Posts by Mark

Re: Perspective

But if that letter is from VM, it cannot say anything about the copyright abuse. When Sony distributed in the UK their rootkit, it used without license the LAME application which is GPL'd.

I'd asked the authorities whether I could take Sony to court for breech of copyright and they said only the copyright owner can do that.

So VM cannot tell users off about copyright abuses. They don't own the copyrights.

@frymaster

"What you are basically demanding is a right to dictate the actions of a company."

Well a company is demanding the right to dictate the actions of the rest of humanity.

What do we get for being nice and respecting copyrights? Extended copy rights and extended copyright. And in thanks for letting them demand more of us, the public? The right to be outed under criminal law (where the power to find you out is much greater), but guilt "proven" in civil law (where the burden of proof is much lower).

Copyright (at first it was a bribe to printers unions to self-censor and be nice to the crown) is a right given by the people to enable an artist to achieve a possible commercial success so that they can devote their full time to creating more art. But once enough money has been made to pay off all the people involved, why does copyright continue? If companies are going to just wait out copyright then that's not a problem with the public, but with companies being selfish. Heck, some people suggest that if copyright lasted until the death of the author, companies would deafen us with the sound of artists landing like a pond of mince on the floor, dead, so that the companies can get the goods for free. That this would necessarily ensure that there would be no follow up seems to be no issue in this scenario.

But the short of it is that a few companies want to dictate to the public what they can do. You don't seem to have a problem with that. Why? Into S&M?

Re: If only...

Unfortunately, the CD is no longer "the real thing". To win "the loudness war" the sound levels on CD's are heavily compressed and clipping far too frequent. They are therefore tiring and of much lower quality (its more compressible so there's less relevant information in the datastream).

Apart from that, fair enough.

How BPI s getter it's "proof"

Well it getters it proof that way and yet you still have "humans" agreeing to a company claiming copyright ownership of a work that they had "stolen", created a derivative and then used as an advert. They accused the owner of the work they misappropriated and this "human" said "muh. hokay".

This "human" had better not be working as an illegal agent of the BPI. Unless the POLICE ask you, you don't say anything. If someone complains, you work with that, but you MUST tell the one you're censuring what you're doing, who it is from and why you're doing it.

Or would you be OK with me telling your boss you assaulted my sister and him just summarily sacking you 'cos I seemed like a nice honest person (or just had wodges of cash)?

You are NOT law enforcement.

And from past experience, these "human" processing units do as little checking as possible and swallow any load that expensive lawyers give them.

@Eponymous Cowherd

You don't need a license for IP if one is not offered but the IP is.

Take, for example, this message.

Copyrighted.

To me.

You now have a copy.

To read.

You make a derivative (and answer).

No license needed.

Why? Because without a license for given "IP" being automatic, the internet and this site would not work. Explicit license is not possible, never mind feasible.

Similarly, on BitTorrent, even where it's legally given stuff, there is no possibility of handing over a license (which is copyrighted too, so you'd need a license for that, which is copyrighted...) but it is INTENDED to give away IP. Giving it away is only possible by the copyright owner or their agents. Giving it away doesn't require a license because you, the copyright owner, waived it.

In much the same way as if you loan my car, we don't *have* to sign a contract. I could ask for one and a hire company certainly will. But I can decide whether we need an agreement beforehand.

So by the agents of the copyright owners putting the copyrighted works on the internet under a protocol and in a place that tells others "please take a copy", that is the license. And once given a copy, if you rely on the giver's word to continue, you have the doctrine of laches to ensure they don't decide unilaterally that they want to take the agreement back.

This is law.

@Jonathan Richards

Yes, copyright DOES work like that.

If I offer you to come into my home, I cannot prosecute you for trespass for it. If I offer you the loan of my car, I cannot report you to the police for Grand Theft, Auto. If I offer you a copy of my IP, I cannot sue you for taking a copy.

NOTE: if me giving a website with my IP on it and saying "take a copy" is not me making the copy, then making available for download is not a copyright infringement and bang goes "making available" as a criminal matter.

@frymaster

Why can't the labels be force to face the consequences of their actions?

Making digital recordings makes making copies cheap. They knew that and that's why they wanted CD's. Consequence: we can take advantage of the cheap cost of copying (because they refuse to).

Making frivolous cases in court and running away before they are found out. Consequence: jailed for abuse and perjury.

Etc.

Re: A few answers

Well based on past actions of the labels (in the US), it will be:

Connect to a torrent.

See the IP's.

Sue, IP's Sue.

@Simon

Cancelling the DD isn't to get you out of the contract, it's to ensure that when YOU have got out of the contract, the ISP is also out of it.

Too many times ISP's have "forgotten" to remove the direct debit and once they have your money, it's harder to get their grip off it than an octopus with cramps.

So you tell them to end the contract. You end the contract. You end the direct debit.

@Chris Cheale

No, it's not been illegal to make your own copy. It's never been *legal* but that (except in Germany) doesn't make it *illegal*.

Copyright is a tort law. In the UK, tort infractions can only get damages paid for. If you're copying for your own use, there IS no damage. Ergo, there was no need for making it legal.

Meanwhile, they changed the law so copying even without any harm being done is now possibly criminal and they didn't update the other side of the quid-pro-quo.

Napster was done for inducing copyright infringement but that has no bearing here

a) that was in the US and this is in the UK

b) Napster was safe because the VCR induced copyright infringement (especially dual-deck) and case law and interpretation of the law (when "teh interwebs" weren't involved, so the judges knew what the feck was going on) about copyright infringement being "possible" was NOT ILLEGAL. Add "on a computer" and judges have no clue.

OK, lets clear the crap away.

I don't get what you're saying because it makes no sense.

IE8 is W3C compliant. The tag isn't part of W3C. The tag doesn't add compliance to W3C pages.

When pages were written for IE6 and refused to give data to a browser that didn't identify itself as IE6, opera, for example, could set its ID string up to be IE6. This could be set per site or page.

This seemed to be very acceptable.

So why does there need to be a tag?

There is no reason.

What are you explaining?

You say that IE6 has a standards mode that wasn't. So bad pages still rendered incorrectly*. IE7 was supposed to have a standards mode that isn't. So bad pages still rendered incorrectly*. But a different incorrectly. IE8 is supposed to have a standards mode that may be (this time). So bad pages render correctly.

(*incorrectly in that a bad page should give bad output, showing that you have a bad page.)

Now if IE6 required you to change your page from IE5 to meet the new quirks, IE7 required you to change your page from IE6 to meet the new quirks, why do you not change your page from IE7 to meet the new quirks (W3C correct rendering)?

You did it before.

And you didn't need a meta tag.

And early IE6 there weren't any competitors (hence it stagnated a long time: MS killed off the IE team and used them elsewhere because they had won the browser war against Netscape). So you HAD to render for quirks. Now, however, a large and growing section of the internet and intranet (because of cross-site-scripting security problems) have other rendering engines. Much bigger a market than IE7 has. MUCH more than IE8 has. So you have already a pressure to make your pages work on these browsers.

And if IE8 has good standards compliance, if it works on these other browsers, it will work under IE8 too. So even if you have to keep IE7 for those legacy systems running closed source applications that will not be supported (see how nice lock-in is?), there's no need to use this meta tag: you already have a page that recognises IE7 and makes a quirky page that "works" on it and if it notices Firefox or Safari or Opera, gives out a page that works with them.

Well, guess what? IE8 you've told us tells the site that it is IE8 and not IE7, so the code that detects IE7 in your site and gives it the broken pages and if not IE7 gives it the W3C pages can give IE8 the W3C pages.

No need for the tag.

By NOT using the tag, W3C standards are more widely used.

By NOT using the tag, if IE9 doesn't support IE7 (or 6, 5.5, ...), you have no change to make, because IE9 will be W3C compliant. Hey, lookie! No work treadmill!

By using the tag, W3C standards are less widely used.

By using the tag, if IE9 doesn't support IE7, you have to change again.

Or is that what you're looking for? A continuing reason for employment?

Now if you REALLY want IE7 pages to remain pristine and unchanged, how about demanding that IE8 isn't used and IE7 remain the browser for your company? After all, that way you don't even need to put the meta-tag in! That's a LOT less work!

Your parting shot isn't a reason for having the tag. If your page is broken, you're stuck with IE7 (or hoping like heck the IE8 version of IE7 doesn't change and screw up your specific page). If your page is broken as per the standards, change it. And users wouldn't notice a difference looking at your page with IE8, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Lynx, ... If you're really trying to appear as you're thinking of the "user experience", then enabling people to use the browser they WANT to use on your pages is what you should be looking for. And the tag doesn't let that happen. You still have to change your pages to be W3C compliant.

Christopher

You change your ideas to suit the occasion, don't you.

I earlier pointed out that IE6 and earlier were broken and needed changing. You told us that this tag was only for IE7 rendering under IE8 and told us that the earlier IE versions weren't the issue.

Now you say they are.

You still have ignored the explanation of why an "IE7 not W3C compliant" tag, which is ignored by earlier versions of IE, so only for IE8 helps the adoption of standards. You still haven't shown why making w3C pages and getting IE8 to show them as W3C HTML isn't "advancing the standards" instead (thereby assuring that the REMOVAL of this non-standard tag is actually advancing standards).

Your retort of "The tag tells it not to break them" doesn't work, either. You've too many meta-syntatic variables. The tag doesn't tell IE8 to break the standards. If you mean that non-standard HTML pages won't be broken by IE8 if it's tagged as IE7 compliant (which doesn't say ANYTHING about earlier versions of IE, so where's that stuff about IE6/5.5/5/... come from?), then how about making the page ready for IE8, like you did for your pages that were IE5 and it was then discontinued and you had to move to IE6? You made your pages compliant with IE6 no problem. Then, when IE6 was replaced with IE7 because IE6 is broken and unsupported, you changed your IE6 pages to be IE7 pages. So change your IE7 pages to IE8. You've done it before. And the advantage you get this time (that you didn't get before when making it IEx specific) is that it is now compliant with other browsers. Like Firefox, Safari, KHTML and others. It should be MORE fine.

And please remember, your change from IE5 to IE6 didn't come with a meta-tag that said "This is borken IE5 HTML, so please render it with the bugs of IE5 that we had to work around. Ta". If the meta-tag wasn't needed then, why is it needed now?

So that IE7 pages can remain on your intranet and you can remain locked into Windows. I can't see your CIO or (more especially) your CFO wanting the expense of having no bargaining position with a vendor because your web developers are lazy.

@Christopher

O, I thought you just said nobody knew what was in IE9.

Was that a lie?

Or is this one?

The tag isn't needed. IE7 will not last forever and IE9 can't afford to take the baggage of IE7 along with it.

Trust me, the tag has no worth. Fix your pages. That's the freaking job of a web designer. And if you have pages that ONLY render in IE7, how do you use the competitive world and reduce costs if you can ONLY use Windows? Why are you (the CEO of a company) willing to continue to spend licensing money for an OS rather than put a little bit of work on making your webpages compliant and opening up opportunities that can be used to bargain a better deal at the very least with your OS supplier?

Please remember, IE7 was supposed (when it was vapour) be w3c compliant. When it was really released, it was touted as being much more compliant with w3c than IE6 and so you should upgrade ASAP to it.

So if it's any better, it's less of a job to make a page that's 100% compliant with IE8. After all, that's EXACTLY what you did with earlier pages: made them compliant with IE5, IE5.5, IE6 or IE7 as they became "the browser". You didn't have a problem with making your IE6 pages work on IE7. So why are you saying there's going to be problems making your IE7 pages work on IE8? Especially since then you can make pages that can be seen on the PDA's that only have Opera as its browser.

That is why there's no worth to the tag.

It isn't needed and should not be wanted. For those who DO want it, why not just keep to IE7 and forbid installation of a different browser? You're lazy enough to not want to do some minimal fixes but not lazy enough to refuse to change browser.

@s. pam

Defending Murdoch to the end.

NOTE: you don't PAY the BBC license fee. Why the feck do you care?

@Evan Jones

"There has been a long, slow, steady recovery from the depths of the Little Ice Age. No surprises here."

Uh, have you looked at the temperature graph?

In the past it went up, it went down, it went up, it went down, it went up, it went down, it went up.

Now which way is it going? Would you suspect based on past performance (where CO2 couldn't be burned from fossil fues apart from a few places where seep came to the surface? Down?. Well, it went up. Went up a lot more than it went down durring the little ice age (which evidence is from the same papers and scientists that you deny knowing their arse from their elbow when it comes to climatology today).

"recovery" sounds like it's getting back to where it used to be, doesn't it? Well, the 30 year average before the LIA is lower than it is now. Doesn't sound like "recovery" does it. Sounds like LIA was a blip away.

Please learn maths

Robinson:

"It should, but it does not, because there are more temperature stations in the US than any other country (by a considerable number)"

This only matters if the earth gets no weather where there are no sensors.

Also, please:

1) note that these are satellite images. The number of ground stations is irrelevant.

2) There's stuff about the South Pole which isn't in america. yet

20-year cooling period

How about the 23-year period? Has it warmed more over the 23-year period? If it has, why did you pick 20 years? Kind of arbitrary.

You can't even tell reliably when high summer is from temperatures alone if you average over 20 years, can you. So how can you tell when it's warmer when the entire sample is 30 years?

@Graham Dawson

Carbonic acid is still acid. It's not the acid rain that Scandanavia had to put up with from UK outgassing.

And remember the hows about the cost? Seems we didn't get ejected back to the stone age then, either.

And that sounds rather like the the doom and gloom predicted as the consequence of removing CFC's from refrigerants. THAT was supposed to lead to us all becoming paupers because we couldn't afford refrigerators. That one didn't happen either.

Re: Statistics

Why do we have to?

We can plan on climate changes by virtue of our exhalation of 9 billion tons of carbon each year to power our society.

We only need the models to work out which option gives the best bang for the buck.

Re: I realise science can only prove negatives.

Unfortunately, on the blogosphere, you have equal voice to anyone with the time and energy to yell.

So those who don't want to change their ways have plenty of time to yell how it's cooler or the same.

Those trying to find out what we can do are too busy to yell how it's warmer.

Then the official words are

Government

vs

Oil.

Tobbacco (so they can show how scientists could be wrong about the dangers of smoking).

Coal.

Transport.

Energy providers.

Venture Capitalists.

Government haters.

(note: odd that in the "conspiracy" register arguments, I'm a government hater because I want to tell people about the odd things that have happened and not sweep it away with "conspiracy theory nut" yet here I'm in collusion with the government to tax you back to the stone ages. Odd things, humans).

Each of these groups have equal voice on the internet.

oleaginous

Hah! Hands up people who know what that word means.

I've only ever seen it used once.

@Ignoramus

No, but it proves that governments WILL fake a terrorist attack to pass laws to get more power to themselves.

War On Terror ring any bells?

PATRIOT?

It also proves that "conspiracy" has happened and it wasn't until the Neuremberg trials that any proof was brought forward and there was little enough of that by then available.

So conspiracy is not impossible.

That's what that example shows.

People will believe anything..

So terrorist activity can be ignored.

Ta.