I saw this article with less than two hours to go last night, and immediately made a point to grab a copy of the video using cclive, just to make sure that if nothing else I'd still have access to it if I ever want it.
I've seen it a few times, and it never really grabbed me as "great", although I agree it's good. It's definitely a work of art, however, which should not be lost - and even disregarding that, just on sheer principle it's inappropriate to lock up something that's been (legitimately and) freely available like this.
$1000 is low enough that an individual who truly values the (control represented by the) copyright should be able to afford it once every 8 years. If the individual does not value the copyright that much, then the work should enter the public domain.
I wouldn't be entirely opposed to setting it lower, but I'm concerned that if it's too low, large holders of many copyrights might choose to continue paying the fee just to retain control even if they have no intention of exploiting the copyright - i.e., that they might keep the copyrighted work locked up for as long as they can, rather than making it available as soon as they no longer need it.
I'll admit that some index value should be used instead of an explicit dollar figure, to avoid having it become trivial over time because of inflation. I haven't got a good idea in mind for that, though.
My own idea - partly out of an impression that there are some cases where a longer copyright can make sense, and partly as a form of compromise - is something like as follows:
* Initial copyright is automatic, without requiring registration or indeed any action, and lasts for a term of eight years.
* At the end of the eight years, the term can be renewed for another eight, by A: filing a properly reproducible copy of the thing covered by the copyright with some appropriate central archive, and B: paying either $1000 or 1% of gross revenues attributable to the control of the copyright over the preceding year, whichever is greater. (In effect, renewal requires registration.)
* This renewal can be repeated every eight years, up to seven times, for a maximum copyright term length of 64 years.
This seems to provide "something for everyone". Under this model:
Copyright does not require registration, so even the small guys get copyright protection without need for paperwork et cetera - but renewal does, so we stop losing old works because no usable copy exists by the time the copyright expires.
The initial term is short enough that if no one cares the work will enter the public domain fairly quickly - but the maximum term is long enough to allow extensive exploitation of a work that turns out to be especially valuable.
The maximum term is short enough that people can reasonably expect to see anything created during their youth enter the public domain during their lifetime.
The pessimistic view is that Draconian enforcement from an early age will condition them to obeying authority without protest, and to thinking of that as the "normal" situation - "the way things should be".
An analogy to children of abusive parents might not be inappropriate. It's not always anything remotely like easy to talk such children into rebelling against their parents...
"Modern" is rooted in a now-obscure sense of the word "mode", as in "pie a la mode" (pie with ice cream), which originally meant "pie served in the way which is currently fashionable". Hence, "modern" is semantically related to "fashionable", much as "mode" is similar in meaning to "fashion".
The only way to be "more current" than "modern" is to be ahead of the fashionability / popularity curve. The "postmodern" movement is oxymoronic, and the only things "after the modern era" are in the future.
Copyright is not and should not be a system designed to guarantee financial success, only one designed to benefit the creator (for a limited time) in the event of it's success.
No.
Copyright is not and should not be a system designed to benefit the creator. It is (or should be), rather, a system designed to expand the public domain.
Benefitting the creator is only a method, a means, by which copyright tries to accomplish that goal. Evidence seems to indicate that it has instead been perverted to focus on that means as more important than the end, but that does not change the original design goal.
We do this, like other countries, for legitimate reasons, and it's harder to do this now with what has been made public, legitimate intelligence targets.
Yes, Mr. Hayden, I agree that having a harder time spying on legitimate intelligence targets is a bad thing - but it's your own fault, for having failed to limit your spying to only things likely to be legitimate intelligence targets.
Compare it to the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance.
If you use antibiotics only in cases where there's strong reason to believe that the infections they're meant to target are actually present, they are likely to remain effective for a long time, perhaps indefinitely.
However, if you use them broadly - even when there is little or no evidence that any harmful bacteria at all are present, much less the specific ones you want to target - then the general bacterial population evolves resistance to the antibiotics, and the antibiotics become less effective; the legitimate task of fighting the real infections becomes harder.
Likewise, if you had used these (and similar) advanced surveillance methods only with things you had strong reason to believe were legitimate intelligence targets, those methods would have remained effective; you would have been able to continue to use them for a long time, perhaps indefinitely.
However, because you chose instead to use them broadly - gathering up as much information as possible from all corners, even without any reason to suspect a connection to a national-security concern - you now see that these techniques are less effective; the task of observing the legitimate intelligence targets has become harder.
You made this bed for yourselves. If you want to complain about having to lie in it, at least acknowledge your own share of the responsibility.
It was pointed out a long time ago, actually - I think here on Techdirt shortly after its launch, or at least its becoming relevant to the Snowden story (which may have already been underway at the time of its launch, I'm not sure).
Agreed. This is probably the one thing I'd fix about the English language, if I were given the opportunity: the missing pronoun cases.
If you think about it, there are actually quite a few pronoun niches:
* Singular, gender specified as male. English has "he" and "his". * Singular, gender specified as female. English has "she" and "her". * Singular, gender specified as none. English has "it" and "its". * Singular, gender nonspecified. * Plural, gender specified as male. * Plural, gender specified as female. * Plural, gender specified as none. * Plural, gender nonspecified. English has "they" and "their".
And possibly others I haven't considered, but I think that's mostly comprehensive.
We only cover three of the eight slots in English, and I doubt most other languages are much better - although they're probably missing coverage in different patterns.
Well, I imagine he could institute severe penalties for e.g. having the alternate-DNS-info graffiti up on your building, much less for actually putting it up there. Add draconian enforcement efforts, and he might have some success in that regard.
There would probably also be significant negative consequences from it, but that's a separate issue.
I think the point wasn't to avoid confusion when grabbing a tool out of the toolbox, but to avoid confusion in identifying which tool is being purchased.
I.e., if competing multimeters are allowed to look like a Fluke, someone who doesn't investigate closely enough might think they are Flukes, or at least are of similar quality; thinking that, the someone might buy one, and use it in a way which would be safe with a Fluke but is not with the product which was actually bought.
I don't disagree that the trademark itself does look overly broad, but as applied, the stated purpose of this seems quite consonant with the actual purpose of trademark law.
I think the question wasn't "Why not force people entering the country to get vaccinated if they haven't already been?", but "Why not refuse to let people enter the country if they haven't been vaccinated?".
There might be logistical issues, and there would certainly be questions of abuse of power (Customs and Border Control appears to be way out of control as it is), but on the face of it that seems like a reasonable and legitimate use of customs authority. If I'm not mistaken, there's considerable historical precedent for that sort of thing, if perhaps not on the scale of modern nations.
Re: Re: Re: Vaccination is one of the most important medical advances in history but
In response to your question 1:
I would say that this is the wrong question. The right question would be "What constitutes protection?", or possibly "Who gets to decide what constitutes protection?", which are the first two parts of your question 2 - and then your question 1 becomes the same as the third part of your question 2, i.e., "Anyone who applies the standard for what constitutes protection".
I don't have an immediate answer to your question 3 (although I'm not sure that I would meet the premise for that question), but I would note that just because government doesn't do everything - or even some particular thing - well doesn't mean that there's any better choice for doing that particular thing, even when the thing is something that needs to be done.
While you're right that we knew what he meant, and that what he said was insightful, "would of" et al. are still incorrect and it's not inappropriate to point that out.
It may be less appropriate to do so in some contexts than in others, and there's certainly room to do it badly and/or offensively (not taking a position on whether that was done in this case), but I disagree with the claim that "it's not so much incorrect as it is informal and slangy".
It's an incorrect way to write some of the variant pronunciations of a stock phrase. Writing it that way when you're specifically trying to convey the variant pronunciation is one thing (though there's no sign that that was done here), but when people then start to think that it's written that way because it represents a different word rather than a variant pronunciation of the original word - and then to use the different word in place of the original word - that's a problem.
If I did the measurements enough to notice, then yes, I would.
I base that on the fact that I've felt ripped off after buying a hard drive with an advertised capacity of 1GB and discovering that it had an actual capacity of only about 950MB.
(The original numbers were smaller; I think I first noticed this back around the time when 60GB was a midsize-to-large hard drive. Didn't make it any less noticeable to me, though.)
That said: yes, using different values for the multiplier prefixes for the different contexts (count of data size vs. count of anything else) does make the math harder, and the potential for confusion greater, when converting between them. However, the "powers of two" meaning of the prefixes in a data context were far too long-established before anyone tried to come up with replacement terminology. They left it too late; there's no going back and changing it now, and trying to do so is high-handed and offensive.the established one
Re: Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
you determine exactly what these prefixes mean (the same problem exists with kilo-, mega-, tera-, etc) from context: if you're talking about units of memory, it's the power of 1024 prefix. Anytime else, you're talking about the power of 10 prefix.
Exactly this. I've been arguing this every time I get too aggravated with the "gibi-" crowd to avoid getting sucked into a discussion about the subject for quite some time; it's good to see someone else advocating the same guideline.
Under this idea, no one is allowed to pay for political advertising - not a candidate, not a corporation, not a private citizen, no one.
What does that leave?
Obviously, it leaves people talking about issues among themselves, such as we're doing here.
It also leaves news coverage of issues and of candidacies - also arguably such as Techdirt is doing here.
Thus, an established news outlet (say, radio or TV, just to keep things simple for the moment) would be able to air political advertising of their own viewpoints, without running afoul of this law; they wouldn't be getting paid to air the ads, they would be doing it on their own initiative.
This is problematic enough on its own, because it means the interests and ideologies of the organizations sufficiently established to already have a megaphone of their own would get disproportionate air time, and it would be disproportionately difficult for a disagreeing perspective to make itself heard.
Beyond that, if they can air ads supporting their own viewpoints on their own initiative as long as it isn't for payment, presumably they could also air ads that someone else asks them to, as long as it isn't for payment.
If they can do that, then can they air ads that someone else asks them to, as a "favor" - with no money changing hands?
How do you track what counts as "paid" here? Does it have to be actual money (or direct gifts, et cetera), or do promises of favors count? How long do you keep watching to see whether there's a payback in a form you do track later on, that might be tied to an under-the-table deal to air the ads?
There are probably other ramifications to consider as well, but those should do to start out with. I like the idea at a glance (aside from the problems with restricting freedom of speech, which might be unavoidable for anything that actually does solve the "money in politics" problem), but I'm not at all sure it wouldn't end up causing at least as many problems as it solves.
Allegedly, even with the exact same ingredients, differences in the way you put them together can make a difference in the resulting effect - something like how you can start with "flour, water, and yeast" and end up with a loaf of bread, a pie crust, a pizza crust, or a batch of crackers, depending on what you do with them.
Also, allegedly even when the formulation is the same, the way it's packaged can make a difference in delivery results - think "delayed release" medications for "day-long relief with just one dose!", vs. something that gives you the same total dose all at once up front, so you get a stronger effect right away but a much weaker one near the end of the cycle.
Things like that probably don't make a difference in many cases, but I can certainly see how they could do so in some cases.
On the post: Commander Hadfield's Amazing Cover Of David Bowie's Space Oddity Disappears Today, Thanks To Copyright
Re:
I've seen it a few times, and it never really grabbed me as "great", although I agree it's good. It's definitely a work of art, however, which should not be lost - and even disregarding that, just on sheer principle it's inappropriate to lock up something that's been (legitimately and) freely available like this.
On the post: Commander Hadfield's Amazing Cover Of David Bowie's Space Oddity Disappears Today, Thanks To Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Copyright
I wouldn't be entirely opposed to setting it lower, but I'm concerned that if it's too low, large holders of many copyrights might choose to continue paying the fee just to retain control even if they have no intention of exploiting the copyright - i.e., that they might keep the copyrighted work locked up for as long as they can, rather than making it available as soon as they no longer need it.
I'll admit that some index value should be used instead of an explicit dollar figure, to avoid having it become trivial over time because of inflation. I haven't got a good idea in mind for that, though.
On the post: Commander Hadfield's Amazing Cover Of David Bowie's Space Oddity Disappears Today, Thanks To Copyright
Re: Copyright
* Initial copyright is automatic, without requiring registration or indeed any action, and lasts for a term of eight years.
* At the end of the eight years, the term can be renewed for another eight, by A: filing a properly reproducible copy of the thing covered by the copyright with some appropriate central archive, and B: paying either $1000 or 1% of gross revenues attributable to the control of the copyright over the preceding year, whichever is greater. (In effect, renewal requires registration.)
* This renewal can be repeated every eight years, up to seven times, for a maximum copyright term length of 64 years.
This seems to provide "something for everyone". Under this model:
Copyright does not require registration, so even the small guys get copyright protection without need for paperwork et cetera - but renewal does, so we stop losing old works because no usable copy exists by the time the copyright expires.
The initial term is short enough that if no one cares the work will enter the public domain fairly quickly - but the maximum term is long enough to allow extensive exploitation of a work that turns out to be especially valuable.
The maximum term is short enough that people can reasonably expect to see anything created during their youth enter the public domain during their lifetime.
On the post: Cops To Kids: You're Never Too Young To Be Handcuffed
Re: When the law over reacts...
The pessimistic view is that Draconian enforcement from an early age will condition them to obeying authority without protest, and to thinking of that as the "normal" situation - "the way things should be".
An analogy to children of abusive parents might not be inappropriate. It's not always anything remotely like easy to talk such children into rebelling against their parents...
On the post: Competing NSA Reform Bills Suddenly Lurch Forward In Congress
Re:
The only way to be "more current" than "modern" is to be ahead of the fashionability / popularity curve. The "postmodern" movement is oxymoronic, and the only things "after the modern era" are in the future.
On the post: New Paper Says It's Time To Reasonably Decrease Copyright Term And Rethink Putting Copyright In Treaties
Re: Re: Re:
Copyright is not and should not be a system designed to benefit the creator. It is (or should be), rather, a system designed to expand the public domain.
Benefitting the creator is only a method, a means, by which copyright tries to accomplish that goal. Evidence seems to indicate that it has instead been perverted to focus on that means as more important than the end, but that does not change the original design goal.
On the post: Michael Hayden Thinks Snowden Revelations, Rather Than NSA Actions, May Splinter The Internet
Yes, Mr. Hayden, I agree that having a harder time spying on legitimate intelligence targets is a bad thing - but it's your own fault, for having failed to limit your spying to only things likely to be legitimate intelligence targets.
Compare it to the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance.
If you use antibiotics only in cases where there's strong reason to believe that the infections they're meant to target are actually present, they are likely to remain effective for a long time, perhaps indefinitely.
However, if you use them broadly - even when there is little or no evidence that any harmful bacteria at all are present, much less the specific ones you want to target - then the general bacterial population evolves resistance to the antibiotics, and the antibiotics become less effective; the legitimate task of fighting the real infections becomes harder.
Likewise, if you had used these (and similar) advanced surveillance methods only with things you had strong reason to believe were legitimate intelligence targets, those methods would have remained effective; you would have been able to continue to use them for a long time, perhaps indefinitely.
However, because you chose instead to use them broadly - gathering up as much information as possible from all corners, even without any reason to suspect a connection to a national-security concern - you now see that these techniques are less effective; the task of observing the legitimate intelligence targets has become harder.
You made this bed for yourselves. If you want to complain about having to lie in it, at least acknowledge your own share of the responsibility.
On the post: Exile: Sarah Harrison On Paying The Price For Helping Edward Snowden
Re: UK Terrorism Law Terrible
Which doesn't mean they couldn't be deemed to in some cases, however...
On the post: Even With Its 'Public Facing' Tumblr Blog, The Intelligence Community Is Still Avoiding The Surveillance Discussion
Re: Re: Intel community blog name
On the post: British Library Says It's Copyright Infringement To Take Photos Inside The Library; Demands Person Delete Tweet
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
If you think about it, there are actually quite a few pronoun niches:
* Singular, gender specified as male. English has "he" and "his".
* Singular, gender specified as female. English has "she" and "her".
* Singular, gender specified as none. English has "it" and "its".
* Singular, gender nonspecified.
* Plural, gender specified as male.
* Plural, gender specified as female.
* Plural, gender specified as none.
* Plural, gender nonspecified. English has "they" and "their".
And possibly others I haven't considered, but I think that's mostly comprehensive.
We only cover three of the eight slots in English, and I doubt most other languages are much better - although they're probably missing coverage in different patterns.
On the post: Turkish Prime Minister Bans Twitter... Turkish People Turn Around And Ban The Ban
Re: Re:
There would probably also be significant negative consequences from it, but that's a separate issue.
On the post: Fluke Gives Sparkfun A Bunch Of Multimeters In Response To Trademark Mess
Re:
I.e., if competing multimeters are allowed to look like a Fluke, someone who doesn't investigate closely enough might think they are Flukes, or at least are of similar quality; thinking that, the someone might buy one, and use it in a way which would be safe with a Fluke but is not with the product which was actually bought.
I don't disagree that the trademark itself does look overly broad, but as applied, the stated purpose of this seems quite consonant with the actual purpose of trademark law.
On the post: Thanks Anti-Vax Loons: The Return Of The Measles And The Backlash Against Jenny McCarthy
Re: Re:
There might be logistical issues, and there would certainly be questions of abuse of power (Customs and Border Control appears to be way out of control as it is), but on the face of it that seems like a reasonable and legitimate use of customs authority. If I'm not mistaken, there's considerable historical precedent for that sort of thing, if perhaps not on the scale of modern nations.
On the post: Thanks Anti-Vax Loons: The Return Of The Measles And The Backlash Against Jenny McCarthy
Re: Re: Re: Vaccination is one of the most important medical advances in history but
I would say that this is the wrong question. The right question would be "What constitutes protection?", or possibly "Who gets to decide what constitutes protection?", which are the first two parts of your question 2 - and then your question 1 becomes the same as the third part of your question 2, i.e., "Anyone who applies the standard for what constitutes protection".
I don't have an immediate answer to your question 3 (although I'm not sure that I would meet the premise for that question), but I would note that just because government doesn't do everything - or even some particular thing - well doesn't mean that there's any better choice for doing that particular thing, even when the thing is something that needs to be done.
On the post: Thanks Anti-Vax Loons: The Return Of The Measles And The Backlash Against Jenny McCarthy
Re: Re: Re: Re: WTF?
It may be less appropriate to do so in some contexts than in others, and there's certainly room to do it badly and/or offensively (not taking a position on whether that was done in this case), but I disagree with the claim that "it's not so much incorrect as it is informal and slangy".
It's an incorrect way to write some of the variant pronunciations of a stock phrase. Writing it that way when you're specifically trying to convey the variant pronunciation is one thing (though there's no sign that that was done here), but when people then start to think that it's written that way because it represents a different word rather than a variant pronunciation of the original word - and then to use the different word in place of the original word - that's a problem.
On the post: EU Re-Think Following Discovery Of Major Flaw In CETA Shows The Benefits Of Transparency
Re:
Let's see; it translates to "SOS SOSOSOS". I'm not sure; that could go either way.
On the post: Survey: 27% Think A Gigabyte Is a Type Of South American Insect [Update: Or Not]
Re: Re: Just under 120MB/s
I base that on the fact that I've felt ripped off after buying a hard drive with an advertised capacity of 1GB and discovering that it had an actual capacity of only about 950MB.
(The original numbers were smaller; I think I first noticed this back around the time when 60GB was a midsize-to-large hard drive. Didn't make it any less noticeable to me, though.)
That said: yes, using different values for the multiplier prefixes for the different contexts (count of data size vs. count of anything else) does make the math harder, and the potential for confusion greater, when converting between them. However, the "powers of two" meaning of the prefixes in a data context were far too long-established before anyone tried to come up with replacement terminology. They left it too late; there's no going back and changing it now, and trying to do so is high-handed and offensive.the established one
On the post: Survey: 27% Think A Gigabyte Is a Type Of South American Insect [Update: Or Not]
Re: Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
On the post: Comcast: Throwing Money At Congress To Approve Our Merger Is Ok Because Congress Represents The People!
Re: Re:
Under this idea, no one is allowed to pay for political advertising - not a candidate, not a corporation, not a private citizen, no one.
What does that leave?
Obviously, it leaves people talking about issues among themselves, such as we're doing here.
It also leaves news coverage of issues and of candidacies - also arguably such as Techdirt is doing here.
Thus, an established news outlet (say, radio or TV, just to keep things simple for the moment) would be able to air political advertising of their own viewpoints, without running afoul of this law; they wouldn't be getting paid to air the ads, they would be doing it on their own initiative.
This is problematic enough on its own, because it means the interests and ideologies of the organizations sufficiently established to already have a megaphone of their own would get disproportionate air time, and it would be disproportionately difficult for a disagreeing perspective to make itself heard.
Beyond that, if they can air ads supporting their own viewpoints on their own initiative as long as it isn't for payment, presumably they could also air ads that someone else asks them to, as long as it isn't for payment.
If they can do that, then can they air ads that someone else asks them to, as a "favor" - with no money changing hands?
How do you track what counts as "paid" here? Does it have to be actual money (or direct gifts, et cetera), or do promises of favors count? How long do you keep watching to see whether there's a payback in a form you do track later on, that might be tied to an under-the-table deal to air the ads?
There are probably other ramifications to consider as well, but those should do to start out with. I like the idea at a glance (aside from the problems with restricting freedom of speech, which might be unavoidable for anything that actually does solve the "money in politics" problem), but I'm not at all sure it wouldn't end up causing at least as many problems as it solves.
On the post: As Big Pharma Piles On The Political Pressure, Indian Government Slows Pace Of Compulsory Drug Licensing
Re: Meanwhile, In Venezuela...
Also, allegedly even when the formulation is the same, the way it's packaged can make a difference in delivery results - think "delayed release" medications for "day-long relief with just one dose!", vs. something that gives you the same total dose all at once up front, so you get a stronger effect right away but a much weaker one near the end of the cycle.
Things like that probably don't make a difference in many cases, but I can certainly see how they could do so in some cases.
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