Oh, good. Another slashdolt who thinks natural solution works by magic.
This ploy doesn't select in favor of "wise" snakes. It selects in favor of snakes that have an aversion to the mice for some reason, which is only meaningful if (1) such snakes exist, and (2) the aversion is not correlated with some other factor that limits breeding, and (3) the aversion is genetic.
It is possible that those three things will turn out to be true. Lacking a field test, I guess we don't know if any snakes have an aversion to the bait. It seems unlikely to me, but who knows?
Possible or not, though, it is far from the foregone conclusion you would suggest.
10 digit lat and long? Well, if I did my math right that's about 0.8 inch north/south resolution. The east/west resolution depends on how far from the equator your location is; about 0.8" if you're at the equator, less otherwise.
I doubt you have a world map wtih 1" resolution. I doubt you can click on the single pixel you intend on any map.
It seems to me you can come at this from the other direction; the surface area of the Earth is on the order of 10^14 meters. Eliminate areas where a specific location isn't distinguishable (like oceans), and you have an idea of the number of possible passwords, which can then be equated to a number of bits of information in an individual password. It's not "20 digits".
You also might choose to trade some of the bits away to make your system usable, since hitting exactly the right square meter on a satelite map can be challenging.
If your actions put someone's property at risk, a "no harm no foul" civil resolution makes sense.
If your actions put someone's life at risk, or otherwise impose on others risks for which you cannot actually make things right if you "lose" the bet, criminal punishment associated with the act of creating the risk (regardless of outcome) are far more appropriate.
Easy. Instead of writing new laws targeting the specific act (texting while driving), enforce the existing laws that address the underlying reason it's a problem (distracted driving). That way the presence or absence of a phone isn't a factor, so concealing the phone has nothing to do with anything. If someone isn't paying attention to the road, ticket them.
Interesting. It's popular around here to point out, when a technology can be used to infringe copyright, that if a technology is abused you blame the abuser and not the technology. At least twice in the past week we had front-page stories about government authority to shut down sites that infringe copyright; both cases the tone was "you can't ban tech just because it could be misused; what if we'd done this with VCR's?" (convenienty pretending that a specific web site is a "technology").
And yet here, the blame is fixed to the tech to such a degree that the U.S. gets bashed for having done something that makes the tech moer available. Sounds like another case of "anyone I don't like is responsbile for everything bad that happens" to me.
Also, "assist Iran" has a significantly different meaning from "took actions which had an unintended consequence that benefited Iran"; so even if you do want to pretend that U.S. demand for a technology had more to do with that tech being sold to Iran than the desire of the company supplying said tech to make money, the headline is still inflamatory crap.
"but who do you hate more...the crackhead or the asshole dealer that will do anything to enable and string out the addict until there's nothing left?"
If we were actually talking about addictive, life-destroying substances; or if Lucas actually employed the manipulative tactics of the worst drug dealers; then your analogy would have merit.
But if we're talking about Lucas and Star Wars fans... why would I bother to hate either? If fans want to trip over themselves throwing money at Lucas for the next repackaging of the same product, I can ignore them, which is much easier than hating them. Likewise, if Lucas wants to keep repackaging the same product, I can ignore him too.
People who talk about hating Lucas mostly do so because it's trendy, not because he has some evil mind control over fans.
First of all, did you read the actual quoted text from the statute? It doesn't actually draw the distinctions you're wanting to see. Among the powers the president has to limit or control operation of communication stations is the power to suspend or alter any regulations that do cover them, but I see nowhere in the language that any particular regulatory authority would be a prerequisite for the president to exercise his other powers (which include ordering the station physically disassembled).
Of course, to fully understand the law you'd have to read the whole statute and not just a couple quoted paragraphs; but I'm more confident in my couple paragraphs than you should be in your one sentence that isn't even a direct quote from the statute at all.
In any case... the Internet is not regulated? You're living at the application layer, and the statute lives at the physical layer. The communications equipment upon which the oh-so-free Internet is built are indeed regulated in more ways than you can count.
Let's test that... If I say "According to the dictionary, an ostrich is a flightless bird", do you suspect I'm disparaging the dictionary's authority on the subject?
Perhaps the problem is that you're blaming journalists for what you've brought to the conversation. Beyond that, it's a question of style. You may favor "so-and-so told me..."; but while bloggers and columnists may be comfortable using the first person, I think it's appropriate that reporters generally remove themselves from the story.
There are plenty of reasons to mock news coverage of scientific papers; but how exactly do you have a complaint when a journalist clearly states that someone else (not the journalist) is making an assertion when that is, in fact, true?
Yeah, let's mock them for that until they start omitting the "according to so-and-so" qualifications, and then we can mock them for pretending to be in a position to make definitive claims about topics they don't understand.
God, everyone's so busy wanting to limit the definition of irony.
NO. Irony does not require that the result be contrary (much less directly opposite) to the stated intentions of the person whose actions led to the result. It does not require that it be contrary to any specific individual's intentions or expectations.
The definition is that it is contrary to what you might expect, and like it or not that's subjective. Most of us wouldn't expect the owner of a company that makes a given product to be sufficiently ill equipped to use that product safely that it ends up killing him or her.
Wrong. Company A cannot trade on Company B's name by using product markings that would cause confusion as to whether it was, in fact another product in Company B's line. Even things like product color scheme are sometimes protected (so you can't make an el-cheap-o drill that looks, on the shelf, like a DeWalt.
Now, this makes the most sense and works best when all of a company's products carry a single distinctive mark (such as the Apple logo), and that mark is what gets protection. I'd be happy with a system where that was the only approach allowed; but that isn't the system we have.
As it is, not only distinctive logos, but also words that are distinctive within an industry (even if they are "common English words" in other contexts) have been given protection. There have been some limits established - there's a reason the Pentium wasn't just called a 586. Yet the word Apple is a valid trademark in both the computer and music industries. Something like an "i" prefix or the word "pod" in an audio/visual product are in a grey area.
Laws that create grey areas are not as good as laws that keep it simple, which is why I'd be happy to have a simple "distinctive logo only" system of trademark protection. I'm sure people could lobby for this, and I'm sure other people would lobby against it with all sorts of cases where it wouldn't work so well (and some of those might be valid and need to be addressed)... But what you're doing is simply stating that how you want it to be is how it is; at best that does nothing and at worst it costs someone foolish enough to listen to you some money.
What you (and, apparently, the moderators) don't seem to recognize is, it is not a perfectly acceptable argument. (I was aiming for "funny", not "insightful", with that particular post. I kind of worry how far we've slid if that isn't obvious.)
What it is, is a satire of the sort of corporate weasle-speak that I would expect in that situation. Calling that argument "acceptable" sets up a form of legalized racketeering.
Patent licenses shouldn't be treated as protection money / promise not to sue. They should be treated as the purchasing of a right, which it turns out the seller had no authority to sell.
There are a couple problems with that... The typical agenda that surrounds arguments like yours is that the job of checker is entirely obsolete. I don't think so. I do think it's nice to have a few lanes set up so people have a choice, but people who want to see this expand further don't seem to recognize what they're trading away.
First, these machiens don't reduce the number of people waiting. Today you see a shorter line because most people still don't use them. What would happen if everyone used them? Why, the lines are right back where they started.
You might think the self-check stations take less space, so there would be more lines. My grocery store has four stations, with an attendant in the middle. It takes up about enough space for 3 normal lanes. However, those stations have limited space and as such are reserved for customers with something ilke 20 items or fewer. Convert the whole store to self-check, and at least some of those stations are going to have to be bigger. Only if the store was pretty large to begin with can you expect any increase in the number of lines, and that will be offset by the fact that the lines will move slower.
That leads into your assertion that you can check yuorself out faster than the stoer can... I doubt it. It's probably closer to true today than it was 20 years ago - when there were baggers who seemed to actually care enough not to stack your milk on top of your bread, who worked in tandem with the checker and really kept things moving. But even so, the store employee has a better rig for moving groceries through and scanning them, and has a lot more practice than you do. If something doesn't scan right, they know what buttons to press to manually enter the item, whereas you have to flag down an attendant. The store trusts them, so they don't have to jack around with putting the items on a scale after scanning.
Generally people "feel like" they're moving along faster if they're doing something rather than waiting for something to be done, and probably that's the case here. I've never seen anyone self-check faster than a store checker could've handled them, and I really doubt you're the first.
And getting back to how the lines will move, it isn't a question of how fast you are - it's a question of how fast the average customer is.
Now it is true that the store will have fewer employees, so any store large enough to fully utilize enough lines will save on a few moderate-wage jobs (assuming that isn't eaten up on maintenance costs). Represent that as a percentage of gross revenue for a store that large, though, and you'll get an upper bound for what you can expect to save on your grocery bill. In reality a slice of that tiny pie will go to employees, management, and investors. Cheer the loss of an employment opportunity for kids working through school if you like, but if you're expecting a savings in your budget I think you'll be disappointed.
The government in a perfect democracy is a reflection of the people, but not of every aspect of the people. There may be things to criticize about the people that have nothing to do with the quality of teh government they produce.
Likewise, to the extent that the purpose of democracy is to promote liberty, you cannot assume that a perfectly-functioning government would produce a people who are above criticism.
For example, I would argue that a high rate of unhealthy obesity is neither a cause nor a symptom of improper government, yet it is a criticism that might be leveled at the people.
Even to the extent that your statement would apply to a perfect democracy, no government has been or ever will be a perfect democracy. So you can snark about whether it applies to the U.s., but in fact it can't apply to any real government.
I bet if you try very hard, you can find a better moderation tag than "Troll" to use for "a post with an irrelevant topic".
In fact, Troll roughly refers to a post that espouses an inflamatory point of view for the purpose of generating upset replies, rather than because the poster actually believes what he's saying and is trying to contribute to the conversation.
Because it is often difficult to discern intent (some people really are nuts; and unlike the old days when trolling was a bit more sport than it is now, trolls don't always contain clues to the astute reader that they are, in fact, trolls), and because many people (like you and GP) don't know what "Troll" means, it most often gets used for "I want to censor your post because I don't like it".
Over/under on minutes before someone mods this Troll?
What privacy laws would those be? I'm generally not compelled to protect your privacy in information you provide me unless I'm your doctor, your lawyer, your spiritual advisor, etc. (and then only if I'm operating in that capacity).
A few states' wiretap laws might require your permission to disclose the recording; OTOH most states don't even require your permission or knowledge for me to make a recording (in which case I can do as I wish with it).
That's another area where the copyright angle gets murky. Just because it's your voice on the tape, doesn't necessarily make you the author. If anyone owns the copyright to a recording I secretly make, it would be me. As I've said elsewhere I suspect the caller would be treated as the author in the case of n answering machine, but really that's a pretty inconsistent interpretation of the law.
The fact that every aspect of this is so debatable only strengthens my belief that copyright law, to the extent it attempts to cover something like a phone message, is incorrect.
"There's a huge difference between passive content being recorded by a device which happens to be a receiver of that content, and me talking directly to your recording device."
There's probably not as far as copyright is concerned. You would be right if we were talking about wiretap laws - you can't leave a message on my machine and then claim I illegally intercepted the communication illegally even in an all-party consent state. But this isn't about consent to make the recording; it's about who has the copyright on the resulting recording.
The iTunes music store, with the copyright holder's knowledge and consent, knowingly presents data to your recording device (hard drive and/or iPod). Does that give you the right to use that content in a video promoting your business? Does it transfer any copyright to you at all? No.
Now, I do agree that a properly defined copyright law should not generally protect phone messages. A phone message is not the type of information copyright is intended to protect. However, the law doesn't make a very robust effort to define the boundary, because it is a very difficult thing to get right. AFAIK the courts may well hold that the message is a sound recording afforded copyright protection.
Assuming the message is considered copyrightable, then the author is presumed to own the copyright. The person leaving the message would likely be regarded as the author. That he consented to make the recording on your equipment and leave you with a copy of it does not transfer copyright, just as you don't acquire copyright in a song you download with iTunes.
I suppose you could have your answering machine message state that the caller, by leaving a messages, transfers copyright in that message to you. I don't know if it would hold up, but at least it should make an interesting case. Without such a notice, though, you can't claim an implicit transfer of copyright.
Maybe copyright could/should have boundaries relating to the intent behind the creation of the content, or the expressive value of the content, or the intent of enforcement, or any number of things; but as it stands today, the copyright assertion is probably "valid enough" that you can't call it abusive in any legally meaningful way.
Instead of "presuming", why don't you take a look at what it is these companies actually contract to do. Because if you do, you'll find that you are... how did you put it?... plain wrong.
Ok, you're not "just a jerk", you're a persistent jerk.
Put the comment in context, jerk. The "equivalent to Li-ion" comment was a correct answer to a specific question. (And no, the question wasn't stupid either. It would be unsurprising if this type of adaptation had significantly changed properties like energy density. Essentially someone asked if it did and someone else answered that it didn't, only you don't like the way they phrased it.)
But sure, if you isolate the answer and ignore why it was given you can pretend that it was a stupid thing to say. You probably have a future in political punditry. (And in case you failed to pick it up from the context, that wasn't a compliment.)
Are you not aware that the high-profile RIAA/MPAA cases are a tiny fraction of the copyright litigation that occurs? Have you failed to notice that even in those cases, while the industry groups are pushing for outrageous outcomes, the trend has been toward moderation (or, one might say, "common sense") for a long time now?
It is not shocking news that the court is hearing this argument, and it will not be shocking news if this argument prevails.
The gravity may be a bigger problem than you realize.
IIRC most whtie dwarfs have a very dense atmosphere (density determined by gravity). I doubt an explosion of any reasonable magnitude, if it occured outside the atmosphere, would affect the core. In fact, to eject any of the core material beyond the crushing gravity well, I suspect your best bet would be to trigger an explosion at the very center of the white dwarf. It would have to be a very powerful explosion (many orders of magnitude more powerful than anything humans have produced to date), and it could not depend on any complex configuration of matter; pretty much any explosive device I can think of would be destroyed before it could detonate.
There is one way to coax a white dwarf to explode: Feed it enough matter and it should produce a supernova. You're not going to get little chunks of diamond, though. Between the process of supernova itself and the fact that any surviving carbon plasma would be in open space with no massive gravitational field to hold it together, I predict you get an expanding cloud of carbon. (And oxygen, and maybe a few other materials mixed in as well.)
Although white dwarfs cool over time, none are yet thought to have cooled to less than a few thousand kelvin. It's hot enough to be incandescant; so much so that we can see its light from 50 lightyears away, even though it's only the size of the Earth.
A white dwarf is extremely dense - figure 1,000 kg / cubic centimeter. If you can approach this object without being crushed by its surface gravity, and cut away some of its matter and lift that matter against the surface gravity, you should probably expect the removed matter to eventually explode as it leaves the gravitational field that keeps it so dense.
For your trouble, you'll be hauling away matter that, from what I can tell, you'll have a hard time recognizing as a diamond. Sure, it's carbon. Sure, it's observed to have crystalized. But it's not properly atomic in structure; it's a dense plasma of degenerate matter. I suspect that what form it takes after it explodes in your cargo hold will depend on how well your cargo hold is able to contain the explosion; my guess is it will take the form of a rapidly expanding cloud of carbon atmos.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, good. Another slashdolt who thinks natural solution works by magic.
This ploy doesn't select in favor of "wise" snakes. It selects in favor of snakes that have an aversion to the mice for some reason, which is only meaningful if (1) such snakes exist, and (2) the aversion is not correlated with some other factor that limits breeding, and (3) the aversion is genetic.
It is possible that those three things will turn out to be true. Lacking a field test, I guess we don't know if any snakes have an aversion to the bait. It seems unlikely to me, but who knows?
Possible or not, though, it is far from the foregone conclusion you would suggest.
10 digit lat and long? Well, if I did my math right that's about 0.8 inch north/south resolution. The east/west resolution depends on how far from the equator your location is; about 0.8" if you're at the equator, less otherwise.
I doubt you have a world map wtih 1" resolution. I doubt you can click on the single pixel you intend on any map.
It seems to me you can come at this from the other direction; the surface area of the Earth is on the order of 10^14 meters. Eliminate areas where a specific location isn't distinguishable (like oceans), and you have an idea of the number of possible passwords, which can then be equated to a number of bits of information in an individual password. It's not "20 digits".
You also might choose to trade some of the bits away to make your system usable, since hitting exactly the right square meter on a satelite map can be challenging.
If your actions put someone's property at risk, a "no harm no foul" civil resolution makes sense.
If your actions put someone's life at risk, or otherwise impose on others risks for which you cannot actually make things right if you "lose" the bet, criminal punishment associated with the act of creating the risk (regardless of outcome) are far more appropriate.
Easy. Instead of writing new laws targeting the specific act (texting while driving), enforce the existing laws that address the underlying reason it's a problem (distracted driving). That way the presence or absence of a phone isn't a factor, so concealing the phone has nothing to do with anything. If someone isn't paying attention to the road, ticket them.
Interesting. It's popular around here to point out, when a technology can be used to infringe copyright, that if a technology is abused you blame the abuser and not the technology. At least twice in the past week we had front-page stories about government authority to shut down sites that infringe copyright; both cases the tone was "you can't ban tech just because it could be misused; what if we'd done this with VCR's?" (convenienty pretending that a specific web site is a "technology").
And yet here, the blame is fixed to the tech to such a degree that the U.S. gets bashed for having done something that makes the tech moer available. Sounds like another case of "anyone I don't like is responsbile for everything bad that happens" to me.
Also, "assist Iran" has a significantly different meaning from "took actions which had an unintended consequence that benefited Iran"; so even if you do want to pretend that U.S. demand for a technology had more to do with that tech being sold to Iran than the desire of the company supplying said tech to make money, the headline is still inflamatory crap.
"but who do you hate more...the crackhead or the asshole dealer that will do anything to enable and string out the addict until there's nothing left?"
If we were actually talking about addictive, life-destroying substances; or if Lucas actually employed the manipulative tactics of the worst drug dealers; then your analogy would have merit.
But if we're talking about Lucas and Star Wars fans... why would I bother to hate either? If fans want to trip over themselves throwing money at Lucas for the next repackaging of the same product, I can ignore them, which is much easier than hating them. Likewise, if Lucas wants to keep repackaging the same product, I can ignore him too.
People who talk about hating Lucas mostly do so because it's trendy, not because he has some evil mind control over fans.
First of all, did you read the actual quoted text from the statute? It doesn't actually draw the distinctions you're wanting to see. Among the powers the president has to limit or control operation of communication stations is the power to suspend or alter any regulations that do cover them, but I see nowhere in the language that any particular regulatory authority would be a prerequisite for the president to exercise his other powers (which include ordering the station physically disassembled).
Of course, to fully understand the law you'd have to read the whole statute and not just a couple quoted paragraphs; but I'm more confident in my couple paragraphs than you should be in your one sentence that isn't even a direct quote from the statute at all.
In any case... the Internet is not regulated? You're living at the application layer, and the statute lives at the physical layer. The communications equipment upon which the oh-so-free Internet is built are indeed regulated in more ways than you can count.
Let's test that... If I say "According to the dictionary, an ostrich is a flightless bird", do you suspect I'm disparaging the dictionary's authority on the subject?
Perhaps the problem is that you're blaming journalists for what you've brought to the conversation. Beyond that, it's a question of style. You may favor "so-and-so told me..."; but while bloggers and columnists may be comfortable using the first person, I think it's appropriate that reporters generally remove themselves from the story.
There are plenty of reasons to mock news coverage of scientific papers; but how exactly do you have a complaint when a journalist clearly states that someone else (not the journalist) is making an assertion when that is, in fact, true?
Yeah, let's mock them for that until they start omitting the "according to so-and-so" qualifications, and then we can mock them for pretending to be in a position to make definitive claims about topics they don't understand.
Give me a break.
God, everyone's so busy wanting to limit the definition of irony.
NO. Irony does not require that the result be contrary (much less directly opposite) to the stated intentions of the person whose actions led to the result. It does not require that it be contrary to any specific individual's intentions or expectations.
The definition is that it is contrary to what you might expect, and like it or not that's subjective. Most of us wouldn't expect the owner of a company that makes a given product to be sufficiently ill equipped to use that product safely that it ends up killing him or her.
Wrong. Company A cannot trade on Company B's name by using product markings that would cause confusion as to whether it was, in fact another product in Company B's line. Even things like product color scheme are sometimes protected (so you can't make an el-cheap-o drill that looks, on the shelf, like a DeWalt.
Now, this makes the most sense and works best when all of a company's products carry a single distinctive mark (such as the Apple logo), and that mark is what gets protection. I'd be happy with a system where that was the only approach allowed; but that isn't the system we have.
As it is, not only distinctive logos, but also words that are distinctive within an industry (even if they are "common English words" in other contexts) have been given protection. There have been some limits established - there's a reason the Pentium wasn't just called a 586. Yet the word Apple is a valid trademark in both the computer and music industries. Something like an "i" prefix or the word "pod" in an audio/visual product are in a grey area.
Laws that create grey areas are not as good as laws that keep it simple, which is why I'd be happy to have a simple "distinctive logo only" system of trademark protection. I'm sure people could lobby for this, and I'm sure other people would lobby against it with all sorts of cases where it wouldn't work so well (and some of those might be valid and need to be addressed)... But what you're doing is simply stating that how you want it to be is how it is; at best that does nothing and at worst it costs someone foolish enough to listen to you some money.
What you (and, apparently, the moderators) don't seem to recognize is, it is not a perfectly acceptable argument. (I was aiming for "funny", not "insightful", with that particular post. I kind of worry how far we've slid if that isn't obvious.)
What it is, is a satire of the sort of corporate weasle-speak that I would expect in that situation. Calling that argument "acceptable" sets up a form of legalized racketeering.
Patent licenses shouldn't be treated as protection money / promise not to sue. They should be treated as the purchasing of a right, which it turns out the seller had no authority to sell.
"Why would we offer you a refund? We offered in exchange for your payment a promise that we wouldn't sue under this patent, and we aren't going to!"
There are a couple problems with that... The typical agenda that surrounds arguments like yours is that the job of checker is entirely obsolete. I don't think so. I do think it's nice to have a few lanes set up so people have a choice, but people who want to see this expand further don't seem to recognize what they're trading away.
First, these machiens don't reduce the number of people waiting. Today you see a shorter line because most people still don't use them. What would happen if everyone used them? Why, the lines are right back where they started.
You might think the self-check stations take less space, so there would be more lines. My grocery store has four stations, with an attendant in the middle. It takes up about enough space for 3 normal lanes. However, those stations have limited space and as such are reserved for customers with something ilke 20 items or fewer. Convert the whole store to self-check, and at least some of those stations are going to have to be bigger. Only if the store was pretty large to begin with can you expect any increase in the number of lines, and that will be offset by the fact that the lines will move slower.
That leads into your assertion that you can check yuorself out faster than the stoer can... I doubt it. It's probably closer to true today than it was 20 years ago - when there were baggers who seemed to actually care enough not to stack your milk on top of your bread, who worked in tandem with the checker and really kept things moving. But even so, the store employee has a better rig for moving groceries through and scanning them, and has a lot more practice than you do. If something doesn't scan right, they know what buttons to press to manually enter the item, whereas you have to flag down an attendant. The store trusts them, so they don't have to jack around with putting the items on a scale after scanning.
Generally people "feel like" they're moving along faster if they're doing something rather than waiting for something to be done, and probably that's the case here. I've never seen anyone self-check faster than a store checker could've handled them, and I really doubt you're the first.
And getting back to how the lines will move, it isn't a question of how fast you are - it's a question of how fast the average customer is.
Now it is true that the store will have fewer employees, so any store large enough to fully utilize enough lines will save on a few moderate-wage jobs (assuming that isn't eaten up on maintenance costs). Represent that as a percentage of gross revenue for a store that large, though, and you'll get an upper bound for what you can expect to save on your grocery bill. In reality a slice of that tiny pie will go to employees, management, and investors. Cheer the loss of an employment opportunity for kids working through school if you like, but if you're expecting a savings in your budget I think you'll be disappointed.
Catchy, but not true.
The government in a perfect democracy is a reflection of the people, but not of every aspect of the people. There may be things to criticize about the people that have nothing to do with the quality of teh government they produce.
Likewise, to the extent that the purpose of democracy is to promote liberty, you cannot assume that a perfectly-functioning government would produce a people who are above criticism.
For example, I would argue that a high rate of unhealthy obesity is neither a cause nor a symptom of improper government, yet it is a criticism that might be leveled at the people.
Even to the extent that your statement would apply to a perfect democracy, no government has been or ever will be a perfect democracy. So you can snark about whether it applies to the U.s., but in fact it can't apply to any real government.
I bet if you try very hard, you can find a better moderation tag than "Troll" to use for "a post with an irrelevant topic".
In fact, Troll roughly refers to a post that espouses an inflamatory point of view for the purpose of generating upset replies, rather than because the poster actually believes what he's saying and is trying to contribute to the conversation.
Because it is often difficult to discern intent (some people really are nuts; and unlike the old days when trolling was a bit more sport than it is now, trolls don't always contain clues to the astute reader that they are, in fact, trolls), and because many people (like you and GP) don't know what "Troll" means, it most often gets used for "I want to censor your post because I don't like it".
Over/under on minutes before someone mods this Troll?
What privacy laws would those be? I'm generally not compelled to protect your privacy in information you provide me unless I'm your doctor, your lawyer, your spiritual advisor, etc. (and then only if I'm operating in that capacity).
A few states' wiretap laws might require your permission to disclose the recording; OTOH most states don't even require your permission or knowledge for me to make a recording (in which case I can do as I wish with it).
That's another area where the copyright angle gets murky. Just because it's your voice on the tape, doesn't necessarily make you the author. If anyone owns the copyright to a recording I secretly make, it would be me. As I've said elsewhere I suspect the caller would be treated as the author in the case of n answering machine, but really that's a pretty inconsistent interpretation of the law.
The fact that every aspect of this is so debatable only strengthens my belief that copyright law, to the extent it attempts to cover something like a phone message, is incorrect.
"There's a huge difference between passive content being recorded by a device which happens to be a receiver of that content, and me talking directly to your recording device."
There's probably not as far as copyright is concerned. You would be right if we were talking about wiretap laws - you can't leave a message on my machine and then claim I illegally intercepted the communication illegally even in an all-party consent state. But this isn't about consent to make the recording; it's about who has the copyright on the resulting recording.
The iTunes music store, with the copyright holder's knowledge and consent, knowingly presents data to your recording device (hard drive and/or iPod). Does that give you the right to use that content in a video promoting your business? Does it transfer any copyright to you at all? No.
Now, I do agree that a properly defined copyright law should not generally protect phone messages. A phone message is not the type of information copyright is intended to protect. However, the law doesn't make a very robust effort to define the boundary, because it is a very difficult thing to get right. AFAIK the courts may well hold that the message is a sound recording afforded copyright protection.
Assuming the message is considered copyrightable, then the author is presumed to own the copyright. The person leaving the message would likely be regarded as the author. That he consented to make the recording on your equipment and leave you with a copy of it does not transfer copyright, just as you don't acquire copyright in a song you download with iTunes.
I suppose you could have your answering machine message state that the caller, by leaving a messages, transfers copyright in that message to you. I don't know if it would hold up, but at least it should make an interesting case. Without such a notice, though, you can't claim an implicit transfer of copyright.
Maybe copyright could/should have boundaries relating to the intent behind the creation of the content, or the expressive value of the content, or the intent of enforcement, or any number of things; but as it stands today, the copyright assertion is probably "valid enough" that you can't call it abusive in any legally meaningful way.
Ever had a pet chipped? I'm guessing not.
Instead of "presuming", why don't you take a look at what it is these companies actually contract to do. Because if you do, you'll find that you are... how did you put it? ... plain wrong.
Yeah. And speeding tickets, and red-light camera tickets, and...
Wait, which side of this were you arguing in favor of?
Ok, you're not "just a jerk", you're a persistent jerk.
Put the comment in context, jerk. The "equivalent to Li-ion" comment was a correct answer to a specific question. (And no, the question wasn't stupid either. It would be unsurprising if this type of adaptation had significantly changed properties like energy density. Essentially someone asked if it did and someone else answered that it didn't, only you don't like the way they phrased it.)
But sure, if you isolate the answer and ignore why it was given you can pretend that it was a stupid thing to say. You probably have a future in political punditry. (And in case you failed to pick it up from the context, that wasn't a compliment.)
In what world do you live?
Are you not aware that the high-profile RIAA/MPAA cases are a tiny fraction of the copyright litigation that occurs? Have you failed to notice that even in those cases, while the industry groups are pushing for outrageous outcomes, the trend has been toward moderation (or, one might say, "common sense") for a long time now?
It is not shocking news that the court is hearing this argument, and it will not be shocking news if this argument prevails.
"I guess looking back over it, it doesn't read that way."
No, it does. GP is just a jerk.
"Can we blow it apart into smaller bits?"
The gravity may be a bigger problem than you realize.
IIRC most whtie dwarfs have a very dense atmosphere (density determined by gravity). I doubt an explosion of any reasonable magnitude, if it occured outside the atmosphere, would affect the core. In fact, to eject any of the core material beyond the crushing gravity well, I suspect your best bet would be to trigger an explosion at the very center of the white dwarf. It would have to be a very powerful explosion (many orders of magnitude more powerful than anything humans have produced to date), and it could not depend on any complex configuration of matter; pretty much any explosive device I can think of would be destroyed before it could detonate.
There is one way to coax a white dwarf to explode: Feed it enough matter and it should produce a supernova. You're not going to get little chunks of diamond, though. Between the process of supernova itself and the fact that any surviving carbon plasma would be in open space with no massive gravitational field to hold it together, I predict you get an expanding cloud of carbon. (And oxygen, and maybe a few other materials mixed in as well.)
And what tools will you be using to extract diamond from the hot core of a dead star, exactly? This will provide some mission parameters. cliff notes:
Although white dwarfs cool over time, none are yet thought to have cooled to less than a few thousand kelvin. It's hot enough to be incandescant; so much so that we can see its light from 50 lightyears away, even though it's only the size of the Earth.
A white dwarf is extremely dense - figure 1,000 kg / cubic centimeter. If you can approach this object without being crushed by its surface gravity, and cut away some of its matter and lift that matter against the surface gravity, you should probably expect the removed matter to eventually explode as it leaves the gravitational field that keeps it so dense.
For your trouble, you'll be hauling away matter that, from what I can tell, you'll have a hard time recognizing as a diamond. Sure, it's carbon. Sure, it's observed to have crystalized. But it's not properly atomic in structure; it's a dense plasma of degenerate matter. I suspect that what form it takes after it explodes in your cargo hold will depend on how well your cargo hold is able to contain the explosion; my guess is it will take the form of a rapidly expanding cloud of carbon atmos.