Building owners/architects have sued and won for copyright infringement/trademark dilution when their buildings were used in a movie without their permission. Times Square light-boards are pretty distinctive, and a judge might well side with the owners on the above grounds.
Ah, it sounds like you have the Criterion version of the Seven Samurai. Listen to the commentary again: yes, at first, it sounds trivial. Now listen again: body drops into a perfectly framed triangle, deep focus on big sword, rain on the village.
Of course it easy to provide good commentary on a bad film, the great ones (Seven Samurai, Seventh Seal, Dr. Strangelove) have no errors: all you can do is praise the technique.
The Seven Samurai is one of the best movies ever made - could you annotate any scene with more than "this is perfect?"
This is an idea that sounds good on the surface but is actually very bad.
If you could sue the USPO, the majority of suits would be from companies suing to have their patents *granted*. Being able to sue would just give them a second whack at the pinata.
Normal small companies and rational individuals would not sue to have bad patents denied: if you have the money to go to trial, it's better to wait until the patent is enforced in an unfair way.
So, could you restricts suits to reimbursing the costs of unfair patents? "Unfair" would need to mean that a court had invalidated the patent or restricted its scope, so the defendant would already have gone to trial for patent infringment, and prevailed. In this case, he may well ask for court costs, and get them (especially in a David & Goliath situation) so the USPO incompetance has, in some sense, cost him nothing.
If the defendant can't afford to defend himself in court, no one is going to judge the patent to be "bad."
You've hit the nail on the head: the telcos don't understand the business that they are really in.
Today, customers of the telcos want to moves bits from physical location A to physical location B. If a telco is concentrating on any goal other than this, they are doomed: dumb analog services (e.g. call waiting, message boxes, redial) are just milking a dying cow. Telcos must understand that the end-points now have the smarts - they should just be in the business of moving bits. That means leasing dark fiber, providing redundant circuits, whatever it takes.
Telcos are selling a commodity: work on that, you stay alive, forget it, you die.
If you don't know the long history of Scientology using technical means (e.g. issuing bogus rmgroups and spamming critical newsgroups) or legal means (e.g. the "Tom Cruise missile" incident,) or bizarre means (trying to frame a journalist as a bomber, maybe killing a judge's dog, the "bladders of blood, I was nearly raped incident," you should sit back, do a Google search, read the pages, and remember that your moderation points last for three days.
In summary, the above post was not a troll, it was, if anything, insightful or funny.
It made me laugh too: it's a beautifully dry bit of writing.
Obviously, the author could have said: "most of our users just ignore proprietary licenses and install the software anyway. We would prefer a plan that doesn't expose us to future lawsuits." But what he wrote got the same point across without implying past sins, yet at the same time showing a course of action that is good and clearly not an attempt to hide prior (obviously non-existent) violations.
Most poeple do not have the education or time to provide good input to surveys like this. NASA should provide a broad set of possible future directions/goals and allow people to pick amongst them.
Given that most people are not familiar with current scientific research, but are quite up-to-date on blockbuster sci-fi movies, I modestly propose an improved NASA survey....
Where do you want the USA to be 200 years from now?
1) Star Wars. We at NASA get to work on personal high-performance spacecraft, cool blasters, and the search for cute, intelligent extra-terrestrials.
2) Star Trek. We work on big Navy spaceships, womens' rights, and the search for aliens made of pure energy, etc.
3) Babylon 5. We will design big ass space stations that are like New York only in space.
4) 2001. We will build cool spaceships, smart computers. You won't understand and we don't care.
5) Buck Rogers. We'll make cute robots. We'll hire hot babes. Everyone wins!
6) Dark Star. Hey, we admit it: we're just another government agency that does the best in can with limited funds.
7) Capricorn 5. You want cool video? We'll provide it.
8) Armageddon. We will protect you against incredibly improbable things.
9) Independence Day: We'll really ramp up our Area 51 research project. Crop circles? Cow anus mutilation? We're ON IT!
10) Apollo 13: We'll stick people in tin cans, throw them into hazardous environments, and see what happens. More exciting than Survivor!
Birds of a feather flock together. Microsoft the Monopolist along with USPS the Monopolist.
Funny thing is, the US DOJ went after Microsoft, trying to break its monopoly grip. So why doesn't the DOJ go after the USPS for its monopoly grip on first class mail service? Because the USPS is a government-sanctioned and -backed and -enforced monopoly, which makes the whole thing against Microsoft fairly ironic.
No! The DOJ went after Microsoft for unfair use of its monopoly. It's fine to be a monopoly, but when you are, you must play be much stricter rules. For example, the USPS must deliver to everyone, and therefore can't charge an extra $50 to people living in out of the way areas. They also can't decide to charge more to businesses that also use FedEx at times.
As a government sanctioned monopoly, USPS is restricted more: they can't even raise prices without approval.
If Microsoft had carefully documented APIs, provided all firms with equal access to new product information, and not entered into special pricing deals (Win for $45 if you don't allow dual-OSes,) they probably would never have been attacked by the DOJ.
What a totally moronic article: "it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the cost." Gee, who would have ever thought? If it costs us $20000/lb to get stuff in orbit, what the hell are we going to ship back to earth to make it worthwhile?
"The moon's got a lot of silicon and oxygen," Hey, news flash: its common name is "sand." We have a lot of it down on Earth too.
We can't even create automated mining facilities on Earth for fuck's sack, how are we going to get them working on the moon?
We've got big mineral deposits in Africa we don't exploit because it isn't economically feasible to build a mountain railroad. No problem, let's build a self-assembling, automated mining facility, ship it to the moon, have it build a railgun to launch processed resources back to us. Oh, and to be cost-effective, why not make it self-replicating? WTF? Why not just invent teleporter technology while you're at it?
I ordered 2 PC101 keyboards from that firm while reading the article. That keyboard was a thing of beauty.
My approach to the ultimate Linux machine is quite simple: I buy a new machine every two years, but keep my 21" monitor across upgrades (and my keyboard now!) Backups are handled by buying a new disk every 9 months (capacity has doubled, I just mirror everything and then throw out the smallest disk on my machine: 160G now) If I ever hear swapping, I upgrade immediately (512M now.)
This obviously isn't the most economical solution, but it is the most efficient if I assign a $/hour number to my time.
In theory, everyone should be using LISP: it's fast, interactive, elegant, extensible, and reflective. Many modern languages lack its power: e.g. most "design patterns" are solutions to the problem that you aren't using LISP.
As time goes on, I get to program in LISP less and less, largely because it is being used less. I've wondered about this for some time, and here's my theory:
In the old days, when computers cost $200,000 a piece, the scarcity of hardware made the competition for the chance at a CS degree very high. Graduating required at least the ability to write a compiler, a toy OS, know how to use all the standard data structures, know algorithmic complexity, Turing machines, computability, etc. A DEC-20 supported so few users that a Uni could only graduate 40 CS majors per year: the bar was raised to the point that those making it intuitively understood that LISP expressed computation well.
When desktop machines arrived, there became a demand for programmers (people that could turn ideas in programs.) The schools could turn out more programmers because resources where cheaper for them too. CS (or IT) became as common a major as English Lit, and the bell-curve of talent was no longer chopped off at +3 sigma.
10 years ago, many new CS graduates couldn't explain what a Continuation was. Now, many can't explain how a hashtable is implemented. Moore's Law has obsoleted deep CS knowledge (and thus LISP,) as brutally as the industrial revolution killed weaving skills.
There will always pockets of LISP (the skilled craftmen working on human-scale projects,) but the vast bulk of computer programming is now carried out by people with neither the time, inclination, nor mental capacity to understand what was once Computer Science.
I wish I were wrong, but I fear programming is becoming like food: yes, there will always be some great chefs, but most people in the industry will never be able to progress beyond their fast food outlet's Fryolator.
The wreckage zone is much bigger for two reasons: you may need to abort during the climb to launch alt, and you don't know where the launch will take place.
Assuming a 4 hour climb, you may pass through the jet stream (giving you a speed of 100 mph or more) and then get pushed around by the stratospheric winds. You might have travelled 300 miles or more in a relatively random direction. From this unknown location, you fire your rocket. In this thin air, it easily reaches Mach 4 and starts to go off course. You abort, and put the debris into a nice lob in the thin air. This gives you an additional couple of hundred miles in a random direction.
Ok, I exaggerated a bit - the debris zone is in the 100,000 square mile range: the FAA wants numbers that show the chance of hitting a ship is.1% or so, airplane 1 in ten million or so. Plowing in foreign soil is a no-no. In theory, you could get the waiver, but it still seems easier to just tank up a big dumb booster, ideally launched from White Sands or similar, so you can avoid the FAA red tape.
The main reason is the FAA. If you want to be a high alt attempt, you need to file a lot of paperwork concerning your flight plan and risks to populated areas/foreign airspace. In theory, you could get approval for an orbital shot from two places in the USA (Black Rock and Alaska,) if you have a self-destruct device on board. Note that a self-destruct doesn't make the rocket vanish, it just puts the debris in a safe zone. Now, if you want to float to 120,000 feet before launch, your debris zone is about the size of the Pacific Ocean. You don't get approval, end of story.
H2O2 is a walk in the park compared to liquid O2. Both are quite nasty, but people usually survive a dousing in 95% hydrogen peroxide: yes, you are porcelain white for a few weeks, but you live. That assumes you have a decent shower on-site (think water-tower, not hose-pipe.) O2 accidents of similar magnitude kill you: cryogenic freezing, plus O2 mixes with organics to form pressure-sensitive explosive slush.
LOX eats through bad rocket elements (e.g. below spec piping and valves) much faster than H2O2, and the low temp makes valve sticking and thermal mismatch failures much more likely.
To get equivalent safety, working with LOX will cost 10 times as much.
Actually, you are wrong. this is why covers of songs violate copyright law (if you cover them without permision). if i record myself playing a previously writen song, and sell the recording, i am violating copyright law. copyright law was created before recordings were easy to copy, so saying that you are only violating the law if you are distributing copies of the actuall recording is foolish.
Please try to pay attention. A cover of a song is a violation because you are COPYING the lyrics/melody of the song you are covering.
recordings of songs arent copyrighted, its the sequence of notes that is being copyrighted. just like they copyrighted a sequence of notes (phone numbers)
Of course "recordings of songs" are copyrighted, that's why the recording industry is unhappy about MP3s. You really think all CDs of performances of Bach's work are copyright free?
Still doesn't work - you type in a phone number you know, i.e. have dialled before. You only typed it in because you had already created that melody yourself. No violation there. Even if you haven't dialled it before, the fact that you know it means someone gave you the equivalent of "sheet music" for the number, and that was independently created. No violation.
However, I believe that once you are made aware of the copyright you must desist or else you are in violation.
Independent invention is not a violation (unlike patent law.) I could spend months writing the perfect Apple II sprite blitter. You, being equally intelligent and hard-working, independently create the same 60 line routine. We can now both copyright the exact same thing! We both created it, and we can both prevent third parties from copying our work. When Programmer C creates the exactly same routine and uses it in a game, we can both try to sue him. Do we win? If he bought a copy of my game, and he is a known disassembler, then I have a good chance of winning. If you published your routine in a magazine he subscribes to, you will probably win. Otherwise, he gets to copyright the routine as well!
Slashdot Mirror
Buildings
A mural
Um, how can you be "obligated to oblige?" This is a recursion that would stain any laywer's mind.
Building owners/architects have sued and won for copyright infringement/trademark dilution when their buildings were used in a movie without their permission. Times Square light-boards are pretty distinctive, and a judge might well side with the owners on the above grounds.
Absolutely. Most people don't understand how stuff borrows from other stuff.
My personal theory is that Star Wars was mostly borrowed from the Wizard of Oz. It's so obvious when you think about the main characters:
SW: Has a large, cowardly, shaggy animal.
Oz: Has a large, cowardly, shaggy lion.
SW: Has a whiny robot made of tin
Oz: Has a whiny tin-man made of tin.
SW: Has a comedic R-to-D-to
Oz: Has a comedic toto
I shoulda been a eng-lit major!
Ah, it sounds like you have the Criterion version of the Seven Samurai. Listen to the commentary again: yes, at first, it sounds trivial. Now listen again: body drops into a perfectly framed triangle, deep focus on big sword, rain on the village.
Of course it easy to provide good commentary on a bad film, the great ones (Seven Samurai, Seventh Seal, Dr. Strangelove) have no errors: all you can do is praise the technique.
The Seven Samurai is one of the best movies ever made - could you annotate any scene with more than "this is perfect?"
This is an idea that sounds good on the surface but is actually very bad.
If you could sue the USPO, the majority of suits would be from companies suing to have their patents *granted*. Being able to sue would just give them a second whack at the pinata.
Normal small companies and rational individuals would not sue to have bad patents denied: if you have the money to go to trial, it's better to wait until the patent is enforced in an unfair way.
So, could you restricts suits to reimbursing the costs of unfair patents? "Unfair" would need to mean that a court had invalidated the patent or restricted its scope, so the defendant would already have gone to trial for patent infringment, and prevailed. In this case, he may well ask for court costs, and get them (especially in a David & Goliath situation) so the USPO incompetance has, in some sense, cost him nothing.
If the defendant can't afford to defend himself in court, no one is going to judge the patent to be "bad."
IANAL, etc.
Facinating, I was just moderated "overrated" on a post that had not been rated!
How many moderator points do Scientologists' have anyway?
You've hit the nail on the head: the telcos don't understand the business that they are really in.
Today, customers of the telcos want to moves bits from physical location A to physical location B. If a telco is concentrating on any goal other than this, they are doomed: dumb analog services (e.g. call waiting, message boxes, redial) are just milking a dying cow. Telcos must understand that the end-points now have the smarts - they should just be in the business of moving bits. That means leasing dark fiber, providing redundant circuits, whatever it takes.
Telcos are selling a commodity: work on that, you stay alive, forget it, you die.
Earth calling moderators. Come in, moderators.
If you don't know the long history of Scientology using technical means (e.g. issuing bogus rmgroups and spamming critical newsgroups) or legal means (e.g. the "Tom Cruise missile" incident,) or bizarre means (trying to frame a journalist as a bomber, maybe killing a judge's dog, the "bladders of blood, I was nearly raped incident," you should sit back, do a Google search, read the pages, and remember that your moderation points last for three days.
In summary, the above post was not a troll, it was, if anything, insightful or funny.
Unix? I thought the article was about pre-teen girl's breasts:
I played ball with my friends, rode my bike around the neighborhood, caught a glimpse of Stacy Baker's 6th grade breasts when she showed them to me
my insides twist around like I'm 12 years old and about to see a girl's breasts for the first time.
Linux was a lot like a girl named Allison that I used to date. She was a hot redhead with large, firm breasts in most of my honors classes.
It made me laugh too: it's a beautifully dry bit of writing.
Obviously, the author could have said: "most of our users just ignore proprietary licenses and install the software anyway. We would prefer a plan that doesn't expose us to future lawsuits." But what he wrote got the same point across without implying past sins, yet at the same time showing a course of action that is good and clearly not an attempt to hide prior (obviously non-existent) violations.
All in all, a really nice turn of phrase.
Most poeple do not have the education or time to provide good input to surveys like this. NASA should provide a broad set of possible future directions/goals and allow people to pick amongst them.
Given that most people are not familiar with current scientific research, but are quite up-to-date on blockbuster sci-fi movies, I modestly propose an improved NASA survey....
Where do you want the USA to be 200 years from now?
1) Star Wars. We at NASA get to work on personal high-performance spacecraft, cool blasters, and the search for cute, intelligent extra-terrestrials.
2) Star Trek. We work on big Navy spaceships, womens' rights, and the search for aliens made of pure energy, etc.
3) Babylon 5. We will design big ass space stations that are like New York only in space.
4) 2001. We will build cool spaceships, smart computers. You won't understand and we don't care.
5) Buck Rogers. We'll make cute robots. We'll hire hot babes. Everyone wins!
6) Dark Star. Hey, we admit it: we're just another government agency that does the best in can with limited funds.
7) Capricorn 5. You want cool video? We'll provide it.
8) Armageddon. We will protect you against incredibly improbable things.
9) Independence Day: We'll really ramp up our Area 51 research project. Crop circles? Cow anus mutilation? We're ON IT!
10) Apollo 13: We'll stick people in tin cans, throw them into hazardous environments, and see what happens. More exciting than Survivor!
Birds of a feather flock together. Microsoft the Monopolist along with USPS the Monopolist.
Funny thing is, the US DOJ went after Microsoft, trying to break its monopoly grip. So why doesn't the DOJ go after the USPS for its monopoly grip on first class mail service? Because the USPS is a government-sanctioned and -backed and -enforced monopoly, which makes the whole thing against Microsoft fairly ironic.
No! The DOJ went after Microsoft for unfair use of its monopoly. It's fine to be a monopoly, but when you are, you must play be much stricter rules. For example, the USPS must deliver to everyone, and therefore can't charge an extra $50 to people living in out of the way areas. They also can't decide to charge more to businesses that also use FedEx at times.
As a government sanctioned monopoly, USPS is restricted more: they can't even raise prices without approval.
If Microsoft had carefully documented APIs, provided all firms with equal access to new product information, and not entered into special pricing deals (Win for $45 if you don't allow dual-OSes,) they probably would never have been attacked by the DOJ.
It's quite well composed: starts out slowly with a nod to the endless chocolate chip recipes, then builds towards more interesting "foods."
Damn straight - that f'ing site features 1 popup and 1 pop under per page, plus a few extra for fun.
What a totally moronic article: "it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the cost." Gee, who would have ever thought? If it costs us $20000/lb to get stuff in orbit, what the hell are we going to ship back to earth to make it worthwhile?
"The moon's got a lot of silicon and oxygen," Hey, news flash: its common name is "sand." We have a lot of it down on Earth too.
We can't even create automated mining facilities on Earth for fuck's sack, how are we going to get them working on the moon?
We've got big mineral deposits in Africa we don't exploit because it isn't economically feasible to build a mountain railroad. No problem, let's build a self-assembling, automated mining facility, ship it to the moon, have it build a railgun to launch processed resources back to us. Oh, and to be cost-effective, why not make it self-replicating? WTF? Why not just invent teleporter technology while you're at it?
Fame just lets you strike out with a higher class of woman.
I ordered 2 PC101 keyboards from that firm while reading the article. That keyboard was a thing of beauty.
My approach to the ultimate Linux machine is quite simple: I buy a new machine every two years, but keep my 21" monitor across upgrades (and my keyboard now!) Backups are handled by buying a new disk every 9 months (capacity has doubled, I just mirror everything and then throw out the smallest disk on my machine: 160G now) If I ever hear swapping, I upgrade immediately (512M now.)
This obviously isn't the most economical solution, but it is the most efficient if I assign a $/hour number to my time.
In theory, everyone should be using LISP: it's fast, interactive, elegant, extensible, and reflective. Many modern languages lack its power: e.g. most "design patterns" are solutions to the problem that you aren't using LISP.
As time goes on, I get to program in LISP less and less, largely because it is being used less. I've wondered about this for some time, and here's my theory:
In the old days, when computers cost $200,000 a piece, the scarcity of hardware made the competition for the chance at a CS degree very high. Graduating required at least the ability to write a compiler, a toy OS, know how to use all the standard data structures, know algorithmic complexity, Turing machines, computability, etc. A DEC-20 supported so few users that a Uni could only graduate 40 CS majors per year: the bar was raised to the point that those making it intuitively understood that LISP expressed computation well.
When desktop machines arrived, there became a demand for programmers (people that could turn ideas in programs.) The schools could turn out more programmers because resources where cheaper for them too. CS (or IT) became as common a major as English Lit, and the bell-curve of talent was no longer chopped off at +3 sigma.
10 years ago, many new CS graduates couldn't explain what a Continuation was. Now, many can't explain how a hashtable is implemented. Moore's Law has obsoleted deep CS knowledge (and thus LISP,) as brutally as the industrial revolution killed weaving skills.
There will always pockets of LISP (the skilled craftmen working on human-scale projects,) but the vast bulk of computer programming is now carried out by people with neither the time, inclination, nor mental capacity to understand what was once Computer Science.
I wish I were wrong, but I fear programming is becoming like food: yes, there will always be some great chefs, but most people in the industry will never be able to progress beyond their fast food outlet's Fryolator.
The wreckage zone is much bigger for two reasons: you may need to abort during the climb to launch alt, and you don't know where the launch will take place.
.1% or so, airplane 1 in ten million or so. Plowing in foreign soil is a no-no. In theory, you could get the waiver, but it still seems easier to just tank up a big dumb booster, ideally launched from White Sands or similar, so you can avoid the FAA red tape.
Assuming a 4 hour climb, you may pass through the jet stream (giving you a speed of 100 mph or more) and then get pushed around by the stratospheric winds. You might have travelled 300 miles or more in a relatively random direction. From this unknown location, you fire your rocket. In this thin air, it easily reaches Mach 4 and starts to go off course. You abort, and put the debris into a nice lob in the thin air. This gives you an additional couple of hundred miles in a random direction.
Ok, I exaggerated a bit - the debris zone is in the 100,000 square mile range: the FAA wants numbers that show the chance of hitting a ship is
The main reason is the FAA. If you want to be a high alt attempt, you need to file a lot of paperwork concerning your flight plan and risks to populated areas/foreign airspace. In theory, you could get approval for an orbital shot from two places in the USA (Black Rock and Alaska,) if you have a self-destruct device on board. Note that a self-destruct doesn't make the rocket vanish, it just puts the debris in a safe zone. Now, if you want to float to 120,000 feet before launch, your debris zone is about the size of the Pacific Ocean. You don't get approval, end of story.
LOX eats through bad rocket elements (e.g. below spec piping and valves) much faster than H2O2, and the low temp makes valve sticking and thermal mismatch failures much more likely.
To get equivalent safety, working with LOX will cost 10 times as much.
Actually, you are wrong. this is why covers of songs violate copyright law (if you cover them without permision). if i record myself playing a previously writen song, and sell the recording, i am violating copyright law. copyright law was created before recordings were easy to copy, so saying that you are only violating the law if you are distributing copies of the actuall recording is foolish.
Please try to pay attention. A cover of a song is a violation because you are COPYING the lyrics/melody of the song you are covering.
recordings of songs arent copyrighted, its the sequence of notes that is being copyrighted. just like they copyrighted a sequence of notes (phone numbers)
Of course "recordings of songs" are copyrighted, that's why the recording industry is unhappy about MP3s. You really think all CDs of performances of Bach's work are copyright free?
Still doesn't work - you type in a phone number you know, i.e. have dialled before. You only typed it in because you had already created that melody yourself. No violation there. Even if you haven't dialled it before, the fact that you know it means someone gave you the equivalent of "sheet music" for the number, and that was independently created. No violation.
However, I believe that once you are made aware of the copyright you must desist or else you are in violation.
Independent invention is not a violation (unlike patent law.) I could spend months writing the perfect Apple II sprite blitter. You, being equally intelligent and hard-working, independently create the same 60 line routine. We can now both copyright the exact same thing! We both created it, and we can both prevent third parties from copying our work. When Programmer C creates the exactly same routine and uses it in a game, we can both try to sue him. Do we win? If he bought a copy of my game, and he is a known disassembler, then I have a good chance of winning. If you published your routine in a magazine he subscribes to, you will probably win. Otherwise, he gets to copyright the routine as well!