It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux (currently in beta). You can take the notes in whatever format or program you like, bring in PDFs, images, media files (such as dictation or lecture recordings), etc., and organize them as part of a Scrivener project.
Scrivener is extremely robust and offers multiple ways to view and organize your notes (such as in an outline or as notecards on a corkboard). You can choose what information gets compiled into a document for printing (such as an outline of a particular topic) and apply different formatting without having to change the source formatting. It's also great for handling endnotes and footnotes.
I bought a copy of Borderlands for XBox 360 used. It's true the developer did not receive compensation for that transaction. However, I ended up liking the game enough that I eventually purchased each of the DLC expansions, for which the developer presumably did receive compensation. I pre-ordered Borderlands 2 shortly after its release was announced and bought some of the BL2 DLC as well.
If I had not had the opportunity to purchase a used copy of the first game for $15, it's very unlikely any of my money would have found its way into Gearbox's coffers, as I wasn't willing to take a ~ $65 flier on a new copy of the game. I don't doubt I'm the only casual videogame buyer out there who operates like this.
Here's a great law review article written by Jean Sternlight of UNLV's Boyd School of Law discussing the impact of the recent case--AT&T Mobility, LLC v. Concepcion, 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011)--that paved the way for companies like Paypal and Amazon to impose arbitral class action waivers in their consumer contracts.
As others may have pointed out, the most effective (and direct) remedial measure here would involve amendment by Congress of the Federal Arbitration Act. Partisanship and regulatory capture by big business may render this option unworkable for now. In that case, changing the composition of the high court justices, coupled with nationwide reports of the deleterious effects of the Concepcion decision, could allow for SCOTUS to agree to hear a similar case in which Concepcion's holding could be narrowed or abrogated.
Did it ever occur to you that your comment is COMPLETELY off-topic? Did it ever occur to you that many people do not consider their step {son | father | mother | daughter} as steps? They just consider them as family? Did it occur to you that I am well aware that my wife has a history that she is not completely proud of (are any of us?) and yet I love her anyway?
Admittedly, my prior comment was off topic; hardly a first for/. or an offense meriting reprisal. What my off-topic comment did not do, however, was engage--even tacitly--in the judgments you apparently perceived to have been made thereby. I meant no offense -- and certainly nothing in my words impugned (i) your relationship with your children [natural or otherwise] or (ii) your feelings for your wife. YOU supplied the context.
I'm also willing to admit, in retrospect, that the comment I made was a bit tactless, and I should have been more diligent in censoring myself rather than firing off a quick post. On this account, I apologize for any resulting offense. As a practical matter on your end, you might want to omit irrelevant personal details the next time you ask advice from an online community.
Did it occur to anyone else that if the two adults (ages 36 and 30) are the natural parents of the two minors (ages 13 and 4) in the family, there may have been statutory rape involved in the conception of the older child (depending, of course, on whether the law in the family's place of residence provides for an age of consent > 16 years old)?
Students attending Florida’s state universities have to pay tuition to attend. As I’ve already pointed out, state law requires that the state expend money from general revenues for the “establishment, maintenance, and operation of” these state universities. I’m not aware of, nor have you pointed out, any “tuitions support (sic)” that exists as some separate series of payments to college students. I certainly don’t remember receiving any such “support” when I attended UF, so enlighten me, if you will. Supporting cites to specific provisions of the Florida Statutes, Laws of Florida, and/or Florida Administrative Code would be helpful and appreciated.
At bottom, I think your problem is with the law--chiefly, that you don't control it. I suspect that, like most people who’ve taken up the “not with my tax dollars” refrain, you believe that you should receive the benefits of citizenship, and of residing in the State of Florida, without cost to you—at least not unless *you* approve of any such costs in advance. In other words, you reject the sovereignty of the government of the State of Florida and of the United States of America, believing (foolishly, to be sure) that *you* are an exception to the laws which govern all other citizens and residents.
Or, perhaps you are simply making an (ineloquent and contrived) argument that you don’t like the state of the law, in which case your gripes were already addressed in the portion of my previous comment regarding relocation and/or ballot initiatives, supra.
Well, skippy, I do vote and I don't go to university. I am a real adult. I actually work.
When trying to convince others that you are “a real adult[,]” it’s probably a good rule of practice to avoid remarks that make you seem like a petulant child.
What you didn't explain is why my taxes should go to something that will not benefit me or the rest of society. Explain why my and everyone else's tax dollars should go to paying someone's college tuition for an education that will benefit only that third person?
Florida residents are subject to and bound by the laws of the State of Florida. Except where federally preempted, the supreme source of law of in Florida is the Florida Constitution. Article IX, Section 1 of that document provides, in pertinent part:
The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law . . . for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require.
Art. IX, sec. 1(a), Fla. Const., available at Flsenate.gov (emphasis added).
In other words, the simplest answer to your question is “because it’s the law.” If you don’t like it, you are free to (a) relocate to another state or (b) avail yourself of the provisions of Article XI, Section 3, which sets out the method by which citizens such as yourself may propose amendments to the Florida Constitution through ballot initiative. Whining about your taxes here is the coward’s option, and wholly unpersuasive.
First - efforts to increase tuition at UF have been continually rebuffed by the Board of Trustees and the Florida legislature. The price of tuition is largely a political matter over which students have no control. If you want to see changes, get involved and vote.
Second, please stop perpetuating the "not with my tax dollars" trope. To the extent some small portion of "your taxes" (Florida has no state income tax, so you must be referring to sales or use taxes) is ultimately distributed by state government for higher education, it is done this way for the same reasons that my taxes are used to pay for building and maintaining the roads and bridges you drive on, and the law enforcement and fire departments that protect you and your property, and any number of other sovereign-provided privileges, immunities, rights and services that you enjoy as a citizen of the United States and (presumably) a resident of Florida.
After Sanderson took over the books have tremendously improved, almost back to the initial volumes.
For the most part, I'd agree with this assessment. While I feel Sanderson has done a decent job with Perrin and Rand, and a fantastic job with Egwene, I found Sanderson's treatment of Mat Cauthon in Towers of Midnight extremely disappointing. Many fans apparently complained that Sanderson's rendering of Mat in The Gathering Storm was inaccurate. So he over-corrected in ToM, styling Mat as more of a caricature of the brash, irreverent youth who was so excited to let loose a badger on the village green in the opening portion of The Eye of the World.
To me, Jordan did a fantastic job evolving and maturing Mat's character over the course of the story, and I wasn't at all unhappy with Sanderson's initial effort with the character in TGS. I certainly never had the impression that Mat was the illiterate simpleton Sanderson made him out to be in ToM. Seeing Mat's character regress to the point of playing puerile practical jokes really soured me on Towers of Midnight and certainly dampens anticipation for the final volume.
Still no eSATA. No USB 3. No SATA III (6GB/s). No Blu-ray. SSDs are still Samsung models which do not use any of the top 3 controller technologies (SandForce, Intel, Indilinx Barefoot). 1920 x 1080 or 1920 x 1200 resolution still not available on 15" models.
All the things I'd been hoping would make it to the next MBP didn't. Looks like I'll be sticking with my 2006 Core2Duo 15" MBP a while longer.
And it is a small step from corporate control to a corporate state (or one that is corporate controlled).
There can be no doubt that Americans are already living in a corporate-controlled state. Sure, elections are held, but it's nigh on impossible to get elected to high office (U.S. House, Senate, President) without enormous political "contributions" from corporate coffers. How many times have we heard the old trope about "protecting American businesses" from our elected officials? Indeed, they've said it so many times that people actually *believe* businesses need protection rather than the other way 'round. However you feel about the healthcare debate, or the TARP bail-outs (too big to fail? WTF!?!), or no-bid defense contracts, etc, one thing should be eminently clear to those on all sides: these days, it is impossible to tell where the government ends and the corporate board room begins.
Maybe this is a step in the right direction but I'm severely underwhelmed by what qualifies for "innovative" when it comes to games.... Anything in 3 dimensions should be far more complex than Go, because a 3d world itself can contain the complex board games. I think the designers forget about things like spatial awareness or presenting players with non-trivial decisions that require an understanding of morality, metaphor, or abstraction....
I couldn't agree more. But this would mean game studios would have to start hiring people with *gasp* liberal arts degrees! In all seriousness, and to take your point further, three-dimensional MMOs offer greater artistic opportunities and pose greater challenges than your run-of-the-mill videogame. These worlds have the capacity to incorporate much of the ingenuity and creativity of the human experience - from art to music to the written word - but always manage to fall woefully short of the mark. I think the reason for this is fairly simple: games like this are massively expensive and have to recoup [or demonstrate the possibility to recoup] significant capital outlay in a relatively short period of time. It's not ars gratia artis.
Would a game which incorporated the theatrical devices of Shakespeare, the rich descriptiveness of Henry James, and the subtleties of games like Go or Bridge into a real-time 3D environment be better [read: more engaging and less prone to bots/spammers] than WoW or its ilk? Probably. Would it sell? I doubt it, unless it offered something for those less attuned to subtlety and artifice.
According to Congress, Copyright Law is the most important set of laws ever written. I say this purely from a damages standpoint: for antitrust violations, patent infringement, securities fraud, toxic torts, and other socially detrimental acts for which civil remedies are provided, often the greatest measure of damages afforded by law is trebled (3x actual damages). With copyrights, however, that number can be 150,000x actual damages. Undedr the methods proposed in the PRO IP Act, someone caught with an iPod full of pirated songs (30,000 songs, let's say) can face a maximum penalty of ~$4.5 BILLION in statutory damages. Somehow, this seems a little ridiculous--to put it in perspective, most record companies average less than ~$700 million in sales. So the "theft" mentioned above is valued at more than 3x TOTAL Revenues for some companies!
And in patent infringement or antitrust cases, the injured party has to PROVE damages. Not so in the case of copyright - it's strict liability. My personal feeling on this is that Congress should go back to the drawing board--i.e., the Constitution--and limit copyright protection to the "Authors" mentioned in the text of Article I. Musicians, movie studios, and more importantly, publishing clearinghouses != authors as the term was used in 1787, and so should not get the same protection granted to AUTHORS. But this is what happens in any system where elected officials rely on private money to campaign for office--only the wealthiest and most powerful interests will receive representation, no matter how invidious or destructive their goals may be.
While this is an interesting idea in theory, it would unfortunately have little impact within the current system because patent examiners at the PTO do not have unrestricted internet access. In fact, what they have is extremely limited--they can't, for example, "google" for prior art. I believe the databases they rely most heavily upon are unique to the PTO. So in a system such as you propose, this prior art RSS feed would prove most useful as evidence in patent litigation for a party challenging the patent (I'm assuming, arguendo, that the quality and logistical problems with the concept could be solved). However, it would have little or no impact for examiners at the PTO, meaning no reduction in patents being granted. And once a patent is granted, it carries a presumption of validity...
Thankfully, the USPTO has begun a trial run of a new PEER-TO-PATENT system, as proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck http://www.nyls.edu/pages/591.asp in Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform, which can be found at 20 Harvard Journal of Law Technology 123 (2006) for those of you who want some interesting reading--especially about how ridiculous each PTO examiner's workload is. The PEER-TO-PATENT Project http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ between the PTO and NYLS will solve some of the issues with prior art (and obviousness, hopefully), but it'll likely be years before we start seeing any real progress on this front.
For the most egregious software patents, we will still *sigh* have to rely on private litigation for invalidation, but recent Supreme Court decisions (Ebay, MedImmune, Teleflex) may have made that process a little easier as well.
most of the license agreements you must agree to in order to use the media [music, dvd, software, etc] include explicit provisions which work a WAIVER of these provisions of the DMCA - the real evil here is LICENSING AGREEMENTS. Typical jurisprudence which applies to contracts for the sale of goods has been sidestepped by these content rights holders. Shrinkwrap and clickwrap licenses have continually been given effect by the courts - those of you in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit [Chicago - Judge Posner's Court] are bound by some heavily pro-business precedent. See ProCd v. Zeidenberg, Hill v. Gateway 2000, etc. You have to hand it to those Law and Economics types . . . Unfortunately, rather than adopting their own constructions of the law, most of the other circuits have adopted or followed ProCD and its sister line of cases.
Most people are confused about Fair Use. It is not a "right" granted to you by the law. It's a DEFENSE to a claim of infringement. So in order to establish what is or is not a "fair use," you have to be sued for infringement and litigate the issue. If it were otherwise, i.e., an affirmative right, we'd see organizations like the EFF challenging these restrictive measures and theories of infringement in every circuit in the country on the OFFENSIVE. So rather than attack the DMCA--which will require legislative action to disable--we should be attacking LICENSE AGREEMENTS from the standpoint of UNCONSCIONABILITY, unequal bargaining power, unsophisticated parties, contracts of adhesion, etc. The best arguments will demonstrate negative impact on the market [ECONOMICS] rather than some argument in EQUITY.
Every time a story pops up involving government regulation of some facet of "business," the so-called libertarians come out of the woodwork with shouts of "Free Market!" and "Let the market solve . .." Others chime in with their comments about how to define this mythical "free market," but I feel like these cyclical discussions about pros and cons miss the bigger point: ALL of these assertions spring from the same underlying trope; namely, money/wealth = most important human development ever. The market, be it free, regulated, or completely monopolistic, is a remarkably poor indicator of the human condition on the whole, mostly because it cannot by definition admit any of the noneconomic considerations which inform human existence, such as the feelings of love and contentment you get when your first child takes her first steps, or the awe and sense of "smallness" one feels when first confronting megalithic wonders of nature. From the time some clever schemer figured out he could lock up the food to coerce others into doing his bidding, we as a species have "bought into" the private-property-first concept as being the only real way of organizing our societies. This is a fallacy - one need only look to the few remaining aboriginal micro-cultures to see that there is indeed another way of conceptualizing existence.
That said, I freely admit that to expect such sea change in our attitudes toward life is madness. We live in a world dominated by greed above all else. And it is to this basest of desires that political-economic theories like libertarianism appeal. Where the problem arises is that some people actually see VALUE and VIRTUE in these theories. Then they attempt to impose these illusory values on everyone else through manipulation of the political fora. Just as all the bible-thumping in the world will never convert everyone, so too will your efforts fail to convince everyone that Ayn Rand had even a rudimentary conscience. She'd happily poison her community's water supply if it meant a few extra nickels in the "Assets" column of her company's balance sheet (provided, of course, that her personal wealth afforded her access to a private well). The accumulation of private property and wealth cannot create liberty, or protect it. All that's really going on is a shifting from one person or group to another: as one gets richer--by locking in his customers to his wireless network, for example--his "liberty" increases because he can buy more methods to obtain it (like a private jet, or a private estate, or special access to political channels). Meanwhile, those he locks in experience a tightening of their "spheres of liberty" because they are now bound by his contracts, his protocols, and the features of his choosing. At bottom, the libertarian / free market ideology views the "spaces" of life--sociocultural space, cyberspace, geographic/terrestrial space--as necessitating exploitation for profit irrespective of social cost. Libertarians are nothing if not champions of the right to exclude, which is precisely what is at issue here.
In the world the libertarians envision, where Insatiable Greed and Sociopathy have replaced Humanities and Fine Arts in all school curricula, dividing up the broadcast spectrum into proprietary, non-interoperable blocks would result in greater freedom for everyone because it would invite wide-ranging competition. Of course, when you emphasize the right to exclude others, you correspondingly de-emphasize progress and development. Capital expenditure targeted at improving reliability, usability, or security will only be made where it directly correlates to an expected, quantifiable rate of return. The converse of this--as so many slashdotters have pointed out--is that an open, interoperable network dedicated to the public and divorced from the "this is mine you can't use it" mentality will foster improvement simply because improvements can be made. Improvement for improvement's sake is preposterous,
Slashdot Mirror
I've found Scrivener to be invaluable in my law practice. See http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php.
It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux (currently in beta). You can take the notes in whatever format or program you like, bring in PDFs, images, media files (such as dictation or lecture recordings), etc., and organize them as part of a Scrivener project.
Scrivener is extremely robust and offers multiple ways to view and organize your notes (such as in an outline or as notecards on a corkboard). You can choose what information gets compiled into a document for printing (such as an outline of a particular topic) and apply different formatting without having to change the source formatting. It's also great for handling endnotes and footnotes.
I bought a copy of Borderlands for XBox 360 used. It's true the developer did not receive compensation for that transaction. However, I ended up liking the game enough that I eventually purchased each of the DLC expansions, for which the developer presumably did receive compensation. I pre-ordered Borderlands 2 shortly after its release was announced and bought some of the BL2 DLC as well.
If I had not had the opportunity to purchase a used copy of the first game for $15, it's very unlikely any of my money would have found its way into Gearbox's coffers, as I wasn't willing to take a ~ $65 flier on a new copy of the game. I don't doubt I'm the only casual videogame buyer out there who operates like this.
Here's a great law review article written by Jean Sternlight of UNLV's Boyd School of Law discussing the impact of the recent case--AT&T Mobility, LLC v. Concepcion, 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011)--that paved the way for companies like Paypal and Amazon to impose arbitral class action waivers in their consumer contracts.
As others may have pointed out, the most effective (and direct) remedial measure here would involve amendment by Congress of the Federal Arbitration Act. Partisanship and regulatory capture by big business may render this option unworkable for now. In that case, changing the composition of the high court justices, coupled with nationwide reports of the deleterious effects of the Concepcion decision, could allow for SCOTUS to agree to hear a similar case in which Concepcion's holding could be narrowed or abrogated.
Did it ever occur to you that your comment is COMPLETELY off-topic? Did it ever occur to you that many people do not consider their step {son | father | mother | daughter} as steps? They just consider them as family? Did it occur to you that I am well aware that my wife has a history that she is not completely proud of (are any of us?) and yet I love her anyway?
Admittedly, my prior comment was off topic; hardly a first for /. or an offense meriting reprisal. What my off-topic comment did not do, however, was engage--even tacitly--in the judgments you apparently perceived to have been made thereby. I meant no offense -- and certainly nothing in my words impugned (i) your relationship with your children [natural or otherwise] or (ii) your feelings for your wife. YOU supplied the context.
I'm also willing to admit, in retrospect, that the comment I made was a bit tactless, and I should have been more diligent in censoring myself rather than firing off a quick post. On this account, I apologize for any resulting offense. As a practical matter on your end, you might want to omit irrelevant personal details the next time you ask advice from an online community.
Did it occur to anyone else that if the two adults (ages 36 and 30) are the natural parents of the two minors (ages 13 and 4) in the family, there may have been statutory rape involved in the conception of the older child (depending, of course, on whether the law in the family's place of residence provides for an age of consent > 16 years old)?
Students attending Florida’s state universities have to pay tuition to attend. As I’ve already pointed out, state law requires that the state expend money from general revenues for the “establishment, maintenance, and operation of” these state universities. I’m not aware of, nor have you pointed out, any “tuitions support (sic)” that exists as some separate series of payments to college students. I certainly don’t remember receiving any such “support” when I attended UF, so enlighten me, if you will. Supporting cites to specific provisions of the Florida Statutes, Laws of Florida, and/or Florida Administrative Code would be helpful and appreciated.
At bottom, I think your problem is with the law--chiefly, that you don't control it. I suspect that, like most people who’ve taken up the “not with my tax dollars” refrain, you believe that you should receive the benefits of citizenship, and of residing in the State of Florida, without cost to you—at least not unless *you* approve of any such costs in advance. In other words, you reject the sovereignty of the government of the State of Florida and of the United States of America, believing (foolishly, to be sure) that *you* are an exception to the laws which govern all other citizens and residents.
Or, perhaps you are simply making an (ineloquent and contrived) argument that you don’t like the state of the law, in which case your gripes were already addressed in the portion of my previous comment regarding relocation and/or ballot initiatives, supra.
Well, skippy, I do vote and I don't go to university. I am a real adult. I actually work.
When trying to convince others that you are “a real adult[,]” it’s probably a good rule of practice to avoid remarks that make you seem like a petulant child.
What you didn't explain is why my taxes should go to something that will not benefit me or the rest of society. Explain why my and everyone else's tax dollars should go to paying someone's college tuition for an education that will benefit only that third person?
Florida residents are subject to and bound by the laws of the State of Florida. Except where federally preempted, the supreme source of law of in Florida is the Florida Constitution. Article IX, Section 1 of that document provides, in pertinent part:
The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law . . . for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require.
Art. IX, sec. 1(a), Fla. Const., available at Flsenate.gov (emphasis added).
In other words, the simplest answer to your question is “because it’s the law.” If you don’t like it, you are free to (a) relocate to another state or (b) avail yourself of the provisions of Article XI, Section 3, which sets out the method by which citizens such as yourself may propose amendments to the Florida Constitution through ballot initiative. Whining about your taxes here is the coward’s option, and wholly unpersuasive.
First - efforts to increase tuition at UF have been continually rebuffed by the Board of Trustees and the Florida legislature. The price of tuition is largely a political matter over which students have no control. If you want to see changes, get involved and vote.
Second, please stop perpetuating the "not with my tax dollars" trope. To the extent some small portion of "your taxes" (Florida has no state income tax, so you must be referring to sales or use taxes) is ultimately distributed by state government for higher education, it is done this way for the same reasons that my taxes are used to pay for building and maintaining the roads and bridges you drive on, and the law enforcement and fire departments that protect you and your property, and any number of other sovereign-provided privileges, immunities, rights and services that you enjoy as a citizen of the United States and (presumably) a resident of Florida.
After Sanderson took over the books have tremendously improved, almost back to the initial volumes.
For the most part, I'd agree with this assessment. While I feel Sanderson has done a decent job with Perrin and Rand, and a fantastic job with Egwene, I found Sanderson's treatment of Mat Cauthon in Towers of Midnight extremely disappointing. Many fans apparently complained that Sanderson's rendering of Mat in The Gathering Storm was inaccurate. So he over-corrected in ToM, styling Mat as more of a caricature of the brash, irreverent youth who was so excited to let loose a badger on the village green in the opening portion of The Eye of the World. To me, Jordan did a fantastic job evolving and maturing Mat's character over the course of the story, and I wasn't at all unhappy with Sanderson's initial effort with the character in TGS. I certainly never had the impression that Mat was the illiterate simpleton Sanderson made him out to be in ToM. Seeing Mat's character regress to the point of playing puerile practical jokes really soured me on Towers of Midnight and certainly dampens anticipation for the final volume.
Still no eSATA. No USB 3. No SATA III (6GB/s). No Blu-ray. SSDs are still Samsung models which do not use any of the top 3 controller technologies (SandForce, Intel, Indilinx Barefoot). 1920 x 1080 or 1920 x 1200 resolution still not available on 15" models.
All the things I'd been hoping would make it to the next MBP didn't. Looks like I'll be sticking with my 2006 Core2Duo 15" MBP a while longer.
And then there have been rather recent studies which indicate plenty of ill effects. http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation?currentPage=1
--
Total value of the derivatives time-bomb: $1.144 quadrillion and counting.
And it is a small step from corporate control to a corporate state (or one that is corporate controlled).
There can be no doubt that Americans are already living in a corporate-controlled state. Sure, elections are held, but it's nigh on impossible to get elected to high office (U.S. House, Senate, President) without enormous political "contributions" from corporate coffers. How many times have we heard the old trope about "protecting American businesses" from our elected officials? Indeed, they've said it so many times that people actually *believe* businesses need protection rather than the other way 'round. However you feel about the healthcare debate, or the TARP bail-outs (too big to fail? WTF!?!), or no-bid defense contracts, etc, one thing should be eminently clear to those on all sides: these days, it is impossible to tell where the government ends and the corporate board room begins.
Maybe this is a step in the right direction but I'm severely underwhelmed by what qualifies for "innovative" when it comes to games. ... Anything in 3 dimensions should be far more complex than Go, because a 3d world itself can contain the complex board games. I think the designers forget about things like spatial awareness or presenting players with non-trivial decisions that require an understanding of morality, metaphor, or abstraction. ...
I couldn't agree more. But this would mean game studios would have to start hiring people with *gasp* liberal arts degrees! In all seriousness, and to take your point further, three-dimensional MMOs offer greater artistic opportunities and pose greater challenges than your run-of-the-mill videogame. These worlds have the capacity to incorporate much of the ingenuity and creativity of the human experience - from art to music to the written word - but always manage to fall woefully short of the mark. I think the reason for this is fairly simple: games like this are massively expensive and have to recoup [or demonstrate the possibility to recoup] significant capital outlay in a relatively short period of time. It's not ars gratia artis. Would a game which incorporated the theatrical devices of Shakespeare, the rich descriptiveness of Henry James, and the subtleties of games like Go or Bridge into a real-time 3D environment be better [read: more engaging and less prone to bots/spammers] than WoW or its ilk? Probably. Would it sell? I doubt it, unless it offered something for those less attuned to subtlety and artifice.
According to Congress, Copyright Law is the most important set of laws ever written. I say this purely from a damages standpoint: for antitrust violations, patent infringement, securities fraud, toxic torts, and other socially detrimental acts for which civil remedies are provided, often the greatest measure of damages afforded by law is trebled (3x actual damages). With copyrights, however, that number can be 150,000x actual damages. Undedr the methods proposed in the PRO IP Act, someone caught with an iPod full of pirated songs (30,000 songs, let's say) can face a maximum penalty of ~$4.5 BILLION in statutory damages. Somehow, this seems a little ridiculous--to put it in perspective, most record companies average less than ~$700 million in sales. So the "theft" mentioned above is valued at more than 3x TOTAL Revenues for some companies! And in patent infringement or antitrust cases, the injured party has to PROVE damages. Not so in the case of copyright - it's strict liability. My personal feeling on this is that Congress should go back to the drawing board--i.e., the Constitution--and limit copyright protection to the "Authors" mentioned in the text of Article I. Musicians, movie studios, and more importantly, publishing clearinghouses != authors as the term was used in 1787, and so should not get the same protection granted to AUTHORS. But this is what happens in any system where elected officials rely on private money to campaign for office--only the wealthiest and most powerful interests will receive representation, no matter how invidious or destructive their goals may be.
G-R-E-E-D.
While this is an interesting idea in theory, it would unfortunately have little impact within the current system because patent examiners at the PTO do not have unrestricted internet access. In fact, what they have is extremely limited--they can't, for example, "google" for prior art. I believe the databases they rely most heavily upon are unique to the PTO. So in a system such as you propose, this prior art RSS feed would prove most useful as evidence in patent litigation for a party challenging the patent (I'm assuming, arguendo, that the quality and logistical problems with the concept could be solved). However, it would have little or no impact for examiners at the PTO, meaning no reduction in patents being granted. And once a patent is granted, it carries a presumption of validity...
Thankfully, the USPTO has begun a trial run of a new PEER-TO-PATENT system, as proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck http://www.nyls.edu/pages/591.asp in Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform, which can be found at 20 Harvard Journal of Law Technology 123 (2006) for those of you who want some interesting reading--especially about how ridiculous each PTO examiner's workload is. The PEER-TO-PATENT Project http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ between the PTO and NYLS will solve some of the issues with prior art (and obviousness, hopefully), but it'll likely be years before we start seeing any real progress on this front.
For the most egregious software patents, we will still *sigh* have to rely on private litigation for invalidation, but recent Supreme Court decisions (Ebay, MedImmune, Teleflex) may have made that process a little easier as well.
most of the license agreements you must agree to in order to use the media [music, dvd, software, etc] include explicit provisions which work a WAIVER of these provisions of the DMCA - the real evil here is LICENSING AGREEMENTS. Typical jurisprudence which applies to contracts for the sale of goods has been sidestepped by these content rights holders. Shrinkwrap and clickwrap licenses have continually been given effect by the courts - those of you in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit [Chicago - Judge Posner's Court] are bound by some heavily pro-business precedent. See ProCd v. Zeidenberg, Hill v. Gateway 2000, etc. You have to hand it to those Law and Economics types . . . Unfortunately, rather than adopting their own constructions of the law, most of the other circuits have adopted or followed ProCD and its sister line of cases.
Most people are confused about Fair Use. It is not a "right" granted to you by the law. It's a DEFENSE to a claim of infringement. So in order to establish what is or is not a "fair use," you have to be sued for infringement and litigate the issue. If it were otherwise, i.e., an affirmative right, we'd see organizations like the EFF challenging these restrictive measures and theories of infringement in every circuit in the country on the OFFENSIVE. So rather than attack the DMCA--which will require legislative action to disable--we should be attacking LICENSE AGREEMENTS from the standpoint of UNCONSCIONABILITY, unequal bargaining power, unsophisticated parties, contracts of adhesion, etc. The best arguments will demonstrate negative impact on the market [ECONOMICS] rather than some argument in EQUITY.
just a thought.
>cd /SoapBox
." Others chime in with their comments about how to define this mythical "free market," but I feel like these cyclical discussions about pros and cons miss the bigger point: ALL of these assertions spring from the same underlying trope; namely, money/wealth = most important human development ever. The market, be it free, regulated, or completely monopolistic, is a remarkably poor indicator of the human condition on the whole, mostly because it cannot by definition admit any of the noneconomic considerations which inform human existence, such as the feelings of love and contentment you get when your first child takes her first steps, or the awe and sense of "smallness" one feels when first confronting megalithic wonders of nature. From the time some clever schemer figured out he could lock up the food to coerce others into doing his bidding, we as a species have "bought into" the private-property-first concept as being the only real way of organizing our societies. This is a fallacy - one need only look to the few remaining aboriginal micro-cultures to see that there is indeed another way of conceptualizing existence.
Every time a story pops up involving government regulation of some facet of "business," the so-called libertarians come out of the woodwork with shouts of "Free Market!" and "Let the market solve . .
That said, I freely admit that to expect such sea change in our attitudes toward life is madness. We live in a world dominated by greed above all else. And it is to this basest of desires that political-economic theories like libertarianism appeal. Where the problem arises is that some people actually see VALUE and VIRTUE in these theories. Then they attempt to impose these illusory values on everyone else through manipulation of the political fora. Just as all the bible-thumping in the world will never convert everyone, so too will your efforts fail to convince everyone that Ayn Rand had even a rudimentary conscience. She'd happily poison her community's water supply if it meant a few extra nickels in the "Assets" column of her company's balance sheet (provided, of course, that her personal wealth afforded her access to a private well). The accumulation of private property and wealth cannot create liberty, or protect it. All that's really going on is a shifting from one person or group to another: as one gets richer--by locking in his customers to his wireless network, for example--his "liberty" increases because he can buy more methods to obtain it (like a private jet, or a private estate, or special access to political channels). Meanwhile, those he locks in experience a tightening of their "spheres of liberty" because they are now bound by his contracts, his protocols, and the features of his choosing. At bottom, the libertarian / free market ideology views the "spaces" of life--sociocultural space, cyberspace, geographic/terrestrial space--as necessitating exploitation for profit irrespective of social cost. Libertarians are nothing if not champions of the right to exclude, which is precisely what is at issue here.
In the world the libertarians envision, where Insatiable Greed and Sociopathy have replaced Humanities and Fine Arts in all school curricula, dividing up the broadcast spectrum into proprietary, non-interoperable blocks would result in greater freedom for everyone because it would invite wide-ranging competition. Of course, when you emphasize the right to exclude others, you correspondingly de-emphasize progress and development. Capital expenditure targeted at improving reliability, usability, or security will only be made where it directly correlates to an expected, quantifiable rate of return. The converse of this--as so many slashdotters have pointed out--is that an open, interoperable network dedicated to the public and divorced from the "this is mine you can't use it" mentality will foster improvement simply because improvements can be made. Improvement for improvement's sake is preposterous,