I said nothing about recording a radio broadcast. The issue concerned downloading content that the copyright holder had not posted to the internet. Whether it was actually fair use or not is not the issue, the issue is that the ratioanalization given for possibly violating copyright being OK was that he was a "poor college student".
It may be necessary to also set some sort of mechanism to funnel at least part of the money gotten from poscast begging to the local NPR stations to make up for lost local station revenue. This mechanism could become a point of contention between the stations and between the stations and NPR; the contention could become a story that would be covered very well on NPR News.
"Was I stealing from TAL? I didn't really feel like it, I was a poor college student and I had heard the program on the radio -- I just wanted it on my computer to listen to it time after time. "
Why is it that some people feel that considering themselves to be a "poor college student" is a justification to violate copyrights? "Being poor" is not a justification for violating copyrights. The copyright holder SELLS CDs so that you can "listen to it time after time".
Training is important but the lack of formal training will not stop people from learning how to use a well designed system, as long as it is properly documented and good user instructions are provided. The biggest barrier to adoption of new systems are bugs and needed features that "will be provided in a later version". Developers frequently do not fully understand the real world use of the system that they are developing and new systems are frequently rushed to delivery; this results in usability problems and bugs. I believe that if a new system is truly better than the legacy system that people will learn to use the new system, training can certainly help users adopt a new system but the lack of training will not stop users from adopting a truly better system. I have seen so many new systems that are different from the legacy system but are not really any better, and the first release of a new system is frequently worse than the legacy system. Not accepting a new system and continuing to use the legacy system does not mean "reverting to old bad habits", from my experience it means that users are reverting to a system that works in favor of a new system that is either buggy or has a bad design. Sometimes the developers are to blame, sometimes management needs to share the blame.
A Google search for Jerry Taylor is somewhat useless as there are several web pages for several different Jerry Taylor's. Number 10 Jerry Taylor builds transmissions for racing cars, number 1 (and several other entries) is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, number 8 is an assistant professor at a small christian college, number 9 is an Arkansas state senator, number 2 and 3 is a "Technology Integration Specialist" for the Greece, New York School District and provides computer training for Senior citizens in Hilton, NY; our Jerry Taylor is currently #6 on the list.
I fervently hope that the content industries lay the DRM as thick and as heavy as technologically possible. If the DRM is wimpy, people will not know who to blame for the DRM annoyances that they have to put up with. If the DRM is heavy enough and intrusive enough, maybe people will start to understand WHY they the movie that they bought won't play right with their 2 year old television. I also hope that people start returning movies and music when they can't do with it what they think that they should be able to do with it.
The problem is that Wal-Mart wants cheap lawnmowers with a prestige name on them. Wal-Mart doesn't care if the products are the same quality as what are sold at higher priced dealers, they just want mowers that have shiny bells and whistles and a prestige name brand. I used to have a Snapper lawn mower, it really was a good as the review made Snapper sound. I had the mower for five years and sold it for nearly what I paid for it.
That pretty much sums it up. In addition to the USPTO not properly screening patent applications, I think that much of the problem is that judges and lawmakers do not understand today's technology. Judges try to bend old world legal judgements to fit new technology and lawmakers rely on corporations to write the laws regarding new technology. Interesting thing is that the corporations who write the laws can end up getting bit on the ass because somebody else can find a judge who doesn't understand the new law. Some of the patents sound like joke RFC's, see United States Patent 6368227, "Method of swinging on a swing"
There are no tracks from The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Metallica or Radiohead in the iTunes online catalogue (with the exception of an album collaboration between Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, and two Radiohead songs).
Which is going to happen first, this bug gets patched, or Vista gets released to the masses? What new bugs are going to be discovered between now and when Vista is in wide release?
"I think telcos are justified in charging companies for their real consumption of resources."
AT&T's customers are paying AT&T for the bandwidth that AT&T is providing to them.
"Some sites consume an inordinate amount of bandwidth and we can't expect someone to foot the bill for that for free."
It is AT&T's customers who consume (and pay for) the AT&T provided portion of the bandwidth for the data that they request from Google.
What AT&T should be saying is that the bandwidth intensive services are increasing their costs and that they they need to increase the flat rates that they charge their customers, or charge customers based upon usage. AT&T may not be able to do either because charging customers may not be possible and charging Google for consumer access ain't gonna happen.
The corporations are not funding the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the USPTO is funded by US taxpayers. Corporations are funding, both indirectly and through lobbyests, the lawmakers who tell the USPTO what to do. There are many thousands of lobbyests in Washington, DC and almost all of them are being paid for by corporations. The corporations would not be funding this vast army of lobbyests if they weren't successful in getting pro-corporate laws passed.
Another issue is that the republicans are in the majority in the House and in Congress, and the President is a Republican. Republicans today tend to look out for the best interests of corporations (and good Christians). One way that politicians raise money is to have fundraising dinners, which cost hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of dollars per plate. Who attends these fundraising dinners? Corporate officers and their lobbyists attend these dinners.
If any employer has a problem with their employees getting authorized software from particular sites that are listed as an official mirror by the software maintainers, the employer should block those sites at the firewalls or routers. As the computer security manager, why don't you 'protect' your employees from accidentally using the 'wrong' mirror?
I am not advocating government censorship, the government has the right to secure access on networks that it owns.
Knowing that the US government has such prejudices toward certain software mirrors, it makes me wish that I owned some hard core porn sites to use as FOSS mirrors.
Playboy.com also mirrors Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, FreeBSD, and CPAN. Playboy uses FOSS in it's operation and wants to give back to the community by providing mirrors.
There are two seperate and distinct "solutions" for people who have issues with porn. The first "solution" is government censorship of the inernet. The second "solution" involves local filtering installed by the computer owner, and there are at least two flavors of this "solution". There are bastard situations where various non-federal governments (including libraries) own the computer or the network which get REAL complicated. There are also situations where ISPs and networks censor access.
Government Censorship: There are wing nuts who want the US government to censor the internet, usually with cries of "think of the children" or "help fight terrorism". People who know how the internet works generally realize that this is a stupid "solution".
Local Filtering: There are several different way that this can be done and all of the currently available local filtering "solutions" have problems. TFA was about a new local filtering scheme, which COULD be better than the existing methods.
Local filtering vs. government censorship is, I think, where you see the contradiction. It really isn't a contradiction for people to say NO to government censorship (including local filtering in public libraries) and to also have some of the same people wanting the government to get involved in improving local filtering technologies.
If it wasn't for porn on the internet, war, gay marriage, and abortion; you couldn't get anybody to go to the polls.
In TFA, Jamie Hyneman is said to have used the words "person-hours" in a sentence. The term is totally appropriate and it is not out of character for him from what I have seen on his television program.
A person hour is a measurement of effort. One person who works for one hour will have performed one person hour worth of work. This measure is often abbreviated as PH.
http://www.spc.ca/resources/metrics/glossary.htm
This information was obtained by reading TFA (I searched for "hours" in the page) and by googling for "define person hours".
OK, use the word "transmitting", it doesn't matter. Assuming that the poster is the copyright owner, the poster sent the copyrighted document to the Usenet network which consists of a large number of servers located around the world. The usage of Usenet is described in several RFCs. The copyright owner made the document available to anybody who could connect to one of the many Usenet servers. Assuming that there was no "Expires" header, the NNTP RFCs say that the server owner sets the retention period. Commonly available NNTP clients do not normally include an "Expires" header, so virtually no Usenet posts will have one. Google set their retention policy to essentially "forever". I can see several possiblities for violation of copyright abuse, but Google making posts available on their Usenet server is not one of them.
I hate to reply to my own message but I forgot something.
A very well known, large NNTP server that archived Usenet messages was started in 1995 by Deja News. Google acquired Deja News' Usenet message database in 2001 and incorporated it into the newly formed Google Groups.
As you later corrected, it is not necessary for the messages to become public domain for an NNTP server to store them and make them available. I am not sure what you mean by "unlimited" distribution; Google is not distributing the messages, it is providing a very large distributed NNTP server with large amounts of available storage. There ARE documents regarding NNTP/Usenet, see RFC 977 and RFC 1036. RFC 977 specifies that messages are stored in a central database and that "Indexing, cross-referencing, and expiration of aged messages are also provided." RFC 1036 says that the "Expires" header is what sets the dates for expiring aged messages. RFC 1036 also says that if the "Expires" header is not present, the local default expiration date is used (which appears to be "forever" in the case of Google). It would be interesting to know how many Usenet messages include an "Expires" header and whether Google honors the "Expires" header for those messages that have one. Unless Google is not honoring "Expires" headers, Google's NNTP server is not doing anything that is not specified or permitted by the applicable RFC's.
Why should the Miami-Dade school board feel that it is so special that it believes that it can censor video games? Come on, this should not have been a news item.
Slashdot Mirror
I said nothing about recording a radio broadcast. The issue concerned downloading content that the copyright holder had not posted to the internet. Whether it was actually fair use or not is not the issue, the issue is that the ratioanalization given for possibly violating copyright being OK was that he was a "poor college student".
It may be necessary to also set some sort of mechanism to funnel at least part of the money gotten from poscast begging to the local NPR stations to make up for lost local station revenue. This mechanism could become a point of contention between the stations and between the stations and NPR; the contention could become a story that would be covered very well on NPR News.
"Was I stealing from TAL? I didn't really feel like it, I was a poor college student and I had heard the program on the radio -- I just wanted it on my computer to listen to it time after time. "
Why is it that some people feel that considering themselves to be a "poor college student" is a justification to violate copyrights? "Being poor" is not a justification for violating copyrights. The copyright holder SELLS CDs so that you can "listen to it time after time".
Training is important but the lack of formal training will not stop people from learning how to use a well designed system, as long as it is properly documented and good user instructions are provided. The biggest barrier to adoption of new systems are bugs and needed features that "will be provided in a later version". Developers frequently do not fully understand the real world use of the system that they are developing and new systems are frequently rushed to delivery; this results in usability problems and bugs. I believe that if a new system is truly better than the legacy system that people will learn to use the new system, training can certainly help users adopt a new system but the lack of training will not stop users from adopting a truly better system. I have seen so many new systems that are different from the legacy system but are not really any better, and the first release of a new system is frequently worse than the legacy system. Not accepting a new system and continuing to use the legacy system does not mean "reverting to old bad habits", from my experience it means that users are reverting to a system that works in favor of a new system that is either buggy or has a bad design. Sometimes the developers are to blame, sometimes management needs to share the blame.
You forgot the three year mark: $34.77 at Walmart or your local drugstore.
A Google search for Jerry Taylor is somewhat useless as there are several web pages for several different Jerry Taylor's. Number 10 Jerry Taylor builds transmissions for racing cars, number 1 (and several other entries) is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, number 8 is an assistant professor at a small christian college, number 9 is an Arkansas state senator, number 2 and 3 is a "Technology Integration Specialist" for the Greece, New York School District and provides computer training for Senior citizens in Hilton, NY; our Jerry Taylor is currently #6 on the list.
I fervently hope that the content industries lay the DRM as thick and as heavy as technologically possible. If the DRM is wimpy, people will not know who to blame for the DRM annoyances that they have to put up with. If the DRM is heavy enough and intrusive enough, maybe people will start to understand WHY they the movie that they bought won't play right with their 2 year old television. I also hope that people start returning movies and music when they can't do with it what they think that they should be able to do with it.
The problem is that Wal-Mart wants cheap lawnmowers with a prestige name on them. Wal-Mart doesn't care if the products are the same quality as what are sold at higher priced dealers, they just want mowers that have shiny bells and whistles and a prestige name brand. I used to have a Snapper lawn mower, it really was a good as the review made Snapper sound. I had the mower for five years and sold it for nearly what I paid for it.
That pretty much sums it up. In addition to the USPTO not properly screening patent applications, I think that much of the problem is that judges and lawmakers do not understand today's technology. Judges try to bend old world legal judgements to fit new technology and lawmakers rely on corporations to write the laws regarding new technology. Interesting thing is that the corporations who write the laws can end up getting bit on the ass because somebody else can find a judge who doesn't understand the new law. Some of the patents sound like joke RFC's, see United States Patent 6368227, "Method of swinging on a swing"
Apple computer doesn't sell Beatles songs to anybody. With the exception of one collaboration album, the Beatles are not distributed via iTMS.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Music_Store
There are no tracks from The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Metallica or Radiohead in the iTunes online catalogue (with the exception of an album collaboration between Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, and two Radiohead songs).
Hmmm, it's getting more and more difficult to buy coal to put in xmas stockings, copies of windows would make the perfect replacement .....
Which is going to happen first, this bug gets patched, or Vista gets released to the masses? What new bugs are going to be discovered between now and when Vista is in wide release?
"I think telcos are justified in charging companies for their real consumption of resources."
AT&T's customers are paying AT&T for the bandwidth that AT&T is providing to them. "Some sites consume an inordinate amount of bandwidth and we can't expect someone to foot the bill for that for free."
It is AT&T's customers who consume (and pay for) the AT&T provided portion of the bandwidth for the data that they request from Google.
What AT&T should be saying is that the bandwidth intensive services are increasing their costs and that they they need to increase the flat rates that they charge their customers, or charge customers based upon usage. AT&T may not be able to do either because charging customers may not be possible and charging Google for consumer access ain't gonna happen.
The internet divisions of US telcos do not have common carrier status and are essentially unregulated.
The corporations are not funding the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the USPTO is funded by US taxpayers. Corporations are funding, both indirectly and through lobbyests, the lawmakers who tell the USPTO what to do. There are many thousands of lobbyests in Washington, DC and almost all of them are being paid for by corporations. The corporations would not be funding this vast army of lobbyests if they weren't successful in getting pro-corporate laws passed.
Another issue is that the republicans are in the majority in the House and in Congress, and the President is a Republican. Republicans today tend to look out for the best interests of corporations (and good Christians). One way that politicians raise money is to have fundraising dinners, which cost hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of dollars per plate. Who attends these fundraising dinners? Corporate officers and their lobbyists attend these dinners.
If any employer has a problem with their employees getting authorized software from particular sites that are listed as an official mirror by the software maintainers, the employer should block those sites at the firewalls or routers. As the computer security manager, why don't you 'protect' your employees from accidentally using the 'wrong' mirror?
I am not advocating government censorship, the government has the right to secure access on networks that it owns.
Knowing that the US government has such prejudices toward certain software mirrors, it makes me wish that I owned some hard core porn sites to use as FOSS mirrors.
Playboy.com also mirrors Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, FreeBSD, and CPAN. Playboy uses FOSS in it's operation and wants to give back to the community by providing mirrors.
It is no more necessary to embrace porn on the internet than it is necessary to embrace hate sites on the internet.
Clickable list of hate sites on the internet: http://www.bcpl.net/~rfrankli/hatedir.pdf
There are two seperate and distinct "solutions" for people who have issues with porn. The first "solution" is government censorship of the inernet. The second "solution" involves local filtering installed by the computer owner, and there are at least two flavors of this "solution". There are bastard situations where various non-federal governments (including libraries) own the computer or the network which get REAL complicated. There are also situations where ISPs and networks censor access.
Government Censorship: There are wing nuts who want the US government to censor the internet, usually with cries of "think of the children" or "help fight terrorism". People who know how the internet works generally realize that this is a stupid "solution".
Local Filtering: There are several different way that this can be done and all of the currently available local filtering "solutions" have problems. TFA was about a new local filtering scheme, which COULD be better than the existing methods.
Local filtering vs. government censorship is, I think, where you see the contradiction. It really isn't a contradiction for people to say NO to government censorship (including local filtering in public libraries) and to also have some of the same people wanting the government to get involved in improving local filtering technologies.
If it wasn't for porn on the internet, war, gay marriage, and abortion; you couldn't get anybody to go to the polls.
In TFA, Jamie Hyneman is said to have used the words "person-hours" in a sentence. The term is totally appropriate and it is not out of character for him from what I have seen on his television program.
A person hour is a measurement of effort. One person who works for one hour will have performed one person hour worth of work. This measure is often abbreviated as PH. http://www.spc.ca/resources/metrics/glossary.htm
This information was obtained by reading TFA (I searched for "hours" in the page) and by googling for "define person hours".
OK, use the word "transmitting", it doesn't matter. Assuming that the poster is the copyright owner, the poster sent the copyrighted document to the Usenet network which consists of a large number of servers located around the world. The usage of Usenet is described in several RFCs. The copyright owner made the document available to anybody who could connect to one of the many Usenet servers. Assuming that there was no "Expires" header, the NNTP RFCs say that the server owner sets the retention period. Commonly available NNTP clients do not normally include an "Expires" header, so virtually no Usenet posts will have one. Google set their retention policy to essentially "forever". I can see several possiblities for violation of copyright abuse, but Google making posts available on their Usenet server is not one of them.
I hate to reply to my own message but I forgot something.
A very well known, large NNTP server that archived Usenet messages was started in 1995 by Deja News. Google acquired Deja News' Usenet message database in 2001 and incorporated it into the newly formed Google Groups.
As you later corrected, it is not necessary for the messages to become public domain for an NNTP server to store them and make them available. I am not sure what you mean by "unlimited" distribution; Google is not distributing the messages, it is providing a very large distributed NNTP server with large amounts of available storage. There ARE documents regarding NNTP/Usenet, see RFC 977 and RFC 1036. RFC 977 specifies that messages are stored in a central database and that "Indexing, cross-referencing, and expiration of aged messages are also provided." RFC 1036 says that the "Expires" header is what sets the dates for expiring aged messages. RFC 1036 also says that if the "Expires" header is not present, the local default expiration date is used (which appears to be "forever" in the case of Google). It would be interesting to know how many Usenet messages include an "Expires" header and whether Google honors the "Expires" header for those messages that have one. Unless Google is not honoring "Expires" headers, Google's NNTP server is not doing anything that is not specified or permitted by the applicable RFC's.
All analogies are bad and that was a Really bad analogy.
Why should the Miami-Dade school board feel that it is so special that it believes that it can censor video games? Come on, this should not have been a news item.