Even if we're talking animals (and we're not) it's not nessecary to convince an opponent that you'll win a figth to avoid having him attack you.
It's merely nessecary to convince him that attacking you carries significant risk that is greater than the reward.
Evolution will take care of predators which chose to attack when the odds are 90% uninjured victory, 9% injury, but win, 1% loss. A meal simply ain't normally worth that kind of risk.
It depends ofcourse. If you're a mosquito and a sucessful meal means laying 100 eggs rather than 3 eggs, attempting the meal at the above odds is actually worth it.
In most jurisdictions copyright is the default for all new works being created, symbol or no symbol, registration or no registration.
This means you should probably assume any new cd, book or dvd you buy (or otherwise get) to be copyrighted aslong as you have no indication of the oposite.
Telephones where invented around 1875. It took atleast 75 years before most households had one.
First television-signal was transmitted 1925. 40 years later the majority of households had a tv.
First geosynch communication-satelite goes up 1965, 20 years later it's perfectly common, a large fraction of households have satelite-receivers. (would've been majority if not for competition from cable)
Tim Berners Lee makes the first prototype web-browser and web-server at CERN in 1979. 10 years later a very large fraction of households have it.
Where's your evidence ?
To me it seems very much like the oposite is true: each new generation of gear takes hold a lot *quicker* than the previous generation ever did. What was the time from introducation to say 25% market-penetration for telephones, mobile-phones, dial-up-internet, dsl-internet, television, radio, cars, bicycles ?
In general, the older the invention is, the longer it used to become accepted.
I agree it's stupid, but actually, there's SLRs where you *can* get an image on the screen with the mirror down.
You could very easily do it with any SLR by leaving the mirror up all the time, and simply use the sensor and lcd-display as a viewfinder instead of the optical one.
My guess is there's no large demand for this though, as I'm only aware of one or two digital SLRs that can do it. It eats rather a lot of battery too, my guess is the pros care more about being able to shoot a lot of images without a battery-change (ok, so a battery-grip helps, but still) than about live preview.
When you buy a CD, you are purchasing a licence which grants you the right to listen to the music contained on that CD, nothing more.
No. Sorry. Wrong.
When you buy a CD containing music, or a DVD containing a movie. Or a book containing a novel, you buy two things;
A physical media (a round plastic-thing or a stack of specially treated dead trees)
A single copy of a copyrigthed work.
Both of which are your property for you to do as you wish with, aslong as that what you wish is inside of applicable law.
There are things you can't do with these items, even though you own them. Because you're constrained by law. For example, you can't hit your neighbour over the head with the book, because there's laws against that. And you can't have a public performance of the music on the CD, because copyright-law prevents that.
There's a better reason for proportional representation;
How about a political system that allows politics ?
The one-man districts don't allow this. They're geographical representation, not political.
Put simply, a geographical group that is (very) popular in 10% of the USA, while being unpopular elsewhere gets about their fair representaiton, they get about 10% of the representatives. Fine.
But a *political* group, that focuses on actual policy rather than geography, fares much worse. If they're really unlucky, they can get the same number of votes as those above, and still not a single representative.
If you get 10% of the votes in every district. Because you have a *political* platform that about 10% agree with, then guess what, you get zero representation whatsoever.
As it is in the US, only a few votes count. Namely only those that go to one of the few (mostly 2, on rare occasions 3) candidates with real chanses of winning in one of the districts where there's a close race.
Normally, two computers that are both nated have no way of directly contacting eachother.
STUN is a method by which they still can, by getting information on ip and portnumber for the other side from a third source. (in this case the Skype-network)
If we both know, that we're listening for UDP packets on:33115 and you on:22056 then we can communicate, trough double NAT if need be by both sending a single packet to the other. This will cause the NAT-routers to set up mappings, so that any response packets coming from the other side will get trough.
Yes. But the market will consist of idiots. Because, as you say, today you can literally use such a setup for nothing.
Sure, 3 years down the road there'll be games that look noticeably better with such a setup, but heres the thing; 3 years down the road you can have this graphics-performance for 1/8th the price and power-consumption.
It's fine though, those "early adopters" (aka idiots) pay a large fraction of the development-cost for the rest of us.
I second this. Noone who has witnessed what happens when you pour (at worse cold) water into burning fat of any kind will EVER make that mistake.
Our instructor when I learned smoke-diving and firefigthing performed a bit larger scale experiment. About half a gallon of burning fat in a metal-bucket. Then he very carefully, using a 5 meter long pole with a tin-can welded on the end, poured half a liter of cold water directly into the burning fat.
The result was a very convincing imitation of a nuclear blast. I mean, it didn't explode or anything, but a ball of fire rose like 2-3 meters above the metal-bucket and expanded to perhaps one meter diameter or so. The heat was intense enough that he'd have singed his eyebrows for sure (5 meters away) if not for the fact that he was wearing professional fire-figther gear, including a facemask.
Then the burning fat scattered in all directions, the end-result was a circle of burning fat, perhaps 3 meters across.
Now picture yourself trying to put out the oil that caugth fire on your stove when you overheated it by pouring in a liter of cold water, thinking that'll cool it off. Standing directly over the pot, fully unprotected.
Do NOT try to put out burning fat by pouring cold water on it.
You're confused. Really. Or if you're not, you word yourself extremely poorly.
The main thing you have to realize is that there's a difference between owning one copy of a copyrigthed work, and owning the copyrigth.
You *do* own one copy of a copyrigthed work. You do not "license" it. We both agree that you do not own the copyrigth.
Unless by "license" you mean: "own, but usage is restricted by copyrigth law", which is a very strange way to define license.
I stand by what I said: You walk into a normal shop, plonk down money and ask for a copy of lord of the rings, you have *bougth* a single copy of that copyrigthed work, the work is *stored* on a circular piece of plastic. You OWN both. You OWN that single copy of the copyrigthed work. And you OWN the little round piece of plastic.
Even though you own it, there are limits to what you can do with the copyrigthed work. Those limits are set by copyright-law, and not any license.
Nobody would claim you go in the shop an "license" a book. It's just a plain ridicolous statement. Yes there's limits to what you are allowed to do with it. Doesn't mean you don't own the book. You sure as hell do.
Whatever conditions appear when you play the disc are not part of your agreement to buy the disc. You bougth one copy of the DVD, you own it. No question about it.
It's still true that you cannot do everything you migth like with it. But that's because of copyrigth-law, and not because of any legal-sounding bullshit on the disc itself.
Copyrigth-law prevents you from, among other things perform the work in public and make new copies of the work.
You're talking of unconditional returnability. Even if you don't have unconditional returnability for a product (as in, you may return it and demand your money back without stating a reason, and without the product being faulty) you can offcourse still return a product that is faulty.
If you buy something you reasonably expect is a CD, then try to play it in your standards-compliant cd-player in your car, and it fails. Then the product is faulty. It's unfit for the purpose for which it was bougth, and for which the buyer had a reasonable expectation it would be fit.
I'd say it's pretty reasonable to expect a CD to play in a CD-player. I'm betting judges would see it that way too.
Atleast 3 differnt people on 4 different occasions. Look it up yourself.
This is totally beside the point anyway, my entire point was that 11km up is not anywhere remotely close to a vacuum, thus a spaceship being released there at 10km/s or whatever would experience significant air-friction. Likely enough to burn it up, or if not, atleast enough to significantly slow it down, requiring an even higher release-velocity to make geosynch possible.
You have discussed it with people who have done the math ? How ridicolous do you want to become ?
Listen, its fairly trivial math. Here, let me help you. I'll do it rigth here in this post.
First, earth has a radius of about 6375 km (eqautorial), geosynch orbit is about 35700 km above sea-level, which means a circular geosynchronous orbit has a radius of about 42100 km or so.
Now, to be geosynchronous you need to circle once a day, so you'll have to go 42100*2*3.14 km every 24 hours. This works out to 3060 m/s. In addition to this you need to actually lift yourself up to geosynchronous orbit, adding a whole lot of potential energy, the total works out to about 10km/s.
I would contest that this is waaaay lower than 11.2 km/s but to each his own...
Is 11km really enough that you don't need to worry about air-friction emerging from the tube at escape-velocity ? (well almost, you said geosynch orbit. But that is like 90% escape-velocity anyway)
I very very very much doubt it. Even at 31km you still have 1% of the sea-level air-pressure, and at 9km healthy people can still breathe unaided. (as witnessed by the fact that people have climbed Mt. Everest without oxygen)
I don't know the air-pressure at 11km, but I'd guess around 15% of that at sea-level. Are you suggesting that punching trough 15% of sea-level air at speeds around 40.000km/h causes negligble frictional losses ?
I haven't done the math, but I think it's more likely the resulting friction would make re-entry look gentle, thus you'd need to start out going *even* faster to compensate the frictional losses.
In short, I think releasing a spacecraft at 11km with sufficient speed to reach geosynch is impossible, you would have to release it with such a speed that it'd immediately burn up.
Its not surprising that religious adults frequently set out rules without justification. Afterall it's how they imagine the world to work. There being a being more powerful than them that will punish and/or reward according to if they follow arbitrary rules with no justification to his liking. Why would they treat their kids any different ?
Sure. Even most religious people, exclusing a few total nutcases, knows the difference between fantasy and reality when it comes down to it.
They may, in principle, disbelieve evolution, consider God omnipotent, believe in the "healing power" of prayer and so on.
But the day they have a serious infection, their first choise tends to be antibiotics like the rest of us.
The study says kids notice that people talk differently about say germs, and god. This has a reason; even religious people "believe" that god exists -- to a point. They are *certain* that bacteria exists. Yes, they'll claim to be certain about God too. But literally -- even 5 year olds can tell they're not really.
Any user who cares about their stuff both should and could back up $HOME every night; it's small, and the delta set is even smaller, so backing up is fast and cheap. Any user who cares about their stuff should, but often cannot, back up / every night, purely do to practical issues.
I beg to differ. I mean, I agree one should backup. But actually, with todays users and todays machines, the large majority of the data and also the largest deltas live in $HOME.
I've got a single 300GB disc. Perfectly average, and by no means high-end.
The sum total of the operating-system and applications comes to perhaps 5GB. The sum total of $HOME comes to 200GB.
Backing up home is in practice exactly as much work as backing up the entire computer.
And no, the deltas are *not* smaller. If I delete a *single* dvd-image (say the old Mandriva.iso) from my $HOME, that's more than the sum total of deltas for the OS over the entire supported lifespan.
This is stupid. To most people, $HOME is about 1000 times more valuable than the sum total of everything stored outside of $HOME. Thus wiping $HOME is equally serious (more or less) as wiping the entire system.
Compared to public domain software or BSD license, it is restricting the ability of developers to add features to the software they use and sell those features.
Yes. It's restricting your ability to make money by selling a better, but less free product.
Also, it's improving the community and thus contributing to make the copylefted code progress faster. It's quite demoralising to many that care about freedom to make a product, then watch as 80% of the users use the your-code+5% version released proprietary by some company that contributes nothing back.
But you're rigth. If you look *exclusively* on the individual developer, then he is "more free" to do as he pleases with public domain code.
It's not that hard to re-synch occasionally, and infact it's certain you'd want to do so on any carrier that can suffer from lost and/or flipped bits.
With that, errors (that persist after the error-correcting codes have done their magic) are amplified (a lot) but atleast the rest of the movie isn't fucked. If you re-synch every 10 seconds, for example, any error severe enough to get trough the error-correcting codes will result in up to 10 seconds of static.
There's (lots!) better ways. This is mentioned just as a trivial example of how to avoid totally ruining the rest of the movie due to a single non-correctible bit-flip.
True, in principle. But it's still a challenge in practice. I don't have the solution, but it *is* a problem for justice that you will get away with a lot with a million in the bank that you wouldn't get away with if you where broke.
There's several mechanisms at play, for example:
All litigation carries risk, if there's a risk you'll lose say $50K the rich guy can shoulder this risk, while the poor one likely literally cannot accept that risk, so has a much stronger incentive to bend over, even though the case may have no more merit.
Even if you win, litigation is expensive. Anti-SLAP laws help this somewhat for one class of lawsuits, but for others it's the same. It's one thing not to be able to afford losing a case, but in some cases people can't afford to *win* a case.
Even if the case goes forward, more money tends to buy better representation, which in principle shouldn't matter, but in practice does.
I don't think there's any simple solutions for these problems.
Instead, you sign up people to buy the stock at some fixed, agreed upon price. This price will most of the time turn out to be somewhat lower than what the stock starts trading at -- if not, you'd not manage to sign up people for all the stock.
Now, I don't know why it's done like that, probably just tradition. The logical way to get a correct market-pricing for the stock from the get-go would be to hold an auction, and to give the stock to those willing to pay the most, for the lowest price of those.
For example, if you wanted to IPO with 3 shares, you'd hold an auction, and if the bids where 10,8,7,5,5,4 then the ones bidding 10,8 and 7 get one each, at the price 7. (because that's the highest price you can sell all shares for)
Slashdot Mirror
Even if we're talking animals (and we're not) it's not nessecary to convince an opponent that you'll win a figth to avoid having him attack you.
It's merely nessecary to convince him that attacking you carries significant risk that is greater than the reward.
Evolution will take care of predators which chose to attack when the odds are 90% uninjured victory, 9% injury, but win, 1% loss. A meal simply ain't normally worth that kind of risk.
It depends ofcourse. If you're a mosquito and a sucessful meal means laying 100 eggs rather than 3 eggs, attempting the meal at the above odds is actually worth it.
In most jurisdictions copyright is the default for all new works being created, symbol or no symbol, registration or no registration.
This means you should probably assume any new cd, book or dvd you buy (or otherwise get) to be copyrighted aslong as you have no indication of the oposite.
When CD-roms where being introduced, a single cdrom was larger than many harddrives.
Now blu-ray and HD-dvd are slowly being introduced. Yet even today a single harddrive has a capacity 10 to 30 times larger than these media.
Telephones where invented around 1875. It took atleast 75 years before most households had one.
First television-signal was transmitted 1925. 40 years later the majority of households had a tv.
First geosynch communication-satelite goes up 1965, 20 years later it's perfectly common, a large fraction of households have satelite-receivers. (would've been majority if not for competition from cable)
Tim Berners Lee makes the first prototype web-browser and web-server at CERN in 1979. 10 years later a very large fraction of households have it.
Where's your evidence ?
To me it seems very much like the oposite is true: each new generation of gear takes hold a lot *quicker* than the previous generation ever did. What was the time from introducation to say 25% market-penetration for telephones, mobile-phones, dial-up-internet, dsl-internet, television, radio, cars, bicycles ?
In general, the older the invention is, the longer it used to become accepted.
You could very easily do it with any SLR by leaving the mirror up all the time, and simply use the sensor and lcd-display as a viewfinder instead of the optical one.
My guess is there's no large demand for this though, as I'm only aware of one or two digital SLRs that can do it. It eats rather a lot of battery too, my guess is the pros care more about being able to shoot a lot of images without a battery-change (ok, so a battery-grip helps, but still) than about live preview.
No. Sorry. Wrong.
When you buy a CD containing music, or a DVD containing a movie. Or a book containing a novel, you buy two things;
Both of which are your property for you to do as you wish with, aslong as that what you wish is inside of applicable law.
There are things you can't do with these items, even though you own them. Because you're constrained by law. For example, you can't hit your neighbour over the head with the book, because there's laws against that. And you can't have a public performance of the music on the CD, because copyright-law prevents that.
How about a political system that allows politics ?
The one-man districts don't allow this. They're geographical representation, not political.
Put simply, a geographical group that is (very) popular in 10% of the USA, while being unpopular elsewhere gets about their fair representaiton, they get about 10% of the representatives. Fine.
But a *political* group, that focuses on actual policy rather than geography, fares much worse. If they're really unlucky, they can get the same number of votes as those above, and still not a single representative.
If you get 10% of the votes in every district. Because you have a *political* platform that about 10% agree with, then guess what, you get zero representation whatsoever.
As it is in the US, only a few votes count. Namely only those that go to one of the few (mostly 2, on rare occasions 3) candidates with real chanses of winning in one of the districts where there's a close race.
All other votes are completely irrelevant.
Normally, two computers that are both nated have no way of directly contacting eachother.
STUN is a method by which they still can, by getting information on ip and portnumber for the other side from a third source. (in this case the Skype-network)
If we both know, that we're listening for UDP packets on :33115 and you on :22056 then we can communicate, trough double NAT if need be by both sending a single packet to the other. This will cause the NAT-routers to set up mappings, so that any response packets coming from the other side will get trough.
Kinda sorta. For a more precise explanation see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN
I wonder how the patent filing-date compares to the earlier draft-versions of the RFC...
Sure, 3 years down the road there'll be games that look noticeably better with such a setup, but heres the thing; 3 years down the road you can have this graphics-performance for 1/8th the price and power-consumption.
It's fine though, those "early adopters" (aka idiots) pay a large fraction of the development-cost for the rest of us.
Our instructor when I learned smoke-diving and firefigthing performed a bit larger scale experiment. About half a gallon of burning fat in a metal-bucket. Then he very carefully, using a 5 meter long pole with a tin-can welded on the end, poured half a liter of cold water directly into the burning fat.
The result was a very convincing imitation of a nuclear blast. I mean, it didn't explode or anything, but a ball of fire rose like 2-3 meters above the metal-bucket and expanded to perhaps one meter diameter or so. The heat was intense enough that he'd have singed his eyebrows for sure (5 meters away) if not for the fact that he was wearing professional fire-figther gear, including a facemask.
Then the burning fat scattered in all directions, the end-result was a circle of burning fat, perhaps 3 meters across.
Now picture yourself trying to put out the oil that caugth fire on your stove when you overheated it by pouring in a liter of cold water, thinking that'll cool it off. Standing directly over the pot, fully unprotected.
Do NOT try to put out burning fat by pouring cold water on it.
You're confused. Really. Or if you're not, you word yourself extremely poorly.
The main thing you have to realize is that there's a difference between owning one copy of a copyrigthed work, and owning the copyrigth.
You *do* own one copy of a copyrigthed work. You do not "license" it. We both agree that you do not own the copyrigth.
Unless by "license" you mean: "own, but usage is restricted by copyrigth law", which is a very strange way to define license.
I stand by what I said: You walk into a normal shop, plonk down money and ask for a copy of lord of the rings, you have *bougth* a single copy of that copyrigthed work, the work is *stored* on a circular piece of plastic. You OWN both. You OWN that single copy of the copyrigthed work. And you OWN the little round piece of plastic.
Even though you own it, there are limits to what you can do with the copyrigthed work. Those limits are set by copyright-law, and not any license.
Nobody would claim you go in the shop an "license" a book. It's just a plain ridicolous statement. Yes there's limits to what you are allowed to do with it. Doesn't mean you don't own the book. You sure as hell do.
Whatever conditions appear when you play the disc are not part of your agreement to buy the disc. You bougth one copy of the DVD, you own it. No question about it.
It's still true that you cannot do everything you migth like with it. But that's because of copyrigth-law, and not because of any legal-sounding bullshit on the disc itself.
Copyrigth-law prevents you from, among other things perform the work in public and make new copies of the work.
If you buy something you reasonably expect is a CD, then try to play it in your standards-compliant cd-player in your car, and it fails. Then the product is faulty. It's unfit for the purpose for which it was bougth, and for which the buyer had a reasonable expectation it would be fit.
I'd say it's pretty reasonable to expect a CD to play in a CD-player. I'm betting judges would see it that way too.
This is totally beside the point anyway, my entire point was that 11km up is not anywhere remotely close to a vacuum, thus a spaceship being released there at 10km/s or whatever would experience significant air-friction. Likely enough to burn it up, or if not, atleast enough to significantly slow it down, requiring an even higher release-velocity to make geosynch possible.
Listen, its fairly trivial math. Here, let me help you. I'll do it rigth here in this post.
First, earth has a radius of about 6375 km (eqautorial), geosynch orbit is about 35700 km above sea-level, which means a circular geosynchronous orbit has a radius of about 42100 km or so.
Now, to be geosynchronous you need to circle once a day, so you'll have to go 42100*2*3.14 km every 24 hours. This works out to 3060 m/s. In addition to this you need to actually lift yourself up to geosynchronous orbit, adding a whole lot of potential energy, the total works out to about 10km/s.
I would contest that this is waaaay lower than 11.2 km/s but to each his own...
I very very very much doubt it. Even at 31km you still have 1% of the sea-level air-pressure, and at 9km healthy people can still breathe unaided. (as witnessed by the fact that people have climbed Mt. Everest without oxygen)
I don't know the air-pressure at 11km, but I'd guess around 15% of that at sea-level. Are you suggesting that punching trough 15% of sea-level air at speeds around 40.000km/h causes negligble frictional losses ?
I haven't done the math, but I think it's more likely the resulting friction would make re-entry look gentle, thus you'd need to start out going *even* faster to compensate the frictional losses.
In short, I think releasing a spacecraft at 11km with sufficient speed to reach geosynch is impossible, you would have to release it with such a speed that it'd immediately burn up.
They may, in principle, disbelieve evolution, consider God omnipotent, believe in the "healing power" of prayer and so on.
But the day they have a serious infection, their first choise tends to be antibiotics like the rest of us.
The study says kids notice that people talk differently about say germs, and god. This has a reason; even religious people "believe" that god exists -- to a point. They are *certain* that bacteria exists. Yes, they'll claim to be certain about God too. But literally -- even 5 year olds can tell they're not really.
I beg to differ. I mean, I agree one should backup. But actually, with todays users and todays machines, the large majority of the data and also the largest deltas live in $HOME.
I've got a single 300GB disc. Perfectly average, and by no means high-end.
The sum total of the operating-system and applications comes to perhaps 5GB. The sum total of $HOME comes to 200GB.
Backing up home is in practice exactly as much work as backing up the entire computer.
And no, the deltas are *not* smaller. If I delete a *single* dvd-image (say the old Mandriva.iso) from my $HOME, that's more than the sum total of deltas for the OS over the entire supported lifespan.
This is stupid. To most people, $HOME is about 1000 times more valuable than the sum total of everything stored outside of $HOME. Thus wiping $HOME is equally serious (more or less) as wiping the entire system.
I mean, it really does work like that; anyone with the same ability to pay for "justice" gets the same "justice", more or less.
I would assume most people find this distasteful, but history has taugth me never to take even such for granted. You meet some pretty crazy people.
Yes. It's restricting your ability to make money by selling a better, but less free product.
Also, it's improving the community and thus contributing to make the copylefted code progress faster. It's quite demoralising to many that care about freedom to make a product, then watch as 80% of the users use the your-code+5% version released proprietary by some company that contributes nothing back.
But you're rigth. If you look *exclusively* on the individual developer, then he is "more free" to do as he pleases with public domain code.
With that, errors (that persist after the error-correcting codes have done their magic) are amplified (a lot) but atleast the rest of the movie isn't fucked. If you re-synch every 10 seconds, for example, any error severe enough to get trough the error-correcting codes will result in up to 10 seconds of static.
There's (lots!) better ways. This is mentioned just as a trivial example of how to avoid totally ruining the rest of the movie due to a single non-correctible bit-flip.
There's several mechanisms at play, for example:
I don't think there's any simple solutions for these problems.
Instead, you sign up people to buy the stock at some fixed, agreed upon price. This price will most of the time turn out to be somewhat lower than what the stock starts trading at -- if not, you'd not manage to sign up people for all the stock.
Now, I don't know why it's done like that, probably just tradition. The logical way to get a correct market-pricing for the stock from the get-go would be to hold an auction, and to give the stock to those willing to pay the most, for the lowest price of those.
For example, if you wanted to IPO with 3 shares, you'd hold an auction, and if the bids where 10,8,7,5,5,4 then the ones bidding 10,8 and 7 get one each, at the price 7. (because that's the highest price you can sell all shares for)