No, but it also isn't a great idea to cut out such a huge chunk of your audience. It's just not nice, and in Slashdot's case, they could be losing a lot of potential subscribers if D2 becomes standard without working in IE.
BTW, anyone know if IE7 fixes these problems? I've lost track of when Vista's coming out (as I really don't care that much) but if IE7 has a better Javascript stack and most people get it at launch, this might be a moot point.
I wholeheartedly agree with the later start of the school day and was saying that throughout my high school days as well. I think I would have done much better had we started then. Teens tend to like to stay up late; forcing them to get up early as well is not a recipe for success.
It should be noted that there's no way they're eliminating Protection and Semi-Protection. So really, they're just adding another level of approval. Whether or not this is a good thing depends (as do most things) entirely on the community.
Absolutely, and if I hadn't already posted here with the grandparent, I would mod you up informative.
Clearly I was wrong about them having complete authority. As someone who has been through the process from the other side (US customs), though, I really don't like customs that much, especially when it takes them three hours to get you back across the border to your origin country. And it's not like they were processing me or anything, that was done within twenty or so minutes, no, I was just sitting in the immigration office for the rest of the time.
I guess it just seems absurd to me that I'd meet with such suspicion on a trip to the States when I had already taken the same trip under the same circumstances twice before with no problems. Details here if you care to read.
Canadian customs do seem a lot easier to deal with.
Shouldn't the Coast Guard have paid to have the equipment certified though? I mean, we're talking about putting multiple servicepersons' lives at risk; shouldn't the equipment at least be formally tested for the very circumstances in which they're going to be used?
Unfortunately, I think he's going to be arrested for treason for the very reasons you mentioned. I thought this as soon as I saw him put up a diagram of the camera's blindspot. He's violating United States national security in a very big way. I wouldn't be surprised if he quietly disappeared.
Ah, but you forget: He's not a Canadian citizen. He's an alien looking to visit Canada.
The rules change quite a lot in this situation. He could do what you said, but I guarantee you he'd be instantly thrown out of the country and would likely be looked on with extreme suspicion if he tried to get in again (read: he wouldn't).
Customs officers effectively have complete authority when they're dealing with non-citizens.
They'll arrest you for having the worm because you did not take reasonable care of the security of your system (at least, that's what they'd try to prove in court).
BTW, I believe this isn't a great idea, but could you try to be a little less black and white? Microsoft isn't The Great Satan.
If you are a manufacturer or importer, you can avoid the levy entirely on your products as long as you record some sound on the media before you sell it. The sound recorded on the media can even be erased. Clearly this is not an option for CD-Rs, but for devices that include a hard drive, simply recording a sound on the drive and then erasing it exempts the drive from the levy. This is because (as the legislation now stands) "blank audio recording medium means a recording medium, regardless of its material form, onto which a sound recording may be reproduced, that is of a kind ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose and on which no sounds have ever been fixed..."
So THAT'S why there was a track on my MP3 player when I bought it! Wal-Mart and/or RCA is apparently awesome.
I wonder if on the grand scheme of things whether the RIAA et al's resistance to free copying will end up being an endnote in history books because later generations will simply ignore them, thinking (and rightly so) that they are living in the past?
Why should they have to limit themselves simply because the recording companies refuse to adapt?
I have a much more optimistic vision. By the time replicators are invented, I would guess that energy will be plentiful enough that even it won't be that big of a problem. Even if it still has a cost on the level of what it is now, I think that being able to replicate the essentials of life for effectively nil would create a massive tipping point whereby only the ones profiting from keeping the system as it is were still resisting, and they would be eventually brought down by the masses. After all, I don't think an issue can get much clearer than a government withholding goods from the public in order to preserve corporations that are threatened by this new freedom.
Also, you mention fake luxury / sports cars. I would guess that we would get a sort of open source movement in replicator designs, whereby people could obtain free designs for things like cars and the like. I think it might take a while, but people would realize that paying for the rights to copyrighted designs is stupid compared to being able to obtain those things for free or next to free, which would eventually cause those "old world" businesses to shut down or go bankrupt, leading us into the Star Trek-style free-for-all mentioned.
If Echostar doesn't agree to that price, so be it... unless Tivo decides that it would rather lower the price to keep from losing easy money...
If I was TiVo, I wouldn't even negotiate: Nothing would convince me that it would be in my best interest to license this patent. They have the chance here to completely destroy a competitor and unleash massive customer backlash against them while securing their position as the only game in town.
I'll be very surprised if TiVo does indeed license the patent in question.
When your car wears out, you don't complain that you should have had the right to a backup copy, you go out an buy a new car. Why is music (or movies, or even books for that matter) any different?
Because music, movies, books, and data are all information, not physical, tangible objects. As such, the cost of copying that information is zero, or at least negligible.
The cost of producing a car has a solid per-item price: Parts plus labour plus whatever other expenses are involved in production. This price will always exist with every copy of a car's design produced because we can't magick up a car out of thin air.
Information may have an initial cost in its research / discovery / creation. But it doesn't have any per-item cost. Effectively, we can magick up as many copies of information as we want with impunity; nobody will be hurt by our copying of it, short of the original producers losing potential profits.
What sort of profit margins do you think a company should be able to make on a product that costs them nothing to produce?
Now, consider that if the customer already effectively owns the information, but is locked out of accessing it via a practical means like not being able to move it to a new format. You're arguing that they should have to pay the company that originally produced the information for a license to access it on a new format, even though it gives them absolutely no benefit that they wouldn't already have had they not been locked out of it artificially by the original producer?
This is why a lot of people argue over the use of the word theft in place of copyright infringement. One deprives the owner of their own property, the other does not.
PS: If you believe that allowing unlimited copying of information would destroy many businesses, you're probably right, but I argue it would be better for humanity as a whole. I also think the market needs to evolve with the times, and there are plenty of suggested ways to do that out there. I suggest reading The Digital Art Auction for one of those methods: It allows unlimited copying but also recoups production costs and profits for artists, keeping them in business.
"The one that prevents us from taking the old video tape I bought of it, which I can no longer watch on newer video devices due to built in DRM and I am prevented from recording onto a computer and removing the old DRM and writing to digital storage which the new digital video devices read."
As much as I dislike the DMCA, as posted earlier, your story won't happen under the current DMCA as it exists now. Interoperability is one of the exceptions that the DMCA allows for in creating circumvention tools. Of course, in reality, you'll probably have to back that up with lawyers and a court battle you probably couldn't afford. But on paper, the law says you're able to do just what you said it disallows.
Make no mistake, analog copyright protection systems are protected under the DMCA. The DMCA makes it illegal to create an anticircumvention device of any kind, with few exceptions (fairly well explained on Copyright.gov's DMCA overview, page 5 (Warning: PDF)), none of which apply to breaking older copyright protection methods. If you're going to enforce the DMCA anywhere, you must also enforce it here, and against every other technological copyright circumvention scheme ever conceived.
Which, of course, is why the DMCA is so stupid, arbitrary, and completely one-sided.
If enforcing the law is a serious problem, repeal the law.
Certainly, that's the ideal. But actually getting crappy laws thrown out would appear to be much more difficult than it should be. Haven't you ever heard of some of the crazy laws out there, a lot of which are still on the books? Now factor in laws which are passed by lobbyists through some convenient military spending bill, and you've got a whole lot of laws to get struck down with a whole lot of resistance from various groups against you.
Indeed, I don't think the grandparent knows what they're talking about.
Copyright = Protection for an individual implementation of an idea. Patent = Protection for an entire idea and all possible implementations that have and may come from it by anyone.
One is reasonable, the other is not. I leave which as an exercise for the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a new breed of cyborg brought forth from Slashdot's future from the year 2101 to save humanity from the idiots.
Come with me if you want to live.
I call your triple-standard player and raise you a quintuple-standard BluRay/HDDVD/DVD/CD/floppy disk hybrid.
Bonus: If you punch a hole in the lower right corner, you instantly get double the storage!
No, but it also isn't a great idea to cut out such a huge chunk of your audience. It's just not nice, and in Slashdot's case, they could be losing a lot of potential subscribers if D2 becomes standard without working in IE.
BTW, anyone know if IE7 fixes these problems? I've lost track of when Vista's coming out (as I really don't care that much) but if IE7 has a better Javascript stack and most people get it at launch, this might be a moot point.
I like Cory Doctorow's take on the DRM issue, as explained in his talk at Microsoft. Eye-opening to anyone who isn't into cryptography, it explains just how easy it is to break DRM.
I wholeheartedly agree with the later start of the school day and was saying that throughout my high school days as well. I think I would have done much better had we started then. Teens tend to like to stay up late; forcing them to get up early as well is not a recipe for success.
It should be noted that there's no way they're eliminating Protection and Semi-Protection. So really, they're just adding another level of approval. Whether or not this is a good thing depends (as do most things) entirely on the community.
My guess is that it will help though.
Absolutely, and if I hadn't already posted here with the grandparent, I would mod you up informative.
Clearly I was wrong about them having complete authority. As someone who has been through the process from the other side (US customs), though, I really don't like customs that much, especially when it takes them three hours to get you back across the border to your origin country. And it's not like they were processing me or anything, that was done within twenty or so minutes, no, I was just sitting in the immigration office for the rest of the time.
I guess it just seems absurd to me that I'd meet with such suspicion on a trip to the States when I had already taken the same trip under the same circumstances twice before with no problems. Details here if you care to read.
Canadian customs do seem a lot easier to deal with.
Shouldn't the Coast Guard have paid to have the equipment certified though? I mean, we're talking about putting multiple servicepersons' lives at risk; shouldn't the equipment at least be formally tested for the very circumstances in which they're going to be used?
Unfortunately, I think he's going to be arrested for treason for the very reasons you mentioned. I thought this as soon as I saw him put up a diagram of the camera's blindspot. He's violating United States national security in a very big way. I wouldn't be surprised if he quietly disappeared.
Ah, but you forget: He's not a Canadian citizen. He's an alien looking to visit Canada.
The rules change quite a lot in this situation. He could do what you said, but I guarantee you he'd be instantly thrown out of the country and would likely be looked on with extreme suspicion if he tried to get in again (read: he wouldn't).
Customs officers effectively have complete authority when they're dealing with non-citizens.
Westnet Broadband: Huge pipes ready for you to fill.
Unless you happen to be in Soviet Russia, in which case your database programs you.
They'll arrest you for having the worm because you did not take reasonable care of the security of your system (at least, that's what they'd try to prove in court).
BTW, I believe this isn't a great idea, but could you try to be a little less black and white? Microsoft isn't The Great Satan.
What's interesting here is that Shaw is also a high-speed cable internet provider.
I wonder if on the grand scheme of things whether the RIAA et al's resistance to free copying will end up being an endnote in history books because later generations will simply ignore them, thinking (and rightly so) that they are living in the past?
Why should they have to limit themselves simply because the recording companies refuse to adapt?
I have a much more optimistic vision. By the time replicators are invented, I would guess that energy will be plentiful enough that even it won't be that big of a problem. Even if it still has a cost on the level of what it is now, I think that being able to replicate the essentials of life for effectively nil would create a massive tipping point whereby only the ones profiting from keeping the system as it is were still resisting, and they would be eventually brought down by the masses. After all, I don't think an issue can get much clearer than a government withholding goods from the public in order to preserve corporations that are threatened by this new freedom.
Also, you mention fake luxury / sports cars. I would guess that we would get a sort of open source movement in replicator designs, whereby people could obtain free designs for things like cars and the like. I think it might take a while, but people would realize that paying for the rights to copyrighted designs is stupid compared to being able to obtain those things for free or next to free, which would eventually cause those "old world" businesses to shut down or go bankrupt, leading us into the Star Trek-style free-for-all mentioned.
I'll be very surprised if TiVo does indeed license the patent in question.
Homer (To Bill Gates): I reluctantly accept your offer.
Bill Gates: Well everyone always does. Buy 'em out, boys.
Bill Gates' companions begin to trash the "office".
Homer: Hey, what the hell is going on?
Bill Gates: Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!
True, which is why I believe a Star Trek universe-style communism could work, but only once we invent replicators.
The cost of producing a car has a solid per-item price: Parts plus labour plus whatever other expenses are involved in production. This price will always exist with every copy of a car's design produced because we can't magick up a car out of thin air.
Information may have an initial cost in its research / discovery / creation. But it doesn't have any per-item cost. Effectively, we can magick up as many copies of information as we want with impunity; nobody will be hurt by our copying of it, short of the original producers losing potential profits.
What sort of profit margins do you think a company should be able to make on a product that costs them nothing to produce?
Now, consider that if the customer already effectively owns the information, but is locked out of accessing it via a practical means like not being able to move it to a new format. You're arguing that they should have to pay the company that originally produced the information for a license to access it on a new format, even though it gives them absolutely no benefit that they wouldn't already have had they not been locked out of it artificially by the original producer?
This is why a lot of people argue over the use of the word theft in place of copyright infringement. One deprives the owner of their own property, the other does not.
PS: If you believe that allowing unlimited copying of information would destroy many businesses, you're probably right, but I argue it would be better for humanity as a whole. I also think the market needs to evolve with the times, and there are plenty of suggested ways to do that out there. I suggest reading The Digital Art Auction for one of those methods: It allows unlimited copying but also recoups production costs and profits for artists, keeping them in business.
Make no mistake, analog copyright protection systems are protected under the DMCA. The DMCA makes it illegal to create an anticircumvention device of any kind, with few exceptions (fairly well explained on Copyright.gov's DMCA overview, page 5 (Warning: PDF)), none of which apply to breaking older copyright protection methods. If you're going to enforce the DMCA anywhere, you must also enforce it here, and against every other technological copyright circumvention scheme ever conceived.
Which, of course, is why the DMCA is so stupid, arbitrary, and completely one-sided.
If enforcing the law is a serious problem, repeal the law.
Certainly, that's the ideal. But actually getting crappy laws thrown out would appear to be much more difficult than it should be. Haven't you ever heard of some of the crazy laws out there, a lot of which are still on the books? Now factor in laws which are passed by lobbyists through some convenient military spending bill, and you've got a whole lot of laws to get struck down with a whole lot of resistance from various groups against you.
Indeed, I don't think the grandparent knows what they're talking about.
Copyright = Protection for an individual implementation of an idea.
Patent = Protection for an entire idea and all possible implementations that have and may come from it by anyone.
One is reasonable, the other is not. I leave which as an exercise for the reader.
...while letting everyone else go through.
If you can't see the problem here already, you're missing the point.
(See my post below for information on how polygraphs are easily faked.)