Hey man, don't ruin this amature linux admin's fantasy with real world experience, that's just cruel!
MS licensing is obscene, that's for sure, but they've never tied anything to the hard disk. It's all installs, users, and CPUs, with variations for each category.
It's interesting how this will increase the adoption of iSCSI storage, yet the original reason to go to iSCSI will be lost since fiber cables will have to be laid.
The spec includes 40Gbit and 100Gbit over copper via twinaxial cables, so you do have to make new runs of cable but you don't have to take the fiber hit when you do. Cat 6 definitely won't cover it though, I'm afraid.
There isn't a whole lot of difference between the raw speed of the signal in a copper line and fiber line, the electrical signal already travels at effectively the speed of light (or close enough that it doesn't really matter). It's distance that's a problem for copper. An electrical signal through copper has significantly more attenuation than an optical signal through fiber, which means right from the very start the signal is cleaner and more usable. The cleaner the signal, the easier it is to pick up small variations in the signal accurately, and the more data you can pack into the signal. Copper is also vulnerable to noise, which further reduces the signal quality, which means a less complex signal is possible. This is why copper is useful for ultra-high speed IO inside a computer covering inches or less (the IO in a CPU travels only nanometers and is obscenely fast), but once you start stretching it a few feet its effectiveness drops off dramatically. Fiber is capable of handling much longer distances before the same attenuation loss occurs.
Other than that it's just the equipment on the back end that are different, and the concepts behind both fiber and copper are the same. Only the components are different.
In other words, it's trivial to make copper just as fast or faster than fiber. In fact, the fastest copper connections are already faster than the fastest fiber connections. What isn't trivial is making copper as fast as fiber over the same distances. Fiber wins hands down on a run of any distance. Therefor copper only wins on short runs, due to the huge price difference between the two.
That's what I was trying to say: drilling needs to stop to get a handle on exactly what happened.
Except stopping the drilling and capping the wells is more likely to cause a spill than just allowing the drilling to continue. The capping procedure is the trickiest part of the whole exploratory process, and it's exactly what the Deepwater Horizon was doing when it blew. Now, just to be safe, we're going to force all the other rigs to cap their wells at the same time? Yeah, that's smart.
What if there is some fundamental flaw in the process that needs to be changed, and we haven't figured out what it is yet? What if another rig has cut corners, and it's too late to fix it? Capping the wells without knowing exactly what went wrong in the first place is gambling on another spill. I know I don't have to tell you that we already cannot manage a single spill, a second spill would devastate the gulf - possibly beyond repair. Capping all the wells makes a second spill more likely, not less likely.
The group of scientists who Obama misrepresented have said as much, and if asked if capping the wells were a good idea they have said they would have told him absolutely not.
But if there is another shoddy oil well being built, this will keep it from causing a spill (really a leak; more is gushing out every moment) that will worsen the current situation.
Actually, it's more likely to cause another spill than to keep them all in "drill" mode.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was caused at least in part by a BOP failure during the well capping process. Guess what every single one of those deep wells has to do now? If you guessed "cap the well" you win a prize!
The moratorium basically has the effect of saying "Because the highway exit ramps are potentially unsafe, we are going to force all cars on the road to exit on the exit ramps. You know, just in case another one blows up." It's idiocy at its finest.
3) whether any of the wells built or under construction are safe.
That's exactly the reason you don't force all the deep water rigs on the Gulf Coast to undergo the exact same operation that caused the damn spill in the first place.
As for the workers, there is plenty of work to be done cleaning up the current mess, so they need not worry about that, I'm sure.
They're all demons in disguise anyway right? They can't possibly have a spouse and children they need to provide for, right? No way, just go ahead and take away their lively hoods in the name of safety all while making things less safe.
Maybe if we required redundant BOPs with an acoustic shutoff
Saying "redundant BOP" is like saying "redundant RAID". A BOP is already redundant, it's built into the design. That's it's sole purpose: to be a redundant shutoff mechanism. Since the BOP actually crimps and cuts the pipe, adding another one adds nothing to your safety - if some condition caused the first to fail, it will almost certainly cause the second to fail as well. There is also new analysis of the oil flow that suggests that the BOP actually did attempt to close, but the pipe cracked before it could crimp shut for some reason, and so is shooting out of a small slit (which is more than likely opening wider).
That could be an explanation for why original estimates were around 5,000 barrels a day, and are now into the 50,000+ range.
I could care less if you agree, it's blatantly obvious the place has been gang raped by the industry.
Yeah, not really. The Gulf spews out about 22 million barrels of oil every year, all on its own. No human intervention necessary. In fact, a few weeks before the spill you could see thin oil slicks hundreds of miles long from satellite images.
On the other hand, this is the first oil rig spill in US waters in 40 years.
So it's more like accidentally stabbing that friend you know who really loves to cut herself. You pretty much hope you didn't stab her where it will kill her, otherwise she'll probably enjoy it.
The BP case is really clear cut. Even if it was the contractor that messed up, BP was supposed to keep tabs on them and owned the well.
By the same token, the MMS was supposed to keep tabs on BP and their contractors. In fact, they signed off on everything. If the MMS thought it was OK, why is BP to blame when it turns out it wasn't? Why isn't the federal government sharing any of the blame?
Every accident is caused by bad decisions. Big accidents are usually caused by a number of bad decisions that link together "just so", creating a sort of perfect storm for a catastrophe when a single bad decision can be made continuously without consequence. There is no way in hell BP wanted to spill millions of barrels of oil in the gulf. This accident was in no way caused by any sort of malicious behavior. It was a fucking accident.
He was an idiot for phrasing it as an apology to BP.
I completely disagree. I was thoroughly impressed when I heard Barton apologize. BP screwed up (I mean, REALLY screwed up) and caused the spill, but as soon as the spill happened they did the right thing. The legal limit for cleanup costs an oil company is required to pay for a spill is $75 million. That's it. From day one BP waved that and said they would pay every dime of cleanup costs, and compensate every legitimate claim of loss caused by the spill. That is far, far more than the law requires, and in fact BP is up to $2 billion and counting, with no signs of slowing down. They have definitely proven that their word is good, and they have been extremely responsible in the aftermath. The worst you can say about them is that they low-balled early estimates of the spill's volume. That's it, and the government agreed with them at the time, so it's not exactly damning.
Yet in spite of that they have gotten zero credit from Congress or Obama. The coast guard was more than willing to talk about how great their efforts were though, so Obama had to shut them up.
Obama's $20 billion extortion fund is just grandstanding, and his moratorium was about the worst idea he could possibly have had. The Deepwater spill occurred while capping the well - either the cement failed or the mud solution was too light, causing the blow out. That left only the blow out preventor, which also failed. So what does Obama do? Why, he makes everyone cap their wells! Brilliant! Why don't we just go ahead and see if we can't get another spill going, why don't we?
It's like an airplane crashing on landing for an as-yet unknown reason, so to be safe Obama orders all the airplanes in the sky to land... I mean, what the fuck? Yeah, that makes tons of sense.
Which was completely unnecessary, since BP already unequivocally promised to pay for every cent of damaged caused by the spill.
They did this within days of the spill, by the way, yet somehow Obama is the fucking hero.
Do you know what their legal responsibility is? $75 million for cleanup, and $1000 per barrel in fines. Yet they've already spent $2 billion in clean up, voluntarily and without government pressure of any kind to do so.
Frankly, in my opinion, they would have been better off sending out $75 million worth of boom and saying "fuck it" for the rest, for all the credit their getting for doing the right thing in response to the spill. It would save them $20 billion, at the very least.
I'm especially pissed at Obama, he's as culpable for this as Hayward is, yet he acts like a hero prancing around and making things far less safe than they were without him. Seriously, if Hayward can be held personally responsible for his lower level manager's bad decisions, should not Obama be held personally responsible for the actions of the MMS, which allowed this spill to happen? Obama's man had been in charge for over a year before the spill, either they were inept or they weren't trying to change the cozy culture of the MMS at all. Where is Obama's congressional hearing?
Actually apologized to BP a few days ago for them having to pay for the damage they caused?
Yeah, that would be awful, if one shred of it were true. He apologized for the trumped up witch hunt, the fucking retard congressmen and women who tried to get Hayward to say he was personally aware of the decisions being made. Hayward isn't even a fucking oil man, he's a bureaucrat. He is good at administration - running a company. He hires oil men to help him run it properly, but he himself knows little technically of oil industry technologies. It was that bullshit, these shitheads looking for their 15 minutes of fame, that Barton apologized for. And his spineless co-congressmen crucified him for it.
The fact is, BP's legal responsibility for the cleanup stopped at $75 million. Yet, they immediately promised to cover every single dime of the cleanup cost. There is plenty of evidence that suggest BP seriously fucked up, but from day 1 of the spill they have been trying to do the right thing, and all they've gotten is hell for it.
Nobody bothers to look at Anadarko, who owns 25% of that well and therefore shares 25% of the responsibility, yet has shared in 0% of the cleanup. They are nowhere to be seen. They are definitely not doing the right thing here. BP is. They screwed up big time, and they are working their ass off to clean it up.
BP deserves an apology, and fucking idiots like Obama need to sit down and shut the hell up. The idiotic moratorium of his forces 33 wells to perform the exact same operation that caused the BP spill in deep water. What if one of them fails? What if they have the exact same problem TransOcean had? What then? We're using all our resources to plug just one spill, a second would flow uncontrollably.
Worse than that, the Deepwater Horizon accident happened when they were capping the well, which is exactly what these 33 rigs have to do!
One rig just fucked the operation up, spewing millions of barrels of oil into the ocean, so to be safe you're going to force 33 more to perform the exact same operation? What the fuck?
I'm sorry, but Obama is damn near retarded for this moratorium. If anything could be the opposite of what was needed, this is it.
Lets hope and pray that none of those rigs have the exact same accident, eh?
The idea was to hit the "pause" button on 33 new wells while we figure out why the new-well drilling at Deepwater went so wrong.
The problem is, there is no "pause" button.
To shut down these wells they have to do exactly the same procedure that failed on DeepWater Horizon! The fact is, the risky operation is in sealing it off, not continuing to drill.
Fucking idiot president knows fuck all about the oil industry, and is making another spill far more likely just to make himself look less like a complete imbecile in this situation.
To get around the ex post facto provision, the appeals court basically said "It only applies to new copies, so it isn't retroactive." That is in spite of the fact that the reason it applies to new copies of certain works at all is because it's retroactively removes the derivative right! They're basically saying that distributing it then was ok, but now it's not, thereby dodging the question.
Frankly, I call bullshit on it. When the derivative work was created from the public domain work, a copyright was automatically granted. Saying that making the previously PD work once again copyright removes the derivative creator's copyright is definitely ex post facto.
It's worth noting that our entire culture of film is still copyrighted, and much of it is going to be (and already has been) lost before it ever enters the public domain.
By your (illogical) reasoning Congress could copyright the Venus de Milo and give it to a company like MGM.
Read it again, it says nothing of the kind: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
If they didn't produce it, they can never have copyright on it.
There are two points to argue, and one of them is from Article 1 Section 9: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed".
That is, no law can be made retroactive. This is a very clear case of a person retroactively losing his copyright to his work. They get around this by saying that it only affects future copying of the derivative works. I say that's bullshit, because it still retroactively strips a person's copyright. I hope the SCOTUS hears this case.
The other is a Article 1, section 8 issue - that is, the copyright clause itself. The constitutional question is, does this law promote the progress of the arts and sciences, and does that phrase actually restrict Congress's ability to enact copyright law?
I think it does, but that's definitely a point that could be debated.
A lot of the founders did not want to include the Bill of Rights because it weakened the Constitution. They explicitly state what the government can not do, while the Constitution explicitly states what it can. In other words, the Constitution was designed to imply that if it wasn't in there, it wasn't legal. By denying these powers explicitly, instead of implicitly, it created a framework for loopholes, allowing more expansion of the federal government than was originally intended.
Think about it - most constitutional questions today don't involve what was actually in the constitution. That's well established and well followed, because it tells the government what it can do, not what it can't. It's much more limiting that way, as anything outside of what it can do is automatically something it cannot do. Most constitutional battles are quibbles of the meaning of the restrictions - the amendments in the Bill of Rights.
There is no telling how things may have been different without the Bill of Rights, they may have been better, or they may have been worse. Who knows, really.
and the constitution doesn't really talk about copyrights, on a strictly interpretive level they should have the power to state or re-instate copyright or otherwise alter the system as they see fit.
If the Constitution didn't talk about copyrights, Congress would have exactly zero power to legislate them. That is the purpose of the ninth and tenth amendments.
However, the Constitution does talk about copyrights and patents. Specifically, it grants Congress the right to create copyrights and patents for a specific goal: to promote the advancement of science and the arts. This is the framework Congress is supposed to use when creating copyright law, and it's the framework the courts usually use when looking into the constitutionality of copyright law.
Sometimes, though, they go astray. I imagine this will make it to the SCOTUS at some point. Copyright is always a hot issue.
If you want to be making that sort of comparison, "big business" is pretty much the polar opposite of "the people".
I wouldn't go that far, given that "big business" is made up of "the people". The problem, is it is not made up of all the people. Big business matters, but they are definitely not the only ones who matter on a given issue. The people as a whole matter much more, and Congress has a very bad habit of forgetting that.
Usually, though, the courts are a little better about it. This ruling sucks.
And unless you're suggesting that the books have sentience, or that the slaves do not, it's a horrible analogy.
You missed the comparison.
The correct comparison is that words in their natural state are free, and it is only by force of law that they are held captive (and to a degree, rightly so) by those who wrote them down.
So too are men naturally free, and it was only by force of hand and law that they were kept enslaved, even after escape.
That is the correlation between copyright and fugitive slave laws. In fact, both cases have strong arguments that they benefit society - slave labor is extremely good for the economy, at least in the short term (a lack of cheap labor forces innovation, which is better in the long term). Copyright is also good for the economy, at least to a degree. We have whole industries that could not exist without it.
However, the whole purpose of copyright is to ensure that artists got their due, for the explicit purpose of creating new art. However, with every new restriction on copying the cartel simply grows larger and artist's compensation grows smaller.
In my mind we are paying a heavy cost with little real benefit from the cartels in return.
As an artist, when I sell an oil painting or a drawing, I most certainly *do* retain copyrights.
You retain the rights to copy of the painting or drawing, but if you sell the original you have no further rights to the original. However you still retain the right to copy it, though not the right to access it.
Kind of a catch-22 with physical art. There is generally only one original, and only prints are made for distribution.
Still, someone can't buy your art and start selling prints of it without your permission. At least for about a hundred years anyway (which is fucking absurd).
Are you saying that writing a book is like keeping people as slaves?
Actually, I'd say the monopoly on the words is very much analogous to keeping people as slaves.
Our goals as a society for the two couldn't be any more different, and that's kind of the point. Our goal with copyright is to promote the expansion of culture for our society as a whole to benefit from. To accomplish this we allow the authors to take captive their words, and be assured that they, and they alone have the right to sell them for a limited time.
Conversely, as a society we have deemed slavery an unnatural and unjust state of human existence, and as such we outlawed it (though it was very rough going).
The business case for reducing the rights of African slaves to live freely and reducing the rights of the public to copy, however, are identical. It's only our goals as a society that influence how we respond to either.
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That was his point.
Look up Storage Area Network, and Trunking.
There is never, ever a such thing as "too much bandwidth". You're just thinking too small, that's all.
Hey man, don't ruin this amature linux admin's fantasy with real world experience, that's just cruel!
MS licensing is obscene, that's for sure, but they've never tied anything to the hard disk. It's all installs, users, and CPUs, with variations for each category.
It's interesting how this will increase the adoption of iSCSI storage, yet the original reason to go to iSCSI will be lost since fiber cables will have to be laid.
The spec includes 40Gbit and 100Gbit over copper via twinaxial cables, so you do have to make new runs of cable but you don't have to take the fiber hit when you do. Cat 6 definitely won't cover it though, I'm afraid.
There isn't a whole lot of difference between the raw speed of the signal in a copper line and fiber line, the electrical signal already travels at effectively the speed of light (or close enough that it doesn't really matter). It's distance that's a problem for copper. An electrical signal through copper has significantly more attenuation than an optical signal through fiber, which means right from the very start the signal is cleaner and more usable. The cleaner the signal, the easier it is to pick up small variations in the signal accurately, and the more data you can pack into the signal. Copper is also vulnerable to noise, which further reduces the signal quality, which means a less complex signal is possible. This is why copper is useful for ultra-high speed IO inside a computer covering inches or less (the IO in a CPU travels only nanometers and is obscenely fast), but once you start stretching it a few feet its effectiveness drops off dramatically. Fiber is capable of handling much longer distances before the same attenuation loss occurs.
Other than that it's just the equipment on the back end that are different, and the concepts behind both fiber and copper are the same. Only the components are different.
In other words, it's trivial to make copper just as fast or faster than fiber. In fact, the fastest copper connections are already faster than the fastest fiber connections. What isn't trivial is making copper as fast as fiber over the same distances. Fiber wins hands down on a run of any distance. Therefor copper only wins on short runs, due to the huge price difference between the two.
It was developed later, and is now Mrs T's main catchphrase. He still says "fool" a lot, and is very accusatory about it.
That's what I was trying to say: drilling needs to stop to get a handle on exactly what happened.
Except stopping the drilling and capping the wells is more likely to cause a spill than just allowing the drilling to continue. The capping procedure is the trickiest part of the whole exploratory process, and it's exactly what the Deepwater Horizon was doing when it blew. Now, just to be safe, we're going to force all the other rigs to cap their wells at the same time? Yeah, that's smart.
What if there is some fundamental flaw in the process that needs to be changed, and we haven't figured out what it is yet? What if another rig has cut corners, and it's too late to fix it? Capping the wells without knowing exactly what went wrong in the first place is gambling on another spill. I know I don't have to tell you that we already cannot manage a single spill, a second spill would devastate the gulf - possibly beyond repair. Capping all the wells makes a second spill more likely, not less likely.
The group of scientists who Obama misrepresented have said as much, and if asked if capping the wells were a good idea they have said they would have told him absolutely not.
But if there is another shoddy oil well being built, this will keep it from causing a spill (really a leak; more is gushing out every moment) that will worsen the current situation.
Actually, it's more likely to cause another spill than to keep them all in "drill" mode.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was caused at least in part by a BOP failure during the well capping process. Guess what every single one of those deep wells has to do now? If you guessed "cap the well" you win a prize!
The moratorium basically has the effect of saying "Because the highway exit ramps are potentially unsafe, we are going to force all cars on the road to exit on the exit ramps. You know, just in case another one blows up." It's idiocy at its finest.
3) whether any of the wells built or under construction are safe.
That's exactly the reason you don't force all the deep water rigs on the Gulf Coast to undergo the exact same operation that caused the damn spill in the first place.
As for the workers, there is plenty of work to be done cleaning up the current mess, so they need not worry about that, I'm sure.
They're all demons in disguise anyway right? They can't possibly have a spouse and children they need to provide for, right? No way, just go ahead and take away their lively hoods in the name of safety all while making things less safe.
People like you disgust me.
Unless they are offering an accounting service opt in where by employees could choose to donate some portion of their pay.
That's exactly how it works, and to be legal it must be voluntary, and the money must come from the employees.
It's called a Political Action Committee.
What I find interesting is that people immediately get their hackles up with a business does it, but when unions do it nobody cares.
If it had been an Exxon or Trans-Ocean rig that had blown out, the numbers would have strongly favored McCain.
It actually was a Trans-Ocean rig, you idiot. It was a BP well.
Maybe if we required redundant BOPs with an acoustic shutoff
Saying "redundant BOP" is like saying "redundant RAID". A BOP is already redundant, it's built into the design. That's it's sole purpose: to be a redundant shutoff mechanism. Since the BOP actually crimps and cuts the pipe, adding another one adds nothing to your safety - if some condition caused the first to fail, it will almost certainly cause the second to fail as well. There is also new analysis of the oil flow that suggests that the BOP actually did attempt to close, but the pipe cracked before it could crimp shut for some reason, and so is shooting out of a small slit (which is more than likely opening wider).
That could be an explanation for why original estimates were around 5,000 barrels a day, and are now into the 50,000+ range.
I could care less if you agree, it's blatantly obvious the place has been gang raped by the industry.
Yeah, not really. The Gulf spews out about 22 million barrels of oil every year, all on its own. No human intervention necessary. In fact, a few weeks before the spill you could see thin oil slicks hundreds of miles long from satellite images.
On the other hand, this is the first oil rig spill in US waters in 40 years.
So it's more like accidentally stabbing that friend you know who really loves to cut herself. You pretty much hope you didn't stab her where it will kill her, otherwise she'll probably enjoy it.
The BP case is really clear cut. Even if it was the contractor that messed up, BP was supposed to keep tabs on them and owned the well.
By the same token, the MMS was supposed to keep tabs on BP and their contractors. In fact, they signed off on everything. If the MMS thought it was OK, why is BP to blame when it turns out it wasn't? Why isn't the federal government sharing any of the blame?
Every accident is caused by bad decisions. Big accidents are usually caused by a number of bad decisions that link together "just so", creating a sort of perfect storm for a catastrophe when a single bad decision can be made continuously without consequence. There is no way in hell BP wanted to spill millions of barrels of oil in the gulf. This accident was in no way caused by any sort of malicious behavior. It was a fucking accident.
He was an idiot for phrasing it as an apology to BP.
I completely disagree. I was thoroughly impressed when I heard Barton apologize. BP screwed up (I mean, REALLY screwed up) and caused the spill, but as soon as the spill happened they did the right thing. The legal limit for cleanup costs an oil company is required to pay for a spill is $75 million. That's it. From day one BP waved that and said they would pay every dime of cleanup costs, and compensate every legitimate claim of loss caused by the spill. That is far, far more than the law requires, and in fact BP is up to $2 billion and counting, with no signs of slowing down. They have definitely proven that their word is good, and they have been extremely responsible in the aftermath. The worst you can say about them is that they low-balled early estimates of the spill's volume. That's it, and the government agreed with them at the time, so it's not exactly damning.
Yet in spite of that they have gotten zero credit from Congress or Obama. The coast guard was more than willing to talk about how great their efforts were though, so Obama had to shut them up.
Obama's $20 billion extortion fund is just grandstanding, and his moratorium was about the worst idea he could possibly have had. The Deepwater spill occurred while capping the well - either the cement failed or the mud solution was too light, causing the blow out. That left only the blow out preventor, which also failed. So what does Obama do? Why, he makes everyone cap their wells! Brilliant! Why don't we just go ahead and see if we can't get another spill going, why don't we?
It's like an airplane crashing on landing for an as-yet unknown reason, so to be safe Obama orders all the airplanes in the sky to land... I mean, what the fuck? Yeah, that makes tons of sense.
Which was completely unnecessary, since BP already unequivocally promised to pay for every cent of damaged caused by the spill.
They did this within days of the spill, by the way, yet somehow Obama is the fucking hero.
Do you know what their legal responsibility is? $75 million for cleanup, and $1000 per barrel in fines. Yet they've already spent $2 billion in clean up, voluntarily and without government pressure of any kind to do so.
Frankly, in my opinion, they would have been better off sending out $75 million worth of boom and saying "fuck it" for the rest, for all the credit their getting for doing the right thing in response to the spill. It would save them $20 billion, at the very least.
I'm especially pissed at Obama, he's as culpable for this as Hayward is, yet he acts like a hero prancing around and making things far less safe than they were without him. Seriously, if Hayward can be held personally responsible for his lower level manager's bad decisions, should not Obama be held personally responsible for the actions of the MMS, which allowed this spill to happen? Obama's man had been in charge for over a year before the spill, either they were inept or they weren't trying to change the cozy culture of the MMS at all. Where is Obama's congressional hearing?
Actually apologized to BP a few days ago for them having to pay for the damage they caused?
Yeah, that would be awful, if one shred of it were true. He apologized for the trumped up witch hunt, the fucking retard congressmen and women who tried to get Hayward to say he was personally aware of the decisions being made. Hayward isn't even a fucking oil man, he's a bureaucrat. He is good at administration - running a company. He hires oil men to help him run it properly, but he himself knows little technically of oil industry technologies. It was that bullshit, these shitheads looking for their 15 minutes of fame, that Barton apologized for. And his spineless co-congressmen crucified him for it.
The fact is, BP's legal responsibility for the cleanup stopped at $75 million. Yet, they immediately promised to cover every single dime of the cleanup cost. There is plenty of evidence that suggest BP seriously fucked up, but from day 1 of the spill they have been trying to do the right thing, and all they've gotten is hell for it.
Nobody bothers to look at Anadarko, who owns 25% of that well and therefore shares 25% of the responsibility, yet has shared in 0% of the cleanup. They are nowhere to be seen. They are definitely not doing the right thing here. BP is. They screwed up big time, and they are working their ass off to clean it up.
BP deserves an apology, and fucking idiots like Obama need to sit down and shut the hell up. The idiotic moratorium of his forces 33 wells to perform the exact same operation that caused the BP spill in deep water. What if one of them fails? What if they have the exact same problem TransOcean had? What then? We're using all our resources to plug just one spill, a second would flow uncontrollably.
Worse than that, the Deepwater Horizon accident happened when they were capping the well, which is exactly what these 33 rigs have to do!
One rig just fucked the operation up, spewing millions of barrels of oil into the ocean, so to be safe you're going to force 33 more to perform the exact same operation? What the fuck?
I'm sorry, but Obama is damn near retarded for this moratorium. If anything could be the opposite of what was needed, this is it.
Lets hope and pray that none of those rigs have the exact same accident, eh?
The idea was to hit the "pause" button on 33 new wells while we figure out why the new-well drilling at Deepwater went so wrong.
The problem is, there is no "pause" button.
To shut down these wells they have to do exactly the same procedure that failed on DeepWater Horizon! The fact is, the risky operation is in sealing it off, not continuing to drill.
Fucking idiot president knows fuck all about the oil industry, and is making another spill far more likely just to make himself look less like a complete imbecile in this situation.
To get around the ex post facto provision, the appeals court basically said "It only applies to new copies, so it isn't retroactive." That is in spite of the fact that the reason it applies to new copies of certain works at all is because it's retroactively removes the derivative right! They're basically saying that distributing it then was ok, but now it's not, thereby dodging the question.
Frankly, I call bullshit on it. When the derivative work was created from the public domain work, a copyright was automatically granted. Saying that making the previously PD work once again copyright removes the derivative creator's copyright is definitely ex post facto.
I really hopes the SCOTUS hears the case.
It's worth noting that our entire culture of film is still copyrighted, and much of it is going to be (and already has been) lost before it ever enters the public domain.
By your (illogical) reasoning Congress could copyright the Venus de Milo and give it to a company like MGM.
Read it again, it says nothing of the kind: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries ;
If they didn't produce it, they can never have copyright on it.
There are two points to argue, and one of them is from Article 1 Section 9: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed".
That is, no law can be made retroactive. This is a very clear case of a person retroactively losing his copyright to his work. They get around this by saying that it only affects future copying of the derivative works. I say that's bullshit, because it still retroactively strips a person's copyright. I hope the SCOTUS hears this case.
The other is a Article 1, section 8 issue - that is, the copyright clause itself. The constitutional question is, does this law promote the progress of the arts and sciences, and does that phrase actually restrict Congress's ability to enact copyright law?
I think it does, but that's definitely a point that could be debated.
A lot of the founders did not want to include the Bill of Rights because it weakened the Constitution. They explicitly state what the government can not do, while the Constitution explicitly states what it can. In other words, the Constitution was designed to imply that if it wasn't in there, it wasn't legal. By denying these powers explicitly, instead of implicitly, it created a framework for loopholes, allowing more expansion of the federal government than was originally intended.
Think about it - most constitutional questions today don't involve what was actually in the constitution. That's well established and well followed, because it tells the government what it can do, not what it can't. It's much more limiting that way, as anything outside of what it can do is automatically something it cannot do. Most constitutional battles are quibbles of the meaning of the restrictions - the amendments in the Bill of Rights.
There is no telling how things may have been different without the Bill of Rights, they may have been better, or they may have been worse. Who knows, really.
and the constitution doesn't really talk about copyrights, on a strictly interpretive level they should have the power to state or re-instate copyright or otherwise alter the system as they see fit.
If the Constitution didn't talk about copyrights, Congress would have exactly zero power to legislate them. That is the purpose of the ninth and tenth amendments.
However, the Constitution does talk about copyrights and patents. Specifically, it grants Congress the right to create copyrights and patents for a specific goal: to promote the advancement of science and the arts. This is the framework Congress is supposed to use when creating copyright law, and it's the framework the courts usually use when looking into the constitutionality of copyright law.
Sometimes, though, they go astray. I imagine this will make it to the SCOTUS at some point. Copyright is always a hot issue.
If you want to be making that sort of comparison, "big business" is pretty much the polar opposite of "the people".
I wouldn't go that far, given that "big business" is made up of "the people". The problem, is it is not made up of all the people. Big business matters, but they are definitely not the only ones who matter on a given issue. The people as a whole matter much more, and Congress has a very bad habit of forgetting that.
Usually, though, the courts are a little better about it. This ruling sucks.
And unless you're suggesting that the books have sentience, or that the slaves do not, it's a horrible analogy.
You missed the comparison.
The correct comparison is that words in their natural state are free, and it is only by force of law that they are held captive (and to a degree, rightly so) by those who wrote them down.
So too are men naturally free, and it was only by force of hand and law that they were kept enslaved, even after escape.
That is the correlation between copyright and fugitive slave laws. In fact, both cases have strong arguments that they benefit society - slave labor is extremely good for the economy, at least in the short term (a lack of cheap labor forces innovation, which is better in the long term). Copyright is also good for the economy, at least to a degree. We have whole industries that could not exist without it.
However, the whole purpose of copyright is to ensure that artists got their due, for the explicit purpose of creating new art. However, with every new restriction on copying the cartel simply grows larger and artist's compensation grows smaller.
In my mind we are paying a heavy cost with little real benefit from the cartels in return.
As an artist, when I sell an oil painting or a drawing, I most certainly *do* retain copyrights.
You retain the rights to copy of the painting or drawing, but if you sell the original you have no further rights to the original. However you still retain the right to copy it, though not the right to access it.
Kind of a catch-22 with physical art. There is generally only one original, and only prints are made for distribution.
Still, someone can't buy your art and start selling prints of it without your permission. At least for about a hundred years anyway (which is fucking absurd).
Are you saying that writing a book is like keeping people as slaves?
Actually, I'd say the monopoly on the words is very much analogous to keeping people as slaves.
Our goals as a society for the two couldn't be any more different, and that's kind of the point. Our goal with copyright is to promote the expansion of culture for our society as a whole to benefit from. To accomplish this we allow the authors to take captive their words, and be assured that they, and they alone have the right to sell them for a limited time.
Conversely, as a society we have deemed slavery an unnatural and unjust state of human existence, and as such we outlawed it (though it was very rough going).
The business case for reducing the rights of African slaves to live freely and reducing the rights of the public to copy, however, are identical. It's only our goals as a society that influence how we respond to either.