I'm for very limited copyright terms, but do understand your concerns.
What I don't understand is why all works need to have copyright protection for the same amount of time. Yes, your series of novels might need more than 14 years protection, but software certainly doesn't. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. Does that need as much protection as a novel, a piece of art, etc.? I'd actually like to know how much business MS does in Windows 1.0 these days. Hell, how much business does MS do in any of their EOL OSes?
Perhaps software should get a 5 year copyright with an option of another 5 if the product is still commerically viable (as most people know, 10 years is an eternity in the world of software development). Maybe novels should get 15 with a similar extension. The nature of artistic works are not the same, so perhaps they shouldn't get the same protection
Oddly enough my networking professor, who I must say was huge on command line apps in general, showed us how to telnet in to port 25 to send "anonymous email". I'll never forget how he described the evils of "cumbersome email clients". "Why use Outlook or Thunderbird", he said, "this is much easier."
If what you say is indeed correct, then your state is violating the 7th Amendment of the US Constitution. To wit:
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
If the RIAA sues me for $1,000,000... I don't have anywhere near that. Go ahead, sue me. You'll never get paid. If push comes to shove, I liquidate all my assets and move to Canada.
Ask for a damned jury trial. No jury in the world is going to make you pay such exorbitant sums for downloading a movie here or there. People get that downloading "Ice Age" from TBP isn't worth $150,000.
If your trial is of the criminal nature, you're going to get a public defender anyway, so you could always discuss it with him.
There are also some adults who shouldn't be parenting kids.
You, sir, have become a friend.
Re:My College Offered a Class Like This...
on
Hacker Boot Camp
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I currently attend WSU. Dr. Mateti is certainly a great professor (he says after changing majors after taking Mateti's OS course) and did push hard for an "ethical hacking" class. I was going to take it before I changed my major, but I heard from several friends that they learned more in that class than any other class they took at WSU.
As mostly an aside, I decided I didn't like programming and subsequently changed my major to Mathematics with a concentration in computing. I love algorithm analysis, optimization, discrete math, etc. It sure beat the systems programming I was doing! People also interested in the theoretical portion of CS/Math may want to look into a class in modern algebra.
Otherwise, the entire nation would bow to New York's interests.
That argument doesn't hold water. If we'd abolished the electoral college in 2004 Bush would have still won.
For presidential elections, they don't have to take your vote.
In many states, it is illegal to become "faithless" and vote for someone else other than who you have pledged to. Of course, you're right. The state decides how electors are elected. They can be appointed, etc.
Basically, you're saying "it could be worse, so quit whining", which ranks you up there with the torture apologists who say that "at least we're better than Saddam".
In response to the original question, spying on our own citizens is framed as a national security issue (so it immediately gets at least 300 votes in the House and 70 votes in the Senate). Border control isn't. I could spout off theories as to why this is, but I don't want to stray off topic.
I've made the move to a GNU/Linux system a few months ago using FC4 (and now FC5) as my distro of choice. I'm really hooked on the GUI tools that are coded for Fedora Core (redhat-config-$SERVICE). I tried Ubuntu and tried to configure Samba. On FC4/5 it took about 2 minutes and a few more to mount a few shares using CIFS in/etc/fstab. I had a hell of a time doing it in Dapper. I gave up after about 10 minutes of 'man samba' and related docs.
Had it not been for that bad experience (and perhaps I missed something that would have made it much easier), I probably would have stuck with it. Unfortunately, I did and decided to stick with Fedora.
The UK House of Commons has pretty much the same voting system we do. First past the post/fixed districts. They have 11 different parties represented*. For effect I will list them all:
Labour Conservative Lib. Dems Democratic Unionist Scottish National Sinn Fein Plaid Cymru Social Dem./Labour Ulster Unionist RESPECT Kidderminster Health Concern
Tell me again how we will always have 2 parties. The only way we will continue to have 2 parties is if people are resigned to the fact that we will have 2 parties.
*Sinn Fein is technically not represented as they refuse to swear an oath to the Queen.
I will agree with you on the following conditions:
1) You can guarantee that everyone who wishes to work will have a job that will enable them to pay for adequate medical care. 2) In the absence of condition #1, you can guarantee that no one will be subject to serious injury, permanent disability, or death because they were unable to pay for health care (in fact this happens quite a bit already).
I understand that you do not wish to pay for health care for people who are simply too lazy to get a job and work like the rest of us, but I don't think you wish to say "fuck you" to everyone who might have had bad luck and got laid-off. In absence of those conditions, you're basically saying "If you can't to pay, you deserve to die." If that is your opinion, then more power to you, but I don't think you'll have much luck getting your views past the front door of Congress or your state legislature.
Supply and demand does not work with health care unless you're allowing for "If you can't pay, you deserve to die". Assume I have a condition that requires expensive medication that I will die without. If my insurance company decides I am no longer profitable, they will increase my premiums. If I cannot afford the new premiums, they will drop me. At some point I am simply uninsurable. Being uninsured means I cannot afford my medication, and I will soon die.
Certainly, there is no universal imperative that says you are obligated to pay for others' care, but not doing so in this siutation is awfully callous and downright cold (we can debate the efficiency of Medicare/Medicaid at a later time). I hope you do not mean that.
1) Should corporations be beholden to only the pursuit of profit?
I say that corporations, since they are legal persons, should have exactly the same rights as people. They should be able to vote. They should be put in jail for misdeameanors and felonies. Since they can't really be jailed, they are fined. If the fine is less than the profit gained from the illegal transaction, it just becomes a cost of doing business. Now I don't believe corporations should have the same rights as people, but if they're going to be subject to the protections of the 14th Amendment, then they'd better be subject to all the Constitution's provisions. Lets really show the SCOTUS how bad they fucked up when they decided that corporations were people.
2) Why should corporations pay for health insurance?
Accepting that corporations should maximize profit at all other costs, they shouldn't. Of course, as my friend Profane MuthaFucka said, since WalMart doesn't do it, I end up doing it anyway. Certainly, looking out for numbero uno as WalMart is doing will apply to me. Therefore, I wouldn't care about WalMart's well being and would subsequently rather have them do it.
All jests aside, I think its going to take someone hacking the machine to display some incredible result for people to get excited about this issue. I'm thinking someone needs to hack machines in a small, safe D or R state -- perhaps Wyoming or DC. Just imagine if John McCain won DC or Hilary Clinton won Wyoming... both with over 90% of the vote. That'd raise some eyebrows and, more importantly, not affect the end result of the election, assuming 3 EVs wouldn't change the balance.
Well the grandparent is actually correct in how many people view copyright. Indeed, with the retroactive extensions and such, it seems that the people in Congress believe this as well.
You also touch on the fact that the "limited time" is limited in name only. The copyright on MS Windows 1.0 will last until 2080. Even if that code can still be found at that time, will it be of any use to anyone? Assuming MS is the only entity that has access to that code, what is to stop them from deleting it the day it falls into the public domain? Yeah, its in the public domain, but have fun finding a copy of it!
For these reasons I advocate a much shorter copyright term for source code -- 10 years max. To qualify for copyright, a copy of the work must be also be deposited with the Library of Congress to be sure that such works will actually be available when their term is up.
You may have to have a counterpart in a different branch of government review an "emergency closure request" or somesuch and OK it.
You bring up an interesting point here, one that shows something interesting about the way we often think of our checks and balances system.
In theory, all three branches of government are co-equal and enact checks on each other so that any one branch cannot become too powerful. As we've seen in the last few years, this is not the way it works in practice. In practice, if the legislature and executive are controlled by the same political party, there are essentially no real checks and/or balances with respect to those branches. The Congress will never enact any sort of check on President Bush because party loyalty trumps country loyalty (loyalty to the Constitution). I am too young to recall the days when the Democrats were in control of both the executive and legislative branches, but I suspect there was much trouble with getting Congress to conduct meaningful oversight against the executive.
Getting back to the point at hand, so long as such an "emergency closure request" is okayed by a member of the judiciary, it might work. Asking anyone else is asking for trouble. Even then, the judiciary is powerless if the executive and legislative branches decide to ignore it. If Congress wants to pass bills of attainder and Bush complies, the courts can't do anything.
What many of us forget is that the people are the true guardians of the Constitution. If our leaders regularly subvert it. It is our job to alter or abolish the institutions that allows for such behavior. The only question is when will we have enough BS and take to the streets. I fear that we have become so docile as to not care. I hope I'm wrong.
I knew that my incredibly hard-to-understand scrawling would cause some confusion.
I don't like sudo because I have to append "sudo" to everything. I made a root account on Ubuntu, but the pop-up windows for GUI programs that required it, still used the sudo (user) password.
Upon looking around, I hear using "sudo bash" is a good way to get around typing "sudo" on every line. Why I never though of that, I'll never know. I'd still like for an attacker to have to break 2 passwords rather than one.
Note: Fedora doesn't use sudo by default. It can be installed, but I don't like it. Ubuntu requires it.
I've tried both Fedora and {K/U}buntu. I stuck with Fedora for one reason... sudo. There is no way to get rid of using sudo to do administrative tasks. Give me a user account and a root account on Ubuntu and I'll probably switch.
And yes, I do know you can enable the root account on Ubuntu, but I don't know how to make it such that it asks for the root password rather than the user password for sudo.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm for very limited copyright terms, but do understand your concerns.
What I don't understand is why all works need to have copyright protection for the same amount of time. Yes, your series of novels might need more than 14 years protection, but software certainly doesn't. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. Does that need as much protection as a novel, a piece of art, etc.? I'd actually like to know how much business MS does in Windows 1.0 these days. Hell, how much business does MS do in any of their EOL OSes?
Perhaps software should get a 5 year copyright with an option of another 5 if the product is still commerically viable (as most people know, 10 years is an eternity in the world of software development). Maybe novels should get 15 with a similar extension. The nature of artistic works are not the same, so perhaps they shouldn't get the same protection
Then log in as AC you fool!
Oddly enough my networking professor, who I must say was huge on command line apps in general, showed us how to telnet in to port 25 to send "anonymous email". I'll never forget how he described the evils of "cumbersome email clients". "Why use Outlook or Thunderbird", he said, "this is much easier."
If what you say is indeed correct, then your state is violating the 7th Amendment of the US Constitution. To wit:
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Heh ... you're using Pine? Real nerds just telnet to port 110.
</sarcasm>
Well you can't squeeze blood from a turnip.
... I don't have anywhere near that. Go ahead, sue me. You'll never get paid. If push comes to shove, I liquidate all my assets and move to Canada.
If the RIAA sues me for $1,000,000
The point is that any average joe with enough fortitude can do this themselves.
And her guilt isn't of issue. The issue is if the RIAA can prove that she is guilty by the preponderance of the evidence.
You don't even have to do that.
Ask for a damned jury trial. No jury in the world is going to make you pay such exorbitant sums for downloading a movie here or there. People get that downloading "Ice Age" from TBP isn't worth $150,000.
If your trial is of the criminal nature, you're going to get a public defender anyway, so you could always discuss it with him.
There are also some adults who shouldn't be parenting kids.
You, sir, have become a friend.
I currently attend WSU. Dr. Mateti is certainly a great professor (he says after changing majors after taking Mateti's OS course) and did push hard for an "ethical hacking" class. I was going to take it before I changed my major, but I heard from several friends that they learned more in that class than any other class they took at WSU.
For anyone interested in the class (CEG 429), Dr. Mateti licenses all his lecture notes under the Open Publication License.
Agreed.
I wanted to "do computers" when I was in high school, so that meant CS for me. I, after 3.5 years figured out that CS wasn't my cup of tea.
As mostly an aside, I decided I didn't like programming and subsequently changed my major to Mathematics with a concentration in computing. I love algorithm analysis, optimization, discrete math, etc. It sure beat the systems programming I was doing! People also interested in the theoretical portion of CS/Math may want to look into a class in modern algebra.
Otherwise, the entire nation would bow to New York's interests.
That argument doesn't hold water. If we'd abolished the electoral college in 2004 Bush would have still won.
For presidential elections, they don't have to take your vote.
In many states, it is illegal to become "faithless" and vote for someone else other than who you have pledged to. Of course, you're right. The state decides how electors are elected. They can be appointed, etc.
Basically, you're saying "it could be worse, so quit whining", which ranks you up there with the torture apologists who say that "at least we're better than Saddam".
It's not me ;-)
In response to the original question, spying on our own citizens is framed as a national security issue (so it immediately gets at least 300 votes in the House and 70 votes in the Senate). Border control isn't. I could spout off theories as to why this is, but I don't want to stray off topic.
I've made the move to a GNU/Linux system a few months ago using FC4 (and now FC5) as my distro of choice. I'm really hooked on the GUI tools that are coded for Fedora Core (redhat-config-$SERVICE). I tried Ubuntu and tried to configure Samba. On FC4/5 it took about 2 minutes and a few more to mount a few shares using CIFS in /etc/fstab. I had a hell of a time doing it in Dapper. I gave up after about 10 minutes of 'man samba' and related docs.
Had it not been for that bad experience (and perhaps I missed something that would have made it much easier), I probably would have stuck with it. Unfortunately, I did and decided to stick with Fedora.
Do you have a link that lists the states in question?
The UK House of Commons has pretty much the same voting system we do. First past the post/fixed districts. They have 11 different parties represented*. For effect I will list them all:
Labour
Conservative
Lib. Dems
Democratic Unionist
Scottish National
Sinn Fein
Plaid Cymru
Social Dem./Labour
Ulster Unionist
RESPECT
Kidderminster Health Concern
Tell me again how we will always have 2 parties. The only way we will continue to have 2 parties is if people are resigned to the fact that we will have 2 parties.
*Sinn Fein is technically not represented as they refuse to swear an oath to the Queen.
I will agree with you on the following conditions:
1) You can guarantee that everyone who wishes to work will have a job that will enable them to pay for adequate medical care.
2) In the absence of condition #1, you can guarantee that no one will be subject to serious injury, permanent disability, or death because they were unable to pay for health care (in fact this happens quite a bit already).
I understand that you do not wish to pay for health care for people who are simply too lazy to get a job and work like the rest of us, but I don't think you wish to say "fuck you" to everyone who might have had bad luck and got laid-off. In absence of those conditions, you're basically saying "If you can't to pay, you deserve to die." If that is your opinion, then more power to you, but I don't think you'll have much luck getting your views past the front door of Congress or your state legislature.
Supply and demand does not work with health care unless you're allowing for "If you can't pay, you deserve to die". Assume I have a condition that requires expensive medication that I will die without. If my insurance company decides I am no longer profitable, they will increase my premiums. If I cannot afford the new premiums, they will drop me. At some point I am simply uninsurable. Being uninsured means I cannot afford my medication, and I will soon die.
Certainly, there is no universal imperative that says you are obligated to pay for others' care, but not doing so in this siutation is awfully callous and downright cold (we can debate the efficiency of Medicare/Medicaid at a later time). I hope you do not mean that.
This question is asking two seperate questions.
1) Should corporations be beholden to only the pursuit of profit?
I say that corporations, since they are legal persons, should have exactly the same rights as people. They should be able to vote. They should be put in jail for misdeameanors and felonies. Since they can't really be jailed, they are fined. If the fine is less than the profit gained from the illegal transaction, it just becomes a cost of doing business.
Now I don't believe corporations should have the same rights as people, but if they're going to be subject to the protections of the 14th Amendment, then they'd better be subject to all the Constitution's provisions. Lets really show the SCOTUS how bad they fucked up when they decided that corporations were people.
2) Why should corporations pay for health insurance?
Accepting that corporations should maximize profit at all other costs, they shouldn't. Of course, as my friend Profane MuthaFucka said, since WalMart doesn't do it, I end up doing it anyway. Certainly, looking out for numbero uno as WalMart is doing will apply to me. Therefore, I wouldn't care about WalMart's well being and would subsequently rather have them do it.
All jests aside, I think its going to take someone hacking the machine to display some incredible result for people to get excited about this issue. I'm thinking someone needs to hack machines in a small, safe D or R state -- perhaps Wyoming or DC. Just imagine if John McCain won DC or Hilary Clinton won Wyoming ... both with over 90% of the vote. That'd raise some eyebrows and, more importantly, not affect the end result of the election, assuming 3 EVs wouldn't change the balance.
Any takers?
Well the grandparent is actually correct in how many people view copyright. Indeed, with the retroactive extensions and such, it seems that the people in Congress believe this as well.
You also touch on the fact that the "limited time" is limited in name only. The copyright on MS Windows 1.0 will last until 2080. Even if that code can still be found at that time, will it be of any use to anyone? Assuming MS is the only entity that has access to that code, what is to stop them from deleting it the day it falls into the public domain? Yeah, its in the public domain, but have fun finding a copy of it!
For these reasons I advocate a much shorter copyright term for source code -- 10 years max. To qualify for copyright, a copy of the work must be also be deposited with the Library of Congress to be sure that such works will actually be available when their term is up.
You may have to have a counterpart in a different branch of government review an "emergency closure request" or somesuch and OK it.
You bring up an interesting point here, one that shows something interesting about the way we often think of our checks and balances system.
In theory, all three branches of government are co-equal and enact checks on each other so that any one branch cannot become too powerful. As we've seen in the last few years, this is not the way it works in practice. In practice, if the legislature and executive are controlled by the same political party, there are essentially no real checks and/or balances with respect to those branches. The Congress will never enact any sort of check on President Bush because party loyalty trumps country loyalty (loyalty to the Constitution). I am too young to recall the days when the Democrats were in control of both the executive and legislative branches, but I suspect there was much trouble with getting Congress to conduct meaningful oversight against the executive.
Getting back to the point at hand, so long as such an "emergency closure request" is okayed by a member of the judiciary, it might work. Asking anyone else is asking for trouble. Even then, the judiciary is powerless if the executive and legislative branches decide to ignore it. If Congress wants to pass bills of attainder and Bush complies, the courts can't do anything.
What many of us forget is that the people are the true guardians of the Constitution. If our leaders regularly subvert it. It is our job to alter or abolish the institutions that allows for such behavior. The only question is when will we have enough BS and take to the streets. I fear that we have become so docile as to not care. I hope I'm wrong.
Yeah, I'm new to Linux. :-)
Thanks for the info.
I knew that my incredibly hard-to-understand scrawling would cause some confusion.
I don't like sudo because I have to append "sudo" to everything. I made a root account on Ubuntu, but the pop-up windows for GUI programs that required it, still used the sudo (user) password.
Upon looking around, I hear using "sudo bash" is a good way to get around typing "sudo" on every line. Why I never though of that, I'll never know. I'd still like for an attacker to have to break 2 passwords rather than one.
Note: Fedora doesn't use sudo by default. It can be installed, but I don't like it. Ubuntu requires it.
I've tried both Fedora and {K/U}buntu. I stuck with Fedora for one reason ... sudo. There is no way to get rid of using sudo to do administrative tasks. Give me a user account and a root account on Ubuntu and I'll probably switch.
And yes, I do know you can enable the root account on Ubuntu, but I don't know how to make it such that it asks for the root password rather than the user password for sudo.