> If someone cites Wikipedia or sites like it gets a lower grade,...
I wonder if they would get a lower grade if they cited Britanica, as comparison by Nature showed it was not more accurate then Wikipedia, at least in scientific matters.
My son is 12 years old. He uses Wikipedia and we encourage him. When he sees something that's not accurate he knows there's an "edit" button and he fixes it. It he's not sure he doesn't (and he knows he can raise the issue in the discussion page).
There's no such thing as "100% accurate information" (well, except perhaps the RFCeditor site, if what you claim is the "RFC says blah"). There are many mistakes in Wikipedia. E.g.,I just corrected several false "facts" in the "planar graphs" entry a few weeks ago. There are also mistakes in other sources but I cannot correct them. Does that make them more credible?
Another story: a colleague of mine (quite a few years ago) has taught a course from an old and very famous book. Some students questioned a proof and he insisted that that were the proof. The next time he openned the lecture with an apology and said that the book was wrong. And then he went on to explain that he grew up in an environment that worshipped the "word of the book" as unquestionable truth (communist Russia) so he haven't considered the possibility that the book could be wrong.
And yet another story: I know a book by a respected mathematican published by a respected publisher (AMS), that has a trivial mistake in the first theorem in page 1. There's a trivial counter example. The rest of the math in the book depends on this first theorem, so it's a whole book full of proofs that rely on a wrong fact! It's not Wikipedia. It's a peer reviewed scientific publication by an expert in the field. But it's useless for anyone except those that don't realize the first theorem is wrong. There are many examples in math of published results that turned up to be wrong.
Teaching students that no source of info can be trusted to be 100% accurate and that they can contribute themselves to inproving accuracy is a far more valuable lesson than blocking them from using peer reviewd sources like Wikipedia.
Well... I should really stop here, but just one more story: A few days ago my 12 years old son had some assignment and the teacher provided several sources on the web (non of which was Wikipedia). One of the sources was an assignment posted by a student, and simple Google searches revealed that it was a cut & paste job from various other websites. several of the sources had large parts copied from Wikipedia...
Just like the police is not going to investigate a burglary (or even know it happened) unless the victim complains, so the DMCA expects hosts to act on complaint and does not expect them to act when no one complains.
Of course one might expect that the police will act to prevent burglary from happening, and they do, but they cannot prevent it entirely as we all know. YouTube also makes a reasonable effort to make it hard to post some kinds of materials, but they cannot and cannot be expected to totally prevent posting of copyrighted works without permission. If you want better protection against burglary than what thee police provides to the public, you can pay for it...
Finaly: if YouTube refrained from posting copyrighted material it would be empty. There is no such thing. Everything is copyrighted. If you contribute your work to the public domain it just means that you licensed your work to the public. It cannot be determined to be in the public domain without such a license (your death certificate can be a substitute for that license...). When the copyright merchants complain that "YouTube is distributing copyrighted content" what they mean is that they are allowing the distribution of content by people who do not have permisions. Posting of copyrighted content with permision is allowed and is perfectly legal, as long as the copyright holder permits it, and I'm quite positive that by accepting YouTube ToS a user declares that posted material are allowed to be posted by the copyright holder. So it's not a question of whether or not posted material is copyrighted or not. It's a question of whether or not the copyright holder permitted it. And YouTube has no reasonable way to know this is so unless the copyright holder says so. The discussed section of the DMCA says it is OK to post unless there copyright holder explicitly says "no", just like the police department may assume that the people taking all that furniture and loading it on that truck have been allowed to do it by the owner, unless someone says it's a burglary, or it looks very much like a burglary (such as happenning in the midle of the night).
An important difference is that in the case of copyrights the same technology that allows the the cheap distribution of information also allows the copyright holder to locate infringing copies. Google provides such tools (its search engine). The guy with the stolen skis has no way to tell which pair of skis on sale at Ebay is his pair of skis.
Are you claiming that since registration of a work is not required to obtain copyright I cannot claim that I wrote "Tom Sawyer" but if it were required and the author failed to register then I would be able to claim that I'm the author?
I think that "Tom Sawyer" is in the public domain and is not protected by copyright but I still cannot claim I am the author, and even though registration was required at the time it was first published, had the author forgot to register for copyright at the time it might have meant that Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) would perhaps have lost some income but I don't think it would have made it possible for me to legally claim I wrote it. At least not if I were to try and profit from this lie. Lying perhaps is legal, but making money by lying is not. And if it is absolutely legal for me to take a work out of the public domain and claim that I wrote it now and therefore I can obtain copyright for the work for the next zillion years then something's absolutely wrong.
Anyway, I don't understand how an unknown author that sends a manuscript to a publisher is protected if the manuscript is subject to abstract copyright. If the work is "stolen" how does she prove she was the copyright owner? Being able to register the work for something like the price of domain registration can provide proof (nowadays one might pay notary much more for the this kind of service).
You say that requiring a fee to register for copyright protection would undermine free open source. So I would expect supporters of of the FOSS and Creative Commons "share alike" model to be supporters of "no registration required", but the Lawrence Lessig writes exactly the opposite in his book "Free Culture" (http://www.free-culture.cc/). In the "Afterword" in this book he favourably describes Richard Stallman's motivation in creating Gnu and the GPL, and then advocates mandatory registration of copyrights and periodical extensions of them (He suggests that registration can be done through registrars just like domain registration).
Is requiring a fee really contraditory to open source? I don't know. The GPL requires making the sources and the license available which also creates some costs. Anyway, the GPL doesn't necessarily means that a programmer cannot release her own contributed code separately under other licences, including releasing it to the public domain. It just requires that the code that is published together with the original code is made available under the GPL (and of course the original code cannot be republished under any license not allowed by the original license). So in a "registration required" environment modification to GPLed code that is protected be copyright can be released under the GPL and the original copyright would still apply to portions of the modified code. Other portions might not be protected by copyright (they would be public domain unless they are registered, and provided they can exist independently).
In the same chapter he discusses the requirment of marking a copyrighted work (that was dropped about 30 years ago in the US) and suggests that failing to provide required marking on some copies doesn't necessarily have to mean that copyright protection is lost entirely. This is something that I think can also apply to registration of a work in a legal environment that requires registration: If an author realizes she actualy wants to register for copyright protection, she should be able to do so within a reasonable time from when the work was first published (or created) and then publishing the work after the time of registration would be subject to copyright. This would also provide as a side effect some rotection to unregistered works that are registerable but this should only be so for a very limited time.
Now there's a possibility of someone taking someone else's copyrighted work and publishing it as her own work. That is criminal whether registration is required or not. When someone copies without permision they can have all sorts of explanations: they believed they had permission, they believed it's in the public domain etc. These excuses don't apply to registering someone else's work as your own.
I believe that requiring registeration of a work to obtain copyright protection is good for the litle guy. Without this requirement most works are automatically copyrighted and to use them in any way (quoting, derived work etc.) licensing is required, and a deep pocket is a huge advantage in securing licensing. The big guys also have an advantage in locating infringement and in suing. The little guy has no legal department.
In practice right now the little guys are the ones opting for a sort of voluntary registration, called "Creative Commons". It is a mistake to think of CC as "Free open source non-software". It is not. Creative Commons is really about one thing: having creators of copyrighted works explicitly state what they allow and what they don't allow.
I can see how requiring registration was a burden for authors in the 19th century (requiring them to ride a few days to the capital city, stay several days to deal with the beaurocrats only to end up with something that is filed in a cabinet somewhere in government archives and a piece of paper as prrof of registration, and then no tools to discover infringement). But in the 21st century there is an internet connecting the whole world, data is is accessible from everywhre, an author in a distant village in Andes can access a registry and register a work for copyright just as an author in NYC can (well.. perhaps after riding a lama to the nearest Internet caffee), and registrration doesn't necessarily mean government or UN beaurocracy. It can be done by private companies or volunteer organizations. The MPAA or RIAA can run one. Creaive Commons can too. (But some of the exponentially increasing fees would have to go elsewhere...)
I used to have XBIFF running when I was using unix@edu (little window on the Xterminal that shows a mailbox and raises a flag when there's new mail).
Nowadays I use FastMail.fm and have FastCheck under Windows that creates an audible notification on incoming mail to monitored folders so new email "rings" just like a phone does (using IMAP IDLE extension notifications are practically real time). I file most incoming email out of the Inbox using Sieve so I don't get notifications for whatever I don't want to be notified about.
> many kinds of work cost a lot of money. > Say goodbye to movies for a start, > as well as games....
To make these things possible and profitable there's no need for automatic copyright on anything that lasts lifetime+70.
Three years copyright for preregistered works only would be enough to justify huge budget movies.
I think a very good compromise between no copyrights at all and the current crazy laws that makes it formally illegal to copy any post on the web because everything is automatically copyrighted is to have a copyright system that is very limited in time but has an option for almost perpetual copyright by extension of the copyright term.
What I think of reserves moral rights (a quote should mention the original author) automatically, but not property rights. Then an author (or a authorised representative) can register the work and have temporary monopoly for a short time (say 3 or 5 years). This would cost nothing or only a small handling fee. Then periodically the copyright term can be renewed, for an exponentially increasing fee. Theoreticaly a copyright could be extended forever but not practically. THis kind of system would enable Disney to keep the copyrights for old Mickey Mouse films for a very long time if it's profitable for them (I think they don't really have a problem with people using the Mickey Mouse trademark in nesw works because trademarks do not expire). On the other hand every work that's not profitable would end pretty soon in the public domain and those that are somewhat profitable would last longer but not forever under copyright.
Let's say an initial $10 fee to renew copyright on a work after 5 years, and then every 5 years the fee doubles: then it's:
$20 after 10 years $80 after 20 years $320 after 30 years $1280 after 40 years $5120 after 50 years $20480 after 60 years $81920 after 70 years $327680 after 80 years $1310720 after 90 years $5242880 after 100 years
So if I were Disney making millions on Micky Mosue after 70 years I would certainly pay the fee, but after 100 years perhaps not.
I think the main barrier to sensible copyright laws is the Berne convention treaty that requires all members not to require copyright holders to register works as a condition to copyright protection, and applies this logic to anything produced regardless of financial value. This should be changed. A system of protections that differentiates more profitable from less profitable works would be beneficial to everyone: it could offer much better protection to those that require it without draining the public domain.
I don't know about entrapment, but if the mix was ordered by representatives of the copyright holders (the RIAA) was any copyright infringed? Doesn't this constitute explicit consent by the copyright holder?
There used to be a free program by Prof. Mark Overmars called Drape (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/kids/drape.html) but unfortunately it is no longer available for free download (though there might be ways to get a copy). It's advantage over Logo is that it is used through a graphic interface and does not require the child to know anything about letters (perhaps it has some value as a preparation to reading as it makes a child realize how sequences of sybols arranged in different ways have different meanings.
The real reason to let kids use these is that it gives them more ways to be creative. It is not supposed to completely replace things like building blocks or Legos.
Game Maker (see http://www.gamemaker.nl/) by the same Prof. Overmars is suitable for older kids. My 6 year old child can do some things with it (actually he did when he was 5) but it's really not for his level and his success owes a lot to help from his 12 years old brother. For older kids it is a great way to learn programming in an environment that balances their needs for fast results with the ability to do complicated programming (and I've seen my older son progressing from simple graphic UI programming by dragging icons around and editting their property sheets to using more and more scripting). It's Windows only and the author claims it is not suitable for open sourcing or porting to other platforms as the code is too Windows-centric, but I think it can serve as a good model for creating a similar open source alternative - a programming environment that grows with the child.
Finally: even a standard graphics program such as MS Paint can let a child be creative, especially if a child learns to use Google images and copy/paste images to his/her own work. My younger son convinced himself at the age of 4 that he needs to learn to read because this is the key to obtain images from Google, and that he needs to learn English because searching in English produces more and better search results.
Prof. OverMars has one more cool program that kids can use to be creative and it is "Drawing for Children" (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/kids/draw.html). It is not a replacement for a standard graphics program but it lets kids be creative in a different way (composing images from erady made components.) I think it has some cool things like fractal-based generation of trees, letting the child "draw" a forest with each tree a randomly generated fractal. (I haven't followed Tux paint too much. Does it have these things? Tux paint have a problem of "too many penguins". It makes a child's drawing look like a Windows desktop after an ISP instalation disk has been run, assuming the ISP's logo is a penguin;-) ).
Of course there's no body! He didn't really die! It's just that the effect of the super transformation formula has gone and he went back to his original identity of Evil Dr. RIAAlity!
They could have been much more successful if they haven't tries to reverse the role of a superhero into one that is protecting those that want to rule the planet from the evil public...
> The marketing company really needs to learn to think through > the possible consequences of their actions... >... say, a label saying who placed the device...
Perhaps mark it "Adv:"?
You identified the real problem here, and this makes this incident quite like spam: this marketing method indirectly abused public resources and caused indirect costs to 3rd parties. Another spammy attribute of this marketing campaign is an attempt to disguise itself as something else (not looking like an an ad but as something that requires attention to determine what it is). It relied on the public handling of the strange "devices" that suddenly appeared everywhere, thus creating cost for 3rd parties was planned by whoever ran this campaign.
A lot of words are wasted trying to "define spam" as opt-in vs. opt-out, commercial or not etc. I think the real characteristic that includes spam and lots of other nuisanses we have nowadays, including the one discussed here, is the transfering of costs to third parties.
Boston authorities might have over reacted, but they certainly had to react. Nobody that's posting here knows what kind of other inteligence they had about terrorist activity in Boston that were irrelevant in other cities.
I don't know too much about VPN. My employer (Israeli Open University) gives me a Windows client called "CheckPoint VPN-1 SecuRemote" that I can download from their site and install to access the network from home (needless to say, I need to use my username and password). Most people use it to connect their PC and access their email from home using Outlook, accessing their files and folders on the intranet and accessing the internal website that is only accessible from withing the intranet. When I use it (I don't do it often) it connects me to the intranet and displays a Windows desktop for me to use logged into my account. It automatically mapped my local drives until I configured it to stop doing so fearing that I am connecting my Hard drives to the same Windows machine with lots of others that connect from home and might have all kinds of malware.
I don't really understand the logic of this: is it really safer to have people connect using VPN than to let them access specific services using authentication? (like use IMAP to use work email from home, connect to the intranet website using usermname/password authentication (perhaps only over ssl) and using a protocol like webdav or ftp (over ssl) to access files? And am I being paranoid about connecting my machine to the internal network this way (given that in the university all users are using Outlook+IE on Windows admin accounts, and at home I don't use either and only use limited privileges account for anything but maintenance).
There's hardly any Spam going out of Hotmail. Spam with a Hotmail return address usually is not sent by Hotmail. I have reported thousands of spam messages through SpamCop and have seen very few spam messages that were really sent from Hotmail's servers.
Email protocols are open standards. Anyone can use any address to identify with, and it is much easier for spammers to to pump out their spam with their own software that they run on the huge networks of computers they form from computers they hijack by infecting them with malware (botnets).
Webmail providers have tools to detect multiple signups and catch spammers, and Google's invitation system already let a spammer send himself (or herself?) 100 invitations (and then 10000 etc.) and yet there was very little spam coming out of Gmail, so they must have their spammer detection tools working OK, just like Hotmail and Yahoo do.
The difference between Fastmail and Gmail is that Gmail is run by a billion dollars corporation with huge infrastructure and has about 30,000,000 subscribers and FastMail.FM is run by a few developers on two racks with open source software and has only a 1,000,000 subscribers (perhaps a bit less).
And the main difference is that if you contact Gmail with a question or suggestion you get a form reply (to their credit they never called back but they did implement some of the suggestions I made). When you contact FastMail you usually get a reply from a developer and often the reply is something like,"login to/beta/ and see if it works now". There are advantages and disadvantages to this.
There are people using both FastMail and Gmail (like I do) and enjoy both worlds. Both allow forwarding (free FastMail accounts require a little hacking that is documented in the FastMail wiki to do it) and cross-forwarding works great (both have duplicate suppression. In FastMail it is a documented fact. In Gmail it seems to work). There are people who like Gmail's interface better, and there are people who like FastMail's interface better, and of course FastMail has IMAP functionality on all membership levels including free accounts, so you can choose your interface. FastMail's interface is much geekier, but I guess for many Slashdotters this is an advantage.
I think Fastmail is worth checking out by Slashdotters at least to see how much functinality can be crammed into one webmail client. So go to Fastmail.FM and try it. Even if you don't adopt it as your main account you'd probably enjoy the experience and find some uses for it. (And if you don't want them to know I sent you remove the STKI parameter from the URL. Unlike Gmail, FastMail would not disclose to me who used my referal but only how many people used it).
The way I see it, Google will soon have to do in mainland Europe what it had to do in the UK - block users from registering @gmail.com addresses because someone else owns the trademark. So right now it allows Europeans to register @gmail addresses while they still can...
Getting rid of spam sent to Slashdot users is no big deal. There are many Slashdot users with Gmail accounts, so Gmail's filters should have no problem learning to recognize spam sent to mailing lists compiled from addresses harvested from Slashdot. So you don't see much spam except in the spam "folder". Your private email is a different story. I often see non-spam that Gmail puts in the spam folder, and I see lots of spam there despite the fact that my gmail address had very little circulation (it was only seen by very few people I sent invitation to. Otherwise it is only used by me to forward mail for backup in the Gmail account).
Besides, I have no idea how Gmail filters spam. I know quite well how FastMail filters spam: the processes are public, the blocklists and policies used in the SMTP gateway are known, and the filtering process is open (Spamassassin - an open source project, and the use of spamassassin scoring is completely customizable by the user).
> Why are the child porn types writing software that magically > puts child porn on random people's computers? > I'm really not clear about what they're accomplishing there,...
And why do spammers send spam advertising whatever to "random people"? The point you (and most everyone) doesn't understand is that spammers (advertisers of porn and child porn included) do not send their advertising to "people" at all. Spammers that "advertise" petty stock are advertising to a tiny percantage of email users and their method of reaching those mailboxes is issuing all the email routing instructions they know. Advertisers of child porn are trying to reach a tiny fraction of the population that is willing to pay for their "offering" and their method is using software inserted into hundreds of thousands of hijacked PCs that shows popup ads (probably not just of child porn). Haven't you seen TV commercials directed at much less than half the watching audience?
The point is that the advertiser cares only about the relevant audience: potential paying customers. The rest of the targets is a side effect of the method of market research. Since it is much more expensive (or impossible) to find out in advance exactly how to reach your potential audience, you use a method that would bring your "message" to a wider audience that would include your desired audience. The ones who want the info would come to you. The rest of them would ignore it, or perhaps would be annoyed or appaled, but what do you care: they're not potential customers of yours anyway!
TV comercials are expensive, so advertisers at least invest in finding audiences that have higher percentage of their desired audience (relative to cost of advertising). Email and popup and other spam costs next to nothing, so the most cost effective method of "market research" here is to just send to as many "random targets" as possible. Some of them would turn out to be paying customers. The rest of them are not interesting. The spammer doesn't care what they think.
So this is the explanation of their motive: they didn't really know if you or your windows based server is a consumer child pornography. Since it cost them nothing to install their software on your machine they did it anyway "just in case".
Some consequences: Ratio of customers/spam served is imaterial. Spammers would send as much as they can and take as much business as they get. Therefore blocking spam to uninterested parties does not hurt the spammer's business model. It helps the spammer, since the spammer's business model is tto let the market research itself by having uninterested parties not respond to spam. Spammers are not interested in "removing" email addresses. sending does not cost them as much as maintaining "clean lists". They only handle whoever is responding and paying for their stuff. They don't and cannot handle the rest of us. There are too many of us and dealing with us produces no income to the spammer. Finally: spamers (including popup spammers that sell anything, including child porn) are not equipped to handle masses of responds that don't lead to income. Not responding to them helps them keep their businesses running. If people start responding, making them act on the response but producing no income their business model would collapse. So if you want to hurt child pornography business the way to act would be to let them popup their ads, erspond to them, feed in fake info and fake CC number and order some of their stuff. Eventually they would find out the info is fake, possibly after paying for the processing of the fake order. If enough people do it they would not be able to find someone to process their order. Unfortunately if you do try to interfere with their business you might go to jail for the child pronography they displayed on your PC, so its best to let them have it their way and let the law enforcement agencies handle this themselves. It's still legal to spam other spammers (i.e. overload them with real fake responses. responses of real people that are indistinguishable from responses by real customers without human effort).
Just today I found this cool tool that converts easy to type ascii notation for formulas ("simplied TeX") to mathml using javascript. And there are also visual tools to help. There is a special page to make it easier to use in email: http://math.chapman.edu/email/
one way is: 11/2 and this is the way I would usually do it (with an html composer that has superscript/subscript buttons like all three different alternative composers in FastMail.FM's webmail interface).
My student normally don't do these things. But then I can do the guesswork on what they mean, but I don't expect them to do the ame to understand what I say. Anyway most of my students use forums were they have an eqation editor that creates mathml (if they run winxp and can have admin privileges).
The box you describe is my "new" desktop (actually it's almost 4 years old now). The box I was trying to put Linux on is an 8 years old 500 MHz Pentium 3 with quite standard ASUS motherboard, ATI graphics card and SB soundcard, with 128MB RAM which is quite a lot compared to what used to be on PCs back when it was new, and I think the main reason that Knoppix 3.7 that happens to work on it is painfully slow is that Knoppix "steals" much of the RAM for the RAMdisk it "installs" itself on and not enough is left for applications. So it should be able to cope with a reasonable Linux installation, only I was unlucky until now and haven't succeeded in installing one (a similar machine my parents had handled WinXP quite well for a few years).
Email messages need to convey information. If I need to tell a student that 2 x e is not integrable in elementary tame then you say I have to create a pdf document for this one sentence? Most people I know attach a word document to do it because they don't know any other way. Or I can write $e^{x^2}$ like mathematicians do and tell my students that hardly cope with their math that they need to learn TeX before they can learn math. Or I can write e^x^2 and make it ambiguous. Or I can do what I do and write e<sup>x<sup>2</sup></sup> and send it in a message with Content-type set to text/html and the student will be able to see it in any mime compliant email reader that is set to render a minimal harmless subset of html (sadly Slashdot doesn't think <sup> is a safe tag for me to use in formating a post making me use "code" formating to make sure this is rendered with fixed width font. In Email I don't even get the option to set fixed width font unless I use HTML or attach a file created in a word processor).
In real life most of the email I write is in Hebrew and there is no real plain text format that guaranties the recipient sees the same sentence I wrote. HTML provides the tools needed to control the way text is displayed without needing to create printable documents for every short note. When I compose English email I use plain text unless I need to convey information that needs html like math formulas or links.
HTML is not really needed if formatting is needed. People can just write the message in MS Word and attach the file if HTML is unavailable! Really good choice indeed!
I use FastMail.FM webmail to read my email. I always view HTML. The HTML produced is a subset of the full HTML and most tags are "defanged" (including images and forms but lots of other stuff too). That's the correct way to read email. Banning HTML completely instead of allowing a secure subset in a secure environment means people would opt for formats that are much worse than HTML.
Slashdot Mirror
god.i.va - seems like a nice domain name, and it's not in use by anyone, but where does one register *.va domains?
> If someone cites Wikipedia or sites like it gets a lower grade, ...
I wonder if they would get a lower grade if they cited Britanica, as comparison by Nature showed it was not more accurate then Wikipedia, at least in scientific matters.
My son is 12 years old. He uses Wikipedia and we encourage him. When he sees something that's not accurate he knows there's an "edit" button and he fixes it. It he's not sure he doesn't (and he knows he can raise the issue in the discussion page).
There's no such thing as "100% accurate information" (well, except perhaps the RFCeditor site, if what you claim is the "RFC says blah"). There are many mistakes in Wikipedia. E.g.,I just corrected several false "facts" in the "planar graphs" entry a few weeks ago. There are also mistakes in other sources but I cannot correct them. Does that make them more credible?
Another story: a colleague of mine (quite a few years ago) has taught a course from an old and very famous book. Some students questioned a proof and he insisted that that were the proof. The next time he openned the lecture with an apology and said that the book was wrong. And then he went on to explain that he grew up in an environment that worshipped the "word of the book" as unquestionable truth (communist Russia) so he haven't considered the possibility that the book could be wrong.
And yet another story: I know a book by a respected mathematican published by a respected publisher (AMS), that has a trivial mistake in the first theorem in page 1. There's a trivial counter example. The rest of the math in the book depends on this first theorem, so it's a whole book full of proofs that rely on a wrong fact! It's not Wikipedia. It's a peer reviewed scientific publication by an expert in the field. But it's useless for anyone except those that don't realize the first theorem is wrong. There are many examples in math of published results that turned up to be wrong.
Teaching students that no source of info can be trusted to be 100% accurate and that they can contribute themselves to inproving accuracy is a far more valuable lesson than blocking them from using peer reviewd sources like Wikipedia.
Well... I should really stop here, but just one more story:
A few days ago my 12 years old son had some assignment and the teacher provided several sources on the web (non of which was Wikipedia). One of the sources was an assignment posted by a student, and simple Google searches revealed that it was a cut & paste job from various other websites. several of the sources had large parts copied from Wikipedia...
Just like the police is not going to investigate a burglary (or even know it happened) unless the victim complains, so the DMCA expects hosts to act on complaint and does not expect them to act when no one complains.
...
Of course one might expect that the police will act to prevent burglary from happening, and they do, but they cannot prevent it entirely as we all know. YouTube also makes a reasonable effort to make it hard to post some kinds of materials, but they cannot and cannot be expected to totally prevent posting of copyrighted works without permission. If you want better protection against burglary than what thee police provides to the public, you can pay for it
Finaly: if YouTube refrained from posting copyrighted material it would be empty. There is no such thing. Everything is copyrighted. If you contribute your work to the public domain it just means that you licensed your work to the public. It cannot be determined to be in the public domain without such a license (your death certificate can be a substitute for that license...). When the copyright merchants complain that "YouTube is distributing copyrighted content" what they mean is that they are allowing the distribution of content by people who do not have permisions. Posting of copyrighted content with permision is allowed and is perfectly legal, as long as the copyright holder permits it, and I'm quite positive that by accepting YouTube ToS a user declares that posted material are allowed to be posted by the copyright holder. So it's not a question of whether or not posted material is copyrighted or not. It's a question of whether or not the copyright holder permitted it. And YouTube has no reasonable way to know this is so unless the copyright holder says so. The discussed section of the DMCA says it is OK to post unless there copyright holder explicitly says "no", just like the police department may assume that the people taking all that furniture and loading it on that truck have been allowed to do it by the owner, unless someone says it's a burglary, or it looks very much like a burglary (such as happenning in the midle of the night).
An important difference is that in the case of copyrights the same technology that allows the the cheap distribution of information also allows the copyright holder to locate infringing copies. Google provides such tools (its search engine). The guy with the stolen skis has no way to tell which pair of skis on sale at Ebay is his pair of skis.
Are you claiming that since registration of a work is not required to obtain copyright I cannot claim that I wrote "Tom Sawyer" but if it were required and the author failed to register then I would be able to claim that I'm the author?
I think that "Tom Sawyer" is in the public domain and is not protected by copyright but I still cannot claim I am the author, and even though registration was required at the time it was first published, had the author forgot to register for copyright at the time it might have meant that Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) would perhaps have lost some income but I don't think it would have made it possible for me to legally claim I wrote it. At least not if I were to try and profit from this lie. Lying perhaps is legal, but making money by lying is not. And if it is absolutely legal for me to take a work out of the public domain and claim that I wrote it now and therefore I can obtain copyright for the work for the next zillion years then something's absolutely wrong.
Anyway, I don't understand how an unknown author that sends a manuscript to a publisher is protected if the manuscript is subject to abstract copyright. If the work is "stolen" how does she prove she was the copyright owner? Being able to register the work for something like the price of domain registration can provide proof (nowadays one might pay notary much more for the this kind of service).
Those are very interesting points you raise.
You say that requiring a fee to register for copyright protection would undermine free open source. So I would expect supporters of of the FOSS and Creative Commons "share alike" model to be supporters of "no registration required", but the Lawrence Lessig writes exactly the opposite in his book "Free Culture" (http://www.free-culture.cc/). In the "Afterword" in this book he favourably describes Richard Stallman's motivation in creating Gnu and the GPL, and then advocates mandatory registration of copyrights and periodical extensions of them (He suggests that registration can be done through registrars just like domain registration).
Is requiring a fee really contraditory to open source? I don't know. The GPL requires making the sources and the license available which also creates some costs. Anyway, the GPL doesn't necessarily means that a programmer cannot release her own contributed code separately under other licences, including releasing it to the public domain. It just requires that the code that is published together with the original code is made available under the GPL (and of course the original code cannot be republished under any license not allowed by the original license). So in a "registration required" environment modification to GPLed code that is protected be copyright can be released under the GPL and the original copyright would still apply to portions of the modified code. Other portions might not be protected by copyright (they would be public domain unless they are registered, and provided they can exist independently).
In the same chapter he discusses the requirment of marking a copyrighted work (that was dropped about 30 years ago in the US) and suggests that failing to provide required marking on some copies doesn't necessarily have to mean that copyright protection is lost entirely. This is something that I think can also apply to registration of a work in a legal environment that requires registration: If an author realizes she actualy wants to register for copyright protection, she should be able to do so within a reasonable time from when the work was first published (or created) and then publishing the work after the time of registration would be subject to copyright. This would also provide as a side effect some rotection to unregistered works that are registerable but this should only be so for a very limited time.
Now there's a possibility of someone taking someone else's copyrighted work and publishing it as her own work. That is criminal whether registration is required or not. When someone copies without permision they can have all sorts of explanations: they believed they had permission, they believed it's in the public domain etc. These excuses don't apply to registering someone else's work as your own.
I believe that requiring registeration of a work to obtain copyright protection is good for the litle guy. Without this requirement most works are automatically copyrighted and to use them in any way (quoting, derived work etc.) licensing is required, and a deep pocket is a huge advantage in securing licensing. The big guys also have an advantage in locating infringement and in suing. The little guy has no legal department.
...)
In practice right now the little guys are the ones opting for a sort of voluntary registration, called "Creative Commons". It is a mistake to think of CC as "Free open source non-software". It is not. Creative Commons is really about one thing: having creators of copyrighted works explicitly state what they allow and what they don't allow.
I can see how requiring registration was a burden for authors in the 19th century (requiring them to ride a few days to the capital city, stay several days to deal with the beaurocrats only to end up with something that is filed in a cabinet somewhere in government archives and a piece of paper as prrof of registration, and then no tools to discover infringement). But in the 21st century there is an internet connecting the whole world, data is is accessible from everywhre, an author in a distant village in Andes can access a registry and register a work for copyright just as an author in NYC can (well.. perhaps after riding a lama to the nearest Internet caffee), and registrration doesn't necessarily mean government or UN beaurocracy. It can be done by private companies or volunteer organizations. The MPAA or RIAA can run one. Creaive Commons can too. (But some of the exponentially increasing fees would have to go elsewhere
I used to have XBIFF running when I was using unix@edu (little window on the Xterminal that shows a mailbox and raises a flag when there's new mail).
Nowadays I use FastMail.fm and have FastCheck under Windows that creates an audible notification on incoming mail to monitored folders so new email "rings" just like a phone does (using IMAP IDLE extension notifications are practically real time). I file most incoming email out of the Inbox using Sieve so I don't get notifications for whatever I don't want to be notified about.
That's $8034690221294951377709810461705813012611014968913 964176506880 for keeping the copyright past the 1000th year.
Not Disney and not anyone and not everyone in the whole world together has this amout of money!
(And thanks Maxima for computing 10*2^199 for me!)
> many kinds of work cost a lot of money.
> Say goodbye to movies for a start,
> as well as games....
To make these things possible and profitable there's no need for automatic copyright on anything that lasts lifetime+70.
Three years copyright for preregistered works only would be enough to justify huge budget movies.
I think a very good compromise between no copyrights at all and the current crazy laws that makes it formally illegal to copy any post on the web because everything is automatically copyrighted is to have a copyright system that is very limited in time but has an option for almost perpetual copyright by extension of the copyright term.
What I think of reserves moral rights (a quote should mention the original author) automatically, but not property rights. Then an author (or a authorised representative) can register the work and have temporary monopoly for a short time (say 3 or 5 years). This would cost nothing or only a small handling fee. Then periodically the copyright term can be renewed, for an exponentially increasing fee. Theoreticaly a copyright could be extended forever but not practically. THis kind of system would enable Disney to keep the copyrights for old Mickey Mouse films for a very long time if it's profitable for them (I think they don't really have a problem with people using the Mickey Mouse trademark in nesw works because trademarks do not expire). On the other hand every work that's not profitable would end pretty soon in the public domain and those that are somewhat profitable would last longer but not forever under copyright.
Let's say an initial $10 fee to renew copyright on a work after 5 years, and then every 5 years the fee doubles: then it's:
$20 after 10 years
$80 after 20 years
$320 after 30 years
$1280 after 40 years
$5120 after 50 years
$20480 after 60 years
$81920 after 70 years
$327680 after 80 years
$1310720 after 90 years
$5242880 after 100 years
So if I were Disney making millions on Micky Mosue after 70 years I would certainly pay the fee, but after 100 years perhaps not.
I think the main barrier to sensible copyright laws is the Berne convention treaty that requires all members not to require copyright holders to register works as a condition to copyright protection, and applies this logic to anything produced regardless of financial value. This should be changed. A system of protections that differentiates more profitable from less profitable works would be beneficial to everyone: it could offer much better protection to those that require it without draining the public domain.
I don't know about entrapment, but if the mix was ordered by representatives of the copyright holders (the RIAA) was any copyright infringed? Doesn't this constitute explicit consent by the copyright holder?
There are various Logo environments, some are free. They are great for kids that know a few letters (see http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/)
) but unfortunately it is no longer available for free download (though there might be ways to get a copy). It's advantage over Logo is that it is used through a graphic interface and does not require the child to know anything about letters (perhaps it has some value as a preparation to reading as it makes a child realize how sequences of sybols arranged in different ways have different meanings.
. It is not a replacement for a standard graphics program but it lets kids be creative in a different way (composing images from erady made components.) I think it has some cool things like fractal-based generation of trees, letting the child "draw" a forest with each tree a randomly generated fractal. (I haven't followed Tux paint too much. Does it have these things? Tux paint have a problem of "too many penguins". It makes a child's drawing look like a Windows desktop after an ISP instalation disk has been run, assuming the ISP's logo is a penguin ;-) ).
There used to be a free program by Prof. Mark Overmars called Drape (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/kids/drape.html
The real reason to let kids use these is that it gives them more ways to be creative. It is not supposed to completely replace things like building blocks or Legos.
Game Maker (see http://www.gamemaker.nl/) by the same Prof. Overmars is suitable for older kids. My 6 year old child can do some things with it (actually he did when he was 5) but it's really not for his level and his success owes a lot to help from his 12 years old brother. For older kids it is a great way to learn programming in an environment that balances their needs for fast results with the ability to do complicated programming (and I've seen my older son progressing from simple graphic UI programming by dragging icons around and editting their property sheets to using more and more scripting). It's Windows only and the author claims it is not suitable for open sourcing or porting to other platforms as the code is too Windows-centric, but I think it can serve as a good model for creating a similar open source alternative - a programming environment that grows with the child.
Finally: even a standard graphics program such as MS Paint can let a child be creative, especially if a child learns to use Google images and copy/paste images to his/her own work. My younger son convinced himself at the age of 4 that he needs to learn to read because this is the key to obtain images from Google, and that he needs to learn English because searching in English produces more and better search results.
Prof. OverMars has one more cool program that kids can use to be creative and it is "Drawing for Children" (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/kids/draw.html)
Of course there's no body!
He didn't really die!
It's just that the effect of the super transformation formula has gone and he went back to his original identity of Evil Dr. RIAAlity!
They could have been much more successful if they haven't tries to reverse the role of a superhero into one that is protecting those that want to rule the planet from the evil public...
> The marketing company really needs to learn to think through ... ... say, a label saying who placed the device ...
> the possible consequences of their actions
>
Perhaps mark it "Adv:"?
You identified the real problem here, and this makes this incident quite like spam: this marketing method indirectly abused public resources and caused indirect costs to 3rd parties. Another spammy attribute of this marketing campaign is an attempt to disguise itself as something else (not looking like an an ad but as something that requires attention to determine what it is). It relied on the public handling of the strange "devices" that suddenly appeared everywhere, thus creating cost for 3rd parties was planned by whoever ran this campaign.
A lot of words are wasted trying to "define spam" as opt-in vs. opt-out, commercial or not etc. I think the real characteristic that includes spam and lots of other nuisanses we have nowadays, including the one discussed here, is the transfering of costs to third parties.
Boston authorities might have over reacted, but they certainly had to react. Nobody that's posting here knows what kind of other inteligence they had about terrorist activity in Boston that were irrelevant in other cities.
I don't know too much about VPN. My employer (Israeli Open University) gives me a Windows client called "CheckPoint VPN-1 SecuRemote" that I can download from their site and install to access the network from home (needless to say, I need to use my username and password). Most people use it to connect their PC and access their email from home using Outlook, accessing their files and folders on the intranet and accessing the internal website that is only accessible from withing the intranet. When I use it (I don't do it often) it connects me to the intranet and displays a Windows desktop for me to use logged into my account. It automatically mapped my local drives until I configured it to stop doing so fearing that I am connecting my Hard drives to the same Windows machine with lots of others that connect from home and might have all kinds of malware.
I don't really understand the logic of this: is it really safer to have people connect using VPN than to let them access specific services using authentication? (like use IMAP to use work email from home, connect to the intranet website using usermname/password authentication (perhaps only over ssl) and using a protocol like webdav or ftp (over ssl) to access files? And am I being paranoid about connecting my machine to the internal network this way (given that in the university all users are using Outlook+IE on Windows admin accounts, and at home I don't use either and only use limited privileges account for anything but maintenance).
There's hardly any Spam going out of Hotmail. Spam with a Hotmail return address usually is not sent by Hotmail. I have reported thousands of spam messages through SpamCop and have seen very few spam messages that were really sent from Hotmail's servers.
Email protocols are open standards. Anyone can use any address to identify with, and it is much easier for spammers to to pump out their spam with their own software that they run on the huge networks of computers they form from computers they hijack by infecting them with malware (botnets).
Webmail providers have tools to detect multiple signups and catch spammers, and Google's invitation system already let a spammer send himself (or herself?) 100 invitations (and then 10000 etc.) and yet there was very little spam coming out of Gmail, so they must have their spammer detection tools working OK, just like Hotmail and Yahoo do.
The difference between Fastmail and Gmail is that Gmail is run by a billion dollars corporation with huge infrastructure and has about 30,000,000 subscribers and FastMail.FM is run by a few developers on two racks with open source software and has only a 1,000,000 subscribers (perhaps a bit less).
And the main difference is that if you contact Gmail with a question or suggestion you get a form reply (to their credit they never called back but they did implement some of the suggestions I made). When you contact FastMail you usually get a reply from a developer and often the reply is something like ,"login to /beta/ and see if it works now". There are advantages and disadvantages to this.
There are people using both FastMail and Gmail (like I do) and enjoy both worlds. Both allow forwarding (free FastMail accounts require a little hacking that is documented in the FastMail wiki to do it) and cross-forwarding works great (both have duplicate suppression. In FastMail it is a documented fact. In Gmail it seems to work). There are people who like Gmail's interface better, and there are people who like FastMail's interface better, and of course FastMail has IMAP functionality on all membership levels including free accounts, so you can choose your interface. FastMail's interface is much geekier, but I guess for many Slashdotters this is an advantage.
I think Fastmail is worth checking out by Slashdotters at least to see how much functinality can be crammed into one webmail client. So go to Fastmail.FM and try it . Even if you don't adopt it as your main account you'd probably enjoy the experience and find some uses for it. (And if you don't want them to know I sent you remove the STKI parameter from the URL. Unlike Gmail, FastMail would not disclose to me who used my referal but only how many people used it).
The way I see it, Google will soon have to do in mainland Europe what it had to do in the UK - block users from registering @gmail.com addresses because someone else owns the trademark. So right now it allows Europeans to register @gmail addresses while they still can...
Getting rid of spam sent to Slashdot users is no big deal. There are many Slashdot users with Gmail accounts, so Gmail's filters should have no problem learning to recognize spam sent to mailing lists compiled from addresses harvested from Slashdot. So you don't see much spam except in the spam "folder". Your private email is a different story. I often see non-spam that Gmail puts in the spam folder, and I see lots of spam there despite the fact that my gmail address had very little circulation (it was only seen by very few people I sent invitation to. Otherwise it is only used by me to forward mail for backup in the Gmail account).
Besides, I have no idea how Gmail filters spam. I know quite well how FastMail filters spam: the processes are public, the blocklists and policies used in the SMTP gateway are known, and the filtering process is open (Spamassassin - an open source project, and the use of spamassassin scoring is completely customizable by the user).
> Why are the child porn types writing software that magically ...
> puts child porn on random people's computers?
> I'm really not clear about what they're accomplishing there,
And why do spammers send spam advertising whatever to "random people"?
The point you (and most everyone) doesn't understand is that spammers (advertisers of porn and child porn included) do not send their advertising to "people" at all. Spammers that "advertise" petty stock are advertising to a tiny percantage of email users and their method of reaching those mailboxes is issuing all the email routing instructions they know. Advertisers of child porn are trying to reach a tiny fraction of the population that is willing to pay for their "offering" and their method is using software inserted into hundreds of thousands of hijacked PCs that shows popup ads (probably not just of child porn). Haven't you seen TV commercials directed at much less than half the watching audience?
The point is that the advertiser cares only about the relevant audience: potential paying customers. The rest of the targets is a side effect of the method of market research. Since it is much more expensive (or impossible) to find out in advance exactly how to reach your potential audience, you use a method that would bring your "message" to a wider audience that would include your desired audience. The ones who want the info would come to you. The rest of them would ignore it, or perhaps would be annoyed or appaled, but what do you care: they're not potential customers of yours anyway!
TV comercials are expensive, so advertisers at least invest in finding audiences that have higher percentage of their desired audience (relative to cost of advertising). Email and popup and other spam costs next to nothing, so the most cost effective method of "market research" here is to just send to as many "random targets" as possible. Some of them would turn out to be paying customers. The rest of them are not interesting. The spammer doesn't care what they think.
So this is the explanation of their motive: they didn't really know if you or your windows based server is a consumer child pornography. Since it cost them nothing to install their software on your machine they did it anyway "just in case".
Some consequences:
Ratio of customers/spam served is imaterial. Spammers would send as much as they can and take as much business as they get.
Therefore blocking spam to uninterested parties does not hurt the spammer's business model. It helps the spammer, since the spammer's business model is tto let the market research itself by having uninterested parties not respond to spam.
Spammers are not interested in "removing" email addresses. sending does not cost them as much as maintaining "clean lists". They only handle whoever is responding and paying for their stuff. They don't and cannot handle the rest of us. There are too many of us and dealing with us produces no income to the spammer.
Finally: spamers (including popup spammers that sell anything, including child porn) are not equipped to handle masses of responds that don't lead to income. Not responding to them helps them keep their businesses running. If people start responding, making them act on the response but producing no income their business model would collapse.
So if you want to hurt child pornography business the way to act would be to let them popup their ads, erspond to them, feed in fake info and fake CC number and order some of their stuff. Eventually they would find out the info is fake, possibly after paying for the processing of the fake order. If enough people do it they would not be able to find someone to process their order.
Unfortunately if you do try to interfere with their business you might go to jail for the child pronography they displayed on your PC, so its best to let them have it their way and let the law enforcement agencies handle this themselves.
It's still legal to spam other spammers (i.e. overload them with real fake responses. responses of real people that are indistinguishable from responses by real customers without human effort).
Just today I found this cool tool that converts easy to type ascii notation for formulas ("simplied TeX") to mathml using javascript. And there are also visual tools to help.
There is a special page to make it easier to use in email: http://math.chapman.edu/email/
1^{1/2} in HTML:
l l_example.html which actually has a cool equation editor :)
one way is: 11/2 and this is the way I would usually do it (with an html composer that has superscript/subscript buttons like all three different alternative composers in FastMail.FM's webmail interface).
Another way: 2
And another: 1½ (this is doable in fckeditor or in xinha using the "Insert special characters" button, see http://www.fckeditor.net/demo and http://xinha.gogo.co.nz/xinha-nightly/examples/fu
(I got the html entities from http://www.bigbaer.com/sidebars/entities/)
My student normally don't do these things. But then I can do the guesswork on what they mean, but I don't expect them to do the ame to understand what I say. Anyway most of my students use forums were they have an eqation editor that creates mathml (if they run winxp and can have admin privileges).
The box you describe is my "new" desktop (actually it's almost 4 years old now). The box I was trying to put Linux on is an 8 years old 500 MHz Pentium 3 with quite standard ASUS motherboard, ATI graphics card and SB soundcard, with 128MB RAM which is quite a lot compared to what used to be on PCs back when it was new, and I think the main reason that Knoppix 3.7 that happens to work on it is painfully slow is that Knoppix "steals" much of the RAM for the RAMdisk it "installs" itself on and not enough is left for applications. So it should be able to cope with a reasonable Linux installation, only I was unlucky until now and haven't succeeded in installing one (a similar machine my parents had handled WinXP quite well for a few years).
Email messages need to convey information.
If I need to tell a student that
2
x
e is not integrable in elementary tame then you say I have to create a pdf document for this one sentence? Most people I know attach a word document to do it because they don't know any other way. Or I can write $e^{x^2}$ like mathematicians do and tell my students that hardly cope with their math that they need to learn TeX before they can learn math. Or I can write e^x^2 and make it ambiguous. Or I can do what I do and write e<sup>x<sup>2</sup></sup> and send it in a message with Content-type set to text/html and the student will be able to see it in any mime compliant email reader that is set to render a minimal harmless subset of html (sadly Slashdot doesn't think <sup> is a safe tag for me to use in formating a post making me use "code" formating to make sure this is rendered with fixed width font. In Email I don't even get the option to set fixed width font unless I use HTML or attach a file created in a word processor).
In real life most of the email I write is in Hebrew and there is no real plain text format that guaranties the recipient sees the same sentence I wrote. HTML provides the tools needed to control the way text is displayed without needing to create printable documents for every short note. When I compose English email I use plain text unless I need to convey information that needs html like math formulas or links.
HTML is not really needed if formatting is needed. People can just write the message in MS Word and attach the file if HTML is unavailable! Really good choice indeed!
I use FastMail.FM webmail to read my email. I always view HTML. The HTML produced is a subset of the full HTML and most tags are "defanged" (including images and forms but lots of other stuff too). That's the correct way to read email. Banning HTML completely instead of allowing a secure subset in a secure environment means people would opt for formats that are much worse than HTML.