Posts by nzlemming
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Absolutely a propos of nothing at all, but you should visit Family First's website right fucking now! ;-)
[edit] Okay, so it's not their real site, but it's still funny.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Jackson James Wood,
Dammit, I clicked that link.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
Care to quantify? Is an A student twice as fast as a B? Ten times faster? Whatever number you pick, that's the number of resources their talents take to replicate. They are therefore not essential at all.
That's the kind of flawed thinking behind the myth of the man-hour - that you can speed up the progress of a project by throwing more people at it. There's an optimum number (often no more than 2) after which it actually slows the project down because of the increased amount of communication, co-ordination, reporting, meetings, yadda yadda yadda.
With respect, Ben, you're talking as if all brains are equal. They're not. Get over it.
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Medication time.
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Capture: Howling at the Moon, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Well that's one way to do it...
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Up Front: Making It Better, in reply to Emma Hart,
I suspected but had no proof.
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Up Front: Making It Better, in reply to Emma Hart,
And these are fairly liberal open-minded people. I've found it so demoralising I've actually just stopped telling people.
See, I'd just be all "pics or it never happened" on yo ass. ;-)
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Capture: Howling at the Moon, in reply to Russell Brown,
Just out of interest, who here has urged a Lessig-liberal approach to non-commercial copyright infringement (around, say, TV shows) and/or said something nice about Kim Dotcom?
Hmm, I tend to share Lessig's approach to most of this but I can see the problem that bottom-feeders would use it as an excuse to package it up and make money off it (though they're doing it anyway so what's the diff?).
Re Dotcom, I don't like the man himself, but I don't think the US has a leg to stand on in persecuting him and his company under the 'evidence' they've given and the screw-ups they've made. Sadly, for him, it will be a cold day in hell before he gets any back of what has been seized, and it saddens me that the NZ Govt has been a party to that, in the way they've gone about it.
My personal thoughts on MegaUpload is that they probably crossed the line from safe harbour to transgressor under US law, in that they don't appear to have taken all possible steps to remove offending material as the DMCA requires, but they weren't a US company and most of the principals aren't US citizens (none, I think, but I may be wrong on that) so I think there was really no case for the USG to take.
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Capture: Howling at the Moon, in reply to Petra Jane,
By using a CC-BY image without attributing it to Alex, those organisations aren't covered by the license.
Um, no, they are covered by it - they're just in breach of it. Tiny legal quibble but it makes the difference. Theoretically*, Alex could sue them for breach of copyright, as they had not observed the terms of the permissive CC licence, purely because they are then subject to the full weight of copyright that Alex still holds in the image.
CC does not replace copyright, and a lot of people(especially journalists) make this error. It depends on copyright and on an individual who holds that right allowing work to be used in certain ways without being bothered by requests for use, except when it's going to be to that person's benefit (like paying for usage - which is why I tend to use BY-SA-NC, so that I don't miss any opportunities.
The alternative to holding the copyright (which is the default pretty much globally) is to explicitly place the item in the Public Domain, long before the expiration of the copyright term would place it in there anyway. I capitalized that to emphasis that that PD is a legal state that is independent of Creative Commons, though a number of people still seem confused about that as well.
* I say theoretically because a cost/benefit analysis would probably indicate it's not worth it in this instance.
EDIT: Okay, I take your point about the breach ending the access to the licence, but I read it that they weren't covered anyway. My bad, but the rest of it stands.
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Capture: Howling at the Moon, in reply to Russell Brown,
Edit: Phew I'm not going mad.
That's just weird. Welcome to the Internet ;-)