Whereas when you make a contribution to a cause you pull the money from thin air?
When anyone provides funding for anything, they first appropriate the money. You can dislike the tax system all you want, but don't expect that preference to obligate me to use loaded language on your behalf.
More correct to say "a public library where the internet (access) is bought from a telecommunications company using public funds".
This is the same as how libraries get their books - there is no government publication house stocking libraries with information. And before we start arguing details of how the analogy might be better formed, how about focusing on the important point: the governmetn's role is the same in both cases - it provides the funding, end of story.
"in a theoretical world without copyright, there would be no reason not to publish your source code - because you wouldn't be able to profit off of software sales in a world where anyone could legally copy your program for free"
Sounds great... right up until some enterprising programmer says "I won't release the code, therefore you can't modify it; but I can, and you can pay me to make such modifications if you need them."
Or uses DRM to continue profiting off of sales.
Or sells the use of the software rather than providing you a copy of it.
An information asymetry is an opportunity to profit. Copyright is only one tool in that workshop.
I've heard a lot of people say Bush was our worst president ever.
None of the people I've heard say it have a degree in history.
For an awful lot of them, Bush was the first president to hold office during their adult lives.
Bush and his administration had serious flaws, but if you're going to propagate this "worst ever" meme, then I for one would like to know where you fall on the spectrum of historical perspective.
GP's lack of precision notwithstanding, you seem to be saying that there is no discovery in civil trials. If that is what you're saying, then you would be mistaken.
Producing evidence demanded by the court is not self-incrimination; evidence is not testimony.
The thing to realize is, in spite of their related names, a nova and a supernova are fundamentally different phenomena. They happen to have enough similarity (esp. in what's observed) to be named as though a "supernova" were just a nova only bigger, but that obscures huge differences in what's really going on.
AFAIK, neither phenomenon would be expected to produce this kind of mid-range result. Possibly it's a different kind of event altogether. (Must... resist... LHC joke...)
Just to be clear about the parameters of this test... I assume the PC from which you sent the request isn't on the same local network as the DNS server? (Since, you know, the ISP routers would never even see the traffic if it were?)
It's not really a question of whether a specific group of children will benefit.
It's a question of, can we prevent any group of children from being hurt by the move, and is there a net benefit? Here the driver is cost - and don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to say that a rush to technology to save a buck can be a disaster.
That said, none of the issues people are raising are show-stoppers. We're talking about books, not dynamic content, so internet access need not be a requirement. ("But if you had the ineternet, think of all the cool value adds..." Yes, but right now we're just trying to save resources without putting extra burden on any children. Doing too much too fast is one of the easiest ways for this to go wrong.) School-provided hardware, done the right way, could save money over school-provided books. The computer doesn't have to be a general-purpose PC, so the tech support environment can be kept dirt simple.
Yes, they need to think this through and proceed carefully. Let's save the pointing and laughing until we see whether they do or not.
For a lot of businesses, 1TB isn't that much. We have systems with well over 1TB of data, to which over 5GB of new data are added every day, with an accelerating rate of new data coming in (as the systems model more fo the business, in more detail, etc.).
Historically these scales have only increased over time, and nothing is evident that would show that slowing down any time soon.
Now, do you want all that storage in one HDD? Probably not; there are pros and cons. But, there are absolutely applications where the desired amount of storage on a device exceeds what you could get today. It's not all about how many movies you can torrent.
What does this have to do with enjoyment of gambling, exactly? I understand math better than the vast majority of people. I am not deluded into believing I'm going to "win" when I play blackjack. But I do enjoy it.
It's not like the money I pay to see a movie, or watch a ball game or a concert, is any less "gone" than the money I lose to a blackjack dealer.
TFS appears to want to make this sound official, so refers to "an examination of the law". Well, if you read TFA, some guy read a section of the law and in his opinion it could mean... blah, blah, blah. "Some guy" is identified as "Nate" in TFA; since I don't read techdirt I can only guess that regular readers do know who that is; but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't appear any lawyers were involved in this discussion.
And while certainly IANAL, it is plain to my eyes that few if any lawyers are involved in the discussion here on slashdot as well. All this "Al Capone" bs, and the back-and-forth "I can come up with a more coy interpretation than you can" nonsense, mean nothing. It doesn't matter what is or isn't income, or what is or isn't an inocme tax deduction. It doesn't matter what is or isn't traditionally sales tax. We're talking about a specific state law that either does, or dosen't, assign value to files downloaded illegally and tax that value.
I've only just started reading the law in question, and won't have time to finish it until tonight at the earliest, but the part I found most interesting so far was the definition of "Electronically Transfer":
(8) "Electronically transferred" or "transferred electronically" means obtained by the purchaser by means other than tangible storage media. It is not necessary that a copy of the product be physically transferred to the purchaser. So long as the purchaser may access the product, it will be considered to have been electronically transferred to the purchaser.
I don't know how this act intends to define 'purchaser', but it's certainly playing fast and loose with "obtained". Maybe they mean to avoid letting streaming media be exempt; maybe they want to apply the tax at the moment of sale even if the actual download occurs later... but in a non-sale context like a p2p server, at what point is it first the case that I "may access the product"? It seems to me that anyone may access the entire catalogue... so is every freely-available file on the Internet deemed to have been transferred to every Internet-connected citizen of Washington?
You're suggesting the selective blurring of the base in the older imagery was a coincidence? It was blurrier than other imagery of neighboring areas from the same time period...
So I think a better hypothesis is, there was/is an informal agreement, but when updated photography came in somebody goofed up and didn't re-blur it before re-applying it.
Mercury is "easy" to "scrub" from power plant emmisions? Citation needed.
You misunderstand the argument that centralized pollution is better. The reason it's better than internal combustion engines isn't that it's anything close to "clean" ; it's that internal combustion engines are that incredibly dirty.
As for the locality of the pollution -- wrong again. When you burn coal, the mercury goes into the atmosphere. It doesn't just hover around the power plant. It does exactly what the other airborne pollutants do: it circulates with the air.
Apples and oranges. You're talking about two different problems as if they're the same problem.
The local problem with CFL's (they contain a trace of mercury) is outbalanced by the central problem of coal-burning releasing even more mercury.
The local problem with an internal combustion engine (it constantly pumps many pollutants into the environment) is not outbalanced by the central problem of power plant pollution.
These two statements would only be in contradiction if the polluting effect of the mercury in a CFL were on the same order of magnitude as the polluting effect of an internal combustion engine. It's not even close.
The "better" law you're describing, is (contrary to GP's claim) what we already have. Incandescants are not being banned. Inefficient incandescants (which would include the kind you can buy today, but not the kind TFA describes) are being "banned".
(If by "banned" I mean you can't market them for general-purpose lighting.)
If we're swapping anecdotes today: I put a pair of CFL's in lamps in my bedroom a couple years ago. I leave them on quite a lot when the dog is home alone. I haven't changed them once.
There are many possible reasons for the problem you're experiencing, but it's not a geenral shortcoming of CFL's.
Not true. Incandescants will not be banned in 2014. They will be subject to new efficiency standards.
An incandescant you can buy today would be unable to meet those standards, leading many to claim that incandescants were being banned.
But the bulbs described in TFA will meet the new standards and will be legal to market and sell for general-purpose lighting in the U.S. If anything, the law will speed the time to market for these bulbs, as manufacturers won't be able to hold them back to stretch sales of less efficient bulbs.
A GPS and a magnetic compass are two different things.
A number of non-magnetic direction-finding devices can also be called a compass, and one of those happens to be a GPS (with a bit of software). Of course, different types of compass have different limitations.
For example, a magnetic compass can be thrown off by local magnetic fields, etc.; but it can find direction even when you stand still (and, I suppose, you don't have to know if your frame of reference is moving to read it correctly).
You can avoid both sets of problems using a gyroscope-based compass, but that's not always practical.
For example, there are many sources (e.g. legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com is a nice easy-to-find one) from which you could learn that patent infringement includes both use and manufacture. It is absolutely a coder's concern.
You also should look up "troll", which surprisingly does not mean "for someone to correctly state facts of which you are unaware".
It may be common sense, if the standard were there first (i.e. before the patent). If the patent were there first, why would it be common sense that an international standards body would be allowed to say "Hey, that's a good idea; we'll just invalidate your patent by incorporating it into a standard!"?
And indeed, if the standard came first, then any later-filed patent covering the idea could not be novel and non-obvious, so the law would behave in what I consider a common-sense fashion.
Whether the patent would be valid might well depend on when it was filed. The mechanisms for editing XML are obvious if the XML spec is taken as background, but if the patent was in force when the XML spec was created and if those methods were covered by the patent, then XML would violate the patent (not the other way around).
Right. And any Open Office developers who happen to live in the U.S. - whose coding would be subject to U.S. patents - would do what exactly to avoid their liability for infringing the patent? And even if we pretend (as TFS seems to imply, incorrectly) that patent damages somehow have to be tied to a count of distributed copies, and that OO could cut off U.S. distribution, how would the cover the damages for copies already distributed in the U.S.?
If the patent applies to what OO is doing, it would be a big problem for the project.
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas when you make a contribution to a cause you pull the money from thin air?
When anyone provides funding for anything, they first appropriate the money. You can dislike the tax system all you want, but don't expect that preference to obligate me to use loaded language on your behalf.
More correct to say "a public library where the internet (access) is bought from a telecommunications company using public funds".
This is the same as how libraries get their books - there is no government publication house stocking libraries with information. And before we start arguing details of how the analogy might be better formed, how about focusing on the important point: the governmetn's role is the same in both cases - it provides the funding, end of story.
"in a theoretical world without copyright, there would be no reason not to publish your source code - because you wouldn't be able to profit off of software sales in a world where anyone could legally copy your program for free"
Sounds great... right up until some enterprising programmer says "I won't release the code, therefore you can't modify it; but I can, and you can pay me to make such modifications if you need them."
Or uses DRM to continue profiting off of sales.
Or sells the use of the software rather than providing you a copy of it.
An information asymetry is an opportunity to profit. Copyright is only one tool in that workshop.
I've heard a lot of people say Bush was our worst president ever.
None of the people I've heard say it have a degree in history.
For an awful lot of them, Bush was the first president to hold office during their adult lives.
Bush and his administration had serious flaws, but if you're going to propagate this "worst ever" meme, then I for one would like to know where you fall on the spectrum of historical perspective.
GP's lack of precision notwithstanding, you seem to be saying that there is no discovery in civil trials. If that is what you're saying, then you would be mistaken.
Producing evidence demanded by the court is not self-incrimination; evidence is not testimony.
Huh... So, for instance, you can't deal with: "The RIAA lawyers are not following the rules of evidence, Your Honor"?
Well, yes...
The thing to realize is, in spite of their related names, a nova and a supernova are fundamentally different phenomena. They happen to have enough similarity (esp. in what's observed) to be named as though a "supernova" were just a nova only bigger, but that obscures huge differences in what's really going on.
AFAIK, neither phenomenon would be expected to produce this kind of mid-range result. Possibly it's a different kind of event altogether. (Must... resist... LHC joke...)
Just to be clear about the parameters of this test... I assume the PC from which you sent the request isn't on the same local network as the DNS server? (Since, you know, the ISP routers would never even see the traffic if it were?)
That's the only way you can think of to verify what's happening?
GP controls the DNS server in question. Think server logs and monitoring tools.
It's not really a question of whether a specific group of children will benefit.
It's a question of, can we prevent any group of children from being hurt by the move, and is there a net benefit? Here the driver is cost - and don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to say that a rush to technology to save a buck can be a disaster.
That said, none of the issues people are raising are show-stoppers. We're talking about books, not dynamic content, so internet access need not be a requirement. ("But if you had the ineternet, think of all the cool value adds..." Yes, but right now we're just trying to save resources without putting extra burden on any children. Doing too much too fast is one of the easiest ways for this to go wrong.) School-provided hardware, done the right way, could save money over school-provided books. The computer doesn't have to be a general-purpose PC, so the tech support environment can be kept dirt simple.
Yes, they need to think this through and proceed carefully. Let's save the pointing and laughing until we see whether they do or not.
If you're thinking home computers, maybe.
For a lot of businesses, 1TB isn't that much. We have systems with well over 1TB of data, to which over 5GB of new data are added every day, with an accelerating rate of new data coming in (as the systems model more fo the business, in more detail, etc.).
Historically these scales have only increased over time, and nothing is evident that would show that slowing down any time soon.
Now, do you want all that storage in one HDD? Probably not; there are pros and cons. But, there are absolutely applications where the desired amount of storage on a device exceeds what you could get today. It's not all about how many movies you can torrent.
What does this have to do with enjoyment of gambling, exactly? I understand math better than the vast majority of people. I am not deluded into believing I'm going to "win" when I play blackjack. But I do enjoy it.
It's not like the money I pay to see a movie, or watch a ball game or a concert, is any less "gone" than the money I lose to a blackjack dealer.
TFS appears to want to make this sound official, so refers to "an examination of the law". Well, if you read TFA, some guy read a section of the law and in his opinion it could mean ... blah, blah, blah. "Some guy" is identified as "Nate" in TFA; since I don't read techdirt I can only guess that regular readers do know who that is; but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't appear any lawyers were involved in this discussion.
And while certainly IANAL, it is plain to my eyes that few if any lawyers are involved in the discussion here on slashdot as well. All this "Al Capone" bs, and the back-and-forth "I can come up with a more coy interpretation than you can" nonsense, mean nothing. It doesn't matter what is or isn't income, or what is or isn't an inocme tax deduction. It doesn't matter what is or isn't traditionally sales tax. We're talking about a specific state law that either does, or dosen't, assign value to files downloaded illegally and tax that value.
I've only just started reading the law in question, and won't have time to finish it until tonight at the earliest, but the part I found most interesting so far was the definition of "Electronically Transfer":
(8) "Electronically transferred" or "transferred electronically" means obtained by the purchaser by means other than tangible storage media. It is not necessary that a copy of the product be physically transferred to the purchaser. So long as the purchaser may access the product, it will be considered to have been electronically transferred to the purchaser.
I don't know how this act intends to define 'purchaser', but it's certainly playing fast and loose with "obtained". Maybe they mean to avoid letting streaming media be exempt; maybe they want to apply the tax at the moment of sale even if the actual download occurs later... but in a non-sale context like a p2p server, at what point is it first the case that I "may access the product"? It seems to me that anyone may access the entire catalogue... so is every freely-available file on the Internet deemed to have been transferred to every Internet-connected citizen of Washington?
You're suggesting the selective blurring of the base in the older imagery was a coincidence? It was blurrier than other imagery of neighboring areas from the same time period...
So I think a better hypothesis is, there was/is an informal agreement, but when updated photography came in somebody goofed up and didn't re-blur it before re-applying it.
Mercury is "easy" to "scrub" from power plant emmisions? Citation needed.
You misunderstand the argument that centralized pollution is better. The reason it's better than internal combustion engines isn't that it's anything close to "clean" ; it's that internal combustion engines are that incredibly dirty.
As for the locality of the pollution -- wrong again. When you burn coal, the mercury goes into the atmosphere. It doesn't just hover around the power plant. It does exactly what the other airborne pollutants do: it circulates with the air.
Apples and oranges. You're talking about two different problems as if they're the same problem.
The local problem with CFL's (they contain a trace of mercury) is outbalanced by the central problem of coal-burning releasing even more mercury.
The local problem with an internal combustion engine (it constantly pumps many pollutants into the environment) is not outbalanced by the central problem of power plant pollution.
These two statements would only be in contradiction if the polluting effect of the mercury in a CFL were on the same order of magnitude as the polluting effect of an internal combustion engine. It's not even close.
Uh... these "slightly more efficient" incandescants are, if the figures in TFA are correct, as efficient as a CFL.
It is true that using incandescants that are commercially available today puts more mercury in the environment than using CFL's.
The "better" law you're describing, is (contrary to GP's claim) what we already have. Incandescants are not being banned. Inefficient incandescants (which would include the kind you can buy today, but not the kind TFA describes) are being "banned".
(If by "banned" I mean you can't market them for general-purpose lighting.)
If we're swapping anecdotes today: I put a pair of CFL's in lamps in my bedroom a couple years ago. I leave them on quite a lot when the dog is home alone. I haven't changed them once.
There are many possible reasons for the problem you're experiencing, but it's not a geenral shortcoming of CFL's.
Not true. Incandescants will not be banned in 2014. They will be subject to new efficiency standards.
An incandescant you can buy today would be unable to meet those standards, leading many to claim that incandescants were being banned.
But the bulbs described in TFA will meet the new standards and will be legal to market and sell for general-purpose lighting in the U.S. If anything, the law will speed the time to market for these bulbs, as manufacturers won't be able to hold them back to stretch sales of less efficient bulbs.
A GPS and a magnetic compass are two different things.
A number of non-magnetic direction-finding devices can also be called a compass, and one of those happens to be a GPS (with a bit of software). Of course, different types of compass have different limitations.
For example, a magnetic compass can be thrown off by local magnetic fields, etc.; but it can find direction even when you stand still (and, I suppose, you don't have to know if your frame of reference is moving to read it correctly).
You can avoid both sets of problems using a gyroscope-based compass, but that's not always practical.
You might want to look up a few terms.
For example, there are many sources (e.g. legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com is a nice easy-to-find one) from which you could learn that patent infringement includes both use and manufacture. It is absolutely a coder's concern.
You also should look up "troll", which surprisingly does not mean "for someone to correctly state facts of which you are unaware".
It may be common sense, if the standard were there first (i.e. before the patent). If the patent were there first, why would it be common sense that an international standards body would be allowed to say "Hey, that's a good idea; we'll just invalidate your patent by incorporating it into a standard!"?
And indeed, if the standard came first, then any later-filed patent covering the idea could not be novel and non-obvious, so the law would behave in what I consider a common-sense fashion.
Whether the patent would be valid might well depend on when it was filed. The mechanisms for editing XML are obvious if the XML spec is taken as background, but if the patent was in force when the XML spec was created and if those methods were covered by the patent, then XML would violate the patent (not the other way around).
Right. And any Open Office developers who happen to live in the U.S. - whose coding would be subject to U.S. patents - would do what exactly to avoid their liability for infringing the patent? And even if we pretend (as TFS seems to imply, incorrectly) that patent damages somehow have to be tied to a count of distributed copies, and that OO could cut off U.S. distribution, how would the cover the damages for copies already distributed in the U.S.?
If the patent applies to what OO is doing, it would be a big problem for the project.