While indeed the current trend is to abuse copyright via absurd lengths, "modern" copyright law originated much earlier than the USA's founding - in Europe, where it was used as a means to ensure that only words agreeable to the Crown and the Church were distributed, as the technology of the printing press began to spread in the 15th and 16th centuries. Note that the first privileges of monopoly were given to the printers, not the authors; e.g. in Britain the latter were not "protected" by the Law until the Copyright Act of 1709.
Modern patents have a similarly sordid origin; it's not a coincidence that the system arose at a time when the ability to record and distribute information began to grow in tandem with the need for more workers (all potential leaks) to meet product demand, and many patents were to manufacturers and middlemen, not necessarily the inventors. Also, while the granting of patents became systematic around 1450 in Venice, formally publishing the descriptions of patented inventions was not introduced until 1555 by King Henry II of France (and that concept spread very slowly). Basically? Patents were still "viciously protected" trade secrets, it was just that the privilege of breaking your kneecaps for tattling was enforced by the crown.
TL,DR: copyrights and patents originated as self-serving plutocratic legislation; as social and economic systems grew increasingly tangled and interdependent, what appears to be a "modern" system built on mutual respect is the result of enough varied selfish interests pulling taut the legal fabric as to give only the semblance of a level playing field.
The laws governing copyright, patents, trademarks and every other legal concept commonly lumped under the banner of "Intellectual Property" are all entirely different, and in most cases they are mutually exclusive. This makes using them in the aggregate as "Intellectual Property" legally meaningless if one is trying to state something concrete.
I disagree. The term "intellectual property" is a useful super-set for the group of sets "copyright", "patent", etcetera, that all result from different legislative approaches to the same goal: monopolising wealth by artificially restricting the use of information.
(of the "big three", I find trademarks the least offensive in this regard - the idea of a "maker's mark" at least began as an honest attempt to provide something useful to the citizenry, whilst copyrights and patents are rooted in their origins of censorship and extortion respectively)
I'd give it a year, tops, before our already-vaguely-representative government would be replaced by completely un-representative, un-traceable overlords.
Hmm. What's really more terrifying, some foreign wackos that could've been stopped by locking and reinforcing a door, or our own police force preying on the very people whom they swore an oath to protect and serve?
... hmm. It occurs to me that the GP can be completely wrong about there being some grand conspiracy and yet still accurately describe/predict what happens.
Enough people, acting independently towards coincidentally similar goals, can look remarkably like a conspiracy from the outside.
And unfortunately cause the same problems.
Best to amend the system so that the effect is prevented/fixed regardless of the cause.
Uh, either way your "quickly try to estimate" idea still means you are staring into an atomic explosion. You should instead take cover immediately, thus covering both bases.
If they can get it down to a quarter-hour I'd be happy. Enough time to take that healthy walk after hours of driving, grab a bite to eat, etc. And if I wasn't doing cross-country, it probably means I've either repeatedly forgotten to charge the car at home or I've got bigger problems.
I had a dream once, where our first meeting with aliens involved a giant spaceship appearing over the capital and confiscating the White House in the case of "The Galactic Republic versus 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States, Earth".
I was much more interested in the cool giant spaceship and not the politicians complaining at their own civil forfeiture laws being used against them, but anyway...
MIRV = Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. So each of those 1500 MIRVs carries multiple nuclear warheads. Need five mid-sized nukes to wipe out NYC? No problem. Ten for LA? Still no problem. One missile each, just program in your preferred detonation pattern for the warheads:
I had understood the US to have the most with some 6000, and other than western europe and Russia I didnt think anyone else had any.
From the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russia and US have rough parity, then it's France/China/Britain, then Israel/Pakistan/India, then North Korea, in descending orders of magnitude.
You're thinking "world" = "surface area". I strongly suspect the GP is thinking "world" = "modern civilisation". Deploy even a fifth of those 1500 MIRVs against the planet by strategically targeting urban population centres in order of descending population, and the world as we know it would be gone.
Why not have each reviewer's rating for a given item/location be statistically compared/weighted to that reviewer's history of ratings, e.g. a 5-star rating from someone who consistently gives 5-star ratings for everything could be valued less than someone who only does so some of the time, with weighting for older reviewers, anonymous reviewers, etc. Basically the equivalent of a bayesian spam filter, except for reviewers instead of mail. Yes, it won't be perfect, but can it at least be better than what we have now?
You put your grubby mits on my nice clean monitor and you're pulling back a bloody stump. Are you fucking people blind? Smears and fingerprints drive me nuts!
... where did you source your monitor, Umbrella or Weyland-Utani or something?
That's (state) socialism, not communism. I've pondered that communism ("characterized by the absence of social classes, money and the state") should be easier to achieve via capitalism than via (state) socialism, since the former more strongly encourages the technological innovations required to provide the means of eliminating scarcity that communism requires to be at all practical.
That, so far to me, was the deepest irony of the USSR: to eliminate the State, they created the State, and It was doomed from the beginning; whether or not communism may one day be feasible, our 20th Century selves lacked (and still lack) the technology to compensate for our psychology.
The USA and similar "capitalist" nations do have their own irony: one of their economic foundations is the very non-capitalist structure of copyright and patent law (think about it: fundamentally, the state dictates who may use any idea, enforcing artificial scarcities and artificially captive markets). It will be interesting to see if/how they overcome this flaw.
Ugh, one of those questions. By which I mean, people do tend to unconsciously insert "knowingly" into such questions, proceed to consciously answer "No", and then there it is, lurking silently in the filing cabinet for if HR ever need a pretext to fire someone.
I believe the implication is that if your opponents are claiming to be proponents of the existing government, it's hypocritical of them to use illegal means in their efforts to silence you - the old "do as I say, not as I do" problem.
Slashdot Mirror
While indeed the current trend is to abuse copyright via absurd lengths, "modern" copyright law originated much earlier than the USA's founding - in Europe, where it was used as a means to ensure that only words agreeable to the Crown and the Church were distributed, as the technology of the printing press began to spread in the 15th and 16th centuries. Note that the first privileges of monopoly were given to the printers, not the authors; e.g. in Britain the latter were not "protected" by the Law until the Copyright Act of 1709.
Modern patents have a similarly sordid origin; it's not a coincidence that the system arose at a time when the ability to record and distribute information began to grow in tandem with the need for more workers (all potential leaks) to meet product demand, and many patents were to manufacturers and middlemen, not necessarily the inventors. Also, while the granting of patents became systematic around 1450 in Venice, formally publishing the descriptions of patented inventions was not introduced until 1555 by King Henry II of France (and that concept spread very slowly). Basically? Patents were still "viciously protected" trade secrets, it was just that the privilege of breaking your kneecaps for tattling was enforced by the crown.
TL,DR: copyrights and patents originated as self-serving plutocratic legislation; as social and economic systems grew increasingly tangled and interdependent, what appears to be a "modern" system built on mutual respect is the result of enough varied selfish interests pulling taut the legal fabric as to give only the semblance of a level playing field.
I disagree. The term "intellectual property" is a useful super-set for the group of sets "copyright", "patent", etcetera, that all result from different legislative approaches to the same goal: monopolising wealth by artificially restricting the use of information.
(of the "big three", I find trademarks the least offensive in this regard - the idea of a "maker's mark" at least began as an honest attempt to provide something useful to the citizenry, whilst copyrights and patents are rooted in their origins of censorship and extortion respectively)
What's more important, the claims of one sock-puppet or the actions of the person wearing both sock-puppets?
Completely untraceable transactions, physically divorced from the participants? Now where have I seen that before... oh.
GIFT.
What do you think criminals would do with completely untraceable transactions? What do you think organised crime would do? You might want to study the consequences of driving transactions underground during the Prohibition era.
I'd give it a year, tops, before our already-vaguely-representative government would be replaced by completely un-representative, un-traceable overlords.
Hmm. What's really more terrifying, some foreign wackos that could've been stopped by locking and reinforcing a door, or our own police force preying on the very people whom they swore an oath to protect and serve?
What? It was a _no-knock_ warrant, how would they have known there were any officers to impede?
... hmm. It occurs to me that the GP can be completely wrong about there being some grand conspiracy and yet still accurately describe/predict what happens.
Enough people, acting independently towards coincidentally similar goals, can look remarkably like a conspiracy from the outside.
And unfortunately cause the same problems.
Best to amend the system so that the effect is prevented/fixed regardless of the cause.
Oh, the irony. Congratulations, you now have an idea of how the Michigan public were treated.
Uh, either way your "quickly try to estimate" idea still means you are staring into an atomic explosion. You should instead take cover immediately, thus covering both bases.
If they can get it down to a quarter-hour I'd be happy. Enough time to take that healthy walk after hours of driving, grab a bite to eat, etc. And if I wasn't doing cross-country, it probably means I've either repeatedly forgotten to charge the car at home or I've got bigger problems.
I had a dream once, where our first meeting with aliens involved a giant spaceship appearing over the capital and confiscating the White House in the case of "The Galactic Republic versus 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States, Earth".
I was much more interested in the cool giant spaceship and not the politicians complaining at their own civil forfeiture laws being used against them, but anyway...
... did you mean "tough" and "toughness"? If so, sadly, yeah.
... that second graph in the first link is interesting, regardless of whether any primary causes are anthropogenic or not.
... George Lucas?
Maybe my google-fu is weak today, I got nothing (but pages and pages of that Amidala quote). Please cite the original quote from the actual person?
MIRV = Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. So each of those 1500 MIRVs carries multiple nuclear warheads. Need five mid-sized nukes to wipe out NYC? No problem. Ten for LA? Still no problem. One missile each, just program in your preferred detonation pattern for the warheads:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Here's a long-exposure photo of a single "Peacekeeper" missile dropping eight independent warheads (unarmed in this case):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
From the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russia and US have rough parity, then it's France/China/Britain, then Israel/Pakistan/India, then North Korea, in descending orders of magnitude.
http://bos.sagepub.com/content...
You're thinking "world" = "surface area". I strongly suspect the GP is thinking "world" = "modern civilisation". Deploy even a fifth of those 1500 MIRVs against the planet by strategically targeting urban population centres in order of descending population, and the world as we know it would be gone.
Why not have each reviewer's rating for a given item/location be statistically compared/weighted to that reviewer's history of ratings, e.g. a 5-star rating from someone who consistently gives 5-star ratings for everything could be valued less than someone who only does so some of the time, with weighting for older reviewers, anonymous reviewers, etc. Basically the equivalent of a bayesian spam filter, except for reviewers instead of mail. Yes, it won't be perfect, but can it at least be better than what we have now?
To borrow from HHGttG, maybe the foreigners realise the purpose of the president is "not to wield power but to draw attention away from it"?
On slashdot, GP usually means "Grand-Parent (post)", as in:
Grand-Parent post
.. Parent post
.. .. This post.
You put your grubby mits on my nice clean monitor and you're pulling back a bloody stump.
Are you fucking people blind? Smears and fingerprints drive me nuts!
... where did you source your monitor, Umbrella or Weyland-Utani or something?
Point taken.
That's (state) socialism, not communism. I've pondered that communism ("characterized by the absence of social classes, money and the state") should be easier to achieve via capitalism than via (state) socialism, since the former more strongly encourages the technological innovations required to provide the means of eliminating scarcity that communism requires to be at all practical.
That, so far to me, was the deepest irony of the USSR: to eliminate the State, they created the State, and It was doomed from the beginning; whether or not communism may one day be feasible, our 20th Century selves lacked (and still lack) the technology to compensate for our psychology.
The USA and similar "capitalist" nations do have their own irony: one of their economic foundations is the very non-capitalist structure of copyright and patent law (think about it: fundamentally, the state dictates who may use any idea, enforcing artificial scarcities and artificially captive markets). It will be interesting to see if/how they overcome this flaw.
Ugh, one of those questions. By which I mean, people do tend to unconsciously insert "knowingly" into such questions, proceed to consciously answer "No", and then there it is, lurking silently in the filing cabinet for if HR ever need a pretext to fire someone.
I believe the implication is that if your opponents are claiming to be proponents of the existing government, it's hypocritical of them to use illegal means in their efforts to silence you - the old "do as I say, not as I do" problem.