One of the benefits of copyright is that a copyright holder can use the power of the state, ultimately big guys with guns, to enforce the copyright. Why should the public give copyright holders this power if they get nothing in return? As can be seen by the wording in the Constitution, the creators of the Constitution did not believe in an absolute right to "intellectual property". Patents and copyrights are limited monopolies granted by the state to further the public interest.
I have to disagree. The IBM PC was a disaster for the microcomputer industry. It set back hardware design for years. Instead of designing new and improved chips and systems, everyone got sucked into building hardware clones of a mediocre computer.
I used to have a 4 MHz Z-80A CP/M system with 64K and dual 8" DSDD floppy drives. That "obsolete" system was noticably faster than the original IBM PC. The floppy drives were twice as fast and had three times the capacity of the 5.25" drives in the IBM PC. The CPU was also faster, probably due to the sloppy ports of many programs to the 8088.
Software vendors produced hardware independent programs for CP/M, giving hardware engineers freedom to use new technology. They were not locked in to using the 6845 (video), 8250 (serial), 1791 (floppy) and the Intel PIC, CTC and DMA chips. Except for the 6845, these chips still exist in modern PC chipsets.
Digital Research was a much nicer company than Microsoft. If you wanted to, you could buy a copy of CP/M, write a BIOS for your hardware, and have it running in a matter of a week or two. You didn't have to be a DRI approved OEM with a DRI approved business plan to build a CP/M system.
The IBM PC resulted in a decades long stagnation of hardware design and gave control of the systems software to Microsoft , who expertly exploited that control for their own benefit.
The contractors that ground the Hubble mirror knew the thing was flawed when they delivered it.
Bullshit. Don't accuse someone of knowingly delivering a defective component if you can't back it up with evidence.
Obviously the problem is that NASA and its contractors make mistakes. Well, we will just have to fire them all and replace them with magic robots who never make errors and will work unlimited hours for free.
I work for a NASA contractor and have seen the effects of faster and cheaper up close. It's like Stalin's purges, every month more people disappear, never to be seen again. I haven't seen a new hire in years. My boss is retiring this week and his position will disappear with him. Time to print out another org chart.
Most of those are not NASA missions. Except for the Space Shuttle, satellite launch services are purchased from private companies such as Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. NASA does not design or build the launch vehicle. Almost all of the Titan launches are done for the USAF, NRO and NSA., not NASA. NASA has enough to deal with without being blamed for other people's launch failures.
For some reason, I find the variations in brightness to be very annoying. When I first got a DVD player, it drove me crazy and I wondered if there was something wrong with the mastering or the MPEG decoder. Later on, I found out about macrovision and the "fix" for the problem, which was to buy a video switch so that the DVD video signal could go straight into the TV.
I ran across this tidbit in an interview with Daniel Curzon-Brown:
Q. So does all this mean that you haven't mellowed in middle age?
CURZON. Don't I sound mellow? I'm finally tenured. Once you're tenured you're supposed to turn into a mushmelon, right? Well, I haven't. But I don't think people should confuse my persona as a writer with my private demeanor. I'm a pussycat -- really. Of course when things piss them off even pussycats have claws. What pisses me off now? Oh, for one, the fact that I can never retire from teaching English. I don't have enough years in, because I was a part-time slave for twelve years -- despite getting a Ph.D. and publishing my butt off. Historical forces beyond my control crippled my career. For another, the fact that some younger gay people have never heard of my work. But then as a teacher I know lots of people have never heard of Gore Vidal or even Tennessee Williams either! Amazing! But don't get me started on who reads and who doesn't. I may get depressed and give up the world of literature once and for all and become Mother Teresa's press agent.
I have to wonder, if he hates teaching English, why did he spend all those years getting a Ph.D, a teaching position and tenure?
I wouldn't expect a laptop to last 100 years. Capacitors dry out, metal contacts corrode, lubricants evaporate and become gummy, plastics crack and become brittle. I used to fix old tube hi-fi equipment from the 1950s that had been in storage for decades. I almost always had to replace the power cord and all of the electrolytic capacitors.
It isn't fair to compare clock rates. The G4 and K7 are completely different architectures. PPC chips have a much cleaner architecture as compared to the x86 chips. You need SPEC numbers to make a reasonable comparison, and even that doesn't tell you how fast your application will run. I have a program that runs great on Intel chips and runs like crap on Alpha chips. This is because the inner loop is composed mostly of logical operations on bytes, something the Alpha has trouble with.
The Russians/Soviets have been using one time pads for low volume (text) traffic for over 60 years. The one time pad can't be cracked by a quantum computer (or conventional computer) if properly generated. It's a pain to use but it is provably secure.
There have been conflicts in the past due to technology. The liner notes on one of my CDs (Duke Ellington at Carnegie Hall) makes a reference to a "strike" by ASCAP members in the 1940s over royalties from radio stations who were members of the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters). This resulted in the creation of BMI. I've never been able to find a good description of the conflict and its resolution.
Producing music or books has associated costs. Copyright ensures that those who bear those costs also have an opportunity to benefit from producing these goods for the rest of us. It protects those who create music and books from plagiarism (among other things).
The institution of Copyright also has costs, for the government and ultimately the citizen. The whole apparatus of copyright registration, investigation and prosecution of criminal copyright cases, courts to hear civil and criminal copyright cases, prison cells for people convicted of criminal infringement, is a substantial cost. If the end result is not a significant benefit to the public, then Copyright should be abolished.
Copyrights, patents and trademarks are not natural rights, although some people would disagree with that, they are legal inventions for the benefit of the public. Licenses and contracts will not be enforced by the courts if the result is judged to be against the public interest. I've seen real estate covenants that say that the property may not be sold to Blacks or Jews. They are a legitimate part of the deed but they will not be enforced by modern courts.
After reading the decision, I think Samara would have had a better case if they had included some sort of distinctive mark on their clothes, like the little alligator that is on some men's shirts. Something the consumer could recognize and competitors couldn't legally copy.
I think OshKosh B'Gosh ran into similar problems with people ripping off their designs for children's clothes when they were fashionable and in great demand.
Even though they won, I still think Wal-Mart is sleazy for blatantly ripping off Samara's designs. There is a difference between copying a design idea and sending photographs to a manufacturer with instructions to replicate the clothes. When Ford introduced the Taurus, many other car companies borrowed elements of the body design without making exact duplicates of the Taurus.
Ten years may also be the design lifetime. The satellite's components and fuel capacity being designed for a 10-year mission life. At the end of ten years, assuming nothing major has broken, maneuvering fuel is low, solar cell and transmitter output are near the low end of the acceptable operating range, and other components may be degraded or worn out.
It seems that all many of these artists can see is that people are copying their music and they aren't getting paid for it. While true, it isn't that simple.
Like warez kiddies, many napster users are young people, without a lot of money, who would never have bought the official product anyway, so they aren't a loss to the artist.
Many people buy the CD after they hear MP3s from the CD and decide they like the artist's music. They have money to spend, but they aren't going to walk into a music store and spend money on a bunch of random CDs from unknown artists.
Radio used to be an important medium for exposing the public to an artist's music. Today, it is difficult to find a radio station that plays a wide variety of music. Most have rigid and short playlists based on some consultant's version of "make money fast in radio". There is a lot of excellent music that never gets airplay.
I can believe that an exoskeleton could be built with hydraulics and/or electric motors. The trick is coming up with a compact power source that will run the suit for some reasonable amount of time. Maybe they could use something like the APU used on the Space Shuttle. It weighs about 90 pounds and produces 135 horsepower. The downside is that it runs on hydrazine, which is very nasty stuff.
3Gs is the structural load limit for the Shuttle. 9Gs is a typical limit for sustained stress on a trained military fighter pilot. The 3G limit on the Shuttle allows it to carry passengers who don't have the physical strength and endurance of fighter pilots.
How long would a brown dwarf burn for before fizzling and cooling off?
According to the article in the current Scientific American, deuterium fusion only lasts a few million years. It takes a very long time for the brown dwarf to cool off from radiative cooling.
The current (2000-04) issue of Scientific American has an interesting article on brown dwarfs. The author describes a technique for differentiating brown dwarfs from low-mass stars by looking for lithium in the spectra. Lithium is quickly burned up by fusion in normal stars.
How about training, documentation, support and device driver support from third party hardware manufacturers. It isn't cheap for an individual but a business may consider the cost to be trivial.
Different problem. TEMPEST is concerned with information leakage via electro-magnetic radiation.
Covert channels are a concern in multi-level secure systems where information of different classifications and compartments are processed on a single system. A process running in a Top Secret context should not be able to send classified information to a process running in a Confidential context.
NASA should stop spending money on the exploration of Mars and instead spend it on the eradication of rain forests and cute, furry animals. Take the pledge today. There is no problem so big that it can't be solved with a few million tons of asphalt.
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Who has the marshmallows?
One of the benefits of copyright is that a copyright holder can use the power of the state, ultimately big guys with guns, to enforce the copyright. Why should the public give copyright holders this power if they get nothing in return? As can be seen by the wording in the Constitution, the creators of the Constitution did not believe in an absolute right to "intellectual property". Patents and copyrights are limited monopolies granted by the state to further the public interest.
I used to have a 4 MHz Z-80A CP/M system with 64K and dual 8" DSDD floppy drives. That "obsolete" system was noticably faster than the original IBM PC. The floppy drives were twice as fast and had three times the capacity of the 5.25" drives in the IBM PC. The CPU was also faster, probably due to the sloppy ports of many programs to the 8088.
Software vendors produced hardware independent programs for CP/M, giving hardware engineers freedom to use new technology. They were not locked in to using the 6845 (video), 8250 (serial), 1791 (floppy) and the Intel PIC, CTC and DMA chips. Except for the 6845, these chips still exist in modern PC chipsets.
Digital Research was a much nicer company than Microsoft. If you wanted to, you could buy a copy of CP/M, write a BIOS for your hardware, and have it running in a matter of a week or two. You didn't have to be a DRI approved OEM with a DRI approved business plan to build a CP/M system.
The IBM PC resulted in a decades long stagnation of hardware design and gave control of the systems software to Microsoft , who expertly exploited that control for their own benefit.
Bullshit. Don't accuse someone of knowingly delivering a defective component if you can't back it up with evidence.
Obviously the problem is that NASA and its contractors make mistakes. Well, we will just have to fire them all and replace them with magic robots who never make errors and will work unlimited hours for free.
I work for a NASA contractor and have seen the effects of faster and cheaper up close. It's like Stalin's purges, every month more people disappear, never to be seen again. I haven't seen a new hire in years. My boss is retiring this week and his position will disappear with him. Time to print out another org chart.
Most of those are not NASA missions. Except for the Space Shuttle, satellite launch services are purchased from private companies such as Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. NASA does not design or build the launch vehicle. Almost all of the Titan launches are done for the USAF, NRO and NSA., not NASA. NASA has enough to deal with without being blamed for other people's launch failures.
For some reason, I find the variations in brightness to be very annoying. When I first got a DVD player, it drove me crazy and I wondered if there was something wrong with the mastering or the MPEG decoder. Later on, I found out about macrovision and the "fix" for the problem, which was to buy a video switch so that the DVD video signal could go straight into the TV.
I have to wonder, if he hates teaching English, why did he spend all those years getting a Ph.D, a teaching position and tenure?
I wouldn't expect a laptop to last 100 years. Capacitors dry out, metal contacts corrode, lubricants evaporate and become gummy, plastics crack and become brittle. I used to fix old tube hi-fi equipment from the 1950s that had been in storage for decades. I almost always had to replace the power cord and all of the electrolytic capacitors.
It isn't fair to compare clock rates. The G4 and K7 are completely different architectures. PPC chips have a much cleaner architecture as compared to the x86 chips. You need SPEC numbers to make a reasonable comparison, and even that doesn't tell you how fast your application will run. I have a program that runs great on Intel chips and runs like crap on Alpha chips. This is because the inner loop is composed mostly of logical operations on bytes, something the Alpha has trouble with.
The Russians/Soviets have been using one time pads for low volume (text) traffic for over 60 years. The one time pad can't be cracked by a quantum computer (or conventional computer) if properly generated. It's a pain to use but it is provably secure.
There have been conflicts in the past due to technology. The liner notes on one of my CDs (Duke Ellington at Carnegie Hall) makes a reference to a "strike" by ASCAP members in the 1940s over royalties from radio stations who were members of the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters). This resulted in the creation of BMI. I've never been able to find a good description of the conflict and its resolution.
The institution of Copyright also has costs, for the government and ultimately the citizen. The whole apparatus of copyright registration, investigation and prosecution of criminal copyright cases, courts to hear civil and criminal copyright cases, prison cells for people convicted of criminal infringement, is a substantial cost. If the end result is not a significant benefit to the public, then Copyright should be abolished.
Copyrights, patents and trademarks are not natural rights, although some people would disagree with that, they are legal inventions for the benefit of the public. Licenses and contracts will not be enforced by the courts if the result is judged to be against the public interest. I've seen real estate covenants that say that the property may not be sold to Blacks or Jews. They are a legitimate part of the deed but they will not be enforced by modern courts.
I think OshKosh B'Gosh ran into similar problems with people ripping off their designs for children's clothes when they were fashionable and in great demand.
Even though they won, I still think Wal-Mart is sleazy for blatantly ripping off Samara's designs. There is a difference between copying a design idea and sending photographs to a manufacturer with instructions to replicate the clothes. When Ford introduced the Taurus, many other car companies borrowed elements of the body design without making exact duplicates of the Taurus.
Ten years may also be the design lifetime. The satellite's components and fuel capacity being designed for a 10-year mission life. At the end of ten years, assuming nothing major has broken, maneuvering fuel is low, solar cell and transmitter output are near the low end of the acceptable operating range, and other components may be degraded or worn out.
If you look at the music available on napster, you can get an idea of the demographics of the users.
Wasn't Bob Dylan one of the people who testified before a congressional committee in favor of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act?
Like warez kiddies, many napster users are young people, without a lot of money, who would never have bought the official product anyway, so they aren't a loss to the artist.
Many people buy the CD after they hear MP3s from the CD and decide they like the artist's music. They have money to spend, but they aren't going to walk into a music store and spend money on a bunch of random CDs from unknown artists.
Radio used to be an important medium for exposing the public to an artist's music. Today, it is difficult to find a radio station that plays a wide variety of music. Most have rigid and short playlists based on some consultant's version of "make money fast in radio". There is a lot of excellent music that never gets airplay.
I can believe that an exoskeleton could be built with hydraulics and/or electric motors. The trick is coming up with a compact power source that will run the suit for some reasonable amount of time. Maybe they could use something like the APU used on the Space Shuttle. It weighs about 90 pounds and produces 135 horsepower. The downside is that it runs on hydrazine, which is very nasty stuff.
3Gs is the structural load limit for the Shuttle. 9Gs is a typical limit for sustained stress on a trained military fighter pilot. The 3G limit on the Shuttle allows it to carry passengers who don't have the physical strength and endurance of fighter pilots.
According to the article in the current Scientific American, deuterium fusion only lasts a few million years. It takes a very long time for the brown dwarf to cool off from radiative cooling.
The current (2000-04) issue of Scientific American has an interesting article on brown dwarfs. The author describes a technique for differentiating brown dwarfs from low-mass stars by looking for lithium in the spectra. Lithium is quickly burned up by fusion in normal stars.
How about training, documentation, support and device driver support from third party hardware manufacturers. It isn't cheap for an individual but a business may consider the cost to be trivial.
Different problem. TEMPEST is concerned with information leakage via electro-magnetic radiation.
Covert channels are a concern in multi-level secure systems where information of different classifications and compartments are processed on a single system. A process running in a Top Secret context should not be able to send classified information to a process running in a Confidential context.
NASA should stop spending money on the exploration of Mars and instead spend it on the eradication of rain forests and cute, furry animals. Take the pledge today. There is no problem so big that it can't be solved with a few million tons of asphalt.
I'll believe it when I read about it in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.