Honestly, guessing what solutions to a problem exist wouldn't be a good use of engineers. It WOULD be a good use of engineering students, though. This exact task would make an extremely appropriate internship. The difficult part would be in phrasing the problem such that it isn't too vague, yet it isn't steering the students directly towards the patent.
He's asking what the difference between buying virtual people and virtual goods is. These aren't real people behind the profile. These are pictures stolen off of some modeling website and stitched into a profile, backed by a CGI-script which allows you to select comments to post to your personal page. And to sum up a lot of other people's disbelief, this isn't for lonely people. This is going to be used for fake profiles which are basically a link to a porn site. And probably purchased every now and then as a joke.
I thought over/underrated don't actually affect karma. I personally can't remember seeing those ratings in meta-moderation, and I thought that was because they don't change the poster's karma and so are less likely to be abused...
Granted, a funny rating also makes you more visible to troll, flamebait, redundant and offtopic mods if another moderator is annoyed by the joke.
I guess some people see having a lot of friends on Myspace as a measurement of their worth or something.
In a way, yes. But it's not about vanity. This service isn't for the regular users of myspace... this service is for fake user pages which are basically an ad for a porn site. People are more likely to visit the site advertised if there are a number of friends. In the eyes of the person building the myspace profile, this creates a bootstrap problem of getting enough people to fall for the page to add it to their friends list that enough people will think it is a genuine profile and add it to their friends list. At first it wasn't that hard as there are enough guys out there that will do anything if they see a picture of a girl in a bikini (probably stolen off a modeling agencies website,) however, even these guys are getting wise to the fact that they're just getting used and won't ever get anything out of befriending an advertisement for a website, especially if that ad doesn't already have any friends. So, the bootstrap problem can now be fixed for $0.99 a month.
If we raise the efficiency standard by very much, we're basically banning American made cars in America.
Actually, this statement is not nearly as accurate as you think. I don't have a source on hand, but I believe that where I heard this was reputable. Anyways... "American" cars such as GM and Mopar have less than 50% of the manufacturing and assembly actually performed in the United States. Honda automobiles sold in the United States have approximately 70% of their manufacturing and assembly performed in the United States. While, indeed, Honda has a very anti-union stance that is mitigated by the fact that their pay rate is higher, their benefits are far better and their rate of layoffs is lower than that of corresponding positions in U.S. owned facilities.
This may sound like I'm slamming American manufacturers, but this is not a simple matter of "American companies are greedy and inefficient" A large portion of the costs that US automobile companies incur is in paying pensions, IIRC about equal to $3,000 per automobile for GM. That is purely related to the fact that their largest growth period was several decades ago (50's and 60's) so a really large proportion of the employees from that period are in retirement and thus drawing from their pension funds rather than contributing. Expect Honda and Toyota to be in a similar situation in a couple decades. In addition, the marketing, manufacturing, and expectations of consumers are set to a paradigm of power and luxury over efficiency.
It's easy to explain what would happen with this (it is basically a variation on the grandfather paradox.) As you send the information back events are changed, but just not in your timeline. Basically at the moment your message is received in the past, a new timeline branches off. This keeps happening, creating an ever wider group of timelines. A large temporal bubble is created between the time you send the message and when the message is received. Eventually, something will cause the sending of the message to fail (Power outage, hardware failure, somebody not receiving or understanding the message, typo, etc etc etc. At that point, temporal paradoxes are solved and the other timelines collapse leaving the event of trying to send the message back in time, but failing. Although with the information based paradox, it would be possible to break the cycle by also sending back instructions to make the message available to the future sender. Then the message can be sent back, even if the event you wish to prevent does not occur.
I have one large issue with the diversion reasoning for prescription heroin... you already agreed that the major "advantage" of heroin is its low price. Allowing prescription use of heroin would most likely not cause overtly significant diversion as compared to other opiates, as it it likely that street heroin is CHEAPER to make than pharmaceutical grade heroin would be. Street heroin does not have to go through the safeguards, QA and testing that pharmaceutical grade heroin do. In fact, the low price of street heroin is probably the major reason why pharmaceutical heroin has not been approved... the costs of testing long term effectiveness and safety, as well as the costs of developing and implementing a manufacturing process would not be financially advantageous to a pharm. company as they could not compete with the street dealer. Not to mention heroin is not patentable (more specifically, the patent was awarded to Bayer, then removed after WWI) and so any pharmaceutical company that went through the testing and industrial engineering to bring a pharmaceutical grade heroin to market would also have to compete with every other drug company in addition to the black market. The profit motive just isn't there, so it would not be in the best interest of the drug companies to show that heroin is safe enough to use.
There may also be OTHER reasons such as addictive potential why heroin is illegal while other opiates are legal (controlled, but not outright prohibited) but the medical community could probably find ways to make heroin safe enough to use IF there was a profit motive. There simply is not profit motive in bringing a drug to market that anybody can make a reasonable facsimile of out of any poppy seeds and a couple common household items.
You're right... clear communication needs to come into it. My previous post was clarifying what I thought the grandparent was saying, not the actual terms of the GPL. There is a difference between what the OP said and the post you originally replied to... but I was making no attempt to clarify which one is accurate. And I was posting really tired so it didn't come out as clear as I thought it did.
It's different because the OP was saying that it is given away with the restrictions. One does not need to agree to the GPL to USE GPLed software. You only need to agree to the terms if you wish to distribute GPLed material. It's a matter of semantics, but this wouldn't be Slashdot without people arguing over semantics.
Wow... speaking of inventors quoting a price they just made up...
Thus if this stuff costs (say) $1 a square more than concrete
From the article, the addition of titanium dioxide is about a 30% increase in the cost of the concrete itself. A 4' depth driveway pour will be about.01 cubic yards of concrete, while a yard is about equal to a 100 lb bag of dry premixed concrete, which costs around $10 (U.S) retail. A square foot of concrete costs about... 10 cents. 30% of that is... 3 cents. And that's assuming retail purchase which is far more expensive that what many contractors will actually use. And this assumes that all of the concrete has the TiO2 mixed evenly, rather than simply a surface pour.
1000 square miles is 27,878,400,000 (almost 28 billion) square feet, not the 27,878,400,000,000 (almost 28 trillion) square feet that you came up with. Another 3 orders of magnitude off, for 5 orders of magnitude in your calculations. So, for the 15 billion square feet, that would be around... half a billion dollars. With a population of 2 million, that's about 250$ per resident, not much off from the price of a catalytic converter.
Of course I'm assuming similar prices for the cost of a TiO2 paint, which will be a good portion of the coating used. In reality, it will cost much less for paint, as you don't really need 4'. I'll assume this addition also adds 30% to the price of paint. A gallon of paint is estimated to cover 350 square feet, and a 5 gallon bucket of paint (size you would generally buy in for outdoor painting) costs about $75, or about 4 cents a square foot, and a 30% increase in price would be... about a cent per square foot, which works out on the order of $85 per resident of Paris. Let's assume a mix of concrete and paint for... $150 a person. Assuming a 10 year life expectancy, that means an annual cost increase of... $15. I doubt most residents would even notice that kind of tax hike if the entire difference in cost were covered with tax breaks and subsidies.
What about the labor costs? They can pretty much be ignored. It's not as if the entire city will be coated with this stuff at once, but rather the materials will be used in new construction, as well as in repair and unmaintainence of existing facilities. So yes, the next time the Eiffel tower needs painting, they will most likely consider using a paint containing TiO2 or similar catalyst.
Grass also has a much bigger cooling effect than conduction - transpiration. Basically, all living plants draw water up into their leaves for photosynthesis. To keep pulling the water up, small amounts of water are excreted out of small holes in the leaves, and the water evaporates. I don't remember the exact mechanism behind WHY this helps to pull water up, but it supposedly does. However, the evaporating water cools down the plant and the surrounding environment, much like sweating.
But what I think your parent was thinking of is Asphalt. While concrete gets really warm in the sun, asphalt can become blisteringly hot. I've done work on freshly laid asphalt, on a 90 degree(F) day the air above fresh black asphalt can easily get up to 130-140 degrees if there isn't a decent breeze.
This has nothing to do with pollution control. The summary merely mentions that because they had a handy story that was also about an environmental concern.
And for the science, this material will actually cause MORE CO2 as it breaks down various organic compounds, but many of those compounds broken down will likely be far worse compounds including NOx and carbon monoxide which, while not necessarily strong greenhouse gases themselves, can each lead to photochemical reactions which lead to an increase in other greenhouse gases. There are likely a whole slew of organic compounds broken down by this, many of which could have significantly higher greenhouse potential than CO2, such as methane. But the point of this doesn't seem to be to reduce global warming, but smog and other related local pollution issues. And nothing that I saw in the summary or article really indicated otherwise, besides a link which I took to be saying "People care about the environment."
The United States ALSO pays interest on it's debts. Which means in the future the taxpayers will be paying for Bush's war, as well as any interest accrued.
Consider how well China and the USA were willing to put forth anything into the Kyoto protocol to stop global warming (China maneuvered so they didn't have to do anything, so the US just backed out.) The cost to build this is going to be quite immense. This MAY however be more likely to pass in the current political climate... the solar shade would work whether global warming is created by humans or not. There are a lot of people in the US. government who would never publicly admit that global warming is caused by human industrial activity. And I really doubt that's going to change tomorrow, either.
But the doctrine of fair use does indeed make enforcement of Copyright through DRM tricky, because it removes fair use rights that copyright holders have no right to revoke. The applicable statue is as follows:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
According to many anti-DRM people copyright as the RIAA and MPAA are attempting to enforce it completely ignore parts 1 and 4 of the fair use test. The RIAA and MPAA, of course argue that part 4 is indeed violated. Although part 3 is generally applicable, as it is whole songs, movies, etc that are shared. Another problem is that DRM does not acknowledge that copyrights eventually expire, and thus the DRM would be creating an artificial barrier to access to the material. However, adding a DRM expiration would make defeating DRM trivial (change the date on your computer.)
Then there are those who are against DRM as they believe copyright is intrinsically unjust, as copyright in its current incarnation violate the purpose for copyright, which is to induce artists to create more works, adding more to the general domain and enriching the culture of the country that maintains copyright laws. Copyright currently has been extended such that it extends well beyond the life of the artist, and indeed the copyright is generally not held by artists but by the studios that publish their work. Thus, copyright does not increase cultural depth. These anti-DRM people believe that breaking copyright is a form of Civil Disobedience. Civil disobedience is a form of protest, and many people feel that protest is a moral imperative against situations they feel are unjust. However, most anti-DRM types don't realize that the main reason civil disobedience is a moral imperative as a form of protest is because the protester is generally arrested for their act, and it is the arrest that brings attention to the situation (I.E. people will think "Wow, he's willing to get arrested for his cause. Maybe I should at least take a look at what he's talking about.)
Wow, that turned into a much longer rant than I expected. Sorry about that.
There would potentially be LESS harm if drugs were regulated rather than prohibited, as the purity of the drugs could be assured, and often times the substances used to cut the drugs are much worse healthwise than the drugs themselves. Even discounting that, the war on drugs has done nothing to prevent addiction. Thus, decriminalizing drugs would not put an additional strain on the health care system.
The thing about WGA is, it doesn't actually prevent you from using the computer. It prevents you from using Windows Update. So what you do is release the code into the wild that kills WGA meaning all infected computers will not be patched. THEN you release a virus into the wild that utilizes a vulnerability that has not been patched by Microsoft yet. Finally, you do whatever you want with the constantly growing botnet. DOS attacks, spam, spying on users, running a distributed password/encryption cracking utility... whatever. Shutting down their computers would be a waste at that time. You control all Windows computers that had WGA killed by the original exploit, as well as all pirated copies that wouldn't get the updates anyways.
And more important than having a large pool of applicants, having a decent sports (in particular football with some emphasis on basketball) program will usually do more than a good academic program when it comes to attracting the attention of the alumni's pocketbooks. If a university's team is doing well, that team actually becomes profitable for the university through ticket sales, merchandising and increased Alumni donations, allowing the University to SUBSIDIZE academic and other student life related activities.
What... you don't see the humor in downmodding the comment such that it in great probability is reduced below the viewing threshold for the majority of Slashdot readers, in some essence censoring a post which is making a (debatably) humorous reference to an error message which has implications that can be viewed as being related to censorship, all of this being posted to a discussion on censorship in an organization supposedly modeled on free sharing of information, the discussion being held in a community of people who are supposedly great supporters of freedom of information?
To double the humor, the mod of offtopic was in itself an offtopic mod, as the post was in an of itself on topic. Redundant would have been a far more appropriate mod, as we see a "nothing to see here, move along" post on just about every Slashdot story that is related to censorship, but then again that mod would have brought up complaints of being unfair as many Slashdotters can't seem to realize that a post can be redundant even if it is the first post on that particular discussion if the post shows up on every single discussion of similar nature.
Exactly... using the law of 70, this means the number of people telecommuting from a 3rd party location (oh god... that means that a new buzzword is going to be produced to describe this... mobicommuting or something. Ack Pthh! Anyways...) is going to approximately double in 7 years at 10% growth. (Law of 70 is an extremely handy shortcut for figuring out how long it takes to double assuming fairly consistant logarithmic growth... 70/r=number of years, where r is annual percentage growth. Also can be applied to days or whatever if r is daily percentage growth in such numbers as bacterial population. Not an exact number, but a good rule of thumb. Umm... don't remember the whole proof, but basically uses the financial equation P1=P0e^(rt) substitute 2 for P1 (final principal) 1 for P0 (intial principle) and solve for 2=1e^(rt) and end up with (I believe???) rt=ln(2). From there t= approximately ln70/r, or t=.693/r.
But the mechanics of it doesn't really matter. In a few years, all the journalist will have to do is change the definition of "mobomuting" (Ack... disgusted myself with that word) to "talking about work that occurs neither at home or at the workplace" and *PRESTO* the vast majority of the population is mobomuting! Even people in jobs that have nothing to do with offices! Unemployed hipsters drinking Latte's and talking about not having jobs will be mobomuting! Then, the future will be NOW!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, guessing what solutions to a problem exist wouldn't be a good use of engineers. It WOULD be a good use of engineering students, though. This exact task would make an extremely appropriate internship. The difficult part would be in phrasing the problem such that it isn't too vague, yet it isn't steering the students directly towards the patent.
He's asking what the difference between buying virtual people and virtual goods is. These aren't real people behind the profile. These are pictures stolen off of some modeling website and stitched into a profile, backed by a CGI-script which allows you to select comments to post to your personal page. And to sum up a lot of other people's disbelief, this isn't for lonely people. This is going to be used for fake profiles which are basically a link to a porn site. And probably purchased every now and then as a joke.
I thought over/underrated don't actually affect karma. I personally can't remember seeing those ratings in meta-moderation, and I thought that was because they don't change the poster's karma and so are less likely to be abused...
Granted, a funny rating also makes you more visible to troll, flamebait, redundant and offtopic mods if another moderator is annoyed by the joke.
I guess some people see having a lot of friends on Myspace as a measurement of their worth or something.
In a way, yes. But it's not about vanity. This service isn't for the regular users of myspace... this service is for fake user pages which are basically an ad for a porn site. People are more likely to visit the site advertised if there are a number of friends. In the eyes of the person building the myspace profile, this creates a bootstrap problem of getting enough people to fall for the page to add it to their friends list that enough people will think it is a genuine profile and add it to their friends list. At first it wasn't that hard as there are enough guys out there that will do anything if they see a picture of a girl in a bikini (probably stolen off a modeling agencies website,) however, even these guys are getting wise to the fact that they're just getting used and won't ever get anything out of befriending an advertisement for a website, especially if that ad doesn't already have any friends. So, the bootstrap problem can now be fixed for $0.99 a month.
Dolphins do this as well, presumably because they need to surface to breathe.
I really doubt it. Japan doesn't have THAT much landfill space.
If we raise the efficiency standard by very much, we're basically banning American made cars in America.
Actually, this statement is not nearly as accurate as you think. I don't have a source on hand, but I believe that where I heard this was reputable. Anyways... "American" cars such as GM and Mopar have less than 50% of the manufacturing and assembly actually performed in the United States. Honda automobiles sold in the United States have approximately 70% of their manufacturing and assembly performed in the United States. While, indeed, Honda has a very anti-union stance that is mitigated by the fact that their pay rate is higher, their benefits are far better and their rate of layoffs is lower than that of corresponding positions in U.S. owned facilities.
This may sound like I'm slamming American manufacturers, but this is not a simple matter of "American companies are greedy and inefficient" A large portion of the costs that US automobile companies incur is in paying pensions, IIRC about equal to $3,000 per automobile for GM. That is purely related to the fact that their largest growth period was several decades ago (50's and 60's) so a really large proportion of the employees from that period are in retirement and thus drawing from their pension funds rather than contributing. Expect Honda and Toyota to be in a similar situation in a couple decades. In addition, the marketing, manufacturing, and expectations of consumers are set to a paradigm of power and luxury over efficiency.
It's easy to explain what would happen with this (it is basically a variation on the grandfather paradox.) As you send the information back events are changed, but just not in your timeline. Basically at the moment your message is received in the past, a new timeline branches off. This keeps happening, creating an ever wider group of timelines. A large temporal bubble is created between the time you send the message and when the message is received. Eventually, something will cause the sending of the message to fail (Power outage, hardware failure, somebody not receiving or understanding the message, typo, etc etc etc. At that point, temporal paradoxes are solved and the other timelines collapse leaving the event of trying to send the message back in time, but failing. Although with the information based paradox, it would be possible to break the cycle by also sending back instructions to make the message available to the future sender. Then the message can be sent back, even if the event you wish to prevent does not occur.
I have one large issue with the diversion reasoning for prescription heroin... you already agreed that the major "advantage" of heroin is its low price. Allowing prescription use of heroin would most likely not cause overtly significant diversion as compared to other opiates, as it it likely that street heroin is CHEAPER to make than pharmaceutical grade heroin would be. Street heroin does not have to go through the safeguards, QA and testing that pharmaceutical grade heroin do. In fact, the low price of street heroin is probably the major reason why pharmaceutical heroin has not been approved... the costs of testing long term effectiveness and safety, as well as the costs of developing and implementing a manufacturing process would not be financially advantageous to a pharm. company as they could not compete with the street dealer. Not to mention heroin is not patentable (more specifically, the patent was awarded to Bayer, then removed after WWI) and so any pharmaceutical company that went through the testing and industrial engineering to bring a pharmaceutical grade heroin to market would also have to compete with every other drug company in addition to the black market. The profit motive just isn't there, so it would not be in the best interest of the drug companies to show that heroin is safe enough to use.
There may also be OTHER reasons such as addictive potential why heroin is illegal while other opiates are legal (controlled, but not outright prohibited) but the medical community could probably find ways to make heroin safe enough to use IF there was a profit motive. There simply is not profit motive in bringing a drug to market that anybody can make a reasonable facsimile of out of any poppy seeds and a couple common household items.
You're right... clear communication needs to come into it. My previous post was clarifying what I thought the grandparent was saying, not the actual terms of the GPL. There is a difference between what the OP said and the post you originally replied to... but I was making no attempt to clarify which one is accurate. And I was posting really tired so it didn't come out as clear as I thought it did.
It's different because the OP was saying that it is given away with the restrictions. One does not need to agree to the GPL to USE GPLed software. You only need to agree to the terms if you wish to distribute GPLed material. It's a matter of semantics, but this wouldn't be Slashdot without people arguing over semantics.
Wow... speaking of inventors quoting a price they just made up...
.01 cubic yards of concrete, while a yard is about equal to a 100 lb bag of dry premixed concrete, which costs around $10 (U.S) retail. A square foot of concrete costs about... 10 cents. 30% of that is... 3 cents. And that's assuming retail purchase which is far more expensive that what many contractors will actually use. And this assumes that all of the concrete has the TiO2 mixed evenly, rather than simply a surface pour.
Thus if this stuff costs (say) $1 a square more than concrete
From the article, the addition of titanium dioxide is about a 30% increase in the cost of the concrete itself. A 4' depth driveway pour will be about
1000 square miles is 27,878,400,000 (almost 28 billion) square feet, not the 27,878,400,000,000 (almost 28 trillion) square feet that you came up with. Another 3 orders of magnitude off, for 5 orders of magnitude in your calculations. So, for the 15 billion square feet, that would be around... half a billion dollars. With a population of 2 million, that's about 250$ per resident, not much off from the price of a catalytic converter.
Of course I'm assuming similar prices for the cost of a TiO2 paint, which will be a good portion of the coating used. In reality, it will cost much less for paint, as you don't really need 4'. I'll assume this addition also adds 30% to the price of paint. A gallon of paint is estimated to cover 350 square feet, and a 5 gallon bucket of paint (size you would generally buy in for outdoor painting) costs about $75, or about 4 cents a square foot, and a 30% increase in price would be... about a cent per square foot, which works out on the order of $85 per resident of Paris. Let's assume a mix of concrete and paint for... $150 a person. Assuming a 10 year life expectancy, that means an annual cost increase of... $15. I doubt most residents would even notice that kind of tax hike if the entire difference in cost were covered with tax breaks and subsidies.
What about the labor costs? They can pretty much be ignored. It's not as if the entire city will be coated with this stuff at once, but rather the materials will be used in new construction, as well as in repair and unmaintainence of existing facilities. So yes, the next time the Eiffel tower needs painting, they will most likely consider using a paint containing TiO2 or similar catalyst.
Grass also has a much bigger cooling effect than conduction - transpiration. Basically, all living plants draw water up into their leaves for photosynthesis. To keep pulling the water up, small amounts of water are excreted out of small holes in the leaves, and the water evaporates. I don't remember the exact mechanism behind WHY this helps to pull water up, but it supposedly does. However, the evaporating water cools down the plant and the surrounding environment, much like sweating.
But what I think your parent was thinking of is Asphalt. While concrete gets really warm in the sun, asphalt can become blisteringly hot. I've done work on freshly laid asphalt, on a 90 degree(F) day the air above fresh black asphalt can easily get up to 130-140 degrees if there isn't a decent breeze.
This has nothing to do with pollution control. The summary merely mentions that because they had a handy story that was also about an environmental concern.
And for the science, this material will actually cause MORE CO2 as it breaks down various organic compounds, but many of those compounds broken down will likely be far worse compounds including NOx and carbon monoxide which, while not necessarily strong greenhouse gases themselves, can each lead to photochemical reactions which lead to an increase in other greenhouse gases. There are likely a whole slew of organic compounds broken down by this, many of which could have significantly higher greenhouse potential than CO2, such as methane. But the point of this doesn't seem to be to reduce global warming, but smog and other related local pollution issues. And nothing that I saw in the summary or article really indicated otherwise, besides a link which I took to be saying "People care about the environment."
The United States ALSO pays interest on it's debts. Which means in the future the taxpayers will be paying for Bush's war, as well as any interest accrued.
Consider how well China and the USA were willing to put forth anything into the Kyoto protocol to stop global warming (China maneuvered so they didn't have to do anything, so the US just backed out.) The cost to build this is going to be quite immense. This MAY however be more likely to pass in the current political climate... the solar shade would work whether global warming is created by humans or not. There are a lot of people in the US. government who would never publicly admit that global warming is caused by human industrial activity. And I really doubt that's going to change tomorrow, either.
And the Unix way is not to provide a safety net, but to give people the freedom to fall.
I thought the Unix way was to give users just enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot...
But the doctrine of fair use does indeed make enforcement of Copyright through DRM tricky, because it removes fair use rights that copyright holders have no right to revoke. The applicable statue is as follows:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
According to many anti-DRM people copyright as the RIAA and MPAA are attempting to enforce it completely ignore parts 1 and 4 of the fair use test. The RIAA and MPAA, of course argue that part 4 is indeed violated. Although part 3 is generally applicable, as it is whole songs, movies, etc that are shared. Another problem is that DRM does not acknowledge that copyrights eventually expire, and thus the DRM would be creating an artificial barrier to access to the material. However, adding a DRM expiration would make defeating DRM trivial (change the date on your computer.)
Then there are those who are against DRM as they believe copyright is intrinsically unjust, as copyright in its current incarnation violate the purpose for copyright, which is to induce artists to create more works, adding more to the general domain and enriching the culture of the country that maintains copyright laws. Copyright currently has been extended such that it extends well beyond the life of the artist, and indeed the copyright is generally not held by artists but by the studios that publish their work. Thus, copyright does not increase cultural depth. These anti-DRM people believe that breaking copyright is a form of Civil Disobedience. Civil disobedience is a form of protest, and many people feel that protest is a moral imperative against situations they feel are unjust. However, most anti-DRM types don't realize that the main reason civil disobedience is a moral imperative as a form of protest is because the protester is generally arrested for their act, and it is the arrest that brings attention to the situation (I.E. people will think "Wow, he's willing to get arrested for his cause. Maybe I should at least take a look at what he's talking about.)
Wow, that turned into a much longer rant than I expected. Sorry about that.
There would potentially be LESS harm if drugs were regulated rather than prohibited, as the purity of the drugs could be assured, and often times the substances used to cut the drugs are much worse healthwise than the drugs themselves. Even discounting that, the war on drugs has done nothing to prevent addiction. Thus, decriminalizing drugs would not put an additional strain on the health care system.
And all of those issues would basically disappear if drugs were decriminalized. The only thing that would NOT change is the rate of addiction.
The thing about WGA is, it doesn't actually prevent you from using the computer. It prevents you from using Windows Update. So what you do is release the code into the wild that kills WGA meaning all infected computers will not be patched. THEN you release a virus into the wild that utilizes a vulnerability that has not been patched by Microsoft yet. Finally, you do whatever you want with the constantly growing botnet. DOS attacks, spam, spying on users, running a distributed password/encryption cracking utility... whatever. Shutting down their computers would be a waste at that time. You control all Windows computers that had WGA killed by the original exploit, as well as all pirated copies that wouldn't get the updates anyways.
THAT's the danger of WGA.
And more important than having a large pool of applicants, having a decent sports (in particular football with some emphasis on basketball) program will usually do more than a good academic program when it comes to attracting the attention of the alumni's pocketbooks. If a university's team is doing well, that team actually becomes profitable for the university through ticket sales, merchandising and increased Alumni donations, allowing the University to SUBSIDIZE academic and other student life related activities.
What... you don't see the humor in downmodding the comment such that it in great probability is reduced below the viewing threshold for the majority of Slashdot readers, in some essence censoring a post which is making a (debatably) humorous reference to an error message which has implications that can be viewed as being related to censorship, all of this being posted to a discussion on censorship in an organization supposedly modeled on free sharing of information, the discussion being held in a community of people who are supposedly great supporters of freedom of information?
To double the humor, the mod of offtopic was in itself an offtopic mod, as the post was in an of itself on topic. Redundant would have been a far more appropriate mod, as we see a "nothing to see here, move along" post on just about every Slashdot story that is related to censorship, but then again that mod would have brought up complaints of being unfair as many Slashdotters can't seem to realize that a post can be redundant even if it is the first post on that particular discussion if the post shows up on every single discussion of similar nature.
That's why my roomate splits up his time... about 40 hours a week from the office, 30-40 hours telecommuting. BTW, salary is for SUCKERS!.
Exactly... using the law of 70, this means the number of people telecommuting from a 3rd party location (oh god... that means that a new buzzword is going to be produced to describe this... mobicommuting or something. Ack Pthh! Anyways...) is going to approximately double in 7 years at 10% growth. (Law of 70 is an extremely handy shortcut for figuring out how long it takes to double assuming fairly consistant logarithmic growth... 70/r=number of years, where r is annual percentage growth. Also can be applied to days or whatever if r is daily percentage growth in such numbers as bacterial population. Not an exact number, but a good rule of thumb. Umm... don't remember the whole proof, but basically uses the financial equation P1=P0e^(rt) substitute 2 for P1 (final principal) 1 for P0 (intial principle) and solve for 2=1e^(rt) and end up with (I believe???) rt=ln(2). From there t= approximately ln70/r, or t=.693/r.
But the mechanics of it doesn't really matter. In a few years, all the journalist will have to do is change the definition of "mobomuting" (Ack... disgusted myself with that word) to "talking about work that occurs neither at home or at the workplace" and *PRESTO* the vast majority of the population is mobomuting! Even people in jobs that have nothing to do with offices! Unemployed hipsters drinking Latte's and talking about not having jobs will be mobomuting! Then, the future will be NOW!!!