Give me a break, I'm seeing double because there's a nitrogen bubble in my left eye. Not only am I seeing double but that eye is REALLY out of focus. And since it's a bubble it moves around, which makes that part of the double vision move around too.
If I got pulled over there's no way I'd pass a field sobriety test, even though I've not been drinking.
The pain in my neck and back from keeping my head down 50 minutes out of every hour is distracting as well, affecting my reading comprehension too.
But mcgrew haters can rejoice, it keeps me from posting at slashdot much.
From TFS: cognitive performance-enhancing drug abuse
If it enhances performance, how is that "abuse"? In sports, what's the difference between a batter taking steroids, and a batter getting his eyesight enhanced to better than normal via LASIK surgery (which by necessity involves antibiotic drugs)?
Not when it affects those in society. Ie, if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business.
Marijuana is a performance enhancing drug for artists and other creative types. You cannot overdose from marijuana. Marijuana has no detrimental health effects whatever. Why should society tell me I can't eat reefer?
More people die from alcohol poisoning (overdose) than all other drug overdoses combined, yet alcohol is legal. But clearly alcohol prohibition was a monumental failure.
What if you're bungee jumping (legal) and have no insurance and suffer a detached retina (which I got just from being nearsighted and wouldn't wish on anyone)? Should we outlaw bungee jumping?
What about baseball (again). What if you have no insurance and tear a ligament? Should we outlaw baseball?
More people are hospitalized from construction work than from any other activity. Should we outlaw construction?
I really don't think you've thought this through very well.
Will they have to pay a fine? Maybe, but ten bucks says* it won't be the hundred thousand dollars the RIAA can collect for a single copyright violation. Will anybody go to jail? Maybe, but again ten bucks says* no way in hell.
Did someone say "rule of law"?
-mcgrew
*offer void where prohibited. I live in Illinois, and gambling is illegal here. Except in the casinos. And the state lottery. And horseracing tracks. And in the bars that have bribed the cops to look the other way.
Darn, and I never EVER rtfa, but the summary made it necessary. So for my fellow slashdotters who hate to RTFA, what they mean by "reignite" is to turn into a quasar. The way the black hole could turn into a quasar is for the galaxy to collide with another galaxy.
I don't think we have anything to worry about. Nothing to see here (and if it happened, nobody to see it)
1. The copyright holder can place something they own into the public domain at any time.
Noce completely missing the point. Not just missing it but running from it screaming and crying. The point is that Jimi Hendrix's work should be in the public domain, whether or not his heirs want it to be. Most of Disney's stuff should be in the public domain despite the fact that they don't want it to be. The point is that COPYRIGHTS LAST WAY WAY WAY TOO LONG!
It's an identification number used for books.
And you don't get one unless you register the work with the copyright office. When you register your copyright you get an ISBN number.
The two works are HRG (a computer program for a proprietary computer they stopped making in 1983, completely worthless now) and Artificial Insanity, which was originally written for the TS-1000, ported to the MC10, then the Apple IIe, then to DOS. I'll probably port that one to javascript eventually when I get less lazy.
They should be in the public domain because they're over thirty fucking years old.
I use Microsoft software every day. I wish I didn't have to. When some other company makes something similar I'll look into it, but I have yet to see anything from Microsoft that isn't unreasonable and illogical, with all thought to look and none to functionality.
Knowing Microsoft the thing will probably break if you brake. It won't follow any standards (WE are Microsoft. We ARE the standard!), it will be unreasonably expensive, it will ask me where I want to go today and then take me somewhere else.
I'd rather have a retarded woman back-seat driving. She'd probably be more accurate and functional, too.
'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards.
Made me think of a National Lampoon Radio Hour (SNL before it was on TV) skit about the George Foreman-Muhammed Ali fight. Foreman (John Belushi IIRC) talking about Ali:
"He so fast he can turn off the light and be in bed before the room get dark!"
Okay, okay, I'm not saying Star Trek is "great art". It's not.
Whether or not Star Trek is, it's not debatable whether Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles were great artists. Hendrix, Harrison, and Lennon will never record again. As you say, why should their work NOT be in the public domain?
Copyright was originally to protect artists from publishers, not the other way around!
Be glad you have an Advertising Standards Agency. We don't have anything like it here in the US, and we need it badly! We used to be the greatest country on earth. I still don't know what happened to us.
Some people don't understand the concept of 'bandwidth'.
If their ISP is advertising "unlimited bandwidth" they shouldn't have to understand the concept of bandwith. All they should have to know is that they can have as much of it as they want.
The ISP, OTOH, doesn't understand the concept of "telling the truth."
I'm torn as to lay blame to other providers for running unethical marketing campaigns.(e.g. get unlomited everything only to have a buried clause in a TOS/AUP/etc. that nullifies all the marketing promises.) or people not performing due-diligence
I'm not the least bit torn. When I buy a service it should perform as advertised, PERIOD. I shouldn't have to "perform due diligence". I shouldn't have to suspect that the big corporation I'm thinking of doing business with is run by liars and thieves.
I'm a geezer. When I was young you couldn't trust small, new, "fly by night" companies. The tables have turned, now it's the megagiants who are full of liars and thieves.
And you young people are so used to the thieving liars you feel you have to perform "due diligence" to be certain that some bigased corporation isn't going to bend you over and fuck you without lube.
But I'm also old enough to be hopeful, to know that the tides go out and come back in. Douglas Adams' phrase "First up against the wall when the revolution comes" comes to mind. The thieves, con artists and liars running Sony, Microsoft, Comcast, and all the big companies that got their money the hard way (stealing it) are going to get their come uppance.
My fear is that they will get it through armed revolution.
-mcgrew
(yes, keeping your head down 50 minutes out of every hour puts you in a REAL BAD MOOD. I wouldn't even wish a vitrectomy on Sony's CEO.)
People who see copyright as unfair, unbalanced, biased and unjust, and thus either ignoring it altogether or making their own rules based on their set of standards and morals.
Sounds like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Unfair and unjust laws WILL be ignored. Copyright law, which in the form it took before the 20th century, was a good tool. But it became a monster that demands that people simply ignore it, much like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.
Corporations do bad things with their rights, therefore they shouldn't be granted rights?
No, corporations shouldn't be granted rights because only PEOPLE should have rights. Corporations shield the people who own the corporations from responsibility, which is just plain WRONG.
If you buy a restaraunt and someone dies of food poisoning because of your gross negligence, his heirs can sue you and take your business, your cars, your home, your artwork, everything else of value you own. But if you incorporate that business and someone dies from your gross negligence, all they can take is the business.
Fix that first then you can talk about limiting the bad things the corporations (and people!) do with their granted rights, by repealing the DMCA, reducing copyright terms, etc. Actually repealing the DMCA, reducing copyright terms, etc. should apply to people as well.
Legislative advocacy, in of itself, is not corruption. However, when the American arm of a Japanese corporation can contribute ten million to the Demnocrat candidate and ten million to the Republican candidate, that certainly IS corruption. When a rich man from Arizona has more access to an Illinois congressman than an Illinois voter, that, too, is corrupt.
IMO it should be illegal to contribute to more than one candidate in any given race, and illegal to contribute to a candidate you are not eligible to vote for.
They will pass these reforms when genetic engineering perfects the flying pig.
The Uncyclopedia has this to say about Black holes:
"Black holes are simply where I decided to divide by zero" ~ God on Black Holes
"That's crazy" ~ Mr. Replier on God's black holes
"It's a hole that is black" ~ Captain Obvious on Black Holes
"It's a hole that is white" ~ Captain Sarcasm on Black Holes
"Falling in is bad for your health" ~ Captain Understatement on Black Holes
"Originally, Black Holes were known as 'Gravaitationally Collapsed Stars'" ~ Steven Hawking on Gravaitationally Collapsed Stars
Oops, wrong black holes. We're discussing internet black holes, right? Wow, what a coincidence, when I went to the Uncyclopedia to look up black holes I see the featured article on its front page reads
So I was online, right, just chatting away with my friends about normal things. Porn, killing fluffy bunnies, the sad state of the world, things like that.
When all of a sudden -- Well, maybe it wasn't all that sudden, when you're online you're used to sudden things like popups and viruses and parents bursting in when you're Googling Lesbians Gone Wild 4 -- This guy IMs me.
He's one of those people that've migrated to the bottom of your buddy list, you know what I mean? The kind of person you may have talked to once regarding some homework assignment or other that you've never really had the balls to delete because you think having a long buddy list means you have a social life. And you don't remember why they're there. And you'd never expect someone like that to actually make contact with you again. But he did.
So he says
isllcrk88 [6:14 PM]: hey Okay. So what have I got from him so far?
Username Seems standard enough. Bunch of random letters and two numbers: Maybe a birth year or something? Font Default font, no webdings or any other communication problems there. Greeting "Hey." Pretty typical. Neither suggestive nor harsh, not too formal or too friendly. Nothing to trip any alarms here. No misspellings yet, although I could be judging too soon. [More]
So I click the link which goes to "Why?:Do I have a drug dealer on my buddy list?"
No, your karma's fine. Mine is now swirling down an internet black hole, as a lot of slashdot mods absolutely hate juvenile humor, while others have no humor at all, while some slashdotters hate ME. Fortunately for me most of them are trolls who lost their karma long ago.
Think about how that might work with, say, an instruction manual.
An instruction manual with, say, 200 contributors (like the service manual for a Boeing 737).
Each contributor would hold copyright to the part he or she wrote. What's so hard about that?
To print a new copy of the manual, you'd need to get permission from each of them
Yes. Copyright is supposed to protect the author from the publisher, not the other way around. It is not supposed to protect the publisher from the public. Copyright is not supposed to protect the publisher at all.
-- or their descendants.
Why should their descendants be able to get anything except money earned while the author was alive? As I said, lifetime copyrights are IMO wrong, and are plainly against my Constitution, despite what the bought and paid for corporate stooges in the SCOTUS say. I don't believe you should be able to will a copyright. In the US copyright is supposed to get you to create more works. You can't do that if you're dead.
You're saying that artists should not be able to sell their copyrights
Correct.
That they should only be able to make a living by distributing their own works -- that artist and publisher must be combined into one role
No. Copyright protects (or did before copyright was perverted) the author from the publisher.
So 6 guys get together and form Little Green Man Entertainment Ltd and make a computer game and sell it.
Fine, if they incorporate then the corporation is the publisher, and licenses the rights from the autthors. The end user licenses nothing - he buys a copy and has no right to sell copies of his copy.
No, *you* pirate it because you refuse to honor any copyright held by a corporation
No, I refuse to buy it. Obtaining a copy is legal (provided of course I'm not shoplifting, taking the copy it by force, or burglary, etc) and ethical. It's distribution that's "pirating" and illegal. The RIAA doesn't sue downloaders, they sue uploaders.
To buy these guy's [sic]game would compromise your *principles* [sic].
Yes, if they sold the copyright to a corporation. If a corporation is simply publishing it I would have no problem.
See, I had several problems with corporations period, one of which is the lack of liability on the part of the corporation's owners. If I buy a restaraunt and someone dies from food poisoning, I can be sued and lose everything I own. But if I incorporate that restaraunt all I can lose is the business itself. That's just plain wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
See here.
Give me a break, I'm seeing double because there's a nitrogen bubble in my left eye. Not only am I seeing double but that eye is REALLY out of focus. And since it's a bubble it moves around, which makes that part of the double vision move around too.
If I got pulled over there's no way I'd pass a field sobriety test, even though I've not been drinking.
The pain in my neck and back from keeping my head down 50 minutes out of every hour is distracting as well, affecting my reading comprehension too.
But mcgrew haters can rejoice, it keeps me from posting at slashdot much.
From TFS: cognitive performance-enhancing drug abuse
If it enhances performance, how is that "abuse"? In sports, what's the difference between a batter taking steroids, and a batter getting his eyesight enhanced to better than normal via LASIK surgery (which by necessity involves antibiotic drugs)?
Not when it affects those in society. Ie, if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business.
Marijuana is a performance enhancing drug for artists and other creative types. You cannot overdose from marijuana. Marijuana has no detrimental health effects whatever. Why should society tell me I can't eat reefer?
More people die from alcohol poisoning (overdose) than all other drug overdoses combined, yet alcohol is legal. But clearly alcohol prohibition was a monumental failure.
What if you're bungee jumping (legal) and have no insurance and suffer a detached retina (which I got just from being nearsighted and wouldn't wish on anyone)? Should we outlaw bungee jumping?
What about baseball (again). What if you have no insurance and tear a ligament? Should we outlaw baseball?
More people are hospitalized from construction work than from any other activity. Should we outlaw construction?
I really don't think you've thought this through very well.
Will they have to pay a fine? Maybe, but ten bucks says* it won't be the hundred thousand dollars the RIAA can collect for a single copyright violation. Will anybody go to jail? Maybe, but again ten bucks says* no way in hell.
Did someone say "rule of law"?
-mcgrew
*offer void where prohibited. I live in Illinois, and gambling is illegal here. Except in the casinos. And the state lottery. And horseracing tracks. And in the bars that have bribed the cops to look the other way.
Me? Cynical? Whatever gave you that idea?
Darn, and I never EVER rtfa, but the summary made it necessary. So for my fellow slashdotters who hate to RTFA, what they mean by "reignite" is to turn into a quasar. The way the black hole could turn into a quasar is for the galaxy to collide with another galaxy.
I don't think we have anything to worry about. Nothing to see here (and if it happened, nobody to see it)
I don't think thay had X10 controlled lights back when Ali was boxing, or when SNL was only on the radio.
56. But I'm a whippersnapper compared to my friend Ralph, who was on a Navy ship in WWII and introduced me to a lot of the hookers I know.
I wrote Growing up with computers when I was 53.
Damn now I feel old, thanks a lot...
1. The copyright holder can place something they own into the public domain at any time.
Noce completely missing the point. Not just missing it but running from it screaming and crying. The point is that Jimi Hendrix's work should be in the public domain, whether or not his heirs want it to be. Most of Disney's stuff should be in the public domain despite the fact that they don't want it to be. The point is that COPYRIGHTS LAST WAY WAY WAY TOO LONG!
It's an identification number used for books.
And you don't get one unless you register the work with the copyright office. When you register your copyright you get an ISBN number.
The two works are HRG (a computer program for a proprietary computer they stopped making in 1983, completely worthless now) and Artificial Insanity, which was originally written for the TS-1000, ported to the MC10, then the Apple IIe, then to DOS. I'll probably port that one to javascript eventually when I get less lazy.
They should be in the public domain because they're over thirty fucking years old.
One is completely worthless; it is specifically for a proprietary computer that they stopped making in 1983.
Ali may have actually said it, but National Lampoon used it (I taped the show and still have the tape).
Ironically, on the same tape (not sure of it's the same show), Cheech and Chong get busted for stealing comedy material.
I use Microsoft software every day. I wish I didn't have to. When some other company makes something similar I'll look into it, but I have yet to see anything from Microsoft that isn't unreasonable and illogical, with all thought to look and none to functionality.
Knowing Microsoft the thing will probably break if you brake. It won't follow any standards (WE are Microsoft. We ARE the standard!), it will be unreasonably expensive, it will ask me where I want to go today and then take me somewhere else.
I'd rather have a retarded woman back-seat driving. She'd probably be more accurate and functional, too.
-mcgrew
(Yes, I'm still in a bad mood)
'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards.
Made me think of a National Lampoon Radio Hour (SNL before it was on TV) skit about the George Foreman-Muhammed Ali fight. Foreman (John Belushi IIRC) talking about Ali:
"He so fast he can turn off the light and be in bed before the room get dark!"
Okay, okay, I'm not saying Star Trek is "great art". It's not.
Whether or not Star Trek is, it's not debatable whether Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles were great artists. Hendrix, Harrison, and Lennon will never record again. As you say, why should their work NOT be in the public domain?
Copyright was originally to protect artists from publishers, not the other way around!
Be glad you have an Advertising Standards Agency. We don't have anything like it here in the US, and we need it badly! We used to be the greatest country on earth. I still don't know what happened to us.
Nobody viewing normal websites keeps their pipe in constant use
"Normal" changes daily.
Some people don't understand the concept of 'bandwidth'.
If their ISP is advertising "unlimited bandwidth" they shouldn't have to understand the concept of bandwith. All they should have to know is that they can have as much of it as they want.
The ISP, OTOH, doesn't understand the concept of "telling the truth."
I'm torn as to lay blame to other providers for running unethical marketing campaigns.(e.g. get unlomited everything only to have a buried clause in a TOS/AUP/etc. that nullifies all the marketing promises.) or people not performing due-diligence
I'm not the least bit torn. When I buy a service it should perform as advertised, PERIOD. I shouldn't have to "perform due diligence". I shouldn't have to suspect that the big corporation I'm thinking of doing business with is run by liars and thieves.
I'm a geezer. When I was young you couldn't trust small, new, "fly by night" companies. The tables have turned, now it's the megagiants who are full of liars and thieves.
And you young people are so used to the thieving liars you feel you have to perform "due diligence" to be certain that some bigased corporation isn't going to bend you over and fuck you without lube.
But I'm also old enough to be hopeful, to know that the tides go out and come back in. Douglas Adams' phrase "First up against the wall when the revolution comes" comes to mind. The thieves, con artists and liars running Sony, Microsoft, Comcast, and all the big companies that got their money the hard way (stealing it) are going to get their come uppance.
My fear is that they will get it through armed revolution.
-mcgrew
(yes, keeping your head down 50 minutes out of every hour puts you in a REAL BAD MOOD. I wouldn't even wish a vitrectomy on Sony's CEO.)
People who see copyright as unfair, unbalanced, biased and unjust, and thus either ignoring it altogether or making their own rules based on their set of standards and morals.
Sounds like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Unfair and unjust laws WILL be ignored. Copyright law, which in the form it took before the 20th century, was a good tool. But it became a monster that demands that people simply ignore it, much like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.
Corporations do bad things with their rights, therefore they shouldn't be granted rights?
No, corporations shouldn't be granted rights because only PEOPLE should have rights. Corporations shield the people who own the corporations from responsibility, which is just plain WRONG.
If you buy a restaraunt and someone dies of food poisoning because of your gross negligence, his heirs can sue you and take your business, your cars, your home, your artwork, everything else of value you own. But if you incorporate that business and someone dies from your gross negligence, all they can take is the business.
Fix that first then you can talk about limiting the bad things the corporations (and people!) do with their granted rights, by repealing the DMCA, reducing copyright terms, etc. Actually repealing the DMCA, reducing copyright terms, etc. should apply to people as well.
Hilarious that you believe in hell
I see you've never been married!
Yeah, screw all those rich bastards that own the corporations./i?
In USSA, all those rich bastards that own the corporations screw YOU!
Legislative advocacy, in of itself, is not corruption. However, when the American arm of a Japanese corporation can contribute ten million to the Demnocrat candidate and ten million to the Republican candidate, that certainly IS corruption. When a rich man from Arizona has more access to an Illinois congressman than an Illinois voter, that, too, is corrupt.
IMO it should be illegal to contribute to more than one candidate in any given race, and illegal to contribute to a candidate you are not eligible to vote for.
They will pass these reforms when genetic engineering perfects the flying pig.
Oops, wrong black holes. We're discussing internet black holes, right? Wow, what a coincidence, when I went to the Uncyclopedia to look up black holes I see the featured article on its front page readsSo I click the link which goes to "Why?:Do I have a drug dealer on my buddy list?"
No, your karma's fine. Mine is now swirling down an internet black hole, as a lot of slashdot mods absolutely hate juvenile humor, while others have no humor at all, while some slashdotters hate ME. Fortunately for me most of them are trolls who lost their karma long ago.
My eyeball hurts. Damn your goatse link!
Even though I don't care what color the hos are.
Think about how that might work with, say, an instruction manual.
An instruction manual with, say, 200 contributors (like the service manual for a Boeing 737).
Each contributor would hold copyright to the part he or she wrote. What's so hard about that?
To print a new copy of the manual, you'd need to get permission from each of them
Yes. Copyright is supposed to protect the author from the publisher, not the other way around. It is not supposed to protect the publisher from the public. Copyright is not supposed to protect the publisher at all.
-- or their descendants.
Why should their descendants be able to get anything except money earned while the author was alive? As I said, lifetime copyrights are IMO wrong, and are plainly against my Constitution, despite what the bought and paid for corporate stooges in the SCOTUS say. I don't believe you should be able to will a copyright. In the US copyright is supposed to get you to create more works. You can't do that if you're dead.
You're saying that artists should not be able to sell their copyrights
Correct.
That they should only be able to make a living by distributing their own works -- that artist and publisher must be combined into one role
No. Copyright protects (or did before copyright was perverted) the author from the publisher.
So 6 guys get together and form Little Green Man Entertainment Ltd and make a computer game and sell it.
Fine, if they incorporate then the corporation is the publisher, and licenses the rights from the autthors. The end user licenses nothing - he buys a copy and has no right to sell copies of his copy.
No, *you* pirate it because you refuse to honor any copyright held by a corporation
No, I refuse to buy it. Obtaining a copy is legal (provided of course I'm not shoplifting, taking the copy it by force, or burglary, etc) and ethical. It's distribution that's "pirating" and illegal. The RIAA doesn't sue downloaders, they sue uploaders.
To buy these guy's [sic]game would compromise your *principles* [sic].
Yes, if they sold the copyright to a corporation. If a corporation is simply publishing it I would have no problem.
See, I had several problems with corporations period, one of which is the lack of liability on the part of the corporation's owners. If I buy a restaraunt and someone dies from food poisoning, I can be sued and lose everything I own. But if I incorporate that restaraunt all I can lose is the business itself. That's just plain wrong.