Actually, someone already did a study featuring exactly that a few years ago. I can't remember the details of the study, but what actually happened was that the kids stopped watching tv almost entirely and went outside to play instead.
Australia is not America - the Democrats are a minor party and fading fast, and all members of both houses of parliament are required to vote on party lines. They don't get a choice.
In other words this Bill is probably going nowhere. The Democrats may continue to hold onto the title of "most important minor party" but they're rapidly losing even that honour to the Greens. Introducing bills like this is political posturing pure and simple - they're rarely taken up and can sit in the lists for years.
The minor parties and independants, particularly the Dems, were once important as the two major parties rarely had a simple senate majority - the minors could use their votes as bargaining chips to get their own agendas some real attention. That's no longer an option - Little Johnny will have his senate majority from July 1 and can do whatever the hell he wants.
Now would be a good time to move to New Zealand.
That doesn't mean the Democrats, Greens and sundry others don't still have an important role to play in the senate. It just means that they're losing whatever power they once had.
We don't have implied fair use as such but the copyright holder can come out and say "please feel free to download this song and copy it as many times as you want and play it or pass it one however you choose", which many independant bands etc have done.
What the article should say is "it's the only site where iPod users can legally download songs from major labels".
I'm sorry, but given that this book is clearly written on a Mac, she's perfectly right to ignore Gimp. Cross-platform my arse.
When I got my Mac I installed it thinking "great - I can't afford Photoshop and I'd rather not pirate things".
While I have no complaints about Gimp's functionality (well, except for its lack of a healing brush but that I can live without), on the Mac it is simply really really unusable.
So unusable in fact that I actually find it less frustrating to get out my un-networked PC laptop to use photoshop when I need to do non-trivial image editing, using a flash drive to get the images to and from the Mac.
While you *can* run Linux applications through X11, once you've got the flow of the Mac interface then it just amplifies all the little usability niggles already in those apps and piles on a bunch of others.
This makes it all an unpleasant experience, and that's not why one buys Apples.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine was backpacking in the middle east. Like a lot of backpackers, she had travellers cheques for emergencies but relied on her credit card for everything else.
Then all of a sudden, it stopped working. On the weekend.
When Monday finally rolled around she rang up the credit card company to find out what was wrong and was informed that her card had been used in a number of suspicious places - several different countries in a short space of time in a dodgy part of the world, and had automatically been stopped.
Yes she said - I'm doing a whirlwind backpacking tour of said dodgy part of the world. All that usage is legitimate. The card was re-enabled - but the process would take a couple of days during which she had to borrow money from her travelling companions.
A week later, now in some other middle eastern country (I forget where), the same thing happened.
My point? People don't always behave consistently. Life is not always stable. The real kicker is that usually when people are behaving differently than they normally do it's because they are outside of their comfort zone and really need as many things as possible to go smoothly.
A suspicion engine can prevent legitimate use of a system in these situations.
There're signs that this might change. The common law in New Zealand is on the way to establishing a right of privacy that cannot be invaded by publication of photographs without a "legitimate public interest" - that was the decision in a 2004 Court of Appeal case that is unlikely to go to the New Zealand Supreme Court (since the current SC bench has the same judges who formed the majority in the CA decision).
The case was Hosking & Hosking v Simon Runting & Anor. If you're interested, the judgements contain a pretty good review of privacy laws in the main common law countries - the UK, USA, Canada and Australia.
It's a question of judicial interpretation - if tomatoes are vegetables and a pony with a feather pillow on its back is a small bird then it's entirely possible that a judge will apply the old "legislative intent" rule
and tell you to stuff off with your hair-splitting, as "identical" in this context clearly means identical in terms of the perceivable results of viewing/using the file as intended - or more to the point, in terms of the application of copyright to the file in question.
Judges are often only stupid when they want to be. And lets not forget who owns the US Supreme Court...
The problem is most people don't do that. If they disagree with the general philosophy of a site they'll stop reading it - so people just read the majors, and the sites they've found that they generally agree with, effectively completely blocking off alternative points of view.
I've never been to Chicago, so I'm curious - how is it obviously meant to be set there when they go to great pains to not specify?
I mean, yes, it clearly wasn't set in Sydney despite being filmed there (despite the distracting recognisability of a lot of the locations), but why Chicago over any other randomly selected large-ish inner-city area?
Not long after I got by comp sci degree, I discovered Systers - an "informal organization for technical women in computing". It's not a bad place to start if you're looking for female inspiration - there're some very smart ladies in that group.
In Australia, any Commonwealth law, provided that it is within the Commonwealth government's constitutionally assigned powers, overrides any state law about the same thing (s109. "When a law of a State is inconsistent with a law of the Commonwealth, the latter shall prevail, and the former shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be invalid" - see Chapter V [aph.gov.au], and see Chapter 1 part V [aph.gov.au] for the Commonwealth's powers)
I've not read the FTA laws, but in theory any new laws made to entrench it would fall under s51(xxix) - which basically means that they can do anything to satisfy treaty obligations (which for e.g. was used to override the Tasmanian law against homosexuality after the International Human Rights court declared it bad - so it's pretty broad).
But they don't even have to go that far - s51(xviii) gives the feds power to make laws regarding "Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks", so while states can legislate to their hearts' content about those things, it don't mean squat if Little Johnny and his chums want to pass a law saying, essentially, "all US copyright, patent and trade mark laws apply in Australia".
IANAL... yet
Oh really? I just sat a Criminal Law exam last Tuesday, and my notes contained a little gem of a study* that found that on average for every 1000 crimes committed only about 400 are reported to cops, of which the cops record about 320. 64 are cleared up, a conviction is secured for 43 of those and 1 person is imprisoned (and yes, those are the numbers from the study - I didin't make them up).
Of course, that's including everyday crimes like burglary and bag snatching. OTOH, I imagine the drop would be even steeper if you included every single instance of "self administer prohibited drug" and similar offences.
Cases don't get to court unless the police and prosecutors are pretty sure they've got the right person, which is why conviction rates once there are so high. The vast majority of crimes never make it that far.
Australian Institute of Criminology report "The Size of the Crime Problem" - sorry, I didn't put a more thorough reference in my notes and I don't have the textbook with me.
I think most people can see the difference between a modern12" laptop and a some of the beasts they came up with in the early 80s, particularly if you turn them on.
The real interest comes from the real old stuff though, particularly if you draw attention to the relative power of the old machines vs modern ones.
As a small child I was taken on a school excursion to a museum that featured nothing but depression era biscuit tins. I kid you not. If Australia can support that, then surely it can support a reasonably sized space somewhere to stick a few random bits of hardware by forcing every ten year old in Sydney to visit it at least once.
Even better, put that sucker in Canberra and make it part of that essential round of things kids do on their school camp to the capital. What geek in NSW/ACT doesn't still foster fond memories of Questacon?
At a university open day a couple of years ago I got stuck supervising the computer science stand, and it's gotta be said that a lot of teenagers were fascinated by the various bits of crap the school had dug out to show them - disk platters a metre in diameter with labels on them saying "1 Mb" , actual transistors and so forth. If you present it in an amusing way (imagine a 40Gb iPod made out of a stack of these!) it could work. Even better if you can get some of the computers working.
All that said, it is ground that is at least partially covered by the Powerhouse in Sydney (although their computer history bit needed some work last time I was there) and Questacon (now renamed something lame like the National Science Museum) in Canberra. A partnership with those and similar organisations is probably a good idea.
cheers to the twin 18" LCDs - I had that at my last job and it was very nice. The best part is that they don't take up as much desk space as CRTs.
On a related note, make sure everyone has properly adjusted monitor stands. I ended up with about six phonebooks on my desk at one point to hold my hardware up and it's just annoying if you have to shift stuff around.
IE 6 is actually pretty good. If you leave out a doctype it uses the usual stuffed up MS version of the standards but with a properly formed doctype at the top of your HTML the standards compliance is on par with the other current crop of browsers - i.e. there are a few problems (and of course they are different problems in each browser) but you can get around them with minimum fuss.
AFAIK (and I haven't looked into this for a while) IE6 is the only browser that pays any attention to the doctype at all - you've gotta give M$ some credit for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately the eyebrow'd one is more into jogging than swimming...
Actually, someone already did a study featuring exactly that a few years ago. I can't remember the details of the study, but what actually happened was that the kids stopped watching tv almost entirely and went outside to play instead.
Australia is not America - the Democrats are a minor party and fading fast, and all members of both houses of parliament are required to vote on party lines. They don't get a choice. In other words this Bill is probably going nowhere. The Democrats may continue to hold onto the title of "most important minor party" but they're rapidly losing even that honour to the Greens. Introducing bills like this is political posturing pure and simple - they're rarely taken up and can sit in the lists for years. The minor parties and independants, particularly the Dems, were once important as the two major parties rarely had a simple senate majority - the minors could use their votes as bargaining chips to get their own agendas some real attention. That's no longer an option - Little Johnny will have his senate majority from July 1 and can do whatever the hell he wants. Now would be a good time to move to New Zealand. That doesn't mean the Democrats, Greens and sundry others don't still have an important role to play in the senate. It just means that they're losing whatever power they once had.
Yes, and no.
We don't have implied fair use as such but the copyright holder can come out and say "please feel free to download this song and copy it as many times as you want and play it or pass it one however you choose", which many independant bands etc have done.
What the article should say is "it's the only site where iPod users can legally download songs from major labels".
I'm sorry, but given that this book is clearly written on a Mac, she's perfectly right to ignore Gimp. Cross-platform my arse.
When I got my Mac I installed it thinking "great - I can't afford Photoshop and I'd rather not pirate things".
While I have no complaints about Gimp's functionality (well, except for its lack of a healing brush but that I can live without), on the Mac it is simply really really unusable.
So unusable in fact that I actually find it less frustrating to get out my un-networked PC laptop to use photoshop when I need to do non-trivial image editing, using a flash drive to get the images to and from the Mac.
While you *can* run Linux applications through X11, once you've got the flow of the Mac interface then it just amplifies all the little usability niggles already in those apps and piles on a bunch of others.
This makes it all an unpleasant experience, and that's not why one buys Apples.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine was backpacking in the middle east. Like a lot of backpackers, she had travellers cheques for emergencies but relied on her credit card for everything else.
Then all of a sudden, it stopped working. On the weekend.
When Monday finally rolled around she rang up the credit card company to find out what was wrong and was informed that her card had been used in a number of suspicious places - several different countries in a short space of time in a dodgy part of the world, and had automatically been stopped.
Yes she said - I'm doing a whirlwind backpacking tour of said dodgy part of the world. All that usage is legitimate. The card was re-enabled - but the process would take a couple of days during which she had to borrow money from her travelling companions.
A week later, now in some other middle eastern country (I forget where), the same thing happened.
My point? People don't always behave consistently. Life is not always stable. The real kicker is that usually when people are behaving differently than they normally do it's because they are outside of their comfort zone and really need as many things as possible to go smoothly.
A suspicion engine can prevent legitimate use of a system in these situations.
The other approach is to do what the local council of one of Australia's most famous beaches is trying to do - ban cameras entirely.
Oh, except you'll be able to take photos of your own kids.
And a few other exceptions.
There're signs that this might change. The common law in New Zealand is on the way to establishing a right of privacy that cannot be invaded by publication of photographs without a "legitimate public interest" - that was the decision in a 2004 Court of Appeal case that is unlikely to go to the New Zealand Supreme Court (since the current SC bench has the same judges who formed the majority in the CA decision).
The case was Hosking & Hosking v Simon Runting & Anor. If you're interested, the judgements contain a pretty good review of privacy laws in the main common law countries - the UK, USA, Canada and Australia.
It's a question of judicial interpretation - if tomatoes are vegetables and a pony with a feather pillow on its back is a small bird then it's entirely possible that a judge will apply the old "legislative intent" rule and tell you to stuff off with your hair-splitting, as "identical" in this context clearly means identical in terms of the perceivable results of viewing/using the file as intended - or more to the point, in terms of the application of copyright to the file in question.
Judges are often only stupid when they want to be. And lets not forget who owns the US Supreme Court...
IANAL... yet
The problem is most people don't do that. If they disagree with the general philosophy of a site they'll stop reading it - so people just read the majors, and the sites they've found that they generally agree with, effectively completely blocking off alternative points of view.
I've never been to Chicago, so I'm curious - how is it obviously meant to be set there when they go to great pains to not specify?
I mean, yes, it clearly wasn't set in Sydney despite being filmed there (despite the distracting recognisability of a lot of the locations), but why Chicago over any other randomly selected large-ish inner-city area?
funny, it looked an awful lot like Sydney to me...
Not long after I got by comp sci degree, I discovered Systers - an "informal organization for technical women in computing". It's not a bad place to start if you're looking for female inspiration - there're some very smart ladies in that group.
In Australia, any Commonwealth law, provided that it is within the Commonwealth government's constitutionally assigned powers, overrides any state law about the same thing (s109. "When a law of a State is inconsistent with a law of the Commonwealth, the latter shall prevail, and the former shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be invalid" - see Chapter V [aph.gov.au], and see Chapter 1 part V [aph.gov.au] for the Commonwealth's powers) I've not read the FTA laws, but in theory any new laws made to entrench it would fall under s51(xxix) - which basically means that they can do anything to satisfy treaty obligations (which for e.g. was used to override the Tasmanian law against homosexuality after the International Human Rights court declared it bad - so it's pretty broad). But they don't even have to go that far - s51(xviii) gives the feds power to make laws regarding "Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks", so while states can legislate to their hearts' content about those things, it don't mean squat if Little Johnny and his chums want to pass a law saying, essentially, "all US copyright, patent and trade mark laws apply in Australia". IANAL... yet
The vast majority of non-cyber crimes are solved.
Oh really? I just sat a Criminal Law exam last Tuesday, and my notes contained a little gem of a study* that found that on average for every 1000 crimes committed only about 400 are reported to cops, of which the cops record about 320. 64 are cleared up, a conviction is secured for 43 of those and 1 person is imprisoned (and yes, those are the numbers from the study - I didin't make them up).
Of course, that's including everyday crimes like burglary and bag snatching. OTOH, I imagine the drop would be even steeper if you included every single instance of "self administer prohibited drug" and similar offences.
Cases don't get to court unless the police and prosecutors are pretty sure they've got the right person, which is why conviction rates once there are so high. The vast majority of crimes never make it that far.
Australian Institute of Criminology report "The Size of the Crime Problem" - sorry, I didn't put a more thorough reference in my notes and I don't have the textbook with me.
I think most people can see the difference between a modern12" laptop and a some of the beasts they came up with in the early 80s, particularly if you turn them on.
The real interest comes from the real old stuff though, particularly if you draw attention to the relative power of the old machines vs modern ones.
As a small child I was taken on a school excursion to a museum that featured nothing but depression era biscuit tins. I kid you not. If Australia can support that, then surely it can support a reasonably sized space somewhere to stick a few random bits of hardware by forcing every ten year old in Sydney to visit it at least once.
Even better, put that sucker in Canberra and make it part of that essential round of things kids do on their school camp to the capital. What geek in NSW/ACT doesn't still foster fond memories of Questacon?
At a university open day a couple of years ago I got stuck supervising the computer science stand, and it's gotta be said that a lot of teenagers were fascinated by the various bits of crap the school had dug out to show them - disk platters a metre in diameter with labels on them saying "1 Mb" , actual transistors and so forth. If you present it in an amusing way (imagine a 40Gb iPod made out of a stack of these!) it could work. Even better if you can get some of the computers working.
All that said, it is ground that is at least partially covered by the Powerhouse in Sydney (although their computer history bit needed some work last time I was there) and Questacon (now renamed something lame like the National Science Museum) in Canberra. A partnership with those and similar organisations is probably a good idea.
Pedantry at work in estimation... isn't a 2x4 more like a 5x10? You just can't get the same grip on a 10x20 when you're sneaking up behind someone.
cheers to the twin 18" LCDs - I had that at my last job and it was very nice. The best part is that they don't take up as much desk space as CRTs.
On a related note, make sure everyone has properly adjusted monitor stands. I ended up with about six phonebooks on my desk at one point to hold my hardware up and it's just annoying if you have to shift stuff around.
I would think a sensible business person would do some fairly serious fraud checking before accepting a $20,000 credit card payment.
There is a point at which you have to protect yourself.
IE 6 is actually pretty good. If you leave out a doctype it uses the usual stuffed up MS version of the standards but with a properly formed doctype at the top of your HTML the standards compliance is on par with the other current crop of browsers - i.e. there are a few problems (and of course they are different problems in each browser) but you can get around them with minimum fuss.
AFAIK (and I haven't looked into this for a while) IE6 is the only browser that pays any attention to the doctype at all - you've gotta give M$ some credit for that.