I apologize for neglecting the tag at the end of my first sentence. Everything else I said was serious. My sarcasm was targeted at the post to which I was replying which claimed that without copyright "there'd be no cultural heritage for anyone to steal^H^H^H^H^H share, and the whole argument would be completely moot." That is the post to which you should direct your outrage, sir.
Right, because before copyright was invented there was no culture whatsoever. I think you meant there would be less cultural heritage to go around. And no, I am not splitting hairs: the difference between "less" and "none" is very significant because it means that a compromise exists. There are extremists on both sides declaring the end of the world unless copyright is either abolished or codified as a god-given right, but neither is a rational position. Once you accept that copyright is not absolutely necessary for the world to keep spinning, you can cut it down to size based on the logical argument for its existence.
The only fair solution is a balance for everyone concerned--a limited copyright that lets businesses recoup their investment without keeping works hostage to private interests for eternity. I am just as frustrated with the "all information should be free" crowd as I am with the "all free information is stealing" crowd, since neither has a lasting solution to the problem.
Except you can't give your employer the password to just one of your circles, can you? You'd still need multiple accounts to thwart "intentional" security breaches.
Wargasm pr0n aside, I can't see the expense of such ordinance being wasted on some kids downloading rips of Avatar.
The MAFIAA has managed to commandeer foreign policy and the entire justice system, who says they won't succeed with the military? All they have to do is drop a "credible" tip that the TPB is supporting t*****rists and the job's as good as done.
All sarcasm aside, if you want to get into what's practical, then I think pi.(d/2)^2 is much better because then you don't have to square such a large number in your head, nor do you have to divide by four at the end. And oh look, that's the same as pi.r^2. Honestly I cannot fathom why people get so hung up over mathematical formulas that are ABSOLUTELY EQUIVALENT. You're perfectly welcome to simplify and redistribute equations in your head, I do it all the time too. Just don't screw with hundreds of years of written convention to suit the peculiarities of your particular mind.
I'm not. First of all, center-left on an eight-lane highway (four each way) is not the passing lane. Second, nobody respects passing lanes around here--when an aggressive driver pulls up behind there's a 60% chance he'll pass on the right even when the left lane is clear, which it usually isn't. Growing up, I didn't even know what a passing lane was until I went on vacation at the beach, so to call anything a passing lane around here is arbitrary at best and a dangerous at worst.
There's a reason why D.C. usually tops the nation's list of worst drivers. Those of us who live in this mess have to survive somehow.
That tutorial overlooks the issue I describe below: a closely-following truck or SUV blocks the center mirror view, so you cannot see a car approaching in the adjacent lane until it is one car length behind you. This makes changing lanes dangerous when you are trying to get out of the tailgater's way, since in those situations it is common for people to pass on the right at high speed (at least in the D.C. area). You can compensate for a blind spot by moving your head, but only the side mirror lets you see through trucks. I have my mirrors adjusted slightly better than their "traditional" method (they are far enough out that I can't see my own car) but to completely eliminate the blind spot made more problems than it was worth. Convex mirrors or inlays are the way to go.
I tried this the last time the topic came up on/. and found that I had a whole new, much worse blind spot: when being followed by a truck or SUV on the freeway, I could not tell when it was safe to change lanes because the center mirror view was blocked and the side mirror gave me a nice view of the shoulder. I had no idea when some jackass two cars behind was going to swerve out and gun past me. And yes this happens all the time when I'm following someone else at a safe distance waiting to pass them, so passing was impossible. So I put my mirrors back to almost (but not quite) showing the side of the car, and got used to moving my head to see the blind spot (either by leaning forward or turning to glance). Yes, I have had a few close calls with cars in my blind spot, but given the number of idiots who tailgate and pass on the right in the D.C. area, I couldn't even consider changing lanes with the mirrors "properly" adjusted.
Of course there are other ways to value a work of art, but economic value is the only one that justifies hampering the artistic value by making a work less accessible to the public. If a work is not generating any revenue, then the copyright is worthless even to a starving artist. There is no "moral ownership" of artistic works, there is only a "right to profit for a limited time" from those works. You have no right to tell me when and where and how I can enjoy your work except during the limited time which you profit from it to make a living. If you don't make even $15 off a song in the first four years, I'm pretty sure it would do you more good in the public domain too.
Any battle around a planet would leave so much debris floating around that it would make entire orbits unsafe. Think about how much trouble was caused when two satellites collided now imagine the remains of a large number of ships or USV (Unmanned Space Vehicles) floating around. One battle could leave earth with no safe place to orbit satellites or a safe trajectory to leave.
Finally someone mentioned the debris problem. >200 posts about kinetic weapons and flak shot and nukes and nobody considered the crap that misses is just going to come around in orbit and hit your back. The oft-posted Wikipedia article is on the Kessler syndrome.
I expect actual space combat to be almost entirely electronic warfare. If you can take control of a satellite, you can simply program it to de-orbit itself, possibly onto a target of your choice. The most effective physical ordinance would be a "robotic end-of-life drone" with a de-orbit engine that would simply attach itself to an enemy satellite and make it fall into the atmosphere. There is no way anyone hoping for anything less than Armageddon is going to start firing more conventional weapons than an occasional missile (as the Chinese have).
Of course, the same thing could be said about nuclear weapons on the planet's surface, so there's no telling how far a Cold War-style arms race would go in space. It is simply a logical extension of the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction. But again, it's a lot more likely that jamming, espionage and hacking from orbit and the ground will be used to disable a space asset. Of course, you could program a dead-man switch on your missile satellites so they go off when they lose communication, but we learned not do that from Dr. Strangelove.
Clearly they are false because no organization owns more than one scanner! This is clear evidence that someone other than their organization scanned some of the documents./sarcasm
That would be true if you were trying to cool the water with the energy you extracted *from the water*. But a nuclear reactor does not conserve energy, it has input from the nuclear fuel. The only reason you need to cool the water at all is because the fuel is generating more heat than you can extract in your turbines, either because of their design or because of the limited electricity demand. If you have a place to dump the extra heat, using some of that electricity to get it from point A to point B is not thermodynamically implausible.
The reason this is a stupid idea is completely unrelated, though. If the reactor design requires active refrigeration, this is even more likely to fail than simple pumps, and you run a much higher risk of melting down. And if it is not required, no one would want to pay extra for a redundant overly-complicated system unless there are other reasons not to use the passive system in normal operation.
Straight from the horse's mouth: The whole reason they want to increase the funding for commercial vehicles is so they can keep more than a couple competing companies in the running. The goal of course is to have multiple systems working in the end, which isn't going to happen if we start picking winners before they've even launched anything. Republicans should know that better than anyone, seeing how much they gloated over the Solyndra affair. The truth is that industry is much better equipped than the government to get something working and in orbit, given that all the underlying research has been done already, in order to get American astronauts back in American spacecraft as quickly as possible.
Plus, I don't know what Sen. Hutchison is smoking, but the part of SLS (also known as the "Senate Launch System") that remains funded is the smaller version of the rocket which is good for low Earth orbit--precisely the part that can be used as a backup to the commercial system(s). Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and the committee won't gut what's left of the Mars budget to fund their local firecracker factory.
It's also no different from a lot of office environments where a few people do most of the work and the rest get coffee and look over their shoulders. Not saying it's good, but it's reality. If you want to test individuals, on the other hand, you have to set up artificial boundaries and won't necessarily be able to measure their "real-world" performance.
That was kind of my point. The OP seemed to think that there is an easily discernible line between "research" and "collaboration", and to a certain extent I disagree, which is why I suggested that if you allow one you may as well allow the other. But like you say, that defeats the purpose of individual education, though for the record, companies also like hiring people who are good members of a team in addition to knowing the material. I think there's a reason the paper exam has lasted so long, and this discussion will very quickly narrow in on it.
If you're going to allow them unlimited research, then why not let them collaborate too? Give the whole class a set of problems big enough that they need to organize and split them up to get them all done in time. And if they can find the solution already completed elsewhere, so be it, that's what a good engineer is supposed to do. The whole point of working in the real world is that your performance depends on those around you, so the only way to measure the performance of students individually is to put them in an artificial problem solving situation like a traditional exam. That's why we still have paper, closed-book exams in theory classes, and why there are an increasing number of "project classes" where the entire class grade depends on the success of a hands-on group project.
These numbers are what the GP is referring to. On a per-Joule basis, nuclear power does have the lowest number of deaths by far. There are a number of factors, starting with the comparatively small volume of fuel required. Coal requires much larger mining operations because the energy density is lower than uranium. More mining equals more opportunity for regulatory capture/failure producing unsafe conditions and mining accidents. The second factor is air pollution: The number of deaths caused by excess smog from coal-fired power plants is large and measurable.
I always think it's funny that solar power is cited as more than 10 times as deadly than nuclear on a per Joule basis. I understand most of those deaths are due to installers falling off house roofs, and since the total volume of production is low the average is not favorable. The bottom line is that once a nuclear plant is operational, the personnel protection regulations do a damn good job of keeping folks out of harm's way, and since they constantly pump out power and fail so infrequently, the average is pretty damn good.
The whole "inferior versus perfect" copy thing is a bit of straw man argument. You can only charge extra (read: more than free) if you provide some extra value in your product. Previously, the only added value they provided was a bit of extra quality in the recording. But 99% of the time the inferior copy served the needs of the user, so people copied things whenever they thought price was too high or didn't have the money.
Now that lossless copies are free, the sold products have lost their added value (and with DRM, actually negated it). So the sellers are complaining that they have to find some new way to add value to their products and they don't like it. Big whoop.
And yes I like Amazon, they are very convenient and I love the DRM-free aspect, but if I want to fill up my iPod I'm not going to shell out $1000 in one sitting. I'm going to put down the $50 of disposable income I have for the week (for however many songs it buys me) and download the rest. That's the market at work, such as it is.
Probably they used a scanning-tunneling electron microscope or similar to do the read. Those obviously don't scale down easily, hence there is no practical way to read the data yet.
Actually, darwin is kind of right. The difference between 120nm transistors and 45nm transistors is quite substantial. Between random radiation, natural wear due to thermal cycling, and period electrostatic discharges from handling and plugging in connectors, it is not surprising that the older chips are sturdier in general.
But he may have just invoked the "They don't make them like they used to" logical fallacy, because sure there are some 20-year-old SNES machines, but how many of them died 2 years after production? Compare that percentage to the figure for PS3's and you have your answer.
But even though you can't stop rape and murder you only punish the culprits...
Don't forget the social services and interventions and public outreach to help people before they descend to committing heinous crimes. It doesn't matter how many people you punish if half the population is still destitute and emotionally disturbed enough that they are on the edge of murder. Drug lords may think twice before killing if prosecution is good enough, but psychopaths will not. You have to take away the circumstances and incentive to actually reduce non-commercial crime.
Consumer piracy of the kind that can be converted to sales is not driven by cost-benefit-risk analysis but by convenience and budget and emotional impulses. Make it easier and cheaper to make impulse purchases online, and you will convert the most significant portion of downloaders. That's why so many people advocate opening more convenient legal download channels, not more prosecution. Take it from me, I used to download a lot of stuff, but now I can get almost everything from three subscription streaming sites for less than the price of cable and I love it. A bigger selection and more unified interface will draw more customers, guaranteed.
This comment does a very nice job of summarizing Google's argument. Basically, they are saying that since only material reproductions are covered under distribution rights, the only way you can control the distribution of mp3 files is if they are material reproductions. However, all material reproductions are also covered by the right of resale, so in that case ReDigi is a lawful reseller. If, on the other hand, mp3 files are not material reproductions and not subject to the right of resale, then they are not subject to the right of exclusive production either. Approached logically, the case falls apart no matter what stance you take. The only way for them to prevail is if the judge decides to apply half the law and ignore the other half.
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I apologize for neglecting the tag at the end of my first sentence. Everything else I said was serious. My sarcasm was targeted at the post to which I was replying which claimed that without copyright "there'd be no cultural heritage for anyone to steal^H^H^H^H^H share, and the whole argument would be completely moot." That is the post to which you should direct your outrage, sir.
Right, because before copyright was invented there was no culture whatsoever. I think you meant there would be less cultural heritage to go around. And no, I am not splitting hairs: the difference between "less" and "none" is very significant because it means that a compromise exists. There are extremists on both sides declaring the end of the world unless copyright is either abolished or codified as a god-given right, but neither is a rational position. Once you accept that copyright is not absolutely necessary for the world to keep spinning, you can cut it down to size based on the logical argument for its existence.
The only fair solution is a balance for everyone concerned--a limited copyright that lets businesses recoup their investment without keeping works hostage to private interests for eternity. I am just as frustrated with the "all information should be free" crowd as I am with the "all free information is stealing" crowd, since neither has a lasting solution to the problem.
Except you can't give your employer the password to just one of your circles, can you? You'd still need multiple accounts to thwart "intentional" security breaches.
Wargasm pr0n aside, I can't see the expense of such ordinance being wasted on some kids downloading rips of Avatar.
The MAFIAA has managed to commandeer foreign policy and the entire justice system, who says they won't succeed with the military? All they have to do is drop a "credible" tip that the TPB is supporting t*****rists and the job's as good as done.
All sarcasm aside, if you want to get into what's practical, then I think pi.(d/2)^2 is much better because then you don't have to square such a large number in your head, nor do you have to divide by four at the end. And oh look, that's the same as pi.r^2. Honestly I cannot fathom why people get so hung up over mathematical formulas that are ABSOLUTELY EQUIVALENT. You're perfectly welcome to simplify and redistribute equations in your head, I do it all the time too. Just don't screw with hundreds of years of written convention to suit the peculiarities of your particular mind.
(measuring d then halving doesn't count)
This is where I stopped reading your post.
I'm not. First of all, center-left on an eight-lane highway (four each way) is not the passing lane. Second, nobody respects passing lanes around here--when an aggressive driver pulls up behind there's a 60% chance he'll pass on the right even when the left lane is clear, which it usually isn't. Growing up, I didn't even know what a passing lane was until I went on vacation at the beach, so to call anything a passing lane around here is arbitrary at best and a dangerous at worst.
There's a reason why D.C. usually tops the nation's list of worst drivers. Those of us who live in this mess have to survive somehow.
That tutorial overlooks the issue I describe below: a closely-following truck or SUV blocks the center mirror view, so you cannot see a car approaching in the adjacent lane until it is one car length behind you. This makes changing lanes dangerous when you are trying to get out of the tailgater's way, since in those situations it is common for people to pass on the right at high speed (at least in the D.C. area). You can compensate for a blind spot by moving your head, but only the side mirror lets you see through trucks. I have my mirrors adjusted slightly better than their "traditional" method (they are far enough out that I can't see my own car) but to completely eliminate the blind spot made more problems than it was worth. Convex mirrors or inlays are the way to go.
I tried this the last time the topic came up on /. and found that I had a whole new, much worse blind spot: when being followed by a truck or SUV on the freeway, I could not tell when it was safe to change lanes because the center mirror view was blocked and the side mirror gave me a nice view of the shoulder. I had no idea when some jackass two cars behind was going to swerve out and gun past me. And yes this happens all the time when I'm following someone else at a safe distance waiting to pass them, so passing was impossible. So I put my mirrors back to almost (but not quite) showing the side of the car, and got used to moving my head to see the blind spot (either by leaning forward or turning to glance). Yes, I have had a few close calls with cars in my blind spot, but given the number of idiots who tailgate and pass on the right in the D.C. area, I couldn't even consider changing lanes with the mirrors "properly" adjusted.
Simple explanation: One of you watches educational television and the other one doesn't.
Of course there are other ways to value a work of art, but economic value is the only one that justifies hampering the artistic value by making a work less accessible to the public. If a work is not generating any revenue, then the copyright is worthless even to a starving artist. There is no "moral ownership" of artistic works, there is only a "right to profit for a limited time" from those works. You have no right to tell me when and where and how I can enjoy your work except during the limited time which you profit from it to make a living. If you don't make even $15 off a song in the first four years, I'm pretty sure it would do you more good in the public domain too.
Any battle around a planet would leave so much debris floating around that it would make entire orbits unsafe. Think about how much trouble was caused when two satellites collided now imagine the remains of a large number of ships or USV (Unmanned Space Vehicles) floating around. One battle could leave earth with no safe place to orbit satellites or a safe trajectory to leave.
Finally someone mentioned the debris problem. >200 posts about kinetic weapons and flak shot and nukes and nobody considered the crap that misses is just going to come around in orbit and hit your back. The oft-posted Wikipedia article is on the Kessler syndrome.
I expect actual space combat to be almost entirely electronic warfare. If you can take control of a satellite, you can simply program it to de-orbit itself, possibly onto a target of your choice. The most effective physical ordinance would be a "robotic end-of-life drone" with a de-orbit engine that would simply attach itself to an enemy satellite and make it fall into the atmosphere. There is no way anyone hoping for anything less than Armageddon is going to start firing more conventional weapons than an occasional missile (as the Chinese have).
Of course, the same thing could be said about nuclear weapons on the planet's surface, so there's no telling how far a Cold War-style arms race would go in space. It is simply a logical extension of the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction. But again, it's a lot more likely that jamming, espionage and hacking from orbit and the ground will be used to disable a space asset. Of course, you could program a dead-man switch on your missile satellites so they go off when they lose communication, but we learned not do that from Dr. Strangelove.
Clearly they are false because no organization owns more than one scanner! This is clear evidence that someone other than their organization scanned some of the documents. /sarcasm
That would be true if you were trying to cool the water with the energy you extracted *from the water*. But a nuclear reactor does not conserve energy, it has input from the nuclear fuel. The only reason you need to cool the water at all is because the fuel is generating more heat than you can extract in your turbines, either because of their design or because of the limited electricity demand. If you have a place to dump the extra heat, using some of that electricity to get it from point A to point B is not thermodynamically implausible.
The reason this is a stupid idea is completely unrelated, though. If the reactor design requires active refrigeration, this is even more likely to fail than simple pumps, and you run a much higher risk of melting down. And if it is not required, no one would want to pay extra for a redundant overly-complicated system unless there are other reasons not to use the passive system in normal operation.
Straight from the horse's mouth: The whole reason they want to increase the funding for commercial vehicles is so they can keep more than a couple competing companies in the running. The goal of course is to have multiple systems working in the end, which isn't going to happen if we start picking winners before they've even launched anything. Republicans should know that better than anyone, seeing how much they gloated over the Solyndra affair. The truth is that industry is much better equipped than the government to get something working and in orbit, given that all the underlying research has been done already, in order to get American astronauts back in American spacecraft as quickly as possible.
Plus, I don't know what Sen. Hutchison is smoking, but the part of SLS (also known as the "Senate Launch System") that remains funded is the smaller version of the rocket which is good for low Earth orbit--precisely the part that can be used as a backup to the commercial system(s). Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and the committee won't gut what's left of the Mars budget to fund their local firecracker factory.
It's also no different from a lot of office environments where a few people do most of the work and the rest get coffee and look over their shoulders. Not saying it's good, but it's reality. If you want to test individuals, on the other hand, you have to set up artificial boundaries and won't necessarily be able to measure their "real-world" performance.
That was kind of my point. The OP seemed to think that there is an easily discernible line between "research" and "collaboration", and to a certain extent I disagree, which is why I suggested that if you allow one you may as well allow the other. But like you say, that defeats the purpose of individual education, though for the record, companies also like hiring people who are good members of a team in addition to knowing the material. I think there's a reason the paper exam has lasted so long, and this discussion will very quickly narrow in on it.
If you're going to allow them unlimited research, then why not let them collaborate too? Give the whole class a set of problems big enough that they need to organize and split them up to get them all done in time. And if they can find the solution already completed elsewhere, so be it, that's what a good engineer is supposed to do. The whole point of working in the real world is that your performance depends on those around you, so the only way to measure the performance of students individually is to put them in an artificial problem solving situation like a traditional exam. That's why we still have paper, closed-book exams in theory classes, and why there are an increasing number of "project classes" where the entire class grade depends on the success of a hands-on group project.
These numbers are what the GP is referring to. On a per-Joule basis, nuclear power does have the lowest number of deaths by far. There are a number of factors, starting with the comparatively small volume of fuel required. Coal requires much larger mining operations because the energy density is lower than uranium. More mining equals more opportunity for regulatory capture/failure producing unsafe conditions and mining accidents. The second factor is air pollution: The number of deaths caused by excess smog from coal-fired power plants is large and measurable.
I always think it's funny that solar power is cited as more than 10 times as deadly than nuclear on a per Joule basis. I understand most of those deaths are due to installers falling off house roofs, and since the total volume of production is low the average is not favorable. The bottom line is that once a nuclear plant is operational, the personnel protection regulations do a damn good job of keeping folks out of harm's way, and since they constantly pump out power and fail so infrequently, the average is pretty damn good.
The whole "inferior versus perfect" copy thing is a bit of straw man argument. You can only charge extra (read: more than free) if you provide some extra value in your product. Previously, the only added value they provided was a bit of extra quality in the recording. But 99% of the time the inferior copy served the needs of the user, so people copied things whenever they thought price was too high or didn't have the money.
Now that lossless copies are free, the sold products have lost their added value (and with DRM, actually negated it). So the sellers are complaining that they have to find some new way to add value to their products and they don't like it. Big whoop.
And yes I like Amazon, they are very convenient and I love the DRM-free aspect, but if I want to fill up my iPod I'm not going to shell out $1000 in one sitting. I'm going to put down the $50 of disposable income I have for the week (for however many songs it buys me) and download the rest. That's the market at work, such as it is.
Probably they used a scanning-tunneling electron microscope or similar to do the read. Those obviously don't scale down easily, hence there is no practical way to read the data yet.
Actually, darwin is kind of right. The difference between 120nm transistors and 45nm transistors is quite substantial. Between random radiation, natural wear due to thermal cycling, and period electrostatic discharges from handling and plugging in connectors, it is not surprising that the older chips are sturdier in general.
But he may have just invoked the "They don't make them like they used to" logical fallacy, because sure there are some 20-year-old SNES machines, but how many of them died 2 years after production? Compare that percentage to the figure for PS3's and you have your answer.
Only if you can find a suitable aeroline. ;-)
But even though you can't stop rape and murder you only punish the culprits...
Don't forget the social services and interventions and public outreach to help people before they descend to committing heinous crimes. It doesn't matter how many people you punish if half the population is still destitute and emotionally disturbed enough that they are on the edge of murder. Drug lords may think twice before killing if prosecution is good enough, but psychopaths will not. You have to take away the circumstances and incentive to actually reduce non-commercial crime.
Consumer piracy of the kind that can be converted to sales is not driven by cost-benefit-risk analysis but by convenience and budget and emotional impulses. Make it easier and cheaper to make impulse purchases online, and you will convert the most significant portion of downloaders. That's why so many people advocate opening more convenient legal download channels, not more prosecution. Take it from me, I used to download a lot of stuff, but now I can get almost everything from three subscription streaming sites for less than the price of cable and I love it. A bigger selection and more unified interface will draw more customers, guaranteed.
This comment does a very nice job of summarizing Google's argument. Basically, they are saying that since only material reproductions are covered under distribution rights, the only way you can control the distribution of mp3 files is if they are material reproductions. However, all material reproductions are also covered by the right of resale, so in that case ReDigi is a lawful reseller. If, on the other hand, mp3 files are not material reproductions and not subject to the right of resale, then they are not subject to the right of exclusive production either. Approached logically, the case falls apart no matter what stance you take. The only way for them to prevail is if the judge decides to apply half the law and ignore the other half.