Copyright term for works of hire, i.e. copyrights held by corporate persons instead of real persons, run for a fixed term of 95 years not for life plus 70.
They are not losing $300M/year due to felt tipped pens. Felt tipped pens have tons of ordinary uses pretty much anywhere an ordinary pen might be used. I wouldn't be surprised if the felt pen market exceeded $300M/year.
Title 17, Section 1201(a)
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that - (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Felt tip markers are not primarially designed to circumvent access controls. Felt tip markers have lots of commercially significant purposes other than circumvention.
But, if you marketed a felt tip pen with the name CD Rip (TM) brand felt tip pens and included instructions for how to circumvent CD protection than you should expect a C&D letter.
It's the same situation as the fellow who's program unset the true type embedded bits and a generic hex editor. The first tool has one purpose, to twiddle embedding bits. The second tool has lots of commercially significant purposes many unrelated to any kind of circumvention.
I'm surprised there are still people on Slashdot who haven't heard of the exception to patent law called Independent Discovery. I could go ahead and describe it here, or I could quote one of the more eminent legal resources [nolo.com] on the Web. Basically, if you didn't copy the patent directly off their patent claim sheets, then they don't have a case against you (US and UK law):
Independant discovery only works in a trade secret environment. Independant discovery is not a defense against patent infringement. The book you link to and the stuff you quote is all about trade secrtes, not patents.
There are thermodynamic limits to how much usable energy you can get out of heat. I believe that the maximum theoretical efficiency to generate any form of coherent energy from heat is 50%. Another fundamental limit is the difference in temperature between your source and your sink. You need to force heat to flow from a hot area (the back of this thing) to a cooler one through some kind of device to extract the energy.
I just can't imagine the temperature that the hot side of something 2" square cooling a room must get. But thousands of BTU per hour is a lot of heat to dump from a small area. The thing must glow.
We had regularly scheduled chats and those were always monitored. The chat rooms were available at other times, so I would often check to see what was happening there if I was online. (One of the sysop privilidges was no charge on time spent in a forum you opped.)
The one case I recall most vividly becuase it was my first experience of this was a (self-described) 21 year old male who asked a 12 year old girl to describe what she was wearing. He only got to ask a few questions before I banned him and mailed a copy of the log to the primary sysop who took up the case with his CIS contact.
In any case, I don't care if a teen comes on to an adult or the other way around. It's the adult who is responsible if they continue, not the teen. Generally speaking, most of our members were under 18.
As a former assistant sysop on the Compuserve Student's forum about 10 years ago, I personally witnessed attempts by adults to engage teens in sexually oriented chat. Part of my duties were monitoring the chatrooms and keeping logs of conversations that occurred there. I personally complained to CIS management in several cases where a teen was approached by an adult with inappropriate conversation. CIS would take action with regard to these complaints.
Now this isn't a call for draconian legislation. The Internet is in many ways like a large city. There are places where I, as a parent, would not allow my children to go without supervision in a city. Similarly, there are places where I would not allow my children to go online without supervision. Unsupervised chatrooms are one of those places.
By utilizing agreements on appropriate content within the domain agreements, new TLDs could create a child and family safe area on the Internet leaving great swaths of area appropriate for adults.
US or any country's laws can not reach all Internet providers, so the agreement has to be made at the point of registering the domain..sex isn't a solution as no one operating from a foriegn area can be forced to segregate themselves there.
Most of the Gnu tools (with the exception of the compiler and linker) can be replaced. Emacs is just a nightmare, Info sucks large rocks through small straws. Busybox replaces many of the standard utilities.
My Sharp Zaurus over here has very little Gnu content.
Man: Here's one- Cart-master: Nine bars of latinum. Old Man: (feebly) I'm not dead! Cart-master: (suprised) What? Man: Nothing! Here's your latinum.... Old Man: I'm not dead! Cart-master: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead! Man: Yes he is. Old Man: I'm not! Cart-master: 'E isn't? Man: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill... Old Man: I'm getting better! Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment. Cart-master: I can't take 'im like that! It's against Starfleet regulations! Old Man: I don't want to go on the cart.... Man: Oh, don't be such a baby. Cart-master: I can't take 'im.... Old Man: I feel fine! Man: Well, do us a favor... Cart-master: I can't! Man: Can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long... Cart-master: No, gotta get to the station in the Regulus Nebula, they lost nine today. Man: Well, when's your next round? Cart-master: Thursday. Old Man: I think I'll go for a walk.... Man: You're not fooling anyone, you know-- (to Cart-master) Look, isn't there something you can do...?
(they both look around) Old Man: I feel happy! I feel happy!
(the Cart-master deals the old man a swift blow to the head with his wooden spoon. The old man goes limp.) Man: (throwing the old man onto the cart) Ah. thanks very much. Cart-master: Not at all. See you on Thursday! Man: Right! All right....
The fundamental economic purpose of the stock market is to provide a liquid market for equity shares. In a liquid market, there are sufficient buyers so that someone can liquidate their position to meet immediate cash needs. No individual investor is a long term investor forever.
The market also provides speculative opportunities. Buying a stock that has even a small chance of eventually holding a significant market share in a significant economic niche
But, to the extent that speculative motives outstrip the fundamental purpose of the market, the market gets subverted from its real economic function as a source of equity financing. These periods of speculation inevitably end in a bust which intereferes with the orderly role of a capital market.
If all investors are short term investors, then the market has already been subverted from its only reason for existing.
A mature stock will pay dividends. The so-called "blue chip" stocks pay regular and reliable dividends. If a stock which does not currently pay dividends has little or no potential to eventually become a mature, dividend payer, there is not reason other than "irrational exuberance" for a future investor to pay more than you paid. If an equity holder has no prospect of ever getting anything out of the investment and only a downside from a future bankrupcy, there's no reason for the stock to have value.
During the Internet boom, stocks had high values for speculative reasons -- there was a chance that the company would become sufficiently entrenched in the "new economy" that future profits would be able to pay dividends sometime down the road. The bust was inevitable because the stocks did not have the fundamental values to support the prices. The indivual investor was left holding the bag.
No one would ever pay for a stock that has no potential to ever pay a dividend. There's no reason for people to bid up the price of a stock unless there's a likelihood of some future dividend return. Over the long term, that is the economic reality of the stock market. When prices get bid up with the expectation that people will sell out to others at higher prices, eventually you run out of suckers and the price crashes. (This is called a Ponzi Scheme and it's usually illegal to set one up outside of the Stock Markets where the potential of Ponzi-like behavior is accepted as a cost of having a liquid equity market.) If this happens to the entire market at once, 1929 will look like a walk in the park -- say goodbye to your retirement savings. We've already seen the bust in Internet stocks -- there wasn't enough economic value there to justify the prices they were getting.
Go back a few yuears, everyone is trying to get on "that Internet thing". High demand for programmers/web designers/sysadmins drives up salaries. Dot coms go bust, there's flood of new IT graduates into the market and companies are cutting pack on web presence. Demand for IT professionals drops and salaries begin to drop. I know a guy who did some very innovative work at Ask Jeeves who's about to be evicted because he can't find a job in his field.
Hey! You're right. How come The Village missed that particular trick? The Number Six would have talked in no time if he would have been convinced he had a wife.
It's been years since I watched The Prisoner, but didn't they actually do that episode?
It's being rerun on my local PBS station. I'll let you know if I see that episode.
Although Eratosthenes was a true genius the world hails Christopher Columbus as a hero even though his accomplishment was sheer accident. What does this tell you about how the world views science and scientists?
More correctly, educated people knew in CC's time that the world was round. Columbus merely managed to come up with a smaller diameter than most people believed which made his trip practical. He was dead wrong and the prevailing view, based on E's calculation, was much more correct.
I can't remember all the people who were involved, but Rene Blondlot claimed to have found a phenenomenon which he called N-rays. But there was a lot of difficulty in reproducing the experiments elsewhere. An American scientist Robert Wood travelled to France to see the apparatus of the team who claimed the discovery.
The experiment took place in a darkened room and a trained observer called out the readinings he saw. Unfortunately, our scientist hero had removed a metal prism which was said to be a critical part of the apparatus. Under their theory, they should not have detected the readings that the observer "saw".
This experiment demonstrates that science is done by *disproving* things as much as it is my *proving* things.
I don't think that releasing a binary-only QuickTime codec would solve any real problems: Firstly, it wouldn't be distributed with some of the most popular distributions like Debian and Mandrake for philosophical reasons as well as technical reasons...
I think you really mean political reasons rather than philosophical reasons. As the recent discussion on LKML over the use of BitKeeper (a non-free source control system) shows, technical reasons are the logical reasons to choose to use one software package over another. Using inferior tool for political reasons is just foolish.
And before someone mentions it, yes, I do "buy" my Linux distributions. I buy the install CDs from the vendor who produces them because, as the recent Mandrake cash crunch shows, they can't continue to develop new distributions if no one will pay to use them. Since Mandrake distributes software like Star Office, I think they'd have no problem with a closed-source QT.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright term for works of hire, i.e. copyrights held by corporate persons instead of real persons, run for a fixed term of 95 years not for life plus 70.
They are not losing $300M/year due to felt tipped pens. Felt tipped pens have tons of ordinary uses pretty much anywhere an ordinary pen might be used. I wouldn't be surprised if the felt pen market exceeded $300M/year.
Read it as (A), (B), or (C). There's no and involved.
Specifically:
Felt tip markers are not primarially designed to circumvent access controls. Felt tip markers have lots of commercially significant purposes other than circumvention.
But, if you marketed a felt tip pen with the name CD Rip (TM) brand felt tip pens and included instructions for how to circumvent CD protection than you should expect a C&D letter.
It's the same situation as the fellow who's program unset the true type embedded bits and a generic hex editor. The first tool has one purpose, to twiddle embedding bits. The second tool has lots of commercially significant purposes many unrelated to any kind of circumvention.
I'm surprised there are still people on Slashdot who haven't heard of the exception to patent law called Independent Discovery. I could go ahead and describe it here, or I could quote one of the more eminent legal resources [nolo.com] on the Web. Basically, if you didn't copy the patent directly off their patent claim sheets, then they don't have a case against you (US and UK law):
Independant discovery only works in a trade secret environment. Independant discovery is not a defense against patent infringement. The book you link to and the stuff you quote is all about trade secrtes, not patents.
...on the rail lines because it stinks on the LIRR right in Verison's backyard.
There are thermodynamic limits to how much usable energy you can get out of heat. I believe that the maximum theoretical efficiency to generate any form of coherent energy from heat is 50%. Another fundamental limit is the difference in temperature between your source and your sink. You need to force heat to flow from a hot area (the back of this thing) to a cooler one through some kind of device to extract the energy.
I just can't imagine the temperature that the hot side of something 2" square cooling a room must get. But thousands of BTU per hour is a lot of heat to dump from a small area. The thing must glow.
We had regularly scheduled chats and those were always monitored. The chat rooms were available at other times, so I would often check to see what was happening there if I was online. (One of the sysop privilidges was no charge on time spent in a forum you opped.)
The one case I recall most vividly becuase it was my first experience of this was a (self-described) 21 year old male who asked a 12 year old girl to describe what she was wearing. He only got to ask a few questions before I banned him and mailed a copy of the log to the primary sysop who took up the case with his CIS contact.
In any case, I don't care if a teen comes on to an adult or the other way around. It's the adult who is responsible if they continue, not the teen. Generally speaking, most of our members were under 18.
As a former assistant sysop on the Compuserve Student's forum about 10 years ago, I personally witnessed attempts by adults to engage teens in sexually oriented chat. Part of my duties were monitoring the chatrooms and keeping logs of conversations that occurred there. I personally complained to CIS management in several cases where a teen was approached by an adult with inappropriate conversation. CIS would take action with regard to these complaints.
Now this isn't a call for draconian legislation. The Internet is in many ways like a large city. There are places where I, as a parent, would not allow my children to go without supervision in a city. Similarly, there are places where I would not allow my children to go online without supervision. Unsupervised chatrooms are one of those places.
A recent article in Ad Age quotes statistics which show that
PVR users are as likely to watch ads as ordinary viewers
and
PVR viewers watch more televisions than ordinary viewers.
By utilizing agreements on appropriate content within the domain agreements, new TLDs could create a child and family safe area on the Internet leaving great swaths of area appropriate for adults.
.sex isn't a solution as no one operating from a foriegn area can be forced to segregate themselves there.
US or any country's laws can not reach all Internet providers, so the agreement has to be made at the point of registering the domain.
Most of the Gnu tools (with the exception of the compiler and linker) can be replaced. Emacs is just a nightmare, Info sucks large rocks through small straws. Busybox replaces many of the standard utilities.
My Sharp Zaurus over here has very little Gnu content.
Yeah, they just put in the Univ of Ca copyright notice for the fun of it.
Man: Here's one-
Cart-master: Nine bars of latinum.
Old Man: (feebly) I'm not dead!
Cart-master: (suprised) What?
Man: Nothing! Here's your latinum....
Old Man: I'm not dead!
Cart-master: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead!
Man: Yes he is.
Old Man: I'm not!
Cart-master: 'E isn't?
Man: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill...
Old Man: I'm getting better!
Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Cart-master: I can't take 'im like that! It's against Starfleet regulations!
Old Man: I don't want to go on the cart....
Man: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Cart-master: I can't take 'im....
Old Man: I feel fine!
Man: Well, do us a favor...
Cart-master: I can't!
Man: Can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long...
Cart-master: No, gotta get to the station in the Regulus Nebula, they lost nine today.
Man: Well, when's your next round?
Cart-master: Thursday.
Old Man: I think I'll go for a walk....
Man: You're not fooling anyone, you know-- (to Cart-master) Look, isn't there something you can do...?
(they both look around)
Old Man: I feel happy! I feel happy!
(the Cart-master deals the old man a swift blow to the head with his wooden spoon. The old man goes limp.)
Man: (throwing the old man onto the cart) Ah. thanks very much.
Cart-master: Not at all. See you on Thursday!
Man: Right! All right....
The fundamental economic purpose of the stock market is to provide a liquid market for equity shares. In a liquid market, there are sufficient buyers so that someone can liquidate their position to meet immediate cash needs. No individual investor is a long term investor forever.
The market also provides speculative opportunities. Buying a stock that has even a small chance of eventually holding a significant market share in a significant economic niche
But, to the extent that speculative motives outstrip the fundamental purpose of the market, the market gets subverted from its real economic function as a source of equity financing. These periods of speculation inevitably end in a bust which intereferes with the orderly role of a capital market.
If all investors are short term investors, then the market has already been subverted from its only reason for existing.
A mature stock will pay dividends. The so-called "blue chip" stocks pay regular and reliable dividends. If a stock which does not currently pay dividends has little or no potential to eventually become a mature, dividend payer, there is not reason other than "irrational exuberance" for a future investor to pay more than you paid. If an equity holder has no prospect of ever getting anything out of the investment and only a downside from a future bankrupcy, there's no reason for the stock to have value.
During the Internet boom, stocks had high values for speculative reasons -- there was a chance that the company would become sufficiently entrenched in the "new economy" that future profits would be able to pay dividends sometime down the road. The bust was inevitable because the stocks did not have the fundamental values to support the prices. The indivual investor was left holding the bag.
No one would ever pay for a stock that has no potential to ever pay a dividend. There's no reason for people to bid up the price of a stock unless there's a likelihood of some future dividend return. Over the long term, that is the economic reality of the stock market. When prices get bid up with the expectation that people will sell out to others at higher prices, eventually you run out of suckers and the price crashes. (This is called a Ponzi Scheme and it's usually illegal to set one up outside of the Stock Markets where the potential of Ponzi-like behavior is accepted as a cost of having a liquid equity market.) If this happens to the entire market at once, 1929 will look like a walk in the park -- say goodbye to your retirement savings. We've already seen the bust in Internet stocks -- there wasn't enough economic value there to justify the prices they were getting.
Go back a few yuears, everyone is trying to get on "that Internet thing". High demand for programmers/web designers/sysadmins drives up salaries. Dot coms go bust, there's flood of new IT graduates into the market and companies are cutting pack on web presence. Demand for IT professionals drops and salaries begin to drop. I know a guy who did some very innovative work at Ask Jeeves who's about to be evicted because he can't find a job in his field.
There's no grand conspiracy here.
I mean, didn't they put a woman in his room with him and have her act like his wife as another of the mind games?
;^)
It might have just been in my dreams.
Hey! You're right. How come The Village missed that particular trick? The Number Six would have talked in no time if he would have been convinced he had a wife.
It's been years since I watched The Prisoner, but didn't they actually do that episode?
It's being rerun on my local PBS station. I'll let you know if I see that episode.
Although Eratosthenes was a true genius the world hails Christopher Columbus as a hero even though his accomplishment was sheer accident. What does this tell you about how the world views science and scientists?
More correctly, educated people knew in CC's time that the world was round. Columbus merely managed to come up with a smaller diameter than most people believed which made his trip practical. He was dead wrong and the prevailing view, based on E's calculation, was much more correct.
I can't remember all the people who were involved, but Rene Blondlot claimed to have found a phenenomenon which he called N-rays. But there was a lot of difficulty in reproducing the experiments elsewhere. An American scientist Robert Wood travelled to France to see the apparatus of the team who claimed the discovery.
The experiment took place in a darkened room and a trained observer called out the readinings he saw. Unfortunately, our scientist hero had removed a metal prism which was said to be a critical part of the apparatus. Under their theory, they should not have detected the readings that the observer "saw".
This experiment demonstrates that science is done by *disproving* things as much as it is my *proving* things.
I don't think that releasing a binary-only QuickTime codec would solve any real problems: Firstly, it wouldn't be distributed with some of the most popular distributions like Debian and Mandrake for philosophical reasons as well as technical reasons...
I think you really mean political reasons rather than philosophical reasons. As the recent discussion on LKML over the use of BitKeeper (a non-free source control system) shows, technical reasons are the logical reasons to choose to use one software package over another. Using inferior tool for political reasons is just foolish.
And before someone mentions it, yes, I do "buy" my Linux distributions. I buy the install CDs from the vendor who produces them because, as the recent Mandrake cash crunch shows, they can't continue to develop new distributions if no one will pay to use them. Since Mandrake distributes software like Star Office, I think they'd have no problem with a closed-source QT.
Then use session cookies or dynamically generated and time-expired URLs. There are a lot of solutions.
(OT: Someone else posts substancially the same comment as I ten posts later and gets a +5 Insightful. <sigh>)
should have technical solutions, not legal ones.
The Dallas Morning News has the means to break all links which do not come from their site if they do not want people deep linking.