Your argument is bogus. The Rolling Stones made a widely known song, and somebody wants to use it after it goes public domain. What problem do you have with this? It's not like the only money they can get from this song is when somebody decides to make an ad campaign.
But you never know when something is going to be in demand. Some company like Microsoft should never be able to go "Jackpot! I can use that formerly copyrighted material in this marketing campaign, I can make millions because it is still popular
There are two problems with your reasoning. First, the point of an ad campaign is not to benefit the creators of artwork for this campaoign but to increase profit of the advertiser. Second, what about Carl Orff and O Fortuna? By your logic his descendants should be paid every time somebody uses his piece in dishwasher commercials, because it's not his fault that he created his music before the age of large advertising campaigns, or even BEFORE COPYRIGHT! (O horror!) Ditto for all the classical composers. Copyright advocates try to fool people into thinking that copyright is some inalienable natural right that no civilized person can contest, whereas in fact this an artificial legal construct.
I can tell you've never worked hard at anything in your life.
Classic ad hominem from your camp. You people keep going emotional, and it's tiresome already.
So? You're free to ignore them and choose alternate sources of entertainment.
If everyone followed this logic then nothing would ever change. What about "If you don't like your government then you're free to choose another country to live in"? And "If you don't like priests molesting children you're free to convert to Islam"? Moreover this is not a debate about giving people free entertainment but amending laws which go counter to their purpose.
And copyright lawyers have exactly what interest in the length of the copyright?
I don't know either but most of them are in favor of long terms, so there must be a reason.
If you don't like it, don't buy it
GP is not in favor of abolishing copyrights but shortening the term. The argument is not about stuff that is actively marketed and available. It is about obscure stuff that you can't easily buy and "artists" making 3-4 hit songs and then sitting on them indefinitely without further activity.
It's up to them how they want to make their money.
It's not. They can make money on vintage stuff only because WE (the society) are letting them by instituting copyright laws.
Copyright was never intended to be anything less than the life of the author
First, citation needed. Second, "Life of the author" is a shitty measure because: 1. It discriminates against people who create late in their life. 2. It makes determining whether a given work is copyrighted difficult if the author is obscure. You need to know his/her death date, and that is an information that is not supplied with the work itself, while the year of creation / publication usually is. 3. What happens if an organization holds the copyright? Does it ever expire? (I don't know here but probably some aspects of cipyright are non-transferable) 4. What about works by multiple authors?
survivorship is an important issue in Western society, so the term has extended to ensure preservation of benefit.
I don't know what you mean. What preservation of benefit? Why we should preserve the benefit of authors' descendants at the expense of society when the authors are long dead? What did the descendants do to deserve special rights to protect them?
For 95% of the entitled
The discussion is not about the 95% of people but the 5% elite of "content producers" that long copyright creates.
The point is that to see someone's divorce case you must be actively searching for it and willing to read it. The fact that "it's accessible to everyone" is not equal to "everyone knows what's in it".
The example TFA gives as justification amounts to "there was a Jewish girl whose faith was shattered when she read the New Testament so we should make it more obscure by removing it from the Internet". At the same time it doesn't discuss any potential data mining and identity theft risks associated with those documents being available.
you can't even center a div consistently across IE (#yourdivsparent{text-align:center;}#yourdiv{text-align:left;}) and non-IE (#yourdiv{margin:0 auto;}).
CSS centering (margin: auto) works properly even in IE 6.0 but only if you use a Strict doctype. This is particularly annoying on auction sites where you can type your own HTML but are usually forced to use the Transitional doctype of the site.
BTW: I like C++ very much, but its main fault is that it tends to alienate crappy programmers naturally as they totally fuck up their projects and requires more careful design - and we know that careful design and experienced programmers is not something that corporate environments are known to have in abundance...
it's that our age-old insistence that we're somehow unique or different is repeatedly proven wrong
Yeah, everyone knows that elephants already utilized nuclear power 500,000 years ago, and crows knew the universe's expansion was accelerating thanks to a space-based telescope long before humans invented the wheel
Agreed. The people who campaign to boycott the Beijing Olympics seem to forget that boycotting a totalitarian regime will not make it fall; it will strengthen it. Regimes need enemies, and by boycotting we create the impression that the entire world is China's enemy. The only real way to destroy a totalitarian regime is for the people of the country to overturn it. The Chinese are quite far from that right now, but these Olympics might change this a little.
"Plastic" is not a single substance. There are literally thousands of kinds of plastic, each having its own distinct properties and production methods. Some of them are not replaceable by any other kind (for example PTFE also known as Teflon) and certainly cannot be produced from plants. They can be produced from coal in a round-about way, but it would dramatically increase their costs.
If I had to rank the fields in which the general public is most uninformed related to their importance, it would probably be: 1. Genetic engineering 2. Plastics 3. Energy sources 4. Foreign affairs (no matter where you live) (I haven't thought about it too much though)
With regard to point 2, the presented jetpack is interesting, becuase it's safer the lower you fly - directly opposite to airplanes and helicopters. It may actually have a niche market after all.
The low end x86 CPUs are finally good enough to power such machines.
The story from yesterday hints that the outcome may be that neither Via, Intel or AMD wins, but the dirt cheap MIPS (or Loongson) chips from China which already have good power efficiency... Those machines would probably be running Linux anyway due to their limited hardware, so the choice of processor architecture is a minor concern.
Things you are missing: 1. Locality of energy generation. Your argument is fine if we can have a global superconducting energy network, which won't happen in predictable future. Otherwise there are large regional variations in sunlight intensity. 2. Seasons. You can probably store a day's worth of energy but when you don't meet the demand in winter, you are in serious trouble since there is no way to store energy for the entire year. 3. Clouds.
Solar energy is great but you also need something else if all it takes to halve your output is a cloud. Geothermal energy is good in that respect but some countries simply don't have viable geothermal sites. Still, it seems to me that too many people are too focused on the solar/nuclear debate and forget about it.
I agree with you but I'll play devil's advocate for a while: The Baseload Fallacy
I have some problems with this paper but it is an interesting read even when you don't agree with it. I.e. what is missing is the comparison of average load patterns during the day and average solar output during the day, and more importantly the variation between seasons. You could possibly store a day's worth of electricity but storing a year's worth is completely impossible.
I contest. There was only 1 really serious incident in the entire history of civil nuclear power plants (Chernobyl). This incident happened because everything that could go wrong went wrong, beginning from the reactor design, through a government that cared more about competition with the Imperialist West than the safety of its citizens and ending at incompetent crew carrying out risky experiments during reactor instability.
The other "serious" accident usually referred to (TMI) was actually a public outrage in response to a completely negligible release of radioactivity.
What is really poor is the society's understanding of atomic power. Most people I talked to that were against nuclear power keep bringing up the same two problems: Chernobyl and waste. The first one is just silly because they seem to think that despite all the dramatic advances in other areas of technology since 1986 the reactors are still similar. The second one is sometimes brought up as a "death blow" to an argument, usually because people think that radioactive waste is something like black death and it can't be handled or contained safely, and are unaware of new technology like the IFR and other modern reactors.
1. UTF-8 support is an addon, not a core feature and doesn't work with several packages, like Musixtex. 2. The syntax is worse than Perl - the parameters come before the package name! 3. Image format support is a laugh.
I would also switch to "modern LaTeX" gladly, if there was one.
This is because tablet PCs are not meant for the masses, and they have some software problems which are hard to solve. The most important problem is that they lack a keyboard, and that cursive text recognition sucks. It's acceptable for English text in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, but for some languages there is no handwriting recognition module, which is dictionary-based and cannot be trained.
Tablet PCs are just software-deficient rather than fundamentally flawed. On top of that, in most models you can't detach the keyboard, which makes the entire Tablet PC concept worthless. The only real TPC I know is the TC1100.
Despite all this, tablet PCs are very decent low-cost replacements for extremely expensive graphic tablets with integrated screens like the Wacom Cintiq.
Is there any good Linux functionality for tablet PCs?
Yes, there's plenty.
1. Notetaking - Xournal (it's better than Windows Journal since you can annotate PDFs, though it doesn't have pressure-sensitive strokes) 2. Cell-based handwriting recognition - Cellwriter 3. Onscreen keyboard - Onboard 4. Screen rotation and tablet rotation are supported. 5. For an overview of things you may need to modify from a stock Ubuntu install, see LQWiki entry for TC1100.
For some exotic functionality you may have problems getting it to work, but overall Linux works pretty well with tablets.
All those navigation units run on batteries rather than on external power from the cigarette lighter.
Moreover, you often need to replace the vehicle's computer when your keys are lost or destroyed, so it isn't too practical to build too much stuff into it.
KDE is a desktop environment. GDI+ is a set of advanced (or obfuscated - I didn't use them personally) drawing APIs from MS. It's like comparing Mass Effect to OpenGL, so your example is much further off than the original comment. You could compare GDI+ to Cairo but not to KDE!
The comparison between Vista and KDE is completely acceptable when we take "KDE" to mean "KDE on Linux". Linux itself with no DE is not usable to an average person, and so is Aero without the rest of Vista.
Having non-randomized puzzle elements in games made sense before the easy availability of Internet boards and hint sites.
And having non-randomized movies only made sense before the easy availability of Internet boards and spoiler sites?
Additionally, most games have cheat codes for the single player mode, which are easily found on the net, and despite this people are still playing them.
You are not forced to look for spoilers, you are not forced to use cheats, and you are not forced to read walkthroughs.
The answer is COLOR. Decent black and white laser printers are about the same cost as decent color inkjets. Crappy color laser printers are about the same price as good inkjets that are capable of producing A4 photo printouts that actually don't make you want to puke - not the case with same-priced lasers. I had a Samsung CLP-300 and it sucked at A4 color printouts (the colors were off and not uniform).
The situation may have changed recently but I don't expect that.
Slashdot Mirror
Check this out, specifically the illustration halfway down the page. Axing features is sometimes the only way to avoid failure.
Your argument is bogus. The Rolling Stones made a widely known song, and somebody wants to use it after it goes public domain. What problem do you have with this? It's not like the only money they can get from this song is when somebody decides to make an ad campaign.
But you never know when something is going to be in demand. Some company like Microsoft should never be able to go "Jackpot! I can use that formerly copyrighted material in this marketing campaign, I can make millions because it is still popular
There are two problems with your reasoning. First, the point of an ad campaign is not to benefit the creators of artwork for this campaoign but to increase profit of the advertiser. Second, what about Carl Orff and O Fortuna? By your logic his descendants should be paid every time somebody uses his piece in dishwasher commercials, because it's not his fault that he created his music before the age of large advertising campaigns, or even BEFORE COPYRIGHT! (O horror!) Ditto for all the classical composers. Copyright advocates try to fool people into thinking that copyright is some inalienable natural right that no civilized person can contest, whereas in fact this an artificial legal construct.
I can tell you've never worked hard at anything in your life.
Classic ad hominem from your camp. You people keep going emotional, and it's tiresome already.
So? You're free to ignore them and choose alternate sources of entertainment.
If everyone followed this logic then nothing would ever change. What about "If you don't like your government then you're free to choose another country to live in"? And "If you don't like priests molesting children you're free to convert to Islam"? Moreover this is not a debate about giving people free entertainment but amending laws which go counter to their purpose.
And copyright lawyers have exactly what interest in the length of the copyright?
I don't know either but most of them are in favor of long terms, so there must be a reason.
If you don't like it, don't buy it
GP is not in favor of abolishing copyrights but shortening the term. The argument is not about stuff that is actively marketed and available. It is about obscure stuff that you can't easily buy and "artists" making 3-4 hit songs and then sitting on them indefinitely without further activity.
It's up to them how they want to make their money.
It's not. They can make money on vintage stuff only because WE (the society) are letting them by instituting copyright laws.
Copyright was never intended to be anything less than the life of the author
First, citation needed. Second, "Life of the author" is a shitty measure because:
1. It discriminates against people who create late in their life.
2. It makes determining whether a given work is copyrighted difficult if the author is obscure. You need to know his/her death date, and that is an information that is not supplied with the work itself, while the year of creation / publication usually is.
3. What happens if an organization holds the copyright? Does it ever expire? (I don't know here but probably some aspects of cipyright are non-transferable)
4. What about works by multiple authors?
survivorship is an important issue in Western society, so the term has extended to ensure preservation of benefit.
I don't know what you mean. What preservation of benefit? Why we should preserve the benefit of authors' descendants at the expense of society when the authors are long dead? What did the descendants do to deserve special rights to protect them?
For 95% of the entitled
The discussion is not about the 95% of people but the 5% elite of "content producers" that long copyright creates.
it's ironic that the ideaology behind removing binary drivers is an attack on peoples freedoms
It's like saying that vegetarians are an attack on your right to eat meat.
In addition try running the moo action with increasing verbosity (e.g. aptitude -v moo, aptitude -vv moo etc.)
Lint Speed of course. But we'll need someone extremely scared to go this fast. Maybe each USB 4.0 device will incorporate a clone of Arthur.
The point is that to see someone's divorce case you must be actively searching for it and willing to read it. The fact that "it's accessible to everyone" is not equal to "everyone knows what's in it".
The example TFA gives as justification amounts to "there was a Jewish girl whose faith was shattered when she read the New Testament so we should make it more obscure by removing it from the Internet". At the same time it doesn't discuss any potential data mining and identity theft risks associated with those documents being available.
you can't even center a div consistently across IE (#yourdivsparent{text-align:center;}#yourdiv{text-align:left;}) and non-IE (#yourdiv{margin:0 auto;}).
CSS centering (margin: auto) works properly even in IE 6.0 but only if you use a Strict doctype. This is particularly annoying on auction sites where you can type your own HTML but are usually forced to use the Transitional doctype of the site.
Nah, it's on overloading the comma and logical or operators to align widgets in a dialog.
Dialog &dlg = (widgetA, widgetB, widgetC) | (okButton, cancelButton);
BTW: I like C++ very much, but its main fault is that it tends to alienate crappy programmers naturally as they totally fuck up their projects and requires more careful design - and we know that careful design and experienced programmers is not something that corporate environments are known to have in abundance...
it's that our age-old insistence that we're somehow unique or different is repeatedly proven wrong
Yeah, everyone knows that elephants already utilized nuclear power 500,000 years ago, and crows knew the universe's expansion was accelerating thanks to a space-based telescope long before humans invented the wheel
Agreed. The people who campaign to boycott the Beijing Olympics seem to forget that boycotting a totalitarian regime will not make it fall; it will strengthen it. Regimes need enemies, and by boycotting we create the impression that the entire world is China's enemy. The only real way to destroy a totalitarian regime is for the people of the country to overturn it. The Chinese are quite far from that right now, but these Olympics might change this a little.
"Plastic" is not a single substance. There are literally thousands of kinds of plastic, each having its own distinct properties and production methods. Some of them are not replaceable by any other kind (for example PTFE also known as Teflon) and certainly cannot be produced from plants. They can be produced from coal in a round-about way, but it would dramatically increase their costs.
If I had to rank the fields in which the general public is most uninformed related to their importance, it would probably be:
1. Genetic engineering
2. Plastics
3. Energy sources
4. Foreign affairs (no matter where you live)
(I haven't thought about it too much though)
With regard to point 2, the presented jetpack is interesting, becuase it's safer the lower you fly - directly opposite to airplanes and helicopters. It may actually have a niche market after all.
The low end x86 CPUs are finally good enough to power such machines.
The story from yesterday hints that the outcome may be that neither Via, Intel or AMD wins, but the dirt cheap MIPS (or Loongson) chips from China which already have good power efficiency... Those machines would probably be running Linux anyway due to their limited hardware, so the choice of processor architecture is a minor concern.
Things you are missing:
1. Locality of energy generation. Your argument is fine if we can have a global superconducting energy network, which won't happen in predictable future. Otherwise there are large regional variations in sunlight intensity.
2. Seasons. You can probably store a day's worth of energy but when you don't meet the demand in winter, you are in serious trouble since there is no way to store energy for the entire year.
3. Clouds.
Solar energy is great but you also need something else if all it takes to halve your output is a cloud. Geothermal energy is good in that respect but some countries simply don't have viable geothermal sites. Still, it seems to me that too many people are too focused on the solar/nuclear debate and forget about it.
I agree with you but I'll play devil's advocate for a while: The Baseload Fallacy
I have some problems with this paper but it is an interesting read even when you don't agree with it. I.e. what is missing is the comparison of average load patterns during the day and average solar output during the day, and more importantly the variation between seasons. You could possibly store a day's worth of electricity but storing a year's worth is completely impossible.
Man's history with reactor safety is poor
I contest. There was only 1 really serious incident in the entire history of civil nuclear power plants (Chernobyl). This incident happened because everything that could go wrong went wrong, beginning from the reactor design, through a government that cared more about competition with the Imperialist West than the safety of its citizens and ending at incompetent crew carrying out risky experiments during reactor instability.
The other "serious" accident usually referred to (TMI) was actually a public outrage in response to a completely negligible release of radioactivity.
What is really poor is the society's understanding of atomic power. Most people I talked to that were against nuclear power keep bringing up the same two problems: Chernobyl and waste. The first one is just silly because they seem to think that despite all the dramatic advances in other areas of technology since 1986 the reactors are still similar. The second one is sometimes brought up as a "death blow" to an argument, usually because people think that radioactive waste is something like black death and it can't be handled or contained safely, and are unaware of new technology like the IFR and other modern reactors.
I'll join the rant:
1. UTF-8 support is an addon, not a core feature and doesn't work with several packages, like Musixtex.
2. The syntax is worse than Perl - the parameters come before the package name!
3. Image format support is a laugh.
I would also switch to "modern LaTeX" gladly, if there was one.
This is because tablet PCs are not meant for the masses, and they have some software problems which are hard to solve. The most important problem is that they lack a keyboard, and that cursive text recognition sucks. It's acceptable for English text in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, but for some languages there is no handwriting recognition module, which is dictionary-based and cannot be trained.
Tablet PCs are just software-deficient rather than fundamentally flawed. On top of that, in most models you can't detach the keyboard, which makes the entire Tablet PC concept worthless. The only real TPC I know is the TC1100.
Despite all this, tablet PCs are very decent low-cost replacements for extremely expensive graphic tablets with integrated screens like the Wacom Cintiq.
Is there any good Linux functionality for tablet PCs?
Yes, there's plenty.
1. Notetaking - Xournal (it's better than Windows Journal since you can annotate PDFs, though it doesn't have pressure-sensitive strokes)
2. Cell-based handwriting recognition - Cellwriter
3. Onscreen keyboard - Onboard
4. Screen rotation and tablet rotation are supported.
5. For an overview of things you may need to modify from a stock Ubuntu install, see LQWiki entry for TC1100.
For some exotic functionality you may have problems getting it to work, but overall Linux works pretty well with tablets.
All those navigation units run on batteries rather than on external power from the cigarette lighter.
Moreover, you often need to replace the vehicle's computer when your keys are lost or destroyed, so it isn't too practical to build too much stuff into it.
KDE is a desktop environment. GDI+ is a set of advanced (or obfuscated - I didn't use them personally) drawing APIs from MS. It's like comparing Mass Effect to OpenGL, so your example is much further off than the original comment. You could compare GDI+ to Cairo but not to KDE!
The comparison between Vista and KDE is completely acceptable when we take "KDE" to mean "KDE on Linux". Linux itself with no DE is not usable to an average person, and so is Aero without the rest of Vista.
Having non-randomized puzzle elements in games made sense before the easy availability of Internet boards and hint sites.
And having non-randomized movies only made sense before the easy availability of Internet boards and spoiler sites?
Additionally, most games have cheat codes for the single player mode, which are easily found on the net, and despite this people are still playing them.
You are not forced to look for spoilers, you are not forced to use cheats, and you are not forced to read walkthroughs.
Answer from an unlikely source: Grue
The answer is COLOR. Decent black and white laser printers are about the same cost as decent color inkjets. Crappy color laser printers are about the same price as good inkjets that are capable of producing A4 photo printouts that actually don't make you want to puke - not the case with same-priced lasers. I had a Samsung CLP-300 and it sucked at A4 color printouts (the colors were off and not uniform).
The situation may have changed recently but I don't expect that.