To be fair, those questions outright SUCKED. *That's* the best Slashdot can give our candidates? No wonder no one responded! I was expecting questions that would give a layman's summary of all the great issues whose explanation we take for granted, including patents, copyright, distribution monopoly, fair use, parenting in the digital age, internet governance, etc., and then ask for a well-reasoned or thought-out action plan. But these questions do nothing to motivate a person to think deeply about anything I care about.
Fuck, you have an opportunity to get official answers to questions that would *never* be asked in a mainstream debate, and instead you shove forward crap about Marijuana and "our elected officials deceive us"? We all deserve the shitty response we got.
Sure. When I watched the Futurama movie commentary, I wanted to scream at David X Cohen and company, "You IDIOTS, you're far too stupid to comprehend your own brilliance!", for not knowing their own work as well as the fans. Guess that's more a matter of expectations than stupidity though.
Wrongo. Licenses can be revoked by the rights holder because they are *not* contracts, at least in their basic form. Contracts must have an offer, acceptance, and consideration (payment or something similar), and open source licenses lack the latter. This situation is not applicable to non-free software.
"A third problem with bare licenses is that they may be revocable by the licensor. Specifically, a license not coupled with an interest may be revoked. The term interest in this context usually means the payment of some royalty or license fee, but there are other more complicated ways to satisfy the interest requirement. For example, a licensee can demonstrate that he or she has paid some consideration - a contract law term not found in copyright or patent law - in order to avoid revocation. Or a licensee may claim that the and she relied on the software licensed under an open source license and now is dependent upon that software, but this contract law concept, called promissory estoppel, is both difficult to prove and unreliable in court tests."
SimCity 2000 was easily the best of the series, and in my opinion the best game of any of the Will Wright games. It pretty much had everything I wanted, putting me at exactly the level of control I wanted to be at. The SCURK definitely helped too. And then you have SimCopter and Streets of SimCity. The latter got lousy reviews, looking back on Wikipedia, but I had a heck of a lot of fun with both of them.
"SCRRReeeee-Crraoo-Ehhhhhhhhhhhh" - as if there were an onomatopoeia for that sequence of tones. I think I recall having some sort of hacked version that didn't require the code. Ah, the olden days, when piracy, anti-piracy, and anti-anti-piracy ran rampant at the speed of real-life, geographically-bound communications.
Nor do I, but that is insufficient to support reasoning about the validity of evidence in court (I hope; IANAL), which is what I think we're talking about.
To use it in court would require a disclosure of the technology and procedures the seller uses (I hope). Perhaps they don't want to give that information away, and will only use the technology to focus their investigation through more traditional means.
Yeah, certainly compared to DRM, watermarks aren't that odious. It really comes down to a question of what it means for you to purchase this media. Do you want a copy of some master recording, is it ok that your version is marked in some way so as to be different from everyone else's? A part of me prefers the former instinctively.
More importantly, how will this affect the transition from buying media content to buying mere licenses to play them? Or is that pretty much orthogonal?
Why does burning to and ripping from a CD remove watermarks? Does reencoding destroy the mark? If not, I can't see why creating perfect digital copies would remove information.
Well, watermarks are harmful in that sense if they're accepted as evidence into court, which is tantamount to accepting the RIAA's word that they didn't just manufacture evidence out of nothing with the intent of framing random people. Third parties can be prevented from framing people in this manner with an encryption scheme, but that doesn't help us when the RIAA itself isn't to be trusted. On the other hand, all this assumes that watermarks are intended to make it to court - perhaps the intent is instead to tie a leaked copy to a user account and that user's IP address, which can then be monitored for other infringing activity.
Of course, even if watermarks weren't considered foolproof evidence by themselves, they could still be used to support the kinds of RIAA cases we see today. I doubt a jury would care whether they could technically be faked.
For that reason, it's probably critical to examine the terms you agree to when you sign up for a download service that uses this technology. I would not at all be surprised if they added in a clause that makes you responsible for any copyright infringement that occurs using your copy, regardless of whether it was you or someone else that did the actual sharing. Without an explicit agreement, the burden would be on them to prove that you were responsible, and not some third party. Not that that would stop them from suing you anyway.
FIRST is an incredible competition. The idea is to get a new young generation of students interested in science and engineering, by creating a cooperative environment between high school teams, business and university sponsors, mentors, and even other teams. It is often very stressful and exciting, and this kickoff marks the beginning of a six week intense building period, followed by shipping the robot and competing at regional events. Every team reacts differently, but there's a good sense of community around the team and their bot. In most cases there's an immense amount of knowledge sharing between teams, facilitated by the forum chiefdelphi.com.
It's a worthy organization, but it takes a tremendous amount of dedication and support.
And it looks like the camera is significantly less important this year, the IR device taking its place. This should significantly lower the stress level of most teams' programmers.
Speaking as an alumnus programmer and someone who was at a regional kickoff today:
Development for the FIRST Robotics Controller is in C and typically uses MPLab as an IDE and IFILoader to transfer the program over. FIRST provides default code that takes care of all of the basic yet difficult tasks such as handling some interrupts and communicating with the human operating interface, and provides stubs for user logic in various modes (default, autonomous, low-latency code). There have been reports of some teams using Linux on development machines, but it's not that common.
The controller is split into a master process and user processor. The user one is programmed by the team, and the master one is flashed from binary firmware and implements critical features such as radio communication, restrictions for autonomous mode, and a disabled mode for safety and competition control.
It's a good indication that the software wasn't engineered to be particularly highly reliable. You wouldn't use Windows to run a nuclear power plant safety-critical system. I'm not saying that this situation demands such reliability, but it's arguably relevant.
Oh absolutely, I didn't realize how essential level design was until Nexuiz's mappack was released. It was basically a rehash of a lot of older quake maps (that I personally would not have had the chance to come into contact with), and they were very noticeably more playable than anything I'd ever seen in that game. Which isn't to say that I didn't like the original Nexuiz maps, but these were much more natural to learn and frag in.
That's what made me groan about this article. It confirms that the RIAA isn't actually (necessarily) questioning the legality of ripping, but they are twisting the words and facts as any good lawyer would, to insinuate that there is something immoral about a defendant that rips CDs and takes "unauthorized" actions. I just hope that the jurors in any case where they use that BS implication would be smart enough to see through it, but I'm not optimistic.
Now if the RIAA were to actually issue some sort of public statement regarding the GP's use of lyrics, it'd be littered with statements like "We've been telling people so for years, so he had no excuse to not know it's completely illegal" and crap like that.
You know, the more I watch this issue, the more the statements uttered by the RIAA resemble something you might see in User Friendly (and I'm sure this particular article will inspire tomorrow's strip; Iliad gets half his comics from slashdot's headlines). When I see people criticize the RIAA's position on copying = theft, there's some natural tendency for me to think of it as an exaggeration of music industry's stupidity, that they can't really have said it in quite that way, but here they are decrying it in the strongest of voices. The sick thing is that this propaganda is enough to convince jurors.
Spike has the additional dilemma in that it tries to be the Manly Man's Network of Manhood while censoring the shit out of classy shows like The Shield. The irony of this astounds me.
You had me going for the first half of the sentence, but copyright is profoundly irrelevant to this topic. Sure, you can try to mold a legal interpretation out of the outdated piece of crap that is IP law in the digital age, but you can do the same for almost every aspect of modern life. Is it an unauthorized derived work to splash a DOG (digital onscreen graphic) over broadcast television (assuming that this right wasn't granted along with the broadcast rights themselves)? And why does the derivative work matter at all? Isn't copying verbatim also illegal? By the way, I never gave you permission to reproduce the contents of this message in RAM.
Seriously though, the proper counter argument would be something like "Because one is informative and precedes access to the service, while the other modifies what is supposed to be traffic between you and one other party," but I'm not sure even that holds up to scrutiny.
You forgot the part where you generate tons of press over controversial content and then back down rather than defend the content, thus maximizing profit while damaging the artform.
> "I fail to see why someones criminal record should be accessible to all after they have paid their debt to soceity. In the specific case of sex offenders, if they are so dangerous that we have to notify people when they move into the neighborhood, then why the fuck are they being released from prison?"
Simple. It is believed that sex offenders are repeat offenders moreso than other criminals, yet the crime is not as severe as murder, so it would be wrong to hold them for a longer sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, those questions outright SUCKED. *That's* the best Slashdot can give our candidates? No wonder no one responded! I was expecting questions that would give a layman's summary of all the great issues whose explanation we take for granted, including patents, copyright, distribution monopoly, fair use, parenting in the digital age, internet governance, etc., and then ask for a well-reasoned or thought-out action plan. But these questions do nothing to motivate a person to think deeply about anything I care about.
Fuck, you have an opportunity to get official answers to questions that would *never* be asked in a mainstream debate, and instead you shove forward crap about Marijuana and "our elected officials deceive us"? We all deserve the shitty response we got.
Sure. When I watched the Futurama movie commentary, I wanted to scream at David X Cohen and company, "You IDIOTS, you're far too stupid to comprehend your own brilliance!", for not knowing their own work as well as the fans. Guess that's more a matter of expectations than stupidity though.
Wrongo. Licenses can be revoked by the rights holder because they are *not* contracts, at least in their basic form. Contracts must have an offer, acceptance, and consideration (payment or something similar), and open source licenses lack the latter. This situation is not applicable to non-free software.
Source: "Open Source Licensing" by Lawrence Rosen, Chapter 4, available at http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm
"A third problem with bare licenses is that they may be revocable by the licensor. Specifically, a license not coupled with an interest may be revoked. The term interest in this context usually means the payment of some royalty or license fee, but there are other more complicated ways to satisfy the interest requirement. For example, a licensee can demonstrate that he or she has paid some consideration - a contract law term not found in copyright or patent law - in order to avoid revocation. Or a licensee may claim that the and she relied on the software licensed under an open source license and now is dependent upon that software, but this contract law concept, called promissory estoppel, is both difficult to prove and unreliable in court tests."
SimCity 2000 was easily the best of the series, and in my opinion the best game of any of the Will Wright games. It pretty much had everything I wanted, putting me at exactly the level of control I wanted to be at. The SCURK definitely helped too. And then you have SimCopter and Streets of SimCity. The latter got lousy reviews, looking back on Wikipedia, but I had a heck of a lot of fun with both of them.
"SCRRReeeee-Crraoo-Ehhhhhhhhhhhh" - as if there were an onomatopoeia for that sequence of tones. I think I recall having some sort of hacked version that didn't require the code. Ah, the olden days, when piracy, anti-piracy, and anti-anti-piracy ran rampant at the speed of real-life, geographically-bound communications.
I couldn't hear you, I was busy watching the NYC episode of the Simpsons and - NOOOOooooooooo...
Nor do I, but that is insufficient to support reasoning about the validity of evidence in court (I hope; IANAL), which is what I think we're talking about.
To use it in court would require a disclosure of the technology and procedures the seller uses (I hope). Perhaps they don't want to give that information away, and will only use the technology to focus their investigation through more traditional means.
Yeah, certainly compared to DRM, watermarks aren't that odious. It really comes down to a question of what it means for you to purchase this media. Do you want a copy of some master recording, is it ok that your version is marked in some way so as to be different from everyone else's? A part of me prefers the former instinctively.
More importantly, how will this affect the transition from buying media content to buying mere licenses to play them? Or is that pretty much orthogonal?
Why does burning to and ripping from a CD remove watermarks? Does reencoding destroy the mark? If not, I can't see why creating perfect digital copies would remove information.
If I hadn't posted to this conversation, I'd mod you down as overrated. Back that up with a definition of DBD that supports your claim, or retract it.
Well, watermarks are harmful in that sense if they're accepted as evidence into court, which is tantamount to accepting the RIAA's word that they didn't just manufacture evidence out of nothing with the intent of framing random people. Third parties can be prevented from framing people in this manner with an encryption scheme, but that doesn't help us when the RIAA itself isn't to be trusted. On the other hand, all this assumes that watermarks are intended to make it to court - perhaps the intent is instead to tie a leaked copy to a user account and that user's IP address, which can then be monitored for other infringing activity.
Of course, even if watermarks weren't considered foolproof evidence by themselves, they could still be used to support the kinds of RIAA cases we see today. I doubt a jury would care whether they could technically be faked.
For that reason, it's probably critical to examine the terms you agree to when you sign up for a download service that uses this technology. I would not at all be surprised if they added in a clause that makes you responsible for any copyright infringement that occurs using your copy, regardless of whether it was you or someone else that did the actual sharing. Without an explicit agreement, the burden would be on them to prove that you were responsible, and not some third party. Not that that would stop them from suing you anyway.
FIRST is an incredible competition. The idea is to get a new young generation of students interested in science and engineering, by creating a cooperative environment between high school teams, business and university sponsors, mentors, and even other teams. It is often very stressful and exciting, and this kickoff marks the beginning of a six week intense building period, followed by shipping the robot and competing at regional events. Every team reacts differently, but there's a good sense of community around the team and their bot. In most cases there's an immense amount of knowledge sharing between teams, facilitated by the forum chiefdelphi.com.
It's a worthy organization, but it takes a tremendous amount of dedication and support.
And it looks like the camera is significantly less important this year, the IR device taking its place. This should significantly lower the stress level of most teams' programmers.
Speaking as an alumnus programmer and someone who was at a regional kickoff today:
Development for the FIRST Robotics Controller is in C and typically uses MPLab as an IDE and IFILoader to transfer the program over. FIRST provides default code that takes care of all of the basic yet difficult tasks such as handling some interrupts and communicating with the human operating interface, and provides stubs for user logic in various modes (default, autonomous, low-latency code). There have been reports of some teams using Linux on development machines, but it's not that common.
The controller is split into a master process and user processor. The user one is programmed by the team, and the master one is flashed from binary firmware and implements critical features such as radio communication, restrictions for autonomous mode, and a disabled mode for safety and competition control.
It's a good indication that the software wasn't engineered to be particularly highly reliable. You wouldn't use Windows to run a nuclear power plant safety-critical system. I'm not saying that this situation demands such reliability, but it's arguably relevant.
Oh absolutely, I didn't realize how essential level design was until Nexuiz's mappack was released. It was basically a rehash of a lot of older quake maps (that I personally would not have had the chance to come into contact with), and they were very noticeably more playable than anything I'd ever seen in that game. Which isn't to say that I didn't like the original Nexuiz maps, but these were much more natural to learn and frag in.
That's what made me groan about this article. It confirms that the RIAA isn't actually (necessarily) questioning the legality of ripping, but they are twisting the words and facts as any good lawyer would, to insinuate that there is something immoral about a defendant that rips CDs and takes "unauthorized" actions. I just hope that the jurors in any case where they use that BS implication would be smart enough to see through it, but I'm not optimistic.
Now if the RIAA were to actually issue some sort of public statement regarding the GP's use of lyrics, it'd be littered with statements like "We've been telling people so for years, so he had no excuse to not know it's completely illegal" and crap like that.
You know, the more I watch this issue, the more the statements uttered by the RIAA resemble something you might see in User Friendly (and I'm sure this particular article will inspire tomorrow's strip; Iliad gets half his comics from slashdot's headlines). When I see people criticize the RIAA's position on copying = theft, there's some natural tendency for me to think of it as an exaggeration of music industry's stupidity, that they can't really have said it in quite that way, but here they are decrying it in the strongest of voices. The sick thing is that this propaganda is enough to convince jurors.
Spike has the additional dilemma in that it tries to be the Manly Man's Network of Manhood while censoring the shit out of classy shows like The Shield. The irony of this astounds me.
You had me going for the first half of the sentence, but copyright is profoundly irrelevant to this topic. Sure, you can try to mold a legal interpretation out of the outdated piece of crap that is IP law in the digital age, but you can do the same for almost every aspect of modern life. Is it an unauthorized derived work to splash a DOG (digital onscreen graphic) over broadcast television (assuming that this right wasn't granted along with the broadcast rights themselves)? And why does the derivative work matter at all? Isn't copying verbatim also illegal? By the way, I never gave you permission to reproduce the contents of this message in RAM.
Seriously though, the proper counter argument would be something like "Because one is informative and precedes access to the service, while the other modifies what is supposed to be traffic between you and one other party," but I'm not sure even that holds up to scrutiny.
I like Desperate Desktops better.
You forgot the part where you generate tons of press over controversial content and then back down rather than defend the content, thus maximizing profit while damaging the artform.
> "I fail to see why someones criminal record should be accessible to all after they have paid their debt to soceity. In the specific case of sex offenders, if they are so dangerous that we have to notify people when they move into the neighborhood, then why the fuck are they being released from prison?"
Simple. It is believed that sex offenders are repeat offenders moreso than other criminals, yet the crime is not as severe as murder, so it would be wrong to hold them for a longer sentence.