"An ideal implementation should allow applications to deal with multiple simultaneous touches, drag events, etc. simultaneously. For example, an audio editor application should allow me to use three fingers to push three sliders simultaneously up and ride them while a finger on my other hand touches a mute button on channel 3 to pull it out of the mix because I'm planning to cut that 30 seconds out but haven't had a chance to do it yet."
There's been a device that does precisely this on sale since 2005: it's called the JazzMutant Lemur, and is a control surface that plugs into a PC or Mac, and has a bunch of specialist software that lets you grab a fistful of sliders and move them, play it as a polyphonic keyboard, etc. It works with most popular DAW software on both platforms, but both it and their newer Dexter are pricey beasts aimed at pro DAW users who are willing to pay big money for a device that combines the flexibility of a computer display with the immediacy of a physical mixing desk.
"pedophiles take pleasure in harming - physically and emotionally - people in no position to defend themselves. Helpless children."
The vast majority of child sexual abuse happens at home or a friend's house, and takes place regularly over a long period by people who've never seen child porn, and don't seek it out, so they won't be caught irrespective of how many laws are passed banning pictures, literature, etc. Child predators who prey on strangers are such a statistically insignificant factor in the child abuse problem as a whole that killing them all wouldn't reduce it in any noticeable way.
"At least I have a firm stance on something that matters."
If you actually wanted to have a real impact on child abuse instead of indulging in tabloid-inspired rants, you'd be calling for teachers and others who work with children to receive comprehensive training about how to spot the signs of abuse, and raise topic with a child without frightening or embarrassing them, or putting them in a position where they falsely accuse somebody because they want to please the adult, or are afraid of getting in trouble (those who thinks kids always tell the truth don't know very many of them!).
"I have a firm stance, that everyone will disagree with aloud, but more than a few will silently agree with."
It's irrelevant how many people agree with you, because it doesn't change the fact that there are hundreds of kids who get abused by nice uncle Aubrey, their slightly older cousin Henry, or their best friend's dad for every one that suffers at the hands of a wandering sexual predator. Nobody's doing anything about them, because it's a much harder problem to solve, and doesn't offer tabloids and TV companies human interest stories with sobbing parents and calls for somebody to do something that politicians can legislate about.
"Production of child pornography is the real crime, this must be stopped"
Sexual abuse of children is the real crime, irrespective of the motivation for it. And the _vast_ majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by people who are very well known to the child, not strange men in raincoats who hang around playgrounds and schools.
Any government that was more serious about reducing child abuse than political posturing would be educating teachers and others who work with children about the behavioural signs, and how to talk to kids about the topic without making them frightened or ashamed of it. But that of course takes money, and doesn't generate the same sort of press coverage as stupid knee-jerk laws like these that target such a minute fraction of sexual abusers that eliminating all of them would have no noticeable effect on number of kids who get abused each year.
"The death penalty is too quick, a jail sentence has them safe from the rest of the world. It is the only case in which I would approve the use of torture - indeed, in it's most sadistic form, since the goal isn't information or confession, just suffering."
Perhaps you should add those who delight in thinking about others being slowly tortured to death to the list of people who should be slowly tortured to death for thinking about things.
"Obviously everyone who has modded me down thinks kid-fucking is okay."
A more likely explanation is that they reckon that you're a hypocritical sicko who thinks that torture and death fantasies are OK because he's having them, but other sick fantasies he doesn't have must be prohibited at all costs.
"f AMD wouldn't have come along and given Intel a run for their money, then processors would be far more expensive, and considerably slower. "
The ones that use X86 instructions might be slower and more expensive, but that doesn't mean microprocessors as a whole would be any slower than they are now.
"A hundred years ago, there was no such thing as agriculture which was not "organic", because we did not turn petroleum into fertilizer or, for that matter, pesticide."
They may not have used petroleum-based pesticides, but other chemical pesticides go back to 2500 BC, when the Sumerians dusted their crops with sulphur. Europeans routinely applied compounds containing mercury, lead, and arsenic to many crops during the 14th to 18th centuries, all of which are more damaging to both people and the environment than today's pesticides.
" will say that A/UX (ca. 1991) provided a smoother integration of X11 and Macintosh than Mac OS X does."
Agreed.
"as should be apparent by now, when I talk about X, I'm speaking broadly of X-based interfaces"
What do you mean by "interfaces"? The design of toolkits for example isn't dependant on any properties of X: Qt has been ported to both Windows and OS X, and uses native widgets in each, and there are (currently partial, but working) KDE ports for each of them.
"Even if Quartz/Aqua offer some measure of user configurability, this is not something that Apple endorses, supports, or promotes."
They certainly don't promote them, but they endorse and support them for developers. The difference therefore is what each considers to be a developer: in the Linux world, there is no real distinction between end users and developers, whereas both MS and Apple regard them as being separate categories who have separate requirements.
"Again, this may be possible, but Apple does not make it easy or tout it as an advantage of their user interface."
1) It's absurd to suggest that writing a window manager for _any_ system is easy, and writing one for X is just as hard as writing one for the Windows GDI or Quartz.
2) Neither of commercial vendors tout it as an advantage of their UIs because it isn't an advantage of their UIs (Quartz and the Windows GDI are part of the drawing subsystems that their UIs use), and it isn't an advantage of the X UI either because it doesn't have a UI.
"They prefer to give us a one-size-fits-all solution."
That's because unlike X, Apple and MS have window managers and UIs as part of the base system. IMO this is one of the major reasons for their success among non-nerds.
"these are not transparent methods and require the user to make extra efforts to use them"
VNC is a transparent method because the original source has been used to produce a wide variety of implementations, some of which are FOSS. It is a standard protocol built on another standard protocol (RFB).
RDP is an likewise an extremely well documented protocol that's based on T.128, and therefore has both FOSS and proprietary implementations of servers and clients.
"I have to admit I'm no exper on these, but from my experience of ARDC, it is sluggish enough to make it a pain to use on a daily basis."
Which version? Versions prior to 2.0 didn't use VNC.
"All this niggling, however, is getting away from my original point - there is a need for standardized GUI configurability. "
Even if this was the case (and I'm not convinced that it is), it's extremely debatable whether the mechanisms X uses are an ideal foundation for such a standard.
"Apple could be at the forefront of this approach (think multi-user Spaces and screen sharing on one machine)"
Doing this while maintaining the multimedia performance that Apple's significant professional graphics user base demands would be extremely difficult.
"but instead they seem committed to promoting Aqua (or rather Leopard's GUI now, whatever that is called) and giving just enough support to administrators and X users to mollify them."
Aqua is a desktop, not a drawing layer.
"I wish they would be a bit more daring, and really turn the GUI world on its head again."
I don't think Apple would have set the world on fire with X-based technologies, and open sourcing of their own UNIX mechanisms such as launchd hasn't resulted in wide scale adoption by others, so it's not very likely that something more complex would be greeted with enough enthusiasm to make the effort of trying to establish new standards worthwhile.
"Fact: Even though thousands of unauthorized copies were surely made of Fellowship of the Ring, the creators still had incentive to make the other two movies of the trilogy."
It's not a fact though, because the three movies were filmed at the same time.
"What has changed? The IRA were a credible threat, carried out multiple attacks, but we didn't need huge changes in daily life or restrictions to freedom, to deal with them"
What's changed is that the generation who remembered WWII weren't mostly dead or too old to care when the main IRA bombing campaigns were taking place, and they were (a) extremely difficult to intimidate because both they and their parents (the WWI generation) had experienced far worse things; and (b) extremely sensitive to anything that was too authoritarian because there were two living generations who'd paid an extremely high price to keep it out of their country.
And because most of those in the three main political parties in both houses also came from those two generations, they were likewise extremely suspicious of anyone who proposed authoritarian laws, so it would have been very difficult for anybody to get such things through parliament irrespective of whether they happened to be in government at the time.
"Why do we need them now?"
They aren't needed, but they're still passed by politicians and tolerated by the public (many of whom seem to welcome them) because people who haven't had to fight and die for their freedoms don't venerate them in the same way as those who paid the cost of preserving them against authoritarian regimes who wanted to take them away by force.
"The 'War on Terror' whilst a real, but insignificant threat, is as useful to the UK government as the war in 1984."
The difference of course being that George Orwell was writing in the 1940s, and therefore wasn't incapable of imagining that the British would turn into a bunch of whining pussies, so Eastasia was presented by the authoritarian government as being a gigantic power, not a few hundred loosely associated religious fanatics who killed far less people in all their operations combined than Britain lost on a single morning at The Somme in 1916.
"I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere if you think that we're arguing about the current state of the law, and I think we're arguing about what the law should be."
Unfortunately, as New Labour's meddling with ancient checks and balances that have worked for centuries, rafts of knee-jerk laws, and badly planned changes to police powers have shown, there are so many repercussions to even minor law changes that it's often better to leave things as they are in precedent-based common law systems, even when they have more than a few warts.
Consider for example your idea about letting people sue the police for every error in judgement. This would result in every person who was cautioned, ticketed, cited, arrested, or charged suing them, which would not only tie up the courts for decades, but also force the police to spend hours or days consulting with legal experts before doing anything, or alternatively, require every officer to have extensive "malpractice" insurance that the public would have to pay for.
The above is precisely what happened in the US with emergency room doctors, whose need to make snap life-or-death decisions with a consequently higher probability of being wrong led to so many malpractice suits from patients or their families that malpractice insurance premiums skyrocketed to the point where many hospitals were forced to close their emergency rooms entirely because they were far too expensive to run.
"my nit-picking a post that I otherwise agreed with"
A Slashdot without nit-picking, hair splitting, and arguing at crossed purposes would cease to be Slashdot!
My point about hourly rates was referring to recording session musicians and backing singers who, along with all the others whose non-excessive incomes are directly or indirectly derived from the recording industry, tend to be ignored in discussions about copyright because it's far easier to self-justify piracy if one one only thinks of it as only harming overpaid, talentless stars and coke-sniffing executives.
""Why should an artist not be entitled reap the benefits of the album they recorded?""
This wasn't a point that I made, so I don't see why you addressed it in an answer to my post.
"One of those things that laundry list covers is receiving other copyrighted works in return."
Money is nothing more nor less than a symbolic form of barter, so it makes sense for them to include all forms of goods or services in their definition of financial gain.
"or after soliciting a cop for a $20 blow job in a city park's toilet, stating publicly for the record that you are not gay?"
It could be that he's a heterosexual who prefers hairy women with cocks that hang around in men's toilets, and very understandably mistook a male cop for one.
"he argument was that copyright infringement is similar to theft in that deprives the rightsholder of the effective ownership of the copyright because he can't exercise his rights as the rightsholder (he cannot prevent others from copying it)"
Copyright holders have never been able to prevent people from copying things that have been published. They could seek damages if the an illegal copier was caught (as indeed is the case today), but seeking damages after something has already happened isn't the same as being capable of stopping it from happening in the first place.
"Now, I think of the Crusades and the terrible things done in the name of Christianity during them. That's where the red cross on a white background originated."
That's not correct. The red cross on a white background (St. George's Cross) was originally Genoa's flag, and the English moanrchy paid a an annual tribute to the Doge of Genua for the right to use starting in 1190. English soldiers who went to the Crusades, including English chapters of the Templars, wore St. George's Cross on their uniforms. There'd previously been a different red cross (the Jerusalem Cross) which looked nothing like St. George's Cross (it was five crosses, and not always on a white background), but it fell into disuse after crusader armies adopted the symbol worn by Richard 1st's army in the 3rd. Crusade.
"[Knights Hospitaller] is actually the origin of both the word "hospital" and the association of the red cross with medicine."
It is neither. Hospital takes its name from the same root as hospitality, and had become a generic term for a religiously run medical facility open to everyone in France at the time of Chalenagne (and perhaps earlier), entering the English language via the Norman conquest. Note also that being a French order that was founded before the English negotiated the rights to use St. George's Cross from Genoa meant that the symbol of the Knights Hospitaller was a white cross on a black background, which they kept all through (and subsequent to) the Crusades.
Associating a red cross with wartime medical facilities is, as others have mentioned, entirely due to the Red Cross organisation, who (as others have also noted) simply reversed the Swiss flag.
"Chances are the books you use to learn to play the piano and the sheet music you play from are both copyrighted."
There are plenty of books telling people how to play instruments that are out of copyright, and a huge amount of music is also out of copyright, a great deal of which was written to help people at all musical skill levels learn various techniques.
"Chances are the books you use to learn to play the piano and the sheet music you play from are both copyrighted."
The fact that a particular performance of a play is copyrighted in no way prevents you from performing your own version of the original, just as somebody's copyrighted performance of one of Chopin's works doesn't prevent you from playing your own interpretation of that same Chopin work.
The vast majority of professional musicians are paid a fixed hourly rate, and have to start looking for work again when a particular job is finished. People tend to use the term "musician" as a synonym for "artist signed to a record company" despite the fact that this is actually a very small proportion of musicians, just as a very small proportion of actors get to charge exorbitant fees for being in a movie.
"Judging by the reaction here..."...from people who aren't aren't ever likely to be Alton Towers customers irrespective of what their policies about anything are...
"...it's probably going to fail"
It will indeed fail to make single geeks who live a long way from England fly there and visit a place that's specifically designed for families with children.
"I think we can agree that the police should only be hassling persons breaking the law."
I certainly agree with this.
"If you support the police being allowed to hassle people for smart-mouthing them, then you support smart-mouthing the police being against the law."
A straw man again, because I didn't say I support the police hassling people over anything, but that attitude _is a factor_ in all human interactions, _including_ those with the police, who are humans, not robots in uniform.
"I'd like to know what charge you think that not co-operating with the police would be prosecuted under."
The Police Act 1996 gives the them the power to arrest those they consider to be obstructing or resisting them (resisting does not need to be a physical act, and is IMO defined far too broadly). One notable form of obstruction is wearing things that are designed to conceal one's identity (e.g. masks), which the police can both tell you to remove, and confiscate. Refusal to comply is the same under the law as refusing to give one's name and address, or giving a false name and address, i.e. an offence that can lead to arrest and up to one month in prison and / or a fine.
"Whether I have that right can be determined from facts which do exist at the time (i.e. the situation, the wording of the sign, and the law as written at the time) - that the determination based upon those facts is made at a later date doesn't mean that the determination is not valid at the time."
The police are not barristers or judges, so they aren't expected to determine whether a person is actually guilty of an offence, but whether they _suspect_ them to have committed one within the limits of their training, which is notable for its absence of spending several years studying for a law degree. Of course, you're free to demand a police force that does have the level of legal training you seem to think they should have, but it'll incur a massive tax hike, because they'll expect to be paid rather more than lawyers who sit in offices instead of standing in the rain being pelted with missiles and spat on.
"Being in a common law jurisdiction means that you can't get a judgement before you do something that says that the something is specifically legal - you must do it and get the judgement later, but that doesn't mean that what you did doesn't become legal until the judgement is made. If you could, it would put the kibosh on this kind of thing from the start."
It sounds to me like you'd prefer a system like that of some European countries where anything that you don't have specific permission to do illegal.
"So why, exactly, do you think that's it's ok for the police to make that decision and take action against a person if they don't think that they have such a right, and face no repercussions if a court subsequently decides that the person did have that right?"
A straw man again, because I haven't said that I think it's OK for the police to do anything.
"They, in a threatening manner, asked him to take the sign down"
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that their manner was threatening. Advising somebody that their actions may have legal consequences isn't a threat, because lawyers tell their clients the same thing all the time, but most people don't classify that as a threat.
" although the question of whether he had the right to hold that sign up was still unanswered"
If you'd bothered to check up on what actually happened instead of inventing things to support your views, you'd know that the police at the scene consulted a superior officer before taking any action, so as far as they were concerned, the question had indeed been answered.
"When he refused they took it away, thus partially silencing his protest. They could have taken his details and left him with the sign."
If they'd left him with the sign, the CPS would have said that they'd failed to gather pertinent evidence if they'd decided to prosecute, and they'd have failed in their dut
"specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b: an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property"
There are many categories of illegal acts that don't count as theft either, e.g. selling heroin, trespass, and indecent exposure.
"just because a law is hard to enforce doesn't make the action moral or the law immoral."
And by the same token, the fact that a law exists is not an indication that the law is moral or whatever it prohibits is immoral.
"It is impossible to stop every rapist car thief, child molester, speeder, and drunk driver without make the world a police state. Does that mean those actions should just be made legal or that they are moral?"
The fact that the media companies have completely failed in their attempts to convince the public of any country that there is even a remote moral equivalency between these acts and copying a file without permission means that they have no moral equivalence. Societal consensus is the final arbiter of what is and is moral within that society, not the opinions of those who govern them,
"by creating a zero-value market for digital media, it is effectively removing the incentive to create it in the first place"
The only reason recorded media had any value in the first place was due to certain technologies appearing, and now that value is in the process of being destroyed by yet another set of technologies. It's a common cycle that's happened countless times in human history, and is going to keep happening for as long as our technologies continue to improve.
"If things carry on as they are, then it's only a matter of time before media sales really do fall due to file sharing."
Or because people simply don't have the same level of interest in what they're offering anymore. The music and TV industries for example are suffering as much from the fact that there are an increasing number of other things competing for peoples' attention nowadays as file sharing, hence the oft-heard complaint from older people about teens constantly fiddling with cell-phones and hand-held games consoles, spending all their free time on the Internet and playing video games instead of doing something outside or being with the family, etc.
"Then it is reasonable to expect a drop in production as money becomes less of a motivator for producing an album/movie/series/whatever (Some might call this a good thing:)"
It's neither a good thing or a bad thing. The entertainment industry's weathered a number of technological changes that resulted in a great deal of squalling from entrenched industries and artists who felt threatened by them, but ended up as being a net job gain, and made fortunes for those who were visionary enough to see the new doors they opened instead of whining about old ones closing.
NB: theatre and music hall artists said that they'd lose income from movies because they would only be paid for a performance once, despite the fact that it could be played over and over again. This is not of course what actually happened.
"These companies that are slamming lawsuits left right and centre, evil as they may be, are effecting self defense."
All of these things have happened before when companies depended on markets based around obsolete technologies, including buying legislation (e.g. all those ludicrously draconian ant-automobile laws that were enacted in most Western countries at the beginning of the 20th century). None of it was effective at preventing newer technologies from replacing old ones, and in many cases the industries and jobs that depended on those older technologies disappeared completely.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the topic was patents.
I already know them:
- 8 core Intel or AMD CPU at 3GHz with 4GB RAM (64 core 12 GHz with 16TB RAM recommended).
"An ideal implementation should allow applications to deal with multiple simultaneous touches, drag events, etc. simultaneously. For example, an audio editor application should allow me to use three fingers to push three sliders simultaneously up and ride them while a finger on my other hand touches a mute button on channel 3 to pull it out of the mix because I'm planning to cut that 30 seconds out but haven't had a chance to do it yet."
There's been a device that does precisely this on sale since 2005: it's called the JazzMutant Lemur, and is a control surface that plugs into a PC or Mac, and has a bunch of specialist software that lets you grab a fistful of sliders and move them, play it as a polyphonic keyboard, etc. It works with most popular DAW software on both platforms, but both it and their newer Dexter are pricey beasts aimed at pro DAW users who are willing to pay big money for a device that combines the flexibility of a computer display with the immediacy of a physical mixing desk.
"um win .1 couldn't run on a 286 it specifically needed a 386 or greater."
The system requirements for Windows 3.1 are at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q32905
"- IBM compatible 80286 or higher (386 recommended)".
"pedophiles take pleasure in harming - physically and emotionally - people in no position to defend themselves. Helpless children."
The vast majority of child sexual abuse happens at home or a friend's house, and takes place regularly over a long period by people who've never seen child porn, and don't seek it out, so they won't be caught irrespective of how many laws are passed banning pictures, literature, etc. Child predators who prey on strangers are such a statistically insignificant factor in the child abuse problem as a whole that killing them all wouldn't reduce it in any noticeable way.
"At least I have a firm stance on something that matters."
If you actually wanted to have a real impact on child abuse instead of indulging in tabloid-inspired rants, you'd be calling for teachers and others who work with children to receive comprehensive training about how to spot the signs of abuse, and raise topic with a child without frightening or embarrassing them, or putting them in a position where they falsely accuse somebody because they want to please the adult, or are afraid of getting in trouble (those who thinks kids always tell the truth don't know very many of them!).
"I have a firm stance, that everyone will disagree with aloud, but more than a few will silently agree with."
It's irrelevant how many people agree with you, because it doesn't change the fact that there are hundreds of kids who get abused by nice uncle Aubrey, their slightly older cousin Henry, or their best friend's dad for every one that suffers at the hands of a wandering sexual predator. Nobody's doing anything about them, because it's a much harder problem to solve, and doesn't offer tabloids and TV companies human interest stories with sobbing parents and calls for somebody to do something that politicians can legislate about.
"Production of child pornography is the real crime, this must be stopped"
Sexual abuse of children is the real crime, irrespective of the motivation for it. And the _vast_ majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by people who are very well known to the child, not strange men in raincoats who hang around playgrounds and schools.
Any government that was more serious about reducing child abuse than political posturing would be educating teachers and others who work with children about the behavioural signs, and how to talk to kids about the topic without making them frightened or ashamed of it. But that of course takes money, and doesn't generate the same sort of press coverage as stupid knee-jerk laws like these that target such a minute fraction of sexual abusers that eliminating all of them would have no noticeable effect on number of kids who get abused each year.
"The death penalty is too quick, a jail sentence has them safe from the rest of the world. It is the only case in which I would approve the use of torture - indeed, in it's most sadistic form, since the goal isn't information or confession, just suffering."
Perhaps you should add those who delight in thinking about others being slowly tortured to death to the list of people who should be slowly tortured to death for thinking about things.
"Obviously everyone who has modded me down thinks kid-fucking is okay."
A more likely explanation is that they reckon that you're a hypocritical sicko who thinks that torture and death fantasies are OK because he's having them, but other sick fantasies he doesn't have must be prohibited at all costs.
"f AMD wouldn't have come along and given Intel a run for their money, then processors would be far more expensive, and considerably slower. "
The ones that use X86 instructions might be slower and more expensive, but that doesn't mean microprocessors as a whole would be any slower than they are now.
"A hundred years ago, there was no such thing as agriculture which was not "organic", because we did not turn petroleum into fertilizer or, for that matter, pesticide."
They may not have used petroleum-based pesticides, but other chemical pesticides go back to 2500 BC, when the Sumerians dusted their crops with sulphur. Europeans routinely applied compounds containing mercury, lead, and arsenic to many crops during the 14th to 18th centuries, all of which are more damaging to both people and the environment than today's pesticides.
" will say that A/UX (ca. 1991) provided a smoother integration of X11 and Macintosh than Mac OS X does."
Agreed.
"as should be apparent by now, when I talk about X, I'm speaking broadly of X-based interfaces"
What do you mean by "interfaces"? The design of toolkits for example isn't dependant on any properties of X: Qt has been ported to both Windows and OS X, and uses native widgets in each, and there are (currently partial, but working) KDE ports for each of them.
"Even if Quartz/Aqua offer some measure of user configurability, this is not something that Apple endorses, supports, or promotes."
They certainly don't promote them, but they endorse and support them for developers. The difference therefore is what each considers to be a developer: in the Linux world, there is no real distinction between end users and developers, whereas both MS and Apple regard them as being separate categories who have separate requirements.
"Again, this may be possible, but Apple does not make it easy or tout it as an advantage of their user interface."
1) It's absurd to suggest that writing a window manager for _any_ system is easy, and writing one for X is just as hard as writing one for the Windows GDI or Quartz.
2) Neither of commercial vendors tout it as an advantage of their UIs because it isn't an advantage of their UIs (Quartz and the Windows GDI are part of the drawing subsystems that their UIs use), and it isn't an advantage of the X UI either because it doesn't have a UI.
"They prefer to give us a one-size-fits-all solution."
That's because unlike X, Apple and MS have window managers and UIs as part of the base system. IMO this is one of the major reasons for their success among non-nerds.
"these are not transparent methods and require the user to make extra efforts to use them"
VNC is a transparent method because the original source has been used to produce a wide variety of implementations, some of which are FOSS. It is a standard protocol built on another standard protocol (RFB).
RDP is an likewise an extremely well documented protocol that's based on T.128, and therefore has both FOSS and proprietary implementations of servers and clients.
"I have to admit I'm no exper on these, but from my experience of ARDC, it is sluggish enough to make it a pain to use on a daily basis."
Which version? Versions prior to 2.0 didn't use VNC.
"All this niggling, however, is getting away from my original point - there is a need for standardized GUI configurability. "
Even if this was the case (and I'm not convinced that it is), it's extremely debatable whether the mechanisms X uses are an ideal foundation for such a standard.
"Apple could be at the forefront of this approach (think multi-user Spaces and screen sharing on one machine)"
Doing this while maintaining the multimedia performance that Apple's significant professional graphics user base demands would be extremely difficult.
"but instead they seem committed to promoting Aqua (or rather Leopard's GUI now, whatever that is called) and giving just enough support to administrators and X users to mollify them."
Aqua is a desktop, not a drawing layer.
"I wish they would be a bit more daring, and really turn the GUI world on its head again."
I don't think Apple would have set the world on fire with X-based technologies, and open sourcing of their own UNIX mechanisms such as launchd hasn't resulted in wide scale adoption by others, so it's not very likely that something more complex would be greeted with enough enthusiasm to make the effort of trying to establish new standards worthwhile.
"Fact: Even though thousands of unauthorized copies were surely made of Fellowship of the Ring, the creators still had incentive to make the other two movies of the trilogy."
It's not a fact though, because the three movies were filmed at the same time.
"What has changed? The IRA were a credible threat, carried out multiple attacks, but we didn't need huge changes in daily life or restrictions to freedom, to deal with them"
What's changed is that the generation who remembered WWII weren't mostly dead or too old to care when the main IRA bombing campaigns were taking place, and they were (a) extremely difficult to intimidate because both they and their parents (the WWI generation) had experienced far worse things; and (b) extremely sensitive to anything that was too authoritarian because there were two living generations who'd paid an extremely high price to keep it out of their country.
And because most of those in the three main political parties in both houses also came from those two generations, they were likewise extremely suspicious of anyone who proposed authoritarian laws, so it would have been very difficult for anybody to get such things through parliament irrespective of whether they happened to be in government at the time.
"Why do we need them now?"
They aren't needed, but they're still passed by politicians and tolerated by the public (many of whom seem to welcome them) because people who haven't had to fight and die for their freedoms don't venerate them in the same way as those who paid the cost of preserving them against authoritarian regimes who wanted to take them away by force.
"The 'War on Terror' whilst a real, but insignificant threat, is as useful to the UK government as the war in 1984."
The difference of course being that George Orwell was writing in the 1940s, and therefore wasn't incapable of imagining that the British would turn into a bunch of whining pussies, so Eastasia was presented by the authoritarian government as being a gigantic power, not a few hundred loosely associated religious fanatics who killed far less people in all their operations combined than Britain lost on a single morning at The Somme in 1916.
"I don't think this discussion is going to go anywhere if you think that we're arguing about the current state of the law, and I think we're arguing about what the law should be."
Unfortunately, as New Labour's meddling with ancient checks and balances that have worked for centuries, rafts of knee-jerk laws, and badly planned changes to police powers have shown, there are so many repercussions to even minor law changes that it's often better to leave things as they are in precedent-based common law systems, even when they have more than a few warts.
Consider for example your idea about letting people sue the police for every error in judgement. This would result in every person who was cautioned, ticketed, cited, arrested, or charged suing them, which would not only tie up the courts for decades, but also force the police to spend hours or days consulting with legal experts before doing anything, or alternatively, require every officer to have extensive "malpractice" insurance that the public would have to pay for.
The above is precisely what happened in the US with emergency room doctors, whose need to make snap life-or-death decisions with a consequently higher probability of being wrong led to so many malpractice suits from patients or their families that malpractice insurance premiums skyrocketed to the point where many hospitals were forced to close their emergency rooms entirely because they were far too expensive to run.
"my nit-picking a post that I otherwise agreed with"
A Slashdot without nit-picking, hair splitting, and arguing at crossed purposes would cease to be Slashdot!
My point about hourly rates was referring to recording session musicians and backing singers who, along with all the others whose non-excessive incomes are directly or indirectly derived from the recording industry, tend to be ignored in discussions about copyright because it's far easier to self-justify piracy if one one only thinks of it as only harming overpaid, talentless stars and coke-sniffing executives.
""Why should an artist not be entitled reap the benefits of the album they recorded?""
This wasn't a point that I made, so I don't see why you addressed it in an answer to my post.
"One of those things that laundry list covers is receiving other copyrighted works in return."
Money is nothing more nor less than a symbolic form of barter, so it makes sense for them to include all forms of goods or services in their definition of financial gain.
"Just wondering....could you break the law by stealing something that was yours?"
Yes if your item happens to be inside somebody else's property or on their person, and you trespass, break in, or use violence to get it back.
"or after soliciting a cop for a $20 blow job in a city park's toilet, stating publicly for the record that you are not gay?"
It could be that he's a heterosexual who prefers hairy women with cocks that hang around in men's toilets, and very understandably mistook a male cop for one.
"he argument was that copyright infringement is similar to theft in that deprives the rightsholder of the effective ownership of the copyright because he can't exercise his rights as the rightsholder (he cannot prevent others from copying it)"
Copyright holders have never been able to prevent people from copying things that have been published. They could seek damages if the an illegal copier was caught (as indeed is the case today), but seeking damages after something has already happened isn't the same as being capable of stopping it from happening in the first place.
"Now, I think of the Crusades and the terrible things done in the name of Christianity during them. That's where the red cross on a white background originated."
That's not correct. The red cross on a white background (St. George's Cross) was originally Genoa's flag, and the English moanrchy paid a an annual tribute to the Doge of Genua for the right to use starting in 1190. English soldiers who went to the Crusades, including English chapters of the Templars, wore St. George's Cross on their uniforms. There'd previously been a different red cross (the Jerusalem Cross) which looked nothing like St. George's Cross (it was five crosses, and not always on a white background), but it fell into disuse after crusader armies adopted the symbol worn by Richard 1st's army in the 3rd. Crusade.
"[Knights Hospitaller] is actually the origin of both the word "hospital" and the association of the red cross with medicine."
It is neither. Hospital takes its name from the same root as hospitality, and had become a generic term for a religiously run medical facility open to everyone in France at the time of Chalenagne (and perhaps earlier), entering the English language via the Norman conquest. Note also that being a French order that was founded before the English negotiated the rights to use St. George's Cross from Genoa meant that the symbol of the Knights Hospitaller was a white cross on a black background, which they kept all through (and subsequent to) the Crusades.
Associating a red cross with wartime medical facilities is, as others have mentioned, entirely due to the Red Cross organisation, who (as others have also noted) simply reversed the Swiss flag.
"Chances are the books you use to learn to play the piano and the sheet music you play from are both copyrighted."
There are plenty of books telling people how to play instruments that are out of copyright, and a huge amount of music is also out of copyright, a great deal of which was written to help people at all musical skill levels learn various techniques.
"Chances are the books you use to learn to play the piano and the sheet music you play from are both copyrighted."
The fact that a particular performance of a play is copyrighted in no way prevents you from performing your own version of the original, just as somebody's copyrighted performance of one of Chopin's works doesn't prevent you from playing your own interpretation of that same Chopin work.
"Most musicians are not being paid up front"
The vast majority of professional musicians are paid a fixed hourly rate, and have to start looking for work again when a particular job is finished. People tend to use the term "musician" as a synonym for "artist signed to a record company" despite the fact that this is actually a very small proportion of musicians, just as a very small proportion of actors get to charge exorbitant fees for being in a movie.
"Judging by the reaction here..." ...from people who aren't aren't ever likely to be Alton Towers customers irrespective of what their policies about anything are...
"...it's probably going to fail"
It will indeed fail to make single geeks who live a long way from England fly there and visit a place that's specifically designed for families with children.
"I think we can agree that the police should only be hassling persons breaking the law."
I certainly agree with this.
"If you support the police being allowed to hassle people for smart-mouthing them, then you support smart-mouthing the police being against the law."
A straw man again, because I didn't say I support the police hassling people over anything, but that attitude _is a factor_ in all human interactions, _including_ those with the police, who are humans, not robots in uniform.
"I'd like to know what charge you think that not co-operating with the police would be prosecuted under."
The Police Act 1996 gives the them the power to arrest those they consider to be obstructing or resisting them (resisting does not need to be a physical act, and is IMO defined far too broadly). One notable form of obstruction is wearing things that are designed to conceal one's identity (e.g. masks), which the police can both tell you to remove, and confiscate. Refusal to comply is the same under the law as refusing to give one's name and address, or giving a false name and address, i.e. an offence that can lead to arrest and up to one month in prison and / or a fine.
"Whether I have that right can be determined from facts which do exist at the time (i.e. the situation, the wording of the sign, and the law as written at the time) - that the determination based upon those facts is made at a later date doesn't mean that the determination is not valid at the time."
The police are not barristers or judges, so they aren't expected to determine whether a person is actually guilty of an offence, but whether they _suspect_ them to have committed one within the limits of their training, which is notable for its absence of spending several years studying for a law degree. Of course, you're free to demand a police force that does have the level of legal training you seem to think they should have, but it'll incur a massive tax hike, because they'll expect to be paid rather more than lawyers who sit in offices instead of standing in the rain being pelted with missiles and spat on.
"Being in a common law jurisdiction means that you can't get a judgement before you do something that says that the something is specifically legal - you must do it and get the judgement later, but that doesn't mean that what you did doesn't become legal until the judgement is made. If you could, it would put the kibosh on this kind of thing from the start."
It sounds to me like you'd prefer a system like that of some European countries where anything that you don't have specific permission to do illegal.
"So why, exactly, do you think that's it's ok for the police to make that decision and take action against a person if they don't think that they have such a right, and face no repercussions if a court subsequently decides that the person did have that right?"
A straw man again, because I haven't said that I think it's OK for the police to do anything.
"They, in a threatening manner, asked him to take the sign down"
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that their manner was threatening. Advising somebody that their actions may have legal consequences isn't a threat, because lawyers tell their clients the same thing all the time, but most people don't classify that as a threat.
" although the question of whether he had the right to hold that sign up was still unanswered"
If you'd bothered to check up on what actually happened instead of inventing things to support your views, you'd know that the police at the scene consulted a superior officer before taking any action, so as far as they were concerned, the question had indeed been answered.
"When he refused they took it away, thus partially silencing his protest. They could have taken his details and left him with the sign."
If they'd left him with the sign, the CPS would have said that they'd failed to gather pertinent evidence if they'd decided to prosecute, and they'd have failed in their dut
"yes copyright infringement should be a Civil problem unless it is for profit then it is theft."
It's not theft even if it's for profit, because no property has been taken from the owner:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theft
"specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b: an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property"
There are many categories of illegal acts that don't count as theft either, e.g. selling heroin, trespass, and indecent exposure.
"just because a law is hard to enforce doesn't make the action moral or the law immoral."
And by the same token, the fact that a law exists is not an indication that the law is moral or whatever it prohibits is immoral.
"It is impossible to stop every rapist car thief, child molester, speeder, and drunk driver without make the world a police state. Does that mean those actions should just be made legal or that they are moral?"
The fact that the media companies have completely failed in their attempts to convince the public of any country that there is even a remote moral equivalency between these acts and copying a file without permission means that they have no moral equivalence. Societal consensus is the final arbiter of what is and is moral within that society, not the opinions of those who govern them,
"by creating a zero-value market for digital media, it is effectively removing the incentive to create it in the first place"
:)"
The only reason recorded media had any value in the first place was due to certain technologies appearing, and now that value is in the process of being destroyed by yet another set of technologies. It's a common cycle that's happened countless times in human history, and is going to keep happening for as long as our technologies continue to improve.
"If things carry on as they are, then it's only a matter of time before media sales really do fall due to file sharing."
Or because people simply don't have the same level of interest in what they're offering anymore. The music and TV industries for example are suffering as much from the fact that there are an increasing number of other things competing for peoples' attention nowadays as file sharing, hence the oft-heard complaint from older people about teens constantly fiddling with cell-phones and hand-held games consoles, spending all their free time on the Internet and playing video games instead of doing something outside or being with the family, etc.
"Then it is reasonable to expect a drop in production as money becomes less of a motivator for producing an album/movie/series/whatever (Some might call this a good thing
It's neither a good thing or a bad thing. The entertainment industry's weathered a number of technological changes that resulted in a great deal of squalling from entrenched industries and artists who felt threatened by them, but ended up as being a net job gain, and made fortunes for those who were visionary enough to see the new doors they opened instead of whining about old ones closing.
NB: theatre and music hall artists said that they'd lose income from movies because they would only be paid for a performance once, despite the fact that it could be played over and over again. This is not of course what actually happened.
"These companies that are slamming lawsuits left right and centre, evil as they may be, are effecting self defense."
All of these things have happened before when companies depended on markets based around obsolete technologies, including buying legislation (e.g. all those ludicrously draconian ant-automobile laws that were enacted in most Western countries at the beginning of the 20th century). None of it was effective at preventing newer technologies from replacing old ones, and in many cases the industries and jobs that depended on those older technologies disappeared completely.