The only thing you can do against the likes of these laws that harm the public in order to cater to short-term special interests is to ensure that your elective representatives answer to you and only you (plural), so you could easily kick them out of office AND INTO PRISON when they begin to contemplate such shenanigans.
To achieve that you have to first vote out all the D's and the R's and replace them with people that are willing to criminalize corruption to an extent that will make premeditated murder look like jaywalking in comparison, revoke corporate personhood, make corporate executives personally responsible for the actions of the respective corporations and in general restore sanity to all branches of government.
Cultures need to be able to decide for themselves what is significant. In order to do that, copyright needs to have a limit. I would suggest no more than 2 generations, or 38 years.
No, because if you don't have access to your culture during the span of your generation, it is not your culture anymore. Copyright should be abolished altogether (although I would grudgingly agree to half a generation or less).
Unfortunately, I do not have any input on the decision so you may ignore me, just as "my" government does.
Both machines run FF 3.6 because I keep reading that later versions have worse memory use and UI performance characteristics.
... people say that 3.6 is more responsive (especially on older HW) than the newer versions.
Those people are wrong. Newer versions of Firefox are *much* faster and use less memory. In fact, lowering memory usage became a priority right about the time you stopped upgrading. Ironic, eh?
"Faster" is a relative term. I was specifically referring to the UI. In particular on machines with old/slow CPUs and GPUs. For example, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=716445 (there are others).
At work I have a quad core Q6700 with 4GB of RAM. At home I use an older single core Athlon 64 3500+ with 2GB of RAM. Both machines run Windows XP.
Both machines run FF 3.6 because I keep reading that later versions have worse memory use and UI performance characteristics.
On both machines, I experience two problems with FF memory usage (all figures were reported as "private bytes" by Sysinternals process explorer):
1) Memory usage keeps growing until it reaches a threshold (1.5GB on my home machine) after which FF locks hard with close to 100% CPU use and never recovers. Closing tabs did not bring the memory usage down in a perceptible way. This used to require daily restarts of FF but lately the problem does not seem to happen that often. A restart can still cut the memory use by half (same tabs courtesy of session restore), which helps with problem #2 below, but it takes much longer to go over 1GB.
2) Periodic "stuttering" where FF will pause for a short period every once in a while with CPU usage spikes approaching 100%. The duration of the pauses seem directly related to the amount of memory that FF uses. That, and the periodic nature of the "hiccups", lead me to believe it is related to garbage collection. Unfortunately, it makes viewing videos when FF is running (even using an external viewer) impractical, so I have to close FF and start IE8 each time I go to youtube, There's a bug report that was opened almost 3 years ago (and still unassigned).
The responses that I get are:
* You're using an old version. True, but according to the comments, bug 490122 is still present in the newer versions (up to v10) and people say that 3.6 is more responsive (especially on older HW) than the newer versions.
* It's the plugins/addons/extensions. Perhaps, but the reason I use FF at all is because of the extensions and I would expect such an "extension-centric" product to help me figure out which one is misbehaving (for example, by reporting the memory usage of each tab).
Now, reading the article and the slides, I am getting hopeful that these issues are being addressed.
This President has orchestrated the greatest loss of individual rights since Stalin. The election can't come fast enough for me... And I will vote for whomever the Republican candidate is who is running against him. While I may not agree with whomever that will be - getting this fanatic out of power is more important than playing political games.
First, they gave you GWB so you vowed to vote Democrat (and the fact that Obama seemed the polar opposite of Dubya didn't hurt). Then, you found out that Obama was no better, probably worse even (according to your views) so you made a pledge to vote Republican...
What will happen if the Republicans win the next election and the next president will prove to be no different? Will you continue the cycle? Or will you finally learn that voting for either of those parties is casting a vote against your rights and freedoms?
When I open a.torrent file with uTorrent, it lets me select the files in the torrent that I want to load (sometimes I may be interested in just a small subset). I can't seem to get this functionality with magnet links.
Everything you said is true except the last bit, "this is a huge, huge, blow to Google." Cynically, there is no way some small Kenyan firm is going to be able to bring a serious lawsuit in the US against Google. Google's legal team would crush them, tie them up in series after series of motions, and bankrupt Mocality before any verdict could hope to be passed. Such is the nature of the US legal system.
There are a lot Google employees that read Slashdot. I strongly encourage those of them that are appalled at the practice to express their disgust to their direct and indirect managers, up to and including the execs.
[...] because the core idea of copyright (that creators have a right to be reimbursed for their hard work) is a good one.
No, it is not.
Furthermore, it is not, and never has been, the "core idea" of copyright.
Nobody, creators included, has a right to be reimbursed for their work. To overcome this, most people in capitalistic societies enter into some sort of a contractual agreement with employers, customers, patrons, etc. which goes along the lines of: I will provide you with my work (or the products resulting from it) and in return, you will give me currency (or an equivalent in goods or services).
The justification to break away from this model by introducing copyright was that society as a whole benefits from having a rich culture, which includes an abundance of creative works. Therefore it is in the society's best interest to provide incentives for creators to continuously supply society with their creations even when "traditional" remuneration options are unavailable. The chosen implementation was to grant the creator of a work a limited time monopoly on its reproduction and distribution (literally: the right to copy), after which, the work reverts to the public domain. It was assumed that a term of 14 years was a reasonable compromise.
Now, some would say that the real reason for copyright was an attempt to forever lock down culture for the benefit of middlemen, and gven the way legislation and enforcement has proceeded I tend to agree.
Used to play and DM 1st and 2nd edition a couple of decades ago. Then life (often spelled with a 'w') happened and I sort of drifted away from it. I participated in a handful of one-time meetings where they used the 3rd edition (or possibly 3.5) which seemed to be a mostly welcome evolution of the 2nd. I tried running an adventure for my kids based on 4th edition once but it felt like a completely different system, and not in a good way. More like a computer game. What's the 5th edition like?
I went and got a BS in Compute Science. I took classes with graduate students who (literally) did not know how to open a file stream in C++ and read individual words out of the file.
CS is about Math, not coding. I doubt that Donald Knuth knows (or even concerns himself with) "how to open a file stream in C++ and read individual words out of the file" either.
Agreed, contacting your elected representatives is the only reasonable way to achieve meaningful change. Just like the people did in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.
Of course, private copying is still legal in Canada, and that is done by stealing money from photographers and computer programmers and anyone who has backed up their files to a burned CD.
Bill C-11 will make circumventing DRM (for any reason) a criminal offence. The days of legal private copying are numbered.
I've been using 1&1 for quite some time (ever since enom decided to proactively treat some emails passing through their DNS system as spam and silently drop them). Granted, I only have 2 domains with them and I use a 3rd party DNS services, but I never had any particular problems. Would you care to enlighten me?
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. The best solution is to limit government power so they can't do this.
And pray tell who is going to limit government power? The government? Yes, your solution makes much more sense...
Otherwise you'll be kicking out Representatives every year.
Representatives, like diapers, should be replaced regularly and often, and for the very same reason.
The only thing you can do against the likes of these laws that harm the public in order to cater to short-term special interests is to ensure that your elective representatives answer to you and only you (plural), so you could easily kick them out of office AND INTO PRISON when they begin to contemplate such shenanigans.
To achieve that you have to first vote out all the D's and the R's and replace them with people that are willing to criminalize corruption to an extent that will make premeditated murder look like jaywalking in comparison, revoke corporate personhood, make corporate executives personally responsible for the actions of the respective corporations and in general restore sanity to all branches of government.
In other words: it will never happen.
Cultures need to be able to decide for themselves what is significant. In order to do that, copyright needs to have a limit. I would suggest no more than 2 generations, or 38 years.
No, because if you don't have access to your culture during the span of your generation, it is not your culture anymore. Copyright should be abolished altogether (although I would grudgingly agree to half a generation or less).
Unfortunately, I do not have any input on the decision so you may ignore me, just as "my" government does.
Both machines run FF 3.6 because I keep reading that later versions have worse memory use and UI performance characteristics.
... people say that 3.6 is more responsive (especially on older HW) than the newer versions.
Those people are wrong. Newer versions of Firefox are *much* faster and use less memory. In fact, lowering memory usage became a priority right about the time you stopped upgrading. Ironic, eh?
"Faster" is a relative term. I was specifically referring to the UI. In particular on machines with old/slow CPUs and GPUs.
For example, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=716445 (there are others).
What about those Russian dating agencies advertised on Slashdot? (The photos of the women look nice.)
Sure, if you're into dating photos.
At work I have a quad core Q6700 with 4GB of RAM. At home I use an older single core Athlon 64 3500+ with 2GB of RAM. Both machines run Windows XP.
Both machines run FF 3.6 because I keep reading that later versions have worse memory use and UI performance characteristics.
On both machines, I experience two problems with FF memory usage (all figures were reported as "private bytes" by Sysinternals process explorer):
1) Memory usage keeps growing until it reaches a threshold (1.5GB on my home machine) after which FF locks hard with close to 100% CPU use and never recovers. Closing tabs did not bring the memory usage down in a perceptible way.
This used to require daily restarts of FF but lately the problem does not seem to happen that often. A restart can still cut the memory use by half (same tabs courtesy of session restore), which helps with problem #2 below, but it takes much longer to go over 1GB.
2) Periodic "stuttering" where FF will pause for a short period every once in a while with CPU usage spikes approaching 100%. The duration of the pauses seem directly related to the amount of memory that FF uses. That, and the periodic nature of the "hiccups", lead me to believe it is related to garbage collection.
Unfortunately, it makes viewing videos when FF is running (even using an external viewer) impractical, so I have to close FF and start IE8 each time I go to youtube,
There's a bug report that was opened almost 3 years ago (and still unassigned).
The responses that I get are:
* You're using an old version.
True, but according to the comments, bug 490122 is still present in the newer versions (up to v10) and people say that 3.6 is more responsive (especially on older HW) than the newer versions.
* It's the plugins/addons/extensions.
Perhaps, but the reason I use FF at all is because of the extensions and I would expect such an "extension-centric" product to help me figure out which one is misbehaving (for example, by reporting the memory usage of each tab).
Now, reading the article and the slides, I am getting hopeful that these issues are being addressed.
raise the question of whether or not Google has become too big to effectively enforce it's 'Do no evil' philosophy across its massive organization.
Do not confuse a marketing slogan for a philosophy.
This President has orchestrated the greatest loss of individual rights since Stalin. The election can't come fast enough for me... And I will vote for whomever the Republican candidate is who is running against him. While I may not agree with whomever that will be - getting this fanatic out of power is more important than playing political games.
First, they gave you GWB so you vowed to vote Democrat (and the fact that Obama seemed the polar opposite of Dubya didn't hurt). Then, you found out that Obama was no better, probably worse even (according to your views) so you made a pledge to vote Republican...
What will happen if the Republicans win the next election and the next president will prove to be no different? Will you continue the cycle? Or will you finally learn that voting for either of those parties is casting a vote against your rights and freedoms?
When I open a .torrent file with uTorrent, it lets me select the files in the torrent that I want to load (sometimes I may be interested in just a small subset).
I can't seem to get this functionality with magnet links.
Everything you said is true except the last bit, "this is a huge, huge, blow to Google." Cynically, there is no way some small Kenyan firm is going to be able to bring a serious lawsuit in the US against Google. Google's legal team would crush them, tie them up in series after series of motions, and bankrupt Mocality before any verdict could hope to be passed. Such is the nature of the US legal system.
FTFY.
There are a lot Google employees that read Slashdot.
I strongly encourage those of them that are appalled at the practice to express their disgust to their direct and indirect managers, up to and including the execs.
Don't admit to being evil.
It's a good thing natural justice trumps US "law".
Sophocles, is that you?
Why not?
Because that would practically limit copyright to the rich, which in today's American system means corporations.
[...] because the core idea of copyright (that creators have a right to be reimbursed for their hard work) is a good one.
No, it is not.
Furthermore, it is not, and never has been, the "core idea" of copyright.
Nobody, creators included, has a right to be reimbursed for their work. To overcome this, most people in capitalistic societies enter into some sort of a contractual agreement with employers, customers, patrons, etc. which goes along the lines of: I will provide you with my work (or the products resulting from it) and in return, you will give me currency (or an equivalent in goods or services).
The justification to break away from this model by introducing copyright was that society as a whole benefits from having a rich culture, which includes an abundance of creative works. Therefore it is in the society's best interest to provide incentives for creators to continuously supply society with their creations even when "traditional" remuneration options are unavailable. The chosen implementation was to grant the creator of a work a limited time monopoly on its reproduction and distribution (literally: the right to copy), after which, the work reverts to the public domain. It was assumed that a term of 14 years was a reasonable compromise.
Now, some would say that the real reason for copyright was an attempt to forever lock down culture for the benefit of middlemen, and gven the way legislation and enforcement has proceeded I tend to agree.
Used to play and DM 1st and 2nd edition a couple of decades ago.
Then life (often spelled with a 'w') happened and I sort of drifted away from it.
I participated in a handful of one-time meetings where they used the 3rd edition (or possibly 3.5) which seemed to be a mostly welcome evolution of the 2nd.
I tried running an adventure for my kids based on 4th edition once but it felt like a completely different system, and not in a good way. More like a computer game.
What's the 5th edition like?
I went and got a BS in Compute Science. I took classes with graduate students who (literally) did not know how to open a file stream in C++ and read individual words out of the file.
CS is about Math, not coding. I doubt that Donald Knuth knows (or even concerns himself with) "how to open a file stream in C++ and read individual words out of the file" either.
Agreed, contacting your elected representatives is the only reasonable way to achieve meaningful change.
Just like the people did in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.
Unless the number of distinct answers is finite (and fits in available memory/storage) the lookup table approach will not work on all possible inputs.
Of course, private copying is still legal in Canada, and that is done by stealing money from photographers and computer programmers and anyone who has backed up their files to a burned CD.
Bill C-11 will make circumventing DRM (for any reason) a criminal offence. The days of legal private copying are numbered.
Like it or not, protection of a work is needed to keep the creative process going.
Because, as we all know, there was no creative process whatsoever prior to the 15th century CE.
I've been using 1&1 for quite some time (ever since enom decided to proactively treat some emails passing through their DNS system as spam and silently drop them). Granted, I only have 2 domains with them and I use a 3rd party DNS services, but I never had any particular problems.
Would you care to enlighten me?
Development should be done on the most powerful hardware possible.
Testing should be done on the least powerful that's still practical.
Anyone with half a brain knows that these services were created for the purpose of sharing copyrighted material.
As opposed to people with a full brain who realize that they were developed for efficient distribution of any material.
IMO it is pretty clear that republicans are way more evil than democrats.
Just remember that choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil.