I do think that the requirement to stop speaking is a bit bizarre (I wish the story had more info. on exactly what he was speaking about and why the parole officer doesn't want him speaking -- I wonder if he's violating movement restrictions while traveling to speak engagements).
But I have no sympathy at all for Mitnick, and I really have no faith in his contrition about what he did (what is this, the 2nd or 3rd time he's said "never again"?)
huh? by definition when you are convicted of a crime you lose numerous rights and such restriction can extend to any parole (which is a conditional alleviation of imprisonment -- Mitnick could, after all, simply elect to stay in jail). And yes there are certain cases where such restrictions might interfere with religious practices. When and if they are paroled, for example, the convicted Branch Davidian folks will probably be barred from associating with each other which certainly would hinder their ability to practice their religious beliefs. It's hard to feel sympath for scum like Mitnick.
Hmmm...Dre has gone from beating the crap out of women he doesn't like to suing Napster and it users. I'm sorry but since Dre doesn't seem to see anything wrong with hitting women, I really don't see anything wrong with pirating his music.
A lot of words that said very little. On the Downs syndrome study, for example, I wonder how they controlled for the increasing age at which women tend to have children in Europe. Of course the BBC apparently doesn't consider passing along that sort of information to be relevant.
Can somebody answer me this question and perhaps point me to some resource on the net regarding this: are there any technical reasons why we couldn't have thousands and thousands of TLDs?
The story is quite clear that Replay and Nielsen aren't negotiating to track system-wide usage statistics for Replay users but rather using Replay to track usage in homes that have specifically agreed to this with Nielsen as part of its People Meter rating system.
"Initial testing will be done only in People Meter homes that use a Replay machine. There are currently 23,000 to 25,000 homes in the top 48 markets with electronic People Meters that indicate when the TV is on, what channel it's on and who is watching.
Once the technology is developed to track the viewing habits of people with these time-shifting machines and testing is done, Nielsen will work with programmers and advertisers to determine how to report it in context."
As the story notes, 1 million people already willingly tell Nielsen exactly what they watch, and Nielsen simply wants to expand its offerings so it can tell advertisers what those homes are watching on their TiVo and Replay machines as well as Internet connections.
Don't like it? Simple, don't agree to be part of Nielsen's tracking system.
Where do you people come up with this stuff? Prefacing statments with "I am of the opinion of" doesn't lend them any less potentially libelous at all (your statement is not likely libelous because it is so vague -- try saying "I am of the opinion that Lawrence Godfrey is a child molester" and see how far that defense gets you if he tries to sue).
Re:Stallman is just plain wrong here
on
RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 2
"I think you may be right when you say that neither of the extremes may work very well, at least in the context of today. You are wrong about that the removal of copyrights would help large media corporations though. Sure, Time-Warner could republish your stuff, but why would they do that, since they wouldn't have copyright on what they publish? Anyone else could simply republish what they published, so they wouldn't make any money from it. Even more so if it would be in digital form."
1. They wouldn't have copyright on *anything* they publish, so there is no need for them to worry any more about whether they own copyright or not on a specific piece.
2. Time Warner has something I don't -- size. An obvious outcome of saying "anybody can republish anything" is that it makes the current trend toward giant media companies even more necessary.
Take Stephen King. Stephen King might at some point in this new world of ours decide to himself that he'd be better off publishing his books independently. Oops -- but Stallman got rid of copyright so now the day after King independently publishes his book, Time Warner comes out with its own version which is a) cheaper than King's and b) has a large promotional budget.
King's screwed. Sure some people will pay more to reward the author, but not very many people. If King wants to stay solvent, he has to cut a deal with the big guys. There's no possibility anymore of independent popular books because any succesful book will immediately find it competing with itself.
Go back to copyright the way it was before the recent excessive revisions, but don't throw out copyright protections altogether.
Re:Stallman is just plain wrong here
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 2
Actually it was a rather dry statistics-based analysis of rape incidence in the United States over the past 50 years. Because of the wild world of search engines, however, it got a ton of hits from idiots looking for idiots who were searching for porn that depicted simulated rape and the web site idiots just swiped it for their site. Getting them to take it off their site took forever.
Regardless, saying "anyone can republish a scholarly paper or monograph" is just another way of saying "screw scholarly researchers" who already find it almost impossible to make any money off of what they write.
In fact today if you want to make money and still do scholarly work you generally have to get a job at a university or research institute which will pay you a salarly to compensate for the non-existent revenues from such scholarship.
And all Stallman's proposal do will accelerate this growth of killing the market for independent works, period, and forcing everyone to be part of a corporate or "guild" structure.
Turn back the clock on the most recent, idiotic changes to copyright laws, but content producers and distributors are always going to need intellectual property protections.
Stallman is just plain wrong here
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 4
"For some kinds of writing, we should go even further. For scholarly papers and monographs, everyone should be encouraged to republish them verbatim online; this helps protect the scholarly record while making it more accessible. For textbooks and most reference works, publication of modified versions should be allowed as well, since that encourages improvement."
This is just ridiculous. Nobody's going to write very much worth reading if the second I write something it goes public domain. I had a commercial pornographic site rip off some of my scholarly articles and put them on their site. According to Stallman, this is just peachy and my emails to them to enforce my copyright were oppressive. What a load of bullshit.
As an independent writer, the problem I see is that the large publishers are trying to get the sort of extreme copyright provisions which were clearly never the intent of copyright's original modest goals. So we have the Time-Warners and Disneys of the world saying "we own it and you can't even link to it without paying us royalties" and then you have the Stallmans and others of the world saying "lets just ditch intellectual property rights altogether."
The solution, btw, is something along the lines of the GPL that provides the sort of protection writers needs without the nonsense that copyright law is becoming (I'm aware that some mechanisms like this already exist, but they are largely deficient).
I regularly give people the right to republish the stuff I write on web sites, and could care less for the most part if they redistributed it on mailing lists, usenet, or whatever, but at the same time just granting anybody a blanket right to copy the stuff I write anywhere in any form is simply a bad idea.
Ironically, the people Stallman's sort of proposal would help would be large corporations. Without copyright protection, writers would be in even poorer positions from large corporations who could simply republish materials and screw the writer (or artist). Sure I'm going to spend a lot of time on an scholarly paper only to have a Time-Warner subsidiary republish it in a collection without having to pay me a dime.
When did Stallman become a corporate hack?
Re:What about the writer?
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 2
As a writer who manages to make money off the Internet despite the copying problem, I think this proposed solution is worse than the problem. This essentially makes it easier to corporatize the production of work. If it costs me X+X*tax for each video tape, that makes it more expensive for me to put my independent production out. I don't want to work for no stinking guild (or corporation for that matter).
The commodity quote had me laughing out loud. If Metallica's music isn't a commodity how come it's on sale at every record store in the country? Of course their music's a commodity.
"Some libraries may be installing censoring software, but the librarians certainly don't like it, and they fight tooth & nail against it."
Which is precisely the problem with public institutions -- the libraries that are public have no choice. If enough people vote for it and the courts uphold it, there's your censorship.
Huh? One of the main reasons the Amazon rain forest gets logged so heavily is because of the huge tax breaks and other benefits that governments like Brazil have traditionally given to logging companies.
Just to emphasize what you said. Everybody's bitching about Cybersitter, etc., but only the government has the power to *mandate* Cybersitter crap.
It was the wonderful government, after all, that mandated the V-chip for television sets. How long before some savvy pol picks up and runs with the idea of a V-chip for all computers sold in the U.S.?
In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek posits a generally laissez-faire state taking actions to correct the sort of problems you mention, though minimal action (for example, Hayek in that book supports a minimal welfare system).
I'm with you on privacy, though I don't quite understand your argument. Even in a very laissez faire system, some external body is needed to define and enforce property rights. It's already a well-established principle of law that I have property rights in my reputation; I can sue those who libel me and damage my reputation. Privacy should be treated the same way -- I have a property right in my privacy just like my reputation. If somebody is collecting and organizing data about me without my permission, I have serious problems with that, regardless of whether that entity is a corporation or a government.
As for guns, "assault rifle" is pretty much a meaningless term, grenade launchers I have no problem with being outlawed (though they should also be outlawed for military and police use), but I'm all for semi-automatic pistols. Self-defense is a fundamental human right.
I'd agree with a basic (and very non-libertarian) reciprocity principle on this -- I'll give up my semiautomatic pistols if the police will give up theirs.
How do libertarians benefit from fighting corporate welfare? If selfishness was all that mattered, the CATO Institute would go get nice big grants from Archer Daniels Midland and change its tune about corporate welfare.
Libertarianism is most definitely about "selfishness," whatever that means.
Exactly. One of the problems here is that most people have no choice but to send their kids the the public school nearest which they live which feeds them with all sorts of propaganda, whether it be WAVE-type nonsense or DARE.
WAVE exists precisely because state-run schools in America love this sort of crap (the state-run schools near me suspend kids for wearing Korn t-shirts; WAVE is their wet dream).
Cybersitter doesn't censor *anything* unless a *government* agency or affiliate decides to install it (such as all those wonderful public libraries the Salon article raved about).
It is nonsense to suggest that libertarians don't fight against corporations. Libertarians fight against corporations when they overstep the bounds of free association. The libertarian CATO Institute, for example, has been one of the most consistent opponents of all forms of corporate welfare (which is inherently anti-libertarian and just plain wrong).
What libertarians don't oppose is corporations doing what they do when they're not overstepping the bounds of free association, so you won't see us protesting against free trade for example.
It was interesting that the article mentioned inviting unions -- hmmm..the same unions who are anti-immigration know nothings? No thank you.
The problem with the Salon article is that it opposes libertarianism with social structures, but the whole point of libertarianism is to allow social structures to evolve without excessive government interference.
I don't even think that the privacy laws that are being written are necessarily anti-libertarian (since I certainly have a property interest in my privacy).
The issue is do you want the government dictating those social structures -- and that means weak crypto and the SEC, FBI and NSA spying on the Internet -- or do we want to allow those social structures to evolve organically.
Wow. Hilarious watching all these/.ers who in the past have argued for political solutions to take apart MS (since Linux *still* sucks), shocked -- shocked I say -- that MS has started buying up lobbyists (hmmm..think we'll see a JonKatz article about the evils of MS stereotyping? doubt it).
Before this whole antitrust suit began, MS lobbying efforts were very low for a company its size. Now the tech field is going to become a lawyer's paradise all because Netscape couldn't get out a browser that didn't suck.
Ironic for Katz to finally concede that women online don't fit the stereotypes after he's done so much to perpetuate them (hmmm..did he forget about that article several weeks ago where he railed against the "male" in-your-face attitude on discussion forums like/. that were driving off the more "female" networkers?)
Katz must be an amalgam of writers because there is absolutely no consistency on his position from one article to the next.
Slashdot Mirror
I do think that the requirement to stop speaking is a bit bizarre (I wish the story had more info. on exactly what he was speaking about and why the parole officer doesn't want him speaking -- I wonder if he's violating movement restrictions while traveling to speak engagements).
But I have no sympathy at all for Mitnick, and I really have no faith in his contrition about what he did (what is this, the 2nd or 3rd time he's said "never again"?)
huh? by definition when you are convicted of a crime you lose numerous rights and such restriction can extend to any parole (which is a conditional alleviation of imprisonment -- Mitnick could, after all, simply elect to stay in jail). And yes there are certain cases where such restrictions might interfere with religious practices. When and if they are paroled, for example, the convicted Branch Davidian folks will probably be barred from associating with each other which certainly would hinder their ability to practice their religious beliefs. It's hard to feel sympath for scum like Mitnick.
Hmmm...Dre has gone from beating the crap out of women he doesn't like to suing Napster and it users. I'm sorry but since Dre doesn't seem to see anything wrong with hitting women, I really don't see anything wrong with pirating his music.
Waiting to see the obvious: "Pollution raises IQ" study!
A lot of words that said very little. On the Downs syndrome study, for example, I wonder how they controlled for the increasing age at which women tend to have children in Europe. Of course the BBC apparently doesn't consider passing along that sort of information to be relevant.
Can somebody answer me this question and perhaps point me to some resource on the net regarding this: are there any technical reasons why we couldn't have thousands and thousands of TLDs?
Thank you,
brian@carnell.com
The story is quite clear that Replay and Nielsen aren't negotiating to track system-wide usage statistics for Replay users but rather using Replay to track usage in homes that have specifically agreed to this with Nielsen as part of its People Meter rating system.
"Initial testing will be done only in People Meter homes that use a Replay machine. There are currently 23,000 to 25,000 homes in the top 48 markets with electronic People Meters that indicate when the TV is on, what channel it's on and who is watching.
Once the technology is developed to track the viewing habits of people with these time-shifting machines and testing is done, Nielsen will work with programmers and advertisers to determine how to report it in context."
As the story notes, 1 million people already willingly tell Nielsen exactly what they watch, and Nielsen simply wants to expand its offerings so it can tell advertisers what those homes are watching on their TiVo and Replay machines as well as Internet connections.
Don't like it? Simple, don't agree to be part of Nielsen's tracking system.
Sheesh
Where do you people come up with this stuff? Prefacing statments with "I am of the opinion of" doesn't lend them any less potentially libelous at all (your statement is not likely libelous because it is so vague -- try saying "I am of the opinion that Lawrence Godfrey is a child molester" and see how far that defense gets you if he tries to sue).
"I think you may be right when you say that neither of the extremes may work very well, at least in the context of today. You are wrong about that the removal of copyrights would help large media corporations though. Sure, Time-Warner could republish your stuff, but why would they do that, since they wouldn't have copyright on what they publish? Anyone else could simply republish what they published, so they wouldn't make any money from it. Even more so if it would be in digital form."
1. They wouldn't have copyright on *anything* they publish, so there is no need for them to worry any more about whether they own copyright or not on a specific piece.
2. Time Warner has something I don't -- size. An obvious outcome of saying "anybody can republish anything" is that it makes the current trend toward giant media companies even more necessary.
Take Stephen King. Stephen King might at some point in this new world of ours decide to himself that he'd be better off publishing his books independently. Oops -- but Stallman got rid of copyright so now the day after King independently publishes his book, Time Warner comes out with its own version which is a) cheaper than King's and b) has a large promotional budget.
King's screwed. Sure some people will pay more to reward the author, but not very many people. If King wants to stay solvent, he has to cut a deal with the big guys. There's no possibility anymore of independent popular books because any succesful book will immediately find it competing with itself.
Go back to copyright the way it was before the recent excessive revisions, but don't throw out copyright protections altogether.
Actually it was a rather dry statistics-based analysis of rape incidence in the United States over the past 50 years. Because of the wild world of search engines, however, it got a ton of hits from idiots looking for idiots who were searching for porn that depicted simulated rape and the web site idiots just swiped it for their site. Getting them to take it off their site took forever.
Regardless, saying "anyone can republish a scholarly paper or monograph" is just another way of saying "screw scholarly researchers" who already find it almost impossible to make any money off of what they write.
In fact today if you want to make money and still do scholarly work you generally have to get a job at a university or research institute which will pay you a salarly to compensate for the non-existent revenues from such scholarship.
And all Stallman's proposal do will accelerate this growth of killing the market for independent works, period, and forcing everyone to be part of a corporate or "guild" structure.
Turn back the clock on the most recent, idiotic changes to copyright laws, but content producers and distributors are always going to need intellectual property protections.
"For some kinds of writing, we should go even further. For scholarly papers and monographs, everyone should be encouraged to republish them verbatim online; this helps protect the scholarly record while making it more accessible. For textbooks and most reference works, publication of modified versions should be allowed as well, since that encourages improvement."
This is just ridiculous. Nobody's going to write very much worth reading if the second I write something it goes public domain. I had a commercial pornographic site rip off some of my scholarly articles and put them on their site. According to Stallman, this is just peachy and my emails to them to enforce my copyright were oppressive. What a load of bullshit.
As an independent writer, the problem I see is that the large publishers are trying to get the sort of extreme copyright provisions which were clearly never the intent of copyright's original modest goals. So we have the Time-Warners and Disneys of the world saying "we own it and you can't even link to it without paying us royalties" and then you have the Stallmans and others of the world saying "lets just ditch intellectual property rights altogether."
The solution, btw, is something along the lines of the GPL that provides the sort of protection writers needs without the nonsense that copyright law is becoming (I'm aware that some mechanisms like this already exist, but they are largely deficient).
I regularly give people the right to republish the stuff I write on web sites, and could care less for the most part if they redistributed it on mailing lists, usenet, or whatever, but at the same time just granting anybody a blanket right to copy the stuff I write anywhere in any form is simply a bad idea.
Ironically, the people Stallman's sort of proposal would help would be large corporations. Without copyright protection, writers would be in even poorer positions from large corporations who could simply republish materials and screw the writer (or artist). Sure I'm going to spend a lot of time on an scholarly paper only to have a Time-Warner subsidiary republish it in a collection without having to pay me a dime.
When did Stallman become a corporate hack?
As a writer who manages to make money off the Internet despite the copying problem, I think this proposed solution is worse than the problem. This essentially makes it easier to corporatize the production of work. If it costs me X+X*tax for each video tape, that makes it more expensive for me to put my independent production out. I don't want to work for no stinking guild (or corporation for that matter).
The commodity quote had me laughing out loud. If Metallica's music isn't a commodity how come it's on sale at every record store in the country? Of course their music's a commodity.
An apt description above of pretty much every religious movement of the last 10,000 years.
"Some libraries may be installing censoring software, but the librarians certainly don't like it, and they fight tooth & nail against it."
Which is precisely the problem with public institutions -- the libraries that are public have no choice. If enough people vote for it and the courts uphold it, there's your censorship.
Huh? One of the main reasons the Amazon rain forest gets logged so heavily is because of the huge tax breaks and other benefits that governments like Brazil have traditionally given to logging companies.
Just to emphasize what you said. Everybody's bitching about Cybersitter, etc., but only the government has the power to *mandate* Cybersitter crap.
It was the wonderful government, after all, that mandated the V-chip for television sets. How long before some savvy pol picks up and runs with the idea of a V-chip for all computers sold in the U.S.?
Jon,
In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek posits a generally laissez-faire state taking actions to correct the sort of problems you mention, though minimal action (for example, Hayek in that book supports a minimal welfare system).
I'm with you on privacy, though I don't quite understand your argument. Even in a very laissez faire system, some external body is needed to define and enforce property rights. It's already a well-established principle of law that I have property rights in my reputation; I can sue those who libel me and damage my reputation. Privacy should be treated the same way -- I have a property right in my privacy just like my reputation. If somebody is collecting and organizing data about me without my permission, I have serious problems with that, regardless of whether that entity is a corporation or a government.
As for guns, "assault rifle" is pretty much a meaningless term, grenade launchers I have no problem with being outlawed (though they should also be outlawed for military and police use), but I'm all for semi-automatic pistols. Self-defense is a fundamental human right.
I'd agree with a basic (and very non-libertarian) reciprocity principle on this -- I'll give up my semiautomatic pistols if the police will give up theirs.
How do libertarians benefit from fighting corporate welfare? If selfishness was all that mattered, the CATO Institute would go get nice big grants from Archer Daniels Midland and change its tune about corporate welfare.
Libertarianism is most definitely about "selfishness," whatever that means.
Exactly. One of the problems here is that most people have no choice but to send their kids the the public school nearest which they live which feeds them with all sorts of propaganda, whether it be WAVE-type nonsense or DARE.
WAVE exists precisely because state-run schools in America love this sort of crap (the state-run schools near me suspend kids for wearing Korn t-shirts; WAVE is their wet dream).
Cybersitter doesn't censor *anything* unless a *government* agency or affiliate decides to install it (such as all those wonderful public libraries the Salon article raved about).
It is nonsense to suggest that libertarians don't fight against corporations. Libertarians fight against corporations when they overstep the bounds of free association. The libertarian CATO Institute, for example, has been one of the most consistent opponents of all forms of corporate welfare (which is inherently anti-libertarian and just plain wrong).
What libertarians don't oppose is corporations doing what they do when they're not overstepping the bounds of free association, so you won't see us protesting against free trade for example.
It was interesting that the article mentioned inviting unions -- hmmm..the same unions who are anti-immigration know nothings? No thank you.
The problem with the Salon article is that it opposes libertarianism with social structures, but the whole point of libertarianism is to allow social structures to evolve without excessive government interference.
I don't even think that the privacy laws that are being written are necessarily anti-libertarian (since I certainly have a property interest in my privacy).
The issue is do you want the government dictating those social structures -- and that means weak crypto and the SEC, FBI and NSA spying on the Internet -- or do we want to allow those social structures to evolve organically.
I'll take the latter any day of the week.
Wow. Hilarious watching all these /.ers who in the past have argued for political solutions to take apart MS (since Linux *still* sucks), shocked -- shocked I say -- that MS has started buying up lobbyists (hmmm..think we'll see a JonKatz article about the evils of MS stereotyping? doubt it).
Before this whole antitrust suit began, MS lobbying efforts were very low for a company its size. Now the tech field is going to become a lawyer's paradise all because Netscape couldn't get out a browser that didn't suck.
Time to reap what you've sown.
Ironic for Katz to finally concede that women online don't fit the stereotypes after he's done so much to perpetuate them (hmmm..did he forget about that article several weeks ago where he railed against the "male" in-your-face attitude on discussion forums like /. that were driving off the more "female" networkers?)
Katz must be an amalgam of writers because there is absolutely no consistency on his position from one article to the next.