Didn't Canada or the UK at one point put a tax on all blank CD's to pay the RIAA (or equal group in those countries) assuming that the discs were used for stealing music?
They did. I also believe they now have that tax for hard-drives too... Music CDs are sold in the US that have a similar tax...so it is always better to avoid those if you are using CDs to back up data, or for purposes other than music.
But don't worry, that is one of those "ridiculous" cases that will never happen thanks to our great democratic process according to those who support the SCOTUS decision.
I know you were being sarcastic, and agree with the sarcasm (my comment was sarcasm as well, which apparently some missed.) I don't think it will happen, but considering the slippery slope and unintended consequences of other "good" laws, I suspect it has already been thought of by those in power over at the RIAA/MPAA. They will likely push for it, if they feel they can get away with it. Hopefully they don't think they can get away with it, or if they do, that we don't let them get away with it.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Apple is so funny it is pathetic
Windows 8 for ARM is completely incompatible with Windows x86/86-64. If it is a touchable swiveled screen attached to a normal laptop architecture and form factor, it is a TABLET PC. True tablets lack an attached keyboard using handwriting or touch screens to work.
Good to know my ASUS Transformer is a tablet pc then, as it has an attached keyboard (which can easily be detached,) even though it runs on the ARM processor (TEGRON 2.)
It will be more helpful at explaining the differences between tablet pc and a tablet at parties. Of course, all of my tech minded friends will laugh at me, but I can tell them the knowledgeable Wally from the internet said it was so so it must be true.
Sadly they are sure it is a myth, because seeing how the cartels have gotten their way over and over it is merely a matter of the right amount of cash in the right hands to get some law requiring everyone to have cable... for the children and to defeat terrorists!
Just wait, now that Individual Mandate has been ok'd by the Supreme Court, it is only a matter of time before we see a new tax on the various copyright industries and on cable subscriptions. If the government can force you to buy health insurance, and can fine you if you don't, I figure there is only a little while longer before they can force you to buy cable AND satellite coverage and fine you if you don't. If it isn't in a bill already sitting in a Senator's inbox, it will be shortly.
I cut the cord back in 1992 when ComCast insisted that I had to buy a five-channel package (four of which were garbage) in order to get the SciFi channel. I canceled my service and haven't gone back or gone to any other service since.
Good thing you did...There is only so much WWF/WWE a person can watch on Sy-Fy before you give up and watch something else. I never understood the link between Science Fiction and wrestling, but apparently that was Sy-Fy's main demographic.
From a copyright perspective, though, reading a book doesn't make a copy, whereas downloading something does.
Which Posner covers in his comment. Streaming(*) is not downloading, and so long as the person does not make a copy of it locally, they are not committing copyright infringement.
(*) - which does include copying bits into a temporary buffer in order to display on the screen, but does not keep an entire copy of the work.
Which is nonsense. Not surprisingly, people are happy to latch on the Posner's nonsense they agree with, while averting their eyes from the nonsense they don't agree with.
Theoretically it could be theft of service or defrauding an innkeeper (though Defrauding an Innkeeper usually only works for walking out on a bill at a restaurant or at a hotel.)
It is nonsense, since it is not equivalent to either these things...since, as noted by others, it is more like walking into a bookstore or library, reading a book, and then walking out without paying for the book. Even walking into a movie theater and watching a movie without paying can be perfectly legal in some cases, and when it isn't, it is usually charged as trespass (for example, CA PC 602(m)), not theft.
Hot girls wrestling in mud in a pool made of piezoelectric materials. The mechanical energy created could generate enough electricity to power my house lamp for 5 minutes.
Won't work. Who needs a house lamp when you have two hot girls wrestling in mud.
Surely this is a classic ultra capitalist situation.
Nope, if that was true, than any competitor could enter the market and break up the monopoly. Since no competitor can legally enter the market, because they are prevented from doing so by the government through copyright, which creates an artificial monopoly...it isn't capitalism.
If course, piracy is competition. So maybe AC is right, it isn't "TRUE Communism".
Not possible. You know too much about tech to be a Senator. A Senator wouldn't know what rip means (other than ripping your pants or ripping paper,) and wouldn't have a clue about central network storage drive or multimedia systems. To them, the internet is a series of tubes which dump-trucks sometimes crash in and cause congestion which means they can't send email.
You could be an aide, or a member of the Senator's staff...
If a civil servant can be charged for this, a congress-critter (as defined under 18 USC 201(a)(1)) should also be held to this standard.
And it is a wonder why Congress has to pass a bill to make government employees (including congressional staff and ethics officers) pay their taxes. Since Congress doesn't follow the rules, why should anyone else?
I think this would fit perfectly into a daytime TV programming slot.
This will only work if NBC takes it on and uses Matt Lauer for the color commentary. That way he can tell people to Google the celebrities that appear on film or make jingoistic jokes and statements about where the person comes from. Of course, they will have to include a commercial right at the point where the show gets interesting, and then come back from the picture three or four people later without any coverage of the stuff they missed.
It is time to build a genealogy tree for "inventions" because now it is worth showing who patented something first and can invalidate new patents more easily.
I believe James Burke already came up with something like that. He called it "Connections" and you can read more about it here.
One thing I learned from watching Connections is that everything is built on top of those things before it, and another thing I learned is there is no shortage of assholes who thought they invented something first and thus claim that they are entitled to a portion of everyone 'elses profits for inventing it. I don't have a problem with people who actually invent something making some money from it...my problem is that the system only works for the few rich folks out there who actually didn't do any work, while the inventors it was meant to help are grounded into meat under the heel of those folks. Capitalism is about inventing a better mousetrap which the customer is happy to hand over cash for. Capitalism is not about suing your customer and your competitors because you fail at life.
People could have more power if they take the process of making the laws out into the open, then electing officials would be a matter to see who would pass the legislation that people want and not promises, promises and promises, the downside to that is that people would have to take responsibility for the screw ups that eventually would happen.
This. Sunlight is always the best antiseptic. Making things transparent in government is the best way to assure that the will of the people is being followed.
E.g. the Electoral college preserves federalism in that it ensures small states like Rhode Island still have a voice in the presidential election process, else the massive states like California, New York, and Texas would dictate all national policy.
It doesn't even do that particularly well. Rhode Island gets 4 votes. California gets 55. So, Rhode Island doesn't get much of a voice. Where it does help is that, if Rhode Island (4), Conneticut (7), Vermont (3), New Hampshire (4), Maine (4), New York (29), and New Jersey (14) all vote a different way from California, then their voice is heard. If electoral colleges were required to follow the will of their constituents, then it might be a good system, but with states not requiring it, the electoral college tends to vote for whatever party put it into office and not for the will of the people.
It made sense when politicians had to travel great distances by covered wagon to meet their constituents, but in the modern era, there are far better ways of doing this.
It is not the system that is broken, but the people charged with enforcing the Rule of Law (Department of Justice) have become complacent. It is essentially regulatory capture at the government level.
It isn't just the people charged with enforcing the law, but the entire population that has become complacent. We have the power to vote who represents us in Congress and most people don't care enough to look at the people they are voting in and would much rather just vote for their party or on key issues. The fact that more than a few have shown time and time again that they are corrupt and voting against the wishes of their own constituents, and yet we keep voting them in.
We need to go in the exact opposite direction. We need to shift our focus away from the importance of grades and degrees and more toward mastery of important concepts (like Algebra) and stop dumbing down the curriculum just so that more people can pass.
We need to get rid of the shitty teachers who are there just to collect a paycheck and fill the schools with teachers that have a passion for the subject they are teaching and a love of sharing that passion with their students.
I did exceptionally well in Pre-Algebra in 7th grade, and it was all due to my teacher and Algebra in 8th grade. I never had a math teacher since that came close to the passion she showed for math, though some were notable.
There are so many teachers out there that hate their job and suck at it, and they make up the teacher unions...which is why it is so difficult to get rid of them. Instead, we should switch to a performance model for teachers, not based on grades, but based on how their students succeed. We need to get rid of the one size fits all way of teaching we use now...it doesn't work...and allow students to determine what they are good at, teach them the basics, and then allow them to master what they are good at. What bothered me most about school was the redundancies; I took 10 years of math in middle school, high school, and college, and the second three years was basically a repeat of the first 3, and the third three was a repeat of both. I was still good at Algebra the third time, but the students that failed in middle school were still failing college Algebra. I learned a lot more math in college: Discrete Mathematics, Logic, Statistics, Combinatorics, etc., but I still had to get past the elementary maths that were repeats of what I had before.
A career in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering needs Algebra, but a career in Psychology or American History does not. Teach the basic math everyone needs and then move on.
Re: Re: CTV no better but at least live coast to coast to coast
I learned decades ago to turn off the vapid commentary and just watch the little running bar that gave me the information I needed to watch the opening and closing ceremonies in peace. ;-)
Living close to Mexico, I got the chance to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremonies live, with no tape delay. And the commentators weren't vapid and didn't talk over everything, and there weren't any commercials (except occasionally an "inlay" for some show coming up on the channel I was watching.) And I managed to see the entire presentation, from beginning to end (only 3 hours) which they intended.
When the American one came on, some friends were watching it and I wasn't really paying attention since I already had seen it, but when I saw all the commercials and heard the vapid comments (we don't know who Tim Berners-Lee is, so Google it,) I was happy I watched the one I did and didn't waste time on a longer and obviously inferior product.
I eventually saw the recorded version, and I became quite angry that the "color commentary" was feeding obvious propaganda to the viewer (they had something bad to say about just every country except the US and the US territories.) This is why I believe in free-market capitalism and why I abhor the current crony capitalism...no legal competition existed here for those who wanted to watch the Olympics without the obvious propaganda spin and poor presentation (since if there was competition, NBC would have been forced to do it better than they did, otherwise they would have risked losing customers.)
Offline mode is like Chaos: for some it works, for others, you have to sacrifice a goat on the eve of a BLue Moon whilst chanting the theme to Psychonauts backwards.
I've had mixed success. On my game machine, Steam just works, offline or not. But since it is always connected to the internet except when the ISP is borked, it should work. On my laptop (until I got rid of Windows,) I followed the exact procedure several different times and it never seemed to work right (sometimes I could play the games, but most of the time it just didn't work.) Getting it working on the laptop was kinda important, because that was the one machine which would go places where there wasn't reliable internet.
On the post: Over 400,000 Homes Have Cut The Cord So Far This Year... But Cord Cutting Is Still A Myth?
Re: Re: Re:
They did. I also believe they now have that tax for hard-drives too... Music CDs are sold in the US that have a similar tax...so it is always better to avoid those if you are using CDs to back up data, or for purposes other than music.
But don't worry, that is one of those "ridiculous" cases that will never happen thanks to our great democratic process according to those who support the SCOTUS decision.
I know you were being sarcastic, and agree with the sarcasm (my comment was sarcasm as well, which apparently some missed.) I don't think it will happen, but considering the slippery slope and unintended consequences of other "good" laws, I suspect it has already been thought of by those in power over at the RIAA/MPAA. They will likely push for it, if they feel they can get away with it. Hopefully they don't think they can get away with it, or if they do, that we don't let them get away with it.
On the post: Apple's Argument: Samsung Could Have Made Its Phone Large, Thick, Bumpy, Sharp-Edged & Hexagonal
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Apple is so funny it is pathetic
Good to know my ASUS Transformer is a tablet pc then, as it has an attached keyboard (which can easily be detached,) even though it runs on the ARM processor (TEGRON 2.)
It will be more helpful at explaining the differences between tablet pc and a tablet at parties. Of course, all of my tech minded friends will laugh at me, but I can tell them the knowledgeable Wally from the internet said it was so so it must be true.
On the post: Over 400,000 Homes Have Cut The Cord So Far This Year... But Cord Cutting Is Still A Myth?
Re:
Just wait, now that Individual Mandate has been ok'd by the Supreme Court, it is only a matter of time before we see a new tax on the various copyright industries and on cable subscriptions. If the government can force you to buy health insurance, and can fine you if you don't, I figure there is only a little while longer before they can force you to buy cable AND satellite coverage and fine you if you don't. If it isn't in a bill already sitting in a Senator's inbox, it will be shortly.
On the post: Over 400,000 Homes Have Cut The Cord So Far This Year... But Cord Cutting Is Still A Myth?
Re: Cord-Cutting is NOT a new phenomenon
Good thing you did...There is only so much WWF/WWE a person can watch on Sy-Fy before you give up and watch something else. I never understood the link between Science Fiction and wrestling, but apparently that was Sy-Fy's main demographic.
On the post: Judge Posner: Embedding Infringing Videos Is Not Copyright Infringement, And Neither Is Watching Them
Re: Re:
Which Posner covers in his comment. Streaming(*) is not downloading, and so long as the person does not make a copy of it locally, they are not committing copyright infringement.
(*) - which does include copying bits into a temporary buffer in order to display on the screen, but does not keep an entire copy of the work.
On the post: Judge Posner: Embedding Infringing Videos Is Not Copyright Infringement, And Neither Is Watching Them
Re: Re:
Theoretically it could be theft of service or defrauding an innkeeper (though Defrauding an Innkeeper usually only works for walking out on a bill at a restaurant or at a hotel.)
It is nonsense, since it is not equivalent to either these things...since, as noted by others, it is more like walking into a bookstore or library, reading a book, and then walking out without paying for the book. Even walking into a movie theater and watching a movie without paying can be perfectly legal in some cases, and when it isn't, it is usually charged as trespass (for example, CA PC 602(m)), not theft.
On the post: Richard Branson Claims People May Confuse 'I Am Not A Virgin Jeans' With His Virgin Properties
Re: Re:
Won't work. Who needs a house lamp when you have two hot girls wrestling in mud.
I'll be in my bunk.
On the post: Amazon Reverses Course, Signs Licenses With Music Labels To Allow File Matching
Re: Re:
Nope, if that was true, than any competitor could enter the market and break up the monopoly. Since no competitor can legally enter the market, because they are prevented from doing so by the government through copyright, which creates an artificial monopoly...it isn't capitalism.
If course, piracy is competition. So maybe AC is right, it isn't "TRUE Communism".
On the post: Is This Real? Is This Recall? MPAA Hosts Screening Of Total Recall To 'Educate' Congress On 'Benefits' Of IP Protection
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Not possible. You know too much about tech to be a Senator. A Senator wouldn't know what rip means (other than ripping your pants or ripping paper,) and wouldn't have a clue about central network storage drive or multimedia systems. To them, the internet is a series of tubes which dump-trucks sometimes crash in and cause congestion which means they can't send email.
You could be an aide, or a member of the Senator's staff...
On the post: Is This Real? Is This Recall? MPAA Hosts Screening Of Total Recall To 'Educate' Congress On 'Benefits' Of IP Protection
Re: Re: Re:
18 USC 201(b)(1).
If a civil servant can be charged for this, a congress-critter (as defined under 18 USC 201(a)(1)) should also be held to this standard.
And it is a wonder why Congress has to pass a bill to make government employees (including congressional staff and ethics officers) pay their taxes. Since Congress doesn't follow the rules, why should anyone else?
On the post: Eleven Year Old Kid Shows That Modern Airport Security Is Not As Secure A You Think
Re: Re: Re: In the news (future)
This will only work if NBC takes it on and uses Matt Lauer for the color commentary. That way he can tell people to Google the celebrities that appear on film or make jingoistic jokes and statements about where the person comes from. Of course, they will have to include a commercial right at the point where the show gets interesting, and then come back from the picture three or four people later without any coverage of the stuff they missed.
On the post: Patent Office Seeking Comments On How To Implement A 'First To File' Regime Instead Of 'First To Invent'
Re:
I believe James Burke already came up with something like that. He called it "Connections" and you can read more about it here.
One thing I learned from watching Connections is that everything is built on top of those things before it, and another thing I learned is there is no shortage of assholes who thought they invented something first and thus claim that they are entitled to a portion of everyone 'elses profits for inventing it. I don't have a problem with people who actually invent something making some money from it...my problem is that the system only works for the few rich folks out there who actually didn't do any work, while the inventors it was meant to help are grounded into meat under the heel of those folks. Capitalism is about inventing a better mousetrap which the customer is happy to hand over cash for. Capitalism is not about suing your customer and your competitors because you fail at life.
On the post: US Has Ignored New Zealand Court Order To Return Data It Seized From Megaupload
Re: Re: Re: Re: What do you think of those Apples
This. Sunlight is always the best antiseptic. Making things transparent in government is the best way to assure that the will of the people is being followed.
On the post: US Has Ignored New Zealand Court Order To Return Data It Seized From Megaupload
Re: Re: Re: What do you think of those Apples
It doesn't even do that particularly well. Rhode Island gets 4 votes. California gets 55. So, Rhode Island doesn't get much of a voice. Where it does help is that, if Rhode Island (4), Conneticut (7), Vermont (3), New Hampshire (4), Maine (4), New York (29), and New Jersey (14) all vote a different way from California, then their voice is heard. If electoral colleges were required to follow the will of their constituents, then it might be a good system, but with states not requiring it, the electoral college tends to vote for whatever party put it into office and not for the will of the people.
It made sense when politicians had to travel great distances by covered wagon to meet their constituents, but in the modern era, there are far better ways of doing this.
It is not the system that is broken, but the people charged with enforcing the Rule of Law (Department of Justice) have become complacent. It is essentially regulatory capture at the government level.
It isn't just the people charged with enforcing the law, but the entire population that has become complacent. We have the power to vote who represents us in Congress and most people don't care enough to look at the people they are voting in and would much rather just vote for their party or on key issues. The fact that more than a few have shown time and time again that they are corrupt and voting against the wishes of their own constituents, and yet we keep voting them in.
On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (which doesn't make much sense, but makes it easier to remember.)
Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication and Divison, Addition and Subtraction.
Everywhere else in the world, it is BEDMAS/BIDMAS/BODMAS. Brackets, Exponents/Indices/Orders, Division and Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction.
On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?
Re: Opposite direction
We need to get rid of the shitty teachers who are there just to collect a paycheck and fill the schools with teachers that have a passion for the subject they are teaching and a love of sharing that passion with their students.
I did exceptionally well in Pre-Algebra in 7th grade, and it was all due to my teacher and Algebra in 8th grade. I never had a math teacher since that came close to the passion she showed for math, though some were notable.
There are so many teachers out there that hate their job and suck at it, and they make up the teacher unions...which is why it is so difficult to get rid of them. Instead, we should switch to a performance model for teachers, not based on grades, but based on how their students succeed. We need to get rid of the one size fits all way of teaching we use now...it doesn't work...and allow students to determine what they are good at, teach them the basics, and then allow them to master what they are good at. What bothered me most about school was the redundancies; I took 10 years of math in middle school, high school, and college, and the second three years was basically a repeat of the first 3, and the third three was a repeat of both. I was still good at Algebra the third time, but the students that failed in middle school were still failing college Algebra. I learned a lot more math in college: Discrete Mathematics, Logic, Statistics, Combinatorics, etc., but I still had to get past the elementary maths that were repeats of what I had before.
A career in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering needs Algebra, but a career in Psychology or American History does not. Teach the basic math everyone needs and then move on.
On the post: NBC: We Have No Clue Who Tim Berners-Lee Is, But Without Our Commentary, You Wouldn't Understand The Olympics
Re: Re: CTV no better but at least live coast to coast to coast
Living close to Mexico, I got the chance to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremonies live, with no tape delay. And the commentators weren't vapid and didn't talk over everything, and there weren't any commercials (except occasionally an "inlay" for some show coming up on the channel I was watching.) And I managed to see the entire presentation, from beginning to end (only 3 hours) which they intended.
When the American one came on, some friends were watching it and I wasn't really paying attention since I already had seen it, but when I saw all the commercials and heard the vapid comments (we don't know who Tim Berners-Lee is, so Google it,) I was happy I watched the one I did and didn't waste time on a longer and obviously inferior product.
I eventually saw the recorded version, and I became quite angry that the "color commentary" was feeding obvious propaganda to the viewer (they had something bad to say about just every country except the US and the US territories.) This is why I believe in free-market capitalism and why I abhor the current crony capitalism...no legal competition existed here for those who wanted to watch the Olympics without the obvious propaganda spin and poor presentation (since if there was competition, NBC would have been forced to do it better than they did, otherwise they would have risked losing customers.)
On the post: Ubisoft DRM Fiasco: Allows Any Website To Take Control Of Your Computer
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not DRM...
I've had mixed success. On my game machine, Steam just works, offline or not. But since it is always connected to the internet except when the ISP is borked, it should work. On my laptop (until I got rid of Windows,) I followed the exact procedure several different times and it never seemed to work right (sometimes I could play the games, but most of the time it just didn't work.) Getting it working on the laptop was kinda important, because that was the one machine which would go places where there wasn't reliable internet.
On the post: Swizz Beatz Defends Megaupload: Says It Was Taken Down Because It Was Too Powerful For RIAA To Control
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I believe this is what you are looking for, Google is your friend.
On the post: Swizz Beatz Defends Megaupload: Says It Was Taken Down Because It Was Too Powerful For RIAA To Control
Re: Re: Re:
Only because the oil industry holds the patents for the good batteries, which they won't allow manufacturers to use to replace gas guzzlers.
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