As long as definance continues then they can't claim victory.
Although a typo, this is in fact the essence of the truth: if we de-finance them -- if we stop giving money to companies that abuse our rights -- then those companies will go away, as money is their only weapon...
If something supposedly changes one's life and they don't even notice, then simple logic tends to suggest that nothing really ever changed in the first place.
Um, that's not "simple logic" because it's not true. The changes might be too subtle or too slow to be easily noticed. They also might begin slow and then accelerate -- during the initial phase you might not notice. Consider the example of weather: A change of one or two degrees might not be noticed by you. Does that mean it never occurs? What about when the temperature change is enough to trigger precipitation?
Should you wait until the changes are irrevocable before agreeing there have been some? Or should you look at subtle measures and try to get an accurate model of the current state of things? I definitely believe in the latter: Although these cases specifically have not wrought great changes in your daily life, they presage a coming tectonic shift.
As another example, drawn from the law: When the Supreme Court held that the state tax assessor could asses a railroad but not the local assessor, it seemed like a tiny thing which had no discernible impact on most people. Yet it was the pinhole through which the legal monster "corporate personhood" entered the law, and in the course of a century has completely shifted the balance of power. Was it worthy of ignoring it just because the first change was small? Or might we have been better off if more people had paid attention then?
But personally I believe it's a poor business decision. It's not like they're knocking anyone dead with the quality of their printers as it is.
Indeed. But then, they don't make their money on the printer. They make it on selling toner cartridges... hence the impulse to block a competitor offering toner for less. I agree it's a stupid move but it makes a certain amount of perverse sense, under the current mode of thinking in Corporatania.
I'm going to put in a claim, then use that $20 to support the EFF (or maybe a different consumer-rights organization). Let's use the record companies' money against them!
The corporation exists to make money. That is its sole purpose in life.
Not too long ago you could have said "The person exists to get food. That is his/her sole purpose in life." And it even would have been true, for a very long time. But you know what? Somewhere along the way, we grew up a little. We saw that there is more to life than grabbing the next, or the biggest, meal. There's a whole Universe of things above, beyond, and immament in the purely material.
Maybe it's time for corporations to grow up, too. Maybe it's time for us to demand that they do, to remove the legal justifications for ones that don't, and to provide the legal framework that allows ones that do. The courts have recognized that, in certain ways, a corporation is a "person". With those rights come certain responsibilities too -- an ethics that can trascend the pure profit motive.
Where is the principle of first sale then? It is NOT present. I was never saying the law didn't mention first sale, nor that fair use isn't mentioned in the law.
This of course is the evil genuis nature of the DMCA. As has been claimed, you have certain rights... but you don't have the right to exercise those rights.
This is my scheme for copy protection: Either a product is released "in plaintext" -- that is, with no access control mechanisms -- and the copyright holder is allowed to pursue infringers through the power of the courts. Or a piece is released with technological protections in place -- but then the producer has no right to redress under the court system.
In other words, don't muck with First Sale or Fair Use -- or you're on your own. If your encryption/protection works, more power to you. But if some kiddie cracks your access control mechanism, then too bad... you have no right to sue.
I don't think there's a snowball's chance in a supernova of such a law passing, but I think it would be fair.
I'm not saying that I agree with the ruling, but in the MP3.com case, the judge ruled exactly that: He said that people could rip their CDs to MP3 and upload them to individual accounts at MP3.com. The company could then offer a service wherein they downloaded a copied MP3 from a customer's directory to that customer's computer (or streamed it... I don't recall). This would all be legitimate timeshifting and spaceshifting.
But, the judge ruled, MP3.com was not allowed to rip the MP3 once, keep it in a central directory, and then download it to customers who possessed the CD.
Yes, the digital copies would be identical. Yes, it would be impossible for any outside agency to distinguish which MP3s were ripped by the customer and which by MP3.com. Yes, this seemed to be a natural (and non-infringing) extension of Fair Use. And no, I have no clue what the judge was thinking that day.
Wow, this is like the distilled essence of copyright myth...
I believe as long as you are not selling it fair use applies
No. Although profit motive has a role in deciding whether a thing is fair use, it is not the sole or even primary factor.
Besides most TV shows are broadcast across the airwaves making them public domain
No. Broadcast on the public airwaves does not render something "public domain" (which has a very precise meaning in copyright law). It does entitle you to making a "timeshift" copy (i.e., to record it on VCR).
Basicly everyone has a license to view TV programming
Sort of but this license does not include copying.
Is it legal for me to record a show with a VCR and then keep it? Is it legal for me to record a show on a pc and keep it? Is it legal for a friend to record a show on a vcr and give me the tape ? Is it legal for a friend to record a show on a vcr and for me to make a copy of his tape? Is it legal for a friend to record a show on a computer and give me a copy?
Yes. Yes. No. No. No. It really isn't tricky: The courts have said you may make a copy of a TV broadcast for timeshifting or spaceshifting for personal use only. Heck, remember the MP3.com case: A judge said that MP3.com couldn't distribute digital copies of a CD even to people who verifiably owned the CD (and thus were entitled to making their own copies).
It seems like this is an attempt to improve performance. The side effect is that the RFC is broken
No. The RFC is the framework. The Internet is a system of systems that can be interlinked because they communicate according to a well-established, public, open framework. No company should be in the "business" in mucking with that. If Microsoft discovered a failing in the RFC -- which, by all appearances, they did not -- then there exists a well-established, well-understood path to fixing the framework.
Here, Microsoft has decided, arrogantly IMHO, that their tiny bit of speed enhancement is worth making the TCP connection less reliable. At the very least this wastes bandwidth; it might also waste human resources as people try to track down a "glitch" in their system that simply isn't there. If Microsoft found that the RFC is "broken", why didn't they tell anyone? Why didn't they try to help "fix" it?
No, this is the same penny-ante, half-assed crap that spawned Windows: Let's use all these undocumented tricks to make our software look better. Standards be damned. Interoperability be damned. Our customers be damned, and by God, the greater public be damned.
For all their talk of information "ecosystems", Microsoft still conducts themselves like a classic slash-and-burn outfit.
we obviously have only to protect what really counts; a few statues and a mountain shaped like some dead peoples heads.
Yes, because after all, symbols don't have any importance to a people... I for one am glad to see my tax dollars spent on a project like this. And if the Statue of Liberty were to fall to terrorism, I would be among those donating for a replacement. Symbols matter. To same extent, they're all that does matter.
Hmmm. Deliberately breaking -- oh, I'm sorry, "rewriting" -- one of the core technologies of the Internet, without telling anyone and in such a way as to pad their speed numbers? Nah, nothing wrong about that...
Either the DRM is complex. Then people don't understand it. Or it is seamless. Then you don't tell them about it.
Or, the DRM is complex and clunky, therefore things fail mysteriously. For a world that has come to accept the Blue Screen of Death, and for whom "equipment failure" is the first, last, and only response of tech support, Hollywood can try to skate by with a "Your equipment doesn't work", leaving the consumer frustrated and confused.
From a journalist, who is supposed to understand basic grammar rules as part of the job, this is just sad. And in the New York Times, no less.
I happen to agree with your point on this particular style issue, but I want to offer up this thought: The New York Times has a well-known Style Guide and, while I have no idea what it says about pluralizing acronyms, I am sure it says something. The writer and his/her editor are surely going to go by that, not a Web-based self-appointed guardian of grammar. Just because a lot of people contribute to a discussion, doesn't mean the discussion is authoritative (slashdot, anyone?).
Much more importantly, one of the great strengths of the English language is its similarity to Perl: There's More Than One Way to Do It. Thankfully, we have no great temple of English usage, where Zen oracles tell we little people what the correct form is. Many competent authorities compete on issues of style. Considering the reach and clout of the New York Times, I think it's fair to say that their Style Guide can be taken as an authority... certainly at least as much as an Internet mailing list can.
The most exciting part, for me, about something new is waiting to see how people innovate.
Just because something is new, doesn't means it's truly innovative... The Segway strikes me as a solution in search of a problem -- and for the problems it would solve, there already exist mature-tech and better solutions.
Re:The purpose of comments is to be USEFUL...
on
Linux Kernel Code Humor
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No. A purpose of comments is to be useful. As the bazillion examples posted here show, there are apparently other uses for comments, such as to let off steam, amuse oneself (or one's peers), or just be clever.
Unless the spurious commenting actively obstructs maintenance -- and it's hard to imagine how it could do that -- it's perfectly fine if it's funny, witty, or (gasp!) off-task. Work is done better by those who enjoy themselves doing it.
What if the snowflake were made out of some compound that neither expanded nor contracted when melted?
Firstly, there can be no such material. But leaving that aside: The original post asked how a snowflake could have a fractal volume, if when melted the resulting water has a good old 3D volume. I was merely pointing out that deducing anything about the snowflake's volume from the behavior of a different phase is invalid. It's like proving that the volume of a sphere can't be (4pi)/3 r^3, because if I take an iceball of radius r and melt it in a cylindrical container, the volume turns out to be pi r^2 h. The two facts are independently true but have no necessary relation.
That is, you've got one three-dimensional liter of water versus one fractionally- dimensional liter of water?
No, the volume is changed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Even with classical geometry, the volume isn't conserved. Melting an ice cube changes its volume. Why shouldn't melting a snowflake? As has been mentioned, the alteration of the configuration does indeed affect volume.
Seriously though, it's not like Gibson has weak books
Um, can you say "The Difference Engine"?
Re:So will they blame terrorists...
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Blockquoth the poster:
"Thinking" pilots are the cause of most accidents. In the event of a controller fuckup (ie: near collision), the systems on commercial jets tell the pilots what to do.
Indeed, in that awful crash over (IIRC) Sweden last summer, it turned out that the pilot of one plane chose to listen to the human traffic controller (who did not have the right information) and to ignore the onboard system (which was giving the right instructions)...
But why stop there? The cause of almost all vehicular accidents on the highways is human error. In a century of automobile engineering, the only system that has failed to become safer is the driver. I think, seriously, that we should be working hard on removing humans from that loop.
It's somewhat reassuring that whatever they come up with will have to be approved by the FCC, but I somehow feel that the FCC should be the one designing the standard to begin with, to insure that everything is fair and impartial.
Yes, it's a good thing we've got an administration that will safeguard citizens' rights over the predations of big nasty corpor -- oh, wait...
if they did that they might as well change their party mascot to the elephant;-)
There are those that would say that the Democrats ought to do just that. And there are those -- like myself, a lifelong Dem -- who would say they already have.
obviously, the page-widening was an undesirable effect, so the Slash code was modified to insert spaces into long character strings so that they would word wrap - effectively averting that problem.
Couldn't the original.sig holder work around this by simply inserting a space after one of the semi-colons? What's wrong with
Slashdot Mirror
Although a typo, this is in fact the essence of the truth: if we de-finance them -- if we stop giving money to companies that abuse our rights -- then those companies will go away, as money is their only weapon...
Um, that's not "simple logic" because it's not true. The changes might be too subtle or too slow to be easily noticed. They also might begin slow and then accelerate -- during the initial phase you might not notice. Consider the example of weather: A change of one or two degrees might not be noticed by you. Does that mean it never occurs? What about when the temperature change is enough to trigger precipitation?
Should you wait until the changes are irrevocable before agreeing there have been some? Or should you look at subtle measures and try to get an accurate model of the current state of things? I definitely believe in the latter: Although these cases specifically have not wrought great changes in your daily life, they presage a coming tectonic shift.
As another example, drawn from the law: When the Supreme Court held that the state tax assessor could asses a railroad but not the local assessor, it seemed like a tiny thing which had no discernible impact on most people. Yet it was the pinhole through which the legal monster "corporate personhood" entered the law, and in the course of a century has completely shifted the balance of power. Was it worthy of ignoring it just because the first change was small? Or might we have been better off if more people had paid attention then?
Indeed. But then, they don't make their money on the printer. They make it on selling toner cartridges
Well, that's a sacrifice that the Content Cartel is willing to make.
When PVRs are outlawed, only outlaws will have PVRs...
I'm going to put in a claim, then use that $20 to support the EFF (or maybe a different consumer-rights organization). Let's use the record companies' money against them!
Not too long ago you could have said "The person exists to get food. That is his/her sole purpose in life." And it even would have been true, for a very long time. But you know what? Somewhere along the way, we grew up a little. We saw that there is more to life than grabbing the next, or the biggest, meal. There's a whole Universe of things above, beyond, and immament in the purely material.
Maybe it's time for corporations to grow up, too. Maybe it's time for us to demand that they do, to remove the legal justifications for ones that don't, and to provide the legal framework that allows ones that do. The courts have recognized that, in certain ways, a corporation is a "person". With those rights come certain responsibilities too -- an ethics that can trascend the pure profit motive.
Not that I'm holding my breath.
This of course is the evil genuis nature of the DMCA. As has been claimed, you have certain rights
This is my scheme for copy protection: Either a product is released "in plaintext" -- that is, with no access control mechanisms -- and the copyright holder is allowed to pursue infringers through the power of the courts. Or a piece is released with technological protections in place -- but then the producer has no right to redress under the court system.
In other words, don't muck with First Sale or Fair Use -- or you're on your own. If your encryption/protection works, more power to you. But if some kiddie cracks your access control mechanism, then too bad... you have no right to sue.
I don't think there's a snowball's chance in a supernova of such a law passing, but I think it would be fair.
But, the judge ruled, MP3.com was not allowed to rip the MP3 once, keep it in a central directory, and then download it to customers who possessed the CD.
Yes, the digital copies would be identical. Yes, it would be impossible for any outside agency to distinguish which MP3s were ripped by the customer and which by MP3.com. Yes, this seemed to be a natural (and non-infringing) extension of Fair Use. And no, I have no clue what the judge was thinking that day.
No. Although profit motive has a role in deciding whether a thing is fair use, it is not the sole or even primary factor.
No. Broadcast on the public airwaves does not render something "public domain" (which has a very precise meaning in copyright law). It does entitle you to making a "timeshift" copy (i.e., to record it on VCR).
Sort of but this license does not include copying.
Yes. Yes. No. No. No. It really isn't tricky: The courts have said you may make a copy of a TV broadcast for timeshifting or spaceshifting for personal use only. Heck, remember the MP3.com case: A judge said that MP3.com couldn't distribute digital copies of a CD even to people who verifiably owned the CD (and thus were entitled to making their own copies).
No. The RFC is the framework. The Internet is a system of systems that can be interlinked because they communicate according to a well-established, public, open framework. No company should be in the "business" in mucking with that. If Microsoft discovered a failing in the RFC -- which, by all appearances, they did not -- then there exists a well-established, well-understood path to fixing the framework.
Here, Microsoft has decided, arrogantly IMHO, that their tiny bit of speed enhancement is worth making the TCP connection less reliable. At the very least this wastes bandwidth; it might also waste human resources as people try to track down a "glitch" in their system that simply isn't there. If Microsoft found that the RFC is "broken", why didn't they tell anyone? Why didn't they try to help "fix" it?
No, this is the same penny-ante, half-assed crap that spawned Windows: Let's use all these undocumented tricks to make our software look better. Standards be damned. Interoperability be damned. Our customers be damned, and by God, the greater public be damned.
For all their talk of information "ecosystems", Microsoft still conducts themselves like a classic slash-and-burn outfit.
Yes, because after all, symbols don't have any importance to a people... I for one am glad to see my tax dollars spent on a project like this. And if the Statue of Liberty were to fall to terrorism, I would be among those donating for a replacement. Symbols matter. To same extent, they're all that does matter.
Hmmm. Deliberately breaking -- oh, I'm sorry, "rewriting" -- one of the core technologies of the Internet, without telling anyone and in such a way as to pad their speed numbers? Nah, nothing wrong about that...
Or, the DRM is complex and clunky, therefore things fail mysteriously. For a world that has come to accept the Blue Screen of Death, and for whom "equipment failure" is the first, last, and only response of tech support, Hollywood can try to skate by with a "Your equipment doesn't work", leaving the consumer frustrated and confused.
I happen to agree with your point on this particular style issue, but I want to offer up this thought: The New York Times has a well-known Style Guide and, while I have no idea what it says about pluralizing acronyms, I am sure it says something. The writer and his/her editor are surely going to go by that, not a Web-based self-appointed guardian of grammar. Just because a lot of people contribute to a discussion, doesn't mean the discussion is authoritative (slashdot, anyone?).
Much more importantly, one of the great strengths of the English language is its similarity to Perl: There's More Than One Way to Do It. Thankfully, we have no great temple of English usage, where Zen oracles tell we little people what the correct form is. Many competent authorities compete on issues of style. Considering the reach and clout of the New York Times, I think it's fair to say that their Style Guide can be taken as an authority
Just because something is new, doesn't means it's truly innovative... The Segway strikes me as a solution in search of a problem -- and for the problems it would solve, there already exist mature-tech and better solutions.
Unless the spurious commenting actively obstructs maintenance -- and it's hard to imagine how it could do that -- it's perfectly fine if it's funny, witty, or (gasp!) off-task. Work is done better by those who enjoy themselves doing it.
Firstly, there can be no such material. But leaving that aside: The original post asked how a snowflake could have a fractal volume, if when melted the resulting water has a good old 3D volume. I was merely pointing out that deducing anything about the snowflake's volume from the behavior of a different phase is invalid. It's like proving that the volume of a sphere can't be (4pi)/3 r^3, because if I take an iceball of radius r and melt it in a cylindrical container, the volume turns out to be pi r^2 h. The two facts are independently true but have no necessary relation.
No, the volume is changed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Even with classical geometry, the volume isn't conserved. Melting an ice cube changes its volume. Why shouldn't melting a snowflake? As has been mentioned, the alteration of the configuration does indeed affect volume.
The fact that I didn't like it doesn't mean I didn't "get" it. I understood it fine
Um, can you say "The Difference Engine"?
Indeed, in that awful crash over (IIRC) Sweden last summer, it turned out that the pilot of one plane chose to listen to the human traffic controller (who did not have the right information) and to ignore the onboard system (which was giving the right instructions)...
But why stop there? The cause of almost all vehicular accidents on the highways is human error. In a century of automobile engineering, the only system that has failed to become safer is the driver. I think, seriously, that we should be working hard on removing humans from that loop.
Yes, it's a good thing we've got an administration that will safeguard citizens' rights over the predations of big nasty corpor -- oh, wait...
There are those that would say that the Democrats ought to do just that. And there are those -- like myself, a lifelong Dem -- who would say they already have.
Couldn't the original