Keep in mind that an OC-48 line can only support 2405 megabits of traffic, or enough for about a hundred heavy users @24 megabits each. It costs what, 100K a month? 50k? maybe slightly less by now?
The flaw in your argument is that you just said that bandwidth costs money because upstream bandwidth costs money. While true, it is, in the most classical sense, begging the question.
If you want an equivalent comparison, the electric company is providing you with the same electrons over and over, just fluctuating back and forth.. soo why are you paying them money? Electrons are everywhere, and they're always moving, after all.
That's a bad comparison. Consuming energy consumes nonrenewable resources proportional to the amount of energy consumed. The same is not true for bandwidth. Up until it requires the upstream provider to add an additional fiber, there is no additional cost for adding bandwidth other than a tiny bit of power from equipment being active instead of idle, and even when additional provisioning is required, there's enough dark fiber rotting in the ground to make that argument pretty thoroughly silly except for the last mile.
The reason bandwidth is expensive in the U.S. is simple: Instead of our government putting in fiber, like they did everywhere else in the world, they let a bunch of corporations put in fiber, and now that's a sunk cost that those businesses have to pay for somehow. Amusingly, this means that the more bandwidth we use (in aggregate), the cheaper it should get, because those fiber providers are no longer distributing all those huge fixed costs over such a small number of users. With that said, there will eventually be a point at which that trend will reverse, as additional infrastructure must be added. We're many decades away from that point, though.
The corporate control of the last mile in the U.S. is particularly problematic, because nearly all of the corporations who own the last-mile infrastructure are either telephone providers or cable companies. Those sorts of companies have spent the past decade or more deliberately sabotaging the public's ability to obtain cheap bandwidth because it competes with their core business.
Broadband data caps are just another example of their monopoly abuse. They are preventing other companies from putting CDNs in their data centers (where they could reasonably provide content unmetered to the customers), and adding caps that make it so that their customers risk having their service shut off or getting hit with extortionate overage charges if they use a competing video-on-demand or VoIP service, in a deliberate effort to force their customers to pay for cable TV service even if they could otherwise get all the shows they care about over the Internet, and to force them to use the cable company's video-on-demand or VoIP service so that they can get extra revenue from those customers.
Make no mistake: This is not about forcing customers to pay for what they use. This is about the telcos abusing their monopolies to thwart free-market competition and to stave off their descent into becoming a dumb pipe. The people running those companies should do hard prison time.
Also regarding transfer rate - a lot of that is out of the control of the ISP itself. It's not their fault that Level 3 and Cogentco are having a tiff or something, nor the fact that you're downloading content or performing (retarded) speed tests from a site hosted on a T3 with 15,000 other broadband users.
For random download servers, yes. For legitimate speed test servers, though, it almost always is your ISP's fault. Most of the speed test servers I've seen are sitting at a major backbone peering point. I just did a speedtest.net speed test on my desktop machine at work. It measured 413 Mbps down and 139 Mbps up. I think the theoretical numbers are approaching a gigabit, so I'm pretty sur
Inkjets are disposable. If you only use them once every few weeks, your heads will be so hopelessly clogged in just a few months that you'll have to junk it. That's false economy; it doesn't take very long even at one $60-printer-per-year before you've exceeded the cost of a small-but-good, duplex-capable color laser, e.g. a Konica Minolta 1650EN (*), particularly when you factor in the high cost of ink. Unless you have a specific need for the look of ink, I'd just steer clear of it entirely.
(*) Note that I have not personally used that particular laser except for seeing print samples at a conference, but I own its big brother, the 7450 II grafx, and would highly recommend it if you need a large-format color laser. For printing music, the ability to do 11x17 folio printing is really useful.
On the other hand, skin and hair are relatively easy to experiment on, making it a fairly reasonable first step, assuming that at least some of the techniques involved can be applied to other areas of regenerative research, such as organ regeneration, dermal regeneration for burn victims, etc.
Nobody said that the tool makes you a professional. That's a lame straw man.
The difference between a professional (or a semipro who doesn't make a living at it) and a wannabe is that the wannabe gains little from moving up to better technology. In photography, the wannabe might miss fewer shots in the dark because of better high ISO performance, but otherwise, at best, they get slightly less fuzzy shots that are still poorly composed and uninteresting. When you get people who know what they're doing, the difference between a cheap camera and high-end gear is night and day, because they actually know how to make use of the additional functionality.
For this reason, the tool is not an afterthought, even for people who are good at what they do, particularly when the tool can make the difference between quality results and bad or no results. For example, although I'm quite capable of manually focusing and metering shots, unless I'm in a controlled studio environment, my camera is almost always at or near full auto. If I'm trying to get a particular DoF for a shot, it's a quick flip over to aperture-dependent mode or manual mode, but then I'm back to full auto. Why? Because great shots frequently come and go about as quickly as you can lift the camera to your face. By letting the camera do the heavy lifting for me when I don't have time to carefully set up the shot, I actually catch that amazing shot while the guy with the full-manual setup is still screwing around with his focus ring.
Of course, for the situations where I'm in nearly fully automatic mode, shooting conditions aren't challenging. If you're taking pictures outdoors during the day, it's all about getting interesting angles, framing, and maybe tweaking DoF once in a while, or stopping down to get more motion blur on waterfalls, or whatever. It is artistic, but even rank amateurs can get some decent shots as long as they at least have an eye for it. A good photographer just gets a higher hit rate and a lower complete dud rate.
The real difference between wannabes and competent photographers doesn't show until conditions start to get challenging. At a stage play, for example, the wannabes tend to just get washed-out white smudges. Me, I get at most one or two shots like that before I conclude that the automatic metering just can't deal with the challenging lighting. Then, for the rest of the night, I'm in full manual (except focus), and all my remaining shots are properly metered, or at least close enough to fix them in Lightroom so that nobody knows the difference.
This is, of course, way off topic at this point, but the same thing applies to professionals who are writing or creating other forms of content. They're not going to drop what they're doing mid-project to switch tools, but every so often, they have to upgrade, whether through obsolescence or just because they realize that better tools can save them from wasting time doing unnecessary grunt work that doesn't actually improve the final result (e.g. manually focusing or fully manually exposing when conditions aren't challenging). Upgrading your tools when you start to recognize that they are holding you back is just as much a part of being a professional as making the best use of the tools that you have. The difference between the wannabe and the professional is that the professional upgrades because he or she recognizes a way in which the tools are holding him or her back, whereas the wannabe upgrades merely because he or she thinks that the tools must be what's holding him or her back.:-)
Or, alternatively, I could make a movie that is a nearly exact copy of your book, but without crediting you at all. Without moral rights, if I can legally copy someone's work and reuse it in another form, I can also plagiarize that work, which deprives the actual creator of the reputation that he or she deserves, thus impacting his or her future earnings potential.
Moral rights are about protecting your reputation as an artist, writer, or other content creator. For example, suppose I create a movie and say that it was based on your romance novel, "My Story". Because I spent all of twelve hours writing the screenplay, and because I decided to try to shock audiences for ratings, it is a horribly written hack that barely even resembles your original book, following the basic story, but in a different setting, with thirty additional minutes of bestiality and extreme graphic violence sprinkled throughout. Now, everyone who sees that movie assumes that your book is horrible, and that you are a horrible writer. When your next book comes out, and/or when someone makes a movie version of your next book, people say, "Hey, isn't that the writer who wrote that awful 'My Story' movie?" and they skip your book.
Obvious troll. Real professionals are always watching for better tools that can make it easier for them to get their job done with less effort. Photographers periodically upgrade their gear because newer gear gives better results. Sure, they tend to stick with the basic technology families that they're familiar with, but if there's a massive game-changer, they usually know about it and consider whether adopting it would be a good move or not. The ones who don't eventually get left behind.
But I'll just note that the biggest issue with Latex is that it has its own idea of how your document should look, and if you disagree or ever dare attempt to override its page and space wasting decisions, you are in for a world of pain.
And heaven help you if you want to do any page layout work that requires computation. If you've never tried to do actual math computation in LaTeX... well, go find a ball-peen hammer and smash yourself in the nuts repeatedly for twenty minutes. You'll get the same basic experience, but you'll spend eight weeks less time doing it.
What IMO we desperately need is a modern typesetting system with as much power as LaTeX, but more scriptable using a modern programming language, and with proper separation between A. content, B. styles, and C. programming code, so that it can be more cleanly translated to and from other languages. If you start with something like HTML/XML and CSS, then modify it with the ability to programmatically control page breaking behavior much more flexibly than the CSS spec allows, you'll get about 95% of the way there.
I assume (but really have no proof since stuff doesn't exactly come out of copyright much...) that trademark law could handle things like Steamboat Willy coming out of copyright.
Trademarks don't cover descriptive use, which that arguably would be, so possibly not. And even if they did, they require continuous use in commerce or else they're worthless. They're also extremely expensive to obtain (several hundred dollars per name for each area of commerce that you want to protect the name in, plus an extra $100 every 10 years per name, per area of commerce), making them a rather pricey alternative to true moral rights.
... but I object to the term "exploit" if it is meant to be pejorative...
As a writer, I choose my words carefully. If there are two ways to interpret a sentence that I wrote, chances are, I meant both of them.:-)
But seriously, it's a fine line and a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, you'd like for truly interesting works to fall out of the public domain while people remember them, not just for the preservation of works and for making them available to future generations, but also so that interesting transformative uses of the work can enhance our culture. On the other hand, other than copyright, authors do not have moral rights, at least in the U.S., which means they have no other means of preventing objectionable use of their works in ways that potentially confuse people into having a negative opinion of the author's original work, or even a negative opinion of the author.
There are two ways to solve that problem. One way is to make the duration long enough that further commercial derivatives are unlikely to gain much of a popularity boost based on the previous commercial success of the original. The other way is to create formal protection of moral rights. For example, you might say that even though freely copying a work is lawful after 20 years, commercial derivative works require permission (which may be for a fee) for the life of the author plus the life of the author's immediate descendants. I'm not sure which approach is better, honestly.
Well, I'm sure some people would write them anyway, but nobody who hoped to ever make money at it would.
Second, how about 20 years, which is what I suggested as a "slam dunk"?
My gut says 20 years would probably be a reasonable balance, so long as it starts from first release and not the date of creation. My one concern about that short a duration is the risk of movie companies waiting out the copyright and then exploiting authors' books without compensating them. That extra decade-ish pushes you an entire generation down the road, which makes such exploitation a less attractive proposition.
The next copyright act would have it under copyright until 2027.
Nope. Even under the 1909 copyright act, 1985 + 28 years is 2013, which means it would have fallen out of copyright just over a month ago unless renewed.
The problem with that argument is that your assumption assumes all content is created by large corporations with a huge advertising budget. That doesn't sync up with reality.
For example, no individual would write a novel if he or she had only 5 years to make money with it. The average first novel takes something like 10.5 years to write, so the first half of the book would be unprotected before the author sold the first copy. And even if you say five years from the first public release, most first novels don't break even by then.
What we need to do is roll back copyright durations to pre-1976 levels, but modified slightly:
Copyright is automatic upon creation, but the 14-year clock begins ticking upon the first intentional/authorized public release.
Statutory protection requires registration, just as it does now.
Protection for a title can be extended to 28 years for a fee, but only if that title was properly registered (for the usual fee) during the first 14 years.
The fee for a 14-year extension should be raised to 3% of the total profits for the title, 1% of the total gross income for the title, or $100, whichever is greater.
With that scheme, you give the opportunity for individuals to still make money off of their work (because their profits are still growing, or at least are not tapering off rapidly to zero), while discouraging corporate extension (because 1% of the total gross of a highly exploited title might exceed their projected additional revenue for the second 14 years).
Alternatively, this scheme could encourage businesses to re-release old titles so that they bring in enough revenue to justify extending the copyright term. Either way, the public gets a very real benefit from the copyright owner having to explicitly file for an extension and pay a variable fee based on the actual income of each title.
Such a scheme provides Berne-compatible automatic copyright, but does so in a way that avoids the "My book isn't published, but it is already out of copyright" problem. But what this scheme explicitly does not do is use a Berne-compatible copyright duration, because those are simply obscene.
One of the main things it's supposed to address is to allow secure login from a public computer.
Unfortunately, that entire concept is flawed for at least two blindingly obvious reasons:
This does not solve the man-in-the-middle attack where untrusted endpoint devices are concerned, because that problem is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. If you cannot trust both endpoints, no secure connection is possible. This is a fundamental tenet of computer security.
In particular, if you can't trust the endpoint, you can't trust anything that the endpoint presents to you. Unless this scheme literally requires you to point your phone at the screen and authenticate every single action, there's nothing stopping someone from tweaking the content on its way to the untrusted screen so that the logout button doesn't actually log you out, but instead merely shows a fake logout screen. Then, the person who owns that untrusted computer has access to your account.
And even if you try to patch around that with a QR code that deauthorizes the computer, there's nothing stopping someone from automatically transferring money to a bank in the Cayman Islands right before it requests that logout code, or whatever. So even in the best case, this does not really add any significant amount of trust to the untrusted device.
If your phone can connect to the Internet, why aren't you just using your phone for browsing, and using the computer merely as a larger display and keyboard? By doing this, the login credentials are stored in your phone's keychain, so you aren't typing a password, making that issue moot, and the control disappears when you unplug from the keyboard and screen, making pretty much all other issues almost entirely moot unless you're actually typing or viewing something sensitive.
Singapore might be an exception. As for the other two, I said significantly lower. The difference between 33% or 37% and 38% isn't particularly significant in my book.
40% is still low compared with most of the civilized world. Most of the countries that are significantly lower on the list also have a significantly lower standard of living than the U.S. The few exceptions almost all have either no military or a U.S.-supported military.
It may take courage for only a moment, but during that moment it takes far more courage than anything else most people will ever do.
Only if you assume that the person in question was, in fact, in full possession of his/her faculties at the time. I don't think that's necessarily a safe assumption. When a person is emotionally distraught, his or her ability to think clearly is compromised—often severely so. IIRC, folks who attempt suicide often say that they thought through things coolly and rationally, which implies that perhaps the normal risk aversion mechanism is probably not functioning correctly, hence not courage, but also not cowardice. In fact, from what I've read, I would probably describe it more as a complete lack of feeling anything.
That said, although I've experienced bullying, I've never experienced thoughts of suicide, so my perspective is somewhat limited. What I do know is that it gets better. Sometimes it takes years, but the bullying and pain usually stops on its own, assuming that the emotional pain isn't caused by a chemical imbalance, in which case it often requires very careful adjustment of medication before it stops.
I can only hope that I will one day have the courage to end my life.
If you're even half seriously contemplating suicide, get help. A state of depression is no way to live your life every day—not just because you might hurt yourself, but also because it sucks to be miserable.
Only a truly courageous person with an iron will and determination to leave this world is capable of it. It is not a cowards end. I see it as a noble end. The Japanese and their culture got a great many things right, and the nobility of suicide is one of them.
Suicide is not the courageous way out—quite the opposite, really. Suicide typically requires courage for only a moment, after which it's too late to change your mind. Actually dealing with your problems takes more courage, potentially for years at a time.
No, not at all. They just assumed that if a bus takes too long to reach its destination, some passengers would get off and say, "Screw it," until the number of endpoints reaches a number for which the computation becomes feasible.:-D
Ummm... It was a good movie and all but the central premise of the movie was that they couldn't stop WOPR from launching the missiles. It's been a while, so I don't remember what the excuse was for why they couldn't just unplug WOPR. It was probably something like: "if the control system goes down, the missiles automatically launch". Now, that's really stupid engineering.
Stupid engineering, but remember that a major goal of good sci-fi is to make people think about the consequences of those sorts of decisions. The fact that any of us are breathing at all is likely in part because Petrov was in the loop in the former Soviet Union just a few months after that movie came out. But there's reason to believe that under the right circumstances, even that would not have protected us, because they did almost precisely what this movie warns us about (minus the artificially intelligent computer hooked up to a dial-in modem, that is). A technical malfunction on the Soviet side of the world could have literally destroyed almost all human life on the planet with little or no human involvement. Our two nations were that far beyond the limits of sanity. So the possibility of such things happening was not out of the question, and possibly still isn't. Scary, no?
I'm not going to be so lenient with the simple question of why the crews who man the missile silos can't sabotage the missiles and/or warheads.
By best estimates, we're talking about getting word out to a dozen or more sites and bringing in the personnel needed to disable over 1,500 missiles. That's not exactly a small order, but yes, that should have been happening in parallel, even knowing that they might not succeed.
I will confess, I knew less about cryptography when I first watched the movie. Knowing more about cryptography makes it more likely to me that there could be a cypher that, through some sort of cryptanalysis, you could figure out one character at a time. It's still pretty implausible.
On that point, I agree. Still, there were an order of magnitude fewer than in most movies of that sort, and they were all the sorts of things that you had to be at least a geek to recognize. Compare that with the sequel, in which the writers apparently didn't recognize that destroying D.C. would never cause missiles to be launched (because NORAD isn't in D.C.), or that a computer would never be built in a room full of CO2 because it would be impossible to repair it, or that just about every cell phone almost certainly requires a different data cable (which makes it really unlikely that the kid would have the right cable for his girlfriend's phone), or that if you have to empty your gas can just to reach a site, you don't stand a chance of making it back, or that people with terminal pancreatic cancer are unlikely to be able to keep up with a bunch of kids, or....
Slashdot Mirror
The flaw in your argument is that you just said that bandwidth costs money because upstream bandwidth costs money. While true, it is, in the most classical sense, begging the question.
That's a bad comparison. Consuming energy consumes nonrenewable resources proportional to the amount of energy consumed. The same is not true for bandwidth. Up until it requires the upstream provider to add an additional fiber, there is no additional cost for adding bandwidth other than a tiny bit of power from equipment being active instead of idle, and even when additional provisioning is required, there's enough dark fiber rotting in the ground to make that argument pretty thoroughly silly except for the last mile.
The reason bandwidth is expensive in the U.S. is simple: Instead of our government putting in fiber, like they did everywhere else in the world, they let a bunch of corporations put in fiber, and now that's a sunk cost that those businesses have to pay for somehow. Amusingly, this means that the more bandwidth we use (in aggregate), the cheaper it should get, because those fiber providers are no longer distributing all those huge fixed costs over such a small number of users. With that said, there will eventually be a point at which that trend will reverse, as additional infrastructure must be added. We're many decades away from that point, though.
The corporate control of the last mile in the U.S. is particularly problematic, because nearly all of the corporations who own the last-mile infrastructure are either telephone providers or cable companies. Those sorts of companies have spent the past decade or more deliberately sabotaging the public's ability to obtain cheap bandwidth because it competes with their core business.
Broadband data caps are just another example of their monopoly abuse. They are preventing other companies from putting CDNs in their data centers (where they could reasonably provide content unmetered to the customers), and adding caps that make it so that their customers risk having their service shut off or getting hit with extortionate overage charges if they use a competing video-on-demand or VoIP service, in a deliberate effort to force their customers to pay for cable TV service even if they could otherwise get all the shows they care about over the Internet, and to force them to use the cable company's video-on-demand or VoIP service so that they can get extra revenue from those customers.
Make no mistake: This is not about forcing customers to pay for what they use. This is about the telcos abusing their monopolies to thwart free-market competition and to stave off their descent into becoming a dumb pipe. The people running those companies should do hard prison time.
For random download servers, yes. For legitimate speed test servers, though, it almost always is your ISP's fault. Most of the speed test servers I've seen are sitting at a major backbone peering point. I just did a speedtest.net speed test on my desktop machine at work. It measured 413 Mbps down and 139 Mbps up. I think the theoretical numbers are approaching a gigabit, so I'm pretty sur
Inkjets are disposable. If you only use them once every few weeks, your heads will be so hopelessly clogged in just a few months that you'll have to junk it. That's false economy; it doesn't take very long even at one $60-printer-per-year before you've exceeded the cost of a small-but-good, duplex-capable color laser, e.g. a Konica Minolta 1650EN (*), particularly when you factor in the high cost of ink. Unless you have a specific need for the look of ink, I'd just steer clear of it entirely.
(*) Note that I have not personally used that particular laser except for seeing print samples at a conference, but I own its big brother, the 7450 II grafx, and would highly recommend it if you need a large-format color laser. For printing music, the ability to do 11x17 folio printing is really useful.
On the other hand, skin and hair are relatively easy to experiment on, making it a fairly reasonable first step, assuming that at least some of the techniques involved can be applied to other areas of regenerative research, such as organ regeneration, dermal regeneration for burn victims, etc.
Nobody said that the tool makes you a professional. That's a lame straw man.
The difference between a professional (or a semipro who doesn't make a living at it) and a wannabe is that the wannabe gains little from moving up to better technology. In photography, the wannabe might miss fewer shots in the dark because of better high ISO performance, but otherwise, at best, they get slightly less fuzzy shots that are still poorly composed and uninteresting. When you get people who know what they're doing, the difference between a cheap camera and high-end gear is night and day, because they actually know how to make use of the additional functionality.
For this reason, the tool is not an afterthought, even for people who are good at what they do, particularly when the tool can make the difference between quality results and bad or no results. For example, although I'm quite capable of manually focusing and metering shots, unless I'm in a controlled studio environment, my camera is almost always at or near full auto. If I'm trying to get a particular DoF for a shot, it's a quick flip over to aperture-dependent mode or manual mode, but then I'm back to full auto. Why? Because great shots frequently come and go about as quickly as you can lift the camera to your face. By letting the camera do the heavy lifting for me when I don't have time to carefully set up the shot, I actually catch that amazing shot while the guy with the full-manual setup is still screwing around with his focus ring.
Of course, for the situations where I'm in nearly fully automatic mode, shooting conditions aren't challenging. If you're taking pictures outdoors during the day, it's all about getting interesting angles, framing, and maybe tweaking DoF once in a while, or stopping down to get more motion blur on waterfalls, or whatever. It is artistic, but even rank amateurs can get some decent shots as long as they at least have an eye for it. A good photographer just gets a higher hit rate and a lower complete dud rate.
The real difference between wannabes and competent photographers doesn't show until conditions start to get challenging. At a stage play, for example, the wannabes tend to just get washed-out white smudges. Me, I get at most one or two shots like that before I conclude that the automatic metering just can't deal with the challenging lighting. Then, for the rest of the night, I'm in full manual (except focus), and all my remaining shots are properly metered, or at least close enough to fix them in Lightroom so that nobody knows the difference.
This is, of course, way off topic at this point, but the same thing applies to professionals who are writing or creating other forms of content. They're not going to drop what they're doing mid-project to switch tools, but every so often, they have to upgrade, whether through obsolescence or just because they realize that better tools can save them from wasting time doing unnecessary grunt work that doesn't actually improve the final result (e.g. manually focusing or fully manually exposing when conditions aren't challenging). Upgrading your tools when you start to recognize that they are holding you back is just as much a part of being a professional as making the best use of the tools that you have. The difference between the wannabe and the professional is that the professional upgrades because he or she recognizes a way in which the tools are holding him or her back, whereas the wannabe upgrades merely because he or she thinks that the tools must be what's holding him or her back. :-)
Or, alternatively, I could make a movie that is a nearly exact copy of your book, but without crediting you at all. Without moral rights, if I can legally copy someone's work and reuse it in another form, I can also plagiarize that work, which deprives the actual creator of the reputation that he or she deserves, thus impacting his or her future earnings potential.
Moral rights are about protecting your reputation as an artist, writer, or other content creator. For example, suppose I create a movie and say that it was based on your romance novel, "My Story". Because I spent all of twelve hours writing the screenplay, and because I decided to try to shock audiences for ratings, it is a horribly written hack that barely even resembles your original book, following the basic story, but in a different setting, with thirty additional minutes of bestiality and extreme graphic violence sprinkled throughout. Now, everyone who sees that movie assumes that your book is horrible, and that you are a horrible writer. When your next book comes out, and/or when someone makes a movie version of your next book, people say, "Hey, isn't that the writer who wrote that awful 'My Story' movie?" and they skip your book.
That's the case for moral rights in a nutshell.
Obvious troll. Real professionals are always watching for better tools that can make it easier for them to get their job done with less effort. Photographers periodically upgrade their gear because newer gear gives better results. Sure, they tend to stick with the basic technology families that they're familiar with, but if there's a massive game-changer, they usually know about it and consider whether adopting it would be a good move or not. The ones who don't eventually get left behind.
And heaven help you if you want to do any page layout work that requires computation. If you've never tried to do actual math computation in LaTeX... well, go find a ball-peen hammer and smash yourself in the nuts repeatedly for twenty minutes. You'll get the same basic experience, but you'll spend eight weeks less time doing it.
What IMO we desperately need is a modern typesetting system with as much power as LaTeX, but more scriptable using a modern programming language, and with proper separation between A. content, B. styles, and C. programming code, so that it can be more cleanly translated to and from other languages. If you start with something like HTML/XML and CSS, then modify it with the ability to programmatically control page breaking behavior much more flexibly than the CSS spec allows, you'll get about 95% of the way there.
Trademarks don't cover descriptive use, which that arguably would be, so possibly not. And even if they did, they require continuous use in commerce or else they're worthless. They're also extremely expensive to obtain (several hundred dollars per name for each area of commerce that you want to protect the name in, plus an extra $100 every 10 years per name, per area of commerce), making them a rather pricey alternative to true moral rights.
As a writer, I choose my words carefully. If there are two ways to interpret a sentence that I wrote, chances are, I meant both of them. :-)
But seriously, it's a fine line and a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, you'd like for truly interesting works to fall out of the public domain while people remember them, not just for the preservation of works and for making them available to future generations, but also so that interesting transformative uses of the work can enhance our culture. On the other hand, other than copyright, authors do not have moral rights, at least in the U.S., which means they have no other means of preventing objectionable use of their works in ways that potentially confuse people into having a negative opinion of the author's original work, or even a negative opinion of the author.
There are two ways to solve that problem. One way is to make the duration long enough that further commercial derivatives are unlikely to gain much of a popularity boost based on the previous commercial success of the original. The other way is to create formal protection of moral rights. For example, you might say that even though freely copying a work is lawful after 20 years, commercial derivative works require permission (which may be for a fee) for the life of the author plus the life of the author's immediate descendants. I'm not sure which approach is better, honestly.
Well, I'm sure some people would write them anyway, but nobody who hoped to ever make money at it would.
My gut says 20 years would probably be a reasonable balance, so long as it starts from first release and not the date of creation. My one concern about that short a duration is the risk of movie companies waiting out the copyright and then exploiting authors' books without compensating them. That extra decade-ish pushes you an entire generation down the road, which makes such exploitation a less attractive proposition.
Correction: not pre-1976 levels. Pre-1831 levels.
Nope. Even under the 1909 copyright act, 1985 + 28 years is 2013, which means it would have fallen out of copyright just over a month ago unless renewed.
The problem with that argument is that your assumption assumes all content is created by large corporations with a huge advertising budget. That doesn't sync up with reality.
For example, no individual would write a novel if he or she had only 5 years to make money with it. The average first novel takes something like 10.5 years to write, so the first half of the book would be unprotected before the author sold the first copy. And even if you say five years from the first public release, most first novels don't break even by then.
What we need to do is roll back copyright durations to pre-1976 levels, but modified slightly:
With that scheme, you give the opportunity for individuals to still make money off of their work (because their profits are still growing, or at least are not tapering off rapidly to zero), while discouraging corporate extension (because 1% of the total gross of a highly exploited title might exceed their projected additional revenue for the second 14 years).
Alternatively, this scheme could encourage businesses to re-release old titles so that they bring in enough revenue to justify extending the copyright term. Either way, the public gets a very real benefit from the copyright owner having to explicitly file for an extension and pay a variable fee based on the actual income of each title.
Such a scheme provides Berne-compatible automatic copyright, but does so in a way that avoids the "My book isn't published, but it is already out of copyright" problem. But what this scheme explicitly does not do is use a Berne-compatible copyright duration, because those are simply obscene.
I was thinking it should be called that... because, as a language, it blows.
Unfortunately, that entire concept is flawed for at least two blindingly obvious reasons:
This does not solve the man-in-the-middle attack where untrusted endpoint devices are concerned, because that problem is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. If you cannot trust both endpoints, no secure connection is possible. This is a fundamental tenet of computer security.
In particular, if you can't trust the endpoint, you can't trust anything that the endpoint presents to you. Unless this scheme literally requires you to point your phone at the screen and authenticate every single action, there's nothing stopping someone from tweaking the content on its way to the untrusted screen so that the logout button doesn't actually log you out, but instead merely shows a fake logout screen. Then, the person who owns that untrusted computer has access to your account.
And even if you try to patch around that with a QR code that deauthorizes the computer, there's nothing stopping someone from automatically transferring money to a bank in the Cayman Islands right before it requests that logout code, or whatever. So even in the best case, this does not really add any significant amount of trust to the untrusted device.
Singapore might be an exception. As for the other two, I said significantly lower. The difference between 33% or 37% and 38% isn't particularly significant in my book.
40% is still low compared with most of the civilized world. Most of the countries that are significantly lower on the list also have a significantly lower standard of living than the U.S. The few exceptions almost all have either no military or a U.S.-supported military.
Yeah, I know. I was just being a smart aleck.
And (c) there's less competition, so there is little to no incentive to improve things more than absolutely necessary.
Yes, I've noticed that pattern, too.
Only if you assume that the person in question was, in fact, in full possession of his/her faculties at the time. I don't think that's necessarily a safe assumption. When a person is emotionally distraught, his or her ability to think clearly is compromised—often severely so. IIRC, folks who attempt suicide often say that they thought through things coolly and rationally, which implies that perhaps the normal risk aversion mechanism is probably not functioning correctly, hence not courage, but also not cowardice. In fact, from what I've read, I would probably describe it more as a complete lack of feeling anything.
That said, although I've experienced bullying, I've never experienced thoughts of suicide, so my perspective is somewhat limited. What I do know is that it gets better. Sometimes it takes years, but the bullying and pain usually stops on its own, assuming that the emotional pain isn't caused by a chemical imbalance, in which case it often requires very careful adjustment of medication before it stops.
If you're even half seriously contemplating suicide, get help. A state of depression is no way to live your life every day—not just because you might hurt yourself, but also because it sucks to be miserable.
Suicide is not the courageous way out—quite the opposite, really. Suicide typically requires courage for only a moment, after which it's too late to change your mind. Actually dealing with your problems takes more courage, potentially for years at a time.
No, not at all. They just assumed that if a bus takes too long to reach its destination, some passengers would get off and say, "Screw it," until the number of endpoints reaches a number for which the computation becomes feasible. :-D
Stupid engineering, but remember that a major goal of good sci-fi is to make people think about the consequences of those sorts of decisions. The fact that any of us are breathing at all is likely in part because Petrov was in the loop in the former Soviet Union just a few months after that movie came out. But there's reason to believe that under the right circumstances, even that would not have protected us, because they did almost precisely what this movie warns us about (minus the artificially intelligent computer hooked up to a dial-in modem, that is). A technical malfunction on the Soviet side of the world could have literally destroyed almost all human life on the planet with little or no human involvement. Our two nations were that far beyond the limits of sanity. So the possibility of such things happening was not out of the question, and possibly still isn't. Scary, no?
By best estimates, we're talking about getting word out to a dozen or more sites and bringing in the personnel needed to disable over 1,500 missiles. That's not exactly a small order, but yes, that should have been happening in parallel, even knowing that they might not succeed.
On that point, I agree. Still, there were an order of magnitude fewer than in most movies of that sort, and they were all the sorts of things that you had to be at least a geek to recognize. Compare that with the sequel, in which the writers apparently didn't recognize that destroying D.C. would never cause missiles to be launched (because NORAD isn't in D.C.), or that a computer would never be built in a room full of CO2 because it would be impossible to repair it, or that just about every cell phone almost certainly requires a different data cable (which makes it really unlikely that the kid would have the right cable for his girlfriend's phone), or that if you have to empty your gas can just to reach a site, you don't stand a chance of making it back, or that people with terminal pancreatic cancer are unlikely to be able to keep up with a bunch of kids, or....
"Most of them" would be my guess.