Note that the SCOTUS has ruled that corporations are required to operate for the benefit of the shareholder and not for any other purpose [...]
Creating a for-profit corporation that nonetheless operated in the public interest might require revising U.S. law.
Only if you define "benefit of the shareholder" to be profits. If the shareholders' declared primary interest in the company were to be some public good rather than the generation of profits, then I see no contradiction in having a for-profit corporation that nonetheless prioritises that good over their profit motive.
I suspect their thinking is that being synonymous with endless hordes of masturbators isn't the best thing for encouraging new people to take part. There's some people willing to put up with the dicks and use the service for whatever it's supposed to be for, but I'll bet there's more people who would be interested if they weren't expecting it to be a continual penis parade...
His point was that copyright infringement is a different crime from theft. Or if that wasn't his point then it's one I'd like to make.
The two things are both illegal, may well both result in financial damage to the victim, bear a certain sort of superficial resemblance, but they aren't the same crime. They don't carry the same punishment (bizarrely the less direct one tends to be punished more harshly, though less often) they aren't seen the same way in public opinion, they are not the same thing.
So it's quite perfectly possible to have a reasoned debate about whether copying should be legalised (making it non-infringing) without that argument also supporting theft being legalised. I for one would support a drastic reduction in the length of copyright terms, to preserve the right to make a buck on your work without depriving the public domain of what would otherwise have been public property (works on which the copyright has expired) for decades/centuries after the creative work was done.
Wait... did I say reasoned debate? I meant hate-filled shouting match. I must be new here.
Re:It's not all in the ending
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
Even Heroes managed a good first season; it was a fairly good/well paced story, and self-contained within the season. Then it descended into a train wreck of confusing time travel and government conspiracies and non-government conspiracies until you didn't know what the hell was going on.
Someone higher up the page said it best - you can't expect a story to work if you're making shit up as you go along. If you want a consistent story that plays out nicely then you need to sit down and plan it all out beforehand, at least in the broad strokes. Then for the love of all that is holy resist the urge to go off on tangents and insert filler. There might be room for subplots to be given greater prominence but changing the direction of the story arc halfway (even if it is "what the audience wants") will be almost as bad as having not had a plan in the first place.
If each season were properly planned out as a self-contained plot with that good old beginning/middle/end structure to it, then even if you maintain the same set of characters and some continuity (although you can't let the continuity get too dense, that shit'll tie you up in knots) it'll all make much more sense. A big project like Lost... I don't know why they'd even try to come up with the ending at the late stage that they seem to have thrown it together at. If they'd really known where they were going from the beginning, and they'd taken the time to work it all out, we'd have had a whole f'in lot more of the early mysteries end up making sense in the context of the overall storyline.
The development of agriculture, in the short term, meant large numbers of people living in a relatively small permanent settlement (as compared to living sparsely spread and being able to move about a lot). The cramped conditions, poor sanitation, and living so close to domesticated animals, all made the first cities into giant petri dishes of disease.
In the long term it improved life expectancy, but not at first.
If you invent a lifechanging product, I assume it would enrich our lives in some way such that we see it as being worth giving you a dollar for it. What you've really done isn't just to aggregate a lot of dollars from us to you, you've taken a collection of component parts that weren't worth a dollar and cleverly rearranged them into a product that is worth a dollar.
We then give you some money in exchange for that product and, assuming you're not gouging us, it's approximately a fair trade, so we both walk away with things of equal value. The creation of wealth part was when you turned something that wasn't very valuable into something worth selling. You could have just stockpiled clever gizmos and still have been 'creating wealth', but you'd rather have the money and we'd rather have the gizmo.
(Cue the knee jerk reactions from the 'intelligent' Slashdot crowd, who have never thought any of this through in their entire lives...)
You must be terribly disappointed with the responses; one agree, one "agree, but...". For my part I'd agree that it's clear that growing plants then eating them is going to be more efficient than growing plants to feed to animals that we then eat, but I think it's more realistic to seek to increase the efficiency of farming animals than just give up on animal products.
not to mention completely unnatural (you cannot have 6 billion carnivores or omnivores, of the size of human beings, living on a planet the size of Earth) [...] We are not supposed to be carnivores.
The unnatural part is that there's so many of us, which is enabled primarily by agriculture. Before we started farming, hunting (and the implied eating of meat) was a major source of energy-dense food and we're 'supposed' to be omnivores; we didn't fuel the massive expansion in the size of our brains by eating grass/leaves, bark and roots like the other apes. Fruit has more energy, but it's not the most dependable food if you're foraging rather than farming.
Now that we do have agriculture, maybe we could survive quite well on plants alone, but that's the result of a few thousand years of improving farming methods and selective breeding. The hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution prior to that have set us up as omnivores, not vegans, and therein lies the flaw in your plans - generally speaking, any idea to improve society that requires people to act against their nature isn't going to work out, no matter how much sense it might make that things would be better if they did. See also communism ("Let's share" is nice enough, but people don't work that way en masse).
Hell, even while agreeing that it would be more efficient to just farm plants for food, I'm thinking that I don't want to give up meat... it tastes really good and I like eating it. That in itself is something of a demonstration that we're designed to eat the stuff; if we weren't built that way then why would so many of us want to carry on eating it?
"How do you say...", or "What do you call...", are correct, but only one of those is what you meant.
Fair point though; native speakers don't learn the language formally, so a lot of grammatical errors are in common use because they match the way that people talk. At some point the rules will probably just be changed (or an exception recognised as correct usage) and so the language evolves, always has done and always will. If it didn't we'd still be using Medieval spelling and grammar.
For IP law, we could let the RIAA write out a list of rights that copyright owners should have, then the public get to decide whether copyrights belong to the artists and corporations or to the public domain.
Performing an emergency stop to avoid going through a yellow light would be a fairly bad idea - the car behind you won't be expecting it and while, theoretically, they should be able to react and stop just as quickly as you can, doing unpredictable things is going to cause accidents eventually. In essence, there's a difference between being physically able to stop the car, and being able to do so safely; in a way that isn't liable to cause a rear-ending.
The way the system is designed to work, you stop at a yellow light if you can do so safely. The idea being that anyone going through just as it turns yellow, or just about to go through (and not able to stop safely), will have enough time to clear the intersection before it turns red. If the yellow light is too short then that's no longer the case and the risk is introduced that either someone will still be on the intersection when the other direction of traffic is allowed to go or people will be forced to make unsafe stops at the lights to avoid the former.
That said, the above is from the perspective of the UK, maybe your traffic laws make less sense.
Even if the shape was found without being explicitly designed,we should still be able to see how it works once the algorithm's found it.
It might not be intuitive; if it was we'd have designed it that way ourselves, but unintuitive doesn't mean incomprehensible
Doesn't the current system provide an incentive for the family of a successful creator to kill him off? That way the royalties go to "the estate of" instead of to the creator in person.
If copyright evaporated on the creator's death, who personally stands to gain by killing them?
Unless you've got a killer idea for a knockoff of a Stephen King novel, and the only thing in your way is the copyright.
Labour being in power, their support for their legislation is assumed. The conservatives are in opposition, but quite possibly about to take power, so drawing attention to their support could become quite relevant (if they later try to disown it as a mistake of the previous government, for example).
I've heard people say we need more "Critical Thinking" quite a bit, and for some reason the people that say it seem convinced that we should have arrived at the same conclusion.
Probably why I used the phrase, it gets suggested often enough to have stuck in some back corner of my mind.
But if you're suggesting it'd be an exercise in teaching them all to think the same way... only in the sense that it'd be nice if more people at least knew how to use logic properly. Then even if they choose other modes of thinking, they'd be aware that they're not being logical (and I don't intend "not logical" as an insult).
It may well not be suitable for very early education, but somewhere... more instruction in what constitutes a valid argument, a logical conclusion, or the opposite, could only be a positive thing.
I'm wondering what that might make room for in the pre-7th curriculum.
Suggestions?
I would suggest some kind of critical thinking course, but that probably requires the same kind of steps of development as formal math does to be learned effectively.
Hell, if kids aren't capable of learning as much until a certain age, why not let them stay home for half the day, or raise the school-starting age; reduce the stress of suddenly having to go to school by reducing the impact or putting it off entirely.
The truth is that there is no such thing as the Moon rotating around the Earth. They both rotate around the center of mass that they both constitute together. I chose Moon/Earth as an example because it is a simpler one than Sun/multiple planets/galaxies but the principle always apply.
If I remember correctly, things are described as one orbiting the other when that shared centre of mass is inside the surface of one of the bodies. If they have a combined centre of mass that lies somewhere between the two bodies (not inside one of them) then you have a double planet.
Pluto would be a double planet, if it were still a planet, as its moon is pretty big compared to Pluto and their centre of mass is in the empty space between them... I guess now it must be a double dwarf or something.
So circular argument would be "X therefore X" whereas begging the question would be "Do we all agree that X? Well then Y" where X = Y, but phrased differently. Either way you're taking the conclusion of your argument as a premise; the difference is in whether you're stating it as your premise or asking an opponent to agree with it as a premise.
If your goal is just to show that your opponent agrees with you, begging the question could be a valid argument - if the question you've 'begged' and the conclusion reached really are logically equivalent, but your opponent professes to agree with one and disagree with the other, then you've effectively shown their position to be self-contradictory. Says nothing about the actual truth of X (and it's easily abused by people claiming two things to be logically equivalent that aren't) but as a method of argument it could work.
If I understand correctly, you could claim copyright on the creative part, but not the factual part - so your subset of the phone book... well there's still not a lot there but facts, but if you took a subset of the phone book and presented it in some creative way, then that particular creative presentation could be copyrighted, but not the numbers themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a lying Cretan you insensitive clod
Note that the SCOTUS has ruled that corporations are required to operate for the benefit of the shareholder and not for any other purpose [...]
Creating a for-profit corporation that nonetheless operated in the public interest might require revising U.S. law.
Only if you define "benefit of the shareholder" to be profits. If the shareholders' declared primary interest in the company were to be some public good rather than the generation of profits, then I see no contradiction in having a for-profit corporation that nonetheless prioritises that good over their profit motive.
I suspect their thinking is that being synonymous with endless hordes of masturbators isn't the best thing for encouraging new people to take part. There's some people willing to put up with the dicks and use the service for whatever it's supposed to be for, but I'll bet there's more people who would be interested if they weren't expecting it to be a continual penis parade...
His point was that copyright infringement is a different crime from theft. Or if that wasn't his point then it's one I'd like to make.
The two things are both illegal, may well both result in financial damage to the victim, bear a certain sort of superficial resemblance, but they aren't the same crime. They don't carry the same punishment (bizarrely the less direct one tends to be punished more harshly, though less often) they aren't seen the same way in public opinion, they are not the same thing.
So it's quite perfectly possible to have a reasoned debate about whether copying should be legalised (making it non-infringing) without that argument also supporting theft being legalised. I for one would support a drastic reduction in the length of copyright terms, to preserve the right to make a buck on your work without depriving the public domain of what would otherwise have been public property (works on which the copyright has expired) for decades/centuries after the creative work was done.
Wait... did I say reasoned debate? I meant hate-filled shouting match. I must be new here.
Even Heroes managed a good first season; it was a fairly good/well paced story, and self-contained within the season. Then it descended into a train wreck of confusing time travel and government conspiracies and non-government conspiracies until you didn't know what the hell was going on.
Someone higher up the page said it best - you can't expect a story to work if you're making shit up as you go along. If you want a consistent story that plays out nicely then you need to sit down and plan it all out beforehand, at least in the broad strokes. Then for the love of all that is holy resist the urge to go off on tangents and insert filler. There might be room for subplots to be given greater prominence but changing the direction of the story arc halfway (even if it is "what the audience wants") will be almost as bad as having not had a plan in the first place.
If each season were properly planned out as a self-contained plot with that good old beginning/middle/end structure to it, then even if you maintain the same set of characters and some continuity (although you can't let the continuity get too dense, that shit'll tie you up in knots) it'll all make much more sense. A big project like Lost... I don't know why they'd even try to come up with the ending at the late stage that they seem to have thrown it together at. If they'd really known where they were going from the beginning, and they'd taken the time to work it all out, we'd have had a whole f'in lot more of the early mysteries end up making sense in the context of the overall storyline.
The development of agriculture, in the short term, meant large numbers of people living in a relatively small permanent settlement (as compared to living sparsely spread and being able to move about a lot). The cramped conditions, poor sanitation, and living so close to domesticated animals, all made the first cities into giant petri dishes of disease.
In the long term it improved life expectancy, but not at first.
If you invent a lifechanging product, I assume it would enrich our lives in some way such that we see it as being worth giving you a dollar for it. What you've really done isn't just to aggregate a lot of dollars from us to you, you've taken a collection of component parts that weren't worth a dollar and cleverly rearranged them into a product that is worth a dollar.
We then give you some money in exchange for that product and, assuming you're not gouging us, it's approximately a fair trade, so we both walk away with things of equal value. The creation of wealth part was when you turned something that wasn't very valuable into something worth selling. You could have just stockpiled clever gizmos and still have been 'creating wealth', but you'd rather have the money and we'd rather have the gizmo.
(Cue the knee jerk reactions from the 'intelligent' Slashdot crowd, who have never thought any of this through in their entire lives...)
You must be terribly disappointed with the responses; one agree, one "agree, but...". For my part I'd agree that it's clear that growing plants then eating them is going to be more efficient than growing plants to feed to animals that we then eat, but I think it's more realistic to seek to increase the efficiency of farming animals than just give up on animal products.
not to mention completely unnatural (you cannot have 6 billion carnivores or omnivores, of the size of human beings, living on a planet the size of Earth) [...] We are not supposed to be carnivores.
The unnatural part is that there's so many of us, which is enabled primarily by agriculture. Before we started farming, hunting (and the implied eating of meat) was a major source of energy-dense food and we're 'supposed' to be omnivores; we didn't fuel the massive expansion in the size of our brains by eating grass/leaves, bark and roots like the other apes. Fruit has more energy, but it's not the most dependable food if you're foraging rather than farming.
Now that we do have agriculture, maybe we could survive quite well on plants alone, but that's the result of a few thousand years of improving farming methods and selective breeding. The hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution prior to that have set us up as omnivores, not vegans, and therein lies the flaw in your plans - generally speaking, any idea to improve society that requires people to act against their nature isn't going to work out, no matter how much sense it might make that things would be better if they did. See also communism ("Let's share" is nice enough, but people don't work that way en masse).
Hell, even while agreeing that it would be more efficient to just farm plants for food, I'm thinking that I don't want to give up meat... it tastes really good and I like eating it. That in itself is something of a demonstration that we're designed to eat the stuff; if we weren't built that way then why would so many of us want to carry on eating it?
The female nipple does have a boob under it. That might be the reason.
And milk ducts... sexy, sexy milk ducts.
A native speaker wouldn't say "How do you call".
"How do you say...", or "What do you call...", are correct, but only one of those is what you meant.
Fair point though; native speakers don't learn the language formally, so a lot of grammatical errors are in common use because they match the way that people talk. At some point the rules will probably just be changed (or an exception recognised as correct usage) and so the language evolves, always has done and always will. If it didn't we'd still be using Medieval spelling and grammar.
For IP law, we could let the RIAA write out a list of rights that copyright owners should have, then the public get to decide whether copyrights belong to the artists and corporations or to the public domain.
What do you mean by "the Mars route"? Mars is a hell of a lot colder than Earth, but you seem to be using it as an example of a planet gone hot.
Runaway greenhouse-like processes producing wild overheating would be the Venus route.
Performing an emergency stop to avoid going through a yellow light would be a fairly bad idea - the car behind you won't be expecting it and while, theoretically, they should be able to react and stop just as quickly as you can, doing unpredictable things is going to cause accidents eventually. In essence, there's a difference between being physically able to stop the car, and being able to do so safely; in a way that isn't liable to cause a rear-ending.
The way the system is designed to work, you stop at a yellow light if you can do so safely. The idea being that anyone going through just as it turns yellow, or just about to go through (and not able to stop safely), will have enough time to clear the intersection before it turns red. If the yellow light is too short then that's no longer the case and the risk is introduced that either someone will still be on the intersection when the other direction of traffic is allowed to go or people will be forced to make unsafe stops at the lights to avoid the former.
That said, the above is from the perspective of the UK, maybe your traffic laws make less sense.
Even if the shape was found without being explicitly designed,we should still be able to see how it works once the algorithm's found it. It might not be intuitive; if it was we'd have designed it that way ourselves, but unintuitive doesn't mean incomprehensible
Doesn't the current system provide an incentive for the family of a successful creator to kill him off? That way the royalties go to "the estate of" instead of to the creator in person.
If copyright evaporated on the creator's death, who personally stands to gain by killing them?
Unless you've got a killer idea for a knockoff of a Stephen King novel, and the only thing in your way is the copyright.
Labour being in power, their support for their legislation is assumed. The conservatives are in opposition, but quite possibly about to take power, so drawing attention to their support could become quite relevant (if they later try to disown it as a mistake of the previous government, for example).
I've heard people say we need more "Critical Thinking" quite a bit, and for some reason the people that say it seem convinced that we should have arrived at the same conclusion.
Probably why I used the phrase, it gets suggested often enough to have stuck in some back corner of my mind.
But if you're suggesting it'd be an exercise in teaching them all to think the same way... only in the sense that it'd be nice if more people at least knew how to use logic properly. Then even if they choose other modes of thinking, they'd be aware that they're not being logical (and I don't intend "not logical" as an insult).
It may well not be suitable for very early education, but somewhere... more instruction in what constitutes a valid argument, a logical conclusion, or the opposite, could only be a positive thing.
I'm not sure I want to know, but feel I have to ask, what have you been doing that involved a pile of that?
Maybe it's a sign of too many years of having maths taught to me, but I'm finding it hard to think how I'd go about counting things logarithmically.
If you decide to do something new, but do it half-assed, then half of your ass is still covered by the old way of doing things.
That way, should the new thing go up in smoke, your ass doesn't get too badly burned.
It's unfortunate for things that really require full commitment if they're going to work properly (c.f. a "green" economy)
I'm wondering what that might make room for in the pre-7th curriculum.
Suggestions?
I would suggest some kind of critical thinking course, but that probably requires the same kind of steps of development as formal math does to be learned effectively.
Hell, if kids aren't capable of learning as much until a certain age, why not let them stay home for half the day, or raise the school-starting age; reduce the stress of suddenly having to go to school by reducing the impact or putting it off entirely.
The truth is that there is no such thing as the Moon rotating around the Earth. They both rotate around the center of mass that they both constitute together. I chose Moon/Earth as an example because it is a simpler one than Sun/multiple planets/galaxies but the principle always apply.
If I remember correctly, things are described as one orbiting the other when that shared centre of mass is inside the surface of one of the bodies. If they have a combined centre of mass that lies somewhere between the two bodies (not inside one of them) then you have a double planet.
Pluto would be a double planet, if it were still a planet, as its moon is pretty big compared to Pluto and their centre of mass is in the empty space between them... I guess now it must be a double dwarf or something.
My guess would be "continued"; s being next to d, it's an easy typo to make.
So circular argument would be "X therefore X" whereas begging the question would be "Do we all agree that X? Well then Y" where X = Y, but phrased differently. Either way you're taking the conclusion of your argument as a premise; the difference is in whether you're stating it as your premise or asking an opponent to agree with it as a premise.
If your goal is just to show that your opponent agrees with you, begging the question could be a valid argument - if the question you've 'begged' and the conclusion reached really are logically equivalent, but your opponent professes to agree with one and disagree with the other, then you've effectively shown their position to be self-contradictory. Says nothing about the actual truth of X (and it's easily abused by people claiming two things to be logically equivalent that aren't) but as a method of argument it could work.
If I understand correctly, you could claim copyright on the creative part, but not the factual part - so your subset of the phone book ... well there's still not a lot there but facts, but if you took a subset of the phone book and presented it in some creative way, then that particular creative presentation could be copyrighted, but not the numbers themselves.