The main problem with indefinite copyright extension is not that it stops people copying, but that it discourages new works being created from those old works, or wider legitimate distribution of said works (a website for instance which streams all out of copyright movies, books, music for a nominal fee to cover bandwidth) which might otherwise bring them to a newer, wider audience, because there is the fear of legal action. It's just a ridiculous additional hurdle they're putting in place for no good reason (since we've already agreed it doesn't stop people copying things).
I don't doubt that many niche works which were not originally commercially viable and have not been maintained by the originators which are now lost to time, many of these could have been saved with shorter copyight periods helping them enter the public domain sooner.
It seems like they've only got themselves to blame for the loss of additional revenue streams by trying to lock everyone in to contracts with certain carriers anyway. The evidence is in the sheer number of phones being unlocked, if they just made it easier to own the phone on any network, they'd lose some control but generate more revenue.
The problem there is this only affects companies who obey the law. When the only disincentive to breaking the law is a minor financial slap on the wrist and the potential benefits are so great, who thinks any of the companies involved in this will have the integrity to resist? (Bearing in mind the, ahem... spotless record of companies involved in ad-serving schemes online to date...)
More to the point it comes down to money. I "pay" Google for its service by viewing their ads. I pay for my ISP with money. I don't expect to have to pay them twice.
You're right - but of course this becomes more of an issue when the kids/teens can get their hands on the product without paying. In situations where this is extremely difficult, such as the cereal example, you have massive marketing aimed at kids who have no money, but real-world barriers to prevent the kids just taking it without paying (an 8 year old walking out of a store with a big box of cereal is likely to be thwarted pretty quickly) - so they have to rely on parents to buy it for them.
When the boundaries become blurred it's not so clear cut. Think of teenagers and alcohol - we all know alcohol advertising appeals to the young, get them hooked at an early age is a strategy that pays for these companies. The money is less of a barrier now as they have pocket money or maybe even jobs so instead there's the legal barrier, but we know teens get around this relatively easily, they ask others to buy for them or use fake ID, etc.
Now remove all barriers - we have readily available content and relative anonymity (a handful of people getting caught when there are 10 million just on one site along sharing content is hardly a deterrent, especially to a kid who doesn't really think of such consequences anyway) and yet the content producers are very aggresively marketing to these kids/teens and expect them NOT to just take what they want without paying? It was always a recipe for disaster from the outset.
Except that many corporations are still using Win2k which will have no IE7, so unless you're willing to exclude those people, you'll have to go on supporting IE6 for a while yet. And then there are rumours of IE8 on the near horizon, which will no doubt follow the IE trend of fixing some issues from IE7 and meaning we're back to the situation of having different CSS for at least two, if not three, versions of one browser. I'm happy they're moving towards standards compliance, but I doubt very much that this will make the web developer's life any easier...
Sometimes it's not desirable for the consumer to always buy where they can get something the cheapest, though, and in some cases it's right that the government intervenes in the public's own interest. I'm not fully conversant with the facts of this case so I won't comment, but food and drugs are two areas where it's not always in the public's interest to buy from the cheapest supplier if, for instance, the food is unhygienic or the drugs are untested.
In these areas the government intervenes to put in place appropriate hygeine and licensing laws in the public's interest even though this undoubtedly means the customer ends up paying more. Other areas may not be so black and white but that doesn't always mean there's no legitimate reason for the government to not intervene in those cases too.
When someone can easily write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of in one night and still get an A, there is a big problem.
I'm not sure that statement is entirely correct. If the person can write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of and still fail to properly comprehend, then there is a big problem. On the other hand, if access to information has reached a level where a person can get a good grasp of a subject quickly and put that to good use, this has to be a good thing, surely?
It seems the way essays are written and, more importantly, the way they are marked are the key things here. Instead of just checking that the student has included all the relevant keywords, assesment should account for good research and a demonstrably well-rounded understanding of the subject. This is not a new problem - it has been the case for a long time, since well before the advent of the internet. I'm sure we all have anecdotal evidence of people who studied the bare minimum and still got good grades because they included the right keywords and could bluff an understanding - all the internet has done is made this problem more visible, since there are now tools to highlight lazy research and plagiarism.
I'm not sure what you're describing is as much to do with the availability of information in the digital age as it is to do with laziness in certain students. When I read law back in the mid-to-late 90s, the internet was a new and pretty much underused tool in legal academic circles, yet there were still lazy students who relied on the minimum recommended reading list (or even worse, on their lecture notes/information sheets) to get all their information and others who read around the subject, did more in-depth research, used the recommended books and articles as a start-point for their research rather than and end-point.
Of my peers at the time, I was one of the few who utilised the internet as much as possible (admittedly there were far fewer legal resources online back then), but again I would use it to lead me down different avenues of research, to give me a much broader understanding of the subject at hand. I saw it as one more source to add to books, case reports, articles, etc. Now, of course, a lot of the information from those other sources is available online - this is merely a more convenient format to allow research, it doesn't prevent the more studious from doing extensive research.
At the end of the day, if a lazy student only has the option of reading books and articles, he will read the bare minimum he needs. If we give him the option of the internet, he will visit the bare minimum of sites he needs to get the same information. The issue here is with motivating students to _want_ to do the additional research, not with criticising the tools of said research.
He was referring to some discs lost by British governments officials containing financial details of tens of thousands of people. After his recent experience, he apparently now considers this a serous problem.
That was the GP's point. In this instance, Clarkson functions as the official - he is the one who was careless (he was also the victim, but he arguably invited just this outcome by his actions) and the GP is saying that this created problems for the people who have to clear up his mess. Of course, this is only an issue if Clarkson asks for the money back, which he probably won't.
It can't be used to harm you though. Direct debits are protected for this very reason, to allow maximum flexibility while providing peace of mind and security to the customer. The people most likely to be harmed here are the banks, who have to automatically refund any queried payment and perform investiations at their own expense into the allegations - they could quite easily lock the whole system down and make life more of a chore for their customers, so I think it actually shows a certain degree of maturity that they don't do this.
I'm by no means a fan of the big banking institutions and believe many of their practices are questionable, but I don't think this is evidence of such; rather it's just more scaremongering on the part of the press who thrive on this kind of story.
Exactly - the show should be predominantly viewed as entertainment and (unless you're super-rich) not a source of real-world car reviews. That's not to say that the presenters don't appreciate such cars - the Top Gear awards generally reflect this and Jeremy has many times expressed his love of hatchbacks (or "hot hatches").
Originally, of course, the show had much more of the standard car review format and it ended up haemorrhaging viewers at an alarming rate. Jeremy successfully transformed the format of the show into something much more watchable by focussing on the kinds of cars people dream about owning over the kinds of cars they can realistically expect to buy.
There was one where they raced an off the rack Mustang (designed for street and open road driving) against some sort of Lotus specifically designed and tuned for twisty, high speed driving. WTF? Will they be pitting a Formula 1 car against a Dodge Nitro next?
You make a good point, but remember: a Mustang might be a practical street car in the US, where corners are almost mythical, but the average UK street map looks like it was drawn by a crack-addict going cold-turkey - cornering suddenly becomes a much more important issue than straight-line performance!
TFA shows cushioned seats with a fold-down flap for the laptop, which I have to say still doesn't look too comfortable for prolonged usages - it seems like there's just enough room for the laptop, no space for a proper keyboard and mouse, let alone a decent-sized monitor.
Even worse, though - there are cables trailing all over the floor (WiFi is great but laptops need juice as well!). Can anyone else see a health and safety disaster in the making?
I'd rather the opposite. Young children inherently understand violence; they don't inherently understand sex.
IANAPsychiatrist and don't really have an opinion on this, but Freud certainly didn't share your opinion. Prior to the pre-pubescent latent stages of psychosexual development (where the child has repressed their sexual feelings), Freud believed children to be highly sexually motivated. Perhaps they don't "understand" in the form of comprehension, but if this theory is correct they certainly are highly aware of and driven by sex.
While it's great that you're obviously a "glass half-full" kind of guy, I think you have the meaning of this phrase wrong. It really is meant to be disparaging of the teaching profession - painting it as a refuge for those who have failed to make a success of their chosen vocation in the "real world" and are instead relegated to telling others how it should be done. It's most often attributed to GBS, though the idea possibly predates this.
As a disclaimer I'd like to point out I'm just identifying one of the origins of the saying, above; not stating my personal opinion.
I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say that the whole responsibility for managing this falls to the extension author. Windows gets enough stick for being so insecure, but I don't hear people arguing that the OS doesn't need to be secure and that security is down to the people writing the applications that run on it. In this case, as in that, the real answer is a combination of the two - sure the extension authors should do their utmost to eliminate memory leaks, but it would be nice if the browser prevented any particular extension from eating all the machine's memory - even if it just alerted users to an extension which was hogging memory and gave the option to disable the extension in this session and reclaim the memory.
FF has done pretty well from extensions - most people cite them as the reason they switched to and stayed with FF, so it's not entirely fair to dump all the blame on people who are dedicating their time and effort to making FF better and to expect no contribution to solving the problem from the people who are being paid to develop the broswer (indirectly by the users of FF who are experiencing these problems and asking for solutions).
The problem is that FF's success has brought an influx of new users, many of whom wouldn't know where to begin to file a bug report, but the second they mention their problem on a site such as this, they are shot down by a dozen anecdotal stories about how user x runs 50 tabs streaming g0te pr0n 24/7 for 17 weeks without seeing memory rise above 27MB so the OP is obviously lying/using their browser wrong/just plain stupid.
This doesn't really encourage people to help - clearly people are having problems, but the only way to find out if those problems are caused by the browser or are really down to how it's being used is to work with those people, not shoot them down. The fact that so many memory leak issues have been fixed between versions 2 and 3 indicates that there was always at least some validity to the arguments of people who claimed they were experiencing issues, yet there are still people in this thread right now basically insinuating (or outright stating) that such users are lying, flying in the face of the evidence.
So in short, you are right, filing a polite bug report will do more to help the cause than ranting, but we as a community need to be more willing to listen to these issues also, otherwise the one thing that helped FF grow (its user base) will end up tearing it apart.
I guess the question is: would it be better to have one big inconvenience or a constant stream of little inconveniences? The solution which causes least overall inconvenience would seem to be the best option. I don't have the answer but it seems like this is the reason we're having the debate - while it's not always a good idea to fix something if it's not broken, it's often worthwhile looking at ways to optimise existing processes.
One question though - I don't know a great deal about the Tor technology, but if he was running an exit node (i.e. he was the end point for the communication), then isn't he himself effectively acting as the telecommunications company? If people didn't provide exit nodes Tor wouldn't work, so in this case he was an essential part of the connection to the internet.
As far as I know, telecoms are allowed to pry into their traffic as it's considered public domain and people are advised to encrypt anything they don't want falling into the "wrong hands" - it seems to me he could use the same argument, if someone agreed to send information via the computer of an unknown third party then this should always be considered non-private or always encrypted if it is private.
As I said, I don't fully understand the technology so feel free to point out the flaws in my logic, but prima facie that seems to hold water.
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The main problem with indefinite copyright extension is not that it stops people copying, but that it discourages new works being created from those old works, or wider legitimate distribution of said works (a website for instance which streams all out of copyright movies, books, music for a nominal fee to cover bandwidth) which might otherwise bring them to a newer, wider audience, because there is the fear of legal action. It's just a ridiculous additional hurdle they're putting in place for no good reason (since we've already agreed it doesn't stop people copying things). I don't doubt that many niche works which were not originally commercially viable and have not been maintained by the originators which are now lost to time, many of these could have been saved with shorter copyight periods helping them enter the public domain sooner.
IANAL, can they trademark something they didn't create/invent?
It seems like they've only got themselves to blame for the loss of additional revenue streams by trying to lock everyone in to contracts with certain carriers anyway. The evidence is in the sheer number of phones being unlocked, if they just made it easier to own the phone on any network, they'd lose some control but generate more revenue.
The problem there is this only affects companies who obey the law. When the only disincentive to breaking the law is a minor financial slap on the wrist and the potential benefits are so great, who thinks any of the companies involved in this will have the integrity to resist? (Bearing in mind the, ahem... spotless record of companies involved in ad-serving schemes online to date...)
More to the point it comes down to money. I "pay" Google for its service by viewing their ads. I pay for my ISP with money. I don't expect to have to pay them twice.
You're right - but of course this becomes more of an issue when the kids/teens can get their hands on the product without paying. In situations where this is extremely difficult, such as the cereal example, you have massive marketing aimed at kids who have no money, but real-world barriers to prevent the kids just taking it without paying (an 8 year old walking out of a store with a big box of cereal is likely to be thwarted pretty quickly) - so they have to rely on parents to buy it for them.
When the boundaries become blurred it's not so clear cut. Think of teenagers and alcohol - we all know alcohol advertising appeals to the young, get them hooked at an early age is a strategy that pays for these companies. The money is less of a barrier now as they have pocket money or maybe even jobs so instead there's the legal barrier, but we know teens get around this relatively easily, they ask others to buy for them or use fake ID, etc.
Now remove all barriers - we have readily available content and relative anonymity (a handful of people getting caught when there are 10 million just on one site along sharing content is hardly a deterrent, especially to a kid who doesn't really think of such consequences anyway) and yet the content producers are very aggresively marketing to these kids/teens and expect them NOT to just take what they want without paying? It was always a recipe for disaster from the outset.
Except that many corporations are still using Win2k which will have no IE7, so unless you're willing to exclude those people, you'll have to go on supporting IE6 for a while yet. And then there are rumours of IE8 on the near horizon, which will no doubt follow the IE trend of fixing some issues from IE7 and meaning we're back to the situation of having different CSS for at least two, if not three, versions of one browser. I'm happy they're moving towards standards compliance, but I doubt very much that this will make the web developer's life any easier...
Sometimes it's not desirable for the consumer to always buy where they can get something the cheapest, though, and in some cases it's right that the government intervenes in the public's own interest. I'm not fully conversant with the facts of this case so I won't comment, but food and drugs are two areas where it's not always in the public's interest to buy from the cheapest supplier if, for instance, the food is unhygienic or the drugs are untested.
In these areas the government intervenes to put in place appropriate hygeine and licensing laws in the public's interest even though this undoubtedly means the customer ends up paying more. Other areas may not be so black and white but that doesn't always mean there's no legitimate reason for the government to not intervene in those cases too.
When someone can easily write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of in one night and still get an A, there is a big problem.
I'm not sure that statement is entirely correct. If the person can write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of and still fail to properly comprehend, then there is a big problem. On the other hand, if access to information has reached a level where a person can get a good grasp of a subject quickly and put that to good use, this has to be a good thing, surely?
It seems the way essays are written and, more importantly, the way they are marked are the key things here. Instead of just checking that the student has included all the relevant keywords, assesment should account for good research and a demonstrably well-rounded understanding of the subject. This is not a new problem - it has been the case for a long time, since well before the advent of the internet. I'm sure we all have anecdotal evidence of people who studied the bare minimum and still got good grades because they included the right keywords and could bluff an understanding - all the internet has done is made this problem more visible, since there are now tools to highlight lazy research and plagiarism.
I'm not sure what you're describing is as much to do with the availability of information in the digital age as it is to do with laziness in certain students. When I read law back in the mid-to-late 90s, the internet was a new and pretty much underused tool in legal academic circles, yet there were still lazy students who relied on the minimum recommended reading list (or even worse, on their lecture notes/information sheets) to get all their information and others who read around the subject, did more in-depth research, used the recommended books and articles as a start-point for their research rather than and end-point.
Of my peers at the time, I was one of the few who utilised the internet as much as possible (admittedly there were far fewer legal resources online back then), but again I would use it to lead me down different avenues of research, to give me a much broader understanding of the subject at hand. I saw it as one more source to add to books, case reports, articles, etc. Now, of course, a lot of the information from those other sources is available online - this is merely a more convenient format to allow research, it doesn't prevent the more studious from doing extensive research.
At the end of the day, if a lazy student only has the option of reading books and articles, he will read the bare minimum he needs. If we give him the option of the internet, he will visit the bare minimum of sites he needs to get the same information. The issue here is with motivating students to _want_ to do the additional research, not with criticising the tools of said research.
He was referring to some discs lost by British governments officials containing financial details of tens of thousands of people. After his recent experience, he apparently now considers this a serous problem.
That was the GP's point. In this instance, Clarkson functions as the official - he is the one who was careless (he was also the victim, but he arguably invited just this outcome by his actions) and the GP is saying that this created problems for the people who have to clear up his mess. Of course, this is only an issue if Clarkson asks for the money back, which he probably won't.
It can't be used to harm you though. Direct debits are protected for this very reason, to allow maximum flexibility while providing peace of mind and security to the customer. The people most likely to be harmed here are the banks, who have to automatically refund any queried payment and perform investiations at their own expense into the allegations - they could quite easily lock the whole system down and make life more of a chore for their customers, so I think it actually shows a certain degree of maturity that they don't do this.
I'm by no means a fan of the big banking institutions and believe many of their practices are questionable, but I don't think this is evidence of such; rather it's just more scaremongering on the part of the press who thrive on this kind of story.
Exactly - the show should be predominantly viewed as entertainment and (unless you're super-rich) not a source of real-world car reviews. That's not to say that the presenters don't appreciate such cars - the Top Gear awards generally reflect this and Jeremy has many times expressed his love of hatchbacks (or "hot hatches").
Originally, of course, the show had much more of the standard car review format and it ended up haemorrhaging viewers at an alarming rate. Jeremy successfully transformed the format of the show into something much more watchable by focussing on the kinds of cars people dream about owning over the kinds of cars they can realistically expect to buy.
There was one where they raced an off the rack Mustang (designed for street and open road driving) against some sort of Lotus specifically designed and tuned for twisty, high speed driving. WTF? Will they be pitting a Formula 1 car against a Dodge Nitro next?
You make a good point, but remember: a Mustang might be a practical street car in the US, where corners are almost mythical, but the average UK street map looks like it was drawn by a crack-addict going cold-turkey - cornering suddenly becomes a much more important issue than straight-line performance!
Even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn...
TFA shows cushioned seats with a fold-down flap for the laptop, which I have to say still doesn't look too comfortable for prolonged usages - it seems like there's just enough room for the laptop, no space for a proper keyboard and mouse, let alone a decent-sized monitor.
Even worse, though - there are cables trailing all over the floor (WiFi is great but laptops need juice as well!). Can anyone else see a health and safety disaster in the making?
I'd rather the opposite. Young children inherently understand violence; they don't inherently understand sex.
IANAPsychiatrist and don't really have an opinion on this, but Freud certainly didn't share your opinion. Prior to the pre-pubescent latent stages of psychosexual development (where the child has repressed their sexual feelings), Freud believed children to be highly sexually motivated. Perhaps they don't "understand" in the form of comprehension, but if this theory is correct they certainly are highly aware of and driven by sex.
Imagine being able to [...] open your [...] zipper [...] without repositioning the hands away from the home row keys.
There. Fixed that for you.
While it's great that you're obviously a "glass half-full" kind of guy, I think you have the meaning of this phrase wrong. It really is meant to be disparaging of the teaching profession - painting it as a refuge for those who have failed to make a success of their chosen vocation in the "real world" and are instead relegated to telling others how it should be done. It's most often attributed to GBS, though the idea possibly predates this.
As a disclaimer I'd like to point out I'm just identifying one of the origins of the saying, above; not stating my personal opinion.
I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say that the whole responsibility for managing this falls to the extension author. Windows gets enough stick for being so insecure, but I don't hear people arguing that the OS doesn't need to be secure and that security is down to the people writing the applications that run on it. In this case, as in that, the real answer is a combination of the two - sure the extension authors should do their utmost to eliminate memory leaks, but it would be nice if the browser prevented any particular extension from eating all the machine's memory - even if it just alerted users to an extension which was hogging memory and gave the option to disable the extension in this session and reclaim the memory.
FF has done pretty well from extensions - most people cite them as the reason they switched to and stayed with FF, so it's not entirely fair to dump all the blame on people who are dedicating their time and effort to making FF better and to expect no contribution to solving the problem from the people who are being paid to develop the broswer (indirectly by the users of FF who are experiencing these problems and asking for solutions).
The problem is that FF's success has brought an influx of new users, many of whom wouldn't know where to begin to file a bug report, but the second they mention their problem on a site such as this, they are shot down by a dozen anecdotal stories about how user x runs 50 tabs streaming g0te pr0n 24/7 for 17 weeks without seeing memory rise above 27MB so the OP is obviously lying/using their browser wrong/just plain stupid.
This doesn't really encourage people to help - clearly people are having problems, but the only way to find out if those problems are caused by the browser or are really down to how it's being used is to work with those people, not shoot them down. The fact that so many memory leak issues have been fixed between versions 2 and 3 indicates that there was always at least some validity to the arguments of people who claimed they were experiencing issues, yet there are still people in this thread right now basically insinuating (or outright stating) that such users are lying, flying in the face of the evidence.
So in short, you are right, filing a polite bug report will do more to help the cause than ranting, but we as a community need to be more willing to listen to these issues also, otherwise the one thing that helped FF grow (its user base) will end up tearing it apart.
I guess the question is: would it be better to have one big inconvenience or a constant stream of little inconveniences? The solution which causes least overall inconvenience would seem to be the best option. I don't have the answer but it seems like this is the reason we're having the debate - while it's not always a good idea to fix something if it's not broken, it's often worthwhile looking at ways to optimise existing processes.
One question though - I don't know a great deal about the Tor technology, but if he was running an exit node (i.e. he was the end point for the communication), then isn't he himself effectively acting as the telecommunications company? If people didn't provide exit nodes Tor wouldn't work, so in this case he was an essential part of the connection to the internet.
As far as I know, telecoms are allowed to pry into their traffic as it's considered public domain and people are advised to encrypt anything they don't want falling into the "wrong hands" - it seems to me he could use the same argument, if someone agreed to send information via the computer of an unknown third party then this should always be considered non-private or always encrypted if it is private.
As I said, I don't fully understand the technology so feel free to point out the flaws in my logic, but prima facie that seems to hold water.
Maybe she already is a clone. It would certainly explain a few things...
Better than having sex with an octopus-human chimera?