Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly.
That's odd. I just dragged this Opera around and it was prefectly smooth, and I have a stupid background image and stacks of shaped icons on the desktop, which usd to be death to X. This is just a generic XF86 from a while ago on a 20 quid video card I bought in a hurry when one died and nevre got around to upgrading.
alpha-blending and the rendering/compositing model currently used.
Why would alpha blending be needed in moving an opaque window?
[X] still "feels" extremely sluggish compared to a similarly equipped Windows XP machine.
In what way? I'm not running very fast hardware (1.2MHz Athlon and a cheap video card) and everything X does is instantaneous.
Now, there are lots of dog-slow programs out there, but I can't think of anything where I've felt X was a problem. Basicly it feels to me that hardware is well past the point where the X overhead is negligable compared to the `programmer felt he needed to include animated semi-transparent penguins' overhead.
Of course if I was doing something 3D or video related things might be different, though even there this old beast will happily play DVDs at 1200x1000.
You hate George Lucas but you are going to line his pockets all the same.
Didn't for the last two, what makes you think I will for this?
Wait, it will be on free TV soon. The adverts they put on during it are all aimed at small kids, because that is his target audience now, so I'm not going to be influenced by them. Apart from the electricity company, and perhaps clean up products if the saccarine makes me throw up, no one is likely to benefit form the miniscule level of curiosity I have about this guaranteed turkey.
I suspect I am far from alone in that.
Give Lucas credit, at least it took him a couple of decades to make the trip from reasonably good to abysmal. The Wachowskis did it starting from The Matrix in, what, 3 years? Most people never manage to get to reasonably good.
The point of copyright is to encourage new speech and ideas to get out there.
So, surely it can't be a bad thing to discourage mere copying of existing work. And it can't be a bad thing to stop people having to worry about the correct form of a copyright claim (when I was first on usenet in the mid 80s this was a FAQ for Americans across many groups).
The automatic protection can never have a bad effect except when combined with really stupid copyright terms, as is the case in the US now. The problem lies there and so you shouldn't try and fix it by breaking something which in any reasonably sane situation is a huge good.
And even in the current US situation, there is no problem from the POV of encouraging new work, since no one is prevented from doing anything even vaguely original, indeed creation is encouraged even more than before.
The main loss is the availability of cheap editions of classic works, and that is a non trivial one. I have stacks of Penguin classics and CDs of out of copyright music which cost bugger all for some of the best things ever produced.
There is now a period for which US works will never enter that state, for no very good reason.
As I said, I think the cure is to tie copyright to the author more strongly. That way copyright extension only comes with advances in medical science and we can probably live with that.
What I do know is that none of those 13+ organizations you rattled off has been able to stop genocide in Yugoslavia or Rwanda
Did ICANN?
This hardly seems a relevent argument in the context of the proposal.
Most of what the UN does is utilitarian stuff, like ITU creating standards or the WHO stomping on disease outbreaks. It all ticks along quietly because it's a long way from the politicians.
On the other hand most of the things the UN gets criticism for are either clearly outside it's power (how could the UN, which has no armed forces, have prevented genocide in Rwanda? Sent in some clerks to threaten everyone with really bad paper cuts?), or political schemes which were never supposed to work (eg oil for food, which was a propoganda tool for the western nations who set up the sanctions on Iraq, and so was immune to any kind of oversight, audit or normal management until it's propoganda use was over, it's supprising it wasn't a lot more corrupt than it was).
Like the EU, one of the main purposes of the UN is to be a front behind which governments can do things they can't be seen to do directly. The upside is that it's existance for that purpose means that some useful stuff gets done too.
And it explains the original text which seems to have puzzled you, or perhaps some other AC. It's not deep or difficult. It is just slightly indirect, because I was trying to avoid insulting your intelligence.
This passes for philosophical in the eyes of the religious?
No, it passes for obvious in the eyes of the literate. At least those with experience of cups.
Think I'll stick with the scientists, if we're after strings which provide an advantage in surviving and perpetuating ourselves in the environment in which we find ourselves!
Do you imagine that many scientists would have a problem with the idea that cups should be cup shaped, if they are to, you know, be useful as cups?
[You should behave as if it's dangerous until you know it's safe]
No, I shouldn't, because *most restaurants don't serve scalding coffee*.
Most cars don't ignore traffic lights (much), that does not mean it is sensible to cross without looking just because you know the lights are with you.
Most is not good enough when major injury is a possibility.
No one I'm aware of can tell the difference between 160 degree coffee in a cup (styrofoam or ceramic) and 190 degree coffee in the same cup.
You don't need to. You take care in either case. However, if the coffee is cool enough that you are not risking injury, then you might do something like squeeze it between your legs and open it, if that is what you need to do for some bizzare reason.
We are clearly not going to converge any more here, you want to assume others are looking after you, and hope you live to go to court when you are proved wrong. I think this is clearly insane, and would rather take responsibility for my own life, but clearly you reflect the US majority, which was where this discussion started.
But, then how do you handle communal works, or works done on contract for a company, such as software?
Communal works are copyright the group, and live until the last member dies. You probably need to have a rule to let the court throw out people clearly included in the authors list to extend copyright (eg imagine an old author including their baby great grandson on the byline).
Work for contract or for pay is copyright the creator, but they can licence it to the person or company who payed them. You probably want to have more than one person working on the project in case of walking-under-bus syndrome, but that is so anyway.
It would make some companies very keen to provide their grunt labour with good medical care. Imagine if The Simpsons went PD when the last Korean animator died, it would make sense for the company to provide good cancer screening etc. to keep all those people alive as long as possible.
However, the "derivative work" part of copyright can be applied to the meaning as well as the text. (If you write a paraphrase, it's a derivative work.)
Only if it is very, Very close to the original (changing a couple of trivial words). Consider the wide variety of books on any technical subject (eg HTML, Java, whatever) They are all paraphrases of each other (well usually paraphrases of online originals). If paraphrase were breach of copyright, there would not be a tenth as many such books.
No: it restricts creation of new works because sooner or later any new work will need to be a derivative of something.
And how many cases where this has resulted in a sucessful prosecution do you know of?
You are allowed to be derivative. There are whole industries based on being derivative (pop songs, soap opera, technical reference books, fashon, hairdressing, more or less anything on the Discovery channel...). If you can show even a small level of original work you are safe. It's enough to find (what you claim is) a clearer way to express something, or a more affecting metaphore to be clear of copyright problems.
Thus you are encouraged to be original and create a new work, no matter how derivative.
And if that fails you can claim you are engaging in parody. and you are safe (eg the Russian author who re-wrote the Harry Potter books).
There's a restaurant near my home called Wally's. While I've never been there, it's pretty much impossible to miss as it has a big golden W in the exact same proportion as the McD's arch, but upside down.
I think any court would conclude that consumers could tell an M from a W.
While warming them will reduce the drop in temperature, it will not eliminate it.
I would think that a cup with it's inner surface warmed with boiling water (the easy option) would have a large effect on the rate of drop. Certainly enough to prevent a 25 degree drop in a few seconds.
If you're serving more than one person, it can take a minute from pour to delivery.
It can take an arbitrary amount of time, but from the POV of what you should expect, and hence your behaviour WRT safety, you have to remember that you may be the first person served. So your cup could be at the hot plate temperature, or indeed there may have been a slip and the coffee is still at brewing temperature, so you should always act as if it was scalding hot until you have determined otherwise.
Given that that is basic common sense, we come back around to where blame lies when someone treats (relatively) fresh coffee as a safe liquid, and gets caught out. Sorry, but I think if you don't take any care of your own well being, you have no cause to blame anyone else when your luck runs out.
Note that I'm not saying that in such circumstances everyone should be unsympathetic or that there isn't an argument for help being available. Up here we have search and rescue helecopters whose main task seems to be rescuing idiots who go up mountains dressed as they would be for a walk in the local park. I'm just saying that the correct response is not to look for someone else to blame.
Now, if the design of the cup had been such that a reasonable test would have wrongly indicated the coffee was already cold and so you thought you were just risking stained clothes, that would be different.
Since the Bono act, which made this automatic copyright thing happen, nothing is automatically entering the public domain.
(note, the Bono act is irrelevant, see below) And this is bad because?
With very few exceptions, having the exact form of words available to be copied is very little use beyond being able to read the text. In the cases where there is a reason for the exact words to be available, only one person has to ask the author to put the text in the PD, or someone can write an equivalent text, and put that into the PD.
Consider this: the point of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works.
Making copyright automatic does this because it discourages mere duplication of existing works, without restricting creation of new works.
And the Bono act is irrelevent to the point here, since that was merely an extension of the copyright lifetimes. The change from having to explicitly claim copyright to not came with the US adoption of Berne convention copyright rules in 1989.
Personally I would limit copyright to the lifetime of the authors + a couple of years (so dependents get time to adjust), and to make that work, eliminate non human copyright ownership, and copyright reasignment.
it'll drop when it hits the cup, due to heat transfer to the cup, unless you keep your cups at 190F.
You should warm the cup, or keep the cups warm.
Measure, pour, measure a minute later (time from serving station to customer)
Er, if it takes you a minute to hand the cup to the customer you must be very very arthritic, or have a quarter mile long restaurant.
Ted Lingle's "Basics of Brewing Coffee", pp. 27-28, recommends[...]
Well, since I can't check the context, I'll just have to point out that the SCA tasting competition rules specify a higher temperature, and they are presumably aiming for maximum flavour, so he is at odds with his organisation, unless there is a reason for the different ideas.
nd I would argue that serving at 160F instead of 190F doesn't make life noticably worse for non-stupid people.
Well, IIRC you said you liked your coffee cold and drank it fast, so perhaps your arguments shouldn't hold much weight. You can always let yours cool down a bit.
Yes, but water is free and therefore totally uninteresting to economics types.
any little peice of shit you scribble on a paper is automatically copyrighted to you, there is no need to register
This is a Very Good Thing. It has no bad effects (who is going to copy some little thing you scribble? Odds are no one will even see it). It has the positive effect that you don't have to decide for each thing you write whether to jump through some legal hoops in case it becomes valuable later.
This is a reason to be wary of attempts to extend copyright into areas wherei t doesn't naturally fit. Car manufacturers trying to `copyright' the way their spark plugs attach to the cylinder for instance, or Apple trying to copyright the idea of using a trashcan icon (rather than the actual trashcan icon they used). Copyright is a very useful and very powerful tool, it has built in limits which prevent it being a major problem (most importantly that you can only copyright an expression not an idea). So long as the limits remain it is a tool for the little guy, if they slip it becomes a tool against the little guy.
You can't trademark something you don't have the copyright to
``McDonald's'' is a trademark of a certain large corporation. They do not have copyright on it, since it is too small and too commonplace to be subject to copyright.
For things which are significant enough to be copyrightable, eg the Intel Inside logo, it would make sense for the trademark owner to hold the copyright, but I don't know of a rule saying they can't just have licenced the image from an artist who likes to hold on to copyright on their work.
Wouldn't suprise me if it was technically possible to trademark an image you don't even have a licience to use. Eg if you had lost the licence temporarilly and needed to put in the application while renegotiating. I supse you'd have had to have had a licence to use at some point to fulfull the condition of a trademark having been used in commerce. You'd have to argue that the use in the application came under fair-use.
There is a big but in this. It should be noted that he will not be able to sue people unless they use the EXACT same image. And I mean EXACT.
Do you imagine you could put some huge golden arches up in front of a restaurant and not get sued because they were not the exact mathematical curve of the McCarpet ones?
Slashdot Mirror
That's odd. I just dragged this Opera around and it was prefectly smooth, and I have a stupid background image and stacks of shaped icons on the desktop, which usd to be death to X. This is just a generic XF86 from a while ago on a 20 quid video card I bought in a hurry when one died and nevre got around to upgrading.
alpha-blending and the rendering /compositing model currently used.
Why would alpha blending be needed in moving an opaque window?
In what way? I'm not running very fast hardware (1.2MHz Athlon and a cheap video card) and everything X does is instantaneous.
Now, there are lots of dog-slow programs out there, but I can't think of anything where I've felt X was a problem. Basicly it feels to me that hardware is well past the point where the X overhead is negligable compared to the `programmer felt he needed to include animated semi-transparent penguins' overhead.
Of course if I was doing something 3D or video related things might be different, though even there this old beast will happily play DVDs at 1200x1000.
I'd have bought in but I'm still long on palladium futures.
Didn't for the last two, what makes you think I will for this?
Wait, it will be on free TV soon. The adverts they put on during it are all aimed at small kids, because that is his target audience now, so I'm not going to be influenced by them. Apart from the electricity company, and perhaps clean up products if the saccarine makes me throw up, no one is likely to benefit form the miniscule level of curiosity I have about this guaranteed turkey.
I suspect I am far from alone in that.
Give Lucas credit, at least it took him a couple of decades to make the trip from reasonably good to abysmal. The Wachowskis did it starting from The Matrix in, what, 3 years? Most people never manage to get to reasonably good.
So, surely it can't be a bad thing to discourage mere copying of existing work. And it can't be a bad thing to stop people having to worry about the correct form of a copyright claim (when I was first on usenet in the mid 80s this was a FAQ for Americans across many groups).
The automatic protection can never have a bad effect except when combined with really stupid copyright terms, as is the case in the US now. The problem lies there and so you shouldn't try and fix it by breaking something which in any reasonably sane situation is a huge good.
And even in the current US situation, there is no problem from the POV of encouraging new work, since no one is prevented from doing anything even vaguely original, indeed creation is encouraged even more than before.
The main loss is the availability of cheap editions of classic works, and that is a non trivial one. I have stacks of Penguin classics and CDs of out of copyright music which cost bugger all for some of the best things ever produced.
There is now a period for which US works will never enter that state, for no very good reason.
As I said, I think the cure is to tie copyright to the author more strongly. That way copyright extension only comes with advances in medical science and we can probably live with that.
Did ICANN?
This hardly seems a relevent argument in the context of the proposal.
Most of what the UN does is utilitarian stuff, like ITU creating standards or the WHO stomping on disease outbreaks. It all ticks along quietly because it's a long way from the politicians.
On the other hand most of the things the UN gets criticism for are either clearly outside it's power (how could the UN, which has no armed forces, have prevented genocide in Rwanda? Sent in some clerks to threaten everyone with really bad paper cuts?), or political schemes which were never supposed to work (eg oil for food, which was a propoganda tool for the western nations who set up the sanctions on Iraq, and so was immune to any kind of oversight, audit or normal management until it's propoganda use was over, it's supprising it wasn't a lot more corrupt than it was).
Like the EU, one of the main purposes of the UN is to be a front behind which governments can do things they can't be seen to do directly. The upside is that it's existance for that purpose means that some useful stuff gets done too.
Courts found for them IIRC.
And it explains the original text which seems to have puzzled you, or perhaps some other AC. It's not deep or difficult. It is just slightly indirect, because I was trying to avoid insulting your intelligence.
This passes for philosophical in the eyes of the religious?
No, it passes for obvious in the eyes of the literate. At least those with experience of cups.
Think I'll stick with the scientists, if we're after strings which provide an advantage in surviving and perpetuating ourselves in the environment in which we find ourselves!
Do you imagine that many scientists would have a problem with the idea that cups should be cup shaped, if they are to, you know, be useful as cups?
No, I shouldn't, because *most restaurants don't serve scalding coffee*.
Most cars don't ignore traffic lights (much), that does not mean it is sensible to cross without looking just because you know the lights are with you.
Most is not good enough when major injury is a possibility.
No one I'm aware of can tell the difference between 160 degree coffee in a cup (styrofoam or ceramic) and 190 degree coffee in the same cup.
You don't need to. You take care in either case. However, if the coffee is cool enough that you are not risking injury, then you might do something like squeeze it between your legs and open it, if that is what you need to do for some bizzare reason.
We are clearly not going to converge any more here, you want to assume others are looking after you, and hope you live to go to court when you are proved wrong. I think this is clearly insane, and would rather take responsibility for my own life, but clearly you reflect the US majority, which was where this discussion started.
Communal works are copyright the group, and live until the last member dies. You probably need to have a rule to let the court throw out people clearly included in the authors list to extend copyright (eg imagine an old author including their baby great grandson on the byline).
Work for contract or for pay is copyright the creator, but they can licence it to the person or company who payed them. You probably want to have more than one person working on the project in case of walking-under-bus syndrome, but that is so anyway.
It would make some companies very keen to provide their grunt labour with good medical care. Imagine if The Simpsons went PD when the last Korean animator died, it would make sense for the company to provide good cancer screening etc. to keep all those people alive as long as possible.
Only if it is very, Very close to the original (changing a couple of trivial words). Consider the wide variety of books on any technical subject (eg HTML, Java, whatever) They are all paraphrases of each other (well usually paraphrases of online originals). If paraphrase were breach of copyright, there would not be a tenth as many such books.
No: it restricts creation of new works because sooner or later any new work will need to be a derivative of something.
And how many cases where this has resulted in a sucessful prosecution do you know of?
You are allowed to be derivative. There are whole industries based on being derivative (pop songs, soap opera, technical reference books, fashon, hairdressing, more or less anything on the Discovery channel...). If you can show even a small level of original work you are safe. It's enough to find (what you claim is) a clearer way to express something, or a more affecting metaphore to be clear of copyright problems.
Thus you are encouraged to be original and create a new work, no matter how derivative.
And if that fails you can claim you are engaging in parody. and you are safe (eg the Russian author who re-wrote the Harry Potter books).
And I was just pointing out that it was a particularly peculiar derogatory word to choose.
I think any court would conclude that consumers could tell an M from a W.
I would think that a cup with it's inner surface warmed with boiling water (the easy option) would have a large effect on the rate of drop. Certainly enough to prevent a 25 degree drop in a few seconds.
If you're serving more than one person, it can take a minute from pour to delivery.
It can take an arbitrary amount of time, but from the POV of what you should expect, and hence your behaviour WRT safety, you have to remember that you may be the first person served. So your cup could be at the hot plate temperature, or indeed there may have been a slip and the coffee is still at brewing temperature, so you should always act as if it was scalding hot until you have determined otherwise.
Given that that is basic common sense, we come back around to where blame lies when someone treats (relatively) fresh coffee as a safe liquid, and gets caught out. Sorry, but I think if you don't take any care of your own well being, you have no cause to blame anyone else when your luck runs out.
Note that I'm not saying that in such circumstances everyone should be unsympathetic or that there isn't an argument for help being available. Up here we have search and rescue helecopters whose main task seems to be rescuing idiots who go up mountains dressed as they would be for a walk in the local park. I'm just saying that the correct response is not to look for someone else to blame.
Now, if the design of the cup had been such that a reasonable test would have wrongly indicated the coffee was already cold and so you thought you were just risking stained clothes, that would be different.
I'm being impersonated by someone with a very limited ability to construct insults.
(note, the Bono act is irrelevant, see below) And this is bad because?
With very few exceptions, having the exact form of words available to be copied is very little use beyond being able to read the text. In the cases where there is a reason for the exact words to be available, only one person has to ask the author to put the text in the PD, or someone can write an equivalent text, and put that into the PD.
Consider this: the point of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works.
Making copyright automatic does this because it discourages mere duplication of existing works, without restricting creation of new works.
And the Bono act is irrelevent to the point here, since that was merely an extension of the copyright lifetimes. The change from having to explicitly claim copyright to not came with the US adoption of Berne convention copyright rules in 1989.
Personally I would limit copyright to the lifetime of the authors + a couple of years (so dependents get time to adjust), and to make that work, eliminate non human copyright ownership, and copyright reasignment.
Clay is moulded to form a cup
yet only the space within
allows the cup to hold water.
You should warm the cup, or keep the cups warm.
Measure, pour, measure a minute later (time from serving station to customer)
Er, if it takes you a minute to hand the cup to the customer you must be very very arthritic, or have a quarter mile long restaurant.
Ted Lingle's "Basics of Brewing Coffee", pp. 27-28, recommends[...]
Well, since I can't check the context, I'll just have to point out that the SCA tasting competition rules specify a higher temperature, and they are presumably aiming for maximum flavour, so he is at odds with his organisation, unless there is a reason for the different ideas.
nd I would argue that serving at 160F instead of 190F doesn't make life noticably worse for non-stupid people.
Well, IIRC you said you liked your coffee cold and drank it fast, so perhaps your arguments shouldn't hold much weight. You can always let yours cool down a bit.
Yes, but water is free and therefore totally uninteresting to economics types.
Economics is not just about money.
This is a Very Good Thing. It has no bad effects (who is going to copy some little thing you scribble? Odds are no one will even see it). It has the positive effect that you don't have to decide for each thing you write whether to jump through some legal hoops in case it becomes valuable later.
This is a reason to be wary of attempts to extend copyright into areas wherei t doesn't naturally fit. Car manufacturers trying to `copyright' the way their spark plugs attach to the cylinder for instance, or Apple trying to copyright the idea of using a trashcan icon (rather than the actual trashcan icon they used). Copyright is a very useful and very powerful tool, it has built in limits which prevent it being a major problem (most importantly that you can only copyright an expression not an idea). So long as the limits remain it is a tool for the little guy, if they slip it becomes a tool against the little guy.
``what do you mean `we' white man''.
You mean you have a strong desire to look at, kiss and do other things which can't be mentioned with young nerds present to this guy?
``McDonald's'' is a trademark of a certain large corporation. They do not have copyright on it, since it is too small and too commonplace to be subject to copyright.
For things which are significant enough to be copyrightable, eg the Intel Inside logo, it would make sense for the trademark owner to hold the copyright, but I don't know of a rule saying they can't just have licenced the image from an artist who likes to hold on to copyright on their work.
Wouldn't suprise me if it was technically possible to trademark an image you don't even have a licience to use. Eg if you had lost the licence temporarilly and needed to put in the application while renegotiating. I supse you'd have had to have had a licence to use at some point to fulfull the condition of a trademark having been used in commerce. You'd have to argue that the use in the application came under fair-use.
Yes, but it' unlikely that he got all those convictions in 18 months or so. So he probably doesn't have 13 adult convictions.
Compared to Coventry, anywhere looks good, so perhaps your evaluation is skewed.
Do you imagine you could put some huge golden arches up in front of a restaurant and not get sued because they were not the exact mathematical curve of the McCarpet ones?