John Gilmore (http://www.toad.com/gnu/) could have saved all that trouble suing the TSA all the way to the US Supreme Court to get a look at this document - he should have known that if he had just waited they would have given it to him. 'Outdated copy' - nah, you don't think someone leaked the one they wouldn't show him on purpose just so he could see that there was nothing in it all along?

Why shouldn't the US Citizens have a right to see how their government works, anyway? Now, I hate being treated like a criminal just so I can take a plane ride, but being told that I do not need to know how the "democracy" works is a lot worse, especially by TSA screeners who are far from being brain surgeons, or even able to design and build the machines they use. I mean, their idea of rocket science involves Bullwinkle - if they really intended to redact with an method that is known to fail, that is.

The one - is obvious after you see it - but it's patentable. The next is trivial to any programmer - an array - but labeled with an analogy that gets copied. The third is not a device; you can't see it or determine how it works. Or do you mean, if I may digress...the shopping cart is so inappropriate because is is a catalog order - but an indicia of patentability is if, once invented it is imitated. Now, imitation is the sincerest form of television, and that is what you have there. What you also need for patentability is a device and a description, a patent application, that tells enough for a practitioner in the art to make the device and make it perform as claimed. So what about these software patents combined with layers of digital secrecy that the owner wants to have you jailed for decrypting and decompiling? Just as with the patent holding company, greed manipulating the system and making everyone's life worse.

Next might come a device for automatically buying patents, or clandestinely spying a la the RIAA to see who is downloading them so they can be sued.

The Michael Geist article mentions printed watermarked copies. You don't suppose they'd have individualized identifiers that a government interested in denying the citizens the right to a republican goverment would detect in an internet transmission, do you?

Search for "ACTA Internet Chapter leak" and some articles appear to have excerpts/quotations.

You're better off putting heads together to write a sensible proposal sending it to the Senators and every government official who might have some sway and mailbombing them with what might actually benefit the public - although they won't want to read THAT.

Then change your career plans to include law, or, if you are a techie, forensic data analysis. Growth industries!

Once upon a time there was a copyright registration requirement, and it was good.

Before you could enforce your copyright you had to register it.

It would be WAY TOO SIMPLE for there to be a digital registration archive and a wee little bottleneck where each ISP could query its national registry with >.

Nope, this is the time raining down upon us of the RIAA default judgment, and it is way bad.

I'm going to send you a notice, and you'd better do what I say, and don't tell me I am lying because I pay off I mean contribute more than you and forget I said anything because it's a secret.

It's all German to me. Or do I mean French. Or Czech. Or Polish...

You'd think the EU would understand that you can't translate without the dictionaries. You can't interoperate without the specifications.

They call it the "first sale doctrine" for a reason. You buy a disk. Does Apple get to rewrite the copyright law because half way through the installation you have to click "I agree Apple can write its own laws"? A "contract of adhesion" has a problem - the software purchaser never agreed to it.

Apple did not sell the computer, they sold the disk. Now you get to use it. Not by playing frisbee, not by using it as a target for shooting skeet, but as a computer program. You bought the copy, you get to put it in any computer you want. Some of them it even works in. Plenty of Apple-branded computers that it won't work in.

Companies keep getting Congress to put more and more restrictions on computer software in the name of, well, it kind of sounds like paranoia. Once they actually make it illegal to use the program you paid for, you might as well get away from the don't-sit-under-the-Apple-tree-with-anyone-else folks and go with open source. That way you can fix it and not have to worry when it's no longer 'supported'.

Music is one way we find our cultural identity, and the information age created a way to reproduce performances and not just the sheet music, but compare this to the history of Bach and Telemann. While the music 'industry' rode a wave of new technology to fame and fortune, as times change there will be another way for another culture to show its own identity. I just hope this is in a way that reinforces individual freedoms of expression rather than conformity to a distant power, and the recent music explosion is doing just that. Pay for Play you say?

Just put that computer down, go get the real weapon of choice, take a walk to the water's edge, and go croc-baiting croc-sniping croc-cutting croc-a-doodle-doo.

Unless your preference goes more toward cuddly things that can't really fight back.

But don't bring a camera and don't put the footage on the web where those censors - who are all under 16, right? - can see it.

Someone's kid probably having a birthday.

Or did you check eBay to see if it was being sold there?

Let's see, buy 30 songs, pay $29.70. Share 30 songs, pay $675,000. After, that is, they were already bought and paid for. Or didn't the defense have the RIAA prove otherwise?

The defense lawyers are not acting with a consistent philosophy. Just why ask the public with no desire to pay the RIAA to suddenly pay them? Bankruptcy, of course, stays litigation and a discharge in bankruptcy would make any appeal moot.

One point missed throughout is that copyright has historically protected publication, you can write a letter and copy a few lines, you can read it to your friends or colleagues, you can tear a page out of a book and send it around the world or put it in a window for all to see, but you just can't reprint the book and sell it as if it were the original. Is someone pretending to be selling something here without being licensed to do so?

If you buy a song, you buy the right to play it, otherwise it is useless. You have the right to put it in your car and crank up the volume, for all to hear, but according to the RIAA you can't play it for your online friends.

Okay, people, create your original music and video and put it on p2p, and when the RIAA downloads it, send them a bill.

Make them pay for snooping on you.

A keyboard layout that places the ';:' key on the right where the 'aA' key is on the left cannot possibly be superior... Putting the right shift key where repeated use leads to carpal tunnel where the left has no such problem is a similar example of a problem created by the keyboard designer - and the article does not address those but instead goes into a vague attack on individual reports supporting Dvorak. This is called argumentum ad ignorantiam - one of the classic fallacies of logic - by attacking what might prove the opposite and then claiming nothing does.

So the American Simplified Keyboard (which does not jumble the numbers as Dvorak's did) is based on alternating right and left usage, and the QWERTY Keyboard has an urban legend at least half a century old of being intended to avoid keyboard jamming in early models. Both are typewriter input methods adapted to computer use, hence the emphasis on two hands of alternating input. Since computer keyboards will not jam, there is surely a more efficient keyboard input method. Suppose the keys were arranged so that common character patterns (such as 'tion') became a drumming motion from little to index fingers. That would speed things up.

There really does not seem to be much in the way of statistical studies on this topic on the web, at least that can be easily found. The author says he has sources but does not cite them. Argumentum ad populem.

Given the ease in remapping a keyboard layout, it would also seem to be much ado about nothing - and that is the impression the reader is left with, an unattributed position paper. Just this side of trollbait.