The GOP doesn't want smaller, less bothersome goverment. They just want the goverment to regulate the things they do not like and leave alone the things they do. Of course, the Dems feel the exact same way, it's just the list of things they with to control/regulate is different.
I have no mod points, but this is too good of a statement to be hidden away at 0, so I'll quote it, and express my complete agreement here.
- Take away the right for corporations to own copyrights. - Make copyrights non-transferrable.
That way, if an employee makes something, the company must retain that employee to keep using his/her work.
This would: - put copyright back into the hands of the creators - re-introduce employee/employer loyalty
I'm sure there are other benefits as well, and almost certianly some downsides that I'm overlooking, but it can't be much worse than what we have now =P
I've read that the Google image index is only done twice a year. This also explains why so many of the images you find there are on pages that don't exist anymore -- Google image search has the worst reputation I've seen for this problem.
For example, try searching on Red Sox, and you'll see nothing about the world series.
Try searching on presidential debates and you'll get no pictures from the Bush/Kerry debates.
I think it's probably safe to say it's just image crawler lazyness more than a conspiracy.
This sounds very much like the property rights management system in Second Life. As the creator, you can set bits to determine what the next owner can do: modify, copy, transfer.
There has been a lot of discussion on the balance of power between creators and owners as far as these permissions go, including the rights granted by Fair Use and First Sale.
The problem is if you give someone the ability to copy, then they can replicate as many copies as they want at no cost, and then turn around and sell the copies. Creators don't like this, so they proposed a system where you lose your permission to sell as soon as you make a copy. This has problems as well, and it seems like it's going to take a lot of work to balance out.
The rose example you give is very similar to this. How do you sell something tangible that can easily replicate itself, and at the same time prevent rampant counterfieting?
There aren't really any more hurricanes than usual lately, it's just that they're hitting land more often instead of just swinging up the middle of the Atlantic to fizzle out. =)
Do you think the guy in the Oval Office is some kind of God handing down holy truth and his word is to be trusted above anyone else's
A significant number of people in the US think GWB was placed into his current position by "God" himself. So that's at least one large chunk of the group who blindly follows whatever he says.
I blame the followers of blind faith for a large portion of the failure of rationality in this country. The whole "faith" concept itself seems to be an excellent personality attribute to exploit.
Earth & Beyond is no longer in service. After an amazing two years of galactic adventure, Electronic Arts has made the decision to close Earth & Beyond in order to focus resources on future games.
We hope you've enjoyed the game as much as we have and we'll see you again in another great EA game!
No you won't.
EA Bought Westwood Studios and then cut E&B's budget so it would go hurling into the ground.
E&B had an excellent foundation and it's story was the most interesting of any other MMO that I've played or looked into so far.
EA bought out Maxis and put an end to their product diversity. Now they just stick with one sure-fire money maker and churn out endless expansions and revisions instead of entirely new simulator games.
And now they have the nerve to tell me I can't run certian software alongside their games because I might be a pirate. Nice way to treat your customers.
Combine this with electronic voting with no paper trails, and you have a great way to rig an election, since nobody has any idea roughly how it should have come out to even contest the validity of the electronic votes.
Don't just stop buying things yourself. Convince other people to do so as well, and for god sakes, please support the EFF by becoming an active member.
It's quite obvious that the best way to be heard in the US government today is by founding or joining a large group which supports your cause, and the EFF is the group that we need to support if we want to see progress toward fair intellectual property rights.
This moves EA down a notch from my "I refuse to buy anything from them" list to my "Friends don't let friends buy products from fucktard companies" list.
Let's see how long before they get on my currently empty "Register an anti-company website and document all their stupidity" list.
you and your community can either work to educate/debunk those 'disruptive users', one troll at a time
You can't reason with trolls. They feed off of *any* attention you give them. Words are fuel to them, no matter what the words say.
You can't appeal to their emotions. Often this is becuase they only see you as a digital abstraction, like an NPC in a game. They do not see a person on the other side.
When you stop responding to them, they will go away. This is a lot easier said than done. The problem is getting *everyone else* to stop responding to them as well. Trolls are great social engineers at manipulating people into responding, and it can be a daunting task to convince everyone to just ignore them.
It's kind of like that Simpsons episode where all the giant anthropomorphic advertisments started destroying the town, and the only way to make them stop was "just don't look".
1) Why do people like you try to polarize things, when it's well known that bell curves are much more naturally occurring? Most democrats are moderates, just as most Republicans are.
2) The current administration is a fine example of how the right-wing can also grow "big government", so you make no point here either.
But just like the obvious motives of the democrats, I also point out the motives of Jeb Bush and his appointed staff who are all suddenly eagar advocates for getting the Reform Party on the ballot in Florida.
Here's an index of various social virutal worlds, with reviews and screen captures. As you stated, there certianly are a lot of them for this to be news.
Active worlds seems more or less abandoned compared to what it was when I first tried it. The land is a wasteland of flashing signs all trying to coerce you into teleporting somewhere else, where there is also nobody to chat with =/
Kind of sad since they were the first to do it, but better alternatives have come along =)
OLEDs are made by sublimation, currently- earlier ones used a spin coat (easy) to make small panels. New panels are on the order of LCD raw stocks. Since you have to sublime chemicals (which could be as low as 150C to as high as 450C) the 'mask' which prevents the chemical from contacting where it shouldn't usually warps.
What ever happened to "the technology is so simple, you could print a screen with your inkjet printer"?
If OLED displays are as cheap as they were hyped to be (with claims like "you could practically print one on an inkjet printer"), then they should just make the OLED component modular so that it can be swapped out for a reasonable price when it begins to fade.
Nuclear power (both fusion and fission) both have the potential to produce incredible amounts of power, but they both have their drawbacks which may be overcome by technology.
The technology is here. It's called an 'energy amplifier'.
It's a nuclear reaction which: - creates far less plutonium and other waste materials - is impossible to runaway/meltdown - is fed by thorium (much more abundant than uranium, and much easier to process) - the waste materials it does create have a much shorter half life, and in fact can be used to process nuclear waste from conventional reactors to be made safer
It has a high start-up cost due to needing a cyclotron accelerator, but the long-term cost will be a great savings overall. We just have to stop being so short-sighted and invest in it.
Agreed. There were at least 3 distinct moments when I thought it was going to fade down and roll credits, but it kept going.
As someone who hasn't read the third book yet (read the first two), it definitely feels like they skipped over a lot of content at the end, as the wrap-up seemed very awkward.
What could perhaps improve the situation is if copyright law were changed so that the author or artist cannot legally give up their ownership over their work.
This would allow artists to go to multiple producers / distributors to release their songs, and put them in competition with each other.
As it is, there's really no competition in the music industry. If you like artist X, you have to fork over money to company Y. There's no alternative to get the same thing you want. It's one big mass-monopoly.
That, and copyrights should last no more than 14 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no mod points, but this is too good of a statement to be hidden away at 0, so I'll quote it, and express my complete agreement here.
You know what might fix a lot of things?
- Take away the right for corporations to own copyrights.
- Make copyrights non-transferrable.
That way, if an employee makes something, the company must retain that employee to keep using his/her work.
This would:
- put copyright back into the hands of the creators
- re-introduce employee/employer loyalty
I'm sure there are other benefits as well, and almost certianly some downsides that I'm overlooking, but it can't be much worse than what we have now =P
I've read that the Google image index is only done twice a year. This also explains why so many of the images you find there are on pages that don't exist anymore -- Google image search has the worst reputation I've seen for this problem.
For example, try searching on Red Sox, and you'll see nothing about the world series.
Try searching on presidential debates and you'll get no pictures from the Bush/Kerry debates.
I think it's probably safe to say it's just image crawler lazyness more than a conspiracy.
This sounds very much like the property rights management system in Second Life. As the creator, you can set bits to determine what the next owner can do: modify, copy, transfer.
There has been a lot of discussion on the balance of power between creators and owners as far as these permissions go, including the rights granted by Fair Use and First Sale.
The problem is if you give someone the ability to copy, then they can replicate as many copies as they want at no cost, and then turn around and sell the copies. Creators don't like this, so they proposed a system where you lose your permission to sell as soon as you make a copy. This has problems as well, and it seems like it's going to take a lot of work to balance out.
The rose example you give is very similar to this. How do you sell something tangible that can easily replicate itself, and at the same time prevent rampant counterfieting?
There aren't really any more hurricanes than usual lately, it's just that they're hitting land more often instead of just swinging up the middle of the Atlantic to fizzle out. =)
Except that, in South Florida, there's plenty of sunshine and it's suicidal to ride a bike anywhere with the way people drive down here.
I blame the followers of blind faith for a large portion of the failure of rationality in this country. The whole "faith" concept itself seems to be an excellent personality attribute to exploit.
No you won't.
EA Bought Westwood Studios and then cut E&B's budget so it would go hurling into the ground.
E&B had an excellent foundation and it's story was the most interesting of any other MMO that I've played or looked into so far.
EA bought out Maxis and put an end to their product diversity. Now they just stick with one sure-fire money maker and churn out endless expansions and revisions instead of entirely new simulator games.
And now they have the nerve to tell me I can't run certian software alongside their games because I might be a pirate. Nice way to treat your customers.
EA will never see another penny from me.
Combine this with electronic voting with no paper trails, and you have a great way to rig an election, since nobody has any idea roughly how it should have come out to even contest the validity of the electronic votes.
Don't just stop buying things yourself. Convince other people to do so as well, and for god sakes, please support the EFF by becoming an active member.
It's quite obvious that the best way to be heard in the US government today is by founding or joining a large group which supports your cause, and the EFF is the group that we need to support if we want to see progress toward fair intellectual property rights.
"really poor customer relations"?
That's putting it mildly.
This moves EA down a notch from my "I refuse to buy anything from them" list to my "Friends don't let friends buy products from fucktard companies" list.
Let's see how long before they get on my currently empty "Register an anti-company website and document all their stupidity" list.
you and your community can either work to educate/debunk those 'disruptive users', one troll at a time
You can't reason with trolls. They feed off of *any* attention you give them. Words are fuel to them, no matter what the words say.
You can't appeal to their emotions. Often this is becuase they only see you as a digital abstraction, like an NPC in a game. They do not see a person on the other side.
The only way to deal with trolls is to limit your reaction to reminding others not to respond to trolls.
When you stop responding to them, they will go away. This is a lot easier said than done. The problem is getting *everyone else* to stop responding to them as well. Trolls are great social engineers at manipulating people into responding, and it can be a daunting task to convince everyone to just ignore them.
It's kind of like that Simpsons episode where all the giant anthropomorphic advertisments started destroying the town, and the only way to make them stop was "just don't look".
1) Why do people like you try to polarize things, when it's well known that bell curves are much more naturally occurring? Most democrats are moderates, just as most Republicans are.
2) The current administration is a fine example of how the right-wing can also grow "big government", so you make no point here either.
I agree this is all quite snafu.
e a_puts_Nader_back_.shtml
But just like the obvious motives of the democrats, I also point out the motives of Jeb Bush and his appointed staff who are all suddenly eagar advocates for getting the Reform Party on the ballot in Florida.
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/14/Decision2004/Pl
Basically the rule is all politicians suck. Don't try to single out one side or the other.
Here's an index of various social virutal worlds, with reviews and screen captures. As you stated, there certianly are a lot of them for this to be news.
Active worlds seems more or less abandoned compared to what it was when I first tried it. The land is a wasteland of flashing signs all trying to coerce you into teleporting somewhere else, where there is also nobody to chat with =/
Kind of sad since they were the first to do it, but better alternatives have come along =)
OLEDs are made by sublimation, currently- earlier ones used a spin coat (easy) to make small panels. New panels are on the order of LCD raw stocks. Since you have to sublime chemicals (which could be as low as 150C to as high as 450C) the 'mask' which prevents the chemical from contacting where it shouldn't usually warps.
What ever happened to "the technology is so simple, you could print a screen with your inkjet printer"?
If OLED displays are as cheap as they were hyped to be (with claims like "you could practically print one on an inkjet printer"), then they should just make the OLED component modular so that it can be swapped out for a reasonable price when it begins to fade.
Nuclear power (both fusion and fission) both have the potential to produce incredible amounts of power, but they both have their drawbacks which may be overcome by technology.
r .html
The technology is here. It's called an 'energy amplifier'.
It's a nuclear reaction which:
- creates far less plutonium and other waste materials
- is impossible to runaway/meltdown
- is fed by thorium (much more abundant than uranium, and much easier to process)
- the waste materials it does create have a much shorter half life, and in fact can be used to process nuclear waste from conventional reactors to be made safer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier
http://einstein.unh.edu/FWHersman/energy_amplifie
It has a high start-up cost due to needing a cyclotron accelerator, but the long-term cost will be a great savings overall. We just have to stop being so short-sighted and invest in it.
Heh -- maybe the web would survive better if sites would stop putting so much extraneous crap on their pages.
Seriously - the ending just dragged
Agreed. There were at least 3 distinct moments when I thought it was going to fade down and roll credits, but it kept going.
As someone who hasn't read the third book yet (read the first two), it definitely feels like they skipped over a lot of content at the end, as the wrap-up seemed very awkward.
I always plug in two mice on my station. It confuses people trying to use it.
Too bad there aren't any programs which will read each mouse independently so we can do neat manipulation stuff in 3d apps =)
Copyright property is a state-sponsored temporary monopoly
You misspelled permanent.
What could perhaps improve the situation is if copyright law were changed so that the author or artist cannot legally give up their ownership over their work.
This would allow artists to go to multiple producers / distributors to release their songs, and put them in competition with each other.
As it is, there's really no competition in the music industry. If you like artist X, you have to fork over money to company Y. There's no alternative to get the same thing you want. It's one big mass-monopoly.
That, and copyrights should last no more than 14 years.