A workable solution would be to start from the assumption that there is no copyright any more and then reintroduce the original compromise in the context of modern society.
What makes you think that history would play out differently next time? Since copyright law could have been perverted once, it will again.
That's right -- it's a crime (perjury) to submit a take down notice if (and only if) you're not authorized by the copyright holder.
Right. Now suppose that I create a file with a misleading name, like $SOME_MOVIE_TITLE, and that I own the copyright on its contents (let that be some poem I wrote, or whatever). $EVIL_RIAA authorizes $EVIL_LAWYER to send a DMCA takedown notice. $EVIL_LAWYER is still NOT covered by the DMCA, because though he is authorized by $EVIL_RIAA to act on their behalf for works of which they own the copyright, he is still NOT authorized by the real copyright holder of $SOME_MOVIE_TITLE file (me). Therefore, $EVIL_LAWYER committed perjury. Or didn't he?
I just don't get what the problem is... How can anyone abuse street view and it's images of buildings?
Most of those paranoid enough to blur their houses objected to the connection between the image and the exact GPS location. Images per se were generally not the problem.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't like the idea of moving to a big city or Silicon Valley, then you should never have gotten a CS degree and should have gone to trade school instead.
We're talking about programming here, not sysadmin. In the age of teleworking, skype/videoconferences etc., companies that still require you to relocate for a programmer's position are increasingly rare. Even if you're across two continents, that's totally irrelevant to programming. Why do you think so many coding jobs are being outsourced to countries like India?
Seriously? I'm interested in ARM assembly programming, including systems programming, and if that beast would run Linux/arm, FreeBSD/arm or some other open platform OS' ARM port, it may get interesting. OTOH, if you have to jailbreak it first with some dubious hack or be stuck with some version of Android, I'm not (yet) interested.
I know quite a lot of newspapers that switched their comment sections to Disqus... only to lose their most valuable writers. Personally, I intensely dislike centralized commenting systems a la Disqus, because of their quite scary cross-site-profiling capabilities. I'm wondering how such an evil scheme could become so popular among journals.
Interestingly, dystopian stories are often a useful predictor of things yet to come in real life. Maybe because those stories are based on seeds that are ALREADY planted in society, just waiting to come out. Or, said another way, every society carries the seeds of its own destruction, just like a dormant virus. Dystopian stories are an early warning sign of that disease.
The problem is that quite a number of politicians appear to be in the pocket of Big Content (...)
The problem is bigger than mere corruption, it's also one of blackmailing. Politicians who adopt an anti-copyright stance are likely to be character-assassinated by Big Content, and since they depend heavily on their reputation (yeah, I know, it's semi-ironic) for votes, they can't afford to publicly oppose the will of the MAFIAA cartel, even if they're not openly bribed.
Required to upgrade due to some security thing, Oh wait, some obscure library has also updated and now the entire OS needs to upgrade.
Event tough I'm using FreeBSD almost exclusively nowadays and have been using it since even before 2.0, this is one of my favorite gripes. Really! devel/icu updated, and poof, nearly your whole/usr/local has to be rebuilt. WTF?! And that's when you learn to put ZFS snapshots and rollbacks to good use, emulating OpenSolaris' beadm alternate boot environment pardigm to quickly recover production machines.
This whole business of filing law suits and waiting for the courts to act etc is taking too much of time.
That's what they thought, and what they've convinced the US Government to forcefully communicate to foreign governments (see leaked US cables). Indeed, in some places in the world, 3-strikes HADOPI-like regimes are exactly about this: extrajudicial punishments with no recourse. Maybe, just maybe, it's only fair that the US people get a taste of the bitter medicine that their own government is recklessly pushing down other peoples' throats. Because, frankly, without some domestic pressure, this international madness will continue, and get worse over time.
Force the patent office to reduce the charges of filing and obtaining a patent to $0
And how would you combat spamming of the USPTO with merit-less patent applications? Reducing the cost to $0 would have the same effect we have with SMTP spam: every bot can send bazillions of spams out, without having to pay the cost of processing them.
IMHO, patents can only be reformed (short of eliminating the whole system) by making the criteria of patentable designs a lot more demanding and severe... and by keeping software patents out of it.
But seriously now: try to beat a 16 cores SPARC T3 if you have anything heavily multithreaded and/or compute intensive. Even the most recent x86 CPUs are still lagging behind... and GPU acceleration prevalent in x86-world, though fine, takes you only so far.
If you're happy with UltraSPARC IIIi's, try some Sun Blade 1500 (1 ultrasparc) or SunBlade 2500 (2 ultrasparcs) desktop deals on eBay. I've got a couple of those very fine machines for less than $100 each, and I'm running Debian Squeeze, FreeBSD, and Solaris on them just fine.
But you're right. I wish we could buy SPARC IV- or later based desktops anytime soon. At this point in time, only FUJITSU would probably consider producing some, if we manage to convince them by showing enough interest. Oracle is way out of touch with the developers' community, they're a lost cause.
The lawyers who signed their names to any papers associated with this frivolous and aggressive C&D need to have their credentials reviewed.
Man, I hate such lawyers as much as every other decent person... but in this case, isn't it someone in Apple's management that hired them? That's the guy (or girl) who needs a little attitude adjustment on the head, and who's responsible for this PR fiasco.
think we should pour billions of dollars into mosquito extermination research. Sure, it may mess up the food chain a bit, but I frankly don't care.
Eliminate mosquitoes, and soon, mother nature will create improved mosquitoes v2.0. At this point, we'll long for the good old times we were "only" haunted by our v1.0 variety.
But here's the tragedy: half the population of Eastern Europe was refugees in 1945, but everyone was settled down *somewhere* decades ago. Yet many Palestinians have been living in refugee camps since 1948. Why?
The member states of the Arab League refused to absorb them, because doing so would have finalized their expulsion by Israel. By keeping them in camps, these states are insisting that those displaced people have to go back to where they came from and to take their descendants with them... or to be compensated for their loss of property and move on to some other place. That's cruel to those people on the humanitarian level, but it is a political statement.
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What makes you think that history would play out differently next time? Since copyright law could have been perverted once, it will again.
Right. Now suppose that I create a file with a misleading name, like $SOME_MOVIE_TITLE, and that I own the copyright on its contents (let that be some poem I wrote, or whatever). $EVIL_RIAA authorizes $EVIL_LAWYER to send a DMCA takedown notice. $EVIL_LAWYER is still NOT covered by the DMCA, because though he is authorized by $EVIL_RIAA to act on their behalf for works of which they own the copyright, he is still NOT authorized by the real copyright holder of $SOME_MOVIE_TITLE file (me). Therefore, $EVIL_LAWYER committed perjury. Or didn't he?
Most of those paranoid enough to blur their houses objected to the connection between the image and the exact GPS location. Images per se were generally not the problem.
Facebook unfriends Hamburg...
That's the French who always take to the streets. Germans just grumble and stay at home.
My only reason to keep a Windows partition around is Slysoft's AnyDVD-HD, and the oddball simulation tool that won't run in Wine.
We're talking about programming here, not sysadmin. In the age of teleworking, skype/videoconferences etc., companies that still require you to relocate for a programmer's position are increasingly rare. Even if you're across two continents, that's totally irrelevant to programming. Why do you think so many coding jobs are being outsourced to countries like India?
Seriously? I'm interested in ARM assembly programming, including systems programming, and if that beast would run Linux/arm, FreeBSD/arm or some other open platform OS' ARM port, it may get interesting. OTOH, if you have to jailbreak it first with some dubious hack or be stuck with some version of Android, I'm not (yet) interested.
I know quite a lot of newspapers that switched their comment sections to Disqus... only to lose their most valuable writers. Personally, I intensely dislike centralized commenting systems a la Disqus, because of their quite scary cross-site-profiling capabilities. I'm wondering how such an evil scheme could become so popular among journals.
Check your spam folder for the services of professional killers, and have one of them take care of that company's management.
Well, I guess it is time to update xbill, adding mainframes to the list of computers to protect...
Interestingly, dystopian stories are often a useful predictor of things yet to come in real life. Maybe because those stories are based on seeds that are ALREADY planted in society, just waiting to come out. Or, said another way, every society carries the seeds of its own destruction, just like a dormant virus. Dystopian stories are an early warning sign of that disease.
Likely not. How else would the powers that be abuse the system to silence dissent?
The problem is bigger than mere corruption, it's also one of blackmailing. Politicians who adopt an anti-copyright stance are likely to be character-assassinated by Big Content, and since they depend heavily on their reputation (yeah, I know, it's semi-ironic) for votes, they can't afford to publicly oppose the will of the MAFIAA cartel, even if they're not openly bribed.
Event tough I'm using FreeBSD almost exclusively nowadays and have been using it since even before 2.0, this is one of my favorite gripes. Really! devel/icu updated, and poof, nearly your whole /usr/local has to be rebuilt. WTF?! And that's when you learn to put ZFS snapshots and rollbacks to good use, emulating OpenSolaris' beadm alternate boot environment pardigm to quickly recover production machines.
ZFS v28 was merged from current into 8-stable many, many months already. Runs very stable here on my FreeBSD/amd64 boxes.
That's what they thought, and what they've convinced the US Government to forcefully communicate to foreign governments (see leaked US cables). Indeed, in some places in the world, 3-strikes HADOPI-like regimes are exactly about this: extrajudicial punishments with no recourse. Maybe, just maybe, it's only fair that the US people get a taste of the bitter medicine that their own government is recklessly pushing down other peoples' throats. Because, frankly, without some domestic pressure, this international madness will continue, and get worse over time.
There's only one reasonable name for it: Miniluv.
And how would you combat spamming of the USPTO with merit-less patent applications? Reducing the cost to $0 would have the same effect we have with SMTP spam: every bot can send bazillions of spams out, without having to pay the cost of processing them.
IMHO, patents can only be reformed (short of eliminating the whole system) by making the criteria of patentable designs a lot more demanding and severe... and by keeping software patents out of it.
1. OpenSolaris, and 2. x86, maybe?
But seriously now: try to beat a 16 cores SPARC T3 if you have anything heavily multithreaded and/or compute intensive. Even the most recent x86 CPUs are still lagging behind... and GPU acceleration prevalent in x86-world, though fine, takes you only so far.
But you're right. I wish we could buy SPARC IV- or later based desktops anytime soon. At this point in time, only FUJITSU would probably consider producing some, if we manage to convince them by showing enough interest. Oracle is way out of touch with the developers' community, they're a lost cause.
Man, I hate such lawyers as much as every other decent person... but in this case, isn't it someone in Apple's management that hired them? That's the guy (or girl) who needs a little attitude adjustment on the head, and who's responsible for this PR fiasco.
Next in line: Oracle sues Mother Nature for making a star named Sun.
Eliminate mosquitoes, and soon, mother nature will create improved mosquitoes v2.0. At this point, we'll long for the good old times we were "only" haunted by our v1.0 variety.
The member states of the Arab League refused to absorb them, because doing so would have finalized their expulsion by Israel. By keeping them in camps, these states are insisting that those displaced people have to go back to where they came from and to take their descendants with them... or to be compensated for their loss of property and move on to some other place. That's cruel to those people on the humanitarian level, but it is a political statement.