DISQUS

PLEASE keep bombarding us. The DMCA did something truly remarkable. It established a legal concept in direct opposition to the first amendment, for the sole purpose of protecting the business plan of a few companies. (That is, making it illegal to reverse engineer, or help reverse engineer, DRM.)

Preventing people from shouting FIRE in a crowded theater is a good reason to limit the first amendment. Fearing that Disney and Sony will make less money is a bad reason.

The DMCA needs serious fixing. Please TALK about it until it's fixed.

There are a LOT of things wrong with realID, and it's great that NH is set to fight it. Please see my blog, http://realIdSucks.blogspot.com, for many of the issues.


If I had to pick one thing that's particularly ridiculous about this law, it's this:


+ the law requires all states to implement it by May, 2008.


+ The law requires the DHS to specify additional requirements to be implemented by every state.


+ The DHS is not specifying.



There was not enough time to comply when the law was passed. Now there's a lot less time.
- Precision Blogger

The best items I think are online, particularly a python primer, and "Dive into Python", an excellent read that quickly stretches your brain on python.

Please email me at tobyr21@gail.com, and I will send you a small zip file with my pointers to Python materials I've used online.
- tobias robison

There will never be a clear, legal definition of "trying unsuccessfully to locate the copyright owner." We need to require copyright ownners to register in one of a very few lists so they can be found.

Oops - what happenes to anonymous works?

You're being incredibly unfair to the FCC. The FCC is just beginning to model itself on the slick workings of the patent office. What's SUPPOSED to happen is that the people who developed "Without a Trace" are responsibe for figuring out the time zone discrepancy and bringing it to the attention of the FCC. The injured party (who gets fined) is not supposed ot bring ANYTHING to the FCC's attention. By trusting show developers to right all of its wrongs in costly proceedings, the FCC frees iteself to act quickly and decisively, levying punitive fines in less than a decade after the infraction. Have some respect!!!
- Precision Blogger

I agree! When my spyware programs give me a list of what I might remove, it's not easy to decide. Many computer users may lack the background needed to decide what really IS spyare on their machines. I stopped using WebRoot because it routinely offered to delete software I had just installed, and I feared acccidentally clicking YES.

- Precision Blogger PrBl

I supported the Department of Justice's antitrust case in the 1990s, and I support Microsoft's desire to do its own anti-spyware work now, UP TO A POINT.




The basic issues are simple:




(1) If it belongs in the operating system, Microsoft should add it to Windows. Many companies have temporarily gotten rich by filling a hole in a larger company's product line, but they do not deserve that hole to be left open. (The best example is HARDWARE, IBM's failure, for while, to sell color CRTs with their new PCs in the early 1980's. Another great example is zipped or encrypted virtual disk drives, which the OS should be able to manage much more safely than a third party product.)





Clearly anti-spyware measures belong in the OS.





(2) It's very dangerous for one company to assume full responsibility for fighting any enemy, such as spyware companies. Microsoft would do best to figure out how to put basic, rugged capabilities to combat spywiare into the OS, and then let other companies (may the best ones win!) come up with lists of what to identify as spyware.





I would make exactly the same arguments for anti-drm and anti-virus software.


- Precision Blogger PrBl