The counterparties believed they had insurance on their CDOs from a very reputable institution (AIG).
Then perhaps they should have bought actual fucking regulated insurance instead of CDSs.
AIG is essentially the company who sold fire insurance to the whole town, and the whole town burned, and now they can't afford the payouts. Replace 'town' with 'the entire financial market', and 'burned' with 'housing prices collapsed'.
Which would be well and good if this was 1609, and, you know, we hadn't regulated the insurance market to require that they actually had to have the ability to cover their payouts for forever. (Seriously, the Western world started regulating insurance at about the same time it invented it.)
Because, you see, it's actually quite common for cataclysmic events to affect a large percentage of a companies policy holders all at once, so we make sure that even if the worse happens and every single person covered by, say, a company's life insurance, dies at once, the company can make the payouts. Some of those assets aren't very liquid and the company will take large losses and probably die, leaving very little for its debt holders in bankrupcy...but people will get paid, or mostly paid.
But, instead of actual insurance products, companies got credit default swaps from AIG, which were insurance in all but name...and regulation. And backed by...um...other CDSs.
Let those fuckers burn. They bought goddamn meat out of the truck of some guy's car instead of something the FDA had looked at. (Of course, it's actually worse than that...companies lobbied congress to allow them to sell meat out of their cars, and existing supermarkets started doing it. Because, you know...cheaper than refrigeration, and only 10% less safe!)
A better fix is to take the product to the cash register, and if they attempt to sell you anything else, put the product down, loudly announce that the store is ripping you off and you're going to [some other store], and walk out.
If you don't want to be so confrontational, do what I do...when they insist that you need an extended warranty, question if that means the product is going to break, and if so if that's going to cost them money.
Remember folks: Extended warranties, by simply mathematical logic, have to either cost them money, or cost you money. Other things involve the exchange of goods for money, which works if you value the goods slightly more than they do.
But extended warranties, which as a practical purpose only involve the exchange of money for money money, can only benefit one party on average.
So while you can get into a discussion about whether or not they cost you money, but they're expecting that. A much more fun discussion is to pretend you think they cost the store money. And, hence, it's ripping them off to get one.
Watch them try to go though contortions to assert that that the store isn't losing money on them, while somehow not stating that it's making money on them. (Which then, hilariously, makes them rather pointless for both sides to participate in.)
Sometimes they avoid this by pretending to be on your side and asserting that it is ripping the store off, but it's okay, but then they sound like dishonest fools harming their own employer.
And that introduces the hilarious problem that, while the chances of the product breaking may, indeed, be high enough that the warranty might actually mean you come out ahead...do you really want to buy such a crappy product in the first place?
Seriously, don't let this asshats walk over you. Point out the stupidity, and other people in line will realize what's going on.
It doesn't have anything to do with an expectation of privacy. If I hear a discussion, and I am not your lawyer, I can compelled to testify as to it. It doesn't matter whether or not you 'expected' me to hear it. Now, if I behaved illegally to overhear it, such as via an illegal wiretap or trespass laws, my testimony can possibly be thrown out on those grounds, but that's not attorney privilege.
Multiple lawyers is just multiple instances of attorney confidentiality. And it's not more than one-on-one, it's that people covered under privilege don't have to reveal any of the conversation.
I.e., client attorney privilege keeps the client or the attorney from having to speak about it at all, even parts not involving the client or attorney. Multiple attorneys or multiple clients don't change anything...the conversation is privileged for all of them and they can't be compelled to reveal it.
However, it does not extend to other people who can hear or participate in the conversation, unless they are also clients or (someone involved in the converstation's) attorneys, and they can be forced to testify as to everything.
Confidentiality is only between the two people. If someone and their lawyer are sitting in front of me on the bus talking about their case, and I overhear them, nothing stops me from being subpoenaed and forced to testify in court as to that conversation.
Likewise, if someone is talking on facebook to their lawyer, 'facebook' is obviously keeping a record of that conversation, and can be forced to reveal it in court, even while they cannot be forced to.
Although, strictly speaking, that's actually what the court is forcing him to do, forcing him to reveal it. Presumably, if there was a lawyer involved, it couldn't do it this way, and would have to contact facebook directly.
Someone's about to say 'What about phone calls?'. Wiretapping is illegal, even by the phone company, and even if it wasn't, they still don't do it, so can't be forced to turn over records.
OTOH, the records they do have, like who you call and when, they can be forced to turn over, even records of you calling your lawyer, which technically can be considered privileged information, in that lawyers can't be forced to reveal it, but rather moot as, duh, it's easy to get from other people.
Bingo. People need to stop using this example. It was an absurd attempt to find some justification to limit free speech, and is not actually against the law, and thus any hypothetical law has never actually been tested in court.
Causing a panic, of course, is illegal. Which has nothing to do with speech at all..you could cause a panic by actually lighting something on fire if you wanted. Or whatever.
If you applied that sort of logic to the 2nd amendment, the example would be 'bearing arms with the intent to kill someone', which, of course, isn't illegal...taking actions intending to kill someone is illegal (As that is murder, or attempted murder), and the 2nd amendment is irrelevant to that.
Likewise, 'speech with the intent to cause a panic' is not illegal, intending to cause a panic via any means is illegal, or at least can be.
Just because the government can't ban X doesn't mean they can't ban Y, even if you do it via X. They can ban murder even if you do it via constitutional protected gun ownership, and likewise they can ban panics even if you do it via constitutional protected ability to say what you want.
However, there's a difference between that and banning X because you're doing Y with it, which they can't do. And often the 'shouting fire' is brought up exactly to confuse this difference.
Exactly. Before they even had street view, I'd use overhead view as a pseudo-street view, and still do for places without it.
Change your view to close to the ground, angled in the right direction, and you can learn what turns actually look like in advance, which is very useful when you've never been there before.
In fact, there's even a feature in Google Earth that does that automatically, on a fly-by, although I don't use it because usually just want to know one or two turns, and I want them to stay up until I grasp them.
But other networks are now buying sci-fi. Admittedly, not as much as Fox, but a good deal more than they were buying seven to ten years ago.
Back then, sci-fi had about a fifty-fifty chance of landing on the WB or Fox. The WB would get the cheap ones, Fox the expensive. It's fun to do a quick headcount and realize the long-running, low budget shows ended up on the WB. (Buffy, Smallville, Charmed.) Whereas the expensive stuff ended up on Fox, and was promptly canceled. Nowadays, it appears the CW isn't in that market so much for sci-fi, though, happily chugging along with the shows it already has, so they're not really an option.
Anyway, a short list of newish sci-fi that isn't on Fox: Lost, Heroes, Bionic Woman, Journeyman, Life on Mars, Knight Rider, Reaper, Supernatural...
Not to mention non-broadcast shows like Eureka, Kyle XY, and Battlestar Galactica. Shows often developed for and by specific cable channels that seem to be doing well. (Of course, ratings don't matter as much on cable.)
Ironically, about half the broadcast shows are made by Fox Studios. And I have to wonder if that has something to do with it...Fox Studios does sci-fi amazingly well, and I'm wondering if it's a coincidence it ends up on Fox.
And, yeah, half of those seemed doomed to failure, so you're right in that audiences often don't like sci-fi. But still, better to try with a network that doesn't seem actively opposed to sci-fi.
And I don't always blame the studio, as I pointed out with my Dollhouse comment...if that show goes south, I don't blame Fox. Message for Joss Whedon: I trust you, and I'm willing to wait for the show to speed up, but people who like your shows and trust you are about 5% of the audience you need.
OTOH, I do blame them for a long line of other shows they screwed up (Wonderfalls if you want the best example.), or at least screwed with enough that we can't tell if they would have succeeded. (Firefly being the best example there.)
No one knows nor cares why Fox purchases science fiction TV shows just to cancel them. It is one of those inexplicable questions, like 'Why does God let bad things happen to good people?'.
No, the real question is: WHY THE FUCK DO THE PRODUCERS OF SCIENCE FICTION SHOWS SELL THEM TO FOX?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me six thousand, three hundred and forty four times, shame on evolution.
That said, if Dollhouse get canceled, sorry, this one's Whedon's fault. You can't start a show this slow.
Frankly, he would have been better off dropping the 'Who was Echo?' slight mystery, and showing us Echo and her joining, showing up Alpha's attack and escape, and then, hey, we've got something exciting and interesting to start with, a character who's 'dead' we might get back and we'll be watching Echo for, and suspense.
What I'm getting from this is that they managed to find one of that places that the organized pirate rings actually share files. Which, despite what everyone appears to think, is actually done via logged in FTP.
This probably didn't impact anything at all. Everyone assuming this has anything to do with The Pirate Bay are just flat wrong. Files on here end up getting posted on the Pirate Bay by others, but this isn't sounding like any sort of 'sharing' server, more a 'transfer files between trusted people' server
An interesting question is what the hell they're going to charge the owners with. The server probably didn't keep FTP logs, and because it wasn't p2p they can't just make up random numbers regarding the amount of people on a network. They weren't sharing with the public.
Frankly, it'd be kinda worrying if this had happened in the US, we could get some really bad precedent that essentially mean you rack up huge penalties for putting pirate stuff on shared drives, even if only known people you trust can get to it.
I'm not saying that is legal, I'm saying it's not the same thing as sharing it with an infinite amount of total strangers. (It is the difference, if you will, between using drugs and letting your friends use your drugs, and selling drugs.)
Luckily, this is happening in Sweden, where the police are in the pocket of the copyright people, but not the courts.
In CD-quality audio, 100k albums at 650 megs per album is 60 terabytes.
Yes, and 100k albums at 650 gigs per album is 60 petabytes!
Or, instead of making up numbers, you could instead realize that almost no album in existence is 650 megs uncompressed. That would require an album where the music literally goes to the end of a CD, a 80 minute album.
And, as you've come up with that number of albums by dividing by ten, would result in an average song length of eight minutes. Um, no. Really, really no.
So even the two-disk albums don't help here, because a two disk album includes more than ten songs and hence your initial estimate is off! For example, the White Album is 93 minutes long, hence two CD...but contains 30 songs. Which according to you, 30 songs equals 3 albums equals 80 minutes * 3, or 240 minutes! Ironically, because of your goofy math, that wouldn't even fit on two CDs.
Most older albums are about 40-50 minutes, and hence maybe 400 megs uncompressed, or, like you say, half that when lossless compressed. Newer albums are even shorter, hovering around 40, so closer to 350 megs.
Seriously, if you want to 'estimate' something, try using some sort of reasonable average, not the absolute max possible that could fit on the CD. (And especially don't arrive at the number of CDs first by using estimate of 'songs per album'.)
Aka, sure, the Nazis were bad, but logically there should be some middle ground. I mean, you don't want Germany to end up without a government.
When any progress is made whatsoever towards relaxing the copyright laws that almost every single human being in almost every single country agrees are out of control, you might have some sort of logical argument.
I actually said 'require registration and renewal for copyrights every X years'
I'm sorry if you misunderstood that, but I pretty clearly said later on that 'If you cannot afford the cost of registering the copyright after years of controlling the property', which would imply that registration is only required the first time you renew it.
Again, you're arguing about changes that would happen if the original registration was altered.
I don't propose doing that at all. Simple because you have to renew it after 15 years wouldn't mean you had to originally register it in any form. You create it, you have automatic copyright...it just only lasts 15 years instead of a bajillion.
Likewise, I have no idea what theft has to do with anything at all.
Or 'registration after death'. You would not be able to register things after death because, as I said, I haven't even slightly proposed changing registration, and you won't need to register things at all.
Of course, the first time you renew the copyright, you'll have to file essentially the same papers you have to do to 'register' it now before filing suit. The fact that, right now, that can be done decades (The first time you need to sue over it.) later sorta proves my point.
Copyright requires publication, and there's no way any clock would ever 'start ticking' on unpublished works.
Nor am I sure what that has to do with theft, which is entirely unrelated to copyright. That problem already exists and isn't anywhere near important enough that people worry about it, and has in fact already been solved: The clock starts when the author publishes it, but they still have copyright over the work before that, and can sue for infringement.
I don't know what either of those has to do with anything. There's already a clock on copyright, and theft is already an issue in theory, although no one actually gives a damn, the copyright office isn't going to try to point out that your movie was 'published' two weeks early by thieves. (Especially since movies are legally published when screened.) My proposal does not alter that.
Nor should it become public domain by accident, as Night of the Living Dead did.
Night of the Living Dead became public domain because of the lack of a 'Copyright (C)' marker. I have not proposed altering the changes in copyright that make that no longer required.
Again, I'm not sure how your arguments against my plan actually relate to my plan.
However, an important part of my plan is that things would become public domain by 'accident', after 15 years. If a work isn't making any money and has become so unimportant that it is literally overlooked, it should be public domain. (Especially as it's probably out of print anyway.)
Likewise, the transition to this system, would extremely quickly weed out all the old copyrights. Starting in 1910 or whenever the oldest copyright in effect is, we should 'eat' a decade a year. First year copyrights from 1910-1919 have to renew, second years copyrights from 1920-1929, etc, etc, until we reach the present, or, rather, 15 years ago.
There's some stuff as recent as the 1970s that literally no one can point to the copyright holder. It ended up in the hands of some company that was sold at auction and then folded again and the owner died and the heirs aren't findable and it wasn't listed in the will and was unknown by the executor of the estate. It just sits out there, ownerless for all intents and purposes, because it would cost tens of thousands of dollars just to track the owner down. That copyright really needs to expire.
This is in addition to the stuff that wouldn't be worth a few hundred dollar renewal fee.
(Note I'm pretending the length of copyright should not change, and that it should be renewable until the current expiration. This is clearly stupid, copyright should actually be much shorter, but I'm deliberately arguing a change with no negative side effects that anyone can point out.)
Right, the owner is allowed to do various things with it, but not to reduce the payoffs below a certain amount, or alter the odds at all.
Aka, they have to do things through the interface, and the machine will not accept certain things.
Which is exactly where electronic voting machines need to be. Obviously, administrators should have, for example, the authority to set up an election. But not erase votes or tamper with the time of votes.
Whereas in reality all this is stored in a damned Access database and it's trivially easy to edit it however you want.
I wish the real conservatives would break off and form a true conservative party, leaving the southern racist and religious white elite parties to its own.
I wish for exactly the same thing, because I'm a progressive, and if there's one thing progressives need, it's someone saying 'Whoa, wait a second, that's a pretty big change, how about we do it in smaller steps'.
I.e., you need level-headed people as well as idealists in politics. Progressives vs. conservatives, with liberals over there making sure neither of us violate our principles. (Liberals in the classic sense, not what Republicans call 'liberals', who are actually progressives. If you want to know what a 'liberal' thinks, grab the Democratic and Libertarian party platform and AND each position.)
The problem is, for the past decade, the Republicans have been the idealists, although with incredibly stupid ideals. (Half the damn ideas stolen from discredited left ideas, like Wilsonian interventionism.) And half the Democrats went along with them, and the other half ended up playing 'level-headed', which they aren't very good at.
So I'd like them flipped back, too. That said, we're so far 'behind' the rest of the world and actual public opinion, we're shifted so far to the right, that if the conservatives took the 'slow down' approach, they'd essentially be powerless for a decade as the progressives and liberals change things to actually match the American people.
Then, and only then, would some of the American people start thinking 'Whoa, too fast, slow down, I'm voting conservative.'. (For just one fact to support this, a small majority of Republicans think the government should help cover the cost of medical emergencies if people cannot afford them.)
However, being exiled for a decade is better than what is happening, as they start acting increasingly irrational, like southern governors threatening to reject the stimulus package. Yeah, good plan...it's not like out-of-work blue-collar southern workers would actually vote Republican or anything.
When those in power change the definition of "treason" to "supporting terrorism" where the definition of "terrorism" has been changed to "voicing disapproval with government policy" and so on and so forth.
But, hey, it's lot of fun since Jan 20.
Republican, hoping the president fails? Don't those traitors know we're at war(1) and they need to support their commander in chief?
1) No, starting to withdraw troops from Iraq does not mean we are not longer at war. They won't be out for almost two years, and we'll still be in the middle of that other war that everyone forgets about.
While you're replacing 'Iraq' in '44571 Iraqui civilians killed', be sure to also multiple the number by 10, as Iraq has a tenth of the population of the US to start with.
'445,710 American civilians killed'.
Or, about the population of...heh...New Orleans before Katrina. Imagine a meteor wiping the entire city out, instead of a hurricane that 99.9% of the people escaped.
I think at the very very very least we should require registration and renewal for copyrights every X years, I'd go for '15' but that's negotiable. You said 28, but I think originally, it was 14, renewable another 14. And then it was 28, renewable another 28. I'd pick '15' because that's more 'even'. (Yes, I know it's not actually even, but we like multiples of five now better than seven, which we used to like more. Society is weird.)
There is absolutely no argument against that. There simply isn't one that can be made. There is no logical reason we shouldn't do that.
If you cannot afford the cost of registering the copyright after years of controlling the property, and cannot get a loan against future earnings, the property is not actually earning any money and the argument you'll 'lose' money is nonsensical. The property, at that point, is worthless to you, and society doesn't need to 'incentive' you anymore.
Meanwhile, it would mean that copyrighted materials would no longer rot away in movie studio vaults because no one's quite sure who owns the rights.
I'd actually reduce that down even further for software and other things that will become 'worthless' even faster.
My birthright as a person is to inherit my folk culture and use it as I please, without anyone retaining the right to stop me (short of some clear and present danger of violence or something like that).
Now you've got me thinking of copyright in terms on an alien. If we ever do make contact with a non-human culture, I wonder if the argument will be made that they should not have free access to public domain works, that humanity as a whole holds the copyright on Shakespeare.
But, hypotheticals aside, you're exactly right. There are stories that, although still under copyright, have become 'culture'.
Like Superman, who is such a recognizable figure that you can create versions of him without actually violating any copyrights. Even non-parody versions. Which is not an argument that he shouldn't be public domain, but rather an argument that he's right up with other mythological figures.
Anything that gets people to read actual books is a good thing for writers at this point. Reading was actually unpopular enough to start with. With the whole 'web page' thing popping up as a reading alternative, it's in even more trouble.
You know a good way to get people to read actual books? Return a few pages of their text in google search results, and send people over to Amazon or B&N to buy the damn book if it's interesting.
Sometimes 'free advertising' as an argument for copyright infringement is stupid. Like with mp3s.
But sometimes it's actually true. Search results that quote a 5-10% certain portion of the copyrighted material, resulting in the searcher to find the original, is how google works in the first place. And it works so well there's an entire industry called SEO that people pay to have them attempt to get Google to display selections of their own copyrighted webpages.
Slashdot Mirror
The counterparties believed they had insurance on their CDOs from a very reputable institution (AIG).
Then perhaps they should have bought actual fucking regulated insurance instead of CDSs.
AIG is essentially the company who sold fire insurance to the whole town, and the whole town burned, and now they can't afford the payouts. Replace 'town' with 'the entire financial market', and 'burned' with 'housing prices collapsed'.
Which would be well and good if this was 1609, and, you know, we hadn't regulated the insurance market to require that they actually had to have the ability to cover their payouts for forever. (Seriously, the Western world started regulating insurance at about the same time it invented it.)
Because, you see, it's actually quite common for cataclysmic events to affect a large percentage of a companies policy holders all at once, so we make sure that even if the worse happens and every single person covered by, say, a company's life insurance, dies at once, the company can make the payouts. Some of those assets aren't very liquid and the company will take large losses and probably die, leaving very little for its debt holders in bankrupcy...but people will get paid, or mostly paid.
But, instead of actual insurance products, companies got credit default swaps from AIG, which were insurance in all but name...and regulation. And backed by...um...other CDSs.
Let those fuckers burn. They bought goddamn meat out of the truck of some guy's car instead of something the FDA had looked at. (Of course, it's actually worse than that...companies lobbied congress to allow them to sell meat out of their cars, and existing supermarkets started doing it. Because, you know...cheaper than refrigeration, and only 10% less safe!)
No, you moron, the people who have life insurance with AIG.
A better fix is to take the product to the cash register, and if they attempt to sell you anything else, put the product down, loudly announce that the store is ripping you off and you're going to [some other store], and walk out.
If you don't want to be so confrontational, do what I do...when they insist that you need an extended warranty, question if that means the product is going to break, and if so if that's going to cost them money.
Remember folks: Extended warranties, by simply mathematical logic, have to either cost them money, or cost you money. Other things involve the exchange of goods for money, which works if you value the goods slightly more than they do.
But extended warranties, which as a practical purpose only involve the exchange of money for money money, can only benefit one party on average.
So while you can get into a discussion about whether or not they cost you money, but they're expecting that. A much more fun discussion is to pretend you think they cost the store money. And, hence, it's ripping them off to get one.
Watch them try to go though contortions to assert that that the store isn't losing money on them, while somehow not stating that it's making money on them. (Which then, hilariously, makes them rather pointless for both sides to participate in.)
Sometimes they avoid this by pretending to be on your side and asserting that it is ripping the store off, but it's okay, but then they sound like dishonest fools harming their own employer.
And that introduces the hilarious problem that, while the chances of the product breaking may, indeed, be high enough that the warranty might actually mean you come out ahead...do you really want to buy such a crappy product in the first place?
Seriously, don't let this asshats walk over you. Point out the stupidity, and other people in line will realize what's going on.
It doesn't have anything to do with an expectation of privacy. If I hear a discussion, and I am not your lawyer, I can compelled to testify as to it. It doesn't matter whether or not you 'expected' me to hear it. Now, if I behaved illegally to overhear it, such as via an illegal wiretap or trespass laws, my testimony can possibly be thrown out on those grounds, but that's not attorney privilege.
Multiple lawyers is just multiple instances of attorney confidentiality. And it's not more than one-on-one, it's that people covered under privilege don't have to reveal any of the conversation.
I.e., client attorney privilege keeps the client or the attorney from having to speak about it at all, even parts not involving the client or attorney. Multiple attorneys or multiple clients don't change anything...the conversation is privileged for all of them and they can't be compelled to reveal it.
However, it does not extend to other people who can hear or participate in the conversation, unless they are also clients or (someone involved in the converstation's) attorneys, and they can be forced to testify as to everything.
Actually, no.
Confidentiality is only between the two people. If someone and their lawyer are sitting in front of me on the bus talking about their case, and I overhear them, nothing stops me from being subpoenaed and forced to testify in court as to that conversation.
Likewise, if someone is talking on facebook to their lawyer, 'facebook' is obviously keeping a record of that conversation, and can be forced to reveal it in court, even while they cannot be forced to.
Although, strictly speaking, that's actually what the court is forcing him to do, forcing him to reveal it. Presumably, if there was a lawyer involved, it couldn't do it this way, and would have to contact facebook directly.
Someone's about to say 'What about phone calls?'. Wiretapping is illegal, even by the phone company, and even if it wasn't, they still don't do it, so can't be forced to turn over records.
OTOH, the records they do have, like who you call and when, they can be forced to turn over, even records of you calling your lawyer, which technically can be considered privileged information, in that lawyers can't be forced to reveal it, but rather moot as, duh, it's easy to get from other people.
Bingo. People need to stop using this example. It was an absurd attempt to find some justification to limit free speech, and is not actually against the law, and thus any hypothetical law has never actually been tested in court.
Causing a panic, of course, is illegal. Which has nothing to do with speech at all..you could cause a panic by actually lighting something on fire if you wanted. Or whatever.
If you applied that sort of logic to the 2nd amendment, the example would be 'bearing arms with the intent to kill someone', which, of course, isn't illegal...taking actions intending to kill someone is illegal (As that is murder, or attempted murder), and the 2nd amendment is irrelevant to that.
Likewise, 'speech with the intent to cause a panic' is not illegal, intending to cause a panic via any means is illegal, or at least can be.
Just because the government can't ban X doesn't mean they can't ban Y, even if you do it via X. They can ban murder even if you do it via constitutional protected gun ownership, and likewise they can ban panics even if you do it via constitutional protected ability to say what you want.
However, there's a difference between that and banning X because you're doing Y with it, which they can't do. And often the 'shouting fire' is brought up exactly to confuse this difference.
Exactly. Before they even had street view, I'd use overhead view as a pseudo-street view, and still do for places without it.
Change your view to close to the ground, angled in the right direction, and you can learn what turns actually look like in advance, which is very useful when you've never been there before.
In fact, there's even a feature in Google Earth that does that automatically, on a fly-by, although I don't use it because usually just want to know one or two turns, and I want them to stay up until I grasp them.
But other networks are now buying sci-fi. Admittedly, not as much as Fox, but a good deal more than they were buying seven to ten years ago.
Back then, sci-fi had about a fifty-fifty chance of landing on the WB or Fox. The WB would get the cheap ones, Fox the expensive. It's fun to do a quick headcount and realize the long-running, low budget shows ended up on the WB. (Buffy, Smallville, Charmed.) Whereas the expensive stuff ended up on Fox, and was promptly canceled. Nowadays, it appears the CW isn't in that market so much for sci-fi, though, happily chugging along with the shows it already has, so they're not really an option.
Anyway, a short list of newish sci-fi that isn't on Fox: Lost, Heroes, Bionic Woman, Journeyman, Life on Mars, Knight Rider, Reaper, Supernatural...
Not to mention non-broadcast shows like Eureka, Kyle XY, and Battlestar Galactica. Shows often developed for and by specific cable channels that seem to be doing well. (Of course, ratings don't matter as much on cable.)
Ironically, about half the broadcast shows are made by Fox Studios. And I have to wonder if that has something to do with it...Fox Studios does sci-fi amazingly well, and I'm wondering if it's a coincidence it ends up on Fox.
And, yeah, half of those seemed doomed to failure, so you're right in that audiences often don't like sci-fi. But still, better to try with a network that doesn't seem actively opposed to sci-fi.
And I don't always blame the studio, as I pointed out with my Dollhouse comment...if that show goes south, I don't blame Fox. Message for Joss Whedon: I trust you, and I'm willing to wait for the show to speed up, but people who like your shows and trust you are about 5% of the audience you need.
OTOH, I do blame them for a long line of other shows they screwed up (Wonderfalls if you want the best example.), or at least screwed with enough that we can't tell if they would have succeeded. (Firefly being the best example there.)
No one knows nor cares why Fox purchases science fiction TV shows just to cancel them. It is one of those inexplicable questions, like 'Why does God let bad things happen to good people?'.
No, the real question is: WHY THE FUCK DO THE PRODUCERS OF SCIENCE FICTION SHOWS SELL THEM TO FOX?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me six thousand, three hundred and forty four times, shame on evolution.
That said, if Dollhouse get canceled, sorry, this one's Whedon's fault. You can't start a show this slow.
Frankly, he would have been better off dropping the 'Who was Echo?' slight mystery, and showing us Echo and her joining, showing up Alpha's attack and escape, and then, hey, we've got something exciting and interesting to start with, a character who's 'dead' we might get back and we'll be watching Echo for, and suspense.
What I'm getting from this is that they managed to find one of that places that the organized pirate rings actually share files. Which, despite what everyone appears to think, is actually done via logged in FTP.
This probably didn't impact anything at all. Everyone assuming this has anything to do with The Pirate Bay are just flat wrong. Files on here end up getting posted on the Pirate Bay by others, but this isn't sounding like any sort of 'sharing' server, more a 'transfer files between trusted people' server
An interesting question is what the hell they're going to charge the owners with. The server probably didn't keep FTP logs, and because it wasn't p2p they can't just make up random numbers regarding the amount of people on a network. They weren't sharing with the public.
Frankly, it'd be kinda worrying if this had happened in the US, we could get some really bad precedent that essentially mean you rack up huge penalties for putting pirate stuff on shared drives, even if only known people you trust can get to it.
I'm not saying that is legal, I'm saying it's not the same thing as sharing it with an infinite amount of total strangers. (It is the difference, if you will, between using drugs and letting your friends use your drugs, and selling drugs.)
Luckily, this is happening in Sweden, where the police are in the pocket of the copyright people, but not the courts.
In CD-quality audio, 100k albums at 650 megs per album is 60 terabytes.
Yes, and 100k albums at 650 gigs per album is 60 petabytes!
Or, instead of making up numbers, you could instead realize that almost no album in existence is 650 megs uncompressed. That would require an album where the music literally goes to the end of a CD, a 80 minute album.
And, as you've come up with that number of albums by dividing by ten, would result in an average song length of eight minutes. Um, no. Really, really no.
So even the two-disk albums don't help here, because a two disk album includes more than ten songs and hence your initial estimate is off! For example, the White Album is 93 minutes long, hence two CD...but contains 30 songs. Which according to you, 30 songs equals 3 albums equals 80 minutes * 3, or 240 minutes! Ironically, because of your goofy math, that wouldn't even fit on two CDs.
Most older albums are about 40-50 minutes, and hence maybe 400 megs uncompressed, or, like you say, half that when lossless compressed. Newer albums are even shorter, hovering around 40, so closer to 350 megs.
Seriously, if you want to 'estimate' something, try using some sort of reasonable average, not the absolute max possible that could fit on the CD. (And especially don't arrive at the number of CDs first by using estimate of 'songs per album'.)
Aka, sure, the Nazis were bad, but logically there should be some middle ground. I mean, you don't want Germany to end up without a government.
When any progress is made whatsoever towards relaxing the copyright laws that almost every single human being in almost every single country agrees are out of control, you might have some sort of logical argument.
Until then, fuck it.
What sort of moron would write a law where the penalty doesn't apply per incidence?
I actually said 'require registration and renewal for copyrights every X years'
I'm sorry if you misunderstood that, but I pretty clearly said later on that 'If you cannot afford the cost of registering the copyright after years of controlling the property', which would imply that registration is only required the first time you renew it.
Again, you're arguing about changes that would happen if the original registration was altered.
I don't propose doing that at all. Simple because you have to renew it after 15 years wouldn't mean you had to originally register it in any form. You create it, you have automatic copyright...it just only lasts 15 years instead of a bajillion.
Likewise, I have no idea what theft has to do with anything at all.
Or 'registration after death'. You would not be able to register things after death because, as I said, I haven't even slightly proposed changing registration, and you won't need to register things at all.
Of course, the first time you renew the copyright, you'll have to file essentially the same papers you have to do to 'register' it now before filing suit. The fact that, right now, that can be done decades (The first time you need to sue over it.) later sorta proves my point.
Copyright requires publication, and there's no way any clock would ever 'start ticking' on unpublished works.
Nor am I sure what that has to do with theft, which is entirely unrelated to copyright. That problem already exists and isn't anywhere near important enough that people worry about it, and has in fact already been solved: The clock starts when the author publishes it, but they still have copyright over the work before that, and can sue for infringement.
I don't know what either of those has to do with anything. There's already a clock on copyright, and theft is already an issue in theory, although no one actually gives a damn, the copyright office isn't going to try to point out that your movie was 'published' two weeks early by thieves. (Especially since movies are legally published when screened.) My proposal does not alter that.
Nor should it become public domain by accident, as Night of the Living Dead did.
Night of the Living Dead became public domain because of the lack of a 'Copyright (C)' marker. I have not proposed altering the changes in copyright that make that no longer required.
Again, I'm not sure how your arguments against my plan actually relate to my plan.
However, an important part of my plan is that things would become public domain by 'accident', after 15 years. If a work isn't making any money and has become so unimportant that it is literally overlooked, it should be public domain. (Especially as it's probably out of print anyway.)
Likewise, the transition to this system, would extremely quickly weed out all the old copyrights. Starting in 1910 or whenever the oldest copyright in effect is, we should 'eat' a decade a year. First year copyrights from 1910-1919 have to renew, second years copyrights from 1920-1929, etc, etc, until we reach the present, or, rather, 15 years ago.
There's some stuff as recent as the 1970s that literally no one can point to the copyright holder. It ended up in the hands of some company that was sold at auction and then folded again and the owner died and the heirs aren't findable and it wasn't listed in the will and was unknown by the executor of the estate. It just sits out there, ownerless for all intents and purposes, because it would cost tens of thousands of dollars just to track the owner down. That copyright really needs to expire.
This is in addition to the stuff that wouldn't be worth a few hundred dollar renewal fee.
(Note I'm pretending the length of copyright should not change, and that it should be renewable until the current expiration. This is clearly stupid, copyright should actually be much shorter, but I'm deliberately arguing a change with no negative side effects that anyone can point out.)
Right, the owner is allowed to do various things with it, but not to reduce the payoffs below a certain amount, or alter the odds at all.
Aka, they have to do things through the interface, and the machine will not accept certain things.
Which is exactly where electronic voting machines need to be. Obviously, administrators should have, for example, the authority to set up an election. But not erase votes or tamper with the time of votes.
Whereas in reality all this is stored in a damned Access database and it's trivially easy to edit it however you want.
I wish the real conservatives would break off and form a true conservative party, leaving the southern racist and religious white elite parties to its own.
I wish for exactly the same thing, because I'm a progressive, and if there's one thing progressives need, it's someone saying 'Whoa, wait a second, that's a pretty big change, how about we do it in smaller steps'.
I.e., you need level-headed people as well as idealists in politics. Progressives vs. conservatives, with liberals over there making sure neither of us violate our principles. (Liberals in the classic sense, not what Republicans call 'liberals', who are actually progressives. If you want to know what a 'liberal' thinks, grab the Democratic and Libertarian party platform and AND each position.)
The problem is, for the past decade, the Republicans have been the idealists, although with incredibly stupid ideals. (Half the damn ideas stolen from discredited left ideas, like Wilsonian interventionism.) And half the Democrats went along with them, and the other half ended up playing 'level-headed', which they aren't very good at.
So I'd like them flipped back, too. That said, we're so far 'behind' the rest of the world and actual public opinion, we're shifted so far to the right, that if the conservatives took the 'slow down' approach, they'd essentially be powerless for a decade as the progressives and liberals change things to actually match the American people.
Then, and only then, would some of the American people start thinking 'Whoa, too fast, slow down, I'm voting conservative.'. (For just one fact to support this, a small majority of Republicans think the government should help cover the cost of medical emergencies if people cannot afford them.)
However, being exiled for a decade is better than what is happening, as they start acting increasingly irrational, like southern governors threatening to reject the stimulus package. Yeah, good plan...it's not like out-of-work blue-collar southern workers would actually vote Republican or anything.
When those in power change the definition of "treason" to "supporting terrorism" where the definition of "terrorism" has been changed to "voicing disapproval with government policy" and so on and so forth.
But, hey, it's lot of fun since Jan 20.
Republican, hoping the president fails? Don't those traitors know we're at war(1) and they need to support their commander in chief?
1) No, starting to withdraw troops from Iraq does not mean we are not longer at war. They won't be out for almost two years, and we'll still be in the middle of that other war that everyone forgets about.
While you're replacing 'Iraq' in '44571 Iraqui civilians killed', be sure to also multiple the number by 10, as Iraq has a tenth of the population of the US to start with.
'445,710 American civilians killed'.
Or, about the population of...heh...New Orleans before Katrina. Imagine a meteor wiping the entire city out, instead of a hurricane that 99.9% of the people escaped.
Politics can be slow. We're just lucky it didn't take three.
The operator is not a trusted entity in gambling machines. I don't know why anyone would think that.
And hence those machines are subject to all sorts of rigorous analysis, and are sealed against tampering by the operator.
I think at the very very very least we should require registration and renewal for copyrights every X years, I'd go for '15' but that's negotiable. You said 28, but I think originally, it was 14, renewable another 14. And then it was 28, renewable another 28. I'd pick '15' because that's more 'even'. (Yes, I know it's not actually even, but we like multiples of five now better than seven, which we used to like more. Society is weird.)
There is absolutely no argument against that. There simply isn't one that can be made. There is no logical reason we shouldn't do that.
If you cannot afford the cost of registering the copyright after years of controlling the property, and cannot get a loan against future earnings, the property is not actually earning any money and the argument you'll 'lose' money is nonsensical. The property, at that point, is worthless to you, and society doesn't need to 'incentive' you anymore.
Meanwhile, it would mean that copyrighted materials would no longer rot away in movie studio vaults because no one's quite sure who owns the rights.
I'd actually reduce that down even further for software and other things that will become 'worthless' even faster.
My birthright as a person is to inherit my folk culture and use it as I please, without anyone retaining the right to stop me (short of some clear and present danger of violence or something like that).
Now you've got me thinking of copyright in terms on an alien. If we ever do make contact with a non-human culture, I wonder if the argument will be made that they should not have free access to public domain works, that humanity as a whole holds the copyright on Shakespeare.
But, hypotheticals aside, you're exactly right. There are stories that, although still under copyright, have become 'culture'.
Like Superman, who is such a recognizable figure that you can create versions of him without actually violating any copyrights. Even non-parody versions. Which is not an argument that he shouldn't be public domain, but rather an argument that he's right up with other mythological figures.
Which is just fucking stupid.
Anything that gets people to read actual books is a good thing for writers at this point. Reading was actually unpopular enough to start with. With the whole 'web page' thing popping up as a reading alternative, it's in even more trouble.
You know a good way to get people to read actual books? Return a few pages of their text in google search results, and send people over to Amazon or B&N to buy the damn book if it's interesting.
Sometimes 'free advertising' as an argument for copyright infringement is stupid. Like with mp3s.
But sometimes it's actually true. Search results that quote a 5-10% certain portion of the copyrighted material, resulting in the searcher to find the original, is how google works in the first place. And it works so well there's an entire industry called SEO that people pay to have them attempt to get Google to display selections of their own copyrighted webpages.
Exact same thing with books.