You can legally mod cars (for financial gain even) to exceed speed limits to the extreme.
You can also legally modify a bagel by slicing it open with a knife and spreading cream cheese on it. That doesn't mean that I should try doing the same thing to people who cut in front of me in line.
Bad analogy - you don't own the person in front of you, but you do own the bagel, the car and the X-Box.
Or the east-German Stasi (Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit), or the Rumanian Securitate (Departamentul Securitatii Statului)... The name is the same, the concept is the same - they're protecting the security of the homeland against freaks, geeks, hippies and the rest of the freethinking criminal element.
Basically something that involves locking them up early and leaving them there for a long time.
That is extremely expensive and puts them together with other career criminals -- and more importantly, isn't allowed for the underage chavs. And they are the ones who are most likely to throw bleach in your face or stick a knife in your gut...
Lindt Swiss chocolate is usually available in most supermarkets (at Tesco for sure), and they have a good variety of non-atrocious chocolate - from sugary milk chocolate to the dark chocolate bars with 75%+ cocoa. A lot better than Cadburys, but it costs a bit more, of course.
Care to back these comments up with some facts? As a parent, your comments made me a bit upset but also curious as to what you base your opinions on.
It doesn't need "facts", it's quite evident from logic alone: If you have two children with your wife, you have caused two additional Americans to exist who otherwise wouldn't. Each American causes the emission of roughly 1,500,000 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere in the course of his lifetime, thus having children is very expensive environmentally. (And we haven't even gone into the matter of grandchildren and great-grandchildren...)
Of course there are counterarguments ("if my children don't use the energy, somebody else's would" and such) but it is probably uncontroversial that the Earth's ecosphere would be a lot more sustainable with a smaller population.
Earth's survival was never in jeopardy. It's Human survival we worry about.
Humans will survive too. Maybe in smaller numbers, but is that really all that bad ? Exponential growth is not sustainable anyway.
It would be great if those "smaller numbers" could come about through enlightened voluntary birth control. This is - regrettably - highly unlikely, and most people think that the more likely way in which it will happen - Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death - should be generally avoided to minimize human suffering.
Pssst! Only people from Oceania are allowed to read it... If you read it as an Eurasian, you have committed thought crime and must purge it from your brain!
(This is because Australia had a Life+50 copyright policy until 2004, so Orwell, Woolfe, Lovecraft and others are in the public domain. No longer, alas -- the US government have "convinced" them to adapt Life+70...)
Has Bezos offered anything more material than a free "apology" as compensation for his customers? No? Then any talk of this being "heartfelt and anguished" is just the corporate spin of the issue.
If Amazon truly wanted to fix their mistake, they would restore the book to the affected Kindles (and work out a deal with the rightholders themselves, maybe).
What's the point of extension at all? Shouldnt you just get the full length upon creation/registration of a work? Extension just seems to make things more confusing for me.
The point of extension is that all trivial bits that no-one bothers to extend will become public domain quickly and painlessly. (I.e. blog posts, holiday photos, slashdot comments - as opposed to books, movies or commercial music)
And with respect to american sportscars: I think the ZR1 is the quickest production car to go around the nurburgring at the moment.
It was for maybe about 2 months in 2008. Right now, there are at least 5 faster cars, one is a Dodge Viper, three of them are Italian, and the fastest one is British. (Not that it matters, mind you, given that you can be almost as fast on a good motorcycle for one tenth of the price and twice the coolness factor...)
The upload process itself is quite simple (and has been at least since 2004) - the problem is the bureaucracy that people with entirely too much time on their hand have built around it... And the fascist enforcement of the minutiae of this bureaucracy by some individuals with even more time on their hands.
I am sure Betacommand alone has turned hundreds (if not thousands) of photographers off Wikipedia with his automated deletion rampages based on "insufficiently explicit copyright tags" and such (doing it on images that were correctly tagged years before he and his ilk even joined to arbitrarily rewrite tagging policies)... He was banned, but there are still dozens of admins like him around.
What we need is a UK Wikipedian to go down to the NPG and snap some photos and put them on Wikimedia under a CC license so this can all be dropped. I know in DC the Smithsonians sometimes don't allow flash photography when it could damage the work but I think that's only on special items and items that have been lent to the museum from a private/personal collection. So respect them and avoid those pictures. Any art teachers out there in the UK that want to offer their kids extra credit for some point and shoot photography and correctly labeling/wikipedia-ing the photos?
We would do it if we could. But in most UK galleries (the Tate, the Tate Modern, the NG, the NPG and lots of others), photography is expressly forbidden even without flash -- and it is vigorously enforced. This regulation was put in place to prevent exactly the scenario that you describe.
Not very well, probably. From the Wikipedia article on Intel GMA:
The Intel System Controller Hub US15W for the Atom processor Z5xx series features a GMA 500 graphic system. Rather than being developed in-house, this core is a PowerVR SGX core licensed from Imagination Technologies. Since PowerVR is not cooperative with the open source movement, this has resulted in the reliance of out dated closed source Linux drivers.
All of Germany fits into less than 3 of our midwestern states. Germany is about 137000 sq. miles and the U.S. is about 3.79 million sq. miles (Wikipedia). That's not 4 times it's closer to 28 times the size of Germany.
The USPS is a self-supporting corporation. It' has government mandates it must fulfill, i.e. delivering "franked" mail from Congress and providing services to every corner of the U.S at a uniform price. The U.S. population densities only approach Germany's in a few places. Much of it is very sparsely populated and not all that easy to get to.
When I lived there, I would have been happy if USPS would have delivered mail even just to the largest, closest cities to German standards. It didn't. (10% lost or significantly delayed mail? Seriously, WTF?)
Is the Bundespost government subsidized or self supporting? I'm suspecting the former, because the 1976 rates were several times higher than the USPS rates of 1976 (I don't recall what they were.)
Deutsche Post AG (google it) was privatized about 20 years ago and is now a profitable private-sector enterprise.
Also, there is competition for the USPS for all the most profitable business except first class mail. UPS and Fedex and others deliver packages - but at rates that are typically much higher and which vary based on distance and location. They can refuse to serve any locations that are unprofitable or inconvenient. The USPS cannot. The USPS still maintains far more post offices in more locations than any private corporation could justify but they do so because citizens want their post offices regardless of how small or isolated their communities are.
Same for Deutsche Post: It also has the obligation to deliver, and also has an inordinate amount of offices (many of which are now being franchised out to flower shops, tobacconists etc in order to stay profitable).
Did you just compare the geographical sizes of US and Germany? I believe that US is just a "bit" more than 4 times larger than Germany....
Try sending a letter to Alaska or Hawai'i - it won't arrive within the week, if it arrives at all. And of course you can send a letter from Germany to the UK for 70 cents, and it will still be quicker than domestic USPS.
Also: the size of the US is no excuse for losing mail.
You still pay more (0.55 EUR vs. 0.44 USD), but the US service is definitely worse. In Germany, mail is delivered within half a day 99% of the time (drop it off at 5pm, get it in the mail at 9am), in the US it is two to three business days.
From anecdotal personal experience I would also say that I wouldn't trust USPS to deliver anything important, as the amount of lost mail is phenomenal, even (or especially) if it is registered - whereas in Germany I wouldn't have a problem sending anything short of cash by mail.
How did those images get to the US ? He broke the rules to obtain the images.
No he didn't. The museum offered the images for free download, he downloaded them. That part is unambiguously legal. The part where the museum
got touchy was the uploading to the wiki.
the EU doesn't officially recognise software patents. So it would be ok for us to just copy and resell Windows and stick 2 fingers up at Microsoft would it ?
False analogy. It would be ok for us (the EU company) to violate one of the ridiculous software patents when we make our own original software. It wouldn't be OK to redistribute Windows, since that is not a patent violation but a copyright violation (and thus a tort in the EU as well due to the Berne convention).
it's not as if there was a difficult process of obtaining the photos and if the NPG were going to charge the user to upload the photos on Wikipedia then he could always look elsewhere for photos or take them him/herself!
I think a lot of people forget common courtesy when they're on the net... if you're going to use someone else's effort, you should at least notify them. To me, this seems just like a case of ignorance... the user was simply filling out an entry and taking photos from official sites but not taking the time to read or even ask for permission
No, this is a case of purposely ignoring horribly bad copyright law in a country where a) the user doesn't reside b) the Commons server doesn't reside. Also, the picture wouldn't be usable for commons even if the museum gave their permission, because commons doesn't do "with permission", it needs PD, GFDL or CC without NC - so YOU can mirror it and not get sued.
How is this going to be different from other Linux distros and associated GUI revamp projects that have sprung up promising "we're going to be better than Windows! Really!" over the years?
Because this one will be a distro backed by the marketing clout and the manpower of a 125-billion-dollar corporation. Who have clout with OEMs and governments. Who have enough drones for programming a decent printer driver or providing non-snarky support. Who have a halo shinier than Apple in the eyes of most consumers.
This will be for Linux what MacOS X was for BSD (but with more code contributed back, hopefully).
Chrome is a nice operating system, but it could do with a decent web browser.
I'm sure Firefox will be one of the first big applications ported onto this "new windowing system" in ChromeOS... They wouldn't want ot miss this marketing opportunity!
(And it would be a good idea, actually - having a decent web browser that blocks all the ads that Chrome won't.)
Don't tell me. It'll be ready for mass production in 3 to 5 years. Somehow, I seem to remember stories like this from more than five years ago, and still, nothing happens and the solar cells are more or less the same as always.
Don't be a universal cynic, inform yourself instead. Look up Nanosolar and First Solar on Wikipedia, and you'll see that they have been already mass-producing panels at one-third of the price of crystalline silicon panels for a year or two.
"Nothing happens" is only true if you close your eyes to all the things that actually do happen.
This was briefly discussed in Number Watch a few years ago.
I looked at that site and I am unimpressed. The guy doesn't give any numbers (despite calling his site "numberwatch"), his only argument is that _he_ can't imagine it working because he can't build it with his engineering skills - without even knowing details of the plan. That is exactly the sort of useless whinging that this thread is about.
Looking at the rest of the site, it seems to be the work of an unhinged libertarian-turned-global-warming-denier who thinks he is much smarter than everybody else, obviously (gems like "there is no scientific theory linking carbon dioxide to the runaway global warming that is the basis of the calamitous predictions" are typical).
The $1/watt is for the panel only, without installation, and it is a peak figure - so actually you don't really get 1kWh from a $1 panel in 42 days (that was just for illustration) but about an order of magnitude less. But over the lifetime, this still ends up being very cheap, as the panels now live 25 years without too much degradation (only 20% or so) or a lot of maintenance. (The wiki has some cost estimates: 5 to 20 cents per kWh depending on insolation and installation costs.)
It was only this year that the solar cell industry celebrated break the $1/watt barrier. Meanwhile, I'm getting power piped into my home at a few cents a kilowatt from a nuke plant ten minutes drive from here. And the power plant will last a lot longer than solar cells stapled to some roof will.
Don't spread FUD here if you can't get your physical units right! You get "power" for a few cents per kWh, not kW (they sell you energy, not power actually - the difference is important). The thin-film solar cells have broken 1$ per Watt installed - i.e. per measure of power which will produce energy year-in, year-out (viz. 1 kWh every 42 days) and thus might end up being as cheap as nuclear energy if you count in the nukes' externalities like reprocessing, security, radioactive waste that are mostly dealt with by the government...
I think Bernie is at least partly taking the fall for his sons. I only wish we could find out the whole truth.
It is very very obvious that the sons knew. The 5+ million dollar loans that each of them received from daddy just before the arrest (never to be repaid, obviously), the sham divorce proceedings that son Andrew and is wife went through right after daddy's arrest (only to be seen splurging on shopping together just days after), the mailing-out of jewellery and other untraceable assets to the sons and the families...
That all is very obvious. (Less provable is of course the origin of the rest of their wealth... Tens of millions in real estate in Manhattan and Greenwich each, etc etc)
Slashdot Mirror
You can also legally modify a bagel by slicing it open with a knife and spreading cream cheese on it. That doesn't mean that I should try doing the same thing to people who cut in front of me in line.
Bad analogy - you don't own the person in front of you, but you do own the bagel, the car and the X-Box.
The name itself reminds me of KGB.
Or the east-German Stasi (Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit), or the Rumanian Securitate (Departamentul Securitatii Statului)... The name is the same, the concept is the same - they're protecting the security of the homeland against freaks, geeks, hippies and the rest of the freethinking criminal element.
Basically something that involves locking them up early and leaving them there for a long time.
That is extremely expensive and puts them together with other career criminals -- and more importantly, isn't allowed for the underage chavs. And they are the ones who are most likely to throw bleach in your face or stick a knife in your gut...
Lindt Swiss chocolate is usually available in most supermarkets (at Tesco for sure), and they have a good variety of non-atrocious chocolate - from sugary milk chocolate to the dark chocolate bars with 75%+ cocoa. A lot better than Cadburys, but it costs a bit more, of course.
Care to back these comments up with some facts? As a parent, your comments made me a bit upset but also curious as to what you base your opinions on.
It doesn't need "facts", it's quite evident from logic alone: If you have two children with your wife, you have caused two additional Americans to exist who otherwise wouldn't. Each American causes the emission of roughly 1,500,000 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere in the course of his lifetime, thus having children is very expensive environmentally. (And we haven't even gone into the matter of grandchildren and great-grandchildren...)
Of course there are counterarguments ("if my children don't use the energy, somebody else's would" and such) but it is probably uncontroversial that the Earth's ecosphere would be a lot more sustainable with a smaller population.
Earth's survival was never in jeopardy. It's Human survival we worry about.
Humans will survive too. Maybe in smaller numbers, but is that really all that bad ? Exponential growth is not sustainable anyway.
It would be great if those "smaller numbers" could come about through enlightened voluntary birth control. This is - regrettably - highly unlikely, and most people think that the more likely way in which it will happen - Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death - should be generally avoided to minimize human suffering.
This gets more absurd (and ironic).
You can read the book free this web site. http://www.george-orwell.org/1984
Pssst! Only people from Oceania are allowed to read it... If you read it as an Eurasian, you have committed thought crime and must purge it from your brain!
(This is because Australia had a Life+50 copyright policy until 2004, so Orwell, Woolfe, Lovecraft and others are in the public domain. No longer, alas -- the US government have "convinced" them to adapt Life+70...)
If Amazon truly wanted to fix their mistake, they would restore the book to the affected Kindles (and work out a deal with the rightholders themselves, maybe).
What's the point of extension at all? Shouldnt you just get the full length upon creation/registration of a work? Extension just seems to make things more confusing for me.
The point of extension is that all trivial bits that no-one bothers to extend will become public domain quickly and painlessly. (I.e. blog posts, holiday photos, slashdot comments - as opposed to books, movies or commercial music)
And with respect to american sportscars: I think the ZR1 is the quickest production car to go around the nurburgring at the moment.
It was for maybe about 2 months in 2008. Right now, there are at least 5 faster cars, one is a Dodge Viper, three of them are Italian, and the fastest one is British. (Not that it matters, mind you, given that you can be almost as fast on a good motorcycle for one tenth of the price and twice the coolness factor...)
I am sure Betacommand alone has turned hundreds (if not thousands) of photographers off Wikipedia with his automated deletion rampages based on "insufficiently explicit copyright tags" and such (doing it on images that were correctly tagged years before he and his ilk even joined to arbitrarily rewrite tagging policies)... He was banned, but there are still dozens of admins like him around.
What we need is a UK Wikipedian to go down to the NPG and snap some photos and put them on Wikimedia under a CC license so this can all be dropped. I know in DC the Smithsonians sometimes don't allow flash photography when it could damage the work but I think that's only on special items and items that have been lent to the museum from a private/personal collection. So respect them and avoid those pictures. Any art teachers out there in the UK that want to offer their kids extra credit for some point and shoot photography and correctly labeling/wikipedia-ing the photos?
We would do it if we could. But in most UK galleries (the Tate, the Tate Modern, the NG, the NPG and lots of others), photography is expressly forbidden even without flash -- and it is vigorously enforced. This regulation was put in place to prevent exactly the scenario that you describe.
Does it run Linux? Seriously.
Not very well, probably. From the Wikipedia article on Intel GMA:
The Intel System Controller Hub US15W for the Atom processor Z5xx series features a GMA 500 graphic system. Rather than being developed in-house, this core is a PowerVR SGX core licensed from Imagination Technologies. Since PowerVR is not cooperative with the open source movement, this has resulted in the reliance of out dated closed source Linux drivers.
All of Germany fits into less than 3 of our midwestern states. Germany is about 137000 sq. miles and the U.S. is about 3.79 million sq. miles (Wikipedia). That's not 4 times it's closer to 28 times the size of Germany.
The USPS is a self-supporting corporation. It' has government mandates it must fulfill, i.e. delivering "franked" mail from Congress and providing services to every corner of the U.S at a uniform price. The U.S. population densities only approach Germany's in a few places. Much of it is very sparsely populated and not all that easy to get to.
When I lived there, I would have been happy if USPS would have delivered mail even just to the largest, closest cities to German standards. It didn't. (10% lost or significantly delayed mail? Seriously, WTF?)
Is the Bundespost government subsidized or self supporting? I'm suspecting the former, because the 1976 rates were several times higher than the USPS rates of 1976 (I don't recall what they were.)
Deutsche Post AG (google it) was privatized about 20 years ago and is now a profitable private-sector enterprise.
Also, there is competition for the USPS for all the most profitable business except first class mail. UPS and Fedex and others deliver packages - but at rates that are typically much higher and which vary based on distance and location. They can refuse to serve any locations that are unprofitable or inconvenient. The USPS cannot. The USPS still maintains far more post offices in more locations than any private corporation could justify but they do so because citizens want their post offices regardless of how small or isolated their communities are.
Same for Deutsche Post: It also has the obligation to deliver, and also has an inordinate amount of offices (many of which are now being franchised out to flower shops, tobacconists etc in order to stay profitable).
Did you just compare the geographical sizes of US and Germany? I believe that US is just a "bit" more than 4 times larger than Germany....
Try sending a letter to Alaska or Hawai'i - it won't arrive within the week, if it arrives at all. And of course you can send a letter from Germany to the UK for 70 cents, and it will still be quicker than domestic USPS.
Also: the size of the US is no excuse for losing mail.
From anecdotal personal experience I would also say that I wouldn't trust USPS to deliver anything important, as the amount of lost mail is phenomenal, even (or especially) if it is registered - whereas in Germany I wouldn't have a problem sending anything short of cash by mail.
How did those images get to the US ? He broke the rules to obtain the images.
No he didn't. The museum offered the images for free download, he downloaded them. That part is unambiguously legal. The part where the museum got touchy was the uploading to the wiki.
the EU doesn't officially recognise software patents. So it would be ok for us to just copy and resell Windows and stick 2 fingers up at Microsoft would it ?
False analogy. It would be ok for us (the EU company) to violate one of the ridiculous software patents when we make our own original software. It wouldn't be OK to redistribute Windows, since that is not a patent violation but a copyright violation (and thus a tort in the EU as well due to the Berne convention).
mod up!
it's not as if there was a difficult process of obtaining the photos and if the NPG were going to charge the user to upload the photos on Wikipedia then he could always look elsewhere for photos or take them him/herself!
I think a lot of people forget common courtesy when they're on the net... if you're going to use someone else's effort, you should at least notify them. To me, this seems just like a case of ignorance... the user was simply filling out an entry and taking photos from official sites but not taking the time to read or even ask for permission
No, this is a case of purposely ignoring horribly bad copyright law in a country where a) the user doesn't reside b) the Commons server doesn't reside. Also, the picture wouldn't be usable for commons even if the museum gave their permission, because commons doesn't do "with permission", it needs PD, GFDL or CC without NC - so YOU can mirror it and not get sued.
How is this going to be different from other Linux distros and associated GUI revamp projects that have sprung up promising "we're going to be better than Windows! Really!" over the years?
Because this one will be a distro backed by the marketing clout and the manpower of a 125-billion-dollar corporation. Who have clout with OEMs and governments. Who have enough drones for programming a decent printer driver or providing non-snarky support. Who have a halo shinier than Apple in the eyes of most consumers.
This will be for Linux what MacOS X was for BSD (but with more code contributed back, hopefully).
Chrome is a nice operating system, but it could do with a decent web browser.
I'm sure Firefox will be one of the first big applications ported onto this "new windowing system" in ChromeOS... They wouldn't want ot miss this marketing opportunity!
(And it would be a good idea, actually - having a decent web browser that blocks all the ads that Chrome won't.)
Don't tell me. It'll be ready for mass production in 3 to 5 years. Somehow, I seem to remember stories like this from more than five years ago, and still, nothing happens and the solar cells are more or less the same as always.
Don't be a universal cynic, inform yourself instead. Look up Nanosolar and First Solar on Wikipedia, and you'll see that they have been already mass-producing panels at one-third of the price of crystalline silicon panels for a year or two.
"Nothing happens" is only true if you close your eyes to all the things that actually do happen.
How much does 40,000 feet of cable weigh?
Go to the top of the class !
This was briefly discussed in Number Watch a few years ago.
I looked at that site and I am unimpressed. The guy doesn't give any numbers (despite calling his site "numberwatch"), his only argument is that _he_ can't imagine it working because he can't build it with his engineering skills - without even knowing details of the plan. That is exactly the sort of useless whinging that this thread is about.
Looking at the rest of the site, it seems to be the work of an unhinged libertarian-turned-global-warming-denier who thinks he is much smarter than everybody else, obviously (gems like "there is no scientific theory linking carbon dioxide to the runaway global warming that is the basis of the calamitous predictions" are typical).
The $1/watt is for the panel only, without installation, and it is a peak figure - so actually you don't really get 1kWh from a $1 panel in 42 days (that was just for illustration) but about an order of magnitude less. But over the lifetime, this still ends up being very cheap, as the panels now live 25 years without too much degradation (only 20% or so) or a lot of maintenance. (The wiki has some cost estimates: 5 to 20 cents per kWh depending on insolation and installation costs.)
It was only this year that the solar cell industry celebrated break the $1/watt barrier. Meanwhile, I'm getting power piped into my home at a few cents a kilowatt from a nuke plant ten minutes drive from here. And the power plant will last a lot longer than solar cells stapled to some roof will.
Don't spread FUD here if you can't get your physical units right! You get "power" for a few cents per kWh, not kW (they sell you energy, not power actually - the difference is important). The thin-film solar cells have broken 1$ per Watt installed - i.e. per measure of power which will produce energy year-in, year-out (viz. 1 kWh every 42 days) and thus might end up being as cheap as nuclear energy if you count in the nukes' externalities like reprocessing, security, radioactive waste that are mostly dealt with by the government...
I think Bernie is at least partly taking the fall for his sons. I only wish we could find out the whole truth.
It is very very obvious that the sons knew. The 5+ million dollar loans that each of them received from daddy just before the arrest (never to be repaid, obviously), the sham divorce proceedings that son Andrew and is wife went through right after daddy's arrest (only to be seen splurging on shopping together just days after), the mailing-out of jewellery and other untraceable assets to the sons and the families... That all is very obvious. (Less provable is of course the origin of the rest of their wealth... Tens of millions in real estate in Manhattan and Greenwich each, etc etc)