So during the entire history of mail order since telephones were invented, a company finding that the delivery address given was incomplete and calling either the sender or the receiver to double-check or get directions has never occured and the process is therefore ingenious and patentable? This is stupid beyond the pale. And what's worse is they'll probably win simply because nobody ever thought to document doing something so basic.
What pissed me off about that movie was that they formed an iron-nickel cored planet, complete with silicate mantle and biosphere out of nothing but dirty ice. Uh huh.
I can see some kind of generated gravitational field device (like an artificial black hole?) that would put a rubble field into a coalescent state of mind. But it would still take a very long time for the elements to sort themselves into something approaching the current layered effect, to say nothing of cooling down to the point of being habitable. And even then you've still got an atmosphere that would eat a hole in your carpet. It took billions of years for the self-maintaining oxygenating system we have today to develop, and it is dependant on far more than just having the right gasses sitting around.
Anyways, if you've got a Type II civilization with that kind of mega-engineering skill, what are you doing screwing around with ordinary planets? Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds would be a far more efficient use of your building material.
"the nerds, geeks, etc. don't have a fucking clue about the legal system and yet they are trying offer commentary about it."
Similarly, "the judges, the lawyers, the politicians, etc. don't have a fucking clue about technology and yet they are regularly passing summary judgement on it and destroying people's lives over issues they don't even come close to understanding." Hmmm, I wonder which is more dangerous, abusive, irresponsible, and totally reprehensible behavior?
I find it unlikely that 'GUI' and 'GNU/Linux' were the only technical terms that arose. If the prosecutor understood but didn't question the others, why these? Declan McCullagh's suggesting that the prosecutor didn't know was likely prompted by more than a simple, "Please explain for the court what a GUI is." On the other hand, 'GUI' is found pretty early on when picking up the jargon, even thumbing through a 'Computers for Absolute Dummies'...
Ah, screw it. This account is second hand from someone who admittedly doesn't know the language particularly well. Let's wait until we get the actual transcript translated by someone able to read it.
They have a right to make money. They have a right to lose it too. Powerful companies have this nasty tendency to forget this though, and become infatuated with the notion that we exist only to give them money, regardless of our satisfaction with their service or product. If they can choose not to care about restricting my freedom, I can choose not to care about their profit margin.
I thoroughly agree. The problem is that he won't be content to slit his own throat; he'll go to court and try to take everyone else down with him. Who needs the invisible hand of economics if you can afford the bludgeoning hand of the law?
Quite true. As has been pointed out many times, copying and playing of copied DVDs was going on for some time before DeCSS was written. Any claims that you have to be able to decode something to copy it are bogus beyond all belief.
Except uncrippled VCR's that can receive HDTV and record it are circumvention devices under the DMCA. We can therefore expect an anti-electronics version of the War On Drugs in the next decade.
The MPAA took just as much a dislike to the source of DeCSS. So you say source code is not speech? Not even if it's one of those funky almost-natural-language programming languages that uses Shakespeare or some such in its syntax? Tell me, does a patent qualify as speech? If so, why not source? If not, why not?
The curved ceiling is the coolest part. Leave that in place and flatten out the floor more. Lopping off a few feet from the bottom gives you most of the width and still leaves you with 8-10 feet of headroom in the middle.
Re:Stability of online societies
on
Virtual Simerica
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· Score: 2
Because if an IRC channel goes to the bad place, it is utterly trivial to just leave and go someplace else and pick up where you left off. If a sysop pisses off his 'constituents' he'll quickly find himself without any.
But if a government or the sole provider of a MMOG goes bad, what are your options? For the former, leaving is an extremely expensive proposition and, depending on how far gone the government is, may even be illegal. For the latter, you can leave, but there's no place else to go to play that particular game (and Blizzard has demonstrated they'll be willing to sue anyone trying to provide an alternative). Either way, you're stuck.
Peter Jackson is definitely not commanding a high salary (he doesn't have enough experience), although I reallyy hope they give him a point or two of revenue.
Is this thing moving at an 'escape' velocity from our solar system? Is it in orbit around the sun like a comet? Can we calculate that orbit and see if it might hit us again?
Uh oh. The sun's escape velocity is 618 kps. This thing was doing around 400. Which means it may still hanging around. But the solar system's gravity fields are chaotic enough that it might get lucky and be slingshot away.
So, they know an approximate mass, they can guestimate how fast it is moving, and from the location of the Earth at that time, they know a relative position in the solar system.
Yeah, it'd behave just like any other piece of mass in the solar system, the only differences being that it's pretty much impossible to see and that when it hits something it doesn't go 'splat'. We _could_ make tentative guesses about where it'd be at any given time, but without additional positional data the potential for error would grow quickly.
How do they know it's quark matter? Why not micro-black-holes or a chunk of neutronium? They may be right, but I'm just curious as to how they narrowed this peculiar effect down to this even more peculiar cause. Large quarks are, to my knowledge, no more or less theoretical than micron-level singularities or thimble-sized pieces of neutronium.
Oooh, excellent point. Ok, then base it on the value of dosh when the copyright expired and adjust it for inflation every year. Though it would depend on how well establish-able the level of inflation is compared to any given year; companies with lots invested in their copyrights would quibble endlessly over it. I know jack squat about accounting, so I can't say.
I know, I know. Silly me, expecting the cover to, if not paint a totally accurate picture, at least not blatantly lie to me about the rest of the book. Someone else pointed out that the effect of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was to make it nearly totally illegal. Sighh....
Except 10 is both a multiple of 5 and 2, so according to your (quite insightful) logic, it will simultaneously be horrific and above average. I guess it's possible; it'd become a cult movie, like Army of Darkness or Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I kind of like the conclusion stemming from x2 and x4; that every movie involving time travel will be good.
Furthermore, what would #12 be like? It would earn money, be excellent, involve mutiny, time travel, and not suck! Now that sounds like a good movie!
It's NOT about copyright. The problem apparently is that FatWallet is publishing unpublishedprice data for sales
Right. If it's not published, then it's not copyrighted. One would think that the Digital Millenium Copyright act would therefore not really have any say here, but that's lawyers for you...
Bear in mind that Trade Secrets get no protection under the law. They are only protected as long as you yourself manage to keep them hidden. If word gets out, tough cookies. This is actually a good thing! Can you imagine what Coca Cola would have done when their copyrighted Coke recipe was about to enter public domain? It'd have made Disney look like a downright philanthropic organization!
but an extra 10 cents per razor can really add up and eat profits
Oh, definitely. 10% costs just to keep track of them would be wayyyy too much. For now, they'll be using it just as you said, to track crates of products in warehouses and shipping, not individual items. _Eventually_, they'll be cheap and small enough to put on everything.
Think of an RFID (Radio Frequency ID) as the next generation bar code. Ever seen that commercial with a rather shifty looking guy who walks around a grocery store, grabbing stuff off the shelves and sticking them into his overcoat and, obviously without paying for anything, is stopped by security guard on his way out who says, "You forgot your receipt". Essentially that. Stick an RFID tag onto the items in a store or warehouse, and it becomes simplicity itself to track them.
Another big difference is that there is a much larger address space available, one not limited by physical space on the object. They can track each and every item uniquely, not just the type.
That assumes that the Bad Guys have easy access to space while the Good Guys sit here on the ground praying (literally, where GWB is concerned) that nobody drops anything heavy. The military advantages of having easy access to the upside of Earth's gravity well, particularly if you have some level of industry up there, are amazing. In some future era where spaceflight is commonplace, any country that a) is capable of establishing a presense in space and b) chooses not to, is being foolishly lax and will almost deserve what it gets.
I'm well aware of the reasons why sales tax in practice are bad, but twice a month I see evidence of why income tax is worse. People and companies that can afford accountants always end up paying far less than they would under a perfect income tax. The poor and middle class end up having to foot the bill anyway. If we can't have something that's even close to being fair, we might as well have one that is (comparatively) simple and requires far less intrusion into our paychecks and lives than an organization like the IRS.
Note that we have far fewer problems with a graduated sales tax. Essentials like groceries are already taxed little, if at all (and food stamps make them entirely irrelevant), while a luxury car gets a much higher percentage.
Doesn't matter. Considering what it took to get the 18th repealed and the continuing existence of the DEA despite its obvious failure, it's not even remotely likely that Congress would repeal an ammendment, disband a major government agency, _and_ cut off their biggest source of income. You'd need a majority Libertarian government and, as much as I like them, there's no way it'll happen in my lifetime.
That's why an income tax is a nice idea in theory (tax the wealthy a higher percentage than the poor), but becomes utterly impossible to implement in real life. You have to know everything about everyone to keep it legit. I wouldn't mind higher sales taxes or even interstate commerce taxes as an IRS replacement. The uber-wealthy and big corps may be able to hide what they earn and lie about what they spend it on, but it would still get taxed anyway. Of course, then they'd just start doing under-the-table sales... sighhh...
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So during the entire history of mail order since telephones were invented, a company finding that the delivery address given was incomplete and calling either the sender or the receiver to double-check or get directions has never occured and the process is therefore ingenious and patentable? This is stupid beyond the pale. And what's worse is they'll probably win simply because nobody ever thought to document doing something so basic.
I can see some kind of generated gravitational field device (like an artificial black hole?) that would put a rubble field into a coalescent state of mind. But it would still take a very long time for the elements to sort themselves into something approaching the current layered effect, to say nothing of cooling down to the point of being habitable. And even then you've still got an atmosphere that would eat a hole in your carpet. It took billions of years for the self-maintaining oxygenating system we have today to develop, and it is dependant on far more than just having the right gasses sitting around.
Anyways, if you've got a Type II civilization with that kind of mega-engineering skill, what are you doing screwing around with ordinary planets? Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds would be a far more efficient use of your building material.
Similarly, "the judges, the lawyers, the politicians, etc. don't have a fucking clue about technology and yet they are regularly passing summary judgement on it and destroying people's lives over issues they don't even come close to understanding." Hmmm, I wonder which is more dangerous, abusive, irresponsible, and totally reprehensible behavior?
I find it unlikely that 'GUI' and 'GNU/Linux' were the only technical terms that arose. If the prosecutor understood but didn't question the others, why these? Declan McCullagh's suggesting that the prosecutor didn't know was likely prompted by more than a simple, "Please explain for the court what a GUI is." On the other hand, 'GUI' is found pretty early on when picking up the jargon, even thumbing through a 'Computers for Absolute Dummies'...
Ah, screw it. This account is second hand from someone who admittedly doesn't know the language particularly well. Let's wait until we get the actual transcript translated by someone able to read it.
They have a right to make money. They have a right to lose it too. Powerful companies have this nasty tendency to forget this though, and become infatuated with the notion that we exist only to give them money, regardless of our satisfaction with their service or product. If they can choose not to care about restricting my freedom, I can choose not to care about their profit margin.
I thoroughly agree. The problem is that he won't be content to slit his own throat; he'll go to court and try to take everyone else down with him. Who needs the invisible hand of economics if you can afford the bludgeoning hand of the law?
Quite true. As has been pointed out many times, copying and playing of copied DVDs was going on for some time before DeCSS was written. Any claims that you have to be able to decode something to copy it are bogus beyond all belief.
I guess they figure that Helm's Deep and the Ent smackdown is enough for one movie. Shrug. Either way it should kick copious amounts of ass.
Except uncrippled VCR's that can receive HDTV and record it are circumvention devices under the DMCA. We can therefore expect an anti-electronics version of the War On Drugs in the next decade.
The MPAA took just as much a dislike to the source of DeCSS. So you say source code is not speech? Not even if it's one of those funky almost-natural-language programming languages that uses Shakespeare or some such in its syntax? Tell me, does a patent qualify as speech? If so, why not source? If not, why not?
The curved ceiling is the coolest part. Leave that in place and flatten out the floor more. Lopping off a few feet from the bottom gives you most of the width and still leaves you with 8-10 feet of headroom in the middle.
But if a government or the sole provider of a MMOG goes bad, what are your options? For the former, leaving is an extremely expensive proposition and, depending on how far gone the government is, may even be illegal. For the latter, you can leave, but there's no place else to go to play that particular game (and Blizzard has demonstrated they'll be willing to sue anyone trying to provide an alternative). Either way, you're stuck.
Sure, they'll just give him 10% of the profits.
Hmmm, maybe not. 618 kps at the sun, but only 42 kps out at Earth orbit. Probably long gone by now.
Uh oh. The sun's escape velocity is 618 kps. This thing was doing around 400. Which means it may still hanging around. But the solar system's gravity fields are chaotic enough that it might get lucky and be slingshot away.
So, they know an approximate mass, they can guestimate how fast it is moving, and from the location of the Earth at that time, they know a relative position in the solar system.
Yeah, it'd behave just like any other piece of mass in the solar system, the only differences being that it's pretty much impossible to see and that when it hits something it doesn't go 'splat'. We _could_ make tentative guesses about where it'd be at any given time, but without additional positional data the potential for error would grow quickly.
How do they know it's quark matter? Why not micro-black-holes or a chunk of neutronium? They may be right, but I'm just curious as to how they narrowed this peculiar effect down to this even more peculiar cause. Large quarks are, to my knowledge, no more or less theoretical than micron-level singularities or thimble-sized pieces of neutronium.
Oooh, excellent point. Ok, then base it on the value of dosh when the copyright expired and adjust it for inflation every year. Though it would depend on how well establish-able the level of inflation is compared to any given year; companies with lots invested in their copyrights would quibble endlessly over it. I know jack squat about accounting, so I can't say.
I know, I know. Silly me, expecting the cover to, if not paint a totally accurate picture, at least not blatantly lie to me about the rest of the book. Someone else pointed out that the effect of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was to make it nearly totally illegal. Sighh....
I kind of like the conclusion stemming from x2 and x4; that every movie involving time travel will be good.
Furthermore, what would #12 be like? It would earn money, be excellent, involve mutiny, time travel, and not suck! Now that sounds like a good movie!
Right. If it's not published, then it's not copyrighted. One would think that the Digital Millenium Copyright act would therefore not really have any say here, but that's lawyers for you...
Bear in mind that Trade Secrets get no protection under the law. They are only protected as long as you yourself manage to keep them hidden. If word gets out, tough cookies. This is actually a good thing! Can you imagine what Coca Cola would have done when their copyrighted Coke recipe was about to enter public domain? It'd have made Disney look like a downright philanthropic organization!
Oh, definitely. 10% costs just to keep track of them would be wayyyy too much. For now, they'll be using it just as you said, to track crates of products in warehouses and shipping, not individual items. _Eventually_, they'll be cheap and small enough to put on everything.
Another big difference is that there is a much larger address space available, one not limited by physical space on the object. They can track each and every item uniquely, not just the type.
That assumes that the Bad Guys have easy access to space while the Good Guys sit here on the ground praying (literally, where GWB is concerned) that nobody drops anything heavy. The military advantages of having easy access to the upside of Earth's gravity well, particularly if you have some level of industry up there, are amazing. In some future era where spaceflight is commonplace, any country that a) is capable of establishing a presense in space and b) chooses not to, is being foolishly lax and will almost deserve what it gets.
Note that we have far fewer problems with a graduated sales tax. Essentials like groceries are already taxed little, if at all (and food stamps make them entirely irrelevant), while a luxury car gets a much higher percentage.
Doesn't matter. Considering what it took to get the 18th repealed and the continuing existence of the DEA despite its obvious failure, it's not even remotely likely that Congress would repeal an ammendment, disband a major government agency, _and_ cut off their biggest source of income. You'd need a majority Libertarian government and, as much as I like them, there's no way it'll happen in my lifetime.
That's why an income tax is a nice idea in theory (tax the wealthy a higher percentage than the poor), but becomes utterly impossible to implement in real life. You have to know everything about everyone to keep it legit. I wouldn't mind higher sales taxes or even interstate commerce taxes as an IRS replacement. The uber-wealthy and big corps may be able to hide what they earn and lie about what they spend it on, but it would still get taxed anyway. Of course, then they'd just start doing under-the-table sales... sighhh...
What is a movie theater if not a film distributor? Just have to imaginative in how you define 'film distribution'.