The history shows nothing of the sort. I don't know where you heard this, but it's a malicious lie, political spin by people who would like to do away with copyright altogether and take us back to the bad old days when publishers could screw authors at will, instead of fixing it and reining them in.
The purpose of copyright was originally to rein in predatory publishers and limit what they could do without the consent of (or compensation to) the author. And from 1709 to the 1970s, it did a pretty good job of that, but then publishers started taking over, pushing a long string of abusive laws that culminated in the DMCA, which literally turns the intention of copyright on its head: the Statute of Anne was explicitly intended to prevent publishers from taking advantage of expensive modern technology (the printing press) to abuse people, while the DMCA is explicitly intended to enable them to take advantage of expensive modern technology (DRM) to do so.
Interestingly, the period from the passage of the Statute of Anne to the 1970s when the whole thing started falling apart is almost exactly the same amount of time that passed from the invention of the printing press to the point where it started getting abused so badly that copyright needed to be invented to fix the mess. Perhaps, when we get it fixed up this time, it'll last for about 260 years before needing serious reform.
As someone who moved across the country recently, driving, it wouldn't be as simple as that.
Even if I had been able to pack all my stuff into a self-driving U-Haul truck, I would have still needed to be in the truck, if for no other reason than because it would eventually need to stop for gas, and an autonomous car can't do that for itself.
Sure, the driverless vehicles could be loaded up with explosives and "told" to drive itself to its destination, but that seems like an incredibly expensive way to deliver a payload. And sure, vehicles might be hacked to ignore everything about them that makes driving safer, but that last part is nothing a human operator can't do in a normal, cheaper vehicle.
Seriously? This is the sort of lack of foresight and understanding of technology that you're always criticizing others for. Yeah, they're expensive now, but just wait a few Moore cycles...
Superhydrophobic concrete would very likely make a horrible material for roadways, because hydrophobic materials tend to have one other thing in common: low friction. Which doesn't sound so bad until you realize that in the context of vehicles and roads, friction is more commonly known as traction, and surfaces that don't have much of it are called "slippery" in layman's terms.
What they're challenging is the assertion that an ECPA warrant in any way resembles a subpoena. The magistrate judge's ruling notwithstanding, there doesn't appear to be any actual legal basis for this claim.
As noted here, the real problem is the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The DMCA lies at the root of everything bad about digital copyright in the modern age, and every newer abuse we've seen enacted or proposed builds upon it.
As I've said before, when a weed grows in your garden, there are two ways to get rid of it. You can cut it off at the ground, and it's gone... until it pops up again. Or you can rip it out by the roots, and then it's gone. The only way to truly fix copyright abuse is to rip it out by the roots: repeal and reverse the DMCA. Restore the sacred legal principles of Due Process and the Presumption of Innocence. Outlaw the use of DRM in any form for any reason. Make it crystal clear that the rights of people, not copyright owners, come first, and no one has any right whatsoever to infringe upon them until they have been proven guilty in a court of law.
Only when we've managed to accomplish this will we make any meaningful progress against copyright abuse. But as long as the root's still in the ground the same weed keeps popping up. We cut off SOPA and PIPA, and now we've got it growing right back as the TPP. Looks like we've just about managed to kill that one, but it'll grow back again soon enough (and it really didn't take long, did it?) unless we rip it out by the roots!
The DMCA must be repealed and reversed. Until then, we'll never accomplish anything meaningful in our fight against copyright abuse; all we'll be doing is more rounds of whack-a-mole.
A full spectrum of candidates is an interesting thing.
The current president of Argentina is a lady named Cristina Kirchner. She got voted in after her husband, President Nestor Kirchner, decided not to run for re-election. I was there in 2003 when he got voted in, and it was very interesting how it happened.
They didn't have 2 major candidates; they had 5. Unlike the US, every citizen was required by law to vote, but one of the options is votar en blanco (casting a blank vote.) When the votes were tallied, they had a situation very similar to the one the US had had not long before: a statistical tie between the top two candidates where the margin of victory was more narrow than the margin of error.
However, because there were five major candidates, they were able to resolve things a lot more reasonably than the US had: they announced a runoff election a few weeks. Then something interesting happened: polls started showing that just about everyone who had not voted for Carlos Menem (the other major candidate) the first time was still not going to vote for him the second time, so he withdrew before the scheduled runoff, and Kirchner took the presidency.
I still remember hearing the news and thinking, "it would sure be nice if our system was that civilized." And when US politics are less civilized than those of a third-world South American country with a history of dictatorship problems, corruption, and financial crashes far worse than anything we've seen in here, you know it's bad.
Have a look at Represent.us, the guys behind this campaign. You may or may not agree with their position, but "they don't present a solution" is simply not true.
Did you actually read the article? The Iroquois in question had not only allied with the British, but had been going on rampages, indiscriminately slaughtering civilians and children against the wishes of the British forces that were theoretically giving the orders. Today, we'd call that "war crimes," but the term wasn't around back then. Washington did what was necessary to destroy their ability to wage war, but he explicitly called for prisoners to be taken from Iroquois civilians, rather than returning their wholesale murder tit-for-tat.
OK, maybe it just got left out of the history books I read, but I really don't recall hearing anything about Washington's army blowing up hospitals, schools, churches, etc, or massacring civilians suspected of Royalist sympathies. Mind providing some sources?
“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter,” one senior executive tells me on condition of anonymity.
That's a bunch of crap. Terrorists and freedom fighters are trivially easy to distinguish: a freedom fighter has a problem with a government he perceives to be corrupt, and he fights against them.
A terrorist's aim is not to fight against corruption, but to incite terror among the populace, and he does this by attacking civilian targets, rather than legitimate military and government ones.
It gets far worse than that. Instead of "common cold," try "cancer". There's a massive amount of research right now going on with the explicit purpose of turning deadly cancers into chronic issues that you can just take a pill for once a day and go on with your life.
As long as you keep paying whatever they charge for one pill a day for the rest of your life, of course...
We try never to forget that business is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.
Generalize that just a tiny bit and you have basic capitalism, as described by Adam Smith. It's a shame today's so-called "capitalists" have strayed so far from his principles.
And every single thing since then runs on the exact same principles that the Write (sic) Brothers used to fly.
Really? When's the last time you flew in a prop plane?
And ever since then every single display device down to the phone in your pocket is based on an image as a grid of pixels.
But the mechanism Farnsworth used to illuminate the grid--using a cathode ray tube as an electron gun--is as dead as the cassette tape. (Another example of revolutionary technological progress over the same period; the phonograph was invented less than a decade before the automobile, and look what we've done with audio recording since then!)
No he wouldn't. He might understand that it's an internal combustion engine, but outside of that nothing he knows would apply. Hell, he wouldn't even know what a catalytic converter is.
A catalytic converter has nothing whatsoever to do with making a car run--China has millions of cars today that don't even have one. (Which is a major part of the reason the air quality in Beijing is so bad.) It's used to convert waste products from the inefficient internal combustion engine into a less toxic form, and would be completely unnecessary if the source of the problem was removed. (I strongly doubt Tesla's cars have one, for example.)
But the basic principles of Benz's Motorwagen are all still present. They've been improved upon by progress, sure, but not revolutionized in the way everything else in modern technology has over the same period of time. My original point still stands: it's a disgrace that, in the middle of the Information Age, so much of our energy comes from Industrial Revolution-age sources.
Society is addicted to petroleum, and the way you deal with that is not by acting as an enabler or denying that a problem exists. You get the person into rehab and the dealers into prison if you want to actually fix the problem rather than let the victim continue to self-destruct.
Karl Benz invented the automobile in 1886. It ran on gasoline. Since then, we've had all sorts of advances in technology.
The Wright Brothers invented powered flight, and then we got biplanes and triplanes, jet planes, stealth planes, Concordes and space shuttles.
Electronic, programmable computing was developed in World War II for the war effort. Since then... well, what are you reading this on? ;)
The television was invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927. His chief innovation was the concept of an image as a grid of pixels. Since then, we've brought color to TVs. We've developed LCD and plasma screens, and touch screens that turn a display device into an interactive input device.
Nearly every significant piece of technology invented for decades after the automobile has gone through significant, extensive revisions and turned into something that completely transcends its original purpose. But if a time traveler were to abduct Karl Benz and bring him forward to the present day, he would know exactly how modern automobiles run: they burn gasoline, ignited by spark plugs. It's not a proud achievement; it's a freaking disgrace, an insult to the very concept of human intelligence and innovation. And idiots like you say that people who see the problem for what it is want society to move backwards?!?
That is not how we solve problems; just look at history. We innovate and figure out a better way to do things. Tesla has shown it's possible, and people's response has shown it's inevitable. So until you get a bit of a clue, please shut up. Once technological progress gets started, you're either riding the steam roller, or you're the coyote.
On the post: Conan Doyle Estate Asks Supreme Court To Step In And Block Sherlock Holmes From Being Public Domain'd
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Conan Doyle Estate Asks Supreme Court To Step In And Block Sherlock Holmes From Being Public Domain'd
Re:
Interestingly, the period from the passage of the Statute of Anne to the 1970s when the whole thing started falling apart is almost exactly the same amount of time that passed from the invention of the printing press to the point where it started getting abused so badly that copyright needed to be invented to fix the mess. Perhaps, when we get it fixed up this time, it'll last for about 260 years before needing serious reform.
On the post: FBI Thinks Driverless Cars Could Be Criminals' New Best Friends
Re: Re:
Even if I had been able to pack all my stuff into a self-driving U-Haul truck, I would have still needed to be in the truck, if for no other reason than because it would eventually need to stop for gas, and an autonomous car can't do that for itself.
On the post: FBI Thinks Driverless Cars Could Be Criminals' New Best Friends
Seriously? This is the sort of lack of foresight and understanding of technology that you're always criticizing others for. Yeah, they're expensive now, but just wait a few Moore cycles...
On the post: Manuel Noriega Sues Activision From Jail Over Call Of Duty Depiction
Lost Profits and Damages
On the post: DailyDirt: Long-Lasting Concrete Ideas
On the post: DOJ Tells Court That Of Course It Can Go On A Fishing Expedition Globally For Emails Microsoft Stores Overseas
Re:
On the post: The Duct-Tape Approach To Fixing Broken Copyright Law Happens Again With Phone Unlocking
Re:
On the post: The Duct-Tape Approach To Fixing Broken Copyright Law Happens Again With Phone Unlocking
As I've said before, when a weed grows in your garden, there are two ways to get rid of it. You can cut it off at the ground, and it's gone... until it pops up again. Or you can rip it out by the roots, and then it's gone. The only way to truly fix copyright abuse is to rip it out by the roots: repeal and reverse the DMCA. Restore the sacred legal principles of Due Process and the Presumption of Innocence. Outlaw the use of DRM in any form for any reason. Make it crystal clear that the rights of people, not copyright owners, come first, and no one has any right whatsoever to infringe upon them until they have been proven guilty in a court of law.
Only when we've managed to accomplish this will we make any meaningful progress against copyright abuse. But as long as the root's still in the ground the same weed keeps popping up. We cut off SOPA and PIPA, and now we've got it growing right back as the TPP. Looks like we've just about managed to kill that one, but it'll grow back again soon enough (and it really didn't take long, did it?) unless we rip it out by the roots!
The DMCA must be repealed and reversed. Until then, we'll never accomplish anything meaningful in our fight against copyright abuse; all we'll be doing is more rounds of whack-a-mole.
On the post: World's Most Honest Candidate Gets IndieGoGo Funding For Kentucky Senate Race
Re: The sad reality
The current president of Argentina is a lady named Cristina Kirchner. She got voted in after her husband, President Nestor Kirchner, decided not to run for re-election. I was there in 2003 when he got voted in, and it was very interesting how it happened.
They didn't have 2 major candidates; they had 5. Unlike the US, every citizen was required by law to vote, but one of the options is votar en blanco (casting a blank vote.) When the votes were tallied, they had a situation very similar to the one the US had had not long before: a statistical tie between the top two candidates where the margin of victory was more narrow than the margin of error.
However, because there were five major candidates, they were able to resolve things a lot more reasonably than the US had: they announced a runoff election a few weeks. Then something interesting happened: polls started showing that just about everyone who had not voted for Carlos Menem (the other major candidate) the first time was still not going to vote for him the second time, so he withdrew before the scheduled runoff, and Kirchner took the presidency.
I still remember hearing the news and thinking, "it would sure be nice if our system was that civilized." And when US politics are less civilized than those of a third-world South American country with a history of dictatorship problems, corruption, and financial crashes far worse than anything we've seen in here, you know it's bad.
On the post: World's Most Honest Candidate Gets IndieGoGo Funding For Kentucky Senate Race
Re: Eh
On the post: US Reporter Ronan Farrow Calls On Internet Companies To Censor Speech Of People He Doesn't Like
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'd hardly call that an act of terrorism.
On the post: US Reporter Ronan Farrow Calls On Internet Companies To Censor Speech Of People He Doesn't Like
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: US Reporter Ronan Farrow Calls On Internet Companies To Censor Speech Of People He Doesn't Like
Re: Re:
On the post: US Reporter Ronan Farrow Calls On Internet Companies To Censor Speech Of People He Doesn't Like
That's a bunch of crap. Terrorists and freedom fighters are trivially easy to distinguish: a freedom fighter has a problem with a government he perceives to be corrupt, and he fights against them.
A terrorist's aim is not to fight against corruption, but to incite terror among the populace, and he does this by attacking civilian targets, rather than legitimate military and government ones.
On the post: Even The Onion Is Mocking Big Pharma's Focus On Patents Over All Else
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Even The Onion Is Mocking Big Pharma's Focus On Patents Over All Else
Re:
As long as you keep paying whatever they charge for one pill a day for the rest of your life, of course...
On the post: Even The Onion Is Mocking Big Pharma's Focus On Patents Over All Else
Generalize that just a tiny bit and you have basic capitalism, as described by Adam Smith. It's a shame today's so-called "capitalists" have strayed so far from his principles.
On the post: Warner Brothers Pulls Plug On Viral Greenpeace Ad Utilizing 'The Lego Movie' Theme Song (And Legos)
Re: Re: Re:
Really? When's the last time you flew in a prop plane?
But the mechanism Farnsworth used to illuminate the grid--using a cathode ray tube as an electron gun--is as dead as the cassette tape. (Another example of revolutionary technological progress over the same period; the phonograph was invented less than a decade before the automobile, and look what we've done with audio recording since then!)
A catalytic converter has nothing whatsoever to do with making a car run--China has millions of cars today that don't even have one. (Which is a major part of the reason the air quality in Beijing is so bad.) It's used to convert waste products from the inefficient internal combustion engine into a less toxic form, and would be completely unnecessary if the source of the problem was removed. (I strongly doubt Tesla's cars have one, for example.)
But the basic principles of Benz's Motorwagen are all still present. They've been improved upon by progress, sure, but not revolutionized in the way everything else in modern technology has over the same period of time. My original point still stands: it's a disgrace that, in the middle of the Information Age, so much of our energy comes from Industrial Revolution-age sources.
On the post: Warner Brothers Pulls Plug On Viral Greenpeace Ad Utilizing 'The Lego Movie' Theme Song (And Legos)
Re:
Karl Benz invented the automobile in 1886. It ran on gasoline. Since then, we've had all sorts of advances in technology.
The Wright Brothers invented powered flight, and then we got biplanes and triplanes, jet planes, stealth planes, Concordes and space shuttles.
Electronic, programmable computing was developed in World War II for the war effort. Since then... well, what are you reading this on? ;)
The television was invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927. His chief innovation was the concept of an image as a grid of pixels. Since then, we've brought color to TVs. We've developed LCD and plasma screens, and touch screens that turn a display device into an interactive input device.
Nearly every significant piece of technology invented for decades after the automobile has gone through significant, extensive revisions and turned into something that completely transcends its original purpose. But if a time traveler were to abduct Karl Benz and bring him forward to the present day, he would know exactly how modern automobiles run: they burn gasoline, ignited by spark plugs. It's not a proud achievement; it's a freaking disgrace, an insult to the very concept of human intelligence and innovation. And idiots like you say that people who see the problem for what it is want society to move backwards?!?
That is not how we solve problems; just look at history. We innovate and figure out a better way to do things. Tesla has shown it's possible, and people's response has shown it's inevitable. So until you get a bit of a clue, please shut up. Once technological progress gets started, you're either riding the steam roller, or you're the coyote.
Next >>