...it is up to them which laws they have in their own country...
That's all very well in theory, but it could never work in practice.
If every tom-dick-and-harry country decided to start creating their own laws willy nilly, surely this would represent an unacceptable barrier to my right, as a Slashdot reader, to make all-encompassing and ill-informed legal pronouncements during my lunch hour.
Why, if what you suggest ever came to pass, then that would suggest that there must be literally hundreds of laws on the statute books around the world! Whereas my sketchy understanding of a couple of US-specific regulations has never let me down yet!
Re. Homer and epic, if you've not already done so, you might be interested in checking out Milman Parry.
This was the guy who, back in the thirties, looked at the oral tradition as it actually existed in illiterate Serbo-Croat communities--he studied the way that storytellers in the Balkans reused and repeated useful "snippets" they'd memorised from stories passed down to them, weaving them back into the larger story. He identified all of the little "tricks" the poets used to reel off prodigiously long and fantastically well-polished stories, without having to read or write anything. (A lot of these tricks look a lot like a sort of "community development" of epic stories).
Then Parry compared these tricks with the famous idiosyncrasies of "Homer". It turned out that a lot of the syntactic patterns we find in Homeric epic look just like the tricks used by the community of Balkan singers-of-tales to elaborate their epic. Thus the theory that Homer isn't a person, but a body of work built up by illiterate singers re-elaborating on one another's performances.
Unfortunately, Parry died before he could publish any of this, but his assistant, Albert Lord, eventually published it all in _The Singer of Tales_.
I teach a class on music technology, and the first assignment is to have students compose and create their own ringtone (not by ripping from a CD, actually creating their own).
If you're interested in this kind of thing, you may be interested in this CD put out by the experimental music label, Touch. The ringtones were created by a wide selection of sound artists and musicians; the album points towards a vaguely disturbing future where the ringtone would be the highest form of musical endeavour.
Still, it's fun to bemuse your enemies by sticking a Gilbert and George or Ryoji Ikeda ringtone on their phone when nobody's looking...
Anyone with true Agartthan wisdom would know that you can cut your water-fuelled engines when travelling between the poles. The telluric currents are quite adequate for the journey.
you'd be doing something completely unlikely and suddenly and unexpectedly get to Slashdot, like pressing Ctrl+Alt+/, then Shift+Meta+., then double clicking on the "Help" menu item
At the end of the day, the BL isn't going to stand up for the interests of consumers. They themselves are heavy users of DRM, and anybody who's ever read in the BL (and paid the exorbitant photocopying fees!) will know how zealously they police copyright laws.
As a legal deposit library, what's important to the BL is that they're seen as the custodians of our intellectual heritagenot the publishers. Quite right too: the points about archiving and library priviledge are meant to ensure that copies of works survive--possibly giving the BL the right to reverse-engineer DRM, as we've seen happen in numerous other National Libraries accross the world. I don't think that it means they'll stop policing fair dealing, looking over your shouler to make sure you don't copy any more than 10% of a work or one chapter (whichever is the smallest)!
As an example of the BLs DRM usage, take a look at their Secure Electronic Delivery service. Not much room for fair dealing there. My partner (a librarian) was working for a big government department that regularly requested heaps of documents from the British Library. They could have saved a bit of public money using electronic delivery, but the Adobe DRM that the British Library uses was a bitch to get working through the departement's web cache. They would have had to pursuade an intransigent IT department to support a different version of Adobe Reader--people have just carried on using good old hard-copies, delivered by van from the BL's Document Supply Centre in Boston Spa.
Everyone makes mistakes - I'm a generous guy, so this is what I figured when they deleted all my mail (I'm a Force9 customer. PlusNet took them over a few years ago, and have kept the brand alive to trade on Force9's once-great reputation).
A few weeks after, though, they sent me an email containing the personal information of 20,000 of their customers, myself included. The data had been accidentally sent to 3,499 other folks, too. Not bank account data, but email addresses. So I don't know about data retention laws, but they certainly have a pretty lax attitude to data protection laws.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all very well in theory, but it could never work in practice.
If every tom-dick-and-harry country decided to start creating their own laws willy nilly, surely this would represent an unacceptable barrier to my right, as a Slashdot reader, to make all-encompassing and ill-informed legal pronouncements during my lunch hour.
Why, if what you suggest ever came to pass, then that would suggest that there must be literally hundreds of laws on the statute books around the world! Whereas my sketchy understanding of a couple of US-specific regulations has never let me down yet!
Every single Linux distro does implement the same.
You install your package from your distro's repo, using the package manager that was conveniently provided with your distro.
The fact that the package managers vary a bit from distro to distro is a non-issue. You'll only be using the one: just ignore the rest!
Excellent point, well made.
Re. Homer and epic, if you've not already done so, you might be interested in checking out Milman Parry.
This was the guy who, back in the thirties, looked at the oral tradition as it actually existed in illiterate Serbo-Croat communities--he studied the way that storytellers in the Balkans reused and repeated useful "snippets" they'd memorised from stories passed down to them, weaving them back into the larger story. He identified all of the little "tricks" the poets used to reel off prodigiously long and fantastically well-polished stories, without having to read or write anything. (A lot of these tricks look a lot like a sort of "community development" of epic stories).
Then Parry compared these tricks with the famous idiosyncrasies of "Homer". It turned out that a lot of the syntactic patterns we find in Homeric epic look just like the tricks used by the community of Balkan singers-of-tales to elaborate their epic. Thus the theory that Homer isn't a person, but a body of work built up by illiterate singers re-elaborating on one another's performances.
Unfortunately, Parry died before he could publish any of this, but his assistant, Albert Lord, eventually published it all in _The Singer of Tales_.
He apparently has a BA in Mathematics.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, you may be interested in this CD put out by the experimental music label, Touch. The ringtones were created by a wide selection of sound artists and musicians; the album points towards a vaguely disturbing future where the ringtone would be the highest form of musical endeavour.
Still, it's fun to bemuse your enemies by sticking a Gilbert and George or Ryoji Ikeda ringtone on their phone when nobody's looking...
Parent is clearly an NSA asset.
Anyone with true Agartthan wisdom would know that you can cut your water-fuelled engines when travelling between the poles. The telluric currents are quite adequate for the journey.
I thought you were going to say, "With Mac, you spend two grand extra, but it 'just works'"
Please stop, it's too horrible! The worst of it all is that my PC is as we speak radiating heat.
That's the same kind of radiation that is used in conventional ovens!
It can cook stuff to death!
So emacs is full of easter eggs...
[Ducks]
I won't even begin to comment on the parent AC's unsubstantiated racial profile of "happy slappers".
Happy slapping is not "a serious problem"; it is a moral panic that has grown up out of alarmist reports in the gutter press.
See these rather more informed articles.
At the end of the day, the BL isn't going to stand up for the interests of consumers. They themselves are heavy users of DRM, and anybody who's ever read in the BL (and paid the exorbitant photocopying fees!) will know how zealously they police copyright laws.
As a legal deposit library, what's important to the BL is that they're seen as the custodians of our intellectual heritagenot the publishers. Quite right too: the points about archiving and library priviledge are meant to ensure that copies of works survive--possibly giving the BL the right to reverse-engineer DRM, as we've seen happen in numerous other National Libraries accross the world. I don't think that it means they'll stop policing fair dealing, looking over your shouler to make sure you don't copy any more than 10% of a work or one chapter (whichever is the smallest)!
As an example of the BLs DRM usage, take a look at their Secure Electronic Delivery service. Not much room for fair dealing there. My partner (a librarian) was working for a big government department that regularly requested heaps of documents from the British Library. They could have saved a bit of public money using electronic delivery, but the Adobe DRM that the British Library uses was a bitch to get working through the departement's web cache. They would have had to pursuade an intransigent IT department to support a different version of Adobe Reader--people have just carried on using good old hard-copies, delivered by van from the BL's Document Supply Centre in Boston Spa.
Everyone makes mistakes - I'm a generous guy, so this is what I figured when they deleted all my mail (I'm a Force9 customer. PlusNet took them over a few years ago, and have kept the brand alive to trade on Force9's once-great reputation).
A few weeks after, though, they sent me an email containing the personal information of 20,000 of their customers, myself included. The data had been accidentally sent to 3,499 other folks, too. Not bank account data, but email addresses. So I don't know about data retention laws, but they certainly have a pretty lax attitude to data protection laws.