The issue with RFID passports would be if they could be forged... it doesn't matter if they can be duplicated.
A distinction without a difference. An organisation (and it doesn't matter if this is a terrorist group or a run-of-the-mill little mafia type operation) coöpts a few postal employees. Not particularly hard to do. Those employees use a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment to scan the passports that pass through their hands. This is nearly instantaneous, and non-invasive, so good luck noticing that. The passports go right along to their intended recipients with no delay, and no one's the wiser. Yet the organisation now has all the information needed to create forged passports with valid data, which will raise no flags when used and allow their operatives to assume the identity of the citizen. All the supposed security benefits of the plan are gone, in fact, it's worse than old-style passports from a standpoint of security.
Sure, there's a minor privacy issue if the passport can be read by proximity (how close do you need to be?
Depends on how good your receiver is. Just because customs will be using an el cheapo setup that needs to be within ten inches to read the signal doesn't mean that no one will be able to construct a better reader. You think that's a *minor* issue? That someone could steal your identity, or detonate a bomb, based on that information without even having to set hands on your passport? Sounds pretty major to me.
True, but much of the reason costs for recording have gone down is because of software, that itself is copyrighted.
Only relatively recently. A great deal of software was developed before it became established that copyright would be considered applicable to it. If you're implying that software would be lacking were it not for copyright, I disagree.
And it is protected under copyright law as fair use.
Is it? In fact, it may be, in certain jurisdictions, and it definitely is not, in other jurisdictions. And sharing that mp3 file once made is certainly illegal in most jurisdictions, yet the same argument for it's legitimacy applies.
But for things that require large investments, there needs to be a period where things are kept scarce for a period long enough to recover the investment.
Even that is open to question, but note that songwriting does not require any great investment and never has. Recording and distribution, some decades back, were capital-intensive ventures, but even those aspects require no great investment today, so even if one accepts your contention here the argument above in the thread would not follow.
Do we just say anybody can use and distribute anything they find, and even claim ownership?
Note that they are two entirely different issues. Copyright is not needed to prohibit misattribution. Making a copy of a CD I bought, either to another CD, or to mp3s for my computer or ipod or whatever to play, comes under the heading of peacefull, honest enjoyment of my own property. Claiming falsely to have written a particular song does not.
A single company? No. A cartel. Absolutely. They all individually require DRM, and no, that's not considered price fixing.
When one label lets go of the DRM fetish, I'm sure the others will follow in relatively short order, but getting one to do that may be an impossible task.
It could be, but it isn't. If they did, Apple could just merrily role their eyes and just hand over the contract that states they need to DRM all music, even music not owned by the record labels negotiating to the contract, to anti-trust lawyers and get whatever they want.
No, that wouldn't work. If they signed such a contract, and its requirements were found to violate anti-trust law, the contract would in no way constitute a defense against anti-trust law.
You have to distinguish between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity.
The latter is not true value - it's just a sneaky form of theft.
Picasso's work is valued by people in part because of its scarcity, sure. But there's no scarcity of Picasso *prints* mind you. There was, at one time, but the market is pretty well supplied now. Since the prints are no longer so valuable, does it follow that the printers are doing something wrong, that they should be enjoined from making so many prints, to keep the supply artificially scarce and the price artificially high? Would that create value? Perhaps the economy would do better if we made half as many cars, half as many shoes, half as much food?
No, it would not. Any more than breaking windows increases wealth.
The NPT also explicitly guarantees the rights of signatories to develop nuclear power, and holds out the carrot of coöperation in that pursuit in return for the disavowal of nuclear weapons. That's why Iran (and the other signatories) signed up.
If you read the actual IAEA reports, instead of relying on out of context quotes cherry-picked by the white house, you'll find they have no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iranian nuclear program is anything but peaceful. They do note some things that *could* be used for either weaponry or power, of course, as well as the impossibility of verifying that there is nothing in the country they aren't aware of, and they'll note that in every report on every NPT signatory, it's the nature of the beast. Many of the things you need for weaponry you also need for power, and every nation that allows inspections puts some limits on where they may go, to protect their own (ostensibly non-nuclear) secrets.
Now, at this point, after several years of sabre-rattling by the US and resolutions pushed through the UN with heavy bribery and outrageous rhetoric against them, it wouldn't be shocking at all if Iran is finally pursuing nuclear weapons. Particularly considering they have a certain very aggressive neighbor who has a large nuclear arsenal, a history of disproportionate violence against their neighbors, and a loudly aggressive government. I know if *I* were Iranian, I'd want some nukes, as soon as possible, just for deterrence. But there isn't any evidence of it, and there certainly was no reason to suspect it was true when the white house started saying it was.
There's a really big difference between the two phrases. More than one, actually.
"Israel" could refer to the entire state, or its citizens. It can be interpreted in genocidal terms. What was actually said, however, was the occupying regime - a very different thing.
And for the verbal portion, "wipe off the map" is an English term that carries a rather violent connotation, again it can even imply genocide. The actual Farsi phrase used has no such connotation, it's more equivelent to the English phrase 'this too shall pass.'
So the bad translation wasn't 'tomeytoe tomahtoe' as you try to paint it, and it wasn't just a bad translation either. It was deliberately misleading. Reading the 'translation' that's been plastered all over our media, you hear violent, possibly genocidal threats against a nation. Read the original, or a decent translation, instead, and what you find is merely disapproval of a particular government, and faith that justice will eventually prevail over it.
"Piracy" doesn't need to be justified. Talking about justifying it is just a means to divert attention from the real question. "Piracy" is simply people using making use of their own property, peacefully, without interfering with anyone else. What needs to be justified is laws that prohibit such behaviour in the first place.
The daughter in this case was *not* a minor child, and has already lost her case.
The problem was the Mafiaa insisted on pursuing the case against her mother, knowing she was innocent, as well. And now they don't want to have to pay the mothers attorneys fees.
Games are far more complex tham those of 15 years ago.
If by 'complex' you mean 'uses fancier graphics.' That's not what I would mean by the word. The games being played today are not in any respect more complicated than the ones I was playing 15 years ago - quite the opposite, in most cases.
People are printing far more detailed images than they ever used to (especially people who make prints from their 8 megapixel cameras).
Umm, no. Your 8 megapixel camera are comparable, at best, to the professionally scanned 35mm photography I was embedding in documents 15 years ago. The difference is that, back then, it was more expensive to do it, so fewer people did, but for those of us that were doing it, it's no more complex.
People read far more complex documents that 15 years ago
Not at all. Not even close. Again, I was doing desktop publishing roughly 15 years ago, and doing stuff every bit as complicated as anything you're likely to see today. Today more people are doing these things, but it's nothing new. TeX hit version 3 in 1989, and very little has been added in publishing since. And Desktop Publishing didn't invent publishing, publishing was a mature art and science long before the computer came along - Desktop Publishing just ports well establishing publishing techniques to new hardware.
And as for collecting media, there's a big difference between having a couple of low res pics 15 years ago and having the entire collection of Jenna Jameson DVDs ripped to your hard drive today
The main difference is a lot of disk space - there's nothing new in that, disk space isn't different in any way, it's just cheaper and more widespread. A 386 running DOS could display full speed video, limited only by your storage capacity. Once windows was forced on the market, the same quality of video playback from the same file had to wait for the Pentium II...
You imply the gp is out of touch with all that's changed, but it sounds to me like it's you that doesn't realise what all was available 15 years ago. I was doing everything mention way back then, on hardware you might have to go to a museum to find today, and while there have certainly been some small advances, the vast majority of the increased computer power today goes to supporting code bloat and drawing pretty pictures all over the place. Which some people do value, after all, but I personally don't.
Ummm mv linux.iso familyguy.iso and share it and see.
The point is they aren't doing anything at all to verify that they have copyright on what's being shared, or even that anything is actually being shared. They see a name they don't like and they send the notice.
Actually this is a problem with the DMCA qua DMCA. Anyone can *claim* to own a copyright on any crazy thing, and send a DMCA notice, and effectively reverse the burden of proof for the price of 30 seconds typing.
That's very well thought out, well written, but still wrong.
They're charging more than enough to provide the service they promise. That's not the problem.
In Sweden I could get that 10Mb/s symmetrical connection you mention - for less than I'm paying in the US for the cheapest available ADSL connection. That's a market with far more regulatory overhead, and LESS effective subsidy as well. Here in the US we've already PAID the telecom companies, in the form of public subsidies, for end to end fiber optic across the country. The telecoms took the money and laid some dark fibre but never opened it up. They're creating artificial scarcity to keep their profit margins up.
Finally, it's not like MS actually has a choice here.
Nonsense. No one has a gun to their head. They are doing these things because it serves their purposes - locking out competition. The movie studios and record companies are thrilled with the idea, of course, but their interests are purely secondary to MS' own. If MS rejected this stuff and refused to implement it, the MAFIAAs would whine and initially refuse to "license" players, which would hurt no one but their own members, certainly not MS. But in the long run they would figure this out and back off the DRM mania, which would not serve MS' interest at all, since DRM is a great tool for them in cutting off the competition.
Ummm, no, 'completely free' it is not by any means.
It's free of additional charge, for those who have already paid the high price of using Windows 2000/XP/Vista. It's not available for real operating systems or alternative hardware, and naturally the actual software is not available for review, just an opaque binary blob. So no, it's far from 'completely free.'
Sadly, most people aren't using rapidshare to get games because there is no demo, they are doing it because they expect to get full games for free. That's bad for everyone in the long term;(
I won't disagree with that, so much as quibble with it.
I don't know how you can know which category most would fall into. I think both of us can only guess. My guess differs from yours, or perhaps not. I'd guess most downloaders just try the game briefly and delete it, and I'd guess most of them do wind up buying the games they like enough to buy. But I think both of us are just guessing, we don't know.
The other semi-disagreement is about the second sentence. It may be valid as far as it goes, but I'd argue that any erosion of civil rights enough to prevent it would do far more damage than it could prevent.
Unlike most other systems for slowing light, this one worked at very low light levels. In one experiment, the "UR" image was clear even when a single photon -- the smallest possible quantity of light -- was beamed through the stencil.
Ok, they had me up to here. There's no way a single photon makes a stencil image.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
A distinction without a difference. An organisation (and it doesn't matter if this is a terrorist group or a run-of-the-mill little mafia type operation) coöpts a few postal employees. Not particularly hard to do. Those employees use a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment to scan the passports that pass through their hands. This is nearly instantaneous, and non-invasive, so good luck noticing that. The passports go right along to their intended recipients with no delay, and no one's the wiser. Yet the organisation now has all the information needed to create forged passports with valid data, which will raise no flags when used and allow their operatives to assume the identity of the citizen. All the supposed security benefits of the plan are gone, in fact, it's worse than old-style passports from a standpoint of security.
Depends on how good your receiver is. Just because customs will be using an el cheapo setup that needs to be within ten inches to read the signal doesn't mean that no one will be able to construct a better reader. You think that's a *minor* issue? That someone could steal your identity, or detonate a bomb, based on that information without even having to set hands on your passport? Sounds pretty major to me.
Only relatively recently. A great deal of software was developed before it became established that copyright would be considered applicable to it. If you're implying that software would be lacking were it not for copyright, I disagree.
Is it? In fact, it may be, in certain jurisdictions, and it definitely is not, in other jurisdictions. And sharing that mp3 file once made is certainly illegal in most jurisdictions, yet the same argument for it's legitimacy applies.
Even that is open to question, but note that songwriting does not require any great investment and never has. Recording and distribution, some decades back, were capital-intensive ventures, but even those aspects require no great investment today, so even if one accepts your contention here the argument above in the thread would not follow.
Note that they are two entirely different issues. Copyright is not needed to prohibit misattribution. Making a copy of a CD I bought, either to another CD, or to mp3s for my computer or ipod or whatever to play, comes under the heading of peacefull, honest enjoyment of my own property. Claiming falsely to have written a particular song does not.
Let me guess, they're all 6 year old G3s?
A single company? No. A cartel. Absolutely. They all individually require DRM, and no, that's not considered price fixing.
When one label lets go of the DRM fetish, I'm sure the others will follow in relatively short order, but getting one to do that may be an impossible task.
No, that wouldn't work. If they signed such a contract, and its requirements were found to violate anti-trust law, the contract would in no way constitute a defense against anti-trust law.
You have to distinguish between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity.
The latter is not true value - it's just a sneaky form of theft.
Picasso's work is valued by people in part because of its scarcity, sure. But there's no scarcity of Picasso *prints* mind you. There was, at one time, but the market is pretty well supplied now. Since the prints are no longer so valuable, does it follow that the printers are doing something wrong, that they should be enjoined from making so many prints, to keep the supply artificially scarce and the price artificially high? Would that create value? Perhaps the economy would do better if we made half as many cars, half as many shoes, half as much food?
No, it would not. Any more than breaking windows increases wealth.
I don't agree that it's anything like counterfeiting, but even if it were, so what?
How many Picassos were actually painted by El Myr? No one knows, probably no one ever will know, and it doesn't really matter.
The NPT also explicitly guarantees the rights of signatories to develop nuclear power, and holds out the carrot of coöperation in that pursuit in return for the disavowal of nuclear weapons. That's why Iran (and the other signatories) signed up.
If you read the actual IAEA reports, instead of relying on out of context quotes cherry-picked by the white house, you'll find they have no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iranian nuclear program is anything but peaceful. They do note some things that *could* be used for either weaponry or power, of course, as well as the impossibility of verifying that there is nothing in the country they aren't aware of, and they'll note that in every report on every NPT signatory, it's the nature of the beast. Many of the things you need for weaponry you also need for power, and every nation that allows inspections puts some limits on where they may go, to protect their own (ostensibly non-nuclear) secrets.
Now, at this point, after several years of sabre-rattling by the US and resolutions pushed through the UN with heavy bribery and outrageous rhetoric against them, it wouldn't be shocking at all if Iran is finally pursuing nuclear weapons. Particularly considering they have a certain very aggressive neighbor who has a large nuclear arsenal, a history of disproportionate violence against their neighbors, and a loudly aggressive government. I know if *I* were Iranian, I'd want some nukes, as soon as possible, just for deterrence. But there isn't any evidence of it, and there certainly was no reason to suspect it was true when the white house started saying it was.
There's a really big difference between the two phrases. More than one, actually.
"Israel" could refer to the entire state, or its citizens. It can be interpreted in genocidal terms. What was actually said, however, was the occupying regime - a very different thing.
And for the verbal portion, "wipe off the map" is an English term that carries a rather violent connotation, again it can even imply genocide. The actual Farsi phrase used has no such connotation, it's more equivelent to the English phrase 'this too shall pass.'
So the bad translation wasn't 'tomeytoe tomahtoe' as you try to paint it, and it wasn't just a bad translation either. It was deliberately misleading. Reading the 'translation' that's been plastered all over our media, you hear violent, possibly genocidal threats against a nation. Read the original, or a decent translation, instead, and what you find is merely disapproval of a particular government, and faith that justice will eventually prevail over it.
"Piracy" doesn't need to be justified. Talking about justifying it is just a means to divert attention from the real question. "Piracy" is simply people using making use of their own property, peacefully, without interfering with anyone else. What needs to be justified is laws that prohibit such behaviour in the first place.
The daughter in this case was *not* a minor child, and has already lost her case. The problem was the Mafiaa insisted on pursuing the case against her mother, knowing she was innocent, as well. And now they don't want to have to pay the mothers attorneys fees.
If by 'complex' you mean 'uses fancier graphics.' That's not what I would mean by the word. The games being played today are not in any respect more complicated than the ones I was playing 15 years ago - quite the opposite, in most cases.
Umm, no. Your 8 megapixel camera are comparable, at best, to the professionally scanned 35mm photography I was embedding in documents 15 years ago. The difference is that, back then, it was more expensive to do it, so fewer people did, but for those of us that were doing it, it's no more complex.
Not at all. Not even close. Again, I was doing desktop publishing roughly 15 years ago, and doing stuff every bit as complicated as anything you're likely to see today. Today more people are doing these things, but it's nothing new. TeX hit version 3 in 1989, and very little has been added in publishing since. And Desktop Publishing didn't invent publishing, publishing was a mature art and science long before the computer came along - Desktop Publishing just ports well establishing publishing techniques to new hardware.
The main difference is a lot of disk space - there's nothing new in that, disk space isn't different in any way, it's just cheaper and more widespread. A 386 running DOS could display full speed video, limited only by your storage capacity. Once windows was forced on the market, the same quality of video playback from the same file had to wait for the Pentium II...
You imply the gp is out of touch with all that's changed, but it sounds to me like it's you that doesn't realise what all was available 15 years ago. I was doing everything mention way back then, on hardware you might have to go to a museum to find today, and while there have certainly been some small advances, the vast majority of the increased computer power today goes to supporting code bloat and drawing pretty pictures all over the place. Which some people do value, after all, but I personally don't.
Only rivalrous goods can properly be property.
"IP" is not a branch of property, but a branch of privilege.
Ummm mv linux.iso familyguy.iso and share it and see. The point is they aren't doing anything at all to verify that they have copyright on what's being shared, or even that anything is actually being shared. They see a name they don't like and they send the notice.
No, while he did in fact do that, he didn't have to.
He could have used a normal bittorrent client to share a linux distro and get the same results.
Actually this is a problem with the DMCA qua DMCA. Anyone can *claim* to own a copyright on any crazy thing, and send a DMCA notice, and effectively reverse the burden of proof for the price of 30 seconds typing.
Last I checked Gandi.net offered by far the best terms. Not in terms of money (close, though!) but in terms of recognising the customers rights.
That's very well thought out, well written, but still wrong.
They're charging more than enough to provide the service they promise. That's not the problem.
In Sweden I could get that 10Mb/s symmetrical connection you mention - for less than I'm paying in the US for the cheapest available ADSL connection. That's a market with far more regulatory overhead, and LESS effective subsidy as well. Here in the US we've already PAID the telecom companies, in the form of public subsidies, for end to end fiber optic across the country. The telecoms took the money and laid some dark fibre but never opened it up. They're creating artificial scarcity to keep their profit margins up.
No, altruism is doing things for others that you do NOT benefit from.
Doing things for others that you benefit from indirectly is called 'enlightened egoisms.'
As opposed to the brute egoism of those who can't see the indirect benefits.
No wonder doctors kill more people than car accidents do.
Nonsense. No one has a gun to their head. They are doing these things because it serves their purposes - locking out competition. The movie studios and record companies are thrilled with the idea, of course, but their interests are purely secondary to MS' own. If MS rejected this stuff and refused to implement it, the MAFIAAs would whine and initially refuse to "license" players, which would hurt no one but their own members, certainly not MS. But in the long run they would figure this out and back off the DRM mania, which would not serve MS' interest at all, since DRM is a great tool for them in cutting off the competition.
Ummm, no, 'completely free' it is not by any means.
It's free of additional charge, for those who have already paid the high price of using Windows 2000/XP/Vista. It's not available for real operating systems or alternative hardware, and naturally the actual software is not available for review, just an opaque binary blob. So no, it's far from 'completely free.'
I won't disagree with that, so much as quibble with it.
I don't know how you can know which category most would fall into. I think both of us can only guess. My guess differs from yours, or perhaps not. I'd guess most downloaders just try the game briefly and delete it, and I'd guess most of them do wind up buying the games they like enough to buy. But I think both of us are just guessing, we don't know.
The other semi-disagreement is about the second sentence. It may be valid as far as it goes, but I'd argue that any erosion of civil rights enough to prevent it would do far more damage than it could prevent.
Ok, they had me up to here. There's no way a single photon makes a stencil image.