Posts by Dave Harland 9 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality." -- Lord Macaulay
Obviously, Macaulay had insufficient experience with Americans. Our only saving grace, with respect to legislating sexual morality, is that we tend to be considerably less successful at it.
"But real artists must keep control of their rights in order to fund their work. Real artists ship, their work is in demand."
This is, of course, pure garbage. It may apply to bland, unchallenging, bastardized commercial art; the sort of boring decorations you see in corporate lobbies and shopping malls; but it is certainly not true for great art. It creates a world of "artists" who spend more time and effort on grant proposals, market research, "networking", and self-indulgent "vision statements" than they do on their actual art.
Art worth the effort is timeless and doesn't depend on some forcible "protection" of a nebulous and arbitrary collection of privileges. Art has been made throughout human history, whereas copyright is very much a modern invention. None of the greatest art has been "copyright", and much of it was a commercial failure. Reubens did not live comfortably off his art, and Van Gogh never sold a single painting during his lifetime. Very few artists were able to make a decent living off of their artwork. Most often, they survived by working a regular job, or living off of a rich patron or lover. By Eicher's definition, the majority of the greatest artists in history were amateurs whose work was inherently worthless.
Regardless of the merits of lack thereof of Ito's work, this article was nothing more than a self-serving bit of propaganda.
on the legal services. The sort of music that is typically downloaded illegally is nothing like the sort of music pushed by services like Lala. The big music-industry-approved services are little more than advertising venues for pushing their latest overdone cookie-cutter crap. If they do manage have music from good artists, it's typically a handful of their charted singles, or a "Greatest Hits" comp. If it didn't chart, it won't be played. You're certainly not going to find entire albums.
On the rare occasions that they do have more, it's almost always their most recent, in-stores album, and once again the service is merely an advertising venue. On top of that the playback is nearly always crap, and typically interspersed with annoying adverts pushing their latest no-talent flash-in-the-pan.
As Ty Cobb noted above, the USAF owned the software the moment he installed on USAF hardware. Period. The fact that he used USAF resources to test it is just one more nail in the coffin he created for himself.
As a member of the US Military, your rights are considerablly different from the rights civilians enjoy; and some rights you lose entirely for the duration of your enlistment. If he had never used any USAF resources at any point in the life cycle of his software, then he might, repeat might, have a case. That's debatable. But he immediatly lost all claim the moment he took it to work.
What so many HD-DVD boosters seem unable to grasp is that it's a dead-end technology. It's little more than a glorified DVD, and it's extremely limited in future improvements. Blu-Ray already has a greater bandwidth and capacity than HD-DVD, and more importantly, has a good dead of room to grow as the specs are expanded -- it has the potential for over double the capabilities projected for HD-DVD. And unlike HD-DVD, will be able to handle the next-generation HD standard (1440p), while HD-DVD won't have that ability, and an entirely new format will be required. We all know how well that goes over.
As far as region locking, yes it is definitely part of the HD-DVD spec, and don't imagine for a moment that the studios would not implement it immediately if they had won the format war. In effect, the HD-DVD camp has already said that the only reason it hasn't been implemented yet is because it was one of the very few advantages it could get over Blu-Ray. But with few Blu-Ray studios implementing their region encoding, that advantage very quickly disappeared. In any case, the scare hype over OHNOESREGIONLOCKING!!1on3! is no different than it was when DVDs were originally released, and look how long that lasted.
Blu-Ray is by far the more future-proof technology, despite it's few small and easily circumvented shortcomings. Downloadable HD content replacing physical media is still a pipe dream; and will continue to be until high-cap broadband availability and reliability is increased by at least an order of magnitude.
"As long as the penalty for rape is less than the penalty for murder, there is no incentive for the rapist to kill. Once the penalties are the same, it is to the assailant's advantage to eliminate the victim/witness, since doing so can reduce the likelihood of later identification and conviction."
This is demonstrably untrue, in every sense. Potential penalties have little to no effect on criminal actions. It's disturbing how people constantly infer rational motives for irrational acts. Many rapists do kill their victims, despite the fact that the penalties for murder are much higher than for rape. Violent criminals don't stay up at night doing cost-benefit analyses and risk-reduction planning for their next attack. (Only organized criminals, aka polititians, do that sort of thinking.) They're driven by irrational impulse, and if they do even think about the possibility of being caught, they typically believe that they're clever enough not to be. There is no recorded instance where increased severity of penalties caused an increase in violence. They are invariably the result of increases in violence.
And in any case, killing the victim doesn't reduce the likelihood of being identified and arrested. In fact, chances are that it's just the opposite. Murders, particularly those with aggravating circumstances like rape, are treated as a higher priority by most law-enforcement organizations; and the vast majority of rapists and murderers tend to leave quite a lot of personally identifying evidence behind -- increasingly so as technology improves. On top of that, in the US, there is no statute of limitations on murder. There is, however, in the marjoity of US states, a statute of limitations on rape of an adult, (although typically none on rape of a chlid or minor). Limits vary from 1 year to 20 years, with the average being 7 years. Furthermore, in some states, murder committed during the commission of another felony (such as rape or armed robbery) is an almost automatic death penalty if convicted.
"the old British law requiring every driver of a motor vehicle to have a man walking in front of said vehicle with a flag"
There's a similar municipal law in Seattle, WA, USA that is still technically on the books and valid. Any motor vehicles travelling through the city must be preceeded by a man with a red flag (daytime) or red lantern (night). Speed is limited to "no faster than a horse can walk".
Some other local doozies:
Washington State: All lollipops are banned.
Seattle: It is mandatory for a motorist with criminal intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the chief of police as he is entering the town.
Auburn: Men who deflower virgins, regardless of age or marital status, may face up to five years in jail.
Everett: It is illegal to display a hypnotized or allegedly hypnotized person in a store window.
Makes you wonder just why these laws are on the books, the circumstances surrouding their creation and signing.
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