Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Absolute Free Speech is an American value
Yeah, I know enough history to remember what came immediately after the French revolutionaries were successful in overthrowing their mainland monarchy, and despite the high-minded rhetoric of the revolutionaries, what actually happened looked nothing like a successful implementation of American ideals of universal freedom.
And I know enough history to know that what happened in France represents "the rule," and what happened in the USA was very much "the exception," when it comes to the aftermath of successful revolutions. I don't know exactly what the Founding Fathers did right, but what they accomplished just doesn't happen. Except it did, for them.
Now, I'm not sure if teens in France behave drastically different than those in the US or elsewhere, but in the US at least I know of no faster way to get a teenager to do something, watch something, or listen to something, than to try and tell them not to do it.
I'm not sure if teens in the US have gotten stupider since I was one, or if you're just spouting silly generalizations that have nothing to do with the truth, but... that's a silly generalization that has nothing to do with the truth. "Rebellious teen monsters" is a silly trope invented by the media, not some objective fact of human psychology.
You know, I found your assertion a bit strange, since it's been a while but I seemed to remember hearing that the French Revolution happened after the American revolution and drew upon its ideals.
Then I read that Wikipedia article you just linked:
The inspiration and content of the document emerged largely from the ideals of the American Revolution. The key drafts were prepared by Lafayette, working at times with his close friend Thomas Jefferson, who drew heavily upon The Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted in May 1776 by George Mason (which was based in part on the English Bill of Rights 1689), as well as Jefferson's own drafts for the American Declaration of Independence.
A while back, a good friend of mine who was (more than) a bit on the heavy side declared her intention to lose 40 pounds over the course of the next month or so.
I sat down with her and asked her, as serious as I could, "it's taken you 20-odd years to put all those pounds on; why in the world do you think you could take them back off in a matter of a few weeks?" And she actually listened, and started doing something realistic about it: generally taking better care of herself.
Now, about 5 years later, she's noticeably slimmer and in much better shape, and that really is the only way to pull off a project like that.
Recommends making legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures conditional upon the publication of the source code or the interface specification
Yes please, but I'd take it a step further.
In the physical world, you can copyright a blueprint, but not a building built from it. Why should the digital world be so different?
Executable software (a program or "app" that you download, install and run) is not a blueprint; it's a building. Programmers don't write these programs; they write source code (blueprints) which are then compiled into executable programs (buildings) by a specialized program called a compiler. The term "build" is commonly used by programmers to describe the process of compiling a project, both as a verb and as a noun (ie. "this is build #3158" or "your latest code change broke the build").
So why is it that copyright applies to executable software at all?
The legal fiction that executable software is equivalent to a creative work, rather than an object derived from the specification laid out by a creative work, has had a severely detrimental effect on the state of software development. No one would expect students attending an English class to have never read a book before, or students attending a Music or Filmmaking class to have never listened to music or watched any movies. In all these cases, (with a few exceptions in filmmaking related to special effects,) the finished product is exactly what went into the work, and you can look at it, take it apart, analyze it, and learn from it. But this is the state for all too many students going into their first programming class: they've never worked with source code before, and many of the best examples are completely unavailable to them when they begin to study.
I've mentioned Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling fantasy author, a few times on here before. When he had a few (really good) published novels under his belt, Robert Jordan, author of the epic The Wheel of Time series, died, leaving his magnum opus close to completion but unfinished. His widow Harriet, (who was in a unique position to competently judge such things due to having also been his editor throughout the entire series) chose Sanderson to finish up The Wheel of Time, and his work at concluding it was widely regarded as a great success. In fact, many fans regard Sanderson's work on the series as better than Jordan's.
When someone asked Brandon Sanderson about this, he gave a very insightful comment: "I think the biggest advantage I had over Robert Jordan is that I was able to grow up reading the work of Robert Jordan, and he wasn't." And that's the way it is throughout the creative arts. The Beatles openly confessed that "The Beatles" never would have happened if it hadn't been for Elvis Presley. George Lucas drew upon Japanese samurai films, World War II movies, and Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces in building Star Wars. And when Isaac Newton famously said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," he was quoting Bernard of Chartres, who lived centuries before him.
But when the source code of the most successful products is locked away, not available for study at any price, what is there for students to learn from? What if the Beatles had not had Elvis's music to study? What if George Lucas had been ignorant of the earlier films that inspired him to build one of the most iconic works in the history of cinema? Then the state of music and cinematography would probably look a lot like the state of software development today.
Because the stated purpose of copyright protection is to "promote the progress" of the creative arts, and because any meaningful progress in said arts requires the study of the techniques involved in earlier works, it makes no sense to give copyright protection to that which cannot be studied. From this perspective, the only sensible copyright system for software is to give copyright protection to source code and source code alone, and only if it is published like any other creative work.
Who doesn't like a good doughnut (or donut)? Okay, so maybe a significant population around the world doesn't consume doughnuts regularly, but that could change.
In Argentina, for example, they don't have donuts; they have facturas, a term that describes a broad class of vaguely similar pastries, much like "donut" does in the US. Most of them are very yummy, particularly those made at a high-quality panaderĂa.
DerYeghiayan's theory was that Karpeles wanted to create a market that used Bitcoin in order to keep the price of the semi-anonymous cryptocurrency robust, which he believed was probable cause for Karpeles's arrest. (Mt. Gox went bankrupt in early 2014.)
"[Silk Road] would be a device for leveraging the value of Bitcoin, and if he could create a site independent of Bitcoin, you could control the value of Bitcoin," Dratel said, reading from DerYeghiayan's emails.
The problem with the theory is that we already know what was happening at Mt. Gox due to leaked documents, and they didn't need an independent site to manipulate the value of Bitcoin; they were doing it themselves. The giant run-up in Bitcoin's price, and its subsequent crash, are both attributable almost entirely to fraudulent transactions being made by a bot running within Mt. Gox's servers. This makes the need for Karpeles to be running Silk Road in order to accomplish this superfluous.
Antibiotics are tricky stuff. Killing bacteria is actually surprisingly easy. There are any number of ways to kill every harmful bacterium in your body, guaranteed. Jumping into an incinerator, for example. This simple (if absurd) example should intuitively explain the difficulty with developing effective antibiotics.
Bacteria are living creatures, which means that antibiotics, when you get down to it, are poisons. It's very difficult to come up with a poison that kills bacteria but doesn't harm humans. It's even harder to come up with a poison that kills harmful bacteria while minimizing the damage to your internal ecosystem of "gut fauna" and other helpful microbes that exist in symbiosis with you...
We all know that the First Amendment of the Constitution is there to protect us from government interference with free speech. It has no impact on private companies and how they treat your expression.
That excuse has always felt like a cop-out to me.
The way I figure it, if certain intrusions on our freedom are considered so fundamentally abominable that we preemptively deny their use even to the people that We The People choose to place in the positions of the highest trust, even though we can still hold them accountable after the fact, how much less, then, should we tolerate such intrusions from unelected, untrusted, unaccountable private actors?
the status of one group can affect that of its neighbors—like a cowboy who points a revolver at another cowboy, only to find himself covered by a rifleman on a roof.
Yeah, Person of Interest did that (it actually involved 4 levels, and the people in question were operatives, not cowboys, but still) in the episode from two weeks ago.
There was no Go involved, but the show is about AIs. Kinda makes you wonder...
Beer: it seems to cause all kinds of trademark problems. I'm actually not sure why that is. Beer makes me happy, not litigious.
Well, that's you. It makes plenty of people violent, and pretty much everyone stupid, because its active ingredient is a toxin that damages the brain. And when a company gets stupid and violent, this is most often expressed through legal, rather than physical, force.
Yeah, this is what I've been saying for years now: The DMCA takedown system is blatantly unconstitutional because it destroys Due Process and the Presumption of Inncocence, and it needs to be done away with.
On the post: French Government Declares Independence From Free Speech: Broad Internet Take-Down Powers Now In Place
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Absolute Free Speech is an American value
And I know enough history to know that what happened in France represents "the rule," and what happened in the USA was very much "the exception," when it comes to the aftermath of successful revolutions. I don't know exactly what the Founding Fathers did right, but what they accomplished just doesn't happen. Except it did, for them.
On the post: French Government Declares Independence From Free Speech: Broad Internet Take-Down Powers Now In Place
Re: Re: Context
I'm not sure if teens in the US have gotten stupider since I was one, or if you're just spouting silly generalizations that have nothing to do with the truth, but... that's a silly generalization that has nothing to do with the truth. "Rebellious teen monsters" is a silly trope invented by the media, not some objective fact of human psychology.
On the post: French Government Declares Independence From Free Speech: Broad Internet Take-Down Powers Now In Place
Re: Re: Absolute Free Speech is an American value
Then I read that Wikipedia article you just linked:
...you were saying?
On the post: DailyDirt: Miracle Cures
I sat down with her and asked her, as serious as I could, "it's taken you 20-odd years to put all those pounds on; why in the world do you think you could take them back off in a matter of a few weeks?" And she actually listened, and started doing something realistic about it: generally taking better care of herself.
Now, about 5 years later, she's noticeably slimmer and in much better shape, and that really is the only way to pull off a project like that.
On the post: New Utah Law Instructs Cops To Seize Uninsured Vehicles
Public Safety
...and if they're driving anyway, seems to me that taking them off the roads serves a very legitimate public safety interest!
On the post: European Parliament Report Proposes Wide-Ranging Copyright Reform, Including Reduction Of EU Copyright Term
Yes please, but I'd take it a step further.
In the physical world, you can copyright a blueprint, but not a building built from it. Why should the digital world be so different?
Executable software (a program or "app" that you download, install and run) is not a blueprint; it's a building. Programmers don't write these programs; they write source code (blueprints) which are then compiled into executable programs (buildings) by a specialized program called a compiler. The term "build" is commonly used by programmers to describe the process of compiling a project, both as a verb and as a noun (ie. "this is build #3158" or "your latest code change broke the build").
So why is it that copyright applies to executable software at all?
The legal fiction that executable software is equivalent to a creative work, rather than an object derived from the specification laid out by a creative work, has had a severely detrimental effect on the state of software development. No one would expect students attending an English class to have never read a book before, or students attending a Music or Filmmaking class to have never listened to music or watched any movies. In all these cases, (with a few exceptions in filmmaking related to special effects,) the finished product is exactly what went into the work, and you can look at it, take it apart, analyze it, and learn from it. But this is the state for all too many students going into their first programming class: they've never worked with source code before, and many of the best examples are completely unavailable to them when they begin to study.
I've mentioned Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling fantasy author, a few times on here before. When he had a few (really good) published novels under his belt, Robert Jordan, author of the epic The Wheel of Time series, died, leaving his magnum opus close to completion but unfinished. His widow Harriet, (who was in a unique position to competently judge such things due to having also been his editor throughout the entire series) chose Sanderson to finish up The Wheel of Time, and his work at concluding it was widely regarded as a great success. In fact, many fans regard Sanderson's work on the series as better than Jordan's.
When someone asked Brandon Sanderson about this, he gave a very insightful comment: "I think the biggest advantage I had over Robert Jordan is that I was able to grow up reading the work of Robert Jordan, and he wasn't." And that's the way it is throughout the creative arts. The Beatles openly confessed that "The Beatles" never would have happened if it hadn't been for Elvis Presley. George Lucas drew upon Japanese samurai films, World War II movies, and Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces in building Star Wars. And when Isaac Newton famously said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," he was quoting Bernard of Chartres, who lived centuries before him.
But when the source code of the most successful products is locked away, not available for study at any price, what is there for students to learn from? What if the Beatles had not had Elvis's music to study? What if George Lucas had been ignorant of the earlier films that inspired him to build one of the most iconic works in the history of cinema? Then the state of music and cinematography would probably look a lot like the state of software development today.
Because the stated purpose of copyright protection is to "promote the progress" of the creative arts, and because any meaningful progress in said arts requires the study of the techniques involved in earlier works, it makes no sense to give copyright protection to that which cannot be studied. From this perspective, the only sensible copyright system for software is to give copyright protection to source code and source code alone, and only if it is published like any other creative work.
On the post: DailyDirt: Donuts Everywhere!
In Argentina, for example, they don't have donuts; they have facturas, a term that describes a broad class of vaguely similar pastries, much like "donut" does in the US. Most of them are very yummy, particularly those made at a high-quality panaderĂa.
On the post: Ross Ulbricht's Lawyers Claim That Mt. Gox CEO Was The Real Dread Pirate Roberts
The problem with the theory is that we already know what was happening at Mt. Gox due to leaked documents, and they didn't need an independent site to manipulate the value of Bitcoin; they were doing it themselves. The giant run-up in Bitcoin's price, and its subsequent crash, are both attributable almost entirely to fraudulent transactions being made by a bot running within Mt. Gox's servers. This makes the need for Karpeles to be running Silk Road in order to accomplish this superfluous.
On the post: DailyDirt: Fighting Off Infections In The Future
Bacteria are living creatures, which means that antibiotics, when you get down to it, are poisons. It's very difficult to come up with a poison that kills bacteria but doesn't harm humans. It's even harder to come up with a poison that kills harmful bacteria while minimizing the damage to your internal ecosystem of "gut fauna" and other helpful microbes that exist in symbiosis with you...
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 7: Terms Of Service Are The New Constitution: Do They Need A First Amendment?
That excuse has always felt like a cop-out to me.
The way I figure it, if certain intrusions on our freedom are considered so fundamentally abominable that we preemptively deny their use even to the people that We The People choose to place in the positions of the highest trust, even though we can still hold them accountable after the fact, how much less, then, should we tolerate such intrusions from unelected, untrusted, unaccountable private actors?
On the post: DailyDirt: Computers Like To Sit In Front Of Computers And Play Games All Day, Too
Re:
Yeah, Person of Interest did that (it actually involved 4 levels, and the people in question were operatives, not cowboys, but still) in the episode from two weeks ago.
There was no Go involved, but the show is about AIs. Kinda makes you wonder...
On the post: DailyDirt: Computers Like To Sit In Front Of Computers And Play Games All Day, Too
Hey, that sounds a lot like last week's episode of Person of Interest! :P
On the post: New York's Top Prosecutor Says We Need New Laws To Fight iPhone/Android Encryption
Re: The nature of police work
On the post: Portland (The City) And Pabst (The...Beer?) Cease Battling Over Unnecessary Trademark Dispute
Re: Re:
What do you think addiction is?
On the post: Portland (The City) And Pabst (The...Beer?) Cease Battling Over Unnecessary Trademark Dispute
Well, that's you. It makes plenty of people violent, and pretty much everyone stupid, because its active ingredient is a toxin that damages the brain. And when a company gets stupid and violent, this is most often expressed through legal, rather than physical, force.
On the post: Prominent YouTube Personality Locked Out Of His Account After A Bogus Copyright Claim
Re:
On the post: With Rollover Data, AT&T Just Keeps Walking Face First Into T-Mobile Attempts To Make It Look Stupid
Re: Re:
On the post: No Surprise: Rightscorp Already Abusing Canada's Notice & Notice System To Send Bogus Shakedown Letters
Re: Re:
On the post: With Rollover Data, AT&T Just Keeps Walking Face First Into T-Mobile Attempts To Make It Look Stupid
Wait, why is this bad? That's exactly how I'd expect it to work...
On the post: FCC Boss Now Making The Case For Reclassification, Rather Than Against It
Re: 'Big broadband is going to howl and protest...'
That's usually the point where you shoot the animal in question...
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