Do they really think there's gonna be that many people willing to be a narc, without any compensation?
Actually, there is a growing body of research that indicates people will punish non-cooperators in a game, even if that punishment also costs the punisher. There's some socio-equilibrant dynamic going on here... People like fair play and apparently are willing to sacrifice to enforce it.
Of course, then you have to convince people that filesharing is a violation of fair play. Most netizens appear to feel the exact opposite.
Ironic twist was Re:More Info
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Blockquoth the article:
"Included in FAST's software is Webcam software that captures a live example of the site for evidence as well as other basic information about the site," Heathcote Hobbins said
Hey, what if that webcam captures some of the original stuff I put on the Web? Isn't that, in itself, copyright infringement? And does that mean I should click the "F" button while at their website?:)
I'm not saying they're right, but I am saying that they're not so obviously wrong, and that we should consider and discuss.
No, they're pretty obviously wrong. They paid the building to put up the ad, to have it displayed. That service is already rendered. Incidentally, the building is caught on film. They didn't pay to have it on film. They don't own that space forever, and they aren't "entitled" to an incidental benefit. Yay for them if Sony gives them free advertising, but if not, then not.
You're exactly right about the choice being about "cultural significance". Those buildings are part of the culture and their image transcends any particular owner's claim. These guys will just have to live with it.
Or are they proposing to pay a portion of their profits back to all the directors, photographers, etc. who made Times Square into the cultural icon it is? After all, those people "created" the value; don't they deserve compensation more than the yahoos who happen to be renting the space right now?
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
From Merriam-Webster:
accompany:
to go with as an associate or companion
So, no, they actually must make it available immediately. And note we are not talking about, "We're really busy so we can't put it online this weekend." They're taking a "principled" stand that the GPL can be ignored for beta.
Interestingly, I think this proverb cuts exactly the other way. Lindows is getting material and monetary benefit from all the unpaid work of all the Linux coders who came before. They released their work into the wild without compensation, in the understanding that follow-ons would adhere to the same principle, thereby encouraging the growth of useful projects. Now Lindows comes along and says, "Well, shucks, thanks for making all that code available to us -- it's been downright useful. But if you want to see what we came up with, well, sucks to be you."
This is just another case of the digital commons being fenced off to benefit a few sheepherders. It's better to stop it early than when it has momentum.
You can't look at the letter of the law ("limited times"). You have to look at the spirit of it.
All we have is the letter of the law. The "spirit of the law", such as it has any thrust, is decided by the courts. You can't let a potential offender, or for that matter, a potential victim, be the sole arbiter of what the law means. In a system of law, under the rule of law, it is quite important that we conform to the letter of the law... that is what we all share.
If Lindows feels this "law" is invalid, then they can follow their conscience and not obey it. But they sure as hell have no moral right to whine when someone calls them on it, or attempts to have the law enforced.
...Answer: we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.
Um, exactly when does one "get to" never? How long do you wait until you conclude they aren't releasing beta code ever? Will it be releaed only at the end of its useful life? It's the same problem with the Sony Bono Copyright Act: Infinite and unlimited extensions make a mockery of any concept of "limited times" or of "eventually".
In major cities, you don't have to drive, either. You can take public transit or a taxi... less convenient, but hey. It's a small price to pay, right...
The issue is not the technical ability. The issue is, under what circumstances can this be used? What justification does law enforcement have to offer? With pen-register, the answer is, "Virtually none." With wiretap, it's the same as a physical search. Which should cell phone content be considered? How about routing info?
If you mistake this post for legal advice, well, the court'll probably at least find that you're not mentally competent to stand trial...
First of all, if the RIAA was interested in "working with" digital manufacturers, they wouldn't be pushing legislation that dictates to those manufacturers.
Secondly, how arrogant is it to assume that the only solution is going to come from the RIAA. Maybe they're entirely off the wall and working with them would be counterproductive. Maybe they misunderstand the issue so thoroughly, so disingenuously, and so deliberately, as to render them more part of the problem than of the solution.
Maybe it's time the RIAA and MPAA face what, ultimately, is their greatest dread of the digital revolution: We don't need them anymore. Maybe we never did. Maybe this "problem" will be solved without them.
Re:Of all the billions of stars to choose...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
Really? I thought pulsars "beamed" in all directions.
Under current understanding, a pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star. Conservation of angular momentum, combined with the stately rotation of main sequence stars, imply that nuetron stars start off spinning really fast. Conservation of magnetic flux, combined with the noticeable magnetic field around main sequence stars, implies that neutron stars are born with extremely high magnetic fields.
Charged particles -- no one exactly knows the source, either from the surface or raining down from debris in orbit -- are accelerated to very high speeds by the magnetic field. When charges accelerate, they radiate. Since they are tied tightly to the strong field, they move along the field lines, and the radiation is strongly beamed along the flight path. We see that radiation primarily as radio waves, although pulsars have been found at all wavelengths.
Pulsars emit their radiation continually. However, because the star is spinning and the beam is narrow, it "sweeps" across the Earth once per revolution. So we see blips, not a continuous signal. The usual analogy is a lighthouse sweepings its light across the sea.
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
But by the end of the decade there will be as many transistors in your wearable pc as there are nurons in the human brain.
And if this were the world imagined in 1950s science fiction, that would actually mean something. But actual researchers in the field of artificial intelligence long ago conceded that "number of neurons" is not a good figure of merit for intelligence. We have, at best, the barest beginnings of software that emulates the human capacity for pattern recognition; and nothing really even hints of human judgment. I think a field should at least exist before we pronounce it about to surpass human capabilities...
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Blockquoth the poster:
something a little more practical.
Much could have -- and was! -- said about the original accelerators. Why spend all this money whipping protons around a ring? Why not do something "practical"? Say, like medical research. Cure diseases instead of peering at tiny particles.
Interestingly enough, much of what we know about microbiology can be traced back to synchrotron radiation labs. At Stanford, the "waste" photons generated by the synchrotron ring turned out to be useful in X-ray crystolography (I assume the same at other facilities). Now SSRL is so important it can compete with the physics experiments in control of beamtime on the accelerator. All from some "impractical" studies.
The nature of research -- frsutrating as you might find it -- is that you never know, ahead of time, what will be a dead end and what will be "practical". The history of the past few centuries indicates that basic research nearly always ends up enhancing "normal" life.
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
so why do we have drag our frail monkey-bodies to Mars if we can get the raw data cheaper and more safely with instrumentation?
Bandwidth, latency, and computing power. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the best decision-making algorithms reside in the human brain. We respond to unexpected contingencies much better than any robot. We recognize (new) patterns and intuit new consequence faster and more accurately. (See, there is something we do well.)
Mars is around 8 light minutes away. If your probe happens into a dangerous situation, or even an unexpected one, it will take 16 minutes for a teleoperator to respond. That cannot be helped and cannot be controlled. Also, teleoperation requires a lot of data, but the data bit rate from deep space is generally pretty small. So you'd be waiting a long time, 16 minutes out of the loop, for a trickle of information. It's really no wnder we lose so many spacecraft.
As things stand today, a human presence is the most efficient way to conduct wide-ranging exploration.
Re:Of all the billions of stars to choose...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
OK, others have harpooned you on the bogus statistic. I'll just ask, do you have any idea what a "stellar remnant" is? They look at the nebula caused by a star going BOOM! in 1182. Then they looks inside it and try to find an object. Possibly there's a good radio signal; I don't know if this thing is a pulsar, and of course, it might not beam toward us. Either way, 800 years is not a lot of time for an object to move (on galactic scales) and so, whatever we see near the center of the nebula is most likely the remnant. Spectroscopic or other astrometric techniques can determine if the distances coincide.
Also, you've fallen prey to a terrible, terrible fallacy that afflicts even good astronomer: the dreaded Selection Effect. How do you think they "happened" to come across this odd object? Almost certainly, because they were already studying the nebula and remnant. In other words, it's not out of the many billions of stars that they chose. It was out of the much much smaller pool of SNRs.
Re:What's the physics behind this?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
In any case, does anyone have any further knowledge of what force might be keeping these denser-than-neutron stars from collapsing into black holes?
Well, actually, I think it's.... fermionic degeneracy pressure. The quarks are spin 1/2, too, and "smaller" than the neutrons. So they can cram closer before their degeneracy pressure kicks in.
Re:How does this fit in with String theory?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
If this turns out to be true, then they can't be regarded as large elementary particles, since elementary particles must be indistinguishable from each other...
... unless, of course, the string is vibrating in a complicated mixture of nodes, which is (I think) what the extremal black hole theory claims. Of course that relies on a belief that extremal black hole theory "explains" astronomical black holes, a belief that I cannot share. (Sorry, Amanda:) )
Re:Is any of this real?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Blockquoth the poster:
Ok, seriously, I'm not a physicist, but I did pay attention in High School/College, and I have to ask: Do we KNOW any of this stuff. Or is everything just one (educated) guess on top of another.
Well, there is no revealed truth in science, so we don't ever know absolutely that something is real. It has happened before that a theory turns out to be based on a house of cards. Most of that time, in retrospect, it can be seen that the theory got way out in front of experiment and so was improperly constrained. That is, the less we've studied an area, the more likely the theoriest are wrong. As facts come in, theories get revised or strengthened.
On the other hand, remember that in physics, most "revolutions" change our understanding of how things work but do not invalidate existing theories in their realm of applicability. For example, relativity didn't kill Newtonian theory. Indeed, that's still where we start today in physics education. Why didn't it? Because at human-scale speeds, with human-scale masses, objects obey Newton's Law pretty well... that's the region in which the theory was derived and it fits the experiments there. At the very fast, it breaks down, and then relativity is needed.
Now, we insist the Universe is "really" relativistic at all speeds, so in that sense the new theory wiped out the old. But we also insist that for slow objects relativity must reduce to Newton's Law (and it does). So the earlier theory reamins a useful, if admittedly inadequate, tool.
I think that attitude is very sad. Are there corrupt Congresspeople and Senators? Of course. Do most representatives allow themselves to be swayed by money too easily? Of course. But that doesn't mean all -- or even most -- are aggressively, systematically, Quimby-esquely corrupt. Most probably do feel they're doing the best they can for their constituents.
Remember, when you hear only one side of the argument, it can be made to sound awfully sweet... The money buys the corporations access, which gets them laws.
There are very very few sci-fi stories that couldn't easily be fantasy stories.
Footfall
"All the Myriad Ways"
"A Distant Sound of Thunder"
"The Cold Equations"
Stand on Zanibar
To name five off the top of my head. Sci fi is a distinct genre, worthy of respect like other genres. It is not just fantasy, nor is it Westerns with the serial numbers filed off. A lot of what is called "science fiction" is ill-disguised fantasy... but that doesn't make the two genres the same.
The reason that the courts are coming down on the RIAA's side is that is what the law says. The courts don't decide what's legal and what's not.
This view of the legal system is extremely naive... so much I find hard to believe it's taken seriosuly by anyone. Of course courts interpret the law. Indeed, that is the description of what a court does. "The law" is a universal. Trials are particular. Someone must bridge the gap, and that someone is the judge (or jury, or, usually, both).
I actually have a lot of respect for the judiciary in general, and I don't think most judges heavy-handedly impose their own ideology on their cases. But they certainly interpret the law according to their best understanding of it and the situation. If not, why would prosecutors (and defense attorneys) fight so hard to try to get the "right" judge for their case? Why do we even have a term for a "hanging judge"?
If the justices do not believe intellectual output is property, then they will not accord it the common protections of property. If they think of "infringement" as "stealing" (which, by the way, is not stated "in the law"), then they will mete out punishments commensurate with theft. Their understanding of copyright as a balance (or as a grant of property) will guide them in granting or denying motions.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is a growing body of research that indicates people will punish non-cooperators in a game, even if that punishment also costs the punisher. There's some socio-equilibrant dynamic going on here... People like fair play and apparently are willing to sacrifice to enforce it.
Of course, then you have to convince people that filesharing is a violation of fair play. Most netizens appear to feel the exact opposite.
Hey, what if that webcam captures some of the original stuff I put on the Web? Isn't that, in itself, copyright infringement? And does that mean I should click the "F" button while at their website?
Nah. Download their button and click F while visitng the websites of the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, and Senator Hollings.
No, they're pretty obviously wrong. They paid the building to put up the ad, to have it displayed. That service is already rendered. Incidentally, the building is caught on film. They didn't pay to have it on film. They don't own that space forever, and they aren't "entitled" to an incidental benefit. Yay for them if Sony gives them free advertising, but if not, then not.
You're exactly right about the choice being about "cultural significance". Those buildings are part of the culture and their image transcends any particular owner's claim. These guys will just have to live with it.
Or are they proposing to pay a portion of their profits back to all the directors, photographers, etc. who made Times Square into the cultural icon it is? After all, those people "created" the value; don't they deserve compensation more than the yahoos who happen to be renting the space right now?
No hyphen, but the proper way to spell one of those is "The Bat Man".
From the text of the GPL:
From Merriam-Webster:
So, no, they actually must make it available immediately. And note we are not talking about, "We're really busy so we can't put it online this weekend." They're taking a "principled" stand that the GPL can be ignored for beta.
This is just another case of the digital commons being fenced off to benefit a few sheepherders. It's better to stop it early than when it has momentum.
All we have is the letter of the law. The "spirit of the law", such as it has any thrust, is decided by the courts. You can't let a potential offender, or for that matter, a potential victim, be the sole arbiter of what the law means. In a system of law, under the rule of law, it is quite important that we conform to the letter of the law
If Lindows feels this "law" is invalid, then they can follow their conscience and not obey it. But they sure as hell have no moral right to whine when someone calls them on it, or attempts to have the law enforced.
I guess my New York roots are showing. Any city without an adequate public transit system is, IMHO, not a "major" city.
Um, exactly when does one "get to" never? How long do you wait until you conclude they aren't releasing beta code ever? Will it be releaed only at the end of its useful life? It's the same problem with the Sony Bono Copyright Act: Infinite and unlimited extensions make a mockery of any concept of "limited times" or of "eventually".
The issue is not the technical ability. The issue is, under what circumstances can this be used? What justification does law enforcement have to offer? With pen-register, the answer is, "Virtually none." With wiretap, it's the same as a physical search. Which should cell phone content be considered? How about routing info?
If you mistake this post for legal advice, well, the court'll probably at least find that you're not mentally competent to stand trial...
First of all, if the RIAA was interested in "working with" digital manufacturers, they wouldn't be pushing legislation that dictates to those manufacturers.
Secondly, how arrogant is it to assume that the only solution is going to come from the RIAA. Maybe they're entirely off the wall and working with them would be counterproductive. Maybe they misunderstand the issue so thoroughly, so disingenuously, and so deliberately, as to render them more part of the problem than of the solution.
Maybe it's time the RIAA and MPAA face what, ultimately, is their greatest dread of the digital revolution: We don't need them anymore. Maybe we never did. Maybe this "problem" will be solved without them.
Under current understanding, a pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star. Conservation of angular momentum, combined with the stately rotation of main sequence stars, imply that nuetron stars start off spinning really fast. Conservation of magnetic flux, combined with the noticeable magnetic field around main sequence stars, implies that neutron stars are born with extremely high magnetic fields.
Charged particles -- no one exactly knows the source, either from the surface or raining down from debris in orbit -- are accelerated to very high speeds by the magnetic field. When charges accelerate, they radiate. Since they are tied tightly to the strong field, they move along the field lines, and the radiation is strongly beamed along the flight path. We see that radiation primarily as radio waves, although pulsars have been found at all wavelengths.
Pulsars emit their radiation continually. However, because the star is spinning and the beam is narrow, it "sweeps" across the Earth once per revolution. So we see blips, not a continuous signal. The usual analogy is a lighthouse sweepings its light across the sea.
And if this were the world imagined in 1950s science fiction, that would actually mean something. But actual researchers in the field of artificial intelligence long ago conceded that "number of neurons" is not a good figure of merit for intelligence. We have, at best, the barest beginnings of software that emulates the human capacity for pattern recognition; and nothing really even hints of human judgment. I think a field should at least exist before we pronounce it about to surpass human capabilities...
Much could have -- and was! -- said about the original accelerators. Why spend all this money whipping protons around a ring? Why not do something "practical"? Say, like medical research. Cure diseases instead of peering at tiny particles.
Interestingly enough, much of what we know about microbiology can be traced back to synchrotron radiation labs. At Stanford, the "waste" photons generated by the synchrotron ring turned out to be useful in X-ray crystolography (I assume the same at other facilities). Now SSRL is so important it can compete with the physics experiments in control of beamtime on the accelerator. All from some "impractical" studies.
The nature of research -- frsutrating as you might find it -- is that you never know, ahead of time, what will be a dead end and what will be "practical". The history of the past few centuries indicates that basic research nearly always ends up enhancing "normal" life.
Bandwidth, latency, and computing power. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the best decision-making algorithms reside in the human brain. We respond to unexpected contingencies much better than any robot. We recognize (new) patterns and intuit new consequence faster and more accurately. (See, there is something we do well.)
Mars is around 8 light minutes away. If your probe happens into a dangerous situation, or even an unexpected one, it will take 16 minutes for a teleoperator to respond. That cannot be helped and cannot be controlled. Also, teleoperation requires a lot of data, but the data bit rate from deep space is generally pretty small. So you'd be waiting a long time, 16 minutes out of the loop, for a trickle of information. It's really no wnder we lose so many spacecraft.
As things stand today, a human presence is the most efficient way to conduct wide-ranging exploration.
Also, you've fallen prey to a terrible, terrible fallacy that afflicts even good astronomer: the dreaded Selection Effect. How do you think they "happened" to come across this odd object? Almost certainly, because they were already studying the nebula and remnant. In other words, it's not out of the many billions of stars that they chose. It was out of the much much smaller pool of SNRs.
Well, actually, I think it's.... fermionic degeneracy pressure. The quarks are spin 1/2, too, and "smaller" than the neutrons. So they can cram closer before their degeneracy pressure kicks in.
... unless, of course, the string is vibrating in a complicated mixture of nodes, which is (I think) what the extremal black hole theory claims. Of course that relies on a belief that extremal black hole theory "explains" astronomical black holes, a belief that I cannot share. (Sorry, Amanda
Well, there is no revealed truth in science, so we don't ever know absolutely that something is real. It has happened before that a theory turns out to be based on a house of cards. Most of that time, in retrospect, it can be seen that the theory got way out in front of experiment and so was improperly constrained. That is, the less we've studied an area, the more likely the theoriest are wrong. As facts come in, theories get revised or strengthened.
On the other hand, remember that in physics, most "revolutions" change our understanding of how things work but do not invalidate existing theories in their realm of applicability. For example, relativity didn't kill Newtonian theory. Indeed, that's still where we start today in physics education. Why didn't it? Because at human-scale speeds, with human-scale masses, objects obey Newton's Law pretty well... that's the region in which the theory was derived and it fits the experiments there. At the very fast, it breaks down, and then relativity is needed.
Now, we insist the Universe is "really" relativistic at all speeds, so in that sense the new theory wiped out the old. But we also insist that for slow objects relativity must reduce to Newton's Law (and it does). So the earlier theory reamins a useful, if admittedly inadequate, tool.
Nah, they're referring to Quark , a sci-fi comedy from the late 1970s. Whatta classic! :)
Um, because -- as with most news sources -- advertising is kept separate from editorial content?
I think that attitude is very sad. Are there corrupt Congresspeople and Senators? Of course. Do most representatives allow themselves to be swayed by money too easily? Of course. But that doesn't mean all -- or even most -- are aggressively, systematically, Quimby-esquely corrupt. Most probably do feel they're doing the best they can for their constituents.
Remember, when you hear only one side of the argument, it can be made to sound awfully sweet... The money buys the corporations access, which gets them laws.
To name five off the top of my head. Sci fi is a distinct genre, worthy of respect like other genres. It is not just fantasy, nor is it Westerns with the serial numbers filed off. A lot of what is called "science fiction" is ill-disguised fantasy
This view of the legal system is extremely naive
I actually have a lot of respect for the judiciary in general, and I don't think most judges heavy-handedly impose their own ideology on their cases. But they certainly interpret the law according to their best understanding of it and the situation. If not, why would prosecutors (and defense attorneys) fight so hard to try to get the "right" judge for their case? Why do we even have a term for a "hanging judge"?
If the justices do not believe intellectual output is property, then they will not accord it the common protections of property. If they think of "infringement" as "stealing" (which, by the way, is not stated "in the law"), then they will mete out punishments commensurate with theft. Their understanding of copyright as a balance (or as a grant of property) will guide them in granting or denying motions.
Courts not interpret the law? That's all they do.