US Copyright Office chief and DMCA booster does not own a computer!

Are you sure she didn’t copyright that photo?

Don’t forget that fearless leader is proud to have gotten maybe a B in economics.

I guess I spend a lot of time thinking of the intellectual accomplishments of our elected officials. As a contrast I would add that Ahmadinejad has a Ph.D.

Like the rest of the Bush administration, that Peters is doing a heckuva job.

This reminds me of two things:

1. the FCC commissioner that didn’t own a television set and still owned a rotary phone

2. a celibate Pope making rules for Catholics on birth control

If you don’t play the game, you shouldn’t be able to make the rules!

A government official
In America
In the year 2007
Who does not even own a computer
and says it like it’s a good thing

Who sez our gov’t is out of touch with the people they represent?

It looks like she doesn’t own any exercise equipment either.

She’s held that position since 1994 and she’s worked at the copyright office for 40 years.

I’m sure when she first held the position she has now, copyright was about books, software and fair use.

It is corporate america which has sought to misuse copyright law to protect printer cartridges and other proprietary schemes.

We are probably better off that is a “luddite” is in that office. Imagine the look on her face when some large company tries to sell her on something that makes no sense to no one.

Maybe we need someone who doesn’t use any Microsoft products making decisions on the interpretation of the application of copyright law

15- The scary flip side of that is that, not knowing any better, she will believe whatever the lobbyist tells her.

“The DMCA is good and protects the publics interest”
“Net Neutrality is dirty dirty Communism”
“Copyright should never expire. Fair use is evil. Please, wont you think of Mickey?”

Ignorance is never preferable to experience / knowledge.

>>If she has no experience using computers, by what basis can
>>she judge the fairness or the effectiveness of the DMCA?!

Who ever said she has “no experience using computers”, Kimo Sabe? She said she DOES NOT HAVE ONE AT HOME. Oh, boo hoo! So she doesn’t spend all of her free time watching YouTube videos, posting to blogs, and looking at internet porn. STRING HER UP!

Having seen enough geeked out losers bogged down with bluetooth earsets, cell phones, blackberries, and laptops to last me a lifetime, it’s kind of refreshing to see somebody whose entire life does not begin and end with tricked-out, bleeding-edge technocrap from work. Do you supposed Colin Powell plays war games in his living room for entertainment? Her opinions on DMCA may not be completely in sync with mine, but bfd. At least she’s not Dumbya or Heart Attack Cheney.

I can’t believe how you’re promoting the value of proud ignorance.

She indicts her self with her own words. She waves the banner for a poorly written law that adversely affects computer users and neuters fair use. Then she brags about how shes a “Luddite” and doesn’t have a computer.

How can she be mindful of the impact this law, and her office has if she’s gleefully ignorant of the possible issues?

#15 – hmeyers

“Maybe we need someone who doesn’t use any Microsoft products making decisions on the interpretation of the application of copyright law”

You got that right. Excellent point. Amen.

#11 – Who sez our gov’t is out of touch with the people they represent?

Republicans.

#18 – …you do not know anything about her.

We know she doesn’t own a computer.

In the 21st Century that is one of the things that should automatically disqualify you from a position of authority in a federal office.

If she wants to be a County Commissioner in rural West Virginia, tell her to have at it…

>>I do imagine the look on her plain doughy little face…

Yeah! Let’s get Jessica Simpson or Britney in there. We don’t need no fucking plain doughy faces in the Copyright Office. If we don’t appoint BIG TITS and pancake makeup to the Copyright Office, the DCMA apologists win! And the bitch probably hasn’t even seen the “Obama Girl” video on YouTube. wtf is wrong with tihs country??

>>You should drink decaf.

And you should spend less time running around the streets in your underwear. Using sexual attractiveness as a criterion for holding public office is just a little bit dodgy, don’t you think?

Or is it really that important to you if public officials watch YouTube videos and internet porn in their off hours?

#31 – And you should spend less time running around the streets in your underwear.

This is an honest question… What the fuck are you talking about?

Using sexual attractiveness as a criterion for holding public office is just a little bit dodgy, don’t you think?

There is no place in this thread or any thread where I ever used sexual attractiveness as a criterion for holding an office, and this includes the place where I said this: “I do imagine the look on her plain doughy little face…”

English is a language and words have meanings. I know thats a hard concept for many readers here, but saying that her face is doughy isn’t the same thing as saying doughy faced people aren’t qualified.

It was a quip. This is Dvorak.org. It’s where people with too much free time bloviate about shit they often know nothing about. I’m not testifying before Congress. I’m posting to a web blog. It is far far more important that I be entertaining than that I maintain any sort of civil decorum.

I have a job with lots of lag time… during which I post for fun… I think its fun to be snarky, and I think you’ve read enough of me to know that. If you think I am actually advocating that sexual attractiveness is a criteria that should be considered for holding a job then you are either reaching or illiterate… and I know you are literate.

Or is it really that important to you if public officials watch YouTube videos and internet porn in their off hours?

No…

It’s important that public officials who make decisions affecting copyright or who have job affected by the DMCA actually understand the technology that the DMCA regulates.

From her statements, I don’t think she does.

Again I say, a guy like Lawrence Lessig is the sort of person this job calls for. His good looks and almost stereotypically academic appearance invoke a feeling of trust with listeners as he talks about copyright related issues.

And these are the people we trust to make decisions about technology for us.

#34, Luddite,

http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=122

That’s what it’s all about, Hop. There’s a atmosphere of musical realism that comes through even modest analog, that most digital gear filters out. Digital is, in most ways, objectively and technically more accurate. But music is not measurements. Even today, few people bother getting a digital playback chain that can compete with analog in terms of musical accuracy; not that it’s difficult or particularly expensive – people are just satisfied with mediocrity. Thank the “whatever” generation…

Son, I’m a musician, an electronics tech and a recording engineer. I built my first studio before you were born. I own over 6000 LPs, many from the ’60s and ’70s – and most of them have ZERO pops, ticks or groove noise. They sound exactly like CDs except better. You see, I know how to maintain them. I also wouldn’t play them on any $200 toy turntable. My table is almost identical to this one. It’s called a Goldmund Studietto Mk. II. It’s handbuilt in Switzerland and it set me back $2200, second hand, 8 years ago. Plus the cartridge (what sheeple like you call the “needle”), which was $1400. The Audioquest Lapis X3 cables that connect it to my preamp cost more than your entire turntable. So forgive me if I’m not impressed, OK?

If it makes you feel any better, I once owned a $200 turntable, when I was 10 years old.

Of course improperly cared-for LPs sound worse than CDs on your toy stereo. However, on a grown-up’s audio system, they are generally the next best thing to the original master tapes.

Y’know, it’s generally better to have some idea of what you’re talking about before you shoot your mouth off around others – who might be just a wee bit farther along than you… in the meantime, take a look at some real hi-fi systems and components, including a couple of over-$30,000 turntables for playing those “inferior” LPs… and a pair of $200,000 German mbl speaker systems. Definitely not for sheeple.

Enjoy your “hell of a lot better” CDs, amigo !

Utter nonsense, Fusion.

I don’t “need” to spend that much money for ‘good’ playback, I demand superlative playback, because I am not the typical person for whom music is mere ‘entertainment.

“When you start buying such high end merchandise then the increase in perfection will be imperceptible. No one over the age of 5 has sufficient hearing left to discern the discretion such “perfect” systems claim.”

Who fed you that line of crap, Fusion? Anyone with normal hearing can detect the magical sense of reality that is possible with a high-end system. Hearing loss doesn’t enter into it. People can and do lose the extreme ends – mostly the upper end – of the 20-20kHz human audible spectrum, but it has little impact on the ability to discern the subtle detail that an accurate system is capable of reproducing.

The only people who ever make such silly statements are people who have never heard a genuine high-end system with quality source material. Just having an “expensive stereo” is meaningless. You can spend $50,000 on the wrong, mismatched components and it’ll sound markedly inferior to a properly integrated and set-up $2500 system. There’s more to it tham just the price.

The Law of Diminishing Returns sets in fairly early, and few audiophiles don’t realize it. A basic, simple $350 table / arm / cartridge combination, the minimum entry-level player, such as the Music Hall mmf 2 will deliver high-end sound, but with many limitations. If you spend ten times that amount, the sound will be improved significantly, but it certainly won’t be ten times better – likewise, you could spend well over $100,000 on LP playback – and the improvement over a $3500 setup will be fairly subtle. No one claims that this stuff is cost-effective. It’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to perform.

“A CD is giving the same reproduction as those Master Reels. Much better than any vinyl could.”

Now, that, my friend, is simply an idiotic statement. A CD cannot even remotely compare to a 15ips 1″ half-track analog master tape. The very idea is a joke.

Philips & Sony, the co-developers of the Compact Disc, jumped the gun in their rush to get it on the market. Had they waited 12-18 more months, the state of audio digital signal processing advancing at the rate it was at the time, we would have a considerably better format than the crappy, inadequate 16 bits sampled at 44.1kHz we’ve been stuck with all these years, at least 20 bit wordlength @ 88.2kHz, the audible superiority of which is glaringly obvious to virtually anyone.

Way back there in the ’80s, the slogan for CD was “Perfect Sound Forever”, which we now know to be a pathetic joke. Besides the far-from-forever longevity of silver discs, that coarse resolution has proven over all these years to be shit. After great gobs of development money and tens of thousands of man-years of work, and today we have CD players that can actually, with some carefully-mastered discs, sound quite acceptable. But the fact remains that an LP on one of those $350 turntables produces music with an sense of authenticity and realism that a $50,000 CD player can not. Sorry.