Perhaps the solution is some sort of automatic grace period? For instance, anyone can maintain copyright on a work for say a timeperiod of 1-year tax-free, but after that they either have to start ponying up (because it's economically relevant enough to care) or lose the copyright. The problem I foresee is figuring out how to appropriately tax copyrights. Photographers for instance sometimes rely on copyright protection to generate revenue off their work, but since an individual photo realistically generates a fraction of their necessary income they would be paying through the nose in taxes. Whereas a huge company like UMG or Sony could easily afford the taxes on their entire vast catalog if they paid the same rate as say a photographer. The trick is finding a way to do this that leverages huge companies to drop some of their less profitable copyrights without killing the livelihood of individual creators.
My apologies, I just noticed he's actually CprE. When I first saw his name come up I thought it was the same Dr. Jacobson who had been my "advisor" when I was still AeroE until I looked him up. Fortunately that's not the case. I should ask some of my old friends from that program if they ever had him as an instructor. As an alumni, I would have to say it would be completely irresponsible of any of you still there to visit any mischief on Dr. Jacobsen (say organized protest/boycotts);)
And just how much do you suppose Dr. Jacobson received for his time? Having read both Jacobson's deposition and Pouwelse's critique, I do find it hard not to question Dr. Jacobson's competence (or at least his ethics). Dr. Jacobson himself testified that he found no evidence of KaZaA on Ms. Lindor's computer. If you accept the plausibility of mis-identification (as Pouwelse's statement strongly suggests) I don't see the grounds for immediately jumping to the conclusion "oh, it must have been her son using his computer on her connection, let's go after him too" that the RIAA has pursued. They're seriously speculating she either tampered with her computer beyond the ability of their "expert" to detect, or someone else brought a computer into her home (but they want to inspect her son's desktop computer anyway). I don't know why this case is even still going, it's utterly ridiculous.
Yes, I believe you're correct. That he's the RIAA's "expert" witness makes me very glad my major from Iowa State is in physics and not CS. Even still his presence at my alma mater makes me feel somehow... dirty. After reading his earlier depositions I would feel shortchanged if he had been the instructor for any of my classes. I wonder if this will in any way impact his career in academia. It would be wonderful to see students boycotting his classes or something.
My problem with the sex scene in question is it was just a particularly boring spot in what was on the whole a boring movie. I don't normally mind a good hot'n'steamy sex scene where it makes sense, but damn if that one didn't drag on forever. I would've been happier if they'd just spliced in a nice porn clip in its place. At least then I might've gotten something out of it.
I'm not really seeing a lot of difference between one and two with the exception that you seem to think that by allowing people to view copyrighted images on the web the photographer has somehow given up all rights to those images. There are plenty of places where you can find free or very low-cost royalty-free images for commercial use. I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect to be paid for your work, especially if someone else is making a profit off of its use.
1. Here are some images, I have watermarked them and I retain copyright on them, so you can look at them AND NOTHING ELSE, I AM THE KING!!! HAHAHAHA, COPYRIGHT GIVES ME SUCH POWER!!!!
Uh, why should you be able to just take any picture off the web and use it for commercial use (i.e. advertising) that makes you money and not pay the artist whose work you're benefiting from? He's not charging you to look at the photos, he's charging you if you're going to use them. This seems a prefectly reasonable use of copyright.
3. If you buy em from me I will not sue you, I PROMISE.;)
As long as you have a valid license contract, you pay the artist, and you don't violate the terms of the license agreement there would be no grounds to sue.
4. I will now search the web and magazines and newspapers and telephone books and anything else I can think of, daily, so I can find people who have used my images without my permission (I AM KING!!) and then I will threaten them with lawsuits and demand three times the sale price unless they reply to me within two weeks, then it is TEN times the sale price, oh, I'm gunna be so rich!!!
Again, what do you have against artists making money off their work? The photographer in this case didn't exactly go scouring the world for copyright infringement. The defendant in this case used the photo in an inside cover ad on a phonebook in the same city where the photographer lives. It's not as if the website they took it from doesn't make it very clear the image requires a license agreement for use. The damages awarded here are for punitive purposes to prevent people from just using the photos until they get caught and have to only pay the original price.
See the difference? The first one is a simple contract which people willfully enter into because the photographer has something the buyer wants.
Clearly he was offering something they wanted or they wouldn't have used it. There are plenty of places to find free or cheap royalty-free images on the internet that would've avoided this whole issue.
I don't think the victim's race/sex/orientation alone is sufficient to impose hate crimes penalties. I'm not a lawyer, but from what I recall reading there also has to be some evidence that the victim's race/sex/orientation was also a motivating factor in committing the crime. If you kill someone in a robbery and they just happen to be black I doubt it would be a hate crime. If there's evidence you were specifically targeting them because they were black it probably would be.
Just from a guess, I'd say the "interviewers" probably tend to ask enough leading questions where in a state of panic you might make up something reasonably convincing but wrong. Or for legitimate suspects who are hardened to torture techniques they could still give mis-information based just enough on the truth to be believable.
I'd say for most of the US this applies to the cable market as well. Granted they face external competition from telcos getting into internet and satellite TV, but I can't say I see much distinction between Comcast and Time Warner and certainly no competition in my market. They just haven't really started suing their customers (yet).
The Oort cloud was proposed based on calculating the orbital parameters of known and previously unknown long-period comets. They have to come from somewhere, and if you calculate the orbits they are in you get aphelion distances of 20,000-200,000 AU. Based on their observed frequency and distribution of orbital parameters you can make an estimate of how many would have to be out there to fit the observations. Turns out that it's a lot of them. Based on this, I don't see how the Oort cloud is in any way "fictional" and it certainly wasn't invented to fit any current theories of planet formation. It's really not much different from how we know the Kuiper Belt exists, except recently technology improved sufficiently to gather many more observations of KBOs and confirm its existence beyond any doubt.
No, if you RTFA the summary was quite correct. The Oort cloud is a vast place and we don't know exactly what may be lurking there waiting for us to catch a glimpse of it. We can rule out any large bodies closer than a little past Pluto, but something the size of Earth could hide well beyond 1000 AU quite easily. The Oort cloud is proposed to extend between 20,000 AU and 200,000 AU. Given the little bit of research I personally did on terrestrial planet formation and evolution of accretion disks I think it is extremely unlikely something that large would form out there, but there could easily be dozens to hundreds of Pluto sized objects out there waiting to be found.
I'll concede that atmosphere has a huge impact. However, if Venus's atmosphere was entirely composed of Ar or even N2 instead of CO2 it wouldn't be nearly as warm, and probably colder than Mercury.
So please stop saying that CO2 causes global warming.
Should I also stop saying that gravity causes things to fall? A simple look at the surface temperatures of Venus and Mercury makes it pretty clear CO2 makes planets retain heat. That's an extreme example, but to say increasing CO2 has no impact on global temperature is like saying if I eat a lot of cake I won't get fat.
It was warmer during the Roman Warming than it is now. Fig trees grew in northern Italy where they don't grow now.
You're conflating regional trends with global mean. In history various parts of the world have been warmer or colder than they are now, this isn't disputed. But in general for everyplace that got warmer, somewhere else got colder. The trend now is that global mean temperature is going up well beyond where it has been in several thousand years.
Your argument is disingenuous. The importance of a greenhouse gas is more than simply the strength of its absorbtion lines, but also its sources/sinks and residence time in the atmosphere. Water is a strong absorber, but its distribution is highly time dependent and its residence time in the atmosphere is exceedingly short. Water acts as a strong feedback mechanism rather than a direct cause. The simple fact is that if there were no CO2 all of the water would freeze out of the atmosphere and its contribution to warming would be lost. See for example the Snowball Earth.
Water is highly unstable in Earth's atmosphere and has a very strong tendency at positive-feedback processes in both directions. If it gets colder and more ice starts forming, more water freezes to ice and makes it get even colder. Methane is a minor effect for a different reason. Without a constant source there would be no more methane in a very short time (it breaks down quite quickly in the atmosphere). CO2 however has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere and as such has a much stronger influence on long-term processes.
The other thing that amazes me are the number of people who believe really weird things about climate change research. For example, I've read comments alleging that climate scientists "tweak" their models to fit known weather patterns, but never verify those models on other data. This is such a patently ridiculous allegation that in any other field it would be laughed off the stage, but for some reason there is a group of people who are desperate to dis-believe in climate change no matter what the evidence.
This has been a constant source of amazement to me as well. Of course scientists try to make their models reproduce known phenomena, otherwise it wouldn't be a very good model. But that is less to do with tweaking parameters and more to do with trying to get an understanding of what's really going on and making sure your model equations reproduce it. A good model that reproduces El Nino does so not because someone programmed in "El Nino" but rather because the equations of fluid mechanics when coupled with Earth-like inputs happen to have an El Nino oscillation. The truth is no one model is perfect, which is why techniques such as ensemble averaging were created. If several different models are telling you the same general thing, there's a good chance something real is going on there.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that doubling the concentration of a known greenhouse gas is going to do something. It's what that something is that's still up for debate.
The problem is most public school science teachers aren't scientists. You don't get those teaching you science until you go to a university, and they rarely get input into how science is actually taught before then. Science/math preparation for high school students going into those fields is lamentable in most of the US.
As someone who actually studied climate science I appreciate the attempt at raising public awareness of the issue. However, I fear it will suffer the same fate as evolution education and turn into a political minefield where neither side really "wins" and the real losers are the students who end up with a half-assed and confusing discussion of a very important issue.
The biggest problem with discussions of global warming is they have become so politicized (by both sides) that the actual science is getting lost in the noise. The "save the environment" types have probably caused as much harm in getting to a real solution as the "skeptics". It's all about soundbites and rarely does the science get laid out in a sane and understandable way to the general public.
The supposition that Mars may have given rise to some form of life is based on what we think we know about the formation of the terrestrial planets. The evidence for life on our own planet suggests it arose at a time when it was far less "benign" than at present. Billions of years of cellular life on our planet have altered its atmosphere and climate far beyond what it was when life started. Earth would've been completely inhospitable to most life as we know it when life first started.
Looking at what we know of Mars, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that it went through an early warm/wet period similar to Earth. However, being smaller this phase was much shorter. The catch is we have far fewer direct clues as to exactly what early Mars was like given we have fewer geological samples, and we have to rely more on inference from theory and comparison to other terrestrial objects.
Composition plays some role, but it does more to affect the apparent color than the luminosity. Like I said, that relationship is just a rule of thumb and it's really only linear for a certain range of masses. That relationship comes from assuming a basic composition that is true for most stars (mass dominated by H/He) and calculating what it takes to keep a star in hydrostatic equilibrium. Extremely small and extremely large stars start to deviate from that rule due to other effects becoming important. You'd never use that for an important calculation, but to get an idea of what you're looking at it's a good starting point.
Actually, the mass/luminosity relationship is (roughly) L~M^3.5. They never mention the exact size of the star, but if we assume it's half as massive as the sun it's luminosity is right around 9% of solar (I'm rounding a bit). Take into account you've got a factor of 4 increase in insolation by moving it to half the distance and you can see the inner planet gets something like 36% of the insolation of Jupiter. Granted, I completely made up the mass of the star, but it gives you an idea of what's going on.
I'm going to respond to this because even though I completely disagree with you, I also disagree with your post being marked flamebait (although adding some evidence to support your point would've been useful). I'm going to presume you're referencing the claims of Cooperstock & Tieu. Unfortunately, their model ultimately requires an unphysical mass distribution (Vogt or Korzynski). It is a good point that for a long time people didn't do full GR simulations, but the end result is just that you need about 30% less dark matter than Newtonian dynamics predicts to explain the observations.
The other major problem of Cooperstock & Tieu's work is while it does address galactic rotation curves, it still fails to address the other observations supporting the existence of dark matter (namely certain galaxy clusters).
Given that your UID/email imply you work in medical research rather than astronomy I'll forgive you for not keeping current on the research, especially given how much press Copperstock & Tieu received. However, you should have learned by now that a single paper is rarely the definitive word in a field of research.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the solution is some sort of automatic grace period? For instance, anyone can maintain copyright on a work for say a timeperiod of 1-year tax-free, but after that they either have to start ponying up (because it's economically relevant enough to care) or lose the copyright. The problem I foresee is figuring out how to appropriately tax copyrights. Photographers for instance sometimes rely on copyright protection to generate revenue off their work, but since an individual photo realistically generates a fraction of their necessary income they would be paying through the nose in taxes. Whereas a huge company like UMG or Sony could easily afford the taxes on their entire vast catalog if they paid the same rate as say a photographer. The trick is finding a way to do this that leverages huge companies to drop some of their less profitable copyrights without killing the livelihood of individual creators.
My apologies, I just noticed he's actually CprE. When I first saw his name come up I thought it was the same Dr. Jacobson who had been my "advisor" when I was still AeroE until I looked him up. Fortunately that's not the case. I should ask some of my old friends from that program if they ever had him as an instructor. As an alumni, I would have to say it would be completely irresponsible of any of you still there to visit any mischief on Dr. Jacobsen (say organized protest/boycotts) ;)
And just how much do you suppose Dr. Jacobson received for his time? Having read both Jacobson's deposition and Pouwelse's critique, I do find it hard not to question Dr. Jacobson's competence (or at least his ethics). Dr. Jacobson himself testified that he found no evidence of KaZaA on Ms. Lindor's computer. If you accept the plausibility of mis-identification (as Pouwelse's statement strongly suggests) I don't see the grounds for immediately jumping to the conclusion "oh, it must have been her son using his computer on her connection, let's go after him too" that the RIAA has pursued. They're seriously speculating she either tampered with her computer beyond the ability of their "expert" to detect, or someone else brought a computer into her home (but they want to inspect her son's desktop computer anyway). I don't know why this case is even still going, it's utterly ridiculous.
Yes, I believe you're correct. That he's the RIAA's "expert" witness makes me very glad my major from Iowa State is in physics and not CS. Even still his presence at my alma mater makes me feel somehow... dirty. After reading his earlier depositions I would feel shortchanged if he had been the instructor for any of my classes. I wonder if this will in any way impact his career in academia. It would be wonderful to see students boycotting his classes or something.
My problem with the sex scene in question is it was just a particularly boring spot in what was on the whole a boring movie. I don't normally mind a good hot'n'steamy sex scene where it makes sense, but damn if that one didn't drag on forever. I would've been happier if they'd just spliced in a nice porn clip in its place. At least then I might've gotten something out of it.
I'm not really seeing a lot of difference between one and two with the exception that you seem to think that by allowing people to view copyrighted images on the web the photographer has somehow given up all rights to those images. There are plenty of places where you can find free or very low-cost royalty-free images for commercial use. I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect to be paid for your work, especially if someone else is making a profit off of its use.
Uh, why should you be able to just take any picture off the web and use it for commercial use (i.e. advertising) that makes you money and not pay the artist whose work you're benefiting from? He's not charging you to look at the photos, he's charging you if you're going to use them. This seems a prefectly reasonable use of copyright.
As long as you have a valid license contract, you pay the artist, and you don't violate the terms of the license agreement there would be no grounds to sue.
Again, what do you have against artists making money off their work? The photographer in this case didn't exactly go scouring the world for copyright infringement. The defendant in this case used the photo in an inside cover ad on a phonebook in the same city where the photographer lives. It's not as if the website they took it from doesn't make it very clear the image requires a license agreement for use. The damages awarded here are for punitive purposes to prevent people from just using the photos until they get caught and have to only pay the original price.
Clearly he was offering something they wanted or they wouldn't have used it. There are plenty of places to find free or cheap royalty-free images on the internet that would've avoided this whole issue.
I don't think the victim's race/sex/orientation alone is sufficient to impose hate crimes penalties. I'm not a lawyer, but from what I recall reading there also has to be some evidence that the victim's race/sex/orientation was also a motivating factor in committing the crime. If you kill someone in a robbery and they just happen to be black I doubt it would be a hate crime. If there's evidence you were specifically targeting them because they were black it probably would be.
Just from a guess, I'd say the "interviewers" probably tend to ask enough leading questions where in a state of panic you might make up something reasonably convincing but wrong. Or for legitimate suspects who are hardened to torture techniques they could still give mis-information based just enough on the truth to be believable.
I'd say for most of the US this applies to the cable market as well. Granted they face external competition from telcos getting into internet and satellite TV, but I can't say I see much distinction between Comcast and Time Warner and certainly no competition in my market. They just haven't really started suing their customers (yet).
I present to you the RIAA.
The Oort cloud was proposed based on calculating the orbital parameters of known and previously unknown long-period comets. They have to come from somewhere, and if you calculate the orbits they are in you get aphelion distances of 20,000-200,000 AU. Based on their observed frequency and distribution of orbital parameters you can make an estimate of how many would have to be out there to fit the observations. Turns out that it's a lot of them. Based on this, I don't see how the Oort cloud is in any way "fictional" and it certainly wasn't invented to fit any current theories of planet formation. It's really not much different from how we know the Kuiper Belt exists, except recently technology improved sufficiently to gather many more observations of KBOs and confirm its existence beyond any doubt.
No, if you RTFA the summary was quite correct. The Oort cloud is a vast place and we don't know exactly what may be lurking there waiting for us to catch a glimpse of it. We can rule out any large bodies closer than a little past Pluto, but something the size of Earth could hide well beyond 1000 AU quite easily. The Oort cloud is proposed to extend between 20,000 AU and 200,000 AU. Given the little bit of research I personally did on terrestrial planet formation and evolution of accretion disks I think it is extremely unlikely something that large would form out there, but there could easily be dozens to hundreds of Pluto sized objects out there waiting to be found.
I'll concede that atmosphere has a huge impact. However, if Venus's atmosphere was entirely composed of Ar or even N2 instead of CO2 it wouldn't be nearly as warm, and probably colder than Mercury.
Should I also stop saying that gravity causes things to fall? A simple look at the surface temperatures of Venus and Mercury makes it pretty clear CO2 makes planets retain heat. That's an extreme example, but to say increasing CO2 has no impact on global temperature is like saying if I eat a lot of cake I won't get fat.
You're conflating regional trends with global mean. In history various parts of the world have been warmer or colder than they are now, this isn't disputed. But in general for everyplace that got warmer, somewhere else got colder. The trend now is that global mean temperature is going up well beyond where it has been in several thousand years.
Your argument is disingenuous. The importance of a greenhouse gas is more than simply the strength of its absorbtion lines, but also its sources/sinks and residence time in the atmosphere. Water is a strong absorber, but its distribution is highly time dependent and its residence time in the atmosphere is exceedingly short. Water acts as a strong feedback mechanism rather than a direct cause. The simple fact is that if there were no CO2 all of the water would freeze out of the atmosphere and its contribution to warming would be lost. See for example the Snowball Earth.
Water is highly unstable in Earth's atmosphere and has a very strong tendency at positive-feedback processes in both directions. If it gets colder and more ice starts forming, more water freezes to ice and makes it get even colder. Methane is a minor effect for a different reason. Without a constant source there would be no more methane in a very short time (it breaks down quite quickly in the atmosphere). CO2 however has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere and as such has a much stronger influence on long-term processes.
This has been a constant source of amazement to me as well. Of course scientists try to make their models reproduce known phenomena, otherwise it wouldn't be a very good model. But that is less to do with tweaking parameters and more to do with trying to get an understanding of what's really going on and making sure your model equations reproduce it. A good model that reproduces El Nino does so not because someone programmed in "El Nino" but rather because the equations of fluid mechanics when coupled with Earth-like inputs happen to have an El Nino oscillation. The truth is no one model is perfect, which is why techniques such as ensemble averaging were created. If several different models are telling you the same general thing, there's a good chance something real is going on there.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that doubling the concentration of a known greenhouse gas is going to do something. It's what that something is that's still up for debate.
The problem is most public school science teachers aren't scientists. You don't get those teaching you science until you go to a university, and they rarely get input into how science is actually taught before then. Science/math preparation for high school students going into those fields is lamentable in most of the US.
Fox News?
As someone who actually studied climate science I appreciate the attempt at raising public awareness of the issue. However, I fear it will suffer the same fate as evolution education and turn into a political minefield where neither side really "wins" and the real losers are the students who end up with a half-assed and confusing discussion of a very important issue.
The biggest problem with discussions of global warming is they have become so politicized (by both sides) that the actual science is getting lost in the noise. The "save the environment" types have probably caused as much harm in getting to a real solution as the "skeptics". It's all about soundbites and rarely does the science get laid out in a sane and understandable way to the general public.
The supposition that Mars may have given rise to some form of life is based on what we think we know about the formation of the terrestrial planets. The evidence for life on our own planet suggests it arose at a time when it was far less "benign" than at present. Billions of years of cellular life on our planet have altered its atmosphere and climate far beyond what it was when life started. Earth would've been completely inhospitable to most life as we know it when life first started.
Looking at what we know of Mars, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that it went through an early warm/wet period similar to Earth. However, being smaller this phase was much shorter. The catch is we have far fewer direct clues as to exactly what early Mars was like given we have fewer geological samples, and we have to rely more on inference from theory and comparison to other terrestrial objects.
Composition plays some role, but it does more to affect the apparent color than the luminosity. Like I said, that relationship is just a rule of thumb and it's really only linear for a certain range of masses. That relationship comes from assuming a basic composition that is true for most stars (mass dominated by H/He) and calculating what it takes to keep a star in hydrostatic equilibrium. Extremely small and extremely large stars start to deviate from that rule due to other effects becoming important. You'd never use that for an important calculation, but to get an idea of what you're looking at it's a good starting point.
Actually, the mass/luminosity relationship is (roughly) L~M^3.5. They never mention the exact size of the star, but if we assume it's half as massive as the sun it's luminosity is right around 9% of solar (I'm rounding a bit). Take into account you've got a factor of 4 increase in insolation by moving it to half the distance and you can see the inner planet gets something like 36% of the insolation of Jupiter. Granted, I completely made up the mass of the star, but it gives you an idea of what's going on.
And for the record I was an astronomer.
I'm going to respond to this because even though I completely disagree with you, I also disagree with your post being marked flamebait (although adding some evidence to support your point would've been useful). I'm going to presume you're referencing the claims of Cooperstock & Tieu. Unfortunately, their model ultimately requires an unphysical mass distribution (Vogt or Korzynski). It is a good point that for a long time people didn't do full GR simulations, but the end result is just that you need about 30% less dark matter than Newtonian dynamics predicts to explain the observations.
The other major problem of Cooperstock & Tieu's work is while it does address galactic rotation curves, it still fails to address the other observations supporting the existence of dark matter (namely certain galaxy clusters).
Given that your UID/email imply you work in medical research rather than astronomy I'll forgive you for not keeping current on the research, especially given how much press Copperstock & Tieu received. However, you should have learned by now that a single paper is rarely the definitive word in a field of research.