Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
Hasn't anyone ever played Flight Simulator? They have frick radio beacons operated from the airport that say 'Hey, here's your landing corridor', and, yes, those exist in real life, although they usually don't result in floating rectangles in space.
And, yes, pilots just use those to line up form a distance, and then eyeball the landing.
In reality, pilots don't have to navigate much. It's much simpler than trying to drive through a city you've never seen, because almost nothing is in the way, except a very few no-fly areas you just have to curve around.
And once they get to airports, there are predefined areas they're supposed to be at, and the tower guides them around.
Flying is more a 'are we still aimed in the correct direction or did the wind turn us' than the 'how do we get from here to there' land navigation is.
The technology for painting a target with a laser, and a missile to hit said paint, is not that expensive.
But this all stupid. Anyone who thinks OBL couldn't have already blow up pretty much any building he wanted, sans some government ones, is stupid.
You want to know how to cripple a city? Carry explosives in your suitcase into a subway hub station (Where two lines cross) and blow the shit out of it.
As OBL has not done that, I am forced to believe his intent is not to cripple the US, and thus protecting against that is not only impossible but pointless.
You know, there's a lot of things I don't like. There's a movie theater I don't visit, because, frankly, it has horrible seating and acostics.
I have yet to bomb it.
People don't attack other people halfway around the world because they dislike those people. People avoid other people they dislike.
People attack people when they can gain from the attack.
Sure, American cultulre makes a nice 'look at how evil they are' image for devout Muslins, but it's an excuse, not a reason. There is no way in hell OBL could attack the US enough to remove reality TV, and he knows it. (And he's not even asking for that.) Getting rid of 'western culture' at this point would basically require nuking a third of the planet. You can't terrorize people into renouncing their culture, that's absurd.
The reason OBL attacks us is Saudi Arabia and Israel and now Afghanistan and Iraq and other stuff we've done in the middle east, which he wants to stop, completely. He couldn't care less about what we do within our own country, except to the extent he can recruit others with it.
The judge in your district in on crack, if that's what he actually said, which I doubt. (And, um, something like 80% of high school students are legally underaged and can't bind anyone to contracts, even themselves.)
Contract law simply doesn't work like that. You are correct that employees can bind businesses to contract as long as the other party had a reasonable assumption that they were doing business with someone able to sign contracts, and it's possible this extends to EULA, although there is a concept of a minimal check...if I walk up to a random customer in Walmart and write a contract with them, I'm not getting anywhere in court.
EULAs don't even check that the button pusher is a human being, much less appears to be able to sign a contract on behalf of the company. But they, possibly, might work in court in a hypothetically 'If there had been a check, this person would have passed' sense. OTOH, as the point of that is to protect the person that's not the business from the business saying 'Oh, he didn't have authority to sign that purchase order, take back your eight million custom ball bearings', it doesn't seem useful here, where the software company loses nothing if the person didn't agree to the EULA. (Because EULAs aren't actually valid contracts in the first place, as they don't grant any rights to the person agreeing to them.)
But students have never had the presumed power to bind schools to contracts. And, likewise, some random person who clicks 'okay' on my computer doesn't have the authority to bind me to anything, anymore than a random person who's been allowed on my property has the authority to have my house bulldozed. Employees binding businesses only works for businesses, period.
There have been a lot of incredibly fucking stupid judges out there who think EULAs are valid, and 'you've agreed to any EULA on your computer' is taing that stupidity to a new height. I just want to write some a Java program that gives, in the EULA, all the assets of the person who agrees to me, in returns for ten minutes of use, and then have someone go Kinkos, download it, and click okay. Damn, now I own FedEx.
Hi from 2603, and I'm actually doing some research on this, those of you from further in the future should be able to locate it.
Basically, like 98% of the people at Woodstock were time travellers, almost everyone here is a crosstemporal poster. (And all but two fark readers are from another time.)
It's one of those historical paradoxes. All time travellers realize they can't affect history if they're just one face in the crowd, and, throughout history, there have been a few really big crowds, so that's when the time travellers go...and end up being the entire crowd. They all think 'one more won't matter', but it does when it happens every single year of the 32,042,394 years of human history. (Minus the few thousand without time travel.)
For every time traveller, there is one native who was assumed to be there, but actually wasn't. The crowds can't just get larger. (For Woodstock, this causes quite a lot of confusion for us historians, because while you can find a lot of people who claim to have been there, and presumably, 'should' have been there, but were not, in fact, there. I suspect this is something to do with the drugs they took, or, rather, failed to take. Only forty-six natives have actually been located who went there, minus the bands and crew. (And at least three of the bands were non-native, as everyone knows.))
And, thanks to all this having actually happened in the first place, there's a rather unanswerable question: How large would the crowds have been without the time travellers knowing the crowds were large and showing up there? That's basically what I'm attempting to answer. I'm begining to think all large crowds are composed of time travellers, and that is the sole reason they happened, and that human history basically happens because time travellers read about it and showed up to play their part. (Like the Jack the Ripper lunatic they caught in 2574.)
And I'm still trying to track down those guys who managed to break through the temporal barrier around the Kennedy assassination and wandered up on the grassy knoll for an out-of-the-way view, if anyone can help with that, but I can't seem to figure out who's running that barrier or why it will have gone down in 2918 for six days.
Hey, they can hold to the terms of the EULA wheen they produce the signed contract by me.
What do you mean, my computer recorded it? No, my computer recorded that it thought someone clicked okay. That doesn't prove someone did click okay, and, more to the point, it's not even pretending to know that was me.
Judges are supposed to weigh laws against the rights people have, some of which are enumerated in the constitution.
Like I say every time someone starts whining about this:
I'm incredibly glad the courts have discovered freedom of expression, because that right isn't in the fucking constitution. There's nothing in there that gives you the right to post whatever you want online...that's not 'speech' or 'press'.
If you don't agree with the courts 'legislating' from the bench, you can shut the fuck up, because you apparently have no right to even have a discussion here. Print out some flyers or call me on the phone if you wish to rebut that.
You can have issues with certain decisions made in recently history, like I do, but complaining online about 'legislating from the bench' is possibly the most hypocritical thing I've ever seen.
How on earth would you 'continue to make a copy'? You could make another copy, which would be illegal under the new law, or keep the old ones, which are still just illegal under the old one, but you'd have to be functioning fairly slowly to be making the same copy before and after the passage of the law.
You're exactly right. What'ss even more absurd is that copyright owners aren't required to register their code.
The entire point of copyright is to enrich the public domain by reqarding authors...but the whole thing falls apart with software, because no one is going to be able to use these works when the copyright expires, even if it was for a sane time period.
For example, let's pretend that Windows 3.0 had fallen, right now, in the public domain. That's be, what, a 13 year copyright? That's not too insane for software.
But so what? We can't do anything with it besides run it, because we have no source.
And, like you said, we can learn from all other copyrighted works, we can slightly modify them for our own use, and we can't do any of that with binary software.
We can sit and watch movies and see how they were made, and make our own movie the same way. (Hell, they give us 'making of' documentaries.) We can analyze poetry, we can deconstruct literature, we can discuss technique in painting. We can, in theory, decompile software, but good luck with that, and here's hoping the EULA doesn't forbid it.
The only software that should have copyright protection is source. Binary stuff is giving people a copyright over 'unpublished' work. You want protection, you have to explain how you did it.
No, fair use doesn't have anything to do with non-copying uses. Fair use is just for making legal copies. For example, quoting a speech from a TV show in a paper is fair use. It's a copy, but it's legal because it's such a small fraction of the work for academic reasons. There are a whole bunch of tests for fair use.
What you're talking about is called 'public performances'. Basically, if you charge for it, or let people view it in a way that benefit you, you might have to pay a fee for it.
(For the categories of theatre productions, music, and movies/TV shows, that is. You can charge whatever you want for art viewing or software use or anything copyrighted work not explicitly in a categories that have the concept of 'public performance'.)
I don't know what universe you live in, but in my universe we have something called a 'copy machine' that does, in fact, allow us to produce unlimited copies of books with the push of a button.
The easiest way to is to rip all the pages out and stack them on a coallating copier at chapter at a time, and run them all through. But there are other ways that don't require destruction of the book.
I agree with you with software patents being pointless, I was just saying, even if they weren't, they should only be around for two years.
Which, yes, like I said, would be a completely idiotic timeframe for patents in the first place. Leaving them in place is just for twits who think they're a good idea...it's saying Okay, but since software development is so fast, your patent will be corrospondingly shorter.
I don't think we need to reduce the areas that are patentable, per se, I think what we need to do is recognize that areas are different.
Even if you want software patents, 20 years for software is insane. 20 years ago we were just inventing personal computers with GUIs. Internet time is traditionally, what, a month a year? 12 times as fast? Software patents should, if they exist at all, last 2 years, not 20. (And by the time you've gone through the patent process, half that time is over anyway, so they seem rather poin tless.)
And with genetic engineering, we need to fix the situtation where farmers accidently grow genetically engineered crops that blow in. That clearly should be legal...the company was already paid for the seeds, if the purchaser can't control them, tough. And if your seeds that were genetically engineered to be sterile blow into someone's field and mess up their seeds, you should be liable for replacing their seeds...if you don't want that, don't make sterile seeds, or require purchasers to keep them under control.
There are lots of areas we should look long and hard at. 20 years is probably the right amount of time for mechanical machines used in industry...that doesn't mean it's the right amount of time for everything else.
In fact, there are two very broad categories of patents that we should split up to start with...patents where the process results in items that are sold to people (Or the process is sold as a service.) and patents where a machine that embodies the process is sold, and the person who uses the machine to do that process does it for themselves.
That's the difference between say, an ore smelting design and a fuel injection system, or a car detailing method and a zero-gravity pen. There's obviously some overlap between the two, but they're just very broad concepts. And I don't think the latter need as much protection as the former.
People should have more latitudes to use patents for themselves, whereas people selling the 'method' need to pay for it. (And it's easier to keep track of the people selling the method, anyway.) People should definately have the ability, if a device that embodies a patent method, that they purchased, breaks, to build their own device that uses the patented method. (I'm thinking along the lines of patented file formats, for one thing.)
You're right, what the grandparent has is a vague 'natural law' conception of patents, and that's not a crazy idea, as that's how several European countries do it, at least for copyrights. (I don't know of anyone who does it for patents.)
But, yes, in the US, we don't have that concept. If we did, you'd be able to patent things without explaining how they worked. (It used to be you couldn't copyright things without turning a copy over to the National Archives, and I kinda wish that was still in effect.)
What I've always thought it WRT genes is that you should be able to patent them, but it only matters if someone else genetically engineers the same gene. If, instead of engineering the gene, they merely took an existing living thing with the gene (Even if it was one of the geneticly modified things you sold.), that should not be subject to patent protection.
I think this would even work with human genes. You can genetically engineer people to have gills or whatever, but you don't get any royalties off their children.
It becomes your problem when you get blacklisted for spamming. Or when people get smart and start confirming spam that you misdirected to you, so you have to look at it also.
The reason it was upsurped from you is that it's utterly impossible to keep track of property rights up there.
And it's utterly absurd to let people forbid others from using property in a way that doesn't hurt it at all if the property owner physically cannot use it. It doesn't use up your sky when an airplane crosses your slice of it. They can't harrass you, they don't make off with stuff you left hovering in midair, they don't mess up your nice tidy air.
If you don't like this, the only thing you have to do to keep people from using it is to put something there. Build a giant 'no trespassing' sign or a giant disco ball or a middle digit upthrust to heaven. At which point not only will they avoid your sky, they'll avoid nearby sky, too.
Of course, it's illegal to do that, because of the danger it presents to others around you when your stupid mile-high sign falls over. But that's not the Federal government doing that, that's local zoning code.
For other examples of this, look up 'easements', which is when 'land-locked' property owners are given the legal right to cross someone else's land to get to the public roads.
Um, yes, you can. Why on earth wouldn't you be able to be? Do you think Goodyear is forbidden from flying their blimp over their own land?
Now, what you can't do is operate a balloon with complete disregard towards the FAA. You have to follow the rules of flight, whether floating within your own property or not. The FAA is in charge of all flying whatsoever, whether 'over' public property or private. (Over in quotes, because, like I said, you own a slice of the universe, not the ground, so you're 'within' public or private property, not over it.)
And, just to cover my bases, although I doubt you were talking about it, if we're talking about tethered balloon, that's not a useful loophole. High-flying tethered balloons are not structures, people can't claim they're not flying simply because they're hooked to the ground remotely. They come under the FAA jurisdiction at some point, and it's not only 'physically disconnected from the ground'. Height does play in there, but, like I said, the FAA is not in charge of buildings (The Sears Tower is now cleared for landing.), so it's not just height.
I don't know exactly what the legal rules are there, but I'm sure they exist. Probably depends on how far you can freely move back and forth...i.e., are you moving far enough that your location needs to be kept track of? A blimp tied to a mooring isn't, a blimp connect to the ground by 30,000 feet of nylon is. A building isn't. (This is actually a fairly silly question, because it's near impossible to tether balloons at any respectable height. The line will either snap from the wind, or the weight will keep the balloon from getting up. You certainly couldn't get to 30,000 feet.)
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Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
Gee, what do you do if you don't know how to land? Well, you could ask the fucking tower.
I mean, I don't know anything about airplanes, and I know that one.
And, yes, pilots just use those to line up form a distance, and then eyeball the landing.
And once they get to airports, there are predefined areas they're supposed to be at, and the tower guides them around.
Flying is more a 'are we still aimed in the correct direction or did the wind turn us' than the 'how do we get from here to there' land navigation is.
How will you figure out where to take cover without GPS?
You aim them by shooting one. And see how far off it is, and feeding corrections in. It only takes one shot and a spotter to tell you how you missed.
And I'm pretty certain every military in the world knows how to do this by now.
But this all stupid. Anyone who thinks OBL couldn't have already blow up pretty much any building he wanted, sans some government ones, is stupid.
You want to know how to cripple a city? Carry explosives in your suitcase into a subway hub station (Where two lines cross) and blow the shit out of it.
As OBL has not done that, I am forced to believe his intent is not to cripple the US, and thus protecting against that is not only impossible but pointless.
I have yet to bomb it.
People don't attack other people halfway around the world because they dislike those people. People avoid other people they dislike.
People attack people when they can gain from the attack.
Sure, American cultulre makes a nice 'look at how evil they are' image for devout Muslins, but it's an excuse, not a reason. There is no way in hell OBL could attack the US enough to remove reality TV, and he knows it. (And he's not even asking for that.) Getting rid of 'western culture' at this point would basically require nuking a third of the planet. You can't terrorize people into renouncing their culture, that's absurd.
The reason OBL attacks us is Saudi Arabia and Israel and now Afghanistan and Iraq and other stuff we've done in the middle east, which he wants to stop, completely. He couldn't care less about what we do within our own country, except to the extent he can recruit others with it.
Contract law simply doesn't work like that. You are correct that employees can bind businesses to contract as long as the other party had a reasonable assumption that they were doing business with someone able to sign contracts, and it's possible this extends to EULA, although there is a concept of a minimal check...if I walk up to a random customer in Walmart and write a contract with them, I'm not getting anywhere in court.
EULAs don't even check that the button pusher is a human being, much less appears to be able to sign a contract on behalf of the company. But they, possibly, might work in court in a hypothetically 'If there had been a check, this person would have passed' sense. OTOH, as the point of that is to protect the person that's not the business from the business saying 'Oh, he didn't have authority to sign that purchase order, take back your eight million custom ball bearings', it doesn't seem useful here, where the software company loses nothing if the person didn't agree to the EULA. (Because EULAs aren't actually valid contracts in the first place, as they don't grant any rights to the person agreeing to them.)
But students have never had the presumed power to bind schools to contracts. And, likewise, some random person who clicks 'okay' on my computer doesn't have the authority to bind me to anything, anymore than a random person who's been allowed on my property has the authority to have my house bulldozed. Employees binding businesses only works for businesses, period.
There have been a lot of incredibly fucking stupid judges out there who think EULAs are valid, and 'you've agreed to any EULA on your computer' is taing that stupidity to a new height. I just want to write some a Java program that gives, in the EULA, all the assets of the person who agrees to me, in returns for ten minutes of use, and then have someone go Kinkos, download it, and click okay. Damn, now I own FedEx.
Basically, like 98% of the people at Woodstock were time travellers, almost everyone here is a crosstemporal poster. (And all but two fark readers are from another time.)
It's one of those historical paradoxes. All time travellers realize they can't affect history if they're just one face in the crowd, and, throughout history, there have been a few really big crowds, so that's when the time travellers go...and end up being the entire crowd. They all think 'one more won't matter', but it does when it happens every single year of the 32,042,394 years of human history. (Minus the few thousand without time travel.)
For every time traveller, there is one native who was assumed to be there, but actually wasn't. The crowds can't just get larger. (For Woodstock, this causes quite a lot of confusion for us historians, because while you can find a lot of people who claim to have been there, and presumably, 'should' have been there, but were not, in fact, there. I suspect this is something to do with the drugs they took, or, rather, failed to take. Only forty-six natives have actually been located who went there, minus the bands and crew. (And at least three of the bands were non-native, as everyone knows.))
And, thanks to all this having actually happened in the first place, there's a rather unanswerable question: How large would the crowds have been without the time travellers knowing the crowds were large and showing up there? That's basically what I'm attempting to answer. I'm begining to think all large crowds are composed of time travellers, and that is the sole reason they happened, and that human history basically happens because time travellers read about it and showed up to play their part. (Like the Jack the Ripper lunatic they caught in 2574.)
And I'm still trying to track down those guys who managed to break through the temporal barrier around the Kennedy assassination and wandered up on the grassy knoll for an out-of-the-way view, if anyone can help with that, but I can't seem to figure out who's running that barrier or why it will have gone down in 2918 for six days.
What do you mean, my computer recorded it? No, my computer recorded that it thought someone clicked okay. That doesn't prove someone did click okay, and, more to the point, it's not even pretending to know that was me.
Like I say every time someone starts whining about this:
I'm incredibly glad the courts have discovered freedom of expression, because that right isn't in the fucking constitution. There's nothing in there that gives you the right to post whatever you want online...that's not 'speech' or 'press'.
If you don't agree with the courts 'legislating' from the bench, you can shut the fuck up, because you apparently have no right to even have a discussion here. Print out some flyers or call me on the phone if you wish to rebut that.
You can have issues with certain decisions made in recently history, like I do, but complaining online about 'legislating from the bench' is possibly the most hypocritical thing I've ever seen.
How on earth would you 'continue to make a copy'? You could make another copy, which would be illegal under the new law, or keep the old ones, which are still just illegal under the old one, but you'd have to be functioning fairly slowly to be making the same copy before and after the passage of the law.
The entire point of copyright is to enrich the public domain by reqarding authors...but the whole thing falls apart with software, because no one is going to be able to use these works when the copyright expires, even if it was for a sane time period.
For example, let's pretend that Windows 3.0 had fallen, right now, in the public domain. That's be, what, a 13 year copyright? That's not too insane for software.
But so what? We can't do anything with it besides run it, because we have no source.
And, like you said, we can learn from all other copyrighted works, we can slightly modify them for our own use, and we can't do any of that with binary software.
We can sit and watch movies and see how they were made, and make our own movie the same way. (Hell, they give us 'making of' documentaries.) We can analyze poetry, we can deconstruct literature, we can discuss technique in painting. We can, in theory, decompile software, but good luck with that, and here's hoping the EULA doesn't forbid it.
The only software that should have copyright protection is source. Binary stuff is giving people a copyright over 'unpublished' work. You want protection, you have to explain how you did it.
What you're talking about is called 'public performances'. Basically, if you charge for it, or let people view it in a way that benefit you, you might have to pay a fee for it.
(For the categories of theatre productions, music, and movies/TV shows, that is. You can charge whatever you want for art viewing or software use or anything copyrighted work not explicitly in a categories that have the concept of 'public performance'.)
The easiest way to is to rip all the pages out and stack them on a coallating copier at chapter at a time, and run them all through. But there are other ways that don't require destruction of the book.
Which, yes, like I said, would be a completely idiotic timeframe for patents in the first place. Leaving them in place is just for twits who think they're a good idea...it's saying Okay, but since software development is so fast, your patent will be corrospondingly shorter.
Even if you want software patents, 20 years for software is insane. 20 years ago we were just inventing personal computers with GUIs. Internet time is traditionally, what, a month a year? 12 times as fast? Software patents should, if they exist at all, last 2 years, not 20. (And by the time you've gone through the patent process, half that time is over anyway, so they seem rather poin tless.)
And with genetic engineering, we need to fix the situtation where farmers accidently grow genetically engineered crops that blow in. That clearly should be legal...the company was already paid for the seeds, if the purchaser can't control them, tough. And if your seeds that were genetically engineered to be sterile blow into someone's field and mess up their seeds, you should be liable for replacing their seeds...if you don't want that, don't make sterile seeds, or require purchasers to keep them under control.
There are lots of areas we should look long and hard at. 20 years is probably the right amount of time for mechanical machines used in industry...that doesn't mean it's the right amount of time for everything else.
In fact, there are two very broad categories of patents that we should split up to start with...patents where the process results in items that are sold to people (Or the process is sold as a service.) and patents where a machine that embodies the process is sold, and the person who uses the machine to do that process does it for themselves.
That's the difference between say, an ore smelting design and a fuel injection system, or a car detailing method and a zero-gravity pen. There's obviously some overlap between the two, but they're just very broad concepts. And I don't think the latter need as much protection as the former.
People should have more latitudes to use patents for themselves, whereas people selling the 'method' need to pay for it. (And it's easier to keep track of the people selling the method, anyway.) People should definately have the ability, if a device that embodies a patent method, that they purchased, breaks, to build their own device that uses the patented method. (I'm thinking along the lines of patented file formats, for one thing.)
But, yes, in the US, we don't have that concept. If we did, you'd be able to patent things without explaining how they worked. (It used to be you couldn't copyright things without turning a copy over to the National Archives, and I kinda wish that was still in effect.)
I think this would even work with human genes. You can genetically engineer people to have gills or whatever, but you don't get any royalties off their children.
Just keep telling yourself that.
It becomes your problem when you get blacklisted for spamming. Or when people get smart and start confirming spam that you misdirected to you, so you have to look at it also.
And it's utterly absurd to let people forbid others from using property in a way that doesn't hurt it at all if the property owner physically cannot use it. It doesn't use up your sky when an airplane crosses your slice of it. They can't harrass you, they don't make off with stuff you left hovering in midair, they don't mess up your nice tidy air.
If you don't like this, the only thing you have to do to keep people from using it is to put something there. Build a giant 'no trespassing' sign or a giant disco ball or a middle digit upthrust to heaven. At which point not only will they avoid your sky, they'll avoid nearby sky, too.
Of course, it's illegal to do that, because of the danger it presents to others around you when your stupid mile-high sign falls over. But that's not the Federal government doing that, that's local zoning code.
For other examples of this, look up 'easements', which is when 'land-locked' property owners are given the legal right to cross someone else's land to get to the public roads.
Now, what you can't do is operate a balloon with complete disregard towards the FAA. You have to follow the rules of flight, whether floating within your own property or not. The FAA is in charge of all flying whatsoever, whether 'over' public property or private. (Over in quotes, because, like I said, you own a slice of the universe, not the ground, so you're 'within' public or private property, not over it.)
And, just to cover my bases, although I doubt you were talking about it, if we're talking about tethered balloon, that's not a useful loophole. High-flying tethered balloons are not structures, people can't claim they're not flying simply because they're hooked to the ground remotely. They come under the FAA jurisdiction at some point, and it's not only 'physically disconnected from the ground'. Height does play in there, but, like I said, the FAA is not in charge of buildings (The Sears Tower is now cleared for landing.), so it's not just height.
I don't know exactly what the legal rules are there, but I'm sure they exist. Probably depends on how far you can freely move back and forth...i.e., are you moving far enough that your location needs to be kept track of? A blimp tied to a mooring isn't, a blimp connect to the ground by 30,000 feet of nylon is. A building isn't. (This is actually a fairly silly question, because it's near impossible to tether balloons at any respectable height. The line will either snap from the wind, or the weight will keep the balloon from getting up. You certainly couldn't get to 30,000 feet.)
There are unregistered ships at sea right now. They're usually pirates. All governments reserve the right to blow them out of the water.