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If I\d encase the receiver's antenna with a type of metal bowl that opens to the top...

I don't know. Do those things really work?

Yes, I can tell that it's Canada. (I lived there for a few years.) There is no damage.

Here is a road sign that is more typical for the USA:

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-9983225-vandalized-road-sign-many-bullet-holes.php

Those mail clusters would be vandalized pretty soon, if road signs are any indication. Too many idiots in this country. I see damage everywhere as I drive around - graffiti, bullet holes, destruction... Some rural roads are so empty that nothing stops a fool from acting as a fool. It's not as bad in Canada.

That's not a "typical" road sign in the USA. Mailbox clusters have already been standard in new housing developments for years and there isn't widespread vandalism or theft of mail. An unlocked mailbox at the end of your driveway isn't exactly immune to theft or vandalism.

Yes, I can tell that it's Canada. (I lived there for a few years.) There is no damage.

Here is a road sign that is more typical for the USA:

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-9983225-vandalized-road-sign-many-bullet-holes.php

Those mail clusters would be vandalized pretty soon, if road signs are any indication. Too many idiots in this country. I see damage everywhere as I drive around - graffiti, bullet holes, destruction... Some rural roads are so empty that nothing stops a fool from acting as a fool. It's not as bad in Canada.

It's an issue of lining one's pockets at the expense of ordinary people. France laws are crazy, Loire valley castles are copyrighted. (See http://www.istockphoto.com/tutorial_copyright_list.php)

The Internet community reclaiming the Internet from domain squatters and registrars that scarf up expired domain names that should go back into the wild, just so they can show backpack girl and keyword spam, and extort money from potential domain name users.

re: close up work. We used to make specs for some Harley St surgeons years ago... I say we we would usually send them to Zeiss in Germany. Anyway, they would have their normal single vision glasses inserted with a magnfying scope. eg; http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/5180286/2/istockphoto_5180286-surgeon-with-magnifying-glasses.jpg Not very practical for day-to-day wear though :-) Or alternatively you need trifocals but they offer limited field of vision.

here's a clue

We already have something that allows this: the trackpad.

many works these days aren't the work of individuals, but corporations, and cost a LOT of money to make (i.e., movies).

That's true of movies but not other art work, and it is not necessary for movies to cost a lot to make, even in recent history. Made in 1999 The Blair Witch Project the "final budget was somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000." Yet it's world wide gross was almost $250 Million. The cost to write a book or write and compose music is even cheaper. It's not expensive to paint either. People with pocket cameras costing only a few hundred dollars make hundreds of dollars a week, well maybe not now but before the recession. With the recession now, pro photographers complain those amateurs taking away their clients. Microstock agencies like iStockphoto as well as photo sharing websites like Flickr are even taking sales away from venerable stock agencies.

They're not going to make as many blockbuster movies if their distribution rights disappear after only 5 years.

One, if they want money to keep coming in they'll make even more. But two, even if so so what? People can go back to how it used to be, and still is in some local scenes, producing art for local consumption. Almost every hit artist now started small. I recall years ago going to parties where people would bring their own instruments, get together, and play music. Others may stage a skit. Though it was too long ago for me, I used to dance on stage as well as work behind the scenes on plays. I have a flute from David Nighteagle I want to learn to play. I used to play the clarinet but that was more than 30 years ago.

Many companies would gladly pay a few million to secure distribution rights for another decade, and then this money would finance the system, so that the government doesn't need to tax anyone.

If government were small it wouldn't need much taxes.

You're no liberal if you believe in small government (if you're in the USA). That's a libertarian viewpoint.

Again you're wrong, you didn't even read the wiki article I linked to: "Classical liberalism is a political ideology that developed in the 19th century in England, Western Europe, and the Americas. It is committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets." Notice "and the Americas". In the USA two of those liberals were Thomas Jefferson and his friend James Madison. Today's libertarian is yesteryear's liberal.

I don't care how small the government is, it still needs money to administer the copyright office (not to mention the patent and trademark office). Why not fund it from companies wanting longer copyright terms on their works?

As I hinted at in the post above I'd abolish the patent office. It already costs money to register trademarks and it's the responsibility of the holder to defend it not the government. The same with copyrights. All the copyright and trademark offices need do is put them in the registery, for what's copyrighted in the Library of Congress (LoC) and for trademarks I don't know where those go, perhaps they can be put in the LoC too.

Falcon

This is why...

No one wants that in their neighborhoods / cities.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/4248715/2/istockphoto_4248715-phone-line-mess-in-shanghai-china.jpg

Can you say eyesore?

Some infrastructure the government should contract out to business. And then mandate free access to all competitors. Like roads, water, sewage. For some reason, phone, cable and internet didn't follow that philosophy.

if you missed it, I'll sell you a pair of these.

Great. Now the government is going to write a 1000-page document on exactly what constitutes manipulation of pixels. "Section 42(d)(5): If two aligned pixels are manipulated such that Pixel A becomes adjusted along either the Red, Green, or Blue color axis more than ten percent of its original value, notwithstanding lighting or discoloration, while Pixel B becomes unequally adjusted along the same or different color axis, an inappropriate pixel adjustment may have occured, pursuant to Section 12(e)(1)."

Related: some time ago, I was buying stock photos on iStockPhoto for a project. Their basic license prohibits online use of the photos at larger than 800x600. If you dig into it, you'll find that they say "any size reproduction is acceptable with substantial changes to the content" (link). But I wanted to use the original image, mostly unaltered, at a width wider than 800 but less than 600. It turns out that they really mean an overall pixel count: your use can be of a wider dimension, but not a higher pixel count. 800 x 600 = 480,000 pixels. So if you wanted to use the image at 1000 pixels wide, you would be limited to 480 pixels high. This is not stated on their web site, but I do have it written in an e-mail from one of their support representatives, and it worked just fine for my project (I wanted a cropped image at 970x400, or 20% under their limit).

Which do you fear more:

Spider

OR

Flower

this guy?

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/5650758/2/istockphoto_5650758-superhero-with-dollar-sign-on-his-chest.jpg

I think it would be a bit unfair singling out Facebook without highlighting another major offender in that category. You really ought to spend some time reading Terms of Service because they can contain the most horrendous rubbish.

Let me show you a bit of text from the Google Terms of Service that more or less appropriates *anything* you post. It's not that they claim copyright (they acknowledge that, probably because there's no legal way around it), but see what you make of this:
 

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organisations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

 
IANAL, but as far as I can tell this means in layman's terms "it's yours, but we'll use it any way we damn well please, including and not limited to handing your content to anyone else who pays us enough for it".
 
Keep in mind that this is the general license to all Google services, as far as I know this governs your use of email, Google docs, Picasa web albums - in principle they have turned their services into a sort of private version of iStockphoto where they can just take and use ANYTHING published without as much as acknowledging it - let alone pay for it.
 
That they haven't done so yet is either a function of them not needing to do it - or we haven't discovered it yet. But the door is wide open due to the Terms of Service their users accepted.
 
Now, do you still feel like keeping all your holiday snaps online?

I've read about this over a week ago and it's very strange: There's no way anyone can take a 600px wide pic and blow it up to 1-2 m. 2m is about 80 inches; so that picture would have to be printed at 7.62 dpi (ppi would be more accurate). No way.

The only way that pic could have been used is if the ad people had access to the original file, which is assumed to be a hi-res picture from a dSLR. How could that happen? I see a few possibilities:

• The lady printed the high-res pic somewhere and a clerk took the pic, forged the model releases and submitted it to a microstock agency;
• She uploaded the full size pic to Facebook and they used her pic. I am not familiar with Facebook's TOS (don't use it) so I don't know if you grant them the use of the stuff you upload;
• The photographer sold the pic - again, model releases should have been required; 'extraordinarymommy' says she did not sign any model release. I don't want to accuse the photographer of anything, I'm just stating the options.

To keep things in perspective, copyright is mostly respected in all Central and East Europe - it's not like it's a jungle. Stock images from sites like iStock are very cheap and of good quality. A 12-15 Mp file costs $20 at iStock, that's nothing when you have a paying customer. There's no NEED for anyone to steal the pic.

Course of action: contact the grocery store, find out who made their ad. Contact the ad agency. If they got the file legitimately, they will have no issue cooperating. If the file was from a stock agency, contact them and they will resolve the issue. If the ad agency cannot provide and proof, get a lawyer, threaten to sue but look for a settlement; a trial would be long a costly.

Disclosure: I am an exclusive contributor to iStock myself and I live in another Central European country.

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/1238611/2/istockphoto_1238611_rabbit_ears.jpg

What if you could create a nano ratchet that can only go in one direction?

Already done.

The graphical artist (probably out of laziness) made some design decisions that area clearly inspired by the Apple logo.

Right, nobody but apple ever did that.

Exhibit A

I understand you get a better, more penetrating, signal using MONSTER gold-plated mm wave antennae. Apparently they produce signal waves using gold ions so any streamed video has sharper definition and crisper sound.

There's a picture of one of these SupaAntennas here.

The normal selling price is $99.99/pair but I can do two for only $49.99.

Are you really naive enough to think that current crop plants are "natural" in any way?

Hint: they aren't.

"Natural" corn (maize).

"Natural" cabbage (also "natural" cauliflower, mustard, turnip, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and canola. Yes, these were all essentially the same thing at one time -- they all came from a group of closely-related species).

"Natural" carrot.

"Natural" apple.

"Natural" wheat looks like a lawn that's gone to seed. "Natural" squash, pumpkins, and melons are egg-sized or smaller.

Oh, and your "natural" olive oil? Did it come from olives the size of a pea? And how about that "natural" butter? Did it come from cows that this or ones that looked like this?

We've been Frankensteining food for millenia, my friend.

Ever notice how the "natural food" freaks are invariably brutally ignorant of the fundamentals of biology and the history of agriculture? In fact, I'd bet money that you've rarely been off pavement in your life.

Better yet, I think that if the user is using Tor, Chinese users should have something like this animated on the screen instead.

And you can see a photo of Danny here:

http://istockphoto.com/DannyCarlton

What's Next? J& J to Sue SWIS (makers of Swis army knife) for having the same symbol but in reverse as well as the Swis Air lines and the Swis Government?

Queued suits. Queued for laundering, no less.

1) The USDOJ will consolidate the States cases under one action.
2) They will select this guy as the lead prosecutor.
3) The case will go to Federal Court and inevitably fail.
4) ???
5) Profit!

1. the opening would be elongated along the axis of the tube

Possibly, but only if the size of the hole is similar to the size of the tube. If this is a shot through the "ceiling" and doesn't come close to the walls, (and if the Dena guess of 130m for the diameter of the cave is close) then this could easily be just a punched "skylight". If the tube is, in fact, even larger, then it might very well be possible to see no difference in the edges. Lava tubes, at least from the data I've seen, tend to have mostly flat ceilings and are not purely cylindrical.

2. it should be more cracked and irregular since there would be little surface erosion to smooth things out

Actually, I'd expect that with only gravity to do it's work, and if it was caused by a meteor impact, that the shape would be almost perfectly circular, with any further cracks being either covered by the pervasive Martian dust (see the Spirit and Opportunity data.) Also, impacts in stone tend not to make many cracks (see this image for an example of how cement breaks. Admittedly volcanic basalt is not concrete, but the idea is similar. Also, how long has this cave been here? A thousand years, a million, a billion? It could be just about any of the above.

3. lava tubes tend to be fairly shallow so the bottom should be visible

Lava tubes tend to be shallow on Earth. However the Ape Cave lava tube in Washington is clearly at least as deep as it is wide [See here], and since we can't see walls on a 100m wide image, we can assume (and I know all about that word) that it might easily be 100m deep. Also, seeing the bottom depends on lots of factors. What is the angle of the sun (hard to tell from the lack of shadows) and the resulting angle to the spacecraft. There's a lot of ways to get near zero light, even given a cave only 50 meters deep.

4. lava tubes tend to be curved and smooth inside, so you'd expect more reflection

Lava tubes on Earth. Which are a few thousand years old. Look at Ape Cave in the above image and show me "smooth and shiny." I see bumpy and cracked. What happens when you expose basalt to ionizing radiation? Mars, lacking in a major magnetic field, allows a lot of radiation to impact the surface. What does that do to basalt? On the moon it makes it dark and bumpy. (see regolith)

5. the walls would be visible on two sides and at least one of them should be getting sunlight

Again, only if this hole spanned the width of the tube because of natural collapse. Lower gravity on Mars means you can have much larger air-supported structures. Lack of water or an erosion cycle means that the tube is less likely to collapse on its own. As some one else stated, these structures could act totally differently on Mars than on Earth. Perhaps on Mars, the thin, cold atmosphere leads to near immediate radiative cooling of the surface and almost all lava flows were under the surface. Once you form an insulating skin that prevents outgassing to proceed to the surface, it could be possible that a large gap would form between the ceiling of the flow and the current lava flow even without a noticable down-slope flow pool. Maybe the entire lava field is just the surface of one big bubble.

It's always dangerous to extrapolate Earth features to other planets and expect there to be no difference. This is a fascinating feature that deserves further study.

Either that, or the Martians are cloaking their secret base. One of the two...

Stupid lawsuit, stupid woman, stupid cat, and there isn't an important issue at stake.

These images are taken from a publicly accessible space and aren't specifically targeted at anyone. They don't use any wallhack technology. The panoramas are taken once and remain static. All this == not any different than if someone (or someone's cat!) happened to be caught in a regular photo like this one. I'm sure if you shell out the 15 bucks for a high-res image you could see someone in one of those windows.

If you don't like anyone seeing you or (oh noes!) taking a photo with you in the frame, well tough luck, you can just stay in your mom's basement and tell the pizza delivery guy to slip it to you under the door. Nobody's watching you engage in your daily activities, in fact I'd say nobody gives a fuck about what you do. Again, Street View != surveillance.

And to the GP, where the hell do you live? I'd like to know so that I could avoid that hellhole.

Seriously, can Windows -- any version -- be made secure?

Don't be ridiculous, of course it can. Here's a step-by-step guide.

You may think that I'm missing your point, but I get your point entirely and I agree with you about why Linux does not see widespread adoption. It is not about the price, as you allude to. The price is driven by market demand. There are a lot of factors as to why something would not see widespread adoption.

But my question is, should Linux really have widespread adoption? Anyone can purchase or download a Linux distro, but, there is a reason that they don't. It just wasn't meant for them.

I have worked with MANY people - both in higher education and the public sector - who knew nothing about the Win XP computer that they were working on. They just didn't care about it. They would blow through pop-up boxes without reading them and hardly understand why the box appeared in the first place. They were not enthusiastic about "what's under the hood" of their OS. They wouldn't know the difference between the kernel and a kernel if it blew up in their face.

Linux is a powerful O/S family that can be used in a professional and home environment, and at the same time, it allows the user to be a hobbyist (granted the right permissions.) I am not a Linux elitist*, but I think that it would be worthless to people who don't really care to learn more about their O/S and just want to drag-n-drop shit. You can't touch the Windows kernel (unless you find a buffer overrun.) Yes, you could set-up KDE or Gnome to see a GUI for those visual people, but if the user doesn't want to spend more than a minute figuring out WHY they have kdelibs or kdeutils as packages, or why they should use Bourne over Bash (or vice versa), then why bother marketing to them?

I'd love to see everyone take the time to become educated about whatever Linux flavour or Free/Net/OpenBSD, especially if it gives them a choice, rather than being stuck with Windows. But as of right now, I see a disaster occurring if Linux was sexed-up for the average user to make it work more like Windows. Imagine if all users of Windows - whom log in with full administrative rights just to check e-mail - were to do the same under Linux as root.

*I say I am not an elitist, because I do not use Linux. Surprise, surprise. My initial foray into the world of anything-but-windows started with FreeBSD, and I did not do so well. So I am starting over. I WANT to use a Linux or UNIX distribution, but I also want to approach it the right way instead of mashing buttons on the keyboard.

If you cared enough about your art, you wouldn't give a shit if somebody else was able to enjoy it without paying you for it; the mere creation would be enough. Same with my poetry- if I could get people to copy it for free (and they most certainly HAVE) it's enough that my message gets out there.

I care about my art but I also care about feeding myself. That includes photography and writing. Yes, I used to write poems, as well as articles for magazines and I was working on a book. However I lost my ability to write when I had an accident. So while I can still photograph I haven't been able to write. And one of the things I had wanted to do was photojournalism.

However, the need to make money inhibits my ability to write poetry- the need to make a living off of it destroys the art.

See, you admit not being able to make money off writing "detroys the art", yet your position would make it even harder to make a living off of your creations. I've been thinking of signing up with some microstock websites that sale photographs such as iStock Photography, Shutterstock, and Big Stock Photo. If copyrights didn't exist, as soon as I were to upload any photo someone else would be able to sale them themself.

Likewise with all creation- if you can't bring it to market in 4 months, forget it, because the R&D will negatively impact the bottom line and some bean-counter will pull the project because it's not "making money".

Tech companies spend much more tyme on R&D than just 4 months. Look at Apple and the switch to Intels. Apple had Mac OSX running on Intels for years before they switched. Just this weekend, Saturday, there was a discussion on new dvd drives that were triple layed and another where a company had come up with a 1 terabyte hd. I seriously doubt it only took 4 months to develop them. As for an individual doing it, unless they were able to find a big company to buy them out, it could take a year or more to get the funding to build a factory never mind getting something out of the door. But it could take a year to find a buyer too.

I've seen far too many projects destroyed by capitalism and the stock market to believe that capitalism is capable of creating anything at all- any invention comes to market IN SPITE OF capitalism, not because of it.

It wasn't capitalism that destroyed these projects, it may of been bean counters or company executives, but it wasn't capitalism. It coud of been that those who killed a project didn't see it of any use, or that it would cost too much money to bring to market. At least capitalism allowed an attempt, unlike communism.

>I'm old enough to remember when a steering wheel was just a steering wheel...

I bring you the steering wheel of the 1958 Edsel, which featured the Teletouch shifting system, available starting in 1956. And we all know how well the Edsel did.

TOO much simplicity bad. But there's a reason we like hierarchical storage, menu systems, and information organization in general: the more options, the longer it takes to find what you're looking for.

These two writers desperately need to read "The Paradox Of Choice" by Barry Schwartz. He argues persuasively that more choice leads to more frustration and more long-term dissatisfaction with the choices that have been made.

If there is going to be a terrorism icon, it should be one that stands on its own and captures the essence of the subject, like maybe this explosion. If that is a little too "spot on", then maybe some dynamite. It should not be something used to represent another subject area, including:

Censorship
Privacy
Big Brother
Republicans
Democrats

The particular flavor of extremists providing most of fodder for discussion on Slashdot have goals independent of the often petty political squabbles here.

No problem, just practice safe virtual sex

It's also common to use a kite.

Replace the woman with Ballmer and you're all set.

Apparently you can't take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night without violating somebody's copyright there. (I think it's the lighting.)

For instance, I'm a photographer. I have a lot of good samples of my work on my website, and people searching for a photographer in a particular market or of a particular style would do well to find my site.

Have you thought about using any of the small stock agencies? There's iStockphoot, Shutterstock.com, Big Stock Phot as well as others. The three above and others are royalty free and don't pay much, in an article in the current print edition of Popular Photography the highest paying pure photo only pays up to $1.00 though it may be only 25 cents. However if you have and buyers download hundreds a week then it can at least pay for itself if not be your only source of income. After reading the article I've thought about trying to join one myself though I'm not a pro, in part because I'm not. I have one problem in photography, as a professor I had once said, my composition needs to be worked on, but the more you shoot the better you get.

Plenty of colors available!! But I missed yellow. And if it's granite, how do you drill those "swiss" holes? Like this. :-)

Free up the helicopters for much more important tasks.

"Seriously, where do people get their pictures for websites?"

I use istockphoto.com. $1-3 for an image suitable for web work.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/ 264862/2/istockphoto_264862_flaming_hard_drive_2.j pg
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/ 264865/2/istockphoto_264865_flaming_hard_drive_3.j pg
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve /264859/2/istockphoto_264859_flaming_hard_drive_1. jpg

Oh, the fun they had...

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/ 264862/2/istockphoto_264862_flaming_hard_drive_2.j pg
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/ 264865/2/istockphoto_264865_flaming_hard_drive_3.j pg
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve /264859/2/istockphoto_264859_flaming_hard_drive_1. jpg

Oh, the fun they had...

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/ 264862/2/istockphoto_264862_flaming_hard_drive_2.j pg
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/ 264865/2/istockphoto_264865_flaming_hard_drive_3.j pg
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve /264859/2/istockphoto_264859_flaming_hard_drive_1. jpg

Oh, the fun they had...

An image of the slashdotted server viewed from MESSENGER spacecraft can be found here

For a stock photography site to be really useful, it needs a LOT of images, a lot of legal ass-covering, and a well thought-out quality control system. This is one of the reasons that stock photography usually costs hundreds of dollars for even restricted uses.

Take a look at the size and complexity of iStockphoto and you'll see just how far a free photography site would have to go to save buyers $1 (or $3 for highest res.). Even if you can match the quality, find 180,000 files, and build a really good search system, then you have the issue of paying for 50 gigs of bandwidth a day... sadly, I can't really see this happening. (Disclaimer: I have some images on iStockphoto, and make about $5 a month from them).

I would also recommend sxc.hu and iStockphoto sxc is free, and istock is neaarly free (anywhere from 50 cents to 1.50 per pic, depending on size)

And then go directly to Jail...Well not really, but this is still likely to be a violation of the copyright in the image. All the manipulation in the world doesn't change the fact that you started with someone elses work. Obviously there are exceptions to this, public domain, creative commons licenses etc.
A little plug here, for a great range of royalty free stock images check out iStockphoto. Images from as little as 0.50c