Oh, I agree, but laws in this country, at least in theory, represent the collective will of the people. Or, maybe they don't -- in which case isn't it our obligation as a society to change them?
There are legal restrictions preventing sale of porn to minors, but no legal restrictions for violence. If your blockbuster won't let twelve year olds rent "Death-Death-Death-And-Blood 7" it is due to store (or corporate) policy, not due to regulation.
It's a matter of local and state laws, not federal laws. There are no federal laws banning the sale of any movies to minors, AFAIK. However, most states have laws regarding the sale of pornography or movies with strong sexual content. Surprisingly, most states do NOT have laws concerning violence.
So what we as a society are saying is that it's okay for kids to see people shooting, stabbing, kick boxing, or whatever else to each other in a violent rage, but HEAVEN FORBID if any minors see NAKED PEOPLE or, worse, two people engaged in a perfectly normal act that is part of our biological survival process as a species. Hmmm, I wonder which would inhibit the development of a child more...?
Actually, I've been batting around ideas lately for a cross-platform, independent, free/open source format and browser plugins (not necessarily compatible with anything like Flash or Sliverlick) for video and other interactive media, with support for open standards like Theora-based video, Vorbis-based sound, SVG-based graphics, JavaScript, XML and even GTK. The idea is to come up with something that allows Web developers to do fancy things with video and interactive media that hasn't been done before -- further blurring the lines between desktop and Web apps.
If anyone's interested and/or has ideas, you know where to find me if you look at my.sig.
Bitlocker (which encrypts the whole windows volume ala Truecrypt but bootable) requires a TPM 1.2 chip in it, which you'd be hard pressed to find in ANY computer.
At the risk of sounding like an overly-eager Apple fanboi (bleck!), recent Macs have an Infineon TPM 1.2 chip in them.
Lobbying is a legal occupation that pays somewhere in the high-6-figure to low-7-figure range. Bribery and extortion are crimes that often result in prison time and heavy fines. Other than that, there's not much difference.
Really? Do you think you are any safer in a police state? Ask the citizens of China if they feel safe. And if there's one thing the fall of the Soviet Union has taught us it's that people prefer a free society where chaos sometimes happens to any sort of totalitarian regime.
This kind of draconian, presumptive, knee-jerk response is exactly what people seem to be calling for from Virginia Tech...after all, "what if" this could have been a real bombing? Maybe even the worst school bombing in US history? They needed to react vigorously and without thinking and full consideration of the situation, right? I mean, after all, the daylight savings change is just a minor oversight. They could have been saving lives, right?
I think a morning show radio personality here in Tampa said it best: "These kinds of things (referring to the shootings at VT) happen in a free society. And that's that unless we all want to live in a police state."
It's along the same lines as the infamous, possibly misquoted, possibly misattributed Ben Franklin quote: "They that would trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither."
So what is it? Do you want free society, where safety is sometimes an issue, or do you want a police state, where you might possibly be safer, but have no rights? Because those are your choices.
How many people really use YouTube as a way to get TV shows illegally? I wonder. Myself, I use YouTube to see unique stuff made by people with DV camcorders and such. If I want TV shows, I've got a DVR. If I want the MPAA drivel that passes for movies these days, there's Netflix and movies on iTunes (and the DVR). Who cares about illegal stuff on YouTube?
A good example of how a good idea can go wrong is Digg. It addresses one of the sore spots about Slashdot: the ability for anyone to submit news, and immediately have it viewable by others. It also opens up the comment moderation system to everyone. It's the Digg comment moderation I'd like to consider for the moment.
I fail to see how your example is relevant to the discussion at hand. Slashdot and Digg are competing Web sites for geek news. They are run by their respective management and editors. It's not a matter of democracy -- each of the editorial and management staffs see different solutions to the same problem of how to run a geek news site.
The patent system in the U.S., OTOH, is a set of laws that have been enacted by Constitution and by the elected representatives of the people. Each law represents the collective will of the people at the time as best expressed by our representative democracy. It is the right and obligation of a free society to periodically review its laws and to lean on our elected representatives to change them if they have become outdated, obsolete, have allowed too much abuse, or otherwise just plain aren't working in the best interests of the people.
Slashdot and Digg can listen to their collective audiences and decide what's best for Slashdot and Digg. The government must listen to the people do decide what's best for the people.
When you do the downloading, the server copies the bits and sends it over to the internet. When it has arrived on your system then you are simply saving it into a file.
But, but, officer, I wasn't speeding, my car was! You're splitting hairs. If I cause the copy to be made, by downloading, then I'm responsible for making the copy, no matter which piece of equipment actually did the copying. No, it doesn't matter that I don't own it, either - "but, officer, not only wasn't I speeding, it's not even my car!" - I'm sure that'd go off real well...
I thought that it was only against the law to distribute IP you don't hold the rights to
No. And most laws in European and other countries that have signed onto WIPO are basically uniform. A copyright holder has exclusive rights. These include:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
In other words, if we look at (1), then it becomes obvious: to download is to make a 'reproduce the copyrighted work in copies'. Literally, it seems, copyright is the 'right to copy'. Downloading a copyrighted work is against the law.
Now, there is a difference between willful infringement and non-willful infringement. Willful infringement means that you know you're making a copy of a copyrighted work, and non-willful means that you don't know what you're copying is copyrighted or not. It could be argued that because downloads don't carry a notice, that the downloader has no idea whether or not what he's downloading is copyrighted and not licensed for download or if it is licensed for free download, or public domain or what.
It's somewhat of a specious argument -- you'd almost have to be half stupid to think that a song labeled, say, 'Smashing Pumpkins - 1979' (what I happen to be listening to;) is not copyrighted or is licensed for free download, since Smashing Pumpkins CDs are sold in stores and carry a copyright notice and the RIAA has been reminding us all for sometime that downloading their studios' music is illegal.
But -- I've seen stranger things being believed by courts and juries.
At one point I kinda thought the RIAA's lawsuits were targeted solely at suppressing P2P usage, and I suppose initially that was true. Now I'm not so sure, since it does look like they're making a significant amount of money from their campaign, I mean, now there's a profit motive directly attached. They aren't just the paid legal arm of the studios any longer, now they're actually making money from their lawsuit machine. Does anyone know where those funds go? Is the "take" from all these settlements only enough to fund the law firms involved, are they losing money, or are they stashing some away for a rainy day? What are they doing with it?
Hint: they have to pay for all those lobbyists somehow.
People keep forgetting that in a corporate setting, you'll want to run your own Web Services service. While GMail for companies may make a lot of sense for the little guys, the big guys are only going to do it if they can control it internally. That takes the privacy and security concerns down to almost zero.
Considering that McCain and Guilani are the front runners, how is electing a Republican the "worst-possible-outcome"? If the choices were a third Bush term, or Cheney, or Jeb, or Rice, you might have a point, but do you really feel that McCain or Guilani would be as bad as the current Republican admin?
Oh, I'm hoping McCain gets the Republican nod. I'd vote for him. And I even voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry is 2004.
Technology experts Dan Lyons and Maureen O'Gara were also on hand to bolster SCO's claims. "We've seen all the SCO materials and while its far to secret to disclose, there is no doubt in our minds that NASDAQ is actually a front for Groklaw."
You left off "...which is actually paid by IBM, Novell and RedHat!"
The examples don't support your statement in any way. Wal*Mart and Target ARE big companies. Toyota IS a big company. So they succeed at the expense of another big company, so what? They are just doing the big company thing better.
Okay. Microsoft, the 800 lb. Gorilla, has failed to capture the personal finance market in any significant way with Microsoft Money, despite the fact that when the fight began, Intuit was a tiny little company by comparison.
Was there any specific quantum effect you had in mind or did your spell checker mysteriously substitute the phrase "quantum effects" for the word quantum effects ?
Funny part is, all they did was run the program in a debugger, put a breakpoint after the clearly labelled "VerifyPassWord" function
Wait. The executable was compiled with debug symbols turned on? With functions with easy-to-understand names? I mean, I know it's only security-through-obscurity, but c'mon! At least up the ante a little bit... many programmers are not skilled enough to disassemble a program with no symbol table. And the ones that are... *shrug* rely on the security of your methods, not on the obscurity of your code. IOW, they should have used encryption, even with the self-destruct mechanism.
It takes commitment, and that's one of the points of the article, I believe. Smaller businesses can succeed, but it takes an entrepreneur who's totally committed to the business. And by 'committed' I mean so committed that they should be committed. And large companies don't always do well. Kmart was once one of the top 5 largest retailers in the country -- until Wal*Mart and Target came in and ate their lunch. Ford Motor Co., just a few years ago, was the #2 automaker in the world. They've been supplanted by Toyota, and it's only getting worse for them.
Actually AMD sells a lot to private builders (may be receeding because of the Core chips beating AMD across the board), their marketshare with OEMs is pretty small, mostly because many of them get incentives to only sell Intel machines.
Really? Did you buy your AMD CPU from AMD? I'll bet you didn't. AMD doesn't sell to end-users, only to volume customers. You probably bought your AMD CPU from Newegg, CDW, TigerDirect or one any number of other online or brick-and-mortar vendors. These companies sell AMD CPUs because they also build PCs with AMD chips in them. They are AMD's customer, not you. That also means for AMD, OEMs are the vast majority of their sales.
Still, while quite a few AMD CPUs get sold to private builders from these vendors, I'll still wager that the largest installed-base of AMD processors comes from prebuilt systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I agree, but laws in this country, at least in theory, represent the collective will of the people. Or, maybe they don't -- in which case isn't it our obligation as a society to change them?
It's a matter of local and state laws, not federal laws. There are no federal laws banning the sale of any movies to minors, AFAIK. However, most states have laws regarding the sale of pornography or movies with strong sexual content. Surprisingly, most states do NOT have laws concerning violence.
So what we as a society are saying is that it's okay for kids to see people shooting, stabbing, kick boxing, or whatever else to each other in a violent rage, but HEAVEN FORBID if any minors see NAKED PEOPLE or, worse, two people engaged in a perfectly normal act that is part of our biological survival process as a species. Hmmm, I wonder which would inhibit the development of a child more...?
Actually, I've been batting around ideas lately for a cross-platform, independent, free/open source format and browser plugins (not necessarily compatible with anything like Flash or Sliverlick) for video and other interactive media, with support for open standards like Theora-based video, Vorbis-based sound, SVG-based graphics, JavaScript, XML and even GTK. The idea is to come up with something that allows Web developers to do fancy things with video and interactive media that hasn't been done before -- further blurring the lines between desktop and Web apps.
.sig.
If anyone's interested and/or has ideas, you know where to find me if you look at my
At the risk of sounding like an overly-eager Apple fanboi (bleck!), recent Macs have an Infineon TPM 1.2 chip in them.
Lobbying is a legal occupation that pays somewhere in the high-6-figure to low-7-figure range. Bribery and extortion are crimes that often result in prison time and heavy fines. Other than that, there's not much difference.
Really? Do you think you are any safer in a police state? Ask the citizens of China if they feel safe. And if there's one thing the fall of the Soviet Union has taught us it's that people prefer a free society where chaos sometimes happens to any sort of totalitarian regime.
I think a morning show radio personality here in Tampa said it best: "These kinds of things (referring to the shootings at VT) happen in a free society. And that's that unless we all want to live in a police state."
It's along the same lines as the infamous, possibly misquoted, possibly misattributed Ben Franklin quote: "They that would trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither."
So what is it? Do you want free society, where safety is sometimes an issue, or do you want a police state, where you might possibly be safer, but have no rights? Because those are your choices.
How many people really use YouTube as a way to get TV shows illegally? I wonder. Myself, I use YouTube to see unique stuff made by people with DV camcorders and such. If I want TV shows, I've got a DVR. If I want the MPAA drivel that passes for movies these days, there's Netflix and movies on iTunes (and the DVR). Who cares about illegal stuff on YouTube?
I fail to see how your example is relevant to the discussion at hand. Slashdot and Digg are competing Web sites for geek news. They are run by their respective management and editors. It's not a matter of democracy -- each of the editorial and management staffs see different solutions to the same problem of how to run a geek news site.
The patent system in the U.S., OTOH, is a set of laws that have been enacted by Constitution and by the elected representatives of the people. Each law represents the collective will of the people at the time as best expressed by our representative democracy. It is the right and obligation of a free society to periodically review its laws and to lean on our elected representatives to change them if they have become outdated, obsolete, have allowed too much abuse, or otherwise just plain aren't working in the best interests of the people.
Slashdot and Digg can listen to their collective audiences and decide what's best for Slashdot and Digg. The government must listen to the people do decide what's best for the people.
That's the difference.
No. And most laws in European and other countries that have signed onto WIPO are basically uniform. A copyright holder has exclusive rights. These include:
In other words, if we look at (1), then it becomes obvious: to download is to make a 'reproduce the copyrighted work in copies'. Literally, it seems, copyright is the 'right to copy'. Downloading a copyrighted work is against the law.
Now, there is a difference between willful infringement and non-willful infringement. Willful infringement means that you know you're making a copy of a copyrighted work, and non-willful means that you don't know what you're copying is copyrighted or not. It could be argued that because downloads don't carry a notice, that the downloader has no idea whether or not what he's downloading is copyrighted and not licensed for download or if it is licensed for free download, or public domain or what.
It's somewhat of a specious argument -- you'd almost have to be half stupid to think that a song labeled, say, 'Smashing Pumpkins - 1979' (what I happen to be listening to
But -- I've seen stranger things being believed by courts and juries.
IANALBIPOOGL
(I am not a lawyer, but I play one on GrokLaw)
Hint: they have to pay for all those lobbyists somehow.
Yeah, you're right. No big companies will run will be running any Gmail or Google Apps at all. No one like Proctor & Gamble, L'Oreal, GE or Prudential. Nope.
Oh, I'm hoping McCain gets the Republican nod. I'd vote for him. And I even voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry is 2004.
It might interest you to know that there are more than 70 political parties in the United States.
Shhh! Nobody tell him they actually did it!
Okay. Microsoft, the 800 lb. Gorilla, has failed to capture the personal finance market in any significant way with Microsoft Money, despite the fact that when the fight began, Intuit was a tiny little company by comparison.
Better?
Ah, didn't see that part I guess. But still, with DLL functions you can name your function something like zxgvflqrt() or something.
.exe file if you like.
Still, there's no reason why one has to use DLLs, either. You can put everything into one
Hey! Mine keeps doing that, too!
Wait. The executable was compiled with debug symbols turned on? With functions with easy-to-understand names? I mean, I know it's only security-through-obscurity, but c'mon! At least up the ante a little bit
It takes commitment, and that's one of the points of the article, I believe. Smaller businesses can succeed, but it takes an entrepreneur who's totally committed to the business. And by 'committed' I mean so committed that they should be committed. And large companies don't always do well. Kmart was once one of the top 5 largest retailers in the country -- until Wal*Mart and Target came in and ate their lunch. Ford Motor Co., just a few years ago, was the #2 automaker in the world. They've been supplanted by Toyota, and it's only getting worse for them.
Really? Did you buy your AMD CPU from AMD? I'll bet you didn't. AMD doesn't sell to end-users, only to volume customers. You probably bought your AMD CPU from Newegg, CDW, TigerDirect or one any number of other online or brick-and-mortar vendors. These companies sell AMD CPUs because they also build PCs with AMD chips in them. They are AMD's customer, not you. That also means for AMD, OEMs are the vast majority of their sales.
Still, while quite a few AMD CPUs get sold to private builders from these vendors, I'll still wager that the largest installed-base of AMD processors comes from prebuilt systems.