Is there any way to see a user's total number of comments? The old comment page would display the last 24 of X, where X was the total number of comments from that user account.
Yeah, but good luck getting folks on/. to listen to you. They'll just quote Feynman, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds" and smugly feel that they've absolved themselves from any critical thought.
With "intelligent design", you have theologians trying to make scientific decisions.
Not really. You'd be hard pressed to find an actual trained theologian, at least one trained at an accredited school, who's a supporter of ID. You'll find that idiots like Ken Ham typically either don't have degrees at all, have them from diploma mills, or have them in subjects completely unrelated to science (or religion).
What does that mean in the legal sense? Can I distribute it?
From what I've learned, yes, you can. To take a more realistic example, if two poets, working independently, write two short poems that are "substantially similar" or even identical (meaning that had one relied upon the other's work, there would be a finding of infringement), they both have separate copyrights, and if one distributes the work, it's not infringing upon the other's copyright.
And if I download a.mp3, introduce some salt, recode it as an.ogg, and claim it came from/dev/random; how do you prove it?
Therein lies the rub. To return to the example of poets, if one of the poets is famous, and his poem has been widely published, the other poet will have a hard time convincing anyone that he actually created the identical poem independently. If he had drafts or notes from earlier versions, that would work in his favor, as it would support his claim of independent creation.
If some teenager read your comment, then claimed that his entire collection of MP3s were really just collections of output from/dev/random, obviously no one is going to buy that.
The other thing is, independent creation isn't really about the "source" of work. Whether your music came from/dev/random or a piano is kind of irrelevant. If you're doing it after a popular song has been published and played everywhere, and you're actively seeking out something that sounds identical to that song, it's clear your aim is to violate the copyright. If you had never heard of the song whose copyright you were violating, then you could claim independent creation, but merely using/dev/random as a trick to get around playing the song on a piano is a silly technicality.
Independent creation is there to protect people who legitimately create works that just happen to correspond to other copyrighted works. If the second poet looks for a string from/dev/random that corresponds to the first poet's poem, that's not really independent creation.
FYI, if you find yourself agreeing with the parent post, you probably have not ever read a Supreme Court or Appeals Court opinion, or decent law review article.
There are of course a number of frankly idiotic opinions, but on the whole judges (or at least good judges, i.e., the ones whose opinions you read in classes) are a fairly analytical bunch. You kind of have to be.
The impression I get when I ponder the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative branches is that we have a lot of well-educated, well-spoken judges trying to make sense of laws that have been cobbled together by a bunch of monkeys flinging poo at one another. It's a little depressing.
I wouldnt quite agree, as the.torrent files are checksums derived from either DVDrips or screencaps, which are both derivative works.
That's an intriguing idea, and one that copyright scholars would probably have a field day with.
Checksums don't really seem to meet the idea of derivative works. For reference, the definition of a "derivative work" is:
a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a âoederivative workâ.
I'm sure a good lawyer could argue that a checksum might fit in there, but it seems like a stretch. A checksum certainly doesn't represent the original work in any meaningful form to a human (or for that matter, a computer - with something like MD5, you can't recreate the original work from the checksum).
You're not thinking like a lawyer. (You should probably be thankful for that)
If I generate a sequence of random numbers, write it to disk, and it happens to be, say, a copyrighted song when fed into an audio player, am I breaking the law?
If the sequence is really random (and not "really" in the sense of mathematically random, but "really" in the sense of not being some obfuscated way of recreating the song in question), congratulations, you've just independently created an identical work. Of course, the chances of this are very low, and I'm not even sure if having a computer generate a sequence of random numbers would meet the ever-so-low threshold for creativity to warrant a copyright. But the point is that copyright law allows for independent creation of identical works, whereas patent law doesn't.
Besides, any song can have an infinite number of representations. If I write an audio decoder that takes a Win32 dll and plays it as audio, am I breaking the law if one of the system files in my licensed copy of Vista can be played as a copyrighted song? Is Microsoft?
It probably depends on how you write the audio decoder. If you write it to use the DLL as a sort of hash with the intent of recreating a copyright song, you've probably infringed. If it just happened to do it, then no.
I don't know how graduate school works. I'm not worried about being miserable at school. I can do anything for one year.
Most master's programs, at least in the U.S., are two years. Maybe you can do it in one year at your school because they offer some kind of smooth track into it, but if you went somewhere else, it's almost guaranteed to be two years.
It's not just about how many freshman come to campus with computers. Practically every academic discipline is going to have its own specialized software. Maybe you want to go look at an electronic version of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the original languages.
"Computer Labs" in the sense of a centralized location where expensive software can be installed so that a bunch of people can use it are not going anywhere.
According to the grokster case, the uploader is violating the distribution right and the downloader the reproduction right by fixing the transitory data stream to a medium on his computer.
Right, but that's different than "being in receipt of infringing goods" (which the OP seemed to liken to being in receipt of stolen goods). Downloading implies making a copy and fixing it in a tangible medium.
The better question would be what happens to the person who buys the knockoff cam from a street corner. The buyer is not reproducing the work in the way that a downloader is, but it's also not a stolen good.
Well, except for that pesky little thing of being in receipt of infringing goods.
I'm not aware that this is actually against (U.S.) law. Obviously it could be considered evidence that you had participated in distribution or copying, which is illegal, but that's different.
Isn't that abridging the freedom of the presses that want to make political statements endorsing candidates? It basically says, "Don't make political endorsements, or else we'll tax you."
Not really, because the assumption is that everyone deserves to be taxed. Not being taxed is the exception - it's a special privilege, and if you want that status, you are required to do certain things.
There are a good number of universities that do have open access policies; sometimes, too, the whole university won't have adopted one, but a specific college or school will have.
For example, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt an open-access policy last year. I also think that all of Duke's law journals are open-access.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Do you? Or do you pay journal to organize unpaid reviewers to determine the quality of submissions, and to cover the cost of distribution? Because I thought that most reviewers and editors don't get paid.
The point is that now distribution costs can be close to nil, but subscription prices keep increasing. I don't see why an open-access journal that was not affiliated with a commercial publisher could not accomplish the same thing, and maintain the quality of articles. The "imprimatur" will simply no longer come courtesy of a commercial publisher - the brand name, e.g., "Well-Respected Journal of X" can persist. After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
While all of that is technically true, I was under the impression that in almost no circumstances are academic journal editors or reviewers paid for their work. Rather, to sit on the editorial board of a prestigious journal is considered its own reward.
From what I have heard, even the publishers don't present it that way. Publishers (Blackwell Synergy, Wiley, ScienceDirect, etc.) aren't editors. Editors are academics. The publishers argue that journal costs pay for the actual cost of distribution, as well as the cost of organizing all the editors, reviewers, etc.
Did you get a chance to file any bugs on the matter? Also, what WM were you using at the time?
HI started with whatever Ubuntu 8.10's defaults were (I think Metacity with Gnome?), but I think I tried other ones.
Here's a link to my forum post describing the end result of the experiment, including the window placement issues. There were just so many buggy things that I didn't bother filing reports (I know, I know, I'm part of the problem).
You can manually setup a Screen for each display adaptor in your xorg.conf. If your video card driver supports Xinerama, enable that as well, and you're good to go.
I know. The problem is that distros like Ubuntu are deprecating Xinerama in favor of RandR. Last time I tried, it wasn't possible to get Xinerama working in 8.10 - and everyone's solution is "use RandR."
About the multiple CRTCs thing, I believe that's different than multiple GPUs. I specifically asked on the RandR mailing list if 1.3 would have support for multiple video cards and was told no.
My then-current solution was to set use RandR on one card (two monitors), where all worked as it should, and to have a separate X session for the second card (third monitor). This "works" but it's pretty useless because of a bunch of bugs in how windows are handled (e.g., you open a window on one screen, and it ends up in the other X session). The whole process was so frustrating, it drove me back to Windows, and I've swore off Linux on this desktop until the multi-monitor support is better.
Re: 3, RandR, which is supposed to be better than the current proprietary hackjobs (nVidia's TwinView and ATI's bigdesktop) and Xinerama, currently doesn't support multiple GPUs. So basically, if you have more than 2 monitors on Linux, you're screwed.
I fought with xorg for hours to get my three monitors working, and it's still shit compared to Windows. That's just the way it is.
Also, what's with the assumption that the desktop won't be relevant in 5 years? That seems highly unlikely.
It's already been around and mainstream for maybe 15 years, and I don't see it going away any time soon. Sure, mobile devices are going to play an increasing role, but I get the feeling that people are still going to be heading into an office five days a week five years from now.
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Is there any way to see a user's total number of comments? The old comment page would display the last 24 of X, where X was the total number of comments from that user account.
Why is this modded funny? I use Dvorak, and I'm sure there are plenty of other /.ers who do, too.
Then there are the people using foreign language layout - AZERTY, etc.
Yeah, but good luck getting folks on /. to listen to you. They'll just quote Feynman, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds" and smugly feel that they've absolved themselves from any critical thought.
With "intelligent design", you have theologians trying to make scientific decisions.
Not really. You'd be hard pressed to find an actual trained theologian, at least one trained at an accredited school, who's a supporter of ID. You'll find that idiots like Ken Ham typically either don't have degrees at all, have them from diploma mills, or have them in subjects completely unrelated to science (or religion).
Sadly, reading comprehension might be a requisite skill for volunteers in such a study:
"Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks."
What does that mean in the legal sense? Can I distribute it?
From what I've learned, yes, you can. To take a more realistic example, if two poets, working independently, write two short poems that are "substantially similar" or even identical (meaning that had one relied upon the other's work, there would be a finding of infringement), they both have separate copyrights, and if one distributes the work, it's not infringing upon the other's copyright.
And if I download a .mp3, introduce some salt, recode it as an .ogg, and claim it came from /dev/random; how do you prove it?
Therein lies the rub. To return to the example of poets, if one of the poets is famous, and his poem has been widely published, the other poet will have a hard time convincing anyone that he actually created the identical poem independently. If he had drafts or notes from earlier versions, that would work in his favor, as it would support his claim of independent creation.
If some teenager read your comment, then claimed that his entire collection of MP3s were really just collections of output from /dev/random, obviously no one is going to buy that.
The other thing is, independent creation isn't really about the "source" of work. Whether your music came from /dev/random or a piano is kind of irrelevant. If you're doing it after a popular song has been published and played everywhere, and you're actively seeking out something that sounds identical to that song, it's clear your aim is to violate the copyright. If you had never heard of the song whose copyright you were violating, then you could claim independent creation, but merely using /dev/random as a trick to get around playing the song on a piano is a silly technicality.
Independent creation is there to protect people who legitimately create works that just happen to correspond to other copyrighted works. If the second poet looks for a string from /dev/random that corresponds to the first poet's poem, that's not really independent creation.
FYI, if you find yourself agreeing with the parent post, you probably have not ever read a Supreme Court or Appeals Court opinion, or decent law review article.
There are of course a number of frankly idiotic opinions, but on the whole judges (or at least good judges, i.e., the ones whose opinions you read in classes) are a fairly analytical bunch. You kind of have to be.
The impression I get when I ponder the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative branches is that we have a lot of well-educated, well-spoken judges trying to make sense of laws that have been cobbled together by a bunch of monkeys flinging poo at one another. It's a little depressing.
I wouldnt quite agree, as the .torrent files are checksums derived from either DVDrips or screencaps, which are both derivative works.
That's an intriguing idea, and one that copyright scholars would probably have a field day with.
Checksums don't really seem to meet the idea of derivative works. For reference, the definition of a "derivative work" is:
a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a âoederivative workâ.
I'm sure a good lawyer could argue that a checksum might fit in there, but it seems like a stretch. A checksum certainly doesn't represent the original work in any meaningful form to a human (or for that matter, a computer - with something like MD5, you can't recreate the original work from the checksum).
You're not thinking like a lawyer. (You should probably be thankful for that)
If I generate a sequence of random numbers, write it to disk, and it happens to be, say, a copyrighted song when fed into an audio player, am I breaking the law?
If the sequence is really random (and not "really" in the sense of mathematically random, but "really" in the sense of not being some obfuscated way of recreating the song in question), congratulations, you've just independently created an identical work. Of course, the chances of this are very low, and I'm not even sure if having a computer generate a sequence of random numbers would meet the ever-so-low threshold for creativity to warrant a copyright. But the point is that copyright law allows for independent creation of identical works, whereas patent law doesn't.
Besides, any song can have an infinite number of representations. If I write an audio decoder that takes a Win32 dll and plays it as audio, am I breaking the law if one of the system files in my licensed copy of Vista can be played as a copyrighted song? Is Microsoft?
It probably depends on how you write the audio decoder. If you write it to use the DLL as a sort of hash with the intent of recreating a copyright song, you've probably infringed. If it just happened to do it, then no.
I don't know how graduate school works. I'm not worried about being miserable at school. I can do anything for one year.
Most master's programs, at least in the U.S., are two years. Maybe you can do it in one year at your school because they offer some kind of smooth track into it, but if you went somewhere else, it's almost guaranteed to be two years.
Cicconi said the notices worked. The company saw very few repeat offenders.
And by "worked", he means "got subscribers to download PeerGuardian."
Exactly.
It's not just about how many freshman come to campus with computers. Practically every academic discipline is going to have its own specialized software. Maybe you want to go look at an electronic version of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the original languages.
"Computer Labs" in the sense of a centralized location where expensive software can be installed so that a bunch of people can use it are not going anywhere.
According to the grokster case, the uploader is violating the distribution right and the downloader the reproduction right by fixing the transitory data stream to a medium on his computer.
Right, but that's different than "being in receipt of infringing goods" (which the OP seemed to liken to being in receipt of stolen goods). Downloading implies making a copy and fixing it in a tangible medium.
The better question would be what happens to the person who buys the knockoff cam from a street corner. The buyer is not reproducing the work in the way that a downloader is, but it's also not a stolen good.
Well, except for that pesky little thing of being in receipt of infringing goods.
I'm not aware that this is actually against (U.S.) law. Obviously it could be considered evidence that you had participated in distribution or copying, which is illegal, but that's different.
Except instead of the FTC, it's the Minerals Management Service, and it actually happened.
Isn't that abridging the freedom of the presses that want to make political statements endorsing candidates? It basically says, "Don't make political endorsements, or else we'll tax you."
Not really, because the assumption is that everyone deserves to be taxed. Not being taxed is the exception - it's a special privilege, and if you want that status, you are required to do certain things.
This seems apposite.
Clearly the solution is to type all your work in Esperanto, on a chorded keyboard. Let them sniff that.
There are a good number of universities that do have open access policies; sometimes, too, the whole university won't have adopted one, but a specific college or school will have.
For example, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt an open-access policy last year. I also think that all of Duke's law journals are open-access.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Do you? Or do you pay journal to organize unpaid reviewers to determine the quality of submissions, and to cover the cost of distribution? Because I thought that most reviewers and editors don't get paid.
The point is that now distribution costs can be close to nil, but subscription prices keep increasing. I don't see why an open-access journal that was not affiliated with a commercial publisher could not accomplish the same thing, and maintain the quality of articles. The "imprimatur" will simply no longer come courtesy of a commercial publisher - the brand name, e.g., "Well-Respected Journal of X" can persist. After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
While all of that is technically true, I was under the impression that in almost no circumstances are academic journal editors or reviewers paid for their work. Rather, to sit on the editorial board of a prestigious journal is considered its own reward.
From what I have heard, even the publishers don't present it that way. Publishers (Blackwell Synergy, Wiley, ScienceDirect, etc.) aren't editors. Editors are academics. The publishers argue that journal costs pay for the actual cost of distribution, as well as the cost of organizing all the editors, reviewers, etc.
Did you get a chance to file any bugs on the matter? Also, what WM were you using at the time?
HI started with whatever Ubuntu 8.10's defaults were (I think Metacity with Gnome?), but I think I tried other ones.
Here's a link to my forum post describing the end result of the experiment, including the window placement issues. There were just so many buggy things that I didn't bother filing reports (I know, I know, I'm part of the problem).
You can manually setup a Screen for each display adaptor in your xorg.conf. If your video card driver supports Xinerama, enable that as well, and you're good to go.
I know. The problem is that distros like Ubuntu are deprecating Xinerama in favor of RandR. Last time I tried, it wasn't possible to get Xinerama working in 8.10 - and everyone's solution is "use RandR."
About the multiple CRTCs thing, I believe that's different than multiple GPUs. I specifically asked on the RandR mailing list if 1.3 would have support for multiple video cards and was told no.
My then-current solution was to set use RandR on one card (two monitors), where all worked as it should, and to have a separate X session for the second card (third monitor). This "works" but it's pretty useless because of a bunch of bugs in how windows are handled (e.g., you open a window on one screen, and it ends up in the other X session). The whole process was so frustrating, it drove me back to Windows, and I've swore off Linux on this desktop until the multi-monitor support is better.
Re: 3, RandR, which is supposed to be better than the current proprietary hackjobs (nVidia's TwinView and ATI's bigdesktop) and Xinerama, currently doesn't support multiple GPUs. So basically, if you have more than 2 monitors on Linux, you're screwed.
I fought with xorg for hours to get my three monitors working, and it's still shit compared to Windows. That's just the way it is.
Also, what's with the assumption that the desktop won't be relevant in 5 years? That seems highly unlikely.
It's already been around and mainstream for maybe 15 years, and I don't see it going away any time soon. Sure, mobile devices are going to play an increasing role, but I get the feeling that people are still going to be heading into an office five days a week five years from now.