The MPAA better sue Google now, because Google has even more torrent links than Pirate Bay ever had, because it includes all Pirate Bay's links.
The establishment is never going to stop people from telling each other where to find stuff. And probably never stop people from publishing stuff they've got. People have the natural right to free press and speech; suppressing it ends only in revolution, even if just ungovernable sneakiness. The free speech about where to find stuff others have published is impossible to suppress.
We, the people, form a government to protect our rights. Like our rights to compete in a market. Without that government opposing business monopolies and otherwise policing the market, it looks like the market in Mogadishu, Somalia. Ron Paul should run for office there - or consultant to a warlord, which is what people like him do for a living in "libertarian" societies.
If by "libertarian" you mean "corporate anarchists", the Republican Party embraces that aspect of their party 110%. You "libertarians" are just unhappy with Republicans for delivering some warlords victory over everyone else, which is what corporate anarchy gives us as soon as it's unopposed by the people in a government.
If by "libertarian" you mean "Mayor of Sim City", then Republicans can appeal to the few thousand geeks who don't notice the huge public efforts that give them everything they take for granted. The rest of us will keep a government of the real world, thanks.
[Congress shall have the power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Congress used that general power of "securing the exclusive right" to write copyright laws. But they're not the only way to do it. A "right" to copy (a privilege, really, when exclusive of the right to press freedom) is inferred from, but not directly mentioned in, that clause.
The copyright exclusivity is now secured for "limited times" only in a perverse way, as copyrights can be extended beyond limit, either under current law or whenever that law is regularly revised to increase the extension. The promotion of progress of science and useful arts is no longer the governing criterion, as ample evidence of the promotion by unrestricted (or minimally restricted) copying now shows, but is regularly ignored by courts and by legislators.
So indeed our current copyright regime is un-Constitutional.
No, we don't have the right to take another's property without permission. We do have the right to express ourselves, including copying content. Just as we have the rights to freely assemble, worship, petition for grievances, and plenty of others.
No, we have the right to free expression, including copying. The US Constitution (and, I presume, other national laws) clearly makes a compromise in protecting that right with "advancement in science and the useful arts", to which it grants artificial government monopolies against copying "for limited times". Like any compromise with our rights, this one has problems. And as the balance has worked ever more towards the commercial privilege under the government monopoly, our rights have suffered ever more.
And now the copyright works against science and the useful arts at least as much as to advance them. There's ample evidence that content sharing boosts revenues and eliminates costs. There's ample evidence that the sharing presents new opportunities for even more lucrative business models to advance science and the useful arts, as well as simple profit. But there's overwhelming evidence that the copyright industry isn't interested in anything but control and profit - science and the useful arts are irrelevant. And plenty of evidence that governments favor the profit, not the advancement, and certainly find the rights to be nothing but inconvenient.
Actually I hadn't noticed that, because most NYC buses run on CNG, not gas/diesel, and are very clean. The trucks still make smog, but how does that make it any less useful to eliminate all the exhaust from the 13,000 taxis currently clogging the air? If all the trucks in NYC were owned by a handful of fleet operators the way the buses and taxis are, we'd be talking about making them electric, too.
No, a "politician's idea" is the kind like yours that don't even take into account the other comments posted before it which debunk it.
NYC cabs are bought by the fleet, not the driver. The cabs typically cost about $50K or more when up to legal requirements. A new Prius costs abour $30K. The driver does pay for fuel, so the cheaper electric would save the drivers money, and make the overall business better.
Electric car batteries don't suffer from batteries wearing out so fast. But all cars wear out. Gasoline cars require a lot more servicing to their violently active parts.
Batteries can be swapped in and out at the garage instead of refueling with gas when they return as NYC cabs currently do (nearly no gas stations in Manhattan).
NYC cabs almost never use their trunks. But there's no reason the electric cars can't have good trunks. Current models of the size we'd use for cabs don't suffer from that limitation.
You evidently are talking about a different NYC and different battery car tech than actually exists, while being smug and conceited about it. You should run for office.
I'm not sure about the battery charging efficiency. But regenerative braking makes battery cars vastly more efficient than one-way fueled cars, especially in the high-G stop and go Manhattan traffic.
And where do you get 35-50% efficient diesel engines? Even the most efficient diesel engines in cars these days that max at 45% efficiency typically get only 37% efficiency. Most of them supposedly get 20-40% better efficiency than gasoline engines. The average gasoline car gets about 20% efficiency, so that's maybe 24-28%.
The electric car is a lot more efficient, which is why cars are going more electric rather than more diesel. Though the 75% max theoretical efficiency does make diesel good for fueling power plants to make the electricity that charges the cars. Especially when they're powered by biodiesel.
Hybrid would be better than gas, but electric is a lot better, and we're looking for a big leap here, not just an increment. We've already got a whole fleet of CNG buses, which reduce emissions a lot. I bet a lot of newer cabs are already hybrids, because the mileage saves money, and we had $4.50 gallons of gas here for a year or two.
But how are shorter cab trips going to reduce smog?
NYC cabs work on 12 hour shifts. The cabbies are supposed to do only 12 hour shifts, too, and it seems like they do (we have more wannabe cabbies than cabs for them). So even at your OC mileage, that's 200-225mi per shift. Electric cars get 300mi.
And NYC cabs don't go nearly as far as OC cabbies. Manhattan itself is only 25 square miles, including the parks. A 75 mile cab ride hailed from the street is extremely rare, because that would take you to Pennsylvania, northern or eastern Connecticut, towards the end of Long Island, or southern New Jersey - all of which people call for the more luxurious cabs to do. In fact yellow cabs aren't even required to take those fares outside the counties adjoining NYC, which are only about 45 miles across.
So in fact electric is quiet good for NYC. OC might have to wait until we've proven them here and advanced the tech a generation. But OC, like everywhere else, always waits for NYC to prove taxi tech - that's why yours are yellow, too.
We had a huge blackout in 2005, but no riots. Instead, the whole city turned into a huge block party. People sharing barbecues on their porches with neighbors, rather than watch their refrigerators full of food go to waste. Stores gave away food towards the end of the night. The parks had bonfires and acoustic music.
NYC has changed a lot since 1977 (though that blackout didn't really riot much, either). Several generations growing up with a social welfare system has seen us become a lot less antisocial. We'll still kick your out of towner ass for badmouthing us, but especially since 9/11/2001 we look to help each other through tough times.
In fact recharging the batteries at night, when electricity is only 50% the cost as during the day, is a big plus for this app, and practically all garages would do it.
NYC's grid is taxed only in a few areas, and then only when super humid days make air conditioners crank hard in super hot days. That peak is so huge that the rest of the days, anywhere from 350-365 a year, have a lot of excess capacity without the peak air conditioner demand.
And possibly the best way to recharge electric car batteries is with onsite natural gas to electric fuelcells. 12,00 NYC cabs would be a great market to boost demand to drive that segment of the industry forward.
But we're going to have to increase the grid anyway, as more and more cars and other equipment will use electric here. This is a good way to start, a known quantity in known locations already regulated by the City.
The cabs all return to their garages every 12 hours. There are only under a dozen gas stations in Manhattan, amidst 2+ million people and hundreds of thousands of cars, so they refuel at garages.
Gasoline cabs get a lot less than their rated city mileage in NYC, because they constantly accelerate and decelereate. Which probably puts them down around 15MPG tops, but which makes regenerative braking electric cars really shine. A 15 gallon tank gives them 225 miles on a tank. That's less than the 300mi an electric car gets.
Cab drivers usually don't own their cars (which typically cost about $50K apiece after they're fitted to legal requirements). But they do pay for gas. So they'll be very happy to get cheaper mileage with less refueling stops.
"Groupware" is a class of applications. Evidently MS just stopped promoting Exchange as an app platform, rather than make it work, and everyone's given up on the original architecture. Too bad, because groupware servers are good places to run apps, just as webservers are with their own native data and transaction/session model.
It's a collaboration server. And the messaging/DB infrastructure is exactly what all kinds of productivity apps are built in, usually from scratch instead of in a server. Exchange is supposed to be like a webserver for PIM data among org populations. But instead it functions more like what you said, a messaging DB, because MS failed to deliver its app platform in a way usable by developers.
As others have pointed out in response, these taxis are private fleet cars. They already mostly refuel at their garages, which buy gas at cheaper bulk prices (Manhattan has only under a dozen gas stations for 2M people and hundreds of thousands of cars). Those garages could swap in/out batteries left recharging at night when electric rates are low (about 50% daytime).
So tell "reality" it's no problem. And take a note: don't go lecturing New Yorkers on "reality". We make it and break it here, and you people who don't know NYC firsthand can only guess how we do it with all those yellow cars and electric trains.
Make all new taxis run on 100% electric. NYC's electric power comes 40% from nuclear (Indian Point), the rest from high-efficiency (up to 85% in CCGT) natural gas plants. The resulting switch would cut a lot of the smog remaining in our fairly green city.
Oh yeah, make the cars amphibious so they can go around the bridges/tunnels bottlenecks that clog so much NYC traffic.
I don't see why these "cinder" features can't be delivered by realtime UI to nice and with a Java sandbox. In other words, Android or any other Linux phoneOS, with a little tweak wiring top to nice, and a Java VM. App running slow, crank out the "nice" level, and it will suck more juice as it runs faster than the other apps left out of the juice rotation. Put the UI in terms of power instead of CPU, and you're groovy.
I'm not talking about their stability in their "out of the box" featureset operation. I'm talking about APIs, programmability, etc, as an app platform. I don't see many Exchange apps built on an Exchange platform, so I'm guessing everyone realized it wasn't really an app platform, despite MS pitching it to developers that way.
I joined an MS consultancy in 1998 because they were supposedly the foremost developers in NYC of MS Exchange applications. Once I settled in, they told me they were expert enough in Exchange as a platform to know never to develop any apps on it, because it was so awful to develop for and to support. A piece of crap. I've never seen any evidence since then that Exchange got any better as an app platform.
Any clue as to whether the 2010 version will be any better? If it were, I'd expect Outlook/Exchange to take over the Internet. But that was possible over a decade ago, and MS totally blew it since then.
We could mount the device on a platform fired from an aircraft, with a parachute, and a long grounding cable fired into the ground from the platform before the plasma fires at the lightning cloud. So county/municipal helicopters or cargo planes could do this work.
I'm glad we have recourse to lawyers to recoup damages when people damage each other. I'm not glad that frivolous lawyers, who repeatedly bring cases without evidence, facts, logic or legal basis, keep their licenses. But I want us to close the "bad lawyers" loopholes, not ignore new methods to cope with our environment, even if there's some risk of damage we'll also have to cope with.
Slashdot Mirror
The MPAA better sue Google now, because Google has even more torrent links than Pirate Bay ever had, because it includes all Pirate Bay's links.
The establishment is never going to stop people from telling each other where to find stuff. And probably never stop people from publishing stuff they've got. People have the natural right to free press and speech; suppressing it ends only in revolution, even if just ungovernable sneakiness. The free speech about where to find stuff others have published is impossible to suppress.
And totally tyrannical to try.
We, the people, form a government to protect our rights. Like our rights to compete in a market. Without that government opposing business monopolies and otherwise policing the market, it looks like the market in Mogadishu, Somalia. Ron Paul should run for office there - or consultant to a warlord, which is what people like him do for a living in "libertarian" societies.
If by "libertarian" you mean "corporate anarchists", the Republican Party embraces that aspect of their party 110%. You "libertarians" are just unhappy with Republicans for delivering some warlords victory over everyone else, which is what corporate anarchy gives us as soon as it's unopposed by the people in a government.
If by "libertarian" you mean "Mayor of Sim City", then Republicans can appeal to the few thousand geeks who don't notice the huge public efforts that give them everything they take for granted. The rest of us will keep a government of the real world, thanks.
Not directly. But not very indirectly, either:
Congress used that general power of "securing the exclusive right" to write copyright laws. But they're not the only way to do it. A "right" to copy (a privilege, really, when exclusive of the right to press freedom) is inferred from, but not directly mentioned in, that clause.
The copyright exclusivity is now secured for "limited times" only in a perverse way, as copyrights can be extended beyond limit, either under current law or whenever that law is regularly revised to increase the extension. The promotion of progress of science and useful arts is no longer the governing criterion, as ample evidence of the promotion by unrestricted (or minimally restricted) copying now shows, but is regularly ignored by courts and by legislators.
So indeed our current copyright regime is un-Constitutional.
No. But if I copy a book, you still have your copy. This is a fundamental difference between property and information.
No, we don't have the right to take another's property without permission. We do have the right to express ourselves, including copying content. Just as we have the rights to freely assemble, worship, petition for grievances, and plenty of others.
No, we have the right to free expression, including copying. The US Constitution (and, I presume, other national laws) clearly makes a compromise in protecting that right with "advancement in science and the useful arts", to which it grants artificial government monopolies against copying "for limited times". Like any compromise with our rights, this one has problems. And as the balance has worked ever more towards the commercial privilege under the government monopoly, our rights have suffered ever more.
And now the copyright works against science and the useful arts at least as much as to advance them. There's ample evidence that content sharing boosts revenues and eliminates costs. There's ample evidence that the sharing presents new opportunities for even more lucrative business models to advance science and the useful arts, as well as simple profit. But there's overwhelming evidence that the copyright industry isn't interested in anything but control and profit - science and the useful arts are irrelevant. And plenty of evidence that governments favor the profit, not the advancement, and certainly find the rights to be nothing but inconvenient.
Actually I hadn't noticed that, because most NYC buses run on CNG, not gas/diesel, and are very clean. The trucks still make smog, but how does that make it any less useful to eliminate all the exhaust from the 13,000 taxis currently clogging the air? If all the trucks in NYC were owned by a handful of fleet operators the way the buses and taxis are, we'd be talking about making them electric, too.
No, a "politician's idea" is the kind like yours that don't even take into account the other comments posted before it which debunk it.
NYC cabs are bought by the fleet, not the driver. The cabs typically cost about $50K or more when up to legal requirements. A new Prius costs abour $30K. The driver does pay for fuel, so the cheaper electric would save the drivers money, and make the overall business better.
Electric car batteries don't suffer from batteries wearing out so fast. But all cars wear out. Gasoline cars require a lot more servicing to their violently active parts.
Batteries can be swapped in and out at the garage instead of refueling with gas when they return as NYC cabs currently do (nearly no gas stations in Manhattan).
NYC cabs almost never use their trunks. But there's no reason the electric cars can't have good trunks. Current models of the size we'd use for cabs don't suffer from that limitation.
You evidently are talking about a different NYC and different battery car tech than actually exists, while being smug and conceited about it. You should run for office.
I'm not sure about the battery charging efficiency. But regenerative braking makes battery cars vastly more efficient than one-way fueled cars, especially in the high-G stop and go Manhattan traffic.
And where do you get 35-50% efficient diesel engines? Even the most efficient diesel engines in cars these days that max at 45% efficiency typically get only 37% efficiency. Most of them supposedly get 20-40% better efficiency than gasoline engines. The average gasoline car gets about 20% efficiency, so that's maybe 24-28%.
The electric car is a lot more efficient, which is why cars are going more electric rather than more diesel. Though the 75% max theoretical efficiency does make diesel good for fueling power plants to make the electricity that charges the cars. Especially when they're powered by biodiesel.
Hybrid would be better than gas, but electric is a lot better, and we're looking for a big leap here, not just an increment. We've already got a whole fleet of CNG buses, which reduce emissions a lot. I bet a lot of newer cabs are already hybrids, because the mileage saves money, and we had $4.50 gallons of gas here for a year or two.
But how are shorter cab trips going to reduce smog?
NYC cabs work on 12 hour shifts. The cabbies are supposed to do only 12 hour shifts, too, and it seems like they do (we have more wannabe cabbies than cabs for them). So even at your OC mileage, that's 200-225mi per shift. Electric cars get 300mi.
And NYC cabs don't go nearly as far as OC cabbies. Manhattan itself is only 25 square miles, including the parks. A 75 mile cab ride hailed from the street is extremely rare, because that would take you to Pennsylvania, northern or eastern Connecticut, towards the end of Long Island, or southern New Jersey - all of which people call for the more luxurious cabs to do. In fact yellow cabs aren't even required to take those fares outside the counties adjoining NYC, which are only about 45 miles across.
So in fact electric is quiet good for NYC. OC might have to wait until we've proven them here and advanced the tech a generation. But OC, like everywhere else, always waits for NYC to prove taxi tech - that's why yours are yellow, too.
We had a huge blackout in 2005, but no riots. Instead, the whole city turned into a huge block party. People sharing barbecues on their porches with neighbors, rather than watch their refrigerators full of food go to waste. Stores gave away food towards the end of the night. The parks had bonfires and acoustic music.
NYC has changed a lot since 1977 (though that blackout didn't really riot much, either). Several generations growing up with a social welfare system has seen us become a lot less antisocial. We'll still kick your out of towner ass for badmouthing us, but especially since 9/11/2001 we look to help each other through tough times.
In fact recharging the batteries at night, when electricity is only 50% the cost as during the day, is a big plus for this app, and practically all garages would do it.
NYC's grid is taxed only in a few areas, and then only when super humid days make air conditioners crank hard in super hot days. That peak is so huge that the rest of the days, anywhere from 350-365 a year, have a lot of excess capacity without the peak air conditioner demand.
And possibly the best way to recharge electric car batteries is with onsite natural gas to electric fuelcells. 12,00 NYC cabs would be a great market to boost demand to drive that segment of the industry forward.
But we're going to have to increase the grid anyway, as more and more cars and other equipment will use electric here. This is a good way to start, a known quantity in known locations already regulated by the City.
The cabs all return to their garages every 12 hours. There are only under a dozen gas stations in Manhattan, amidst 2+ million people and hundreds of thousands of cars, so they refuel at garages.
Gasoline cabs get a lot less than their rated city mileage in NYC, because they constantly accelerate and decelereate. Which probably puts them down around 15MPG tops, but which makes regenerative braking electric cars really shine. A 15 gallon tank gives them 225 miles on a tank. That's less than the 300mi an electric car gets.
Cab drivers usually don't own their cars (which typically cost about $50K apiece after they're fitted to legal requirements). But they do pay for gas. So they'll be very happy to get cheaper mileage with less refueling stops.
"Groupware" is a class of applications. Evidently MS just stopped promoting Exchange as an app platform, rather than make it work, and everyone's given up on the original architecture. Too bad, because groupware servers are good places to run apps, just as webservers are with their own native data and transaction/session model.
It's a collaboration server. And the messaging/DB infrastructure is exactly what all kinds of productivity apps are built in, usually from scratch instead of in a server. Exchange is supposed to be like a webserver for PIM data among org populations. But instead it functions more like what you said, a messaging DB, because MS failed to deliver its app platform in a way usable by developers.
As others have pointed out in response, these taxis are private fleet cars. They already mostly refuel at their garages, which buy gas at cheaper bulk prices (Manhattan has only under a dozen gas stations for 2M people and hundreds of thousands of cars). Those garages could swap in/out batteries left recharging at night when electric rates are low (about 50% daytime).
So tell "reality" it's no problem. And take a note: don't go lecturing New Yorkers on "reality". We make it and break it here, and you people who don't know NYC firsthand can only guess how we do it with all those yellow cars and electric trains.
Make all new taxis run on 100% electric. NYC's electric power comes 40% from nuclear (Indian Point), the rest from high-efficiency (up to 85% in CCGT) natural gas plants. The resulting switch would cut a lot of the smog remaining in our fairly green city.
Oh yeah, make the cars amphibious so they can go around the bridges/tunnels bottlenecks that clog so much NYC traffic.
I don't see why these "cinder" features can't be delivered by realtime UI to nice and with a Java sandbox. In other words, Android or any other Linux phoneOS, with a little tweak wiring top to nice, and a Java VM. App running slow, crank out the "nice" level, and it will suck more juice as it runs faster than the other apps left out of the juice rotation. Put the UI in terms of power instead of CPU, and you're groovy.
I'm not talking about their stability in their "out of the box" featureset operation. I'm talking about APIs, programmability, etc, as an app platform. I don't see many Exchange apps built on an Exchange platform, so I'm guessing everyone realized it wasn't really an app platform, despite MS pitching it to developers that way.
I joined an MS consultancy in 1998 because they were supposedly the foremost developers in NYC of MS Exchange applications. Once I settled in, they told me they were expert enough in Exchange as a platform to know never to develop any apps on it, because it was so awful to develop for and to support. A piece of crap. I've never seen any evidence since then that Exchange got any better as an app platform.
Any clue as to whether the 2010 version will be any better? If it were, I'd expect Outlook/Exchange to take over the Internet. But that was possible over a decade ago, and MS totally blew it since then.
Would shooting a 3100 meter grounded cable into a lightning cloud actually discharge it into the ground?
If so, why indeed are we messing with these lasers at all? Why don't we tap lightning clouds reliably for power that way?
We could mount the device on a platform fired from an aircraft, with a parachute, and a long grounding cable fired into the ground from the platform before the plasma fires at the lightning cloud. So county/municipal helicopters or cargo planes could do this work.
I'm glad we have recourse to lawyers to recoup damages when people damage each other. I'm not glad that frivolous lawyers, who repeatedly bring cases without evidence, facts, logic or legal basis, keep their licenses. But I want us to close the "bad lawyers" loopholes, not ignore new methods to cope with our environment, even if there's some risk of damage we'll also have to cope with.