An arcane factoid: I think that one of the relatives of this pine listed in the Australian information link, "Agathis (Kauri Pines)", furnishes wood for makers of traditional Go boards. If you want to take a look, look here: http://www.yutopian.com/go/table/tk135.html
Go is one of the oldest board games in human history still being played. There is probably some sort of mystic connection between the qualities of the wood from this family and the game. Early legends on Go boards suggest that the construction and design had roots in divination and religious ceremonies, but I'm no expert, I merely note the connection here.
Go players and the game itself is as much about the physical beauty of the game as it is about the beauty of the logical relationships between opposing forces.
Another good site to look at is www.samarkand.net
To continue in this arcane vein, the premium wood for Go boards is katsura, valued primarily for its somewhat more interesting grain. For information about Go, try www.usgo.org, or www.britgo.org.
There's another factor at work (I concede that the tax revenue issue is a powerful one with our elected lawmakers). The telephone companies in the US and everywhere else, AFAIK, are grass roots organizations. Telephone company workers live in every neighborhood and are generally helpful and well liked people (I'm not referring to telco execs, who are mainly evil pond scum). The telcos know this, and when a threat arises to the interests of the telco, the communcations workers are deployed to write letters and knock on doors. Eat your heart out, Ralph Nader.
In addition, the telcos have a huge installed base of ever-vigilent retirees who are very aware of any threat to their pension fund. Retirees have nothing but time, and you can get a busload of them to a demonstration at the state capitol in no time flat.
Further, law makers have been trained to think of the "phone company" as their main contact for all communications matters and for information on communications policy. When telecom decentralizes over IP networks, suddenly Joe Legislator is faced with calling up a bunch of Joe Sixpacks to ask them what they think.
In other words, it's not an easy or quick matter to usher out an obsolete industry. It looses its dying grip on the economy very slowly, and can take down a lot of innocents with it as it goes. The coal industry is still into the federal taxpayer for retiree funding...the railroad industry much the same (and it relinquished it monopoly to the trucking industry only after a 20 year running battle)...I remember that Western Union (telegraph!) still had an office in my home town in the 1990s (although they mostly sold and cashed money orders).
If business and economics were ruled by logic, sure, the telcos would be dead right now. But it ain't that easy or that simple.
In all the hullabaloo raised over declining media sales (by the music industry, may their toenails grow backwards), I haven't seen much discussion about demographics. The "boomer" generation (to which I belong) represented a big population blip in the retail music world, and we've pretty much stopped buying music. The 14-26 year age group of today is much smaller, and is fundamentally convinced that content should be free (or at least low cost). This trend will only intensify as they are alienated by the heavyhanded tactics of the Digital Rights crowd, and (worse) have to start paying for their own music with their own money, buy houses and cars, raise children and pay off student loans at the same time.
In essence, the music industry has lost two generations of music consumers, and is trying to retrain a third (today's 0-12 year olds) to pay whatever they ask for increasingly banal content.
But basically, the product sucks. In an attempt to capture the attention of the mass market, the industry has resorted to more and more outrageous marketing and content, with diminishing returns.
Consumers now spend a huge portion of their disposable income on entertainment. Disposable income has nowhere to go but down, given long term economic trends, including globalization and escalating energy costs. So the long term prognosis for the entertainment industry is poor. Digital rights managment is akin to bailing out the ocean with a teacup.
A few years ago, the nations phone companies were convinced that they were on the verge of becoming major players in the entertainment world because they controlled the phone lines and could deliver "content". Turns out they a) couldn't control communications technology b) didn't know beans about creating "content" and c) had a wildly exaggerated idea of how much time consumers were willing to spend sitting on the couch consuming phone company "movies on demand".
So let the marketing geniuses have their fun. They aren't smarter than everyone else and in fact may not be smarter than anyone else.
Well, your advice is certainly appropriate (sorry, didn't see your reply until just now), and therefore I quote US Copyright Office Circular 3 (which is available along with a bunch of other stuff at www.copyright.gov) and as the circular says, the magic date before which a notice WAS required is March 1, 1989, except for certain foreign works, which may have their copyrights restored upon filing of proper notice with the US Copyright notice or upon the infringer. As always, there are the usual bizarre cases and technical exceptions, if you find all of this too boring, like I said, consult an intellectual property lawyer, pay them money and get on with your life:
"The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U.S. law, although it is often beneficial. Because prior law did contain such a requirement, however, the use of notice is still relevant to the copyright status of older works. This circular discusses both the copyright notice provisions as originally enacted in the 1976 Copyright Act (title 17, U.S. Code), which took effect January 1, 1978, and the effect of the 1988 Berne Convention Implementation Act, which amended the copyright law to make the use of a copyright notice optional on copies of works published on and after March 1, 1989. Specifications for the proper form and placement of the notice are described in this circular. Works published before January 1, 1978, are governed by the previous copyright law. Under that law, if a work was published under the copyright owner's authority without a proper notice of copyright, all copyright protection for that work was permanently lost in the United States. The Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 (URAA) (PL 103-465) modified the effect of publication without notice for certain foreign works. Under this Act, copyright is automatically restored, effective January 1, 1996, for certain foreign works placed into the public domain because of lack of proper notice or noncompliance with other legal requirements. Although restoration is automatic, if the copyright owner wishes to enforce rights against reliance parties (those who, relying on the public domain status of a work, were already using the work before the URAA was enacted), he/she must either file with the Copyright Office a Notice of Intent to Enforce the restored copyright or serve such a notice on the reliance party. For more information about the copyright notice under the law in effect before January 1, 1978, request Circular 96 Section 202.2, "Copyright Notice," from the Copyright Office. For more information about restoration of copyright under the URAA, request Circular 38b, "Highlights of Copyright amendments Contained in the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA).""
There has been some talk that "so and so didn't put a notice on the code and lost their copyright." Get better legal advice. Generally, you never lose your copyright because you didn't provide notice, but you do lose the right to claim statutory damages (can be quite large) if you don't properly include notice in the right format AND register your work with the authorities. The bad, naughty infringer also gets to claim that the infringment was "innocent" in any subsequent suit. If you're producing anything that's copyrightable, patentable &c., either crack the books yourself (Check out Title 17 of the US Code (hint, check around Section 401 and following) or get some legal advice if your creative time is worth something to you and you can't be bothered to go to law school.
The URLs for the before and after blackout pictures were accessed from the following page:
www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s2015.htm
There are a few more pictures there and some explanatory text. I'm a little disappointed with the resolution of these "night" pictures. If you've flown over the region (admittedly at only 35,000 feet / 7 miles) you know how much interesting detail that can be seen on a clear night.
A message from the Seals Environmental Anti-Lungfish Society (SEALS):
"We stand in solidarity with our fellow sea creatures on the opposite hemisphere in protesting anything that irritates users of Linux. We wish, however, that someone would write an operating system with us as a mascot, and it's just totally unfair...splutter, splutter..."
(trails off in cloud of bubbles as a polar bear lopes into view.)
EEK!
"Anything I don't like is blatantly unconstitutional...Anything I like is a right enshrined in the Constitution from time immemorial. [Name or Organization here]'s attempts to [description of reasonable proposal here] is a dangerous assault upon [name or description of true believers] and by extension, upon all Americans"
Repeat this 1 million times and you will see God....or at least Benjamin Franklin who looks remarkably like what God would look like if he had been an 18th century democratic revolutionary.
I should note that the technique works on the web, too. This article seems to have temporarily brought the cheesebikini site to its knees. It's fairly easy to overwhelm most web servers -- even the biggest have limits.
I would expect that the usual progression with these ideas will be followed: it will be taken up by the intellectually deft, then the intellectually curious, then the Newsweek readers, then the low-life scum. That's when the fun will stop and Senator Snuffy will step in demanding new legislation.
While this technique would seem to be an anarchists' wet dream, it is a club that anyone can use. (Just more evidence that technology develops in unpredictable ways that are not necessarily as beneficial as originally envisaged) It will all end in tears.
I'm not saying that this issue is based on "junk" science or not...I simply don't know. But experts have been gloriously wrong for years. Mark Twain wrote a piece about it (you can find the full quote at http://www.okbu.edu/academics/natsci/earth/twain/m iss.htm. An excerpt from the piece:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolithic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined there streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
I have sort of lost touch with what's going on in open source. This thread gave me incentive to try some of the excellent stuff mentioned. As I've flirted with Linux on and off, I was aware of Ghostscript and GIMP, but never thought they'd be ported to x86 machines. Last night I installed both of them and they are absolutely teriffic! (especially Ghostscript which is the only utility I know of that can convert a postscript or EPS image into another format). Let's do this thread again real soon!!
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know that, but yes, I am exactly as cool as I think I am.
An arcane factoid: I think that one of the relatives of this pine listed in the Australian information link, "Agathis (Kauri Pines)", furnishes wood for makers of traditional Go boards. If you want to take a look, look here: http://www.yutopian.com/go/table/tk135.html
Go is one of the oldest board games in human history still being played. There is probably some sort of mystic connection between the qualities of the wood from this family and the game. Early legends on Go boards suggest that the construction and design had roots in divination and religious ceremonies, but I'm no expert, I merely note the connection here.
Go players and the game itself is as much about the physical beauty of the game as it is about the beauty of the logical relationships between opposing forces.
Another good site to look at is www.samarkand.net
To continue in this arcane vein, the premium wood for Go boards is katsura, valued primarily for its somewhat more interesting grain. For information about Go, try www.usgo.org, or www.britgo.org.
There's another factor at work (I concede that the tax revenue issue is a powerful one with our elected lawmakers). The telephone companies in the US and everywhere else, AFAIK, are grass roots organizations. Telephone company workers live in every neighborhood and are generally helpful and well liked people (I'm not referring to telco execs, who are mainly evil pond scum). The telcos know this, and when a threat arises to the interests of the telco, the communcations workers are deployed to write letters and knock on doors. Eat your heart out, Ralph Nader.
In addition, the telcos have a huge installed base of ever-vigilent retirees who are very aware of any threat to their pension fund. Retirees have nothing but time, and you can get a busload of them to a demonstration at the state capitol in no time flat.
Further, law makers have been trained to think of the "phone company" as their main contact for all communications matters and for information on communications policy. When telecom decentralizes over IP networks, suddenly Joe Legislator is faced with calling up a bunch of Joe Sixpacks to ask them what they think.
In other words, it's not an easy or quick matter to usher out an obsolete industry. It looses its dying grip on the economy very slowly, and can take down a lot of innocents with it as it goes. The coal industry is still into the federal taxpayer for retiree funding...the railroad industry much the same (and it relinquished it monopoly to the trucking industry only after a 20 year running battle)...I remember that Western Union (telegraph!) still had an office in my home town in the 1990s (although they mostly sold and cashed money orders).
If business and economics were ruled by logic, sure, the telcos would be dead right now. But it ain't that easy or that simple.
[metaflame mode on]
[angry, sarcastic reply]
[citation of dubious rebuttal evidence]
[sardonic, but opaque critique of poster's intelligence]
[non-witty flourish]
---
[boring and obvious sig]
[metaflame mode off]
== ironic disclosure ==
This metaflame was composed on a Dell Inspiron 8200 running under Knoppix 3.3 via KDE Konqueror
== ironic disclosure end ==
This is an obvious and sophomoric flamebait troll.
In all the hullabaloo raised over declining media sales (by the music industry, may their toenails grow backwards), I haven't seen much discussion about demographics. The "boomer" generation (to which I belong) represented a big population blip in the retail music world, and we've pretty much stopped buying music. The 14-26 year age group of today is much smaller, and is fundamentally convinced that content should be free (or at least low cost). This trend will only intensify as they are alienated by the heavyhanded tactics of the Digital Rights crowd, and (worse) have to start paying for their own music with their own money, buy houses and cars, raise children and pay off student loans at the same time.
In essence, the music industry has lost two generations of music consumers, and is trying to retrain a third (today's 0-12 year olds) to pay whatever they ask for increasingly banal content.
But basically, the product sucks. In an attempt to capture the attention of the mass market, the industry has resorted to more and more outrageous marketing and content, with diminishing returns.
Consumers now spend a huge portion of their disposable income on entertainment. Disposable income has nowhere to go but down, given long term economic trends, including globalization and escalating energy costs. So the long term prognosis for the entertainment industry is poor. Digital rights managment is akin to bailing out the ocean with a teacup.
A few years ago, the nations phone companies were convinced that they were on the verge of becoming major players in the entertainment world because they controlled the phone lines and could deliver "content". Turns out they a) couldn't control communications technology b) didn't know beans about creating "content" and c) had a wildly exaggerated idea of how much time consumers were willing to spend sitting on the couch consuming phone company "movies on demand".
So let the marketing geniuses have their fun. They aren't smarter than everyone else and in fact may not be smarter than anyone else.
Well, your advice is certainly appropriate (sorry, didn't see your reply until just now), and therefore I quote US Copyright Office Circular 3 (which is available along with a bunch of other stuff at www.copyright.gov) and as the circular says, the magic date before which a notice WAS required is March 1, 1989, except for certain foreign works, which may have their copyrights restored upon filing of proper notice with the US Copyright notice or upon the infringer. As always, there are the usual bizarre cases and technical exceptions, if you find all of this too boring, like I said, consult an intellectual property lawyer, pay them money and get on with your life:
"The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U.S. law, although it is often beneficial. Because prior law did contain such a requirement, however, the use of notice is still relevant to the copyright status of older works.
This circular discusses both the copyright notice provisions as originally enacted in the 1976 Copyright Act (title 17, U.S. Code), which took effect January 1, 1978, and the effect of the 1988 Berne Convention Implementation Act, which amended the copyright law to make the use of a copyright notice optional on copies of works published on and after March 1, 1989. Specifications for the proper form and placement of the notice are described in this circular. Works published before January 1, 1978, are governed by the previous copyright law. Under that law, if a work was published under the copyright owner's authority without a proper
notice of copyright, all copyright protection for that work was permanently lost in the United States. The Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 (URAA) (PL 103-465) modified the effect of publication without notice for certain foreign works. Under this Act, copyright is automatically restored, effective January 1, 1996, for certain foreign works placed into the public domain because of lack of proper notice or noncompliance with other legal requirements. Although restoration is automatic, if the copyright owner wishes to enforce rights against reliance parties (those who, relying on the public domain status of a work, were already using the work before the URAA was enacted), he/she must either file with the Copyright Office a Notice of Intent to Enforce the restored copyright or serve such a notice on the reliance party. For more information about the copyright notice under the
law in effect before January 1, 1978, request Circular 96 Section 202.2, "Copyright Notice," from the Copyright Office. For more information about restoration of copyright under the URAA, request Circular 38b, "Highlights of Copyright amendments Contained in the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA).""
There has been some talk that "so and so didn't put a notice on the code and lost their copyright." Get better legal advice. Generally, you never lose your copyright because you didn't provide notice, but you do lose the right to claim statutory damages (can be quite large) if you don't properly include notice in the right format AND register your work with the authorities.
The bad, naughty infringer also gets to claim that the infringment was "innocent" in any subsequent suit. If you're producing anything that's copyrightable, patentable &c., either crack the books yourself (Check out Title 17 of the US Code (hint, check around Section 401 and following) or get some legal advice if your creative time is worth something to you and you can't be bothered to go to law school.
The URLs for the before and after blackout pictures were accessed from the following page: www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s2015.htm There are a few more pictures there and some explanatory text. I'm a little disappointed with the resolution of these "night" pictures. If you've flown over the region (admittedly at only 35,000 feet / 7 miles) you know how much interesting detail that can be seen on a clear night.
A message from the Seals Environmental Anti-Lungfish Society (SEALS): "We stand in solidarity with our fellow sea creatures on the opposite hemisphere in protesting anything that irritates users of Linux. We wish, however, that someone would write an operating system with us as a mascot, and it's just totally unfair...splutter, splutter..." (trails off in cloud of bubbles as a polar bear lopes into view.) EEK!
You forgot the official mantra:
"Anything I don't like is blatantly unconstitutional...Anything I like is a right enshrined in the Constitution from time immemorial. [Name or Organization here]'s attempts to [description of reasonable proposal here] is a dangerous assault upon [name or description of true believers] and by extension, upon all Americans"
Repeat this 1 million times and you will see God....or at least Benjamin Franklin who looks remarkably like what God would look like if he had been an 18th century democratic revolutionary.
I should note that the technique works on the web, too. This article seems to have temporarily brought the cheesebikini site to its knees. It's fairly easy to overwhelm most web servers -- even the biggest have limits.
I would expect that the usual progression with these ideas will be followed: it will be taken up by the intellectually deft, then the intellectually curious, then the Newsweek readers, then the low-life scum. That's when the fun will stop and Senator Snuffy will step in demanding new legislation.
While this technique would seem to be an anarchists' wet dream, it is a club that anyone can use. (Just more evidence that technology develops in unpredictable ways that are not necessarily as beneficial as originally envisaged) It will all end in tears.
I'm not saying that this issue is based on "junk" science or not...I simply don't know. But experts have been gloriously wrong for years. Mark Twain wrote a piece about it (you can find the full quote at http://www.okbu.edu/academics/natsci/earth/twain/m iss.htm. An excerpt from the piece:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolithic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined there streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
I have sort of lost touch with what's going on in open source. This thread gave me incentive to try some of the excellent stuff mentioned. As I've flirted with Linux on and off, I was aware of Ghostscript and GIMP, but never thought they'd be ported to x86 machines. Last night I installed both of them and they are absolutely teriffic! (especially Ghostscript which is the only utility I know of that can convert a postscript or EPS image into another format). Let's do this thread again real soon!!