Colors are always off. No two CCD brands are color calibrated in the same way. If you want accurate color, just shoot in RAW mode, then create or obtain reasonable color profiles for the camera and all your devices, at which point it's a non-issue. If your camera can't shoot in RAW, there's your problem.
As for low light response, the easiest way to get better low light response is to use bigger optics. The light gathering of optics is directly proportional to the area of the lens (the square of the radius of the lens). The big problem we have is that camera makers are trying to use progressively smaller lenses for easy portability, and that is directly contrary to the goal of improving low light response. They have to make huge strides in response just to break even.
Until the quest to keep making cameras smaller stops, the low light performance will continue to regress. It's basically unavoidable. At best, you could improve the noise response in low light by using Peltier junctions or something to cool the chip, but there goes your battery life.
Exactly. The laws of physics are responsible for this, and no headphone design change can fix it.
Basically, it comes down to the directionality of sound. Bass sounds are much less directional than treble sounds. As a result, bass sounds (in the absence of reflections) fall off with the inverse square of the distance, while treble sounds don't fall off as quickly. In an enclosed space like the inside of a pair of cans or the inside of your ear canal (with ear buds), that's not an issue because all the sound is reflected. As soon as that seal is broken and some of the less directional sound escapes, you've lost bass response relative to treble response.
You can improve this somewhat with open-ear headphones to make the treble dispersion patern more bidirectional, but that only goes so far.
I'm not convinced there's a point anyway. With headphones, you get so much difference in sound just from how little or how much the foam pads are compressed that I can't imagine anyone being able to use the word "accurate" when talking about headphones unless it is tongue-in-cheek. For accuracy, nothing beats a well-designed listening room with good speakers. Headphones are fundamentally "ballpark" at best.
Yes, that's exactly what you should do, assuming it is practical to detect P2P traffic reliably and throttle it without throttling other traffic with similar scattergun traffic patterns (web browsing, for example). Unfortunately, P2P hops ports and does all sorts of other stuff specifically to avoid QoS shaping, and the result is that such traffic is a very abusive net citizen that is rather hard to deal with in an even slightly sane fashion....
Practically speaking, you'll probably have to implement per-day bandwidth caps beyond which customers get lower throughput. You should make it tiered so that as they exceed each successive limit, their bandwidth is further reduced; you should ideally use a sliding window so that if a customer hasn't used much bandwidth in a while, the limits are reduced. Open the floodgates between midnight and 6 AM or so. For that matter, if possible, set it up to keep statistics all the time, but only do the actual limiting when the pipe is nearing capacity. That's the least intrusive thing you could do, IMHO.
Odds are good that if you can see your dog and can tell that it is a dog (rather than a tan smudge), it is probably a shot taken from an airplane, not a satellite shot. Some rural areas are covered by those higher resolution images, but most aren't.
The federal government runs military barracks. It helps fund public universities that would also presumably have to comply as a result. And so on. It's not quite as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
Given the poor image quality of most of the satellite photos of the rural South that I've seen, I'm not sure anyone would notice that they had been blurred. Buildings the size of a football field already look like a Rorschach test....
Yes, but I have to admit that if you truly couldn't make any distinction between men and women---if "separate but equal" for the sexes became illegal---that high school band trips would get a lot more interesting. "So, Amanda, how are you getting along with your bedmate, Jonathan?" Not to mention boarding schools, college dormitories, and the religious education programs of the more conservative religions. "What do you mean we can't keep having separate classes for boys and girls?"
I mean... I think it would be mildly entertaining, and I love a little bit of limited chaos once in a while to shake things up and force people to reconsider long-held opinions, but....:-)
No, although unpublished works are not eligible for statutory damages, copyright does still protect unpublished works, at least in the U.S. If I create a work and someone steals it and publishes it first, assuming I can prove (through showing a mountain of early drafts of the work dating back five years, for example) that I created it, I do have the right to sue for actual damages (the amount of profit they made from it) as well as suing for breach of whatever contract allowed them to get their hands on the work in the first place.
I do agree that high-risk photography should be rewarded better than low-risk photos; that said, I'm of the opinion that a longer copyright duration won't have any real effect on the value of such photos. War photos are valuable not just because of the risk, but also because they are timely, and as such, magazines and newspapers are willing to pay for them. After a handful of years, though, most of their value is lost. There's maybe one war photo in ten thousand that gets used even once after the war ends, and with all the embedded media these days, I doubt it is even that high.
For that matter, most photographs tend to not be reused year after year, with the exception of stuff provided through stock photo houses, which tend not to cater to folks looking for exotic, high-risk images. If you need a photo of a celebrity, you're going to probably want the most recent photo, not one taken ten years ago. If you need a photo of the New York skyline, you almost certainly want one that doesn't cause the audience to shiver when they see twin towers. And so on. It's the same reason I said copyright should be short for news stories; because they are factual accounts of something that is happening, most of their value is the result of timeliness.
I know that different people find different types of writing easier or harder, at least when it comes to types of writing, e.g. persuasive writing, fiction writing, non-fiction writing, technical writing, or to different styles of writing (sci-fi versus romance). Within a type and genre, though, finding screenwriting harder than novel writing seems like a stretch. There's just so much more detail, so many more words, etc. in a novel.... Maybe they just say it's harder so nobody will ask them to do it... probably because they hate screenwriting software as much as I do. Thirty minutes in a word processor, two hours with screenwriting software to do the same thing.... *smashes head repeatedly into keyboard*
Most people create works as a part of their ongoing jobs. They collect a paycheck even if a product doesn't sell, and as long as the company doesn't go bankrupt or lay off a bunch of people, they aren't taking a significant personal financial risk by working on a particular project. The greater the risk, the greater the potential reward (or potential loss). That's just the way the system works. The person who writes a book or screenplay is to some degree setting aside his/her ability to put food on the table in order to create this work that might pay off big, complete with residuals, or might be laughed at. That's taking a much greater risk than going in to work every day and earning a salary.
Now if you're talking about creative people who are working for a salary and whether they should get commissions, I might be inclined to agree with you, provided that those people are employed in an ongoing fashion that spans creative projects and aren't routinely disposed of every time a show/project gets cancelled, a contract runs out, or a series finishes its run. So I think it depends on the environment.
I find his works rather interesting. I used to do a classical show on a college radio station, and we'd always play something at the end that bent people's minds a little. Quite often, it was a Glass number. The idea was that if people didn't experience different styles of... I guess I'd call it neoclassical music... then they would never grow to appreciate it.
That said, young people's preference for hyped, brittle highs is a bit like most Chinese-manufactured condenser microphones (for precisely the same reason). When you first get one, you love the bright, crisp highs because it is new and sounds exciting, edgy, etc. Then, once you've experienced good-sounding hardware, you fairly quickly realize just how harsh and abrasive that sizzling sound is by comparison and run away screaming. I would say that any kid who likes that sound hasn't been to enough concerts in the real world---probably because they're sold out to the stupid scalpers before they get a chance to buy tickets. Real concerts don't sound like that.
Which brings up my thoughts for solving the scalping problem. Require that all tickets be in the name of a particular person. Print it on the ticket. In order to change it, you have to go to the box office and show a copy of the receipt from an authorized reseller or from the box office. Otherwise, when the name on the ticket doesn't match your photo ID, you don't get in. Scalpers at that point would be unable to buy up large blocks of tickets and resell them at astronomical prices because the tickets would be worthless without the person being able to show a sales receipt from the box office or an authorized reseller. But I digress.
No, it doesn't. Copyright exists from the date of creation in the U.S. and other Berne Convention signatory nations. Further, you cannot register a copyright on an incomplete work. Thus, what you are suggesting makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There were some changes a few years ago that make it possible to pre-register prior to publication a work that is basically complete to help protect films from being distributed prior to their release, but that's not the same thing as registering your copyright on a book one chapter at a time....
Perhaps you're thinking about statutory damages, which cannot be claimed on an unregistered work.
Distribution is easier, but creating the works still takes time. That novel that you took a year to write should be protected for more than single digit years. I would argue that the copyright duration should be dependent upon the amount of risk the creator or creators had to take on in order to create the work. Thus, a photograph's copyright might last only five years because it takes a fairly short amount of time to create it and the risk is thus relatively low. A novel... twenty years. A movie... ten years.
You may be asking why a movie deserves less protection than a novel. Several reasons. First, having created both, I find that it's a lot harder to write a novel than to write a screenplay.
"EXT. BASEBALL STADIUM---NIGHT. JACK throws the ball angrily to JILL. Slow-motion take as Jill swings and hits it out of the park."
versus
"And with that, Jack wound up for the pitch and furiously threw the ball towards her. Jill watched as the ball grew closer, closer, then swung. Crack! The pitch soared over the infield, across the outfield, past the fence, and out of the park."
So movie content is written in a format that is much, much easier to write and edit. Also, while a lot of time is spent by a lot of people, it is almost always bankrolled by a large corporation with a means to distribute broadly. A novel is almost always written by an individual author without any financial backing, and as such is a much greater financial risk as far as the individuals involved are concerned.
Works of music are harder to categorize because short works of popular music are relatively easy, while large works (I'm writing a mass right now) can take years to create.
I think the risk factor should be a consideration when determining length of copyright. Works created by a legal corporate entity and other works for hire should have the shortest duration because they have no risk for the individual creator and because the actual creator rarely sees any gain from longer durations. Works created by a group of individuals retaining copyright collectively should have a longer duration. Works created by a single individual should have the longest duration.
Don't ask me what a policy like that would actually look like in practice, though....
Let's put that in perspective. I'm writing a sci-fi trilogy. I've written and edited the first part, written (but not edited) the second. If you set the copyright term to five years, the first part and half of the second would be out of copyright. None of it has been published yet.
It is important when considering copyright laws to consider the inherent difference in published and unpublished works. Unpublished works are the exclusive right of the creator until publication. If you set the copyright term to a short period of time, there must be an exemption for unpublished works, i.e. the copyright period must begin at publication. Otherwise, there would be no incentive to create larger works because the copyright would have expired before the works were in a publishable state.
This would also be useful is in the case of bands who perform works but do not make them available on CD. Those works would then remain protected until they were popular enough to profit off of those works.
I would prefer, were I creating a copyright scheme, to create one in which the term of copyright is unlimited until the date of publication, but upon publication, the term is 7 years, renewable up to three times at 7 years apiece (for a maximum of 28 years. The rate should be exponentially graduated to encourage authors to let low-profit works lapse. It should also expire automatically and become nonrenewable if a published work is not republished for any consecutive 10 year period during the copyright term.
That argument doesn't work. eBay was not the only online auction system on the Internet, but they got done like a dinner for third-line forcing when they tried to make everyone in Australia only use PayPal.
As I understand it, third-line forcing is when you refuse to sell one good or service unless the customer agrees to buy another good or service. In the case of eBay and PayPal, by not allowing you to pay using another service, they were making your ability to purchase a product on eBay contingent upon you paying for a second product (PayPal's payment service). You couldn't buy the first product (used junk) without buying the second one (PayPal tax).
By contrast, you can clearly buy an iPhone without being forced to buy applications from the app store, so unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't see how that could be third-line forcing. That said, IANAL.
I think the broken window fallacy applies here. If they're showing extra electronics ads to me, they're reducing the ads for something else that I might actually pay attention to. You are also assuming that my situation is unique. It's not. Most people's interests are not easy to judge from an outside view with few exceptions. And even if they are, most people aren't interested in ads that match their interests. Ultimately, the purpose of an advertisement is to inform a consumer about the existence of a product that they otherwise might not have known existed, but still something related just enough to their area of interest that they might decide to buy it. That is unlikely to occur within an area of significant interest.
For example, if I were interested in motorcycles (I'm not), do you think I'd be likely to be looking for ads about motorcycles? Probably not. I would probably already own one, and I would probably have a pretty good idea what sorts of cycles I like. Similarly, if I bought computing magazines (used to), am I likely to want to see ads for computer-related products? Probably not. As a programmer, I clearly own a computer, clearly have well-formed opinions about what products I would consider for it, and clearly am likely to be better informed than the average person about those sorts of things. The things are likely to sway me as a consumer are products that I just happen to use or tasks that I happen to perform regularly but have only limited interest in one way or the other. Because there's no buying history for items like that, though, those are the absolute hardest things to target ads for.
Granted, there are exceptions. In the case of certain specialty products like baby supplies, for example, -if- (and this is a -big- "if") they are able to reasonably guess whether someone is a new parent or not, that would be beneficial. The problem is that it's such a huge "if". If somebody subscribes to a parenting mag, that's not necessarily an indication that they just had a child---the kid might be in the terrible twos. Since itemized product lists are not available to the CC companies, they can't tell whether you are buying diapers or not. The same problems apply pretty much universally to any other indicator you could use. At least there are slight indicators for that, though, even if they're only slightly better than random. Good luck finding a useful indicator to determine whether I would potentially use any particular class of lawn care product or not. (I don't.) Same goes for nearly every product I can think of.
At best, for a few highly specialized products with a narrow audience, this sort of ad targeting can avoid ads for the person is not likely to be interested in. If you know that the person is over 60, the odds of diaper ads being beneficial are slim. If the person works in software, products from competing companies are not likely to be interesting. And so on. However, in my opinion, with rare exceptions, you aren't likely to do significantly better than the existing method of targeting ads based on the demographic profile of a given TV show, web site, etc. Without a really good feedback path from the user to the content provider, per-person-targeted advertising is likely to have a negligible impact on real-world results.
I wouldn't worry about back doors. Given the history of "secure" hardware devices, I'd be more worried about them turning the password trivially into a 64-bit key, using XOR with the key, and storing the key in unencrypted flash for verification....
Except you won't. Experian won't have details about credit card transactions. They'll see "Oh, he buys a lot of stuff at Fry's, so lets send him electronics ads." What they won't realize is that most of those purchases involve either DVDs or capacitors for microphone modding... the occasional hard drive.... For anything more expensive, I'm 100x more likely to buy online, usually at about half the price.
I'm also likely to spend days or weeks researching purchases ahead of time to zero in on a particular model, so sales on a different model are unlikely to affect my decisions at all on most products.
They'll see that I buy a lot of food at restaurants, so they'll send me restaurant ads. What they won't see is that it is invariably restaurants within walking distance of my workplace and that I almost never go to restaurants that aren't, which pretty much means five or six very specific restaurants.
They'll see that I go to Target a lot, so they'll send me Target ads. What they won't see is that I go there to either eat at the Pizza Hut Pan Pizza Express inside (which looks like any other target purchase) or to buy groceries and carry them back to my workplace refrigerator. Once every couple of months, I'll restock on soap, shampoo, toilet paper, paper towels... but otherwise, it's pretty rare that I go to one looking for more general purchases.
It's just like TiVo's suggestion feature where it sees that I watch a couple of shows that are (IMHO incorrectly) marked as "Kids", and it starts suggesting Barney & Friends. It sees that I watch a couple of shows that are marked "Drama" and "Movie", and it starts picking up black-and-white drama movies from the 1940s.
Any system like this, if you want it to work well, needs to have dozens of very specific keywords associated with each ad, and needs to have a thumbs-up/thumbs-down feature. It should also allow you to give a thumbs up or down to keywords on a manual basis to adjust the rankings.
Ideally, they should also do surveys regularly to randomly chosen people and ask them why they gave a thumbs down to a commercial that looked like something they might have reasonably been interested in. That would give additional insight into the sorts of keyword information they should be adding, and would help the system improve.
Short of that, it is inevitably going to be a joke.
Spinning drives do terrify me. I lost four drives last year (three in a week), which just two drives shy of being every single hard drive I owned and used regularly at the time. The fourth failure was my Time Machine backup drive. After that whole experience, I'm rather paranoid about storage technology.
In a severe thunderstorm under a tornado watch? You bet your you-know-what I switch to OTA. A few extra seconds notice of approaching tornadoes can save your life.
You're missing something with that logic. While most households do have cable/satellite, those can become useless in bad weather (lines breaking, dish swinging in the wind), not to mention random cable outages caused by careless people with backhoes, drivers running into poles, etc. Most sensible people, when asked "Do you want two coupons so that your two cable-equipped sets can continue to receive OTA TV if your cable goes out?" will say "Yes." without giving it a second thought. I'm surprised that the number of people requesting these is not closer to 100% of all TV households.
Slashdot Mirror
Colors are always off. No two CCD brands are color calibrated in the same way. If you want accurate color, just shoot in RAW mode, then create or obtain reasonable color profiles for the camera and all your devices, at which point it's a non-issue. If your camera can't shoot in RAW, there's your problem.
As for low light response, the easiest way to get better low light response is to use bigger optics. The light gathering of optics is directly proportional to the area of the lens (the square of the radius of the lens). The big problem we have is that camera makers are trying to use progressively smaller lenses for easy portability, and that is directly contrary to the goal of improving low light response. They have to make huge strides in response just to break even.
Until the quest to keep making cameras smaller stops, the low light performance will continue to regress. It's basically unavoidable. At best, you could improve the noise response in low light by using Peltier junctions or something to cool the chip, but there goes your battery life.
Exactly. The laws of physics are responsible for this, and no headphone design change can fix it.
Basically, it comes down to the directionality of sound. Bass sounds are much less directional than treble sounds. As a result, bass sounds (in the absence of reflections) fall off with the inverse square of the distance, while treble sounds don't fall off as quickly. In an enclosed space like the inside of a pair of cans or the inside of your ear canal (with ear buds), that's not an issue because all the sound is reflected. As soon as that seal is broken and some of the less directional sound escapes, you've lost bass response relative to treble response.
You can improve this somewhat with open-ear headphones to make the treble dispersion patern more bidirectional, but that only goes so far.
I'm not convinced there's a point anyway. With headphones, you get so much difference in sound just from how little or how much the foam pads are compressed that I can't imagine anyone being able to use the word "accurate" when talking about headphones unless it is tongue-in-cheek. For accuracy, nothing beats a well-designed listening room with good speakers. Headphones are fundamentally "ballpark" at best.
Yes, that's exactly what you should do, assuming it is practical to detect P2P traffic reliably and throttle it without throttling other traffic with similar scattergun traffic patterns (web browsing, for example). Unfortunately, P2P hops ports and does all sorts of other stuff specifically to avoid QoS shaping, and the result is that such traffic is a very abusive net citizen that is rather hard to deal with in an even slightly sane fashion....
Practically speaking, you'll probably have to implement per-day bandwidth caps beyond which customers get lower throughput. You should make it tiered so that as they exceed each successive limit, their bandwidth is further reduced; you should ideally use a sliding window so that if a customer hasn't used much bandwidth in a while, the limits are reduced. Open the floodgates between midnight and 6 AM or so. For that matter, if possible, set it up to keep statistics all the time, but only do the actual limiting when the pipe is nearing capacity. That's the least intrusive thing you could do, IMHO.
Odds are good that if you can see your dog and can tell that it is a dog (rather than a tan smudge), it is probably a shot taken from an airplane, not a satellite shot. Some rural areas are covered by those higher resolution images, but most aren't.
The federal government runs military barracks. It helps fund public universities that would also presumably have to comply as a result. And so on. It's not quite as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
Given the poor image quality of most of the satellite photos of the rural South that I've seen, I'm not sure anyone would notice that they had been blurred. Buildings the size of a football field already look like a Rorschach test....
Yes, but I have to admit that if you truly couldn't make any distinction between men and women---if "separate but equal" for the sexes became illegal---that high school band trips would get a lot more interesting. "So, Amanda, how are you getting along with your bedmate, Jonathan?" Not to mention boarding schools, college dormitories, and the religious education programs of the more conservative religions. "What do you mean we can't keep having separate classes for boys and girls?"
I mean... I think it would be mildly entertaining, and I love a little bit of limited chaos once in a while to shake things up and force people to reconsider long-held opinions, but.... :-)
No, copyright ALSO applies. From Circular 1:
Emphasis mine.
I think the GPP was referring to George Burns.
No, although unpublished works are not eligible for statutory damages, copyright does still protect unpublished works, at least in the U.S. If I create a work and someone steals it and publishes it first, assuming I can prove (through showing a mountain of early drafts of the work dating back five years, for example) that I created it, I do have the right to sue for actual damages (the amount of profit they made from it) as well as suing for breach of whatever contract allowed them to get their hands on the work in the first place.
I do agree that high-risk photography should be rewarded better than low-risk photos; that said, I'm of the opinion that a longer copyright duration won't have any real effect on the value of such photos. War photos are valuable not just because of the risk, but also because they are timely, and as such, magazines and newspapers are willing to pay for them. After a handful of years, though, most of their value is lost. There's maybe one war photo in ten thousand that gets used even once after the war ends, and with all the embedded media these days, I doubt it is even that high.
For that matter, most photographs tend to not be reused year after year, with the exception of stuff provided through stock photo houses, which tend not to cater to folks looking for exotic, high-risk images. If you need a photo of a celebrity, you're going to probably want the most recent photo, not one taken ten years ago. If you need a photo of the New York skyline, you almost certainly want one that doesn't cause the audience to shiver when they see twin towers. And so on. It's the same reason I said copyright should be short for news stories; because they are factual accounts of something that is happening, most of their value is the result of timeliness.
I know that different people find different types of writing easier or harder, at least when it comes to types of writing, e.g. persuasive writing, fiction writing, non-fiction writing, technical writing, or to different styles of writing (sci-fi versus romance). Within a type and genre, though, finding screenwriting harder than novel writing seems like a stretch. There's just so much more detail, so many more words, etc. in a novel.... Maybe they just say it's harder so nobody will ask them to do it... probably because they hate screenwriting software as much as I do. Thirty minutes in a word processor, two hours with screenwriting software to do the same thing.... *smashes head repeatedly into keyboard*
Most people create works as a part of their ongoing jobs. They collect a paycheck even if a product doesn't sell, and as long as the company doesn't go bankrupt or lay off a bunch of people, they aren't taking a significant personal financial risk by working on a particular project. The greater the risk, the greater the potential reward (or potential loss). That's just the way the system works. The person who writes a book or screenplay is to some degree setting aside his/her ability to put food on the table in order to create this work that might pay off big, complete with residuals, or might be laughed at. That's taking a much greater risk than going in to work every day and earning a salary.
Now if you're talking about creative people who are working for a salary and whether they should get commissions, I might be inclined to agree with you, provided that those people are employed in an ongoing fashion that spans creative projects and aren't routinely disposed of every time a show/project gets cancelled, a contract runs out, or a series finishes its run. So I think it depends on the environment.
I find his works rather interesting. I used to do a classical show on a college radio station, and we'd always play something at the end that bent people's minds a little. Quite often, it was a Glass number. The idea was that if people didn't experience different styles of... I guess I'd call it neoclassical music... then they would never grow to appreciate it.
That said, young people's preference for hyped, brittle highs is a bit like most Chinese-manufactured condenser microphones (for precisely the same reason). When you first get one, you love the bright, crisp highs because it is new and sounds exciting, edgy, etc. Then, once you've experienced good-sounding hardware, you fairly quickly realize just how harsh and abrasive that sizzling sound is by comparison and run away screaming. I would say that any kid who likes that sound hasn't been to enough concerts in the real world---probably because they're sold out to the stupid scalpers before they get a chance to buy tickets. Real concerts don't sound like that.
Which brings up my thoughts for solving the scalping problem. Require that all tickets be in the name of a particular person. Print it on the ticket. In order to change it, you have to go to the box office and show a copy of the receipt from an authorized reseller or from the box office. Otherwise, when the name on the ticket doesn't match your photo ID, you don't get in. Scalpers at that point would be unable to buy up large blocks of tickets and resell them at astronomical prices because the tickets would be worthless without the person being able to show a sales receipt from the box office or an authorized reseller. But I digress.
No, it doesn't. Copyright exists from the date of creation in the U.S. and other Berne Convention signatory nations. Further, you cannot register a copyright on an incomplete work. Thus, what you are suggesting makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There were some changes a few years ago that make it possible to pre-register prior to publication a work that is basically complete to help protect films from being distributed prior to their release, but that's not the same thing as registering your copyright on a book one chapter at a time....
Perhaps you're thinking about statutory damages, which cannot be claimed on an unregistered work.
Distribution is easier, but creating the works still takes time. That novel that you took a year to write should be protected for more than single digit years. I would argue that the copyright duration should be dependent upon the amount of risk the creator or creators had to take on in order to create the work. Thus, a photograph's copyright might last only five years because it takes a fairly short amount of time to create it and the risk is thus relatively low. A novel... twenty years. A movie... ten years.
You may be asking why a movie deserves less protection than a novel. Several reasons. First, having created both, I find that it's a lot harder to write a novel than to write a screenplay.
"EXT. BASEBALL STADIUM---NIGHT.
JACK throws the ball angrily to JILL. Slow-motion take as Jill swings and hits it out of the park."
versus
"And with that, Jack wound up for the pitch and furiously threw the ball towards her. Jill watched as the ball grew closer, closer, then swung. Crack! The pitch soared over the infield, across the outfield, past the fence, and out of the park."
So movie content is written in a format that is much, much easier to write and edit. Also, while a lot of time is spent by a lot of people, it is almost always bankrolled by a large corporation with a means to distribute broadly. A novel is almost always written by an individual author without any financial backing, and as such is a much greater financial risk as far as the individuals involved are concerned.
Works of music are harder to categorize because short works of popular music are relatively easy, while large works (I'm writing a mass right now) can take years to create.
I think the risk factor should be a consideration when determining length of copyright. Works created by a legal corporate entity and other works for hire should have the shortest duration because they have no risk for the individual creator and because the actual creator rarely sees any gain from longer durations. Works created by a group of individuals retaining copyright collectively should have a longer duration. Works created by a single individual should have the longest duration.
Don't ask me what a policy like that would actually look like in practice, though....
Let's put that in perspective. I'm writing a sci-fi trilogy. I've written and edited the first part, written (but not edited) the second. If you set the copyright term to five years, the first part and half of the second would be out of copyright. None of it has been published yet.
It is important when considering copyright laws to consider the inherent difference in published and unpublished works. Unpublished works are the exclusive right of the creator until publication. If you set the copyright term to a short period of time, there must be an exemption for unpublished works, i.e. the copyright period must begin at publication. Otherwise, there would be no incentive to create larger works because the copyright would have expired before the works were in a publishable state.
This would also be useful is in the case of bands who perform works but do not make them available on CD. Those works would then remain protected until they were popular enough to profit off of those works.
I would prefer, were I creating a copyright scheme, to create one in which the term of copyright is unlimited until the date of publication, but upon publication, the term is 7 years, renewable up to three times at 7 years apiece (for a maximum of 28 years. The rate should be exponentially graduated to encourage authors to let low-profit works lapse. It should also expire automatically and become nonrenewable if a published work is not republished for any consecutive 10 year period during the copyright term.
As I understand it, third-line forcing is when you refuse to sell one good or service unless the customer agrees to buy another good or service. In the case of eBay and PayPal, by not allowing you to pay using another service, they were making your ability to purchase a product on eBay contingent upon you paying for a second product (PayPal's payment service). You couldn't buy the first product (used junk) without buying the second one (PayPal tax).
By contrast, you can clearly buy an iPhone without being forced to buy applications from the app store, so unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't see how that could be third-line forcing. That said, IANAL.
I think the broken window fallacy applies here. If they're showing extra electronics ads to me, they're reducing the ads for something else that I might actually pay attention to. You are also assuming that my situation is unique. It's not. Most people's interests are not easy to judge from an outside view with few exceptions. And even if they are, most people aren't interested in ads that match their interests. Ultimately, the purpose of an advertisement is to inform a consumer about the existence of a product that they otherwise might not have known existed, but still something related just enough to their area of interest that they might decide to buy it. That is unlikely to occur within an area of significant interest.
For example, if I were interested in motorcycles (I'm not), do you think I'd be likely to be looking for ads about motorcycles? Probably not. I would probably already own one, and I would probably have a pretty good idea what sorts of cycles I like. Similarly, if I bought computing magazines (used to), am I likely to want to see ads for computer-related products? Probably not. As a programmer, I clearly own a computer, clearly have well-formed opinions about what products I would consider for it, and clearly am likely to be better informed than the average person about those sorts of things. The things are likely to sway me as a consumer are products that I just happen to use or tasks that I happen to perform regularly but have only limited interest in one way or the other. Because there's no buying history for items like that, though, those are the absolute hardest things to target ads for.
Granted, there are exceptions. In the case of certain specialty products like baby supplies, for example, -if- (and this is a -big- "if") they are able to reasonably guess whether someone is a new parent or not, that would be beneficial. The problem is that it's such a huge "if". If somebody subscribes to a parenting mag, that's not necessarily an indication that they just had a child---the kid might be in the terrible twos. Since itemized product lists are not available to the CC companies, they can't tell whether you are buying diapers or not. The same problems apply pretty much universally to any other indicator you could use. At least there are slight indicators for that, though, even if they're only slightly better than random. Good luck finding a useful indicator to determine whether I would potentially use any particular class of lawn care product or not. (I don't.) Same goes for nearly every product I can think of.
At best, for a few highly specialized products with a narrow audience, this sort of ad targeting can avoid ads for the person is not likely to be interested in. If you know that the person is over 60, the odds of diaper ads being beneficial are slim. If the person works in software, products from competing companies are not likely to be interesting. And so on. However, in my opinion, with rare exceptions, you aren't likely to do significantly better than the existing method of targeting ads based on the demographic profile of a given TV show, web site, etc. Without a really good feedback path from the user to the content provider, per-person-targeted advertising is likely to have a negligible impact on real-world results.
I wouldn't worry about back doors. Given the history of "secure" hardware devices, I'd be more worried about them turning the password trivially into a 64-bit key, using XOR with the key, and storing the key in unencrypted flash for verification....
Except you won't. Experian won't have details about credit card transactions. They'll see "Oh, he buys a lot of stuff at Fry's, so lets send him electronics ads." What they won't realize is that most of those purchases involve either DVDs or capacitors for microphone modding... the occasional hard drive.... For anything more expensive, I'm 100x more likely to buy online, usually at about half the price.
I'm also likely to spend days or weeks researching purchases ahead of time to zero in on a particular model, so sales on a different model are unlikely to affect my decisions at all on most products.
They'll see that I buy a lot of food at restaurants, so they'll send me restaurant ads. What they won't see is that it is invariably restaurants within walking distance of my workplace and that I almost never go to restaurants that aren't, which pretty much means five or six very specific restaurants.
They'll see that I go to Target a lot, so they'll send me Target ads. What they won't see is that I go there to either eat at the Pizza Hut Pan Pizza Express inside (which looks like any other target purchase) or to buy groceries and carry them back to my workplace refrigerator. Once every couple of months, I'll restock on soap, shampoo, toilet paper, paper towels... but otherwise, it's pretty rare that I go to one looking for more general purchases.
It's just like TiVo's suggestion feature where it sees that I watch a couple of shows that are (IMHO incorrectly) marked as "Kids", and it starts suggesting Barney & Friends. It sees that I watch a couple of shows that are marked "Drama" and "Movie", and it starts picking up black-and-white drama movies from the 1940s.
Any system like this, if you want it to work well, needs to have dozens of very specific keywords associated with each ad, and needs to have a thumbs-up/thumbs-down feature. It should also allow you to give a thumbs up or down to keywords on a manual basis to adjust the rankings.
Ideally, they should also do surveys regularly to randomly chosen people and ask them why they gave a thumbs down to a commercial that looked like something they might have reasonably been interested in. That would give additional insight into the sorts of keyword information they should be adding, and would help the system improve.
Short of that, it is inevitably going to be a joke.
Spinning drives do terrify me. I lost four drives last year (three in a week), which just two drives shy of being every single hard drive I owned and used regularly at the time. The fourth failure was my Time Machine backup drive. After that whole experience, I'm rather paranoid about storage technology.
In a severe thunderstorm under a tornado watch? You bet your you-know-what I switch to OTA. A few extra seconds notice of approaching tornadoes can save your life.
Err... the post above you was missing something, rather. Clicked the wrong reply button. My bad.
You're missing something with that logic. While most households do have cable/satellite, those can become useless in bad weather (lines breaking, dish swinging in the wind), not to mention random cable outages caused by careless people with backhoes, drivers running into poles, etc. Most sensible people, when asked "Do you want two coupons so that your two cable-equipped sets can continue to receive OTA TV if your cable goes out?" will say "Yes." without giving it a second thought. I'm surprised that the number of people requesting these is not closer to 100% of all TV households.