This is why I originally asked you about your question. I was from the beginning talking about the Constitution, not describing Federal Laws which are inferior to the Constitution. I believe I've sufficiently described why it is the case that federal funding laws must not abridge speech. I do believe that it would be appropriate if I had referenced case law supporting this position, but I sadly do not readily know of such (IANAL). Do you wish me to search for and provide such references?
It means that if you're fired because you told your boss to "fuck off", you should have a basis to sue them. As such, said university, company, etc should be required to return said federal funding or rehire you. Of course, realize that IANAL, so this is purely my interpretration of how things should work, not necessarily how they currently function. Also realize that they can probably fire you for no reason at all (many states don't offer any employment protection), so they're likely to claim such and it'd be very difficult to prove they fired you for saying "fuck off".
Such can be taken from the Constitution. As follows:
"Article I
Section 1. All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives....
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to... provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States...
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof....
Bill of Rights Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
From this we gather that Congress is the only part of federal government that can make laws (techincally others, like the President, might write up a bill, but it's Congress which makes it a law), laws are how Congress carries out such things as funding, and that funding, if Constitutional, could be construed to be a part of "provide for the general welfare". As such, no sort of federal funding can go towards abridging speech, and any organization that deals with the US federal government should realize this. Certainly a court case could make any company return said federal funds if they took said funds and abridged speech. And like I said, such an act could be seen as fraud or possibly collusion.
May I ask what specifically you want citation to? Since you mention the USC, I assume you mean something about the federal funding, but your comment is too vague for me to understand exactly what it is you're requesting.
>>One of the requirements to recieve federal funding is to "uphold the United States Constitution", and yes that means free speech as well.
>Let's look at the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Unless my company somehow turned into Congress and passed a law against free speech, they can do as they please.
Federal funding is an Act (ie, law) of Congress. If your company abridges freedom of speech, then it's not eligible for federal funding. Further, knowingly taking money from the government with intent to abridge freedom of speech would be fraud. Of course, Congress should be punished if it wasn't fraud but instead collusion; your company should be punished as well. The real problem is that there's many times that federal funding seems to violate the Bill of Rights (TSA is a great example) and Congress doesn't get punished for it.:~(
What they'd really hate to see is most [music] 'consumers' feeling that it is normal and 100% acceptable to get all their music from filesharing.
If the only way you make money currently, as part of a band, is playing live gigs, then having people get all their music from filesharing is actually a good thing, as it increases exposure of your band. The only real problem right now is that a lot of bands really need to get together and setup some sort of joint system to plan a concert schedule so their fans can hear them perform live. And the internet is almost certainly the way to go about this*.
You can't replace a concert experience with anything, just like you can't replace a theater experience (you can replace a music video or movie experience, since it's the same video each time and the location of a collection of people doesn't matter). That's always been the thing that musicians have sold. The sooner more musicians realize that it's not possible to rely on copyright to make them lots of money without going through a record company, who seems interested wholly in doing whatever it takes to keep the money flowing in, the sooner that they'll realize that concerts are the only way to go. And at that point, the only thing about copyright one cares about is proper attribution.
*Indie labels are just as against online free music as large labels, since they too see it as a way in which people will avoid buying CDs. Perhaps Indie labels taking a cut of the concert trade would make them contribute to such a plan, but any business that ends up taking that job is likely to become just as corrupt as major record labels of today. Theater troops are probably the best model to branch off of.
If none of the publishers (or a few of the smaller ones) make the switch to digital and no change in law is made, I sincerely doubt it. Why? Because the dirty little secret of copyright is that it's generally the publishers who effectively retain the copyright, not the author. There's no way a small upstart or even a few of them all putting their entire catalog online will be able to remotely compete, in the major market shift sort of way, with larger book publishers.
Things like iTunes, for example, didn't really hit it off big until several record companies got into it. This all comes from the fact that there's a large back catalog. That and larger brands have the sort of foundation that draws a lot of authors. Further, larger publishers can buy larger, more expensive ad campaigns for their authors, which further enhance their ability to win out. Moving online doesn't change this. It only changes the scale and the ability to monitor effectiveness.
So, certainly larger publishers moving in, and taking a big risk, could do well. But if one does, they'd probably all join, and their own little part of the oligarchy, via back catalog, would guarantee one couldn't dominate the other (though really late starters might be set back, and the first one to jump in might possible get far ahead..or perhaps the second or third generation).
That being said, it's already the case that several publishers (at least a few bigger ones included) are already selling ebooks, but with ebooks not selling incredibly well so far (compare to iTunes which is something like the 6th largest music seller, though admittedly it's using the catalog of a lot of major players), there is something of an indication that people are either unwilling to buy books online or that ebooks are too constrictive, DRM-wise. The first part is probably in large part due to books inherently taking hours or days to read while there still not being a reasonably cheap mechanism to portably carry around ebooks. Having to charge a book midway through is definitely not acceptable for most people; it's a lot more acceptable to recharge a portable music player when such is already common.
Having said that, the better analogy to all this is simply that of what the RIAA was doing 5 years ago. Whether Apple or another company can lead a major, multi-publisher push to portable/downloadable ebooks in a few years is questionable. In reality, it all comes down to the progressive improvement in portable displays.
It makes perfect sense, competition is not their goal, sales are. One common way of achieving this is through consolidation, where you end up with a dozen brands but only a few actual producers.
And the answer to this is, not surprising, to get rid of those dozen brandings. But how to do it in a fair way? It's quite simple: only allow a company to own a trademark that contains the company's name. In short, if Philip Morris wants to sell cheese, they're perfectly welcome to try to sell Kraft Cheese. But so can anyone else (this means, btw, that Philip Morris might decide to sell "Philip Morris Kraft Cheese" and someone else might sell "Uncle Bob's Kraft Cheese"). And if a "brand" is really worth so much, a company has to choose to buy up the company and changes its name to fit the brand, or it has to relabel the product to fit the original name. Part of this is to discourage horizontal and vertical monopolies. The other part is to address the following.
For consumers to be able to "vote with the wallet" (this feature is supposedly what makes a deregulated market good) they need to be able to make informed choices. But no company is compelled to inform their customers, only to persuade them. Hence all the marketing BS that we are constantly exposed to, and that is also why the one with the biggest marketing budget wins, not the one with the best product. This doesn't benefit consumers.
I totally agree, and this is so often the overlook fact when people talk about "the free market". Capitalism, as has ever existed, isn't a free market. In a free market, there are informed consumers, so it's impossible to commmit fraud (you can't deceive someone who is omnipotent, for example). If there was any one thing that government should do it should be working on ways to inform the consumer in any way possible. Truthfully, people should be doing the same in the above "vote with the wallet", but it's not unreasonable to have a political party or a consumer group devote funds to such information.
Certainly, the government should only grant to companies exclusive rights only if such is to inform the consumer, not benefit the company--any benefit to the company, which might be zero, would have to come as a side-effect. This is why it would make sense to abolish copyright (dumpster diving + reprinting) while still retain trademark (informs the consumer on who makes a product, so they can avoid them in that field and all other fields if they desire). I'm tempted to go so far as to require company attribution on all products, but there doesn't seem any basis to support such.
In any case, informing the consumer is obviously a big step in making deregulation, or the market in general, work out. Another key component is not simply giving companies who were regulated, and hence de facto monopolies in many areas, all the assets (ie, wiring, tubing, etc) they did not fairly earn. If deregulation was warranted, it'd make sense to give such to the various cities, towns, and counties and to divide the company up into many parts, certainly a lot more than 7 or 8. The simple fact is that deregulation would create a temporary burst of chaos, where investors would have the chance to actually compete for a change in a locked market. The simple fact that deregulation has gone so smoothly in the past is a clear sign that deregulation of the past was done improperly.
Maybe those of us boycotting the entire company because of last month's debacle should adjust things a bit?
Yea, 'cause clearly the second Sony brings out a shiny new object you should forget all their past indiscretions and merrily start buying from them again. And to those who would say Sony BGM and Sony <whatever department this is> are different departments, Sony is still Sony. If Sony decides to be a horizontal monopoly, then the bad PR for one arm the company will effect all others. If it doesn't, then clearly any company can just concentrate their evil deeds into certain arms of the company without fearing collapse or customer reprisal. At that point, why even bother pretending like you're not the company's slave.
If you were planning to boycott in the past, you should continue to boycott. The only reasonable time to stop boycotting is when a) they apologize, b) they make reasonable steps that indicate they won't do it again, and c) you believe they've been sufficiently damaged. Seeing as how Sony released a few million DRMed CDs and shows no real sign that they're not going to just do it again the second they get the chance, they don't really fit any quality mentioned. So, are you Sony's bitch?
The whole point of copyright was to benefit society by encouraging creativity, and the supposed targets of encouragement are the people who actually do the creative work. All this stuff about maximizing profits for the publishers was added later.
Actually, the part about publishers was from the very beginning. While it might have been assumed (and worked for a while) that by having copyright the author would have a great deal more power over their work than it being left to publishers to decide what to do with it, it quickly became the case that publishers were the ones who, through successful books, to have the majority of the money in most relationships. Mark Twain was especially against an end to copyright for precisely this reason: copyright ending would only mean that publishers, instead of paying a small royalty to the author, would end up keeping that sum instead.
So, until the time of mass production of cassettes and the like, there really was a legitimiate reason to have copyright, even if it was often perverted. Now, there's so many publishers that there's no way copyright can function. The only thing that should be supported is moves away from granting certain publishers some sort of legal protection to extort money. Hopefully more authors will release into the public domain or under the GNU FDL.
Let me start off that I agree that the author's writing is difficult to read. Having stated that, the author is basically arguing that the DMCA and copyright are doomed to failure, just like Prohibition, because violation is doable by every person and few people see it as morally wrong. At the same time, those in support of the DMCA/Prohibition were constrantly trying to claim it as immoral and subverted the law for their own intentions, noble or not.
The US is the largest producer of copyrighted works in the world. Add to that that the medium that holds said copyrighted works has substantial markup of the physical good (approaching 100x in $50 software), and it's clear that the US has a vested interest in turning copyright and laws that support it into international laws so that US consumers can effectively trade copyrighted works for much more expensive raw goods.
You can't force people to buy your product, though. This is especially the case with copyrighted works, where the internet makes it that the only cost for most works is one's time. This is the mutually benefitial exchange talked about. One thing that the **AA seems especially intent on is brainwashing people into thinking that the author of a work must somehow benefit in distribution. But such really is a moral viewpoint. There's no reason to intrinsically include the author.
The comment about American cars was especially apt. Eventually people realized that paying more money for a car simply because someone else claims it was amoral to buy cars produced by a foreign company was simply stupid. So, too, will people eventually realize that paying 100x the cost of burning a copy of an intellectual work isn't worth it.
But when people aren't swayed by morality, the **AA will come out threatening (basically) that without copyright artists will starve and not make more works. And while it is entirely true that with the vastily inflated prices created by copyright, the music and movie industry as we know it simply will not be substainable, it doesn't mean that there will be an end to intellectual works. The numerous sites that are able to survive on membership fees or advertisement (real goods won't go away, and neither will their want to attract customers) are a testament to the fact that it is possible to exist without copyright--someone else can mirror a site and setup their own advertisment space to rake in cash but eventually people will notice that someone else is the real artist and end up going to their site so they have a chance to talk to them.
The end to copyright is inevitable. And the shift away from an "IP" economy will cause a pretty drastic economic correction. The RIAA and MPAA, kicking and screaming, may be able to slow it down a bit, but it's unlikely they'll slow it down much. The only real question is when copyright will end and will something take its place that can survive in the world of a billion printing presses--I'm sort of in favor of attribution rights, but trademark already can cover that.
This just in: being a nerd is a disease. Everyone on/. now has to spend major $$$ on being "fixed". Seriously, that's how I take it.
Having said that, infornography extends to all the day time talk shows and all the day/night celebrity shows. It sounds like mental health professionals are searching for a problem that doesn't exist*.:/
*Not every mental activity that has detrimental consequences is an addiction, nor something for which mental health professionals have any ability to diagnose, let alone treat.
MS effectively did the same thing to make NT (they hired away several core VMS people). They reinvented the wheel and created a 32-bit version of Windows on top of it. Windows 9x further extended Win32, to fill out the needs of desktop users. And MS went with a standard driver model so that NT and 9x could share drivers. The funniest part is that NT really does have some innovative* things, but the majority of it (running different core APIs being a big one) has been crushed** in the steps to make NT more like 9x to migrate users over.
Something like WinFS, as originally described as an uber database filesystem, might have been the sort of thing to really shake MS up and do some innovation for a change.
*Granted that microkernels, VMS/OS/2 similarties, and the GUI weren't really innovative; the filesystem was something of an innovation, though it also seemed an extension of HPFS (OS/2's filesystem)
**Putting the Win32 video subsystem into kernel space, including Direct X (such necessitates including Ctrl+Alt+Delete capture, which negates the "Secure Login" feature), defaulting users to Administrator access, and still treating the Windows main directory as a sort of library whore (not that I'm saying *nix is better, but clearly when designing from scratch you can fix flaws that other OS designs have had).
Seems like some members of the press don't understand coding. You can't just go and patch everything.
It seems you don't understand coding. It's certainly possible to patch everything. It's possible to prove the mathematical correctness of code (you just can't write a program to do it). Such is very difficult, however, and takes a ton of time. This is similar to the fact that there are quick alogrithms to produce numbers which might be prime, but it's a lot slower to actually prove a number *is* prime.
Do you really think if Microsoft COULD do it, they wouldn't.
No. Microsoft's core interest is selling products, not making perfect code. Nothing about Microsoft's steps towards providing better security has focused on mathematical correctness. Instead, it's been more about doing more extensive testing and using tools that reduce the probability of including certain types of bugs. It would likely cost Microsoft more money than it has to prove the mathematical correctness of Windows. And in the end, it would have only marginal effects on sales; there simply aren't enough people who could buy their software to compensate for the task.
So, I don't hold Microsoft in contempt for not proving they've fixed all bugs. But I also wouldn't deny that it's possible for them to do such.
As a small note, this is almost certainly the reason those in the field are called Computer Scientists, not Computer Mathematicians. You can have much broader progress making code (hypothesis), testing it (experimentation), and declaring it as okay (conclusion), but you're going to have holes in your understanding (we still don't fully understand gravity). Of course, some people (CPU manufacturers) would actually prefer Computer Mathematicians, given they're working wholly with computation and there's no simple way to patch millions of CPUs already deployed.:)
Here's one from the article flagged: "Less critical" from 2002: SA7127 Check out the first paragraph of this 'less critical' item's description.
I wondered how I was able to run mIRC16 on those library computers which wouldn't seem to run any other win32 gui apps (win32 console apps still seem to work). And here I thought it was a bug in their security software. I guess they could simply block NTVDM (assuming there's no neede 16-bit apps on the system), but I sort of wonder if that's really feasible. I guess, once again, other companies will have to come to the rescue to overcome flaws in Windows.
It's worse than that. By the same logic that would hold ISPs accountable for the actions of their customers, so too would each business be accountable for crimes of their customers. So, if I bought a hammer from a hardware store for the purpose of hitting someone in the hand, then by extension the hardware store is guilty of benefiting/facilitating this. This extension goes all the way up the chain to the manufacturer of the hammer, the shippers along the way, and the miners and foresters who extracted the raw goods. It always amazes me that some people are so quick to treat the internet as some sort of radically different thing than all things before it. I mean, is there any precedent that if Paul starts a rumor about Steve that Jane and Jill who passed on said rumor are culpable to slander as well? It's clear that simply being indirectly a party to a criminal or civil act shouldn't be a basis upon which to hold someone accountable.
Where did you get that? I was talking about the social factors involved in the situation. Just as store owners will put pornographic magazines behind the counter to appease a vocal minority, they too will look for a way to appease the vocal minority who are so offended by loiterers to no longer shop there. At the same time, they have to appease everyone else, who, while annoyed with said loiterers, don't like the idea of seeing the cops dragging 12 year olds away simply for being annoying. The person I was responding to tried to call them monsters to justify, socially, why it was okay to use such a device. I was simply pointing out the bullshit of that suggestion.
If I was actually concerned about the whole legality of the situation, I would have asked where the loiterers were standing (possibly on public property) and tried to justify why they had a right standing there. The invention, however, is focused on trying to create a PR-friendly approach, regardless of legality. Personally, I'd assume it is legal. But I'd certain welcome moves to boycott such shops.
>>"That little girl used to be a right pain, shouting abuse and bad language,"
>These kids in England are acting like monsters.
You should really watch A Clockward Orange to get some real perspective on what acting like a monster is. A reality check is that there's a vocal minority of adults who are a bunch of pussies because either they fear that kids will be like they were as a kid or they fear that kids will be as bad as media/fiction depicts kids can be.
Personally, hearing some kid shouting out profanities might at first offend me, but then I'd quickly get over it. There's more reason to fear adults, who have the physical might to do physical harm, than kids. But even then, I'm laughing more because I don't tend to hear kids cursing up a storm. Eventually, though, I'd probably just tell them off and ignore them; certainly, I wouldn't really think much us about it after a while.
I do wonder what the stores would do if this were 30 year olds doing the same. I guess they'd look less evil trying to have 30 year olds locked up than 12 year olds for loitering and hence be a lot more willing to call the police.
No, nor is it likely possible for any remotely large OS. This is precisely why using a small, custom-made OS makes a lot of sense. Having said that, something like OpenBSD might not have a record of absolutely every single programmer who's written code for it (they might, but I somehow doubt it), but they almost certainly have a record of everyone who's went through and auditted it from some set point and then everyone who's added code since. A thorough code audit may not be writing the code itself, but given that it involves going over all the code, and I assume the intent is to hold someone culpable for the code, it seems like at least OpenBSD is in a pretty good position to fit the intent of the law.
The fallacy of this argument is obvious when you look at the enormous political clout the NRA weilds. Politicians are terrified of them. Why? Not because the members are armed with pistols, deer rifles, AR-15s and the occasional.50-caliber sniper rifle. Because their actually show up and vote based on issues that matter to them instead of sound-bites and advertisements.
So, it's a fallacy to claim guns could be used to overthrow a corrupt government because right now an organization of gun owners vote their conscience in a noncorrupt government? The grandparent wasn't arguing anything about using guns for political clout. That's something you brought up and dismissed. He/she was arguing that when voting no longer functions (and the fact politicians fear the NRAs voting clearly shows it still does function) is when guns are important.
Except the major reason that in a postapocalyptic world why you'd need the device to be open is because the developer has closed up shop (it's hard to do work for others when you're too busy trying to just survive the mutant horrors, or whatever the terror du jour is). So, I'd claim that postapocalypes is just a global version of the "developer has closed up shop". But it only takes one important business closing up shop for there to be massive reprocussions. So, I'd say it's more an instance of hedging than assuming some sort of worst case scenario. The good thing is such hedging doesn't have the downside that normal hedging does--normal hedging is really just diversification in the same market, while open source removes an absolute reliance on the market. So, if your point was to demonstrate that, I congratulate you.
Btw, the reason I said it was the "real reason" was primarily because I thought you were kidding about the postapocalypse. It's very difficult to plan ahead for such circumstances, regardless of what people who've built bunkers think (this includes governments who've decided to build bunkers for themselves). But, I guess it's something to think about.
A simple search reveals that WinFS was stripped out, while Avalon and Indigo were "decoupled". So, it seems the only things Longhorn has going for it (beyond the new eyecandy GUI) is the "Fundamentals" APIs and WinFX, to plug it into. Truthfully, before WinFS was even removed, it was downgraded from an all-encompassing database filesystem to a wrapper for NTFS that developers can choose to ignore.
The real reason for the comment, though, is because Vista appears to be a dud, quite like XP. Admittedly, XP was a great improvement for people who were using Win 9x, but there's very little in XP that is an improvement over Windows 2000. It's more a fact that Windows didn't market Windows 2000 for the consumer, while they did market Windows 98/ME, that made XP the first of the Windows NT to sell so well to consumers. Now, assumedly Vista will sell as well, simply because OEMs will be expected to carry the next version of Windows when it's released. It'd take severe issues (a la Windows ME) for customers to actually demand to use XP instead.
So, technologically Vista seems mostly a dud. It's a shame, too, since with Microsoft still quite the monopoly in the desktop PC world, them actually making great strides seems like the only short-term way in which the desktop PC will advance. At the same time, I (and probably many others) never thought that WinFS would be finished on time, let alone included in Vista. Something like WinFS has been promised at least since the time of Windows 2000 (I've heard reports of sooner, but I don't recall personally reading such promises any earlier; a link to such a report appreciated). The real loss is that with all the software engineers at Microsoft who could truly design such a working system, Microsoft doesn't seem really interested in doing the right thing for the sake of good design. It's the same reason I have doubts about Microsoft's commitment to security. It's a long-term process, after all.
I think it's a worthy cause to have an open source operating system working on every piece of equipment that is capable of it. Plenty of reasons it might come in handy some day (post-apocolyptic being the most entertaining one to think about)...
That seems a bit silly of an answer. The real reason it'd come in handy is because of a vendor closing shop. While the odds are quite low that any particular hardware you're using will end up not having a new version released, once you start including all hardware you "need", it becomes a virtual certainty that at least one of those vendors will close shop. So, in the long term having an open source OS gives more assurance that you at least have the option of continuing to manage a device even when there's no one but yourself to offer support. Of course, a lot of companies seem to be willing to spend millions to buy new systems and spend millions for retraining. It'd be interesting to see just how much the cost of sticking to open source and fixing the software yourself compares to an upgrade cycle. I'm inclined to believe that upgrading the whole organization every 4 or 5 years would be more costly than the development and repair costs in the alternative. This would seem especially true if the development ends up being shared with a much large community of companies.
There are actually trade secret protections offered by the FDA*. Trade secrets are an IP protection. Trade secrets simply are the only IP protection that are granted not through government action but instead government inaction (trade secrets are recognized as some sort of right that cannot be infringed through law--hence my bringing up the FDA).
My comparison of copyright and trade secret was silly. So long as there's forced disclosure laws, those under said disclosure laws need some sort of legal exemption to prevent being forced to reveal their trade secrets. Coca-Cola's monopoly status (at least in other countries) and inflated price (relative to production cost) must not be due to trade secrets. It seemed a good example mostly because of the above listed properties, but clearly Coca-Cola must use another mechanism to retain its position.
*From the link: 'The law allows a manufacturer to ask FDA to grant "trade secret" status for a particular ingredient. FDA grants this status under vary limited circumstances and after careful review of the manufacturer's data. The manufacturer must prove that the ingredient imparts some unique property to a product and that the ingredient is not well-known in the industry. If trade secret status is granted, the ingredient does not have to be listed on the label, but the list must end with the phrase "and other ingredients."'
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This is why I originally asked you about your question. I was from the beginning talking about the Constitution, not describing Federal Laws which are inferior to the Constitution. I believe I've sufficiently described why it is the case that federal funding laws must not abridge speech. I do believe that it would be appropriate if I had referenced case law supporting this position, but I sadly do not readily know of such (IANAL). Do you wish me to search for and provide such references?
It means that if you're fired because you told your boss to "fuck off", you should have a basis to sue them. As such, said university, company, etc should be required to return said federal funding or rehire you. Of course, realize that IANAL, so this is purely my interpretration of how things should work, not necessarily how they currently function. Also realize that they can probably fire you for no reason at all (many states don't offer any employment protection), so they're likely to claim such and it'd be very difficult to prove they fired you for saying "fuck off".
Such can be taken from the Constitution. As follows:
...
... provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States ...
...
"Article I
Section 1. All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
Bill of Rights
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
From this we gather that Congress is the only part of federal government that can make laws (techincally others, like the President, might write up a bill, but it's Congress which makes it a law), laws are how Congress carries out such things as funding, and that funding, if Constitutional, could be construed to be a part of "provide for the general welfare". As such, no sort of federal funding can go towards abridging speech, and any organization that deals with the US federal government should realize this. Certainly a court case could make any company return said federal funds if they took said funds and abridged speech. And like I said, such an act could be seen as fraud or possibly collusion.
May I ask what specifically you want citation to? Since you mention the USC, I assume you mean something about the federal funding, but your comment is too vague for me to understand exactly what it is you're requesting.
>>One of the requirements to recieve federal funding is to "uphold the United States Constitution", and yes that means free speech as well.
... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ..." Unless my company somehow turned into Congress and passed a law against free speech, they can do as they please.
:~(
>Let's look at the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law
Federal funding is an Act (ie, law) of Congress. If your company abridges freedom of speech, then it's not eligible for federal funding. Further, knowingly taking money from the government with intent to abridge freedom of speech would be fraud. Of course, Congress should be punished if it wasn't fraud but instead collusion; your company should be punished as well. The real problem is that there's many times that federal funding seems to violate the Bill of Rights (TSA is a great example) and Congress doesn't get punished for it.
What they'd really hate to see is most [music] 'consumers' feeling that it is normal and 100% acceptable to get all their music from filesharing.
If the only way you make money currently, as part of a band, is playing live gigs, then having people get all their music from filesharing is actually a good thing, as it increases exposure of your band. The only real problem right now is that a lot of bands really need to get together and setup some sort of joint system to plan a concert schedule so their fans can hear them perform live. And the internet is almost certainly the way to go about this*.
You can't replace a concert experience with anything, just like you can't replace a theater experience (you can replace a music video or movie experience, since it's the same video each time and the location of a collection of people doesn't matter). That's always been the thing that musicians have sold. The sooner more musicians realize that it's not possible to rely on copyright to make them lots of money without going through a record company, who seems interested wholly in doing whatever it takes to keep the money flowing in, the sooner that they'll realize that concerts are the only way to go. And at that point, the only thing about copyright one cares about is proper attribution.
*Indie labels are just as against online free music as large labels, since they too see it as a way in which people will avoid buying CDs. Perhaps Indie labels taking a cut of the concert trade would make them contribute to such a plan, but any business that ends up taking that job is likely to become just as corrupt as major record labels of today. Theater troops are probably the best model to branch off of.
If none of the publishers (or a few of the smaller ones) make the switch to digital and no change in law is made, I sincerely doubt it. Why? Because the dirty little secret of copyright is that it's generally the publishers who effectively retain the copyright, not the author. There's no way a small upstart or even a few of them all putting their entire catalog online will be able to remotely compete, in the major market shift sort of way, with larger book publishers.
Things like iTunes, for example, didn't really hit it off big until several record companies got into it. This all comes from the fact that there's a large back catalog. That and larger brands have the sort of foundation that draws a lot of authors. Further, larger publishers can buy larger, more expensive ad campaigns for their authors, which further enhance their ability to win out. Moving online doesn't change this. It only changes the scale and the ability to monitor effectiveness.
So, certainly larger publishers moving in, and taking a big risk, could do well. But if one does, they'd probably all join, and their own little part of the oligarchy, via back catalog, would guarantee one couldn't dominate the other (though really late starters might be set back, and the first one to jump in might possible get far ahead..or perhaps the second or third generation).
That being said, it's already the case that several publishers (at least a few bigger ones included) are already selling ebooks, but with ebooks not selling incredibly well so far (compare to iTunes which is something like the 6th largest music seller, though admittedly it's using the catalog of a lot of major players), there is something of an indication that people are either unwilling to buy books online or that ebooks are too constrictive, DRM-wise. The first part is probably in large part due to books inherently taking hours or days to read while there still not being a reasonably cheap mechanism to portably carry around ebooks. Having to charge a book midway through is definitely not acceptable for most people; it's a lot more acceptable to recharge a portable music player when such is already common.
Having said that, the better analogy to all this is simply that of what the RIAA was doing 5 years ago. Whether Apple or another company can lead a major, multi-publisher push to portable/downloadable ebooks in a few years is questionable. In reality, it all comes down to the progressive improvement in portable displays.
It makes perfect sense, competition is not their goal, sales are. One common way of achieving this is through consolidation, where you end up with a dozen brands but only a few actual producers.
And the answer to this is, not surprising, to get rid of those dozen brandings. But how to do it in a fair way? It's quite simple: only allow a company to own a trademark that contains the company's name. In short, if Philip Morris wants to sell cheese, they're perfectly welcome to try to sell Kraft Cheese. But so can anyone else (this means, btw, that Philip Morris might decide to sell "Philip Morris Kraft Cheese" and someone else might sell "Uncle Bob's Kraft Cheese"). And if a "brand" is really worth so much, a company has to choose to buy up the company and changes its name to fit the brand, or it has to relabel the product to fit the original name. Part of this is to discourage horizontal and vertical monopolies. The other part is to address the following.
For consumers to be able to "vote with the wallet" (this feature is supposedly what makes a deregulated market good) they need to be able to make informed choices. But no company is compelled to inform their customers, only to persuade them. Hence all the marketing BS that we are constantly exposed to, and that is also why the one with the biggest marketing budget wins, not the one with the best product. This doesn't benefit consumers.
I totally agree, and this is so often the overlook fact when people talk about "the free market". Capitalism, as has ever existed, isn't a free market. In a free market, there are informed consumers, so it's impossible to commmit fraud (you can't deceive someone who is omnipotent, for example). If there was any one thing that government should do it should be working on ways to inform the consumer in any way possible. Truthfully, people should be doing the same in the above "vote with the wallet", but it's not unreasonable to have a political party or a consumer group devote funds to such information.
Certainly, the government should only grant to companies exclusive rights only if such is to inform the consumer, not benefit the company--any benefit to the company, which might be zero, would have to come as a side-effect. This is why it would make sense to abolish copyright (dumpster diving + reprinting) while still retain trademark (informs the consumer on who makes a product, so they can avoid them in that field and all other fields if they desire). I'm tempted to go so far as to require company attribution on all products, but there doesn't seem any basis to support such.
In any case, informing the consumer is obviously a big step in making deregulation, or the market in general, work out. Another key component is not simply giving companies who were regulated, and hence de facto monopolies in many areas, all the assets (ie, wiring, tubing, etc) they did not fairly earn. If deregulation was warranted, it'd make sense to give such to the various cities, towns, and counties and to divide the company up into many parts, certainly a lot more than 7 or 8. The simple fact is that deregulation would create a temporary burst of chaos, where investors would have the chance to actually compete for a change in a locked market. The simple fact that deregulation has gone so smoothly in the past is a clear sign that deregulation of the past was done improperly.
Maybe those of us boycotting the entire company because of last month's debacle should adjust things a bit?
Yea, 'cause clearly the second Sony brings out a shiny new object you should forget all their past indiscretions and merrily start buying from them again. And to those who would say Sony BGM and Sony <whatever department this is> are different departments, Sony is still Sony. If Sony decides to be a horizontal monopoly, then the bad PR for one arm the company will effect all others. If it doesn't, then clearly any company can just concentrate their evil deeds into certain arms of the company without fearing collapse or customer reprisal. At that point, why even bother pretending like you're not the company's slave.
If you were planning to boycott in the past, you should continue to boycott. The only reasonable time to stop boycotting is when a) they apologize, b) they make reasonable steps that indicate they won't do it again, and c) you believe they've been sufficiently damaged. Seeing as how Sony released a few million DRMed CDs and shows no real sign that they're not going to just do it again the second they get the chance, they don't really fit any quality mentioned. So, are you Sony's bitch?
The whole point of copyright was to benefit society by encouraging creativity, and the supposed targets of encouragement are the people who actually do the creative work. All this stuff about maximizing profits for the publishers was added later.
Actually, the part about publishers was from the very beginning. While it might have been assumed (and worked for a while) that by having copyright the author would have a great deal more power over their work than it being left to publishers to decide what to do with it, it quickly became the case that publishers were the ones who, through successful books, to have the majority of the money in most relationships. Mark Twain was especially against an end to copyright for precisely this reason: copyright ending would only mean that publishers, instead of paying a small royalty to the author, would end up keeping that sum instead.
So, until the time of mass production of cassettes and the like, there really was a legitimiate reason to have copyright, even if it was often perverted. Now, there's so many publishers that there's no way copyright can function. The only thing that should be supported is moves away from granting certain publishers some sort of legal protection to extort money. Hopefully more authors will release into the public domain or under the GNU FDL.
Let me start off that I agree that the author's writing is difficult to read. Having stated that, the author is basically arguing that the DMCA and copyright are doomed to failure, just like Prohibition, because violation is doable by every person and few people see it as morally wrong. At the same time, those in support of the DMCA/Prohibition were constrantly trying to claim it as immoral and subverted the law for their own intentions, noble or not.
The US is the largest producer of copyrighted works in the world. Add to that that the medium that holds said copyrighted works has substantial markup of the physical good (approaching 100x in $50 software), and it's clear that the US has a vested interest in turning copyright and laws that support it into international laws so that US consumers can effectively trade copyrighted works for much more expensive raw goods.
You can't force people to buy your product, though. This is especially the case with copyrighted works, where the internet makes it that the only cost for most works is one's time. This is the mutually benefitial exchange talked about. One thing that the **AA seems especially intent on is brainwashing people into thinking that the author of a work must somehow benefit in distribution. But such really is a moral viewpoint. There's no reason to intrinsically include the author.
The comment about American cars was especially apt. Eventually people realized that paying more money for a car simply because someone else claims it was amoral to buy cars produced by a foreign company was simply stupid. So, too, will people eventually realize that paying 100x the cost of burning a copy of an intellectual work isn't worth it.
But when people aren't swayed by morality, the **AA will come out threatening (basically) that without copyright artists will starve and not make more works. And while it is entirely true that with the vastily inflated prices created by copyright, the music and movie industry as we know it simply will not be substainable, it doesn't mean that there will be an end to intellectual works. The numerous sites that are able to survive on membership fees or advertisement (real goods won't go away, and neither will their want to attract customers) are a testament to the fact that it is possible to exist without copyright--someone else can mirror a site and setup their own advertisment space to rake in cash but eventually people will notice that someone else is the real artist and end up going to their site so they have a chance to talk to them.
The end to copyright is inevitable. And the shift away from an "IP" economy will cause a pretty drastic economic correction. The RIAA and MPAA, kicking and screaming, may be able to slow it down a bit, but it's unlikely they'll slow it down much. The only real question is when copyright will end and will something take its place that can survive in the world of a billion printing presses--I'm sort of in favor of attribution rights, but trademark already can cover that.
This just in: being a nerd is a disease. Everyone on /. now has to spend major $$$ on being "fixed". Seriously, that's how I take it.
:/
Having said that, infornography extends to all the day time talk shows and all the day/night celebrity shows. It sounds like mental health professionals are searching for a problem that doesn't exist*.
*Not every mental activity that has detrimental consequences is an addiction, nor something for which mental health professionals have any ability to diagnose, let alone treat.
MS effectively did the same thing to make NT (they hired away several core VMS people). They reinvented the wheel and created a 32-bit version of Windows on top of it. Windows 9x further extended Win32, to fill out the needs of desktop users. And MS went with a standard driver model so that NT and 9x could share drivers. The funniest part is that NT really does have some innovative* things, but the majority of it (running different core APIs being a big one) has been crushed** in the steps to make NT more like 9x to migrate users over.
Something like WinFS, as originally described as an uber database filesystem, might have been the sort of thing to really shake MS up and do some innovation for a change.
*Granted that microkernels, VMS/OS/2 similarties, and the GUI weren't really innovative; the filesystem was something of an innovation, though it also seemed an extension of HPFS (OS/2's filesystem)
**Putting the Win32 video subsystem into kernel space, including Direct X (such necessitates including Ctrl+Alt+Delete capture, which negates the "Secure Login" feature), defaulting users to Administrator access, and still treating the Windows main directory as a sort of library whore (not that I'm saying *nix is better, but clearly when designing from scratch you can fix flaws that other OS designs have had).
Seems like some members of the press don't understand coding. You can't just go and patch everything.
:)
It seems you don't understand coding. It's certainly possible to patch everything. It's possible to prove the mathematical correctness of code (you just can't write a program to do it). Such is very difficult, however, and takes a ton of time. This is similar to the fact that there are quick alogrithms to produce numbers which might be prime, but it's a lot slower to actually prove a number *is* prime.
Do you really think if Microsoft COULD do it, they wouldn't.
No. Microsoft's core interest is selling products, not making perfect code. Nothing about Microsoft's steps towards providing better security has focused on mathematical correctness. Instead, it's been more about doing more extensive testing and using tools that reduce the probability of including certain types of bugs. It would likely cost Microsoft more money than it has to prove the mathematical correctness of Windows. And in the end, it would have only marginal effects on sales; there simply aren't enough people who could buy their software to compensate for the task.
So, I don't hold Microsoft in contempt for not proving they've fixed all bugs. But I also wouldn't deny that it's possible for them to do such.
As a small note, this is almost certainly the reason those in the field are called Computer Scientists, not Computer Mathematicians. You can have much broader progress making code (hypothesis), testing it (experimentation), and declaring it as okay (conclusion), but you're going to have holes in your understanding (we still don't fully understand gravity). Of course, some people (CPU manufacturers) would actually prefer Computer Mathematicians, given they're working wholly with computation and there's no simple way to patch millions of CPUs already deployed.
Here's one from the article flagged: "Less critical" from 2002: SA7127 Check out the first paragraph of this 'less critical' item's description.
I wondered how I was able to run mIRC16 on those library computers which wouldn't seem to run any other win32 gui apps (win32 console apps still seem to work). And here I thought it was a bug in their security software. I guess they could simply block NTVDM (assuming there's no neede 16-bit apps on the system), but I sort of wonder if that's really feasible. I guess, once again, other companies will have to come to the rescue to overcome flaws in Windows.
It's worse than that. By the same logic that would hold ISPs accountable for the actions of their customers, so too would each business be accountable for crimes of their customers. So, if I bought a hammer from a hardware store for the purpose of hitting someone in the hand, then by extension the hardware store is guilty of benefiting/facilitating this. This extension goes all the way up the chain to the manufacturer of the hammer, the shippers along the way, and the miners and foresters who extracted the raw goods. It always amazes me that some people are so quick to treat the internet as some sort of radically different thing than all things before it. I mean, is there any precedent that if Paul starts a rumor about Steve that Jane and Jill who passed on said rumor are culpable to slander as well? It's clear that simply being indirectly a party to a criminal or civil act shouldn't be a basis upon which to hold someone accountable.
Where did you get that? I was talking about the social factors involved in the situation. Just as store owners will put pornographic magazines behind the counter to appease a vocal minority, they too will look for a way to appease the vocal minority who are so offended by loiterers to no longer shop there. At the same time, they have to appease everyone else, who, while annoyed with said loiterers, don't like the idea of seeing the cops dragging 12 year olds away simply for being annoying. The person I was responding to tried to call them monsters to justify, socially, why it was okay to use such a device. I was simply pointing out the bullshit of that suggestion.
If I was actually concerned about the whole legality of the situation, I would have asked where the loiterers were standing (possibly on public property) and tried to justify why they had a right standing there. The invention, however, is focused on trying to create a PR-friendly approach, regardless of legality. Personally, I'd assume it is legal. But I'd certain welcome moves to boycott such shops.
Teenagers don't want to be cherished and nurtured -- they want freedom without responsibility. (Generalization, not applicable for every teenager.)
Adults don't want to be cherished and nurtured -- they want freedom without responsibility. (Generalization, not applicable for every adult.)
>>"That little girl used to be a right pain, shouting abuse and bad language,"
>These kids in England are acting like monsters.
You should really watch A Clockward Orange to get some real perspective on what acting like a monster is. A reality check is that there's a vocal minority of adults who are a bunch of pussies because either they fear that kids will be like they were as a kid or they fear that kids will be as bad as media/fiction depicts kids can be.
Personally, hearing some kid shouting out profanities might at first offend me, but then I'd quickly get over it. There's more reason to fear adults, who have the physical might to do physical harm, than kids. But even then, I'm laughing more because I don't tend to hear kids cursing up a storm. Eventually, though, I'd probably just tell them off and ignore them; certainly, I wouldn't really think much us about it after a while.
I do wonder what the stores would do if this were 30 year olds doing the same. I guess they'd look less evil trying to have 30 year olds locked up than 12 year olds for loitering and hence be a lot more willing to call the police.
No, nor is it likely possible for any remotely large OS. This is precisely why using a small, custom-made OS makes a lot of sense. Having said that, something like OpenBSD might not have a record of absolutely every single programmer who's written code for it (they might, but I somehow doubt it), but they almost certainly have a record of everyone who's went through and auditted it from some set point and then everyone who's added code since. A thorough code audit may not be writing the code itself, but given that it involves going over all the code, and I assume the intent is to hold someone culpable for the code, it seems like at least OpenBSD is in a pretty good position to fit the intent of the law.
The fallacy of this argument is obvious when you look at the enormous political clout the NRA weilds. Politicians are terrified of them. Why? Not because the members are armed with pistols, deer rifles, AR-15s and the occasional .50-caliber sniper rifle. Because their actually show up and vote based on issues that matter to them instead of sound-bites and advertisements.
So, it's a fallacy to claim guns could be used to overthrow a corrupt government because right now an organization of gun owners vote their conscience in a noncorrupt government? The grandparent wasn't arguing anything about using guns for political clout. That's something you brought up and dismissed. He/she was arguing that when voting no longer functions (and the fact politicians fear the NRAs voting clearly shows it still does function) is when guns are important.
Except the major reason that in a postapocalyptic world why you'd need the device to be open is because the developer has closed up shop (it's hard to do work for others when you're too busy trying to just survive the mutant horrors, or whatever the terror du jour is). So, I'd claim that postapocalypes is just a global version of the "developer has closed up shop". But it only takes one important business closing up shop for there to be massive reprocussions. So, I'd say it's more an instance of hedging than assuming some sort of worst case scenario. The good thing is such hedging doesn't have the downside that normal hedging does--normal hedging is really just diversification in the same market, while open source removes an absolute reliance on the market. So, if your point was to demonstrate that, I congratulate you.
Btw, the reason I said it was the "real reason" was primarily because I thought you were kidding about the postapocalypse. It's very difficult to plan ahead for such circumstances, regardless of what people who've built bunkers think (this includes governments who've decided to build bunkers for themselves). But, I guess it's something to think about.
A simple search reveals that WinFS was stripped out, while Avalon and Indigo were "decoupled". So, it seems the only things Longhorn has going for it (beyond the new eyecandy GUI) is the "Fundamentals" APIs and WinFX, to plug it into. Truthfully, before WinFS was even removed, it was downgraded from an all-encompassing database filesystem to a wrapper for NTFS that developers can choose to ignore.
The real reason for the comment, though, is because Vista appears to be a dud, quite like XP. Admittedly, XP was a great improvement for people who were using Win 9x, but there's very little in XP that is an improvement over Windows 2000. It's more a fact that Windows didn't market Windows 2000 for the consumer, while they did market Windows 98/ME, that made XP the first of the Windows NT to sell so well to consumers. Now, assumedly Vista will sell as well, simply because OEMs will be expected to carry the next version of Windows when it's released. It'd take severe issues (a la Windows ME) for customers to actually demand to use XP instead.
So, technologically Vista seems mostly a dud. It's a shame, too, since with Microsoft still quite the monopoly in the desktop PC world, them actually making great strides seems like the only short-term way in which the desktop PC will advance. At the same time, I (and probably many others) never thought that WinFS would be finished on time, let alone included in Vista. Something like WinFS has been promised at least since the time of Windows 2000 (I've heard reports of sooner, but I don't recall personally reading such promises any earlier; a link to such a report appreciated). The real loss is that with all the software engineers at Microsoft who could truly design such a working system, Microsoft doesn't seem really interested in doing the right thing for the sake of good design. It's the same reason I have doubts about Microsoft's commitment to security. It's a long-term process, after all.
I think it's a worthy cause to have an open source operating system working on every piece of equipment that is capable of it. Plenty of reasons it might come in handy some day (post-apocolyptic being the most entertaining one to think about)...
That seems a bit silly of an answer. The real reason it'd come in handy is because of a vendor closing shop. While the odds are quite low that any particular hardware you're using will end up not having a new version released, once you start including all hardware you "need", it becomes a virtual certainty that at least one of those vendors will close shop. So, in the long term having an open source OS gives more assurance that you at least have the option of continuing to manage a device even when there's no one but yourself to offer support. Of course, a lot of companies seem to be willing to spend millions to buy new systems and spend millions for retraining. It'd be interesting to see just how much the cost of sticking to open source and fixing the software yourself compares to an upgrade cycle. I'm inclined to believe that upgrading the whole organization every 4 or 5 years would be more costly than the development and repair costs in the alternative. This would seem especially true if the development ends up being shared with a much large community of companies.
There are actually trade secret protections offered by the FDA*. Trade secrets are an IP protection. Trade secrets simply are the only IP protection that are granted not through government action but instead government inaction (trade secrets are recognized as some sort of right that cannot be infringed through law--hence my bringing up the FDA).
My comparison of copyright and trade secret was silly. So long as there's forced disclosure laws, those under said disclosure laws need some sort of legal exemption to prevent being forced to reveal their trade secrets. Coca-Cola's monopoly status (at least in other countries) and inflated price (relative to production cost) must not be due to trade secrets. It seemed a good example mostly because of the above listed properties, but clearly Coca-Cola must use another mechanism to retain its position.
*From the link: 'The law allows a manufacturer to ask FDA to grant "trade secret" status for a particular ingredient. FDA grants this status under vary limited circumstances and after careful review of the manufacturer's data. The manufacturer must prove that the ingredient imparts some unique property to a product and that the ingredient is not well-known in the industry. If trade secret status is granted, the ingredient does not have to be listed on the label, but the list must end with the phrase "and other ingredients."'