in an unexpected direction.
The book, excluding the short chapter on RMS, ends on a depressing note, as hackers who love to write games and play with programming are being replaced by a factory model of programmers churning out code to specification, following the company business plan.
But hackers have found another way. Linux is the new wave. It is how people who love computers can get under the hood without violating an EULA. It may not destroy Microsoft, but it does give us our place to work and play. And if somehow, the Linux movement is stopped, another way will be found.
Would the search engine source code show how much money sites have paid to be listed in the top 5 results?
It would be hard to cheat at that criteria.
Everyone in this thread seems to be observing, correctly, that our first amendment rights are being eroded. But, like the recent suck article pointed out, no one is suggesting any action. We are just venting our spleen to like-minded individuals. We need to take action. As the people who understand programming and the internet the best, we need to be the ones stepping up and fighting for our rights in this area. No one will do it for us.
/. may be satisfying, but it doesn't accomplish as much as the above suggestions will.
Join the EFF. It is the organization set up specifically for this kind of thing. Call your elected representatives (you can find their office numbers at their websites) and voice your disapproval over the DCMA, UCITA, and the Methamphetamine Anti-proliferation act. Posting rants to
I would be skeptical of whatever name they are calling this thing at this point. The N-64 was supposedly going to be called the Ultra-64 until a couple weeks before it hit store shelves in Japan.
I have studied Japanese, and I have heard this argument, that the Japanese language is "ambiguous" or "unspecific". It is made often, by people who are smarter than me and who have studied Japanese more than I have. Still, I don't think that it is neccessarily true. Those complaints may be more true of the implementation of the Japanese language than the language itself.
Many Japanese sentences omit subjects and objects or other sentence parts, and they are inferred by the context. Japanese can be very specific however, if the speaker chooses to use it in that socially unconventional way. Being a novice speaker, I probably pepper my sentences with more detail than a native speaker would. The point is, you can provide more detail with the language if you want, but it is not the standard practice.
However, it seems to me in a situation, such as a war, where much depends on clarity, the language could be used to communicate as clearly as neccessary.
In the early 90's, something called Tron came out in Japan. Named after the movie, I think it was created at Tokyo University. It was an operating system, and it had it's own programming language. I think the programming language used hiragana characters, but it also used pretty straight-forward translations of English words (for example, it used the hiragana characters for moshi the Japanese translation of if. Tron was a small operating system, and may still be found in some embedded systems.
Maybe because programming languages use such simple words fairly devoid of context, the verbal language in which it was created doesn't really matter.
look at your target audience
This is absolutely right. You are working for a company, not a school or a library. It's great that you are all for free speech, but the issue is a lot different when you run a private, for-profit business.
When the government, using taxpayer money to provide internet service to the people, decides that there are some things that citizens shouldn't see, I have a problem with that. But when a business offers a service, it's a different story. When I use a service like yours, if sites I want to see are blocked, I'll complain to the management. If that doesn't work, I'll take my business elsewhere.
You have to do what is right for your bussiness and your customers. If they want freewheeling access to some borderline stuff, than let 'em have it. If they don't use that stuff, and are concerned about the kids in the neighborhood, install some OTS blocking software. Listen to your customers and do what they want.
The FBI has a long history of corruption. J. Edgar Hoover kept secret files on people like JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. People who weren't criminals by any stretch of the imagination had their phones tapped, were followed by the FBI, etc.
People could argue (I wouldn't be on of them) that more recent actions by the FBI demonstrate their willful disregard for the constitution did not end with Hoover. Ruby Ridge and Waco are examples of this.
No organazation should have unchecked power, and in my opinion, carnivore is too much power without enough checking.
Why do they even need the system in the first place? ISP's can provide them with all the information they are legally entitled to when they present the ISP with a court order. Why do they need their own unmonitored access to all email on the ISP?
As stated in the above post, this outside review of the software doesn't prevent the FBI from making changes in the future without notifying anyone. I think the FBI is great and does a great job, but I'm not going to give them the keys to my house because they tell me they won't search it without a really good reason.
wearing funny clothes and being disrespectful to the authorities is evidence that you are a dangerous nutjob? Arrest every heavy metal band ever!