In our country, rights are set to "on" by default.
The Copyright Act essentially forbids duplicating a copyrighted work without the owner's permission. Section 117 provides some exceptions. The page states clearly that section 117 does not apply to music or films.
So your right to copy:
was "on" by default
was turned off by the Copyright Act
was turned back on, partially by section 117 - but only for computer software
The linked page does not support that assertion. In fact, it weighs strongly against it. Note criterion 3:
amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
The implication is that copying a small section of a work is more likely to be fair use. Reading further, in the 1961 report, almost all the examples of fair use mention the brevity of the extract:
...quotation of excerpts...
...quotation of short passages...
...some of the content...
...summary of...
...a portion of a work...
...a small part of a work...
Which part of that web page allows copying an entire work for you personal enjoyment?
And if they are selling them for a profit at 10 cents then 5.25 is obscene here.
The cost of marketing a product is different in different countries. Factors such as regulations, lawsuits, expensive advertising and high wages can increase the cost.
Drugs are like software, in that most of the cost goes into R and D. The marginal cost of producing one more unit is very low. Therefore, you might think it's profitable to sell the product for 1 cent. But if the company sold all units at 1 cent, it would lose money. That's because there's a large fixed cost which must be amortized over the full-price sales.
I am in Silicon Valley. My employer has trouble filling positions. We pay very well. We rely heavily on H1Bs.
All the programmers I know in the valley say the same thing. Everyone is looking for good people.
If your experience is different, I'd like to know:
What part of the US do you inhabit? Maybe you are simply living in a depressed or dying area.
Are you as good as you think you are? Realistically, could you make it through technical interviews at the valley's big companies?
At least 2/3 of the candidates are utterly unqualified and don't seem to realize it. And again, my experience agrees with that of my friends at other companies. There are candidates with 10 years of C++ experience who can't write the simplest program on the whiteboard.
From my perspective, we greatly need the Indian and Chinese engineers; there simply aren't enough qualified Americans.
You cannot escape anything political on slashdot any more.
It wasn't always like that. If we have the courage to confront the root cause: it's global warming. Human brains only function well within a narrow range of temperature. Since Bush was elected, sending global temperatures skyrocketing, slashbots have been spewing sparks like so many malfunctioning androids.
Or maybe it's because, since the antitrust trial, Microsoft doesn't act that evil any more. Every religion needs a devil. (Almost every).
Thanks for the reply. I'm glad the system works for you. I am not one of those calling the UK a police state. Quite the reverse: from your description, it seems like a wanted criminal can drive around with impunity, as long as he has a voice on the phone to identify him as various citizens.
But I actually don't know how police in the US handle the driver who simply forgot his license. Could be the same thing for all I know.
Are you saying that the UK is a police state? In that case, which countries are not police states?
Last time I checked, traffic lights don't hold you against your will for 5 hours.
On the other hand, being detained by the police is not an every day occurence for most people. My point is that in the big picture of life, it's nothing. It's down among the dental visits, fender benders and sprained ankles. Not in the same league as divorce, bankruptcy and cancer. Or the sorts of things that happen in actual police states.
Orwell does not have a monopoly on paradox. In particular, the paradox of freedom requiring boundaries is an ancient one. Every man would like to walk the street in absolute freedom, knowing that nobody can mess with him. This isn't possible for most of us on this earth. With too weak a police presence, we're plagued with bullies, drunks and muggers. With too strong a police presence, we are constantly watched; we get stopped for trivial things. Most civilized communities have achieved a reasonable balance, and yes, this reasonable balance means that sometimes an innocent person is detained by the police.
As has already been pointed out - there is no requirement to carry ID in the UK.
I don't understand how this can work. How does the UK address the issues I raised?
You have 48 hours (I think, but several days at least) to provide ID...
What does this mean? They hold you for 48 hours? They let you go, and say "come back in 48 hours with ID, or we'll issue a warrant for Mr. Noname"?
And what is this concept of landlord verification? Is this widely understood in the UK? How can the police tell that they're speaking to a "landlord", and why should they believe him about anything? And how can he identify someone he can't see?
I certainly would. I would gladly spend a month in Jail to live in a nation where...
My point was that the annoyances we experience from the police are a small price to live in a civilized place. Complaining that the police detained you for five hours over an ID issue is like complaining that you have to stop at traffic lights.
ID is about verifying who you are. Laws concern behavior, not identity.
Our laws don't have much teeth without the ability to identify an offender. A functioning, orderly society with no ID would have:
No traffic tickets. Traffic offenders would be arrested and held in jail until their families brought money to pay the fine. Because there is no way to punish someone who doesn't pay a ticket.
No parole or probation.
No bail. Anyone accused of a crime would stay in jail until their trial.
You imply that Somalia is like it is solely because IDs aren't checked.
What I mean is that stable identity is part and parcel of our humane, orderly society. Many people enjoy eating the sausage of freedom, but are disgusted when they see how it's made. Our freedom to walk the streets peacefully is bought by the violent repression of those who would naturally own the streets. Could you abolish ID cards and still have a functioning society? Yes, at some cost. Is it worth it?
Reading between the lines, it sounds like you weren't carrying ID. Do you understand why the police detain people who go around without ID? Do you understand that you've benefited enormously, all your life, from the police checking IDs and warrants at traffic stops and accidents? Would you trade your five hours in a police station for a lifetime living in a place where IDs are not checked, such as Somalia?
In California, they only ask about convictions - I think it's state law. I have one, and while it's embarassing to have to write it down, it's never barred me from a job in CA. I know this because because the background form is sent after the employer makes a conditional offer.
A friend worked for an intelligence agency. They polygraph everyone, and dig deeply into each crime and arrest. But they do hire people with criminal convictions, if they have been clean for a while. However, that agency will not hire anyone who's used an illegal drug other than pot.
For a couple of years, I had a crew cut. In that period I was pulled over by police twice, in two different states. In each case, I was given a warning, not a ticket.
Now I have a normal haircut, and I always get the ticket.
For what it's worth, my manner has been uniformly polite and cooperative.
Ten years ago, NSA/GCHQ used fax intercepts to catch the french selling weapons components to Iran. (Bamford's conclusion that the turbos were harmless civilian generators is ridiculous.) Iran is heating up again, and I'm sure France would like to sell them munitions; besides making money, it will put sand in the gearbox of the anglo-saxons.
Quite a few posters here seem to think Gates is a fool for not using email. To me, that shows an inability to understand his role. He's not a sysadmin or middle manager; he's the head of a huge federal agency. To me, that implies:
He's very busy.
He has too many documents to read, and too many meetings to attend.
He's supported by able subordinates whose only goal is to increase his effectiveness.
Someone else keeps his schedule.
Someone else types any emails or memos from his office. What could someone like that gain from personally using email?
"I don't do email" was avoiding the question. He gives orders that affect hundreds of billions of dollars worth of high tech military equipment, and controls hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but he's baffled by email? I just don't buy it
He didn't say he's baffled by it; he said he doesn't do it. He probably knows how to clean a toilet, too, but doesn't clean the Pentagon's toilets.
It's a valid point. But one of the ideas in the proposal was to only comply with governments as mandated by law. Some of these human rights incidents seem to involve companies either censoring or informing on citizens in response to an unofficial request. This seems to leave human rights activists with no traction, since every government on the planet has employees who could make an unofficial request.
If Yahoo/Google insisted on a formal (though secret) order before censoring/wiretapping, would this get them thrown out of China? I don't think so. What benefits would it bring? Not sure.
China has Baidu, which is home-grown. It's already better than Yahoo and Google, from what Chinese people tell me. The American companies are trying to force themselves into a market where they're really not needed, and the only success they're having is where first-mover advantage builds a network, such as IM.
Golden Shield? Gold is not exactly the best material for a shield. It is:
Expensive
Heavy
Soft
A warrior venturing into battle with a golden shield would bear a heavy burden in more ways than one. Lends new meaning to the exhortation, "Come home with your shield or on it.
Combine the mono-culture fundamentalist christians (no, not cap C), big oil/big money, the one-issue gun lobby, and the demographics, and you have the recipe for an unbreakable control of our government.
Unbreakable? First, the Democrats won the last round of elections. Second, the Democrats can modify their platform to appeal to any of these groups. If 90% of the customers want vanilla, which your competitor is selling, and you're selling chocolate, does the competitor have an "unbreakable" control of the market?
I don't think the future of our government is well served by this large secret police organization. Democracy thrives in the open air.
All governments need secrecy; all have intelligence agencies, etc. A nation without a secret component would be at an extreme disadvantage in dealing with other nations. And yes, the secrecy breeds incompetence and corruption; this has also been true forever.
Whether a specific task is performed by government employees or outsourced has no bearing on this issue. In the end it's up to our legislators on the appropriate committees to exercise oversight of intelligence agencies. This has always been a tough task, and the quality of oversight varies.
Bringing all the secrets out into the open air sounds nice, but it would be quite harmful. To take a random example, if the US has spies in North Korea, would you like their names published?
The other happened as I was talking to a co-worker, trying to get through some bureaucracy, and he just kind of zoned out for a couple of minutes and started drooling.
That may have just been extreme boredom. I've done that a couple of times, although I try to keep the saliva contained.
I happen to have worked on a large scale app that messaged an average 800KB messages for each of 35K concurrent users
OK, that's 800 x 35 = 28G. 28G per what?
Another app transferred the data of tens of thousands of transactions...
OK, roughly 50k txns/?? second? minute? month? To understand your figures, I need the denominator.
In any event, you can hit an arbitrary number of txns/sec with an inefficient protocol given enough servers. To bring the numbers into focus, we need txns/sec, avg txn size, avg keys/txn, and #servers.
I don't know what you've been programming, but "Web services" perform just fine, provided you design and program them optimally for what you're doing.
I used to think that. And loudly evangelize that. Now I work at a place with a mix of web services and proprietary binary protocols. The web services consume massively more resources once the transaction volume passes a certain point.
Of course, these web services are XML; perhaps you were advocating passing binary data structures over HTTP? (just kidding)
As for what domains reach this volume, any high-volume web site has enough transactions between the front end and the middle tier to highlight the slowness of web services.
Slashdot Mirror
So your right to copy:
The linked page does not support that assertion. In fact, it weighs strongly against it. Note criterion 3:
The implication is that copying a small section of a work is more likely to be fair use. Reading further, in the 1961 report, almost all the examples of fair use mention the brevity of the extract:
Which part of that web page allows copying an entire work for you personal enjoyment?
All the programmers I know in the valley say the same thing. Everyone is looking for good people.
If your experience is different, I'd like to know:
At least 2/3 of the candidates are utterly unqualified and don't seem to realize it. And again, my experience agrees with that of my friends at other companies. There are candidates with 10 years of C++ experience who can't write the simplest program on the whiteboard.
From my perspective, we greatly need the Indian and Chinese engineers; there simply aren't enough qualified Americans.
There is a popular myth on slashdot that you have a legal right to rip music or movies that you've bought. There is no such right.
It wasn't always like that. If we have the courage to confront the root cause: it's global warming. Human brains only function well within a narrow range of temperature. Since Bush was elected, sending global temperatures skyrocketing, slashbots have been spewing sparks like so many malfunctioning androids.
Or maybe it's because, since the antitrust trial, Microsoft doesn't act that evil any more. Every religion needs a devil. (Almost every).
Thanks for the reply. I'm glad the system works for you. I am not one of those calling the UK a police state. Quite the reverse: from your description, it seems like a wanted criminal can drive around with impunity, as long as he has a voice on the phone to identify him as various citizens.
But I actually don't know how police in the US handle the driver who simply forgot his license. Could be the same thing for all I know.
Are you saying that the UK is a police state? In that case, which countries are not police states?
On the other hand, being detained by the police is not an every day occurence for most people. My point is that in the big picture of life, it's nothing. It's down among the dental visits, fender benders and sprained ankles. Not in the same league as divorce, bankruptcy and cancer. Or the sorts of things that happen in actual police states.
Orwell does not have a monopoly on paradox. In particular, the paradox of freedom requiring boundaries is an ancient one. Every man would like to walk the street in absolute freedom, knowing that nobody can mess with him. This isn't possible for most of us on this earth. With too weak a police presence, we're plagued with bullies, drunks and muggers. With too strong a police presence, we are constantly watched; we get stopped for trivial things. Most civilized communities have achieved a reasonable balance, and yes, this reasonable balance means that sometimes an innocent person is detained by the police.
I don't understand how this can work. How does the UK address the issues I raised?
What does this mean? They hold you for 48 hours? They let you go, and say "come back in 48 hours with ID, or we'll issue a warrant for Mr. Noname"?
And what is this concept of landlord verification? Is this widely understood in the UK? How can the police tell that they're speaking to a "landlord", and why should they believe him about anything? And how can he identify someone he can't see?
My point was that the annoyances we experience from the police are a small price to live in a civilized place. Complaining that the police detained you for five hours over an ID issue is like complaining that you have to stop at traffic lights.
Our laws don't have much teeth without the ability to identify an offender. A functioning, orderly society with no ID would have:
What I mean is that stable identity is part and parcel of our humane, orderly society. Many people enjoy eating the sausage of freedom, but are disgusted when they see how it's made. Our freedom to walk the streets peacefully is bought by the violent repression of those who would naturally own the streets. Could you abolish ID cards and still have a functioning society? Yes, at some cost. Is it worth it?
Reading between the lines, it sounds like you weren't carrying ID. Do you understand why the police detain people who go around without ID? Do you understand that you've benefited enormously, all your life, from the police checking IDs and warrants at traffic stops and accidents? Would you trade your five hours in a police station for a lifetime living in a place where IDs are not checked, such as Somalia?
In California, they only ask about convictions - I think it's state law. I have one, and while it's embarassing to have to write it down, it's never barred me from a job in CA. I know this because because the background form is sent after the employer makes a conditional offer.
A friend worked for an intelligence agency. They polygraph everyone, and dig deeply into each crime and arrest. But they do hire people with criminal convictions, if they have been clean for a while. However, that agency will not hire anyone who's used an illegal drug other than pot.
For a couple of years, I had a crew cut. In that period I was pulled over by police twice, in two different states. In each case, I was given a warning, not a ticket.
Now I have a normal haircut, and I always get the ticket.
For what it's worth, my manner has been uniformly polite and cooperative.
Ten years ago, NSA/GCHQ used fax intercepts to catch the french selling weapons components to Iran. (Bamford's conclusion that the turbos were harmless civilian generators is ridiculous.) Iran is heating up again, and I'm sure France would like to sell them munitions; besides making money, it will put sand in the gearbox of the anglo-saxons.
What could someone like that gain from personally using email?
Actually, I wonder how many CEOs use email.
He didn't say he's baffled by it; he said he doesn't do it. He probably knows how to clean a toilet, too, but doesn't clean the Pentagon's toilets.
It's a valid point. But one of the ideas in the proposal was to only comply with governments as mandated by law. Some of these human rights incidents seem to involve companies either censoring or informing on citizens in response to an unofficial request. This seems to leave human rights activists with no traction, since every government on the planet has employees who could make an unofficial request.
If Yahoo/Google insisted on a formal (though secret) order before censoring/wiretapping, would this get them thrown out of China? I don't think so. What benefits would it bring? Not sure.
China has Baidu, which is home-grown. It's already better than Yahoo and Google, from what Chinese people tell me. The American companies are trying to force themselves into a market where they're really not needed, and the only success they're having is where first-mover advantage builds a network, such as IM.
I'd say that setting an example is always a goal of criminal sentencing. But in this case, there is no sentence yet. The max is 11 years.
A warrior venturing into battle with a golden shield would bear a heavy burden in more ways than one. Lends new meaning to the exhortation, "Come home with your shield or on it.
The local watering hole's owner pays a yearly fee to ASCAP, which represents the composer. Otherwise he ends up like restauranteur Michael Dorr.
Unbreakable? First, the Democrats won the last round of elections. Second, the Democrats can modify their platform to appeal to any of these groups. If 90% of the customers want vanilla, which your competitor is selling, and you're selling chocolate, does the competitor have an "unbreakable" control of the market?
All governments need secrecy; all have intelligence agencies, etc. A nation without a secret component would be at an extreme disadvantage in dealing with other nations. And yes, the secrecy breeds incompetence and corruption; this has also been true forever.
Whether a specific task is performed by government employees or outsourced has no bearing on this issue. In the end it's up to our legislators on the appropriate committees to exercise oversight of intelligence agencies. This has always been a tough task, and the quality of oversight varies.
Bringing all the secrets out into the open air sounds nice, but it would be quite harmful. To take a random example, if the US has spies in North Korea, would you like their names published?
OK, that's 800 x 35 = 28G. 28G per what?
OK, roughly 50k txns/?? second? minute? month? To understand your figures, I need the denominator.
In any event, you can hit an arbitrary number of txns/sec with an inefficient protocol given enough servers. To bring the numbers into focus, we need txns/sec, avg txn size, avg keys/txn, and #servers.
I used to think that. And loudly evangelize that. Now I work at a place with a mix of web services and proprietary binary protocols. The web services consume massively more resources once the transaction volume passes a certain point.
Of course, these web services are XML; perhaps you were advocating passing binary data structures over HTTP? (just kidding)
As for what domains reach this volume, any high-volume web site has enough transactions between the front end and the middle tier to highlight the slowness of web services.