They do, it's called ReplayGain. It scans music, figures out the peaks and puts a value in the file that is read when it's decoded. And there are some other standards that do the same thing, too, some of which alter the music itself (In a reversable way.) so that even music players that don't understand the standard will play it at the same volume. (Of course, those players can't undo it.) The name mp3gain comes to mind.
In addition, all audio players include real-time normalization DSPs that alter the volume up and down based on the current average volume. Many of them even decode the next several seconds to discover if they're going to have to get louder or quieter, and start doing it smoothly in advance.
Many of these do not actually look just for literal 'peaks', but to do an acoustical analyzation on the 'apparent loudness', for human beings, of different parts of the music. This uses many of the same theories as lossless compression on what parts of the sound is 'most important' for people.
They also let you analyze entire albums and adjust them all by the same value, instead of per-song, which is good if the songs go directly into each other and you often listen to them that way, like some Beatles' albums.
However, none of them do what the music industry does, which is to turn every single frequency as loud as possible, because that makes the music sound like crap and people do not actually want that.
I don't know of any player that deliberately lets people adjust the volume per-song, because that wouldn't actually work right. People don't normally listen to music at the same volume all the time, so just storing the mixer would end up just capturing how loud they wanted music at that time, not how 'wrong' the song was. For it to work, they'd have to sit there and listen to a 'base song' and then adjust the volume of each song based on how much it was off the base.
It's much better to have it automated in the player. Although Replaygain is, actually, just stored as a tag in mp3 and most other audio formats, and is trivial to actually go in and edit manually if you want to. The gain is even stored in dBs instead of some custom value, and it also has 'clipping', which I think is a multipler of the music and is always around 1. I.e, I think it's Ax+B, where a and b are settable. (Or possibly it's A(x+B).) So I guess you could say many players have good support for custom volume in each song, and the automated setting of it by algorithm, but the ability to change that manually is not obvious.
They already lose all credibility, as their claim is stupid. If it were true, they'd simply be providing music that was losslessly compressed to start which. Which, duh, is actually less work on their part. (Yes, they'd still 'need' DRM, but putting DRM on something is completely unrelated to the compression.)
It's like ordering a burrito 'to go' and having them stuff it in a tiny box and claiming that's why it falls apart when you try to eat it. a) No, that's not the reason it fell apart, the reason is you didn't make it right and people who aren't getting them 'to go' are complaining about the same thing, but, more importantly, b) If that actually is the reason, why the hell are you cramming it in such little boxes? Why don't you charge 5 cents more and buy bigger boxes?
What people in this thread are missing is that it's not just the entire sound being turned up or down. If it were that, moderate intelligence in the audio player would fix the problem.
The problem is that they will, for example, max every frequency. By whatever amount is needed to make that frequency go to exactly the same volume. And alter it continually.
So if you have someone singing, they will sing at the same volume the entire time, even if part is supposed to be louder. If you have someone playnig a musical instrument that overlaps that ranges quieter than the singer, you will get that instrument loud when they aren't singing, and quiet when they are.
And heaven help us if that instrument not only covers that frequency but others, you'll have parts of it getting louder and quieter semi-randomly as people sang. Luckily, at this point, they do that sort of normalization in advance of mixing, but that results in all instrumentation and singing being exactly the same volume.
To implement your idea, they'd need to label every single change they made, which, considering they split the music up into second-long intervals and something like a dozen frequency, and adjust every single one of these to max, would be near impossible. It would be impossible to undo changes that were made pre-mix, which is how they do it now.
They do this because, in very noisy places, or on the radio, they can turn it all the way up and it's as loud as possible. (Whereas if every part wasn't made equal, they could only turn it up as loud as the loudest part.)
It's rather akin to making a TV show and making sure every scanline is 'as bright as possible', by maximizing all luminance, so people can see it better at long distances, as some sort of goal. This would render black as white and dark green as bright green, it's so fucking idiotic it's not even comprehendable, and you rather obviously can't fix it at the TV. OTOH, if people wanted that at their TVs, they could just turn the goddamn brightness up all the way and leave the rest of us to actually listen to things the way they'd sound if they were actually created by real objects.
She was not 'the teacher', you moron. She was a substitute. She didn't even use the damn computer. She was watching the class, and some students were using the computer, which they had permission to. Suddenly, porn starts appearing. She kicks them off, tries to close it down, it's malware and keeps popping up, she turns the monitor away from the class because she'd been giving specific instructions not to turn the computer off. She asked for help from the office, they do not show up.
There are plenty of places that don't even bother shutting down monitors anymore. They turn themselves off, and pushing the button to turn them off is like unplugging VCRs when you don't need them so they won't use power...it's not worth dealing with. Do the shutdown, when it finishes, you're done. (If it doesn't finish, you unplug the entire computer from the wall.)
And there are plenty of other places that, first you shut down the computer, and then you flip the power strip off to turn everything else off.
In either of those places, even a 'perfectly-trained' teacher might not know how to turn the monitor off without turning the computer off. They might not even know it is possible. My mother's a teacher, and sometime I'd help with setting up computers during pre-planning...half the teachers didn't know there were multiple power cables, they just assumed everything was powered off the big box thing. And, hey, it's not actually their job to know.
And this was a substitute, who might not actually know the 'correct' procedure for turning on and off computers at that school, and was told not to turn it off anyway.
Oh, and he never proofreads anything. His dribbles are always filled with odd typos and random punctuation and all sorts of crazy-looking unprofessional things.
No, privately declining is a good idea. Or even publically declining at the start.
Accepting and then running and whining in public because the PA, apparently, have legit security concerns about the appearance and didn't want it public is just stupid.
He was going to fact a hostile audience no matter what, people who 'support' him, if such people exist in actuality, are not going to purchase tickets to PAX just to see him. He could either face a group of gamers who had no idea he was about to show up, or he could face hostile gamers very opposed to him, which could, indeed, have some nutjobs.
Considering that Jack's whole reality is based around the theory that games can make people dangerous lunatics, it's sorta hard to understand why he'd be willing to show up in front of gamers with advanced warning. I'm not entirely sure that would be a good idea, and I think he's full of crap, but there is a lot of hatred for him, and there are a lot of irrational people out there. There might only be one in one hundred thousand deranged lunatic gamers out there, but they'd almost certainly be in the audience if this was announced publically.
I'm really left with three options, in decreasing probability:
1) He never intended to debate, and thus picked some random reason to back out. If PA was going to announce it, he would have exited because he didn't want them to do so.
2) He was hoping he would be attacked, or met with some sort of protest and protesters that would leave him unable to actually debate, and he could then point at it and say how horrible video games and gamers are, and PA foiled his plans by not actually telling anyone, and he then realized he might actually have to debate someone.
3) He doesn't actually believe the crap he's spewing, and thinks that video games are completely harmless.
The expression of a recipe may be copyrightable, but the method it describes is not, and even if a particular expression is copyrightable, that won't preclude other people from expressing the same recipe.
Actually the courts have held that even the particular expression of a recipe is not copyrightable. They said that the format of a recipe is so well-define, and so brief, that there is absolutely no creativity in the layout or formatting, the only creativity is in the recipe itself. And while that could be copyrightable if Congress wished to do so, it is not actually protected under any law right now. (Much like, for example, boat hulls were not protected until recently.)
At least, that's what the courts have said. The copyright office is still in denial about it, with the idea that 'where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions' it is copyrightable, but, sadly for that theory, the courts have held directions like 'Stir until smooth, then pour in butter, continuing to stir.' are not 'substantial literary expressions'. Recipes, as commonly written have two parts, a list of ingredients, which isn't copyrightable in any form, and a very very simple list of things to do with the ingredients, which has no 'literary expression'. 'Do this, do that, do the next thing' simply cannot assert any sort of creativity, especially with the limited vocabulary of recipes..
Now, if there's a description of the finished dish, or a story behind the recipe, or an image of the finished dish or any of the steps, or anything like that, you have to be careful and not copy any of those, but that's not really part of the 'recipe' to start with.
Also, there is some sort of trivial protection for collections of non-copyrighted work, so copying an entire recipe book and distributing it whole might be actionable. But who knows?
As for patents, patents have to be a useful progression of science, and the courts have held that 'a method to make a certain food' is not 'original'. The patent office may seem to be very stupid at times, but they realized that almost every that can be done with food has been done with food in some way or another. This, in theory, means if you could demonstrate that you just invented something (like forced injection of carbon dioxide into drinks), you could possibly patent it, although in actuality this tends not to happen.
No, *you* are factually wrong. Trademarks are visual, auditory or physical objects created by human minds to identify a business. They did not spawn themselves de novo.
Yes, and human names are objects created by human minds to identify individuals, a real estate deed is an object create by human minds to identify areas of land, a warrant is an object created by human minds to identify areas legally authorized to be searched, and a stock certificate is an object created by human minds to identify the ownership of a corporation. A corporation itself is an object created by human minds to identify (and treat) a group of people in a fairly unique way. You'll notice that none of these things are 'intellectual property'.
Trademark law, fraud law, real estate law, and stock law, none of those protect the actual thing created by the human mind, as that thing is merely a representation of something else. The representation can be changed and traded and exchanged, but if someone steals a stock certificate or a deed or a trademark registration, they don't legally own anything. (Of course, harming the thing behind the representation might also be illegal, but not under the same laws. For example, harming the thing represented by a human name could be assault.)
What is protected is faking the representation, committing fraud. This fraud can be against the person accepting the identification as genuine, and/or it can be against the actual thing/owner of the thing that the identification is supposed to represent. Most often it's both.
Copyright law and patent law seem similar to that at first, they are representations of something, but that something is something that was created by human minds. There is no actual thing behind it besides what was created that's being represented by a copyright or patent. They are 'intellectual property', because they are literally ownership of an idea. (Although, as I said, they have almost no overlap in how they are treated, legally, so referring to them by one name is stupid.)
Trademarks are just 'invented names', and names, while they are invented, are not property. Neither is 'reputation', which is what trademark laws are actually protecting, not 'trademarks'. However, I don't actually give a rat's ass about this, so you and lawyers can call trademarks whatever you want.
Trade secret law, OTOH, is a really weird concept, and I'm not going to argue that's not 'intellectual property' at all, although it's a rather strange treatment of it. The closest thing to it that I can thing of is marine salvage rights, it's property defined by how much you protect it and that no one violated the law in taking it from you. A very strange sort of property indeed.
Meanwhile, in reality, companies and lawyers refer to IP law because it is a convenient shorthand to a wide range of laws that protect intangible (i.e., not physical things like cars, factories, etc) objects.
I don't mind lawyers doing it. I do mind companies that, instead of asserting actual copyright, trademark, or patent rights over something, assert that it's their 'intellectual property'. Often they do this without any copyright, patent, or trademark, and over something that wouldn't violate any of those laws anyway. It's akin to setting up a toll booth in the middle of a public road and telling people that complain that you have 'the right of way', which is legally gibberish, but then the media treats it as some actual enforceable right.
The biggest example, of course, is SCO, which asserted that Linux contained Unix's 'intellectual property', despite not hold any patents, not holding any of the Unix copyrights, and not even holding the Unix trademark. Lawyers can use the term internally all they want, and can categorize whatever they want under that banner, and even be experts in whatever they included under it, but when they, or anyone else, assert that a law has been violated, they
What part of rights to _immaterial objects_ do you not get?
I'm with you, and it's a shame there isn't anything like that for material objects, like houses and people and stuff. I propose we refer to that as 'theft'.
So if you burn down a house, it's theft. You rape a person, it's theft. You park illegally, it's theft.
That should make things much clearer.
But they all protect the same thing, works of the mind. And that's where the term "intellectual property rights" come from.
This is factually wrong WRT trademarks. Trademarks do not protect any 'works of mind', trademarks prevent misrepresentation of products as produced by someone else.
And copyrights prevent copying 'works of the mind', but allow using them. (Just ask the people who can't copyright recipes about that.) And patents allow and even encouraging copying 'works of the mind', just disallow use of said works.
So your classification seems about as useful as talking about train right-of-way laws and automobile traffic laws as 'transportation laws'. Well, okay, they both indeed appear to have something to do with transportation, but they share absolutely no features in common. Or how about talking about 'dead things laws', aka, laws about desecraction of corpses and FDA regulations about meat?
None of those classifications make any sense, including IP laws. The sole reason they get conflated is that companies want them conflated because they want their copyrights to do things only patents can or their trademarks to do things only copyrights can.
It is trivial to make. It is designed to very very lax tolerances, with the result that almost any machine shop in the world can make one. You could make one almost by hand.
This has the added advantage that, as you say, it is almost impossible to break or foul while in use, because nowhere can a tiny piece of dirt or grain of sand get in the way of anything.
Claiming property rights over stuff 60 years old, police-sanctioned beating of protestors, weapons testings in violation of treaties, secretly attacking other countries, and full of homophobes and racists....
Ha, Ron Paul's the only person who has a snowball's chance in hell of winning the general election as this war goes increasingly south. (No, it will not wrap around at the south pole. I suspect it will shoot off into space.)
But there's no way he could win the primary. The Republicans are, at this point, down to their base, and their base is pro-getting-other-people-killed-for-no-reason. Anyone against throwing good Americans and Iraqis after bad cannot win.
Ron Paul, if he got the nomination, might manage to suck all the sane Republicans back to their party. Of course, that 'if' is about as likely as saying 'if I win the lottery'.
Although, at this point, I suspect it's too late, and the Republicans could run George Washington himself and still lose the general election. And considering they won't stop supporting the war, it's just going to get worse. By the time the primaries role around, we might be asking 'What if the Republicans had a primary and no one came?'.
a) a massive underground grid of tunnels connecting every single palace to all the others, and
b) completely empty barracks that the guy described as NOT being what you would have people in, but weapons. The exact situation-- the guys in the squad looked around at each other and laughed because they all knew the barracks had been used for weapons that weren't there anymore.
Gee, could that be because Iraq used to have a much larger military than it had at the time of invasion, including WMDs?
Jesus Christ, does not one remember past a decade anymore? We know they had WMDs...we invaded in 1991 and forced them to destroy them! Yes, they had vast underground areas for these WMDs and all sorts of crap, none of which could have been used for WMDs because the weapon inspectors that were just there knew where they were.
But I really like how the 'Saddam did too have WMDs' revisionists don't appear to grasp how much worse that actually would be. Let's pretend you are, hypothetically, absolutely correct. Well, the point of the war wasn't to be 'right', it was to remove the WMDs. If they actually did exist and we didn't get them, we made things ten times worse!
Before, a country had WMDs, which, incidentally, plenty of countries do and they don't pose much of a threat. Iraq had absolutely no hope of delivering WMDs against us, and no chance of getting away with it if they did. Now...well, apparently, according to you, some random people are wandering around with WMDs. People wandering around within a few feet of our military. Who are actively trying to kill said military. Hmmm.
Oh, and now we've actually got terrorists there, working to help destabilize the situation. Let's hope that none of the terrorists decides to trade a few hundred guns they don't need for some sarin gas the insurgents can't use safely, but the terrorists know a perfect little football stadium over in the US...
Good plan there, thanks for that. For your next trick, you can resolve a hostage crisis in a fireworks factory with a rocket launcher while carrying 10 gallons of gasoline.
Luckily, you are wrong about the WMDs, or we'd have even more people dead. I just find is absolutely surreal that 'Saddam did have WMDs, we just forced them into the hands of random, unknown people when we invaded' is some sort of defense of this increasingly indefensible war.
Instead, we listened to the Israelis, which have a fine intelligence service, possible the best in the world, but tend to be a bit...biased...about Mideast affairs for very very obvious reasons.
The ability to take the best from an infinite number of cultures and removing the worst, while intergrating those people seamlessly into our society, is just one of the things that makes America great that the right is trying to destroy, along with jury trials, a classless society, and the moral high ground.
Oh, and, apparently, a functioning military and intelligence community. What's going to happen when we say 'Okay, we're going to attack X' and all these private companies say 'No.'?
You do realize we don't actually need the third amendment, right? That the fourth actually covers that increasingly unlikely situation.
But we've had so many idiotic interpetations of the original bill of rights, by both parties, that right now they are almost entirely gibberish.
We need to sit down and actually enumerate the rights we want to have, including filling all the loopholes and questions that have been raised over the years. A few suggestions/questions, for both directions of infringement:
What, exactly, is level of armament do we want people to possess? Probably not WMDs, what about tanks? Mortars? Should governments be able restrict gun possession on certain properties, like schools, or courthouses? What about near certain properties?
What requirements for voting are acceptable? Is non-citizen voting really a large enough problem that we need to make people produce ID? What, legally, should be required to remove someone from the voting roll? To stop fraud we should stamp hands? Should we disallow electronic-only voting? (Duh.) And once and for all, should felons who have served their time be allowed to vote?
How about we change it to 'freedom of expression' instead of speech and press? Making it clearer it applies to the message, not the medium. Other documents defining rights already call it this.
While we're at it, how about putting something in there about the difference between the right to believe religious beliefs, or anything you want, and the non-right to stop the government from stating, teaching, and acting on actual facts when they are in conflict with said beliefs? As a comprimise, we can place some facts eternally beyond the reach of the government while we're at it.
And let's declare, once and for all, that these rights are restrictions on the government in all circumstances, and anyone acting as an agent of the government, and put to rest the bullshit about 'Cuba's not part of the US so if we have someone there they have no rights'. That is not only not what the founders intended, but what the Constitution actually flat-out states, and the Supreme Court has deliberately misread that for decades. All defined rights apply to people, period, or restrict the government, period. (1) They don't say 'people within the US' or 'the government when operating within the US'. (Yes, oddly enough, the rights the constitution grants 'people' technically apply to every person in the world, so it is a unconstitutional for a Chinese person to be held without trial in China by the China government, although, obviously, they don't care.)
Once we fix the existing rights we have, how about worrying about the ones we don't? Let's start with the one human right we don't have that other people do, the one international bill of rights we refused to sign. A right ensuring food and shelter and education for children. Good? Bad?
And then, we can debate new ones. Is anyone else as disgusted at the idea of victimless crime as me? Disgusted we spend so much money tracking down people who aren't hurting anyone, or who are hurting only people who consent?
Slightly related, what about assisted suicide? Do people have the right to end their life?
And, of course, we could have a discussion about the rights we apparently have, but I don't quite understand how, like abortion. (Not saying I oppose abortion rights, just saying I don't see how a right to privacy can protect that, but not, say, taking cocaine recreationally.)
And while we're at it, how about the goddamn ERA? Where'd that get to?
The odds of Congress 'rebooting' the bill of rights to fix all the problems is somewhat slim, though.
1) A few say 'citizens', but those are all about voting.
That's what I assumed. The idea that Peter could just fly out of there when he could just barely keep himself under control is silly.
Peter's been shown to have pretty poor control of his powers to start with, and Ted's power is pretty hard to control when you're angry. Doing something else during that is rather implausible.
I'm a little amazed that everyone didn't immediately get that.
Well, the problem there is that we have no idea if Manny Cato is a Doctor Who fan.;)
Davies isn't running the show alone. Almost every sci-fi writer in England was a Doctor Who fan growing up, and considering the dearth of science fiction TV shows in England, they shouldn't run out of writers. Basically, as long as the BBC doesn't do something to 'mainstream' it, but it's worth noting that Doctor Who is such a random show it can, and has, been set on Earth in the present for a while with no harm done. A whole season of of the original Doctor Who basically was, where he was stranded on Earth and working for UNIT, although now they're certainly going to do those type plots over on Torchwood.
About the only way to break Doctor Who is to break the Doctor and the general sense of 'Isn't this cool?' that he brings to the table.
But, frankly, I think instead of wondering what could go wrong, it might be more useful to wait until something actually does and then complain.;)
Davies, in many ways, reminds me of the guy brought in last season on ST:Enterprise, Manny Cato. A guy who's a fan of the original show and understands what other fans actually want, as opposed to someone who thinks of it as a 'property' and tries to monetize the hell out of it until it's canceled.
Not attempting to appeal to the 'mainstream' may make shows slightly less popular in the short run, but, in the long run, you can either add shows the rapid fanbase likes, which will reap millions in rewards later, or you can add shows they don't like, which can utterly screw things up, like, again, Enterprise did for the first three seasons, which not only won't help but can harm the original property.
Egyptian pharaohs used to marry their own sisters.
To be fair, they didn't actually have sex with their siblings, they just married them because of obscure power-sharing rules and stuff. Both the men and the women in such arrangements had other people to share their (separate) beds.
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They do, it's called ReplayGain. It scans music, figures out the peaks and puts a value in the file that is read when it's decoded. And there are some other standards that do the same thing, too, some of which alter the music itself (In a reversable way.) so that even music players that don't understand the standard will play it at the same volume. (Of course, those players can't undo it.) The name mp3gain comes to mind.
In addition, all audio players include real-time normalization DSPs that alter the volume up and down based on the current average volume. Many of them even decode the next several seconds to discover if they're going to have to get louder or quieter, and start doing it smoothly in advance.
Many of these do not actually look just for literal 'peaks', but to do an acoustical analyzation on the 'apparent loudness', for human beings, of different parts of the music. This uses many of the same theories as lossless compression on what parts of the sound is 'most important' for people.
They also let you analyze entire albums and adjust them all by the same value, instead of per-song, which is good if the songs go directly into each other and you often listen to them that way, like some Beatles' albums.
However, none of them do what the music industry does, which is to turn every single frequency as loud as possible, because that makes the music sound like crap and people do not actually want that.
I don't know of any player that deliberately lets people adjust the volume per-song, because that wouldn't actually work right. People don't normally listen to music at the same volume all the time, so just storing the mixer would end up just capturing how loud they wanted music at that time, not how 'wrong' the song was. For it to work, they'd have to sit there and listen to a 'base song' and then adjust the volume of each song based on how much it was off the base.
It's much better to have it automated in the player. Although Replaygain is, actually, just stored as a tag in mp3 and most other audio formats, and is trivial to actually go in and edit manually if you want to. The gain is even stored in dBs instead of some custom value, and it also has 'clipping', which I think is a multipler of the music and is always around 1. I.e, I think it's Ax+B, where a and b are settable. (Or possibly it's A(x+B).) So I guess you could say many players have good support for custom volume in each song, and the automated setting of it by algorithm, but the ability to change that manually is not obvious.
They already lose all credibility, as their claim is stupid. If it were true, they'd simply be providing music that was losslessly compressed to start which. Which, duh, is actually less work on their part. (Yes, they'd still 'need' DRM, but putting DRM on something is completely unrelated to the compression.)
It's like ordering a burrito 'to go' and having them stuff it in a tiny box and claiming that's why it falls apart when you try to eat it. a) No, that's not the reason it fell apart, the reason is you didn't make it right and people who aren't getting them 'to go' are complaining about the same thing, but, more importantly, b) If that actually is the reason, why the hell are you cramming it in such little boxes? Why don't you charge 5 cents more and buy bigger boxes?
What people in this thread are missing is that it's not just the entire sound being turned up or down. If it were that, moderate intelligence in the audio player would fix the problem.
The problem is that they will, for example, max every frequency. By whatever amount is needed to make that frequency go to exactly the same volume. And alter it continually.
So if you have someone singing, they will sing at the same volume the entire time, even if part is supposed to be louder. If you have someone playnig a musical instrument that overlaps that ranges quieter than the singer, you will get that instrument loud when they aren't singing, and quiet when they are.
And heaven help us if that instrument not only covers that frequency but others, you'll have parts of it getting louder and quieter semi-randomly as people sang. Luckily, at this point, they do that sort of normalization in advance of mixing, but that results in all instrumentation and singing being exactly the same volume.
To implement your idea, they'd need to label every single change they made, which, considering they split the music up into second-long intervals and something like a dozen frequency, and adjust every single one of these to max, would be near impossible. It would be impossible to undo changes that were made pre-mix, which is how they do it now.
They do this because, in very noisy places, or on the radio, they can turn it all the way up and it's as loud as possible. (Whereas if every part wasn't made equal, they could only turn it up as loud as the loudest part.)
It's rather akin to making a TV show and making sure every scanline is 'as bright as possible', by maximizing all luminance, so people can see it better at long distances, as some sort of goal. This would render black as white and dark green as bright green, it's so fucking idiotic it's not even comprehendable, and you rather obviously can't fix it at the TV. OTOH, if people wanted that at their TVs, they could just turn the goddamn brightness up all the way and leave the rest of us to actually listen to things the way they'd sound if they were actually created by real objects.
I meant she wasn't using the computer when it happened.
She was not 'the teacher', you moron. She was a substitute. She didn't even use the damn computer. She was watching the class, and some students were using the computer, which they had permission to. Suddenly, porn starts appearing. She kicks them off, tries to close it down, it's malware and keeps popping up, she turns the monitor away from the class because she'd been giving specific instructions not to turn the computer off. She asked for help from the office, they do not show up.
There are plenty of places that don't even bother shutting down monitors anymore. They turn themselves off, and pushing the button to turn them off is like unplugging VCRs when you don't need them so they won't use power...it's not worth dealing with. Do the shutdown, when it finishes, you're done. (If it doesn't finish, you unplug the entire computer from the wall.)
And there are plenty of other places that, first you shut down the computer, and then you flip the power strip off to turn everything else off.
In either of those places, even a 'perfectly-trained' teacher might not know how to turn the monitor off without turning the computer off. They might not even know it is possible. My mother's a teacher, and sometime I'd help with setting up computers during pre-planning...half the teachers didn't know there were multiple power cables, they just assumed everything was powered off the big box thing. And, hey, it's not actually their job to know.
And this was a substitute, who might not actually know the 'correct' procedure for turning on and off computers at that school, and was told not to turn it off anyway.
Oh, and he never proofreads anything. His dribbles are always filled with odd typos and random punctuation and all sorts of crazy-looking unprofessional things.
No, privately declining is a good idea. Or even publically declining at the start.
Accepting and then running and whining in public because the PA, apparently, have legit security concerns about the appearance and didn't want it public is just stupid.
He was going to fact a hostile audience no matter what, people who 'support' him, if such people exist in actuality, are not going to purchase tickets to PAX just to see him. He could either face a group of gamers who had no idea he was about to show up, or he could face hostile gamers very opposed to him, which could, indeed, have some nutjobs.
Considering that Jack's whole reality is based around the theory that games can make people dangerous lunatics, it's sorta hard to understand why he'd be willing to show up in front of gamers with advanced warning. I'm not entirely sure that would be a good idea, and I think he's full of crap, but there is a lot of hatred for him, and there are a lot of irrational people out there. There might only be one in one hundred thousand deranged lunatic gamers out there, but they'd almost certainly be in the audience if this was announced publically.
I'm really left with three options, in decreasing probability:
1) He never intended to debate, and thus picked some random reason to back out. If PA was going to announce it, he would have exited because he didn't want them to do so.
2) He was hoping he would be attacked, or met with some sort of protest and protesters that would leave him unable to actually debate, and he could then point at it and say how horrible video games and gamers are, and PA foiled his plans by not actually telling anyone, and he then realized he might actually have to debate someone.
3) He doesn't actually believe the crap he's spewing, and thinks that video games are completely harmless.
You did see the 'almost', right?
The expression of a recipe may be copyrightable, but the method it describes is not, and even if a particular expression is copyrightable, that won't preclude other people from expressing the same recipe.
Actually the courts have held that even the particular expression of a recipe is not copyrightable. They said that the format of a recipe is so well-define, and so brief, that there is absolutely no creativity in the layout or formatting, the only creativity is in the recipe itself. And while that could be copyrightable if Congress wished to do so, it is not actually protected under any law right now. (Much like, for example, boat hulls were not protected until recently.)
At least, that's what the courts have said. The copyright office is still in denial about it, with the idea that 'where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions' it is copyrightable, but, sadly for that theory, the courts have held directions like 'Stir until smooth, then pour in butter, continuing to stir.' are not 'substantial literary expressions'. Recipes, as commonly written have two parts, a list of ingredients, which isn't copyrightable in any form, and a very very simple list of things to do with the ingredients, which has no 'literary expression'. 'Do this, do that, do the next thing' simply cannot assert any sort of creativity, especially with the limited vocabulary of recipes..
Now, if there's a description of the finished dish, or a story behind the recipe, or an image of the finished dish or any of the steps, or anything like that, you have to be careful and not copy any of those, but that's not really part of the 'recipe' to start with.
Also, there is some sort of trivial protection for collections of non-copyrighted work, so copying an entire recipe book and distributing it whole might be actionable. But who knows?
As for patents, patents have to be a useful progression of science, and the courts have held that 'a method to make a certain food' is not 'original'. The patent office may seem to be very stupid at times, but they realized that almost every that can be done with food has been done with food in some way or another. This, in theory, means if you could demonstrate that you just invented something (like forced injection of carbon dioxide into drinks), you could possibly patent it, although in actuality this tends not to happen.
No, *you* are factually wrong. Trademarks are visual, auditory or physical objects created by human minds to identify a business. They did not spawn themselves de novo.
Yes, and human names are objects created by human minds to identify individuals, a real estate deed is an object create by human minds to identify areas of land, a warrant is an object created by human minds to identify areas legally authorized to be searched, and a stock certificate is an object created by human minds to identify the ownership of a corporation. A corporation itself is an object created by human minds to identify (and treat) a group of people in a fairly unique way. You'll notice that none of these things are 'intellectual property'.
Trademark law, fraud law, real estate law, and stock law, none of those protect the actual thing created by the human mind, as that thing is merely a representation of something else. The representation can be changed and traded and exchanged, but if someone steals a stock certificate or a deed or a trademark registration, they don't legally own anything. (Of course, harming the thing behind the representation might also be illegal, but not under the same laws. For example, harming the thing represented by a human name could be assault.)
What is protected is faking the representation, committing fraud. This fraud can be against the person accepting the identification as genuine, and/or it can be against the actual thing/owner of the thing that the identification is supposed to represent. Most often it's both.
Copyright law and patent law seem similar to that at first, they are representations of something, but that something is something that was created by human minds. There is no actual thing behind it besides what was created that's being represented by a copyright or patent. They are 'intellectual property', because they are literally ownership of an idea. (Although, as I said, they have almost no overlap in how they are treated, legally, so referring to them by one name is stupid.)
Trademarks are just 'invented names', and names, while they are invented, are not property. Neither is 'reputation', which is what trademark laws are actually protecting, not 'trademarks'. However, I don't actually give a rat's ass about this, so you and lawyers can call trademarks whatever you want.
Trade secret law, OTOH, is a really weird concept, and I'm not going to argue that's not 'intellectual property' at all, although it's a rather strange treatment of it. The closest thing to it that I can thing of is marine salvage rights, it's property defined by how much you protect it and that no one violated the law in taking it from you. A very strange sort of property indeed.
Meanwhile, in reality, companies and lawyers refer to IP law because it is a convenient shorthand to a wide range of laws that protect intangible (i.e., not physical things like cars, factories, etc) objects.
I don't mind lawyers doing it. I do mind companies that, instead of asserting actual copyright, trademark, or patent rights over something, assert that it's their 'intellectual property'. Often they do this without any copyright, patent, or trademark, and over something that wouldn't violate any of those laws anyway. It's akin to setting up a toll booth in the middle of a public road and telling people that complain that you have 'the right of way', which is legally gibberish, but then the media treats it as some actual enforceable right.
The biggest example, of course, is SCO, which asserted that Linux contained Unix's 'intellectual property', despite not hold any patents, not holding any of the Unix copyrights, and not even holding the Unix trademark. Lawyers can use the term internally all they want, and can categorize whatever they want under that banner, and even be experts in whatever they included under it, but when they, or anyone else, assert that a law has been violated, they
What part of rights to _immaterial objects_ do you not get?
I'm with you, and it's a shame there isn't anything like that for material objects, like houses and people and stuff. I propose we refer to that as 'theft'.
So if you burn down a house, it's theft. You rape a person, it's theft. You park illegally, it's theft.
That should make things much clearer.
But they all protect the same thing, works of the mind. And that's where the term "intellectual property rights" come from.
This is factually wrong WRT trademarks. Trademarks do not protect any 'works of mind', trademarks prevent misrepresentation of products as produced by someone else.
And copyrights prevent copying 'works of the mind', but allow using them. (Just ask the people who can't copyright recipes about that.) And patents allow and even encouraging copying 'works of the mind', just disallow use of said works.
So your classification seems about as useful as talking about train right-of-way laws and automobile traffic laws as 'transportation laws'. Well, okay, they both indeed appear to have something to do with transportation, but they share absolutely no features in common. Or how about talking about 'dead things laws', aka, laws about desecraction of corpses and FDA regulations about meat?
None of those classifications make any sense, including IP laws. The sole reason they get conflated is that companies want them conflated because they want their copyrights to do things only patents can or their trademarks to do things only copyrights can.
You missed the other big draw of an AK-47:
It is trivial to make. It is designed to very very lax tolerances, with the result that almost any machine shop in the world can make one. You could make one almost by hand.
This has the added advantage that, as you say, it is almost impossible to break or foul while in use, because nowhere can a tiny piece of dirt or grain of sand get in the way of anything.
Claiming property rights over stuff 60 years old, police-sanctioned beating of protestors, weapons testings in violation of treaties, secretly attacking other countries, and full of homophobes and racists....
I'm confused. Why are they non-Western again?
Ha, Ron Paul's the only person who has a snowball's chance in hell of winning the general election as this war goes increasingly south. (No, it will not wrap around at the south pole. I suspect it will shoot off into space.)
But there's no way he could win the primary. The Republicans are, at this point, down to their base, and their base is pro-getting-other-people-killed-for-no-reason. Anyone against throwing good Americans and Iraqis after bad cannot win.
Ron Paul, if he got the nomination, might manage to suck all the sane Republicans back to their party. Of course, that 'if' is about as likely as saying 'if I win the lottery'.
Although, at this point, I suspect it's too late, and the Republicans could run George Washington himself and still lose the general election. And considering they won't stop supporting the war, it's just going to get worse. By the time the primaries role around, we might be asking 'What if the Republicans had a primary and no one came?'.
a) a massive underground grid of tunnels connecting every single palace to all the others, and
b) completely empty barracks that the guy described as NOT being what you would have people in, but weapons. The exact situation-- the guys in the squad looked around at each other and laughed because they all knew the barracks had been used for weapons that weren't there anymore.
Gee, could that be because Iraq used to have a much larger military than it had at the time of invasion, including WMDs?
Jesus Christ, does not one remember past a decade anymore? We know they had WMDs...we invaded in 1991 and forced them to destroy them! Yes, they had vast underground areas for these WMDs and all sorts of crap, none of which could have been used for WMDs because the weapon inspectors that were just there knew where they were.
But I really like how the 'Saddam did too have WMDs' revisionists don't appear to grasp how much worse that actually would be. Let's pretend you are, hypothetically, absolutely correct. Well, the point of the war wasn't to be 'right', it was to remove the WMDs. If they actually did exist and we didn't get them, we made things ten times worse!
Before, a country had WMDs, which, incidentally, plenty of countries do and they don't pose much of a threat. Iraq had absolutely no hope of delivering WMDs against us, and no chance of getting away with it if they did. Now...well, apparently, according to you, some random people are wandering around with WMDs. People wandering around within a few feet of our military. Who are actively trying to kill said military. Hmmm.
Oh, and now we've actually got terrorists there, working to help destabilize the situation. Let's hope that none of the terrorists decides to trade a few hundred guns they don't need for some sarin gas the insurgents can't use safely, but the terrorists know a perfect little football stadium over in the US...
Good plan there, thanks for that. For your next trick, you can resolve a hostage crisis in a fireworks factory with a rocket launcher while carrying 10 gallons of gasoline.
Luckily, you are wrong about the WMDs, or we'd have even more people dead. I just find is absolutely surreal that 'Saddam did have WMDs, we just forced them into the hands of random, unknown people when we invaded' is some sort of defense of this increasingly indefensible war.
Instead, we listened to the Israelis, which have a fine intelligence service, possible the best in the world, but tend to be a bit...biased...about Mideast affairs for very very obvious reasons.
The ability to take the best from an infinite number of cultures and removing the worst, while intergrating those people seamlessly into our society, is just one of the things that makes America great that the right is trying to destroy, along with jury trials, a classless society, and the moral high ground.
Oh, and, apparently, a functioning military and intelligence community. What's going to happen when we say 'Okay, we're going to attack X' and all these private companies say 'No.'?
You do realize we don't actually need the third amendment, right? That the fourth actually covers that increasingly unlikely situation.
But we've had so many idiotic interpetations of the original bill of rights, by both parties, that right now they are almost entirely gibberish.
We need to sit down and actually enumerate the rights we want to have, including filling all the loopholes and questions that have been raised over the years. A few suggestions/questions, for both directions of infringement:
What, exactly, is level of armament do we want people to possess? Probably not WMDs, what about tanks? Mortars? Should governments be able restrict gun possession on certain properties, like schools, or courthouses? What about near certain properties?
What requirements for voting are acceptable? Is non-citizen voting really a large enough problem that we need to make people produce ID? What, legally, should be required to remove someone from the voting roll? To stop fraud we should stamp hands? Should we disallow electronic-only voting? (Duh.) And once and for all, should felons who have served their time be allowed to vote?
How about we change it to 'freedom of expression' instead of speech and press? Making it clearer it applies to the message, not the medium. Other documents defining rights already call it this.
While we're at it, how about putting something in there about the difference between the right to believe religious beliefs, or anything you want, and the non-right to stop the government from stating, teaching, and acting on actual facts when they are in conflict with said beliefs? As a comprimise, we can place some facts eternally beyond the reach of the government while we're at it.
And let's declare, once and for all, that these rights are restrictions on the government in all circumstances, and anyone acting as an agent of the government, and put to rest the bullshit about 'Cuba's not part of the US so if we have someone there they have no rights'. That is not only not what the founders intended, but what the Constitution actually flat-out states, and the Supreme Court has deliberately misread that for decades. All defined rights apply to people, period, or restrict the government, period. (1) They don't say 'people within the US' or 'the government when operating within the US'. (Yes, oddly enough, the rights the constitution grants 'people' technically apply to every person in the world, so it is a unconstitutional for a Chinese person to be held without trial in China by the China government, although, obviously, they don't care.)
Once we fix the existing rights we have, how about worrying about the ones we don't? Let's start with the one human right we don't have that other people do, the one international bill of rights we refused to sign. A right ensuring food and shelter and education for children. Good? Bad?
And then, we can debate new ones. Is anyone else as disgusted at the idea of victimless crime as me? Disgusted we spend so much money tracking down people who aren't hurting anyone, or who are hurting only people who consent?
Slightly related, what about assisted suicide? Do people have the right to end their life?
And, of course, we could have a discussion about the rights we apparently have, but I don't quite understand how, like abortion. (Not saying I oppose abortion rights, just saying I don't see how a right to privacy can protect that, but not, say, taking cocaine recreationally.)
And while we're at it, how about the goddamn ERA? Where'd that get to?
The odds of Congress 'rebooting' the bill of rights to fix all the problems is somewhat slim, though.
1) A few say 'citizens', but those are all about voting.
That's what I assumed. The idea that Peter could just fly out of there when he could just barely keep himself under control is silly.
Peter's been shown to have pretty poor control of his powers to start with, and Ted's power is pretty hard to control when you're angry. Doing something else during that is rather implausible.
I'm a little amazed that everyone didn't immediately get that.
Well, the problem there is that we have no idea if Manny Cato is a Doctor Who fan. ;)
Davies isn't running the show alone. Almost every sci-fi writer in England was a Doctor Who fan growing up, and considering the dearth of science fiction TV shows in England, they shouldn't run out of writers. Basically, as long as the BBC doesn't do something to 'mainstream' it, but it's worth noting that Doctor Who is such a random show it can, and has, been set on Earth in the present for a while with no harm done. A whole season of of the original Doctor Who basically was, where he was stranded on Earth and working for UNIT, although now they're certainly going to do those type plots over on Torchwood.
About the only way to break Doctor Who is to break the Doctor and the general sense of 'Isn't this cool?' that he brings to the table.
But, frankly, I think instead of wondering what could go wrong, it might be more useful to wait until something actually does and then complain. ;)
Davies, in many ways, reminds me of the guy brought in last season on ST:Enterprise, Manny Cato. A guy who's a fan of the original show and understands what other fans actually want, as opposed to someone who thinks of it as a 'property' and tries to monetize the hell out of it until it's canceled.
Not attempting to appeal to the 'mainstream' may make shows slightly less popular in the short run, but, in the long run, you can either add shows the rapid fanbase likes, which will reap millions in rewards later, or you can add shows they don't like, which can utterly screw things up, like, again, Enterprise did for the first three seasons, which not only won't help but can harm the original property.
We don't know if that's some hard and fast physical law, or a rule. Without any other Time Lords around to enforce rules, it may be completely moot.
Egyptian pharaohs used to marry their own sisters.
To be fair, they didn't actually have sex with their siblings, they just married them because of obscure power-sharing rules and stuff. Both the men and the women in such arrangements had other people to share their (separate) beds.
And I'm sure that would be a useful defense at all the trials.