Suppose that you set up a business ("Vexorian Ltd"), and spent years growing that business... should society say that your rights to income from that business should cease after fifty years, because by fifty years you should have already have been able to take out enough money to retire? And that Microsoft or Disney can now step in and take your business and trademarks and use them however they want?
In mainstream copyright law, they made a comparison between the work required to be, say, a writer, and the work required to set up a small business that would provide for yourself and your family, and they decided that someone who decides to produce creative work shouldn't be penalised compared to someone who spends a similar amount of effort and risk setting up in a more conventional business. That's where the "death plus fifty years" rule came from, it was based on how long the family of someone who set up a successful small family business could expect to have income from it, at the time that the laws were drafted.
Now we can argue about the exact amount of time, and whether the original evaluation criteria are as meaningful in a society that now provides a social security safety net, but that was the basic founding principle of UK copyright law - that a man should have the right to profit by his own work, and prevent his competitors from unfairly exploiting it, and that the legal protection should be comparable to that enjoyed by other risk-taking businesses.
The additional wrinkle that we have here is that in the case of professional performers, there's a legal anomaly that prevents them from having the same protection for recordings of their work that authors have for their books (and songs, etc).
Currently, if you produce the world's finest recording of "Amazing Grace" when you're twenty, then when you're seventy and in a nursing home, CocaCola can decide to use it their adverts without crediting you or paying you a penny, or asking your permission. That doesn't seem right, and it doesn't seem to be in line with the rest of the law.
I'll agree with most people posting here that conventional copyrights are too long and that there's a lot of stupid patent law that should be rolled back... "D+70" really isn't supportable for source content IMO. But I also don't think that it's supportable to say that fifty years after you create something on film or tape, everyone else has a right to make money out of your voice or your image, even if you're still alive, without you having any say in the matter or receiving any money.
I understand the argument that society is richer if we relax the copyright laws on the use of songs (because this results in more interpretations and variations on those songs, producing more cultural diversity), but the same argument can't be used so well on the relaxation of rights on performances. So it seems perverse that an artist's right to benefit from recordings of their performances is weaker than their right to benefit from written records. Currently if you have a recording of a great operatic performance, the protection for that recording is less than the protection given to the printed theatre programme. It's not obvious why audio recordings should be regarded as artistically inferior to text.
What other industry do you get paid for for writing something, then sitting on your backside for the next 70 years watching the money come in?
The computer software industry. You get a loan, you set up your business, you work like stink for years hoping to make world-class product that is as good or better than anything else available, and then you use that as the basis of a product line which other people work on, or you hope to sell out to a major corporation and cash in your chips, and retire and live off the results. After that, you might start a new project, or you might not. You might only have enough original material in you (or enough energy) for that first one idea.
But whether its computer software or music, the key point is that if you want to retain rights and have a continuing income from your work, there isn't an employer who'll give you that deal. You have to set up your own business.
Record companies don't "employ" musicians (except as jobbing session musicians who typically don;t get royalties). The guys we're talking about usually didn't get employee pensions or wages or legal employment protection. They got paid an advance to be set against future royalties, in the early years they may have been be in debt by five or six figures, and the hope was that their records became successful enough to pay back the record company advance, and then pay them an income after that.
If you think that that's a wonderful deal, then you're quite free to quit your job and try getting a loan to set up your own software company, or a chain of shops, or some other similar high-risk enterprise.
I wish I had such an employer willing to throw money at me for 70 years for writing code I wrote in my 20's.
The "employer" who will do that is you. First, you have to be able to produce complete software applications that people are prepared to buy, either alone or with a group of colleagues ("start a band"), then you have to spend a few years broke as you concentrate on honing your skills and getting experience ("small gigs/songwriting"), when you're ready and you think that you have the basis of a killer product that will sell, you go to a venture capital company who'll loan you a five or six-figure sum and point you towards their in-house marketing specialists in exchange for a fairly draconian contract, and the expectation that you'll spend six or seven days a week doing whatever promotion is necessary for however many years it takes (the "record contract").
If you're genuinely sufficiently talented as a programmer, and you also have an instinct for what people want, and you beleive that you're better and brighter than 99% of your colleagues, and you don't mind throwing away the stability of a paycheck and a house and a regular partner and kids to just work solidly at your plan for a few years (and you understand that the significant majority of people trying this plan will fail), then go ahead.
This particular issue isn't about author rights persisting seventy years after death (which I agree is OTT), it's about living musicians being cut off from the performance royalties for the classic recordings they've made.
No, you (and a lot of other people) have totally failed to understand what this story is about.
Please read and attempt to understand:
IT'S ABOUT RIGHTS TO PAYMENTS FOR THE USE OF EXISTING RECORDINGS.
Recordings. Not songwriter copyrights.
So your example is crap. The case simply doesn't apply to it. If your hypothetical struggling musician accidentally sold the rights to their hit song fifty years ago, and was hoping that the song would now go public domain, and is against this extension for the reasons that you gave, then the musician is an idiot, because,
... that's not how copyright law works. Their song wasn't about to go PD.
... this proposed legislation doesn't affect the copyright expiration date of the song in any way, and
... the extension is designed to allow them to continue receiving performance royalties based on the recordings that they made fifty years ago. Without the extension, their remaining rights to their old performances disappears, too.
This is NO different than Windows or OSX. Once those boxes are set up and networked, there is VERY little a teacher needs to do that'd require anything above "user" level.
I dunno, there's a lots more people out there with decent Windows problem-solving skills than the equivalent Linux knowledge. And despite what some people say, there's still parts of linux that aren't as suitable for newbies.
For instance, I was setting up someone's Asus Eee recently, and they were fairly new to the whole windows-icon-mouse thing. The default Eee installation comes with a stupid colour scheme that's all shades of grey - the active window has a grey title strip, the inactive windows have grey title strips, and the interiors of the windows are (of course) grey... Stupid.
So I figure, no problem, I'll change the default colour scheme to match another computer they used recently. On Windows you just right-click the desktop, a dialog box pops us, you click a tab, and then you select window components and their display properties.
On this version of Linux, you couldn't do it. You couldn't even access alternative Windows schemes unless you opened a terminal window and typed in a load of command-link junk.
And while there were window schemes that the authors were probably very proud of, none of them had the particular colours that I wanted to use.
So a simple job that took less than a minute on Windows ended up taking a few hours of R&D, and still wasn't completed satisfactorily. I ended up reading programming specs for raw configuration files before I had an attack of sanity and decided that I was wasting far too much time, and gave up.
One of the first things that many people will want to do when they get a netbook is to change the size of the default window titlebar font, to free up more screen space for documents. Good luck with that if the thing's running the version of linux that comes with the Eee...
I mean, eventually, Linux is going to have all these user-friendly features by default, but it doesn't have them yet, and I can quite see how the people whose job is going to be supporting these things might prefer to stick with "the devil they know" OS for a little bit longer. Depends on exactly how low MS are prepared to go on price.
I guess a good bargaining strategy might be to decide on Ooo rather than MSO, then meet with an MS rep, and say, "We're thinking of going completely over to open source, as a matter of government policy, starting with these student machines. But before we do that, we thought it'd only be fair to ask you guys... how much would MS be prepared to pay us to put Windows on instead?"
Start with a negative price "It's advertising", and consider using XP if the final negotiated price is zero or negative.
On the plus side, it gave Texas the world's finest all-weather underground go-karting track.
Actually, I'm really quite disappointed in the computer games community, that they haven't used a revamped SSC as a fictional location for a racing game. I mean, you have nice tubular tunnels which means that cars can loop-the-loop and do all sorts of cool things... at maximum speed, the driving view would be at ~90 degrees to horizontal in the bends... just needs some section colour coding, a bunch of floating camera pods and some bolt-on gadgetry (viewing stations, etc) for the cars to avoid. Maybe some rocket launchers.
"SSC Racer". Cooool. If anyone wants to write it, give me a credit somewhere...
Are we sure that it's only a small batch of magnets that "received the bad soldering job"? I thought that the reason why the joint failed was still supposed to be an educated guess (since the joint in question completely vaporised, leaving us with nothing to examine).
But maybe there's been some new information since last time I checked. Any pointers?
AFAII, there are still two repair options on the table.
The "quick" option is estimated to give them (reduced) beam in late summer 2009.
The "serious" option involves fitting a new exhaust system to every section of the ring, and means that they'll miss 2009, and we'll be looking at 2010.
Back then, the US needed a bank of high-energy particle physicists for the Star Wars project. SSC was supposed to be the "white" counterpart of the SDI project, encouraging students into the field, and helping to develop the associated industrial infrastructure - SDI coudl then tap into that infrastructure and skills base.
Once it became apparent that the original SDI project(s) weren't going to happen, part of the strategic justification for priority-funding SSC disappeared.
If your kid already loves books, and already has the book "habit" then you (and they) obviously aren't the target market that I was describing.
I hate to break this to you, but not all adults love books. Hell, not all adults have even basic literacy skills. Not all adults know how to be good parents. Some of them had rotten parents themselves and don't know what a good parent looks like, even if they have good intentions and want to do the best by their kids. Not all parents get to spend lots of quality time with their kids. Some have to work three jobs, and others only get to see their kids for a few hours every fortnight. And it's difficult to pass down a love of something if you never had that thing yourself. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're lazy.
Not all parents have a basic education, and not all homes have books. Not all parents can read. There are a lot of homes where books simply aren't a part of the culture, and a parent, told that they ought to have some books lying around, wouldn't have any idea what to get, or how to get a kid interested in something that they themselves never found interesting as a kid.
What there is now is a culture of hand-held game platforms (what kid wouldn't want to spend a few hours flying the Millennium Falcon?).
If a parent who doesn't have a "booky" background has a PS2-addicted kid (and lets face it, some of these games are basically the audiovisual equivalent of crack), and they don't know how to persuade their kid that perhaps reading a lot of old words printed on a glued stack of paper might be more interesting than starship battles and blowing up the Death Star, then this at least allows them so sneak a full library of "classic" books into the kid's game collection.
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Nobody's asking you to buy such a thing for your kids, but there are going to be a lot of other parents out there who'd be interested in something like this.
Yep, in the 1950 version, the constant stream of clever-clever snappy machine-gun-delivery "Howard Hawks" dialogue is distracting. You shouldn't be watching a horror film and being reminded of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant in "Bringing up Baby"! It's kinda like you're watching Alien, but with constant additional dialogue by Carl Sagan and Groucho Marx.
"An intellectual carrot! The mind boggles."
Hmm.
I guess with the 1950's version, you either watch it with the sound almost down, or you forget about the horror aspect and just concentrate on the dialogue (as an amusing historical curiosity), and listen out for the double-entendre smutty bits.
The 1980s version made me jump when the hot wire went into the petri dish.
If you're a parent, and your kid spends all day playing shoot-em-ups on a portable computer game, and you have trouble persuading them to put down the console and open a book... and you're worried about their literacy level, because they don't seem to spend any time reading, and their school reports say that their spelling and grammar sucks...
... then yes, the idea that you could get them a hundred-book library on a Nintendo cartridge or a PS2 disk and give it to your kid as a christmas present might have some appeal. The kid might initially be unimpressed, but they're likely to at least have a poke about the list, and if there are some Sherlock Holmes short stories or other juicy titbits, there's a chance that they might quietly read//something//. And then, who knows, they might read a few more. Y'know, in private, when you can't see them doing it.
Actually, while we're on the subject, does anyone know if there =IS= a PS2 equivalent? 'Cos I know someone who might be interested.
As far as books and the Berne convention are concerned, I think the US was probably a rogue state until, what,... 1986?
Until then, the US had a thing called the Manufacturing Clause, which (as far as I can recall) meant that the US refused to acknowledge copyrights on any books that weren't physically made in the US. Basically, it meant that if you wanted to sell a book in the US, you had to employ a US-based printer... if you didn't employ one of them to produce copies of your book, the US printing community had a legal green light to print as many pirate copies of your book as they liked.
Basically, the US printing lobby lobbied the government to protect them from foreign imports, and they got their way (and copyright be damned).
There are two slightly shocking things about the Manufacturing Clause:
One, that the US was technically a safe haven for (non-US) book piracy as late at 1986. This is at odds with the image that legislators typically present of the US as a country that has historically been a strong believer in copyright law. When we criticise China as a rogue state for not following international copyright conventions, it's important to remember for context's sake that the US also didn't respect some key international conventions on copyright until comparatively recently.
Two, that because the Manufacturing Clause is kinda embarrassing, most people today don't seem to know that it ever existed. It currently only has a brief single-paragraph entry on Wikipedia with no discussion page, and it didn't seem to be mentioned in any of the general histories of US copyright law that I've just googled (until I specifically set "manufacturing clause" as a search term).
For a while, I think that some overseas publishers were getting around the Manufacturing Clause by sending their books to the US in unbound form, and paying a US printer just to put the covers on in the US, on the basis that this counted as "manufacturing". I think this was considered by some US printers as cheating.
If the product had been DRM'ed, that'd probably have been enough to put me off. But since the Goo guys made the thing so damned easy to get hold of and install (you can buy it direct from wwww.WorldOfGoo.com as a download, day or night), when the impulse to get it struck me at 4am, I couldn't think of any reason to hold off. I'd already played the demo, the price was within my comfort threshold, if you bought the Windows version they gave you the Linux version for free (when it's finished). I didn't have to worry about media incompatibilities, or problems installing it on different machines, or network incompatibilities, or the fact that my new PC doesn't have an internal optical drive.
And the Goo guys seemed to be trying so hard to make things as easy as possible for their customers that it was difficult not to have a lot of goodwill towards them.
Result: product purchased, and also recommended to friends.
Actually, Hawking was responsible for pushing though one of the largest theoretical gear-changes of the late Twentieth Century, Hawking radiation.
Before Hawking, people had used general relativity to prove conclusively that information couldn't travel outwards through a gravitational horizon. It was geometrically impossible. Hawking's own "area-addition theorem" was responsible for closing one of the last potential logical loopholes that might have allowed information-escape.
If you talked to relativists, the "perfect blackness" of a black hole was supposed to be one of the purest and most perfect results in the history of human thought. It was a bit like general relativity's equivalent of the result under special relativity that you couldn't accelerate through the speed of light.
But what Hawking then said was that all this perfect logical proof was irrelevant, because another logical system, quantum mechanics, gave a different answer. Since QM was based on more abstract general principles than general relativity, QM really couldn't be wrong. We had two perfect logical systems GR and QM, and neither system's results seemed to be negotiable, and yet, when we applied both systems to the same scenario to try to find out what happened, they both gave qualitatively different answers.
Something fundamental at the core of C20th physics was broken, or misconstructed, or was at the very least missing a critical piece of the puzzle.
Where Hawking scored over his contemporaries was that he recognised the conflict, and went public. Lesser scientists who'd noticed an apparent mismatch had probably thought that they'd done something wrong, and dropped the matter, or were reluctant to go public with such an obviously wrong answer. Hawking's contemporaries thought he'd gone mad, and one well-known black hole populariser, John Taylor, famously stood up and walked out of Hawking's first talk on the subject part-way through, declaring "I'm sorry, Stephen, this is complete ___ * "
* (accounts vary as to what the word used actually was)
So Hawking stood up against pretty much the entire expert community and made a declaration that everyone knew was wrong, and he turned out to be right. Nobody else had the clarity, and the guts, and the sheer don't-give-a-damn attitude to see the problem for what it was, and stand up in a room of theoretical physicists and say so (and to hell with the consequences).
When it comes to "deep" theoretical physics, I rate Hawking as one of the most critically-important theoreticians of the last half century. He's not always right, but he's usually interesting. You can read his research work and see that there's a real human intelligence at work, which isn't always the case with the papers of some of his more mathematically-inclined colleagues.
I agree that some of Hawking's popular books aren't as good as they might have been (unsurprisingly, given that the guy can't sit down and draw diagrams and layouts), and I agree that his public image is probably partly based on his situation rather than on the public actually understanding what it is that he achieved... but his record stands.
I think that there are probably a lot of mathematical physicists out there who think that they're techically better than Hawking, but if you ask them when's the last time they overturned a major foundation-stone of of theoretical physics, or what physical effects have been named after them, you're going to get an awkward silence. If they think that Hawking's a bad communicator, ask them when's the last time they published a popular book on their speciality subject.
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I tend to agree with your criticism of Richard Dawkins, though - I think that RD's arguments are often clumsy and crude, and often don't do credit to the POV he's trying to present - I find it difficult to watch RD on television, because of the wince factor at some of the dumb things he comes out with. Dawkins is enthusuastic, but he's too emotional, and he's not really a logician.
Hawking, though, is the real deal. Hyped, yes... but still the genuine article.
So if America votes someone who is completely divorced from reality into power, someone who watches a lot of Fox news for example...
Alt timeline: The economic crisis doesn't hit until a month after the election. News story a week before the election is an Obama staff member caught buying drugs. Moral backlash. News media run the story long and hard. Christians told not to vote for Obama. Fox News portray the Obama campaign team as drug-running ghetto gangsters. McCain gets to make some great speeches about the heartland and family values and responsibility.
McCain wins.
Delayed Economic Crisis hits, out of the blue. The delay makes it even worse. McCain stresses out, is hospitalised. VP sworn in.
ICBM's tend to leave trails that point back to the country that launched them. This limits the usefulness of ICBMs for any small country that wanted to attack the US.
If Iran really wanted to kill a lot of Americans, and also attack a local neighbour, the smart thing for them to do would NOT be to build ICBMs -- it'd be to fabricate evidence that their neighbour was planning on attacking the US, and then sit back and watch the US "defend" itself by attacking that other country. Faced with overwhelming conventional military power, the locals of that country would then turn to "asymmetrical warfare" methods to retaliate. The result would be that the instigator country gots their target country attacked "for free", and the US got all the blowback.
Now that we're no longer playing the old USA-USSR two-player game, the doctrine of immediate and overwheming response can make the US more vulnerable to outside threats.
If I'm a small Eastern European country, and I hate my neighbouring small Eastern European country with a vengeance, and want them all dead, I can't do it myself. What I CAN do is have my security services devise a "false flag" attack on a US city and make it look like my enemy did it. The US then "retaliates" against my enemy.
If the instigating country pulls this off, then even if the US finds out what happened, it's too late - they can't then openly attack it. That would mean starting a second war in the region, while admitting that the first war that they'd started had been wrong. They'd have to say: "We screwed up and we were the bad guys when we started conflict #1, and now we're going to start conflict #2". The tendency would be for US politicians to try to publicly defend the first war that they'd started even if they subsequently discovered that they'd been duped. There might be hundreds of thousands of aggrieved people in the first attacked country who'd lost friends and relatives in the first war, and who now hated the US's guts, starting the second war would mean that the US would become the sworn enemy of both sides of the initial ethnic conflict.
So beyond a certain point, further increases in the US response rate and strength to perceived threats becomes self-defeating, as third parties parasitise US military power to solve their problems for them.
That's part of the reason why anti-ballistic missile systems were outlawed by treaty between the USA and USSR. The calculation is that if there are two sides at MAD stalemate, and one tries to build a shield, and that shield is actually going to work, then the other has to attack before the shield is completed.
The USA now argues that its old treaty obligation to the USSR not to attempt to build such a system is no longer binding, because the USSR no longer exists as a political entity. The Russians aren't amused by this interpretation, and are watching developments closely.
Yep. If you're in a bus station and some psycho with a meat cleaver screams at you to give them your chair, your initial reaction is to fight back and try to disarm him, even if giving in is the sensible thing to do.
On the other hand, if a blood-stained Hannibal Lector sidles up to you, holding the same meat cleaver, and puts on a painfully embarrassed face and says, wincing, "Excuse me, I realise that this is somewhat impudent, but I find myself in pressing need of your chair. I don't suppose... you'd be so kind... as to... [gestures] ?"
Perhaps he absent-mindedly taps a finger against the cleaver with his other hand while he's waiting for your response.
You give him the chair.
He thanks you politely, eversomuch, and gives you a broad smile that conveys to you and to anyone watching his immense gratefulness for your kind and generous deed.
... Because anti-missile missile systems tend not to work. We were told that the Patriot systems were effective against Scuds during the attacks on Israel, but analysis of the footage suggests otherwise. The reported success of the Patriot system seems to have effectively been a military bluff.
The system will cost a lot of money, and will put a missile and missile-tracking system right up by Russia's borders. Russia aren't happy about this, and don't believe the US are being honest about the motives for the system. Which isn't surprising, because its difficult to find anyone who actually does believe the motives for building the system.
So the system probably won't work as advertised, will probably cost an awful lot of money, and is politically destabilising. It WILL make it easier to attack Russia, but that's not supposed to be something we think about doing these days.
America's seriously in debt, and things are getting worse. Obama's going to be facing some really tough choices when it comes to deciding where to save money, and it'd be surprising if this system survives the budget cuts. When you're on a tight budget, every few billion saved helps.
Yep, those dual bottom-mounted HD fans are a great problem-solver - cheap, too!:) I used to fit one to every 3.5" harddrive on principle. Trouble is, at one point I ended up with a tower PC with a total of 14 fans in, which was pretty noisy!
My conversion to 2.5" HDs was after I'd upgraded my laptop a couple of times, so I already had a couple of spare drives kicking about, and I wanted to build a quiet "mini" PC for music. Screw a 2.5" HD to an alu plate, and screw a couple of sections of rectangular "U" alu extrusion to the sides, and you have a nice easy-to-handle heatsinked unit with no exposed circuitry, that's the same width as a standard HD, but much thinner - you can cram a LOT of those into a confined space without them getting especially warm.
I don't think I'd ever buy a new one to use just as a separate "swapfile" drive (as you say, the "bangs per buck" aren't attractive), but since the drive wouldn't need to be high-capacity and wouldn't be holding actual user-files, there's always the option of "pre-used" drives. If a PC-servicing place has been upgrading laptops for years, and has accumulated a pile of low-capacity used 2.5" drives that nobody wants to buy, they might let you have a batch for next to nothing, dunno. The IDE adaptors might end up costing more than the actual drives.
But aren't window-bars also recyclable scrap in their own right?
In the UK, we've even had problems with people nicking road-signs and cast iron drain covers. They did an undercover hidden-camera tv documentary with the reporter pretending to be a shifty "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" bloke with an obviously fake name selling road signs etc, and the scrap metal dealers all took everything he had. Including road signs and a bus shelter.
There've even been some distressing cases where people have gone into cemeteries at night armed with rechargeable screwdrivers, and stolen all the brass plaques off the monuments and remembrance walls.
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In mainstream copyright law, they made a comparison between the work required to be, say, a writer, and the work required to set up a small business that would provide for yourself and your family, and they decided that someone who decides to produce creative work shouldn't be penalised compared to someone who spends a similar amount of effort and risk setting up in a more conventional business. That's where the "death plus fifty years" rule came from, it was based on how long the family of someone who set up a successful small family business could expect to have income from it, at the time that the laws were drafted.
Now we can argue about the exact amount of time, and whether the original evaluation criteria are as meaningful in a society that now provides a social security safety net, but that was the basic founding principle of UK copyright law - that a man should have the right to profit by his own work, and prevent his competitors from unfairly exploiting it, and that the legal protection should be comparable to that enjoyed by other risk-taking businesses.
The additional wrinkle that we have here is that in the case of professional performers, there's a legal anomaly that prevents them from having the same protection for recordings of their work that authors have for their books (and songs, etc).
Currently, if you produce the world's finest recording of "Amazing Grace" when you're twenty, then when you're seventy and in a nursing home, CocaCola can decide to use it their adverts without crediting you or paying you a penny, or asking your permission. That doesn't seem right, and it doesn't seem to be in line with the rest of the law.
I'll agree with most people posting here that conventional copyrights are too long and that there's a lot of stupid patent law that should be rolled back ... "D+70" really isn't supportable for source content IMO. But I also don't think that it's supportable to say that fifty years after you create something on film or tape, everyone else has a right to make money out of your voice or your image, even if you're still alive, without you having any say in the matter or receiving any money.
I understand the argument that society is richer if we relax the copyright laws on the use of songs (because this results in more interpretations and variations on those songs, producing more cultural diversity), but the same argument can't be used so well on the relaxation of rights on performances. So it seems perverse that an artist's right to benefit from recordings of their performances is weaker than their right to benefit from written records. Currently if you have a recording of a great operatic performance, the protection for that recording is less than the protection given to the printed theatre programme. It's not obvious why audio recordings should be regarded as artistically inferior to text.
The computer software industry. You get a loan, you set up your business, you work like stink for years hoping to make world-class product that is as good or better than anything else available, and then you use that as the basis of a product line which other people work on, or you hope to sell out to a major corporation and cash in your chips, and retire and live off the results. After that, you might start a new project, or you might not. You might only have enough original material in you (or enough energy) for that first one idea.
But whether its computer software or music, the key point is that if you want to retain rights and have a continuing income from your work, there isn't an employer who'll give you that deal. You have to set up your own business.
Record companies don't "employ" musicians (except as jobbing session musicians who typically don;t get royalties). The guys we're talking about usually didn't get employee pensions or wages or legal employment protection. They got paid an advance to be set against future royalties, in the early years they may have been be in debt by five or six figures, and the hope was that their records became successful enough to pay back the record company advance, and then pay them an income after that.
If you think that that's a wonderful deal, then you're quite free to quit your job and try getting a loan to set up your own software company, or a chain of shops, or some other similar high-risk enterprise.
The "employer" who will do that is you. First, you have to be able to produce complete software applications that people are prepared to buy, either alone or with a group of colleagues ("start a band"), then you have to spend a few years broke as you concentrate on honing your skills and getting experience ("small gigs/songwriting"), when you're ready and you think that you have the basis of a killer product that will sell, you go to a venture capital company who'll loan you a five or six-figure sum and point you towards their in-house marketing specialists in exchange for a fairly draconian contract, and the expectation that you'll spend six or seven days a week doing whatever promotion is necessary for however many years it takes (the "record contract").
If you're genuinely sufficiently talented as a programmer, and you also have an instinct for what people want, and you beleive that you're better and brighter than 99% of your colleagues, and you don't mind throwing away the stability of a paycheck and a house and a regular partner and kids to just work solidly at your plan for a few years (and you understand that the significant majority of people trying this plan will fail), then go ahead.
This particular issue isn't about author rights persisting seventy years after death (which I agree is OTT), it's about living musicians being cut off from the performance royalties for the classic recordings they've made.
Please read and attempt to understand:
IT'S ABOUT RIGHTS TO PAYMENTS FOR THE USE OF EXISTING RECORDINGS.
Recordings. Not songwriter copyrights.
So your example is crap. The case simply doesn't apply to it. If your hypothetical struggling musician accidentally sold the rights to their hit song fifty years ago, and was hoping that the song would now go public domain, and is against this extension for the reasons that you gave, then the musician is an idiot, because,
I dunno, there's a lots more people out there with decent Windows problem-solving skills than the equivalent Linux knowledge. And despite what some people say, there's still parts of linux that aren't as suitable for newbies.
For instance, I was setting up someone's Asus Eee recently, and they were fairly new to the whole windows-icon-mouse thing. The default Eee installation comes with a stupid colour scheme that's all shades of grey - the active window has a grey title strip, the inactive windows have grey title strips, and the interiors of the windows are (of course) grey ... Stupid.
So I figure, no problem, I'll change the default colour scheme to match another computer they used recently. On Windows you just right-click the desktop, a dialog box pops us, you click a tab, and then you select window components and their display properties.
On this version of Linux, you couldn't do it. You couldn't even access alternative Windows schemes unless you opened a terminal window and typed in a load of command-link junk.
And while there were window schemes that the authors were probably very proud of, none of them had the particular colours that I wanted to use. So a simple job that took less than a minute on Windows ended up taking a few hours of R&D, and still wasn't completed satisfactorily. I ended up reading programming specs for raw configuration files before I had an attack of sanity and decided that I was wasting far too much time, and gave up.
One of the first things that many people will want to do when they get a netbook is to change the size of the default window titlebar font, to free up more screen space for documents. Good luck with that if the thing's running the version of linux that comes with the Eee...
I mean, eventually, Linux is going to have all these user-friendly features by default, but it doesn't have them yet, and I can quite see how the people whose job is going to be supporting these things might prefer to stick with "the devil they know" OS for a little bit longer. Depends on exactly how low MS are prepared to go on price.
I guess a good bargaining strategy might be to decide on Ooo rather than MSO, then meet with an MS rep, and say, "We're thinking of going completely over to open source, as a matter of government policy, starting with these student machines. But before we do that, we thought it'd only be fair to ask you guys ... how much would MS be prepared to pay us to put Windows on instead?"
Start with a negative price "It's advertising", and consider using XP if the final negotiated price is zero or negative.
Suggested compromise: Placate teachers by keeping Windows XP on the initial batch of laptops, but install OpenOffice instead of MSOffice?
Actually, I'm really quite disappointed in the computer games community, that they haven't used a revamped SSC as a fictional location for a racing game. I mean, you have nice tubular tunnels which means that cars can loop-the-loop and do all sorts of cool things ... at maximum speed, the driving view would be at ~90 degrees to horizontal in the bends ... just needs some section colour coding, a bunch of floating camera pods and some bolt-on gadgetry (viewing stations, etc) for the cars to avoid. Maybe some rocket launchers.
"SSC Racer". Cooool. If anyone wants to write it, give me a credit somewhere ...
But maybe there's been some new information since last time I checked. Any pointers?
The "quick" option is estimated to give them (reduced) beam in late summer 2009.
The "serious" option involves fitting a new exhaust system to every section of the ring, and means that they'll miss 2009, and we'll be looking at 2010.
Once it became apparent that the original SDI project(s) weren't going to happen, part of the strategic justification for priority-funding SSC disappeared.
I hate to break this to you, but not all adults love books. Hell, not all adults have even basic literacy skills. Not all adults know how to be good parents. Some of them had rotten parents themselves and don't know what a good parent looks like, even if they have good intentions and want to do the best by their kids. Not all parents get to spend lots of quality time with their kids. Some have to work three jobs, and others only get to see their kids for a few hours every fortnight. And it's difficult to pass down a love of something if you never had that thing yourself. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're lazy.
Not all parents have a basic education, and not all homes have books. Not all parents can read. There are a lot of homes where books simply aren't a part of the culture, and a parent, told that they ought to have some books lying around, wouldn't have any idea what to get, or how to get a kid interested in something that they themselves never found interesting as a kid.
What there is now is a culture of hand-held game platforms (what kid wouldn't want to spend a few hours flying the Millennium Falcon?).
If a parent who doesn't have a "booky" background has a PS2-addicted kid (and lets face it, some of these games are basically the audiovisual equivalent of crack), and they don't know how to persuade their kid that perhaps reading a lot of old words printed on a glued stack of paper might be more interesting than starship battles and blowing up the Death Star, then this at least allows them so sneak a full library of "classic" books into the kid's game collection.
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Nobody's asking you to buy such a thing for your kids, but there are going to be a lot of other parents out there who'd be interested in something like this.
"An intellectual carrot! The mind boggles."
Hmm.
I guess with the 1950's version, you either watch it with the sound almost down, or you forget about the horror aspect and just concentrate on the dialogue (as an amusing historical curiosity), and listen out for the double-entendre smutty bits.
The 1980s version made me jump when the hot wire went into the petri dish.
Actually, while we're on the subject, does anyone know if there =IS= a PS2 equivalent? 'Cos I know someone who might be interested.
As far as books and the Berne convention are concerned, I think the US was probably a rogue state until, what, ... 1986?
Until then, the US had a thing called the Manufacturing Clause, which (as far as I can recall) meant that the US refused to acknowledge copyrights on any books that weren't physically made in the US. Basically, it meant that if you wanted to sell a book in the US, you had to employ a US-based printer ... if you didn't employ one of them to produce copies of your book, the US printing community had a legal green light to print as many pirate copies of your book as they liked.
Basically, the US printing lobby lobbied the government to protect them from foreign imports, and they got their way (and copyright be damned).
There are two slightly shocking things about the Manufacturing Clause:
For a while, I think that some overseas publishers were getting around the Manufacturing Clause by sending their books to the US in unbound form, and paying a US printer just to put the covers on in the US, on the basis that this counted as "manufacturing". I think this was considered by some US printers as cheating.
If the product had been DRM'ed, that'd probably have been enough to put me off. But since the Goo guys made the thing so damned easy to get hold of and install (you can buy it direct from wwww.WorldOfGoo.com as a download, day or night), when the impulse to get it struck me at 4am, I couldn't think of any reason to hold off. I'd already played the demo, the price was within my comfort threshold, if you bought the Windows version they gave you the Linux version for free (when it's finished). I didn't have to worry about media incompatibilities, or problems installing it on different machines, or network incompatibilities, or the fact that my new PC doesn't have an internal optical drive.
And the Goo guys seemed to be trying so hard to make things as easy as possible for their customers that it was difficult not to have a lot of goodwill towards them.
Result: product purchased, and also recommended to friends.
"I am a valued customer!" -- World of Goo
Before Hawking, people had used general relativity to prove conclusively that information couldn't travel outwards through a gravitational horizon. It was geometrically impossible. Hawking's own "area-addition theorem" was responsible for closing one of the last potential logical loopholes that might have allowed information-escape.
If you talked to relativists, the "perfect blackness" of a black hole was supposed to be one of the purest and most perfect results in the history of human thought. It was a bit like general relativity's equivalent of the result under special relativity that you couldn't accelerate through the speed of light.
But what Hawking then said was that all this perfect logical proof was irrelevant, because another logical system, quantum mechanics, gave a different answer. Since QM was based on more abstract general principles than general relativity, QM really couldn't be wrong. We had two perfect logical systems GR and QM, and neither system's results seemed to be negotiable, and yet, when we applied both systems to the same scenario to try to find out what happened, they both gave qualitatively different answers.
Something fundamental at the core of C20th physics was broken, or misconstructed, or was at the very least missing a critical piece of the puzzle.
Where Hawking scored over his contemporaries was that he recognised the conflict, and went public. Lesser scientists who'd noticed an apparent mismatch had probably thought that they'd done something wrong, and dropped the matter, or were reluctant to go public with such an obviously wrong answer. Hawking's contemporaries thought he'd gone mad, and one well-known black hole populariser, John Taylor, famously stood up and walked out of Hawking's first talk on the subject part-way through, declaring "I'm sorry, Stephen, this is complete ___ * "
* (accounts vary as to what the word used actually was)
So Hawking stood up against pretty much the entire expert community and made a declaration that everyone knew was wrong, and he turned out to be right. Nobody else had the clarity, and the guts, and the sheer don't-give-a-damn attitude to see the problem for what it was, and stand up in a room of theoretical physicists and say so (and to hell with the consequences).
When it comes to "deep" theoretical physics, I rate Hawking as one of the most critically-important theoreticians of the last half century. He's not always right, but he's usually interesting. You can read his research work and see that there's a real human intelligence at work, which isn't always the case with the papers of some of his more mathematically-inclined colleagues.
I agree that some of Hawking's popular books aren't as good as they might have been (unsurprisingly, given that the guy can't sit down and draw diagrams and layouts), and I agree that his public image is probably partly based on his situation rather than on the public actually understanding what it is that he achieved ... but his record stands.
I think that there are probably a lot of mathematical physicists out there who think that they're techically better than Hawking, but if you ask them when's the last time they overturned a major foundation-stone of of theoretical physics, or what physical effects have been named after them, you're going to get an awkward silence. If they think that Hawking's a bad communicator, ask them when's the last time they published a popular book on their speciality subject.
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I tend to agree with your criticism of Richard Dawkins, though - I think that RD's arguments are often clumsy and crude, and often don't do credit to the POV he's trying to present - I find it difficult to watch RD on television, because of the wince factor at some of the dumb things he comes out with. Dawkins is enthusuastic, but he's too emotional, and he's not really a logician.
Hawking, though, is the real deal. Hyped, yes ... but still the genuine article.
Alt timeline: The economic crisis doesn't hit until a month after the election. News story a week before the election is an Obama staff member caught buying drugs. Moral backlash. News media run the story long and hard. Christians told not to vote for Obama. Fox News portray the Obama campaign team as drug-running ghetto gangsters. McCain gets to make some great speeches about the heartland and family values and responsibility.
McCain wins.
Delayed Economic Crisis hits, out of the blue. The delay makes it even worse. McCain stresses out, is hospitalised. VP sworn in.
Result? President Palin.
If Iran really wanted to kill a lot of Americans, and also attack a local neighbour, the smart thing for them to do would NOT be to build ICBMs -- it'd be to fabricate evidence that their neighbour was planning on attacking the US, and then sit back and watch the US "defend" itself by attacking that other country. Faced with overwhelming conventional military power, the locals of that country would then turn to "asymmetrical warfare" methods to retaliate. The result would be that the instigator country gots their target country attacked "for free", and the US got all the blowback.
Now that we're no longer playing the old USA-USSR two-player game, the doctrine of immediate and overwheming response can make the US more vulnerable to outside threats.
If I'm a small Eastern European country, and I hate my neighbouring small Eastern European country with a vengeance, and want them all dead, I can't do it myself. What I CAN do is have my security services devise a "false flag" attack on a US city and make it look like my enemy did it. The US then "retaliates" against my enemy.
If the instigating country pulls this off, then even if the US finds out what happened, it's too late - they can't then openly attack it. That would mean starting a second war in the region, while admitting that the first war that they'd started had been wrong. They'd have to say: "We screwed up and we were the bad guys when we started conflict #1, and now we're going to start conflict #2". The tendency would be for US politicians to try to publicly defend the first war that they'd started even if they subsequently discovered that they'd been duped. There might be hundreds of thousands of aggrieved people in the first attacked country who'd lost friends and relatives in the first war, and who now hated the US's guts, starting the second war would mean that the US would become the sworn enemy of both sides of the initial ethnic conflict.
So beyond a certain point, further increases in the US response rate and strength to perceived threats becomes self-defeating, as third parties parasitise US military power to solve their problems for them.
The USA now argues that its old treaty obligation to the USSR not to attempt to build such a system is no longer binding, because the USSR no longer exists as a political entity. The Russians aren't amused by this interpretation, and are watching developments closely.
So, where are you going to borrow the money for all of this from ... China perhaps?
On the other hand, if a blood-stained Hannibal Lector sidles up to you, holding the same meat cleaver, and puts on a painfully embarrassed face and says, wincing, "Excuse me, I realise that this is somewhat impudent, but I find myself in pressing need of your chair. I don't suppose ... you'd be so kind ... as to ... [gestures] ?"
Perhaps he absent-mindedly taps a finger against the cleaver with his other hand while he's waiting for your response.
You give him the chair.
He thanks you politely, eversomuch, and gives you a broad smile that conveys to you and to anyone watching his immense gratefulness for your kind and generous deed.
Job done.
The system will cost a lot of money, and will put a missile and missile-tracking system right up by Russia's borders. Russia aren't happy about this, and don't believe the US are being honest about the motives for the system. Which isn't surprising, because its difficult to find anyone who actually does believe the motives for building the system.
So the system probably won't work as advertised, will probably cost an awful lot of money, and is politically destabilising. It WILL make it easier to attack Russia, but that's not supposed to be something we think about doing these days.
America's seriously in debt, and things are getting worse. Obama's going to be facing some really tough choices when it comes to deciding where to save money, and it'd be surprising if this system survives the budget cuts. When you're on a tight budget, every few billion saved helps.
Ban the telephone!
My conversion to 2.5" HDs was after I'd upgraded my laptop a couple of times, so I already had a couple of spare drives kicking about, and I wanted to build a quiet "mini" PC for music. Screw a 2.5" HD to an alu plate, and screw a couple of sections of rectangular "U" alu extrusion to the sides, and you have a nice easy-to-handle heatsinked unit with no exposed circuitry, that's the same width as a standard HD, but much thinner - you can cram a LOT of those into a confined space without them getting especially warm.
I don't think I'd ever buy a new one to use just as a separate "swapfile" drive (as you say, the "bangs per buck" aren't attractive), but since the drive wouldn't need to be high-capacity and wouldn't be holding actual user-files, there's always the option of "pre-used" drives. If a PC-servicing place has been upgrading laptops for years, and has accumulated a pile of low-capacity used 2.5" drives that nobody wants to buy, they might let you have a batch for next to nothing, dunno. The IDE adaptors might end up costing more than the actual drives.
In the UK, we've even had problems with people nicking road-signs and cast iron drain covers. They did an undercover hidden-camera tv documentary with the reporter pretending to be a shifty "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" bloke with an obviously fake name selling road signs etc, and the scrap metal dealers all took everything he had. Including road signs and a bus shelter.
There've even been some distressing cases where people have gone into cemeteries at night armed with rechargeable screwdrivers, and stolen all the brass plaques off the monuments and remembrance walls.