Of course it isn't, but it is "secure enough" to operate without a firewall regularly without getting taken over by a random worm. Most people do not need to be too concerned about direct cracking since most people do not run high-profile targets or anything of interest to a cracker. Obviously you can get a locked down NetBSD box and run a virtual server and redirect to a honeypot or two and spend all your time parsing logs. The point is can Windows run as securely as the average Linux box without disabling the functionality you want to use it for in the first place?
A competent system administrator can secure Windows and keep it secure, just as with Linux. An incompetent sysadmin will fail with both.
I'm not sure that is true. I mean sure anything can be secure if you unplug it, but can a Windows machine be as secure while still as functional as a Linux machine? The first suggestions you hear for securing windows are install updates and put it behind a firewall. That's good advice for any system, but a firewall should be an extra layer of security, not a necessary one. If your only solution for securing Windows is put it behind a firewall that is running a different OS, well then that is a pretty big argument against it's security.
P.S. an expert can kill you with a fountain pen from 10 yards, that does not mean the army should not issue guns.
I can't help thinking that you're looking at this purely from the consumer's point of view
I am a published, professional author and I make the majority of my income by writing.
And what if I didn't, but someone did so without my permission... But now, instead of just getting the page containing the illegally leaked information taken down, that information is forever allowed to be kept in the public domain, through no fault of my own.
You are mistaking the purpose of copyright. Facts are not copyrightable. I'll repeat that... you can't copyright a fact. There is no legal way to use copyright law to stop distribution of trade secrets, information about you, or excerpts from a draft you have written. In the case of trade secrets the copyright is actually owned by the person who leaked the information, since they published it. You can stop a particular writing about something if you own it, and then only for a limited time, but there is no way to stop someone from paraphrasing your work and disseminating the information anyway.
As I've posted several times today, the position you and a few others here are advocating seems to assume that the same amount of information would be available, and as quickly, in the absence of copyright protection. I just don't see how that's ever going to be the case.
I've already told you twice, no I'm not saying that. I'm saying that copyright needs to be more limited, not removed. And you know what, if all copyrights expired in 10 years I don't think we'd have much difference in the amount material available. Writers write because they want to make a profit, communicate with customers and partners, or just express themselves. Reducing copyright lengths would not remove any of these motivations and it might actually increase the amount of material available.
Requiring an archived copy be kept for posterity would not inhibit any of the aforementioned motivations either. I'm sure a lot businesses would stop copyrighting every public relations announcement and letter sent out, but it's not like they would stop sending them. Some would send copies to the archive and most would realize that nobody wants to make exact copies of their webpage and would just publish it anyway.
The same advantage as a work that is never released at all: none. But you never had the natural right to copy it freely, because the natural state is that you don't have it at all. I think your whole argument forgets this fundamental point.
The natural state is I can copy anything I can see. You seem to think that without copyrights no one would bother to write or create anything. That is a ridiculous assumption. Writing is not made valuable solely by copyright law. Sending a letter to a business partner or putting up an advertisement is not worthless if it is not copyrighted. Most works don't need to be copyrighted to be of value to the author. Those works that do are works made for commercial distribution. Much less than one percent of commercially sold works still generate a profit after the first three years. Do you really think that companies would stop publishing works for commercial distribution if they lost the profit on that one percent? The reason copyrights last so long now are so companies can milk those very few works forever (removing their incentive to make new works) and so that companies don't have to compete against their old works which are then free. These companies make a very small amount of extra money at the price of actually inhibiting the production of new works and completely erasing our artisic and literary heritage to the point that very few people can see any older works since the 40's.
I'm writing this about a mile away from a British Copyright Library, in which is stored a copy of just about every book ever printed in this country.
Lucky you, 99.9999% of the world is not so lucky. Also even that library does not include works not published in the U.K. which is most
If you publish and copyright it, yes. If you don't want it saved for all time and the legal right to temporarily forbid others to copy it, just don't publish it. As for trade secrets the copyright is held by the leaker not the company and trade secret laws are not copyright laws. Facts cannot be copyrighted, so the actual information cannot be restricted by copyrighting it anyway.
There's no "natural right" to copying. There's the "artificial right" to copy. Much as copyright is artificial. Free speech is a natural right because it doesn't depend on others to exercise.
You're wrong. There is no reason other than artificial laws why I should not be able to copy word for word anything I see, be it a book or a billboard. Copyright is a limitation on my natural right to do so (which is part of free speech/expression by the way) that has been removed for a limited period of time to give authors financial incentive to share their work and create more works. Writing a book or copying another book is free speech. Read some of the writings of the founding fathers of the U.S. who wrote on this topic while arguing about it's implementation. There was little disagreement about the concept, but some thought (rightly so) that it would be abused and the U.S. would be in the same horrible situation as Britain with it's massive publishing houses. History has shown who was right.
Those are just the first few examples that come to mind, but the significance is clear: just because some information was available somewhere at some time, that doesn't automatically means there's a benefit to society to preserving that information in an obvious place for all time.
The answer to problems with information like drafts and trade secrets being public knowledge after being published is simple, don't publish them. If you don't want people to read drafts of unfinished works, don't publish them online. You do realize copyright law, even today in theory, insures that all copyrighted works are to be preserved for the public and given over to the public for all time once it expires right? And how many better authors would we have today if we did have Shakespeare's drafts to look at to help understand his writing process?
I'm going to skip your constitutional arguments, because copyright is an international convention, and most of the world isn't subject to your constitution. Can we agree the more neutral definition that copyright exists to promote the creation and distribution of works for the benefit of society?
Most copyright law in the world is pretty similar to that in the U.S., but fine lets ignore the U.S. constitution. Lets talk about natural versus artificial rights. Freedom of speech is in my opinion a natural right. Copyright is, in my opinion an artificial right, granted as part of an agreement between authors and those who would benefit from said authorship. Authors are rewarded for giving works to the public with the rights to make money. What advantage does a copyrighted work that is not available to the public give to the people who are giving up their natural right to copy it freely?
Your position is illogical. We're talking about material that has already been made available. If it's a work of value, then probably it was removed because the copyright holder was going to distribute it via some other means, or was working on a newer, better version and didn't want the out-of-date material getting in the way. If it's not a work of value, then there is little public interest to be served in preserving it, particularly if doing so causes any harmful effects to the parties involved.
And here is where your argument falls apart completely. You're making a whole slew of assumptions here, most of which are not true. First you're putting responsibility for deciding what is and is not of value to the public into the ahnds of the copyright owner (note in most cases this is NOT the author anymore). Next you're assuming that not only will the copyright owners know what works are valuable to the public, but they will act in the best interests of the public rather than in their own best interests.
You do realize that the vast majority of copyrighted works including art, literature, film, and music are completely unavailable to the average person right? About.05% of all copyrighted books are still in print and maybe 3% are still available either new or used. The same holds true for music. This is mostly because so many works are copyrighted, but no one knows who holds that copyright, or because the large companies that own millions of copyrights don't want older works to compete with current offerings. Is it in the best interests of the public as a whole to have no access to the majority of our artistic, music, theatrical, and literary heritage? How many great works are in those collections, that will never be seen ever again because the last copy is lost and it was illegal for anyone to make more except some company who did not see the profit in it?
If you remove copyright...
I never said anything about removing copyright, only reforming it. For example it used to be that every copyrighted work in the U.S. had to have two good copies sent to the library of congress to be archived for reference and to preserve the work for future generations. Sound familiar? If that law was still in effect
how about a home remodeling show "Fags have fun with your living room" ?
You know the term "queer" as in "Queer Eye for a Straight Guy" used to be an offensive term too, but some homosexuals embraced the term rather than being offended by it. I'd say the term "nerd" is likewise a badge of pride among many people. After all you're reading a site that says, "News for Nerds" right at the top of it.
which they will then resell and lease to private industry to generate another revenue stream for the government.
Are you kidding? The federal government does not generate revenue streams. The federal government will basically give the spectrum away to corporations who will in return make large donations to particular politicians' re-election funds. You're right about who will pay for it all though and in more than just money.
Putting material on the Internet does not give up your copyright on it, place it in the public domain, grant others the right to reproduce it any way they see fit, or otherwise work differently to copyright laws as they apply to all other media. There are necessarily certain implied rights, but arguing that actually ripping someone else's material and then making it publicly available after they've withdrawn it from their own site is a pretty big stretch to anyone without a vested interest.
Actually, while they do not give up any copyright, there are a number of explicitly stated, legal uses of copyrighted materials and there is a great deal of public benefit to enumerating a few more of them. Can you honestly argue it is not in the public's best interest that a historical archive of the internet exists, for educational reasons if no other? This case should be a poster child for just such legislation. A company published something, lied about it, and are now suing the people who made a copy and proved their guilt. Are you saying it is in the best interests of society that copyrights be used as tool to promote lies and censorship?
Copyright is supposed to be about one thing and one thing only, promoting science and arts. That is the only constitutional provision for its existence. If someone is copying legally obtained works into an archive for educational, historical, or non-profit uses then they are almost invariably helping to promote science and arts, and anyone trying to stop them is up to no good.
As to the letter of the law (which is probably unconstitutional although it is impossible to prove that) you're right. The internet archive is screwed in the U.S. and many other countries. They tried to do what copyright law originally required of copyright holders and the library of congress. If a work is to copyrighted then ethically it needs to be available. That is the whole point of copyright. According to the letter of the law it is probably illegal for me to print out the receipt some e-businesses display when I buy something online. The law needs to be fixed.
In fact, limiting the rights of others to distribute your works in order to encourage you to make them available is exactly what copyright is for, and this sort of case is a textbook example of why the principle matters.
What? How does this limiting of the rights of others encourage them to distribute the material? They, like the majority of copyright holders these days, don't want the work to be available at all. It does not encourage them to publish it, it just gives them a way to prevent works from being distributed.
The archive is in trouble not because the violated the intention of copyright. They, in fact, are trying to uphold the very principals upon which it is founded. Unfortunately, the laws have been changed by the corrupt and greedy to create a situation where copyright does exactly the opposite of its original purpose. This is a perfect example of copyright laws that have been rewritten being used to hold back progress and remove works from public availability. It is unethical and sickening and your implication that a businesses financial considerations should trump both the rights of our descendants to have access to our works and that they trump the the ability to find and present the truth in the courts... well it makes me want to vomit. Go to hell.
Anyone who starts a business trying to compete with them knows what they are in for, just like starting a business putting out fires competes with the fire department. Is that fair to the new business, maybe not, but there are damn good reasons why we have publicly owned police, fire departments, and a postal system. The potential for abuse of all these services is extremely high and all of them are vital to everyday life. The post office was created and protected from competition so that it can remain free of censorship, reliable, available in emergencies and throughout all economic situations, and free from tampering and theft. It may not always function perfectly, but it is a task that no private company can be trusted with yet.
The value of work is subjective, thus your proposal is impractical if not impossible. If no direct profit can be made a politician can still sell the labor to a co-conspirator for less than it is work in exchange for campaign contributions or other back scratching. It all leads to the same place, a re-institution of slavery. We already have way, way, way too many people in prison as it is. We have a larger percentage of our populace in prison than any other industrialized nation, with the possible exception of China. Giving politicians incentive to put even more people in prison and keep them there longer is exactly opposed to what our society should be moving towards.
What does it matter? In one case Intel is doing extra work to specifically inhibit the performance of one of their competitors, in the other case they are doing extra work to inhibit the performance of several competitors. The mere fact that they went to the effort to write an especially slow and unnecessary code path is damning enough.
Brilliant! What could be better for a free society than rewarding corrupt bureaucrats financially for every person put in jail by giving them slave labor. Gee that won't be abused at all. I'm sure it won't result in more innocent people locked up just because government officials want more money. I mean politicians doing something dishonest and unethical just for money? Why it's unheard of.
If they intentionally bloated the machine code for AMD processors, then that is wrong.
If you RTFA you'll see that AMD is charging (and numerous sources are confirming) that Intel did extra work to specifically make things slower when programs compiled with their compiler were run on an AMD. On previous poster even posted his two line partial fix for the issue that drastically improved code speed and which he gave to Intel while trying to solve this issue with the compiler. Basically it just tricked the compiler into always using the copy function for Intel processors. This was obviously malicious.
look at the suicide statistics in prison for people with life sentences, obviously a lot of them thinks that death is better than serving their 50 years in jail.
This is, however, a solvable problem. If prisons had adequate health care, oversight, and living conditions this would not be the case. History will look back on or criminal justice system with horror and repulsion. Back in the 20th century in North America 5% of people (only the poor ones) were convicted by a corrupt legal system for having chemicals that made them feel good. They were them locked into small cages where they were regularly beaten by one another and their guards and further punished with anal raping. Prisoners with painful health conditions were denied all medical care for years at a time.
There is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, actually. People who commit violent crimes are usually either desperate or are personality types (like many juveniles and other dissociative types) that do not consider that they might be caught in their actions. Increasingly harsh penalties does little to deter the latter and often motivates the former category towards more violence. Why not risk a shoot out with the police if you're going to die if you go peacefully? Why not shoot the witnesses?
Practically there are two problems. First, most people don't understand the above and law-makers who support concepts the public does not understand are easy targets. Second, the issue is very emotionally charged and victims and people who empathize with victims are more interested in vengeance than doing what is best for society. Harsh punishments for other, especially nonviolent crimes (like illegal intoxicant laws), cause similar escalations of crime into violent crime. Personally, I don't believe in capital punishment. This is not because I have any problem with killing or any religious qualms. I simply have little faith in the accuracy of our legal system (which seems to be justified considering the number of people on death row who are later proven innocent). Our criminal justice system is not perfect, police are not perfect people, and legal representation is often very, very poor for those without a lot of money. I don't trust it nor do I see how anyone else can trust it especially with something as important as life and death.
DRM isn't something that a lot of consumers care about too much. Interesting as a lot of slashdotters seem to feel the opposite.
DRM also isn't something most people understand at all, unlike most slashdotters. When someone tries to put a song they bought from the itunes music store onto their Sony brand mp3 player and can't get it to work, 9 times out of 10 they will blame the sony player. When a song bought from Napster 2 can't be transferred to an ipod, customers often blame the ipod. They don't understand that the behavior is intentional and if you explain to them that it is most people think it should illegal. Once someone understands DRM they dislike it, but very few people ever get to that point because it is a hard concept to grasp and as most americans know... thinking is hard.
Java scares companies like Microsoft and Apple because it has the potential to make their closed platforms irrelevant.
Ok... now tell me how supporting java applications, including cross platform applications, but dropping cocoa bindings (largely irrelevant or even a hindrance to cross-platform java applications) is indicative of Apple being scared that java will enable people to move away from their platform? They are freezing support for cocoa bindings, not the java API in general.
One of the main reasons I prefer OS X over most other platforms for most tasks is all the added benefits from the OS. The system services that are usable across all applications, for example, like the spell checking in this text field (and all other native text presented by applications and the OS). Cross-platform apps and java apps are weak because they have to reinvent the wheel for everything every time because they can't count on the OS offering all the useful features. It's fine for little games and whatnot, but for the most part, it is just not as good.
Microsoft is using an open and robust format (XML) for their office documents - what's wrong with that?
Nothing is wrong with that. It's just that none of us actually believe that they will implement an open XML format. Anyone who has been watching MS for the last 10 years knows that the format will be XML with some big chunks of binary data, probably encrypted, and with patents and the DMCA preventing compatibility. I hope they prove me wrong, but at this point I trust them about as far as I can throw their headquarters (which I think is shaped like a giant cobra for some reason). If they want to implement an open XML format the EU and a number of projects have endorsed and implemented the OASIS standard document format. How about adding support for import and export to that format?
We can't overlook the impact of these dumb kids, and certainly should such abuse become more prevalent they should be dealt with in increasing harshness to act as a deterrent...
There is not a lot of evidence to suggest that increasingly draconian punishments do much to deter crime and quite a bit of evidence to suggest that they increase it. Quite often people committing crimes (especially children or adolescents) simply don't consider the consequences of their crime or have any belief that they can be caught. Professional criminals, on the other hand, if dealt with harshly for nonviolent crimes can often turn to violence. If we punish worm authors with 2 years in jail and a worm author bragged to his ex-girlfriend that he wrote the worm and he knows there is a large reward for his capture, then the criminal will be understandably worried. If he thinks he will be imprisoned for the rest of his life, on the other hand, well then murdering his ex starts to seem like a pretty good idea. After all, if he is caught his life is over anyway, why not commit a much more serious crime in an attempt to avoid capture?
This has been demonstrated time and again with the prohibition on various recreational drugs (including alcohol). Victimless crimes of using or selling recreational drugs escalate into murder and organized crime activities causing more pain and suffering than the original offense ever would have.
Right now writing worms in Germany is being punished appropriately. No one was killed; no one made millions of dollars illegally. Escalating the punishment to act as a deterrent if it becomes more common will almost certainly lead to murders and funding organized crime activities. Let the punishment fit the crime. Justice should not be societal engineering.
It looks like M$ is not the one to blame here (although we do so love to blame them).
Don't worry. We can still blame them. They only released the patch a month before Sasser started hitting machines in the wild. That is hardly enough time to test and apply a patch across a large enterprise, especially given MS's terrible track record for patches. Like many other patches, this one conflicted with a variety of other software packages that customers had to stop using if they wanted to be protected. The worm runs on and propagates to other machines on Windows 98, 98SE, and ME operating systems (although it's other functions fail). MS has still released no patch for any of these systems and has no plan to.
Aside from the above concerns, many versions of Windows are just not easy to update, especially across a great many machines and updates often break functionality or need to be applied in a specific order. Updates are often dependent upon other updates, which may also break something important. MS is the one who wrote an OS without concern for security and we are all still paying for it. Writing the worm was like intentionally tossing a match in an open window. Designing Windows was like deciding to sell all buildings with floors made of extremely flammable material. There is plenty of blame to go around.
A better analogy would be when people start talking about kitchen knife control or baseball bat control. Do you see that happening?
There have been several proposals in the UK to require registration of all knives, including kitchen knives. I also know someone who was arrested and convicted of the crime "carrying a concealed weapon" for having a baseball bat in the back seat of his car and he was wearing a softball uniform at the time of his arrest. You may think the concept is absurd, but it is just absurd enough to be true.
I think it is great that this has been released for Linux, but what is the point of this on OS X? I mean most Firefox users on OS X probably run Camino or something with a native front end right? I know I do. Looking at the feature list I don't see anything (except maybe pagerank) that is not already implemented as a system service and usable on all applications. Why would anyone bother to install a program that will make it work for just Firefox? Half of these functions should be system services (like translation) so they work everywhere not just in Firefox and the the other half are already built into Firefox (pop-up blocking) and are aimed at IE users. The only reason I can think of to run this is if you have to switch platforms many times a day and want a consistent browsing experience. Mostly though, I don't see the point.
Then you ask if she has any photos of her relatives, because you want to be sure that if you eventually breed, your offspring won't be ugly. Wouldn't you expect a slap in the face?
Well, I haven't been dating much in the last couple of years, but no. I would not expect a slap. Maybe we date very different people but I bet that would get a laugh. I suppose maybe it is in the delivery.
I expect he objected to the unprofessionalism. I mean it is one thing to ask an expert in a given field in, then ask him questions about how well he would fit into a given role. It is quite another to give him a generic quiz, likely written by people with much less competence than he. Asking questions is fine, but the implication of incompetence in giving a generic quiz is quite another. If a large company is that impersonal and indiscriminate when hiring, what other stupid bureaucratic procedures would an employee have to deal with? I would not walk out of a job because I am given a quiz, but I might if it was a quiz that did not really apply to the type of job I would expect to be working on.
Think of it this way. You're a nationally renowned chemist and DOW asks you to interview for a position. When you arrive they give you a test asking the atomic number of something and how you would centrifuge a sample of something. It entirely discounts your accomplishments to date. Obviously you know the basics or you would never have been able to do all you have done. It could be very insulting and good warning sign of a bureaucracy run amok.
I had a number of PhD's get all affronted when faced when having to soil their precious fingers with actually proving they could think, rather than regurgitate the stuff they learned in college. My theory is that the really good programmers tended to want to get out into the world and learn practical knowledge, while the less proficient ones continued on to get "educated".
Actually, a lot of PhD's don't expect to be writing a lot of code. There can be a big difference between a good programmer and someone who is good at designing a scalable, practical, and well crafted architecture. Ideally a high-level designer will be familiar with a number of languages and the details of implementation, including a good understanding of tools, but all too often someone who has worked hard for many years to understand how a large system can be developed efficiently is rejected for a position because they have not learned a particular language or are not familiar with a common technique in a language or field.
Obviously PhD's can be incompetent too, but remembering that if you're hiring a PhD you're not likely to be hiring a code-monkey is important. I know a lot of really good programmers and the best ones usually code in the real world and continue their education. I know plenty who have no degree or a bachelor's and are fine for some tasks but fall down completely in other areas. There is something to be said for formal education, be careful not to dismiss it out of hand.
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Linux isn't secure. Check your assumptions.
Of course it isn't, but it is "secure enough" to operate without a firewall regularly without getting taken over by a random worm. Most people do not need to be too concerned about direct cracking since most people do not run high-profile targets or anything of interest to a cracker. Obviously you can get a locked down NetBSD box and run a virtual server and redirect to a honeypot or two and spend all your time parsing logs. The point is can Windows run as securely as the average Linux box without disabling the functionality you want to use it for in the first place?
A competent system administrator can secure Windows and keep it secure, just as with Linux. An incompetent sysadmin will fail with both.
I'm not sure that is true. I mean sure anything can be secure if you unplug it, but can a Windows machine be as secure while still as functional as a Linux machine? The first suggestions you hear for securing windows are install updates and put it behind a firewall. That's good advice for any system, but a firewall should be an extra layer of security, not a necessary one. If your only solution for securing Windows is put it behind a firewall that is running a different OS, well then that is a pretty big argument against it's security.
P.S. an expert can kill you with a fountain pen from 10 yards, that does not mean the army should not issue guns.
I can't help thinking that you're looking at this purely from the consumer's point of view
I am a published, professional author and I make the majority of my income by writing.
And what if I didn't, but someone did so without my permission... But now, instead of just getting the page containing the illegally leaked information taken down, that information is forever allowed to be kept in the public domain, through no fault of my own.
You are mistaking the purpose of copyright. Facts are not copyrightable. I'll repeat that... you can't copyright a fact. There is no legal way to use copyright law to stop distribution of trade secrets, information about you, or excerpts from a draft you have written. In the case of trade secrets the copyright is actually owned by the person who leaked the information, since they published it. You can stop a particular writing about something if you own it, and then only for a limited time, but there is no way to stop someone from paraphrasing your work and disseminating the information anyway.
As I've posted several times today, the position you and a few others here are advocating seems to assume that the same amount of information would be available, and as quickly, in the absence of copyright protection. I just don't see how that's ever going to be the case.
I've already told you twice, no I'm not saying that. I'm saying that copyright needs to be more limited, not removed. And you know what, if all copyrights expired in 10 years I don't think we'd have much difference in the amount material available. Writers write because they want to make a profit, communicate with customers and partners, or just express themselves. Reducing copyright lengths would not remove any of these motivations and it might actually increase the amount of material available.
Requiring an archived copy be kept for posterity would not inhibit any of the aforementioned motivations either. I'm sure a lot businesses would stop copyrighting every public relations announcement and letter sent out, but it's not like they would stop sending them. Some would send copies to the archive and most would realize that nobody wants to make exact copies of their webpage and would just publish it anyway.
The same advantage as a work that is never released at all: none. But you never had the natural right to copy it freely, because the natural state is that you don't have it at all. I think your whole argument forgets this fundamental point.
The natural state is I can copy anything I can see. You seem to think that without copyrights no one would bother to write or create anything. That is a ridiculous assumption. Writing is not made valuable solely by copyright law. Sending a letter to a business partner or putting up an advertisement is not worthless if it is not copyrighted. Most works don't need to be copyrighted to be of value to the author. Those works that do are works made for commercial distribution. Much less than one percent of commercially sold works still generate a profit after the first three years. Do you really think that companies would stop publishing works for commercial distribution if they lost the profit on that one percent? The reason copyrights last so long now are so companies can milk those very few works forever (removing their incentive to make new works) and so that companies don't have to compete against their old works which are then free. These companies make a very small amount of extra money at the price of actually inhibiting the production of new works and completely erasing our artisic and literary heritage to the point that very few people can see any older works since the 40's.
I'm writing this about a mile away from a British Copyright Library, in which is stored a copy of just about every book ever printed in this country.
Lucky you, 99.9999% of the world is not so lucky. Also even that library does not include works not published in the U.K. which is most
Your diary.
If you publish and copyright it, yes. If you don't want it saved for all time and the legal right to temporarily forbid others to copy it, just don't publish it. As for trade secrets the copyright is held by the leaker not the company and trade secret laws are not copyright laws. Facts cannot be copyrighted, so the actual information cannot be restricted by copyrighting it anyway.
There's no "natural right" to copying. There's the "artificial right" to copy. Much as copyright is artificial. Free speech is a natural right because it doesn't depend on others to exercise.
You're wrong. There is no reason other than artificial laws why I should not be able to copy word for word anything I see, be it a book or a billboard. Copyright is a limitation on my natural right to do so (which is part of free speech/expression by the way) that has been removed for a limited period of time to give authors financial incentive to share their work and create more works. Writing a book or copying another book is free speech. Read some of the writings of the founding fathers of the U.S. who wrote on this topic while arguing about it's implementation. There was little disagreement about the concept, but some thought (rightly so) that it would be abused and the U.S. would be in the same horrible situation as Britain with it's massive publishing houses. History has shown who was right.
Those are just the first few examples that come to mind, but the significance is clear: just because some information was available somewhere at some time, that doesn't automatically means there's a benefit to society to preserving that information in an obvious place for all time.
The answer to problems with information like drafts and trade secrets being public knowledge after being published is simple, don't publish them. If you don't want people to read drafts of unfinished works, don't publish them online. You do realize copyright law, even today in theory, insures that all copyrighted works are to be preserved for the public and given over to the public for all time once it expires right? And how many better authors would we have today if we did have Shakespeare's drafts to look at to help understand his writing process?
I'm going to skip your constitutional arguments, because copyright is an international convention, and most of the world isn't subject to your constitution. Can we agree the more neutral definition that copyright exists to promote the creation and distribution of works for the benefit of society?
Most copyright law in the world is pretty similar to that in the U.S., but fine lets ignore the U.S. constitution. Lets talk about natural versus artificial rights. Freedom of speech is in my opinion a natural right. Copyright is, in my opinion an artificial right, granted as part of an agreement between authors and those who would benefit from said authorship. Authors are rewarded for giving works to the public with the rights to make money. What advantage does a copyrighted work that is not available to the public give to the people who are giving up their natural right to copy it freely?
Your position is illogical. We're talking about material that has already been made available. If it's a work of value, then probably it was removed because the copyright holder was going to distribute it via some other means, or was working on a newer, better version and didn't want the out-of-date material getting in the way. If it's not a work of value, then there is little public interest to be served in preserving it, particularly if doing so causes any harmful effects to the parties involved.
And here is where your argument falls apart completely. You're making a whole slew of assumptions here, most of which are not true. First you're putting responsibility for deciding what is and is not of value to the public into the ahnds of the copyright owner (note in most cases this is NOT the author anymore). Next you're assuming that not only will the copyright owners know what works are valuable to the public, but they will act in the best interests of the public rather than in their own best interests.
You do realize that the vast majority of copyrighted works including art, literature, film, and music are completely unavailable to the average person right? About .05% of all copyrighted books are still in print and maybe 3% are still available either new or used. The same holds true for music. This is mostly because so many works are copyrighted, but no one knows who holds that copyright, or because the large companies that own millions of copyrights don't want older works to compete with current offerings. Is it in the best interests of the public as a whole to have no access to the majority of our artistic, music, theatrical, and literary heritage? How many great works are in those collections, that will never be seen ever again because the last copy is lost and it was illegal for anyone to make more except some company who did not see the profit in it?
If you remove copyright...
I never said anything about removing copyright, only reforming it. For example it used to be that every copyrighted work in the U.S. had to have two good copies sent to the library of congress to be archived for reference and to preserve the work for future generations. Sound familiar? If that law was still in effect
how about a home remodeling show "Fags have fun with your living room" ?
You know the term "queer" as in "Queer Eye for a Straight Guy" used to be an offensive term too, but some homosexuals embraced the term rather than being offended by it. I'd say the term "nerd" is likewise a badge of pride among many people. After all you're reading a site that says, "News for Nerds" right at the top of it.
which they will then resell and lease to private industry to generate another revenue stream for the government.
Are you kidding? The federal government does not generate revenue streams. The federal government will basically give the spectrum away to corporations who will in return make large donations to particular politicians' re-election funds. You're right about who will pay for it all though and in more than just money.
Putting material on the Internet does not give up your copyright on it, place it in the public domain, grant others the right to reproduce it any way they see fit, or otherwise work differently to copyright laws as they apply to all other media. There are necessarily certain implied rights, but arguing that actually ripping someone else's material and then making it publicly available after they've withdrawn it from their own site is a pretty big stretch to anyone without a vested interest.
Actually, while they do not give up any copyright, there are a number of explicitly stated, legal uses of copyrighted materials and there is a great deal of public benefit to enumerating a few more of them. Can you honestly argue it is not in the public's best interest that a historical archive of the internet exists, for educational reasons if no other? This case should be a poster child for just such legislation. A company published something, lied about it, and are now suing the people who made a copy and proved their guilt. Are you saying it is in the best interests of society that copyrights be used as tool to promote lies and censorship?
Copyright is supposed to be about one thing and one thing only, promoting science and arts. That is the only constitutional provision for its existence. If someone is copying legally obtained works into an archive for educational, historical, or non-profit uses then they are almost invariably helping to promote science and arts, and anyone trying to stop them is up to no good.
As to the letter of the law (which is probably unconstitutional although it is impossible to prove that) you're right. The internet archive is screwed in the U.S. and many other countries. They tried to do what copyright law originally required of copyright holders and the library of congress. If a work is to copyrighted then ethically it needs to be available. That is the whole point of copyright. According to the letter of the law it is probably illegal for me to print out the receipt some e-businesses display when I buy something online. The law needs to be fixed.
In fact, limiting the rights of others to distribute your works in order to encourage you to make them available is exactly what copyright is for, and this sort of case is a textbook example of why the principle matters.
What? How does this limiting of the rights of others encourage them to distribute the material? They, like the majority of copyright holders these days, don't want the work to be available at all. It does not encourage them to publish it, it just gives them a way to prevent works from being distributed.
The archive is in trouble not because the violated the intention of copyright. They, in fact, are trying to uphold the very principals upon which it is founded. Unfortunately, the laws have been changed by the corrupt and greedy to create a situation where copyright does exactly the opposite of its original purpose. This is a perfect example of copyright laws that have been rewritten being used to hold back progress and remove works from public availability. It is unethical and sickening and your implication that a businesses financial considerations should trump both the rights of our descendants to have access to our works and that they trump the the ability to find and present the truth in the courts... well it makes me want to vomit. Go to hell.
The USPS is unfair competition
Anyone who starts a business trying to compete with them knows what they are in for, just like starting a business putting out fires competes with the fire department. Is that fair to the new business, maybe not, but there are damn good reasons why we have publicly owned police, fire departments, and a postal system. The potential for abuse of all these services is extremely high and all of them are vital to everyday life. The post office was created and protected from competition so that it can remain free of censorship, reliable, available in emergencies and throughout all economic situations, and free from tampering and theft. It may not always function perfectly, but it is a task that no private company can be trusted with yet.
Adjust the amount their work for 0 profit.
The value of work is subjective, thus your proposal is impractical if not impossible. If no direct profit can be made a politician can still sell the labor to a co-conspirator for less than it is work in exchange for campaign contributions or other back scratching. It all leads to the same place, a re-institution of slavery. We already have way, way, way too many people in prison as it is. We have a larger percentage of our populace in prison than any other industrialized nation, with the possible exception of China. Giving politicians incentive to put even more people in prison and keep them there longer is exactly opposed to what our society should be moving towards.
What does it matter? In one case Intel is doing extra work to specifically inhibit the performance of one of their competitors, in the other case they are doing extra work to inhibit the performance of several competitors. The mere fact that they went to the effort to write an especially slow and unnecessary code path is damning enough.
Simple: make them work in prison.
Brilliant! What could be better for a free society than rewarding corrupt bureaucrats financially for every person put in jail by giving them slave labor. Gee that won't be abused at all. I'm sure it won't result in more innocent people locked up just because government officials want more money. I mean politicians doing something dishonest and unethical just for money? Why it's unheard of.
If they intentionally bloated the machine code for AMD processors, then that is wrong.
If you RTFA you'll see that AMD is charging (and numerous sources are confirming) that Intel did extra work to specifically make things slower when programs compiled with their compiler were run on an AMD. On previous poster even posted his two line partial fix for the issue that drastically improved code speed and which he gave to Intel while trying to solve this issue with the compiler. Basically it just tricked the compiler into always using the copy function for Intel processors. This was obviously malicious.
look at the suicide statistics in prison for people with life sentences, obviously a lot of them thinks that death is better than serving their 50 years in jail.
This is, however, a solvable problem. If prisons had adequate health care, oversight, and living conditions this would not be the case. History will look back on or criminal justice system with horror and repulsion. Back in the 20th century in North America 5% of people (only the poor ones) were convicted by a corrupt legal system for having chemicals that made them feel good. They were them locked into small cages where they were regularly beaten by one another and their guards and further punished with anal raping. Prisoners with painful health conditions were denied all medical care for years at a time.
What a horrible thing to be remembered for.
There is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, actually. People who commit violent crimes are usually either desperate or are personality types (like many juveniles and other dissociative types) that do not consider that they might be caught in their actions. Increasingly harsh penalties does little to deter the latter and often motivates the former category towards more violence. Why not risk a shoot out with the police if you're going to die if you go peacefully? Why not shoot the witnesses?
Practically there are two problems. First, most people don't understand the above and law-makers who support concepts the public does not understand are easy targets. Second, the issue is very emotionally charged and victims and people who empathize with victims are more interested in vengeance than doing what is best for society. Harsh punishments for other, especially nonviolent crimes (like illegal intoxicant laws), cause similar escalations of crime into violent crime. Personally, I don't believe in capital punishment. This is not because I have any problem with killing or any religious qualms. I simply have little faith in the accuracy of our legal system (which seems to be justified considering the number of people on death row who are later proven innocent). Our criminal justice system is not perfect, police are not perfect people, and legal representation is often very, very poor for those without a lot of money. I don't trust it nor do I see how anyone else can trust it especially with something as important as life and death.
DRM isn't something that a lot of consumers care about too much. Interesting as a lot of slashdotters seem to feel the opposite.
DRM also isn't something most people understand at all, unlike most slashdotters. When someone tries to put a song they bought from the itunes music store onto their Sony brand mp3 player and can't get it to work, 9 times out of 10 they will blame the sony player. When a song bought from Napster 2 can't be transferred to an ipod, customers often blame the ipod. They don't understand that the behavior is intentional and if you explain to them that it is most people think it should illegal. Once someone understands DRM they dislike it, but very few people ever get to that point because it is a hard concept to grasp and as most americans know... thinking is hard.
Java scares companies like Microsoft and Apple because it has the potential to make their closed platforms irrelevant.
Ok... now tell me how supporting java applications, including cross platform applications, but dropping cocoa bindings (largely irrelevant or even a hindrance to cross-platform java applications) is indicative of Apple being scared that java will enable people to move away from their platform? They are freezing support for cocoa bindings, not the java API in general.
One of the main reasons I prefer OS X over most other platforms for most tasks is all the added benefits from the OS. The system services that are usable across all applications, for example, like the spell checking in this text field (and all other native text presented by applications and the OS). Cross-platform apps and java apps are weak because they have to reinvent the wheel for everything every time because they can't count on the OS offering all the useful features. It's fine for little games and whatnot, but for the most part, it is just not as good.
Microsoft is using an open and robust format (XML) for their office documents - what's wrong with that?
Nothing is wrong with that. It's just that none of us actually believe that they will implement an open XML format. Anyone who has been watching MS for the last 10 years knows that the format will be XML with some big chunks of binary data, probably encrypted, and with patents and the DMCA preventing compatibility. I hope they prove me wrong, but at this point I trust them about as far as I can throw their headquarters (which I think is shaped like a giant cobra for some reason). If they want to implement an open XML format the EU and a number of projects have endorsed and implemented the OASIS standard document format. How about adding support for import and export to that format?
We can't overlook the impact of these dumb kids, and certainly should such abuse become more prevalent they should be dealt with in increasing harshness to act as a deterrent...
There is not a lot of evidence to suggest that increasingly draconian punishments do much to deter crime and quite a bit of evidence to suggest that they increase it. Quite often people committing crimes (especially children or adolescents) simply don't consider the consequences of their crime or have any belief that they can be caught. Professional criminals, on the other hand, if dealt with harshly for nonviolent crimes can often turn to violence. If we punish worm authors with 2 years in jail and a worm author bragged to his ex-girlfriend that he wrote the worm and he knows there is a large reward for his capture, then the criminal will be understandably worried. If he thinks he will be imprisoned for the rest of his life, on the other hand, well then murdering his ex starts to seem like a pretty good idea. After all, if he is caught his life is over anyway, why not commit a much more serious crime in an attempt to avoid capture?
This has been demonstrated time and again with the prohibition on various recreational drugs (including alcohol). Victimless crimes of using or selling recreational drugs escalate into murder and organized crime activities causing more pain and suffering than the original offense ever would have.
Right now writing worms in Germany is being punished appropriately. No one was killed; no one made millions of dollars illegally. Escalating the punishment to act as a deterrent if it becomes more common will almost certainly lead to murders and funding organized crime activities. Let the punishment fit the crime. Justice should not be societal engineering.
It looks like M$ is not the one to blame here (although we do so love to blame them).
Don't worry. We can still blame them. They only released the patch a month before Sasser started hitting machines in the wild. That is hardly enough time to test and apply a patch across a large enterprise, especially given MS's terrible track record for patches. Like many other patches, this one conflicted with a variety of other software packages that customers had to stop using if they wanted to be protected. The worm runs on and propagates to other machines on Windows 98, 98SE, and ME operating systems (although it's other functions fail). MS has still released no patch for any of these systems and has no plan to.
Aside from the above concerns, many versions of Windows are just not easy to update, especially across a great many machines and updates often break functionality or need to be applied in a specific order. Updates are often dependent upon other updates, which may also break something important. MS is the one who wrote an OS without concern for security and we are all still paying for it. Writing the worm was like intentionally tossing a match in an open window. Designing Windows was like deciding to sell all buildings with floors made of extremely flammable material. There is plenty of blame to go around.
A better analogy would be when people start talking about kitchen knife control or baseball bat control. Do you see that happening?
There have been several proposals in the UK to require registration of all knives, including kitchen knives. I also know someone who was arrested and convicted of the crime "carrying a concealed weapon" for having a baseball bat in the back seat of his car and he was wearing a softball uniform at the time of his arrest. You may think the concept is absurd, but it is just absurd enough to be true.
I think it is great that this has been released for Linux, but what is the point of this on OS X? I mean most Firefox users on OS X probably run Camino or something with a native front end right? I know I do. Looking at the feature list I don't see anything (except maybe pagerank) that is not already implemented as a system service and usable on all applications. Why would anyone bother to install a program that will make it work for just Firefox? Half of these functions should be system services (like translation) so they work everywhere not just in Firefox and the the other half are already built into Firefox (pop-up blocking) and are aimed at IE users. The only reason I can think of to run this is if you have to switch platforms many times a day and want a consistent browsing experience. Mostly though, I don't see the point.
Then you ask if she has any photos of her relatives, because you want to be sure that if you eventually breed, your offspring won't be ugly. Wouldn't you expect a slap in the face?
Well, I haven't been dating much in the last couple of years, but no. I would not expect a slap. Maybe we date very different people but I bet that would get a laugh. I suppose maybe it is in the delivery.
Microsoft asked a guy interview questions.
I expect he objected to the unprofessionalism. I mean it is one thing to ask an expert in a given field in, then ask him questions about how well he would fit into a given role. It is quite another to give him a generic quiz, likely written by people with much less competence than he. Asking questions is fine, but the implication of incompetence in giving a generic quiz is quite another. If a large company is that impersonal and indiscriminate when hiring, what other stupid bureaucratic procedures would an employee have to deal with? I would not walk out of a job because I am given a quiz, but I might if it was a quiz that did not really apply to the type of job I would expect to be working on.
Think of it this way. You're a nationally renowned chemist and DOW asks you to interview for a position. When you arrive they give you a test asking the atomic number of something and how you would centrifuge a sample of something. It entirely discounts your accomplishments to date. Obviously you know the basics or you would never have been able to do all you have done. It could be very insulting and good warning sign of a bureaucracy run amok.
I had a number of PhD's get all affronted when faced when having to soil their precious fingers with actually proving they could think, rather than regurgitate the stuff they learned in college. My theory is that the really good programmers tended to want to get out into the world and learn practical knowledge, while the less proficient ones continued on to get "educated".
Actually, a lot of PhD's don't expect to be writing a lot of code. There can be a big difference between a good programmer and someone who is good at designing a scalable, practical, and well crafted architecture. Ideally a high-level designer will be familiar with a number of languages and the details of implementation, including a good understanding of tools, but all too often someone who has worked hard for many years to understand how a large system can be developed efficiently is rejected for a position because they have not learned a particular language or are not familiar with a common technique in a language or field.
Obviously PhD's can be incompetent too, but remembering that if you're hiring a PhD you're not likely to be hiring a code-monkey is important. I know a lot of really good programmers and the best ones usually code in the real world and continue their education. I know plenty who have no degree or a bachelor's and are fine for some tasks but fall down completely in other areas. There is something to be said for formal education, be careful not to dismiss it out of hand.