FWIW, Social Security is not unemployment insurance. I don't know whether H-1B visas don't entitle it's holders to claiming benefits at retirement age, despite requiring those holders to pay the insurance withholding, but I'll take your word for it. That is wrong, and shouldn't happen.
Your other expenses here are of course proper (and appreciated) of any resident in our economy. But there is still a matter of the economic balance these H-1Bs represent. Do you really believe that your contribution at your job could not be obtained from a US citizen? Or perhaps just not at your salary, which you mention is low - which could be the same situation as your friends at Microsoft, just scaled up into Microsoft's definition of "high/low" pay.
What our different experiences show is that the economics of these visas is pretty complex. For example, the US economy didn't invest in preparing you to do your job, but if you don't stay longer than some relatively short time (say under 20 years, compared to the average American career of something like 40 years), your overall contribution to the economy, the return on the economy's investment in you, is also lower than an American who cost more to prepare. And of course while we are also interested in your participating in the America that goes beyond our economy (running the "liberty experiment", sharing compassion, enlightening us and the world with diverse intelligence and soul with an "American" brand on it, etc), if you stay less than an American's average domestic lifetime, we're shortchanged on that, too.
What I'm trying to do is to get foreigners who bring better skills than Americans to stay long enough that it's worth displacing Americans where they do so displace us. Indeed, I'm looking for America to get a better deal for Americans (not just for a few employers) out of the foreigners who want to come here than America gets out of the Americans they displace. Not an extremely better deal, like, say, slavery (though of course that net deal was abominable for everyone involved, except those few "employers" for a while). But in fact a better deal for America than even for the visiting labor, which should still give the visitors enough that they will come and feel it's fair (even if it's fairer to America). Because America has what the visitors want, and has the advantage of playing the buyer in a buyer's labor market. When the labor market is a seller's labor market, like when the visitor has skills unobtainable (or prohibitively expensive) in the US, of course I won't be surprised when the visitor can set the terms to their benefit - though I'd still like to see the US use its advantage to the benefit of Americans.
What kind of "slave" is bound only by the terms of their contract to either continue working for any legal employer they choose, or forfeit a fine corresponding to the benefit they had for the privilege of entering into that contract in the first place. Entering the US when you're not a citizen is a privilege, you realize. And if you break the contract that allowed you to stay longer than a brief guest, then you have to pay the penalty that you voluntarily accepted when you entered.
I guess having to pay rent and for food is "slavery", too.
You really ought to look into this "slavery" thing you're talking about. It involves wholesale kidnapping of millions of people over the years, letting at least 1/3 those kidnapped for sale in North America of them die in transit, and treatment as property with no rights or privileges, worked to death. With no choice in anything, including the forcing of slaves' descendents into perpetual slavery. And in some places, the slavery was released in name only, with no choice or rights protected, and life little different.
You'll find it's a whole different world from a monetary fine of the H-1B visa holder who doesn't stay in the US long enough to justify the country having welcomed them with fat jobs, and all the choices in the world, including breaking the deal.
After the planebombs of 9/11/2001, Bush made a big deal about how suddenly, "oceans cannot protect us anymore". As if oceans had made us immune to ICBMs in the 50 year Cold War, or to air and sea raids in either WWII or any of the other wars (like 1812, or the Revolution) we'd survived without throwing away liberty. It was true, but it wasn't new.
We're going to find out a lot more about blowback when the government Bush installed these past 7.5 years, built mostly on his Republican Congress (and not reformed by the Democratic Congress of the past year and a half), is the foundation for all these invasive technologies we're "beta testing" in China.
If the 2009 Democratic Congress and White House doesn't spend most of its time ripping out Bush's Unitary Executive by the roots, a bigger reform than Bush's 8 years of catastrophes, this country is going to make China look like a cheap, ignorant backwater. By making this country into cheap, ignorant backwater central.
You have some citations to back that up? Because I know the Indian and Chinese guys who used to work with me used to go home for at least a month a year. And they'd go home between gigs, usually to direct the building of a house they paid for with what they made while in the US. They'd get another gig over the Net, or through their network of friends they made while in the US. Sure the high pay while here kept them here more, but they also did miss their families, built those houses, and took their downtime (while not working the 60+ weekly hours that crazy Americans find normal in IT) seriously.
I don't begrudge them on some kind of nationalism. But the economics mean that they're not paying their way to keep this money machine going that they're cashing in on. But I am paying, because I live in this country full time, and helped invest (with taxes and work over 30 years) in the industries they're getting the benefit of.
America supposedly needs these people's skills, not just their willingness to work cheap (cheapness subsidized by living in a foreign country with a low cost of living because they don't invest in labor, environmental or other protections there). So make those H-1B visas come with a price. Let those people live in the US for 10 years, spending only 4 weeks abroad each year at most. If they break the deal, make their employers pay ten years of the median salary of that job description into a fund that retrains US citizens to do those jobs.
Or they can just try their luck turning their own countries into places as good to work in as is the US.
European and American (and thereby worldwide) scientists and historians are fond of labeling artifacts and sites "sacred", as if distant peoples' ideas and practices of "sacred" meant the same as what we mean by it today. All "sacred" means universally is "don't touch unless you're a religious authority". And most religious authorities, especially of longer-lived societies, will not change anything given to them already sanctified.
So "sacred" really is primarily a way for a society to protect something's integrity, even if there's no obvious reason why. The sacred might be a site, like Stonehenge, or it might be a practice, like naming stars and telling stories about their namesakes, or it might be a ritual, like walking up to a mountaintop on a date determined by a site like Stonehenge from the names of some stars. It might just be the way that a town's homes are laid out around an area, or the way a home is laid out around its enclosing walls.
There is no guarantee that something "sacred" was actually believed to be a connection to a "superpowerful person" like a god or a mystic hero as we currently understand them. The sacred is just sanctified in that people's own special way of making obvious something was sacred, and not to be messed with by those who couldn't understand the belief that made it "work". Burying kings in connection with the sacred was one way to ensure that people knew it was sacred, if they knew the king was sacred, and building something sacred at a royal burial place would do it, too.
"Holy" just means that you do something even when you can't understand it. To later civilizations after ours has waned into nonexistence or mutated into something completely obliterating it, plenty of what we do for a reason we can understand is something they won't be able to understand in their different future context. So they'll call it "sacred", and not really get it entirely.
How do you avoid a "My Sweet Lord" hijacking of your song because it shares a chord pattern with a previous song (and thousands of others that happened not to sue you)? Get a better lawyer.
Harrison lost that case not on its merits, but because his lawyer wasn't good enough. Copyrights are simple, which means a better lawyer can simply beat you. Complex laws might make a better lawyer more important, but it's still essential.
All power to "promote" can only be an attempt to promote, unless Congress is going to fund the development directly (which it also does, but government inventions are not subject to copyright or patent, except in unjust cases).
You can't look to the courts for justice in copyright. It's been a long time since copyright law or cases are justified by their original compromise between free expression and commerce. Commerce's case for that compromise has gotten only weaker, but its profits have gotten so huge for so long, to corporations that are so politically powerful in our totally mediated political age, that injustice is the rule. Copyright is mostly bullshit, especially in music, where every artist "borrows" (and great artists steal, as Picasso said, when he plagiarized T. S. Eliot).
Radiohead owns the copyright of their original copy of the song (if they own the master media onto which it was recorded, and didn't release it from copyright control). That gives them "performance copyright", which lets them require permission from the first other person to "perform" their original recording (either a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments, or just playing back the original recording over speakers in the air to a large crowd or over other broadcast media like radio or TV soundtrack). But after they release the first public performance, anyone can perform the song, provided they pay the pre-set "mechanical" royalty rate (determined by the number of listeners in the venue's capacity, not necessarily those actually hearing the performance, though webcasting is per actual listener). The mechanical rate is low, like under $0.001 per listener, designed for repeated broadcast at rates recoverable by whatever commerce is operated using the performance.
But Prince does own his own performance of that song. He owns the copyright of his own performance, though not of the song he's performing. He's merely performing a song that copyright law lets him perform so long as he's in compliance with the royalty laws that pay Radiohead. Unless Prince was the first person other than Radiohead to perform it publicly, Radiohead doesn't have control over the public performance of the song, just the right to collect the royalties when it is played by whoever wants to.
Copyrights are fairly simple, if taken step by step. That doesn't stop them from being bullshit, especially when practiced by musicians, who always use copyrighted content from other artists without respect to the "original's" copyright.
When someone does something in public, I have the right to see it. I have the right to remember it. I have the right to record what I see and remember, even if the law these days is wrong and can stop me (like most copyright laws, and of course the Hollywood-written DMCA). And if I recorded it, I have the right to show it to anyone I want. This is a freedom of expression that copyright infringes. And since YouTube promotes Prince's commerce much more than it competes with it, no copyright is promoting "progress in science and the useful arts". In fact, this DMCA abuse is killing that progress, right when it could be exploding, but instead miserly copyright owners are pretending they represent "progress", when all they represent is profit.
I think we'll do it with something like geobacter cultures GM'ed to require a critical "mask" nutrient that is easy to supply to only the target soil volumes where it doesn't occur otherwise (and is itself both harmless and, naturally, biodegradable). That way we can just "innoculate" target areas, work the nutrient into the soil, and let nature do the rest. Perhaps a variety of geobacter that putrefies the plastic into a recoverable sludge, then physically work the sludgy soil to collect the sludge into recoverable pits.
Or maybe there's a way to harvest the geobacter products with earthworms. Maybe we can get the earthworms to depend on the sludge - or some material in it, leaving the energetic oil undigested or stored in their bodies - into their diet. As well as some other "bait" nutrient that we leave at the surface. Then maybe we can just let "nature" do the work of digging the treasure out of the dirt and bringing it home to harvest, with minimum energy input and maximum sniffed out recovery, but all under control so we don't unleash some terrible plague that entirely destroys our "pre-trash" stock of plastic.
I'd love to see someone use these materials to filter regular polluted water in our waterways (after a regular filter to keep living creatures out) to both clean the water and recover usable chemicals for fuel.
And someday someone's going to figure out how to cheaply and easily mine our landfills for all that plastic we've buried for nearly a century. When the cheap oil's gone soon, that's going to be a reasonable alternative if we have the tech.
Banks never transport the life savings of 4.5 million people without an armored car. There's probably even a lot of laws that prohibit such blatantly reckless behavior, to say nothing of their insurance coverage depending on following those rules. And if they do "lost" that life savings in transit, without an armored car, the bank has to replace it at the bank's cost, even if that drives the bank out of business.
Of course these people's life data is no different: the bank is responsible for protecting it. So the bank should be required to transport only encrypted media (in an armored car). If the bank "loses" the data, the bank should have to pay and organize the resecuring of all that data, including notifying all the many databases that maintain it, changing ID numbers, getting new ID cards, etc, at absolutely no cost in time or money to the people. And the bank should pay a service that monitors those people for ID theft for at least a dozen years, if not the rest of their lives, and assume liability (for losses and extra bureaucratic work) for any fraud using the data the bank "lost".
There oughtta be a law. As long as the cost of these "accidental losses" is minimal to the banks and other corps handling the data, they will of course spend as little as possible on securing it.
In fact there should be a Federal database of people whose personal data has been exposed. Every database that maintains any significant amount of personal data should be required to check that database every day or so to be sure they aren't using data exposed elsewhere. If they are, they should have to notify the FBI, the org that exposed the data, and the person whose data was exposed, then initiate the replacement process at the cost and effort of the org that exposed it.
Of course such a DB of exposed (and therefore exploitable, and at a rich org's expense) data would be extremely valuable, and the world's primary target of attacks by fraudsters and other bad guys. And the government (especially the one we have today) would be tempted to datamine that data for many other big brother purposes, all supposedly to "protect us" (from "the terrorists", etc). The government would love to use such a service as a pretext for other tyrannies, like a required "national ID card". But securing such a DB, even by the government, is absolutely possible. There are many databases already in use that are never compromised, in both government and private control. If the incentive and procedures are strong enough, this is an operation we can pull off. Probably if supported by a Constitutional Privacy Amendment that puts teeth back into the 4th Amendment, the government would protect our data at least as effectively as it protects, say, our nuclear arsenal. There might be some abuses, but they'd be much fewer, and the damage would be recovered by the irresponsible party instead of ruining the people's lives.
Why not? The difference between us and "primitive" people is entirely in our technology. And the aliens we're talking about would make the difference between our tech and Amazonian tech look pretty small, compared to what the aliens would have to come here (unless they really do come from a hole to the center of the Earth or something).
Look at how we're dealing with these Amazonians. Even though they're greeting us with violence, we're not going to let that stop us from getting to a peaceful relationship with them. Even though our society, that sent the helicopters, is a vastly more warlike society than the tribe that met us with their spears.
So like I said in the first place, we don't have much to lose by learning from our Amazonian cousins how to great some creature showing up in your territory with superior tech: throw spears at them. If that pisses them off, they'd inevitably destroy us anyway. But it's more likely to earn some respect and some bargaining. The Amazonians are much more familiar with confronting the ignorance about the outside world we'd like to pretend we've outgrown, but we haven't, and also are more familiar with recognizing threats to their existence. I'm with them, not with some sneaky, fast-talking alien maybe out to eat me.
Do you know anything I can use in Linux to import PostScript paths extracted from a PDF into a 3D model I can edit and export into Google Earth? That is in fact my main use case.
It failed in the same way that several reviews I saw said it might. Bug reports would be redundant, but evidently not enough to get Google to fix them.
I searched for kml and google earth and found nothing in their wiki. I searched for collada , and found only a plugin that opens.dae files, but no way to export a file that Google Earth can import.
So I can download a whatever.dae file and its texture images, change the filename from whatever.dae to whatever.kml , and upload that file into Google Earth? And I can download a Google Earth whatever.kml file, rename it to whatever.dae, and open that with Collada or those other apps?
Is there a way to tell which version Google Earth is compatible with?
3D models for inserting into Google Earth are made with SketchUp, which is a 3D desktop studio available only for Windows, and MacOS, not Linux. When will Google finally release a Linux SketchUp, or at least include its main modeling features into the Web version?
Or even better, when will there be a simple way to use existing (and good) Linux 3D studio tools to make standard-format datasets that are easily and completely importable into Google Earth (whether desktop or Web)?
Hell, at this point I'd even settle for a way to import the paths in a 2D PostScript (or PDF) file into something that makes them 2D lines/areas on a 3D canvas that I can put into Google Earth, rotated and positioned for at least an idea of what a fully 3D model would look like. But to do anything like that right now, I need a Mac or a Windows machine.
See, you expect it to be a "flying saucer", "landing". Because we're no different from these tribespeople: we've got our own myths and legends, and nothing else, just like them. When aliens arrive, it's more likely (out of the infinite possibilities) that their kind of arrival will scare the shit out of most of us, confirm some coincidental crazy superstition some of us have (and contradictory different ones between different groups of us), and generally just blow our minds.
We know nothing of these "new" people we just found in the Amazon, so I of course can't be sure about their particular beliefs. But unless they're perfectly unique among all peoples we've ever known, they also will have stories of strangers from "outside" coming, who they don't really consider human (because their tribe is the only humans, just like every tribe always believes until contacted).
Your basic reaction that we're somehow different from these tribespeople is exactly the reason that we're not, because they too think they understand the rest of the universe, even though they don't. Just like we thing, but are wrong. And since the universe is practically entirely misunderstood, when you compare our glimmer of understanding to the perhaps infinite vastness to understand, our degree of misunderstanding is almost indistinguishable from theirs, in proportion.
We should be certain only that we are certain of nearly as little as these Amazonians are. And take some more lessons from a people who have managed to keep their ways intact, as we hope to do when contacted by aliens ourselves. At the very least it's the best bargaining position from which to start the rest of our lives after contact.
These tribespeople are giving the rest of our species a valuable lesson in how to greet the aliens when they land.
None of this kumbaiyaa stuff that lets sinister aliens into our arms before we know they'll enslave us. Throw some spears at them to see how serious they are about making contact. If they aren't sophisticated enough to anticipate our violent reaction to their sudden appearance, they won't have anything worth learning that we can't get from just capturing some of their spacecraft. If they're really that superior, they'll take it in stride and calm us down.
And if they're really evil, we'll at least have a chance to fight them off, rather than falling for some kind of "To Serve Man" conjob.
That's exactly how this Amazon contact will play out. Why shouldn't we expect at least as much from our even more distant cousins when they arrive at our little backwater planet?
In the 2000s version of the 1990s "Website Under Construction", the site once proudly "Offering bad news about dot.com companies and betting on the demise of companies":
The language has to start out exposing lots of functionality of the machine it's to program. Its syntax has to be the most consistent, so new functionality and techniques are more easily learned on the fly. But that's just the entry fee.
The more existing code there is to "just use" (by calling it, simply and easily), the further ahead the language will pull in the competition. The easier it is to get that code, the more that existing code will count. The more documentation and people who answer questions about using the code, the more the code available will get used well.
And that's why I love Perl. It does everything, really everything, but not necessarily all at once. Most programming problems have already been solved in Perl, and usually in as many ways as there are to do it. And there's so many people who can answer the questions, and already have in googlable pages, that it's pretty reliable to get up to speed to do something, and master it quickly - if the programmer is any good.
Now if I could just store my Perl programs' call graph in a relational DB instead of a flat file, and flip the view between flowchart and lexical subroutines/modules, Perl would be nearly flawless. If it could import other languages like Java, Ruby, Python and C/C++, and output concise, efficient Perl to edit, then spit back efficiently revised code in the original language, it would be perfect.
Windows 95 was so high a point for Microsoft that it got Microsoft officially declared an abusive monopoly, violating its consent decree with the Justice Department by the way it bundled and sold Windows 95.
In fact, as abusive and monopolistic as Microsoft might have been before or since, only with Windows 95 did the corporation ever reach that "high" point.
What if a very tiny meteorite hit the new president while being inaugurated? That would set off World War IV!
Our world is certainly too much armed to the teeth, on hair triggers around the globe, jumping to believe the worst of each other. But inventing such an improbable confluence of several improbable events as a threat worth addressing is almost as irrational as pretending that the mutual destruction machine we've erected is not a threat in itself. There are real threats making that machine risky to deal with, without discrediting the notion with these movie plot threats.
"Reasonable" means you have a reason (as opposed to arbitrary), not some vague standard like "the Age of Reason". The due process specified in the Constitution and laws empowered under it ensure that the reason exists and is tested by experts, known as judges.
But now I think we're going in circles for at least the third time. Which is reason to quit.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, Social Security is not unemployment insurance. I don't know whether H-1B visas don't entitle it's holders to claiming benefits at retirement age, despite requiring those holders to pay the insurance withholding, but I'll take your word for it. That is wrong, and shouldn't happen.
Your other expenses here are of course proper (and appreciated) of any resident in our economy. But there is still a matter of the economic balance these H-1Bs represent. Do you really believe that your contribution at your job could not be obtained from a US citizen? Or perhaps just not at your salary, which you mention is low - which could be the same situation as your friends at Microsoft, just scaled up into Microsoft's definition of "high/low" pay.
What our different experiences show is that the economics of these visas is pretty complex. For example, the US economy didn't invest in preparing you to do your job, but if you don't stay longer than some relatively short time (say under 20 years, compared to the average American career of something like 40 years), your overall contribution to the economy, the return on the economy's investment in you, is also lower than an American who cost more to prepare. And of course while we are also interested in your participating in the America that goes beyond our economy (running the "liberty experiment", sharing compassion, enlightening us and the world with diverse intelligence and soul with an "American" brand on it, etc), if you stay less than an American's average domestic lifetime, we're shortchanged on that, too.
What I'm trying to do is to get foreigners who bring better skills than Americans to stay long enough that it's worth displacing Americans where they do so displace us. Indeed, I'm looking for America to get a better deal for Americans (not just for a few employers) out of the foreigners who want to come here than America gets out of the Americans they displace. Not an extremely better deal, like, say, slavery (though of course that net deal was abominable for everyone involved, except those few "employers" for a while). But in fact a better deal for America than even for the visiting labor, which should still give the visitors enough that they will come and feel it's fair (even if it's fairer to America). Because America has what the visitors want, and has the advantage of playing the buyer in a buyer's labor market. When the labor market is a seller's labor market, like when the visitor has skills unobtainable (or prohibitively expensive) in the US, of course I won't be surprised when the visitor can set the terms to their benefit - though I'd still like to see the US use its advantage to the benefit of Americans.
What kind of "slave" is bound only by the terms of their contract to either continue working for any legal employer they choose, or forfeit a fine corresponding to the benefit they had for the privilege of entering into that contract in the first place. Entering the US when you're not a citizen is a privilege, you realize. And if you break the contract that allowed you to stay longer than a brief guest, then you have to pay the penalty that you voluntarily accepted when you entered.
I guess having to pay rent and for food is "slavery", too.
You really ought to look into this "slavery" thing you're talking about. It involves wholesale kidnapping of millions of people over the years, letting at least 1/3 those kidnapped for sale in North America of them die in transit, and treatment as property with no rights or privileges, worked to death. With no choice in anything, including the forcing of slaves' descendents into perpetual slavery. And in some places, the slavery was released in name only, with no choice or rights protected, and life little different.
You'll find it's a whole different world from a monetary fine of the H-1B visa holder who doesn't stay in the US long enough to justify the country having welcomed them with fat jobs, and all the choices in the world, including breaking the deal.
After the planebombs of 9/11/2001, Bush made a big deal about how suddenly, "oceans cannot protect us anymore". As if oceans had made us immune to ICBMs in the 50 year Cold War, or to air and sea raids in either WWII or any of the other wars (like 1812, or the Revolution) we'd survived without throwing away liberty. It was true, but it wasn't new.
We're going to find out a lot more about blowback when the government Bush installed these past 7.5 years, built mostly on his Republican Congress (and not reformed by the Democratic Congress of the past year and a half), is the foundation for all these invasive technologies we're "beta testing" in China.
If the 2009 Democratic Congress and White House doesn't spend most of its time ripping out Bush's Unitary Executive by the roots, a bigger reform than Bush's 8 years of catastrophes, this country is going to make China look like a cheap, ignorant backwater. By making this country into cheap, ignorant backwater central.
You have some citations to back that up? Because I know the Indian and Chinese guys who used to work with me used to go home for at least a month a year. And they'd go home between gigs, usually to direct the building of a house they paid for with what they made while in the US. They'd get another gig over the Net, or through their network of friends they made while in the US. Sure the high pay while here kept them here more, but they also did miss their families, built those houses, and took their downtime (while not working the 60+ weekly hours that crazy Americans find normal in IT) seriously.
I don't begrudge them on some kind of nationalism. But the economics mean that they're not paying their way to keep this money machine going that they're cashing in on. But I am paying, because I live in this country full time, and helped invest (with taxes and work over 30 years) in the industries they're getting the benefit of.
America supposedly needs these people's skills, not just their willingness to work cheap (cheapness subsidized by living in a foreign country with a low cost of living because they don't invest in labor, environmental or other protections there). So make those H-1B visas come with a price. Let those people live in the US for 10 years, spending only 4 weeks abroad each year at most. If they break the deal, make their employers pay ten years of the median salary of that job description into a fund that retrains US citizens to do those jobs.
Or they can just try their luck turning their own countries into places as good to work in as is the US.
European and American (and thereby worldwide) scientists and historians are fond of labeling artifacts and sites "sacred", as if distant peoples' ideas and practices of "sacred" meant the same as what we mean by it today. All "sacred" means universally is "don't touch unless you're a religious authority". And most religious authorities, especially of longer-lived societies, will not change anything given to them already sanctified.
So "sacred" really is primarily a way for a society to protect something's integrity, even if there's no obvious reason why. The sacred might be a site, like Stonehenge, or it might be a practice, like naming stars and telling stories about their namesakes, or it might be a ritual, like walking up to a mountaintop on a date determined by a site like Stonehenge from the names of some stars. It might just be the way that a town's homes are laid out around an area, or the way a home is laid out around its enclosing walls.
There is no guarantee that something "sacred" was actually believed to be a connection to a "superpowerful person" like a god or a mystic hero as we currently understand them. The sacred is just sanctified in that people's own special way of making obvious something was sacred, and not to be messed with by those who couldn't understand the belief that made it "work". Burying kings in connection with the sacred was one way to ensure that people knew it was sacred, if they knew the king was sacred, and building something sacred at a royal burial place would do it, too.
"Holy" just means that you do something even when you can't understand it. To later civilizations after ours has waned into nonexistence or mutated into something completely obliterating it, plenty of what we do for a reason we can understand is something they won't be able to understand in their different future context. So they'll call it "sacred", and not really get it entirely.
How do you avoid a "My Sweet Lord" hijacking of your song because it shares a chord pattern with a previous song (and thousands of others that happened not to sue you)? Get a better lawyer.
Harrison lost that case not on its merits, but because his lawyer wasn't good enough. Copyrights are simple, which means a better lawyer can simply beat you. Complex laws might make a better lawyer more important, but it's still essential.
All power to "promote" can only be an attempt to promote, unless Congress is going to fund the development directly (which it also does, but government inventions are not subject to copyright or patent, except in unjust cases).
You can't look to the courts for justice in copyright. It's been a long time since copyright law or cases are justified by their original compromise between free expression and commerce. Commerce's case for that compromise has gotten only weaker, but its profits have gotten so huge for so long, to corporations that are so politically powerful in our totally mediated political age, that injustice is the rule. Copyright is mostly bullshit, especially in music, where every artist "borrows" (and great artists steal, as Picasso said, when he plagiarized T. S. Eliot).
Radiohead owns the copyright of their original copy of the song (if they own the master media onto which it was recorded, and didn't release it from copyright control). That gives them "performance copyright", which lets them require permission from the first other person to "perform" their original recording (either a reenactment of producing the song using new instruments, or just playing back the original recording over speakers in the air to a large crowd or over other broadcast media like radio or TV soundtrack). But after they release the first public performance, anyone can perform the song, provided they pay the pre-set "mechanical" royalty rate (determined by the number of listeners in the venue's capacity, not necessarily those actually hearing the performance, though webcasting is per actual listener). The mechanical rate is low, like under $0.001 per listener, designed for repeated broadcast at rates recoverable by whatever commerce is operated using the performance.
But Prince does own his own performance of that song. He owns the copyright of his own performance, though not of the song he's performing. He's merely performing a song that copyright law lets him perform so long as he's in compliance with the royalty laws that pay Radiohead. Unless Prince was the first person other than Radiohead to perform it publicly, Radiohead doesn't have control over the public performance of the song, just the right to collect the royalties when it is played by whoever wants to.
Copyrights are fairly simple, if taken step by step. That doesn't stop them from being bullshit, especially when practiced by musicians, who always use copyrighted content from other artists without respect to the "original's" copyright.
When someone does something in public, I have the right to see it. I have the right to remember it. I have the right to record what I see and remember, even if the law these days is wrong and can stop me (like most copyright laws, and of course the Hollywood-written DMCA). And if I recorded it, I have the right to show it to anyone I want. This is a freedom of expression that copyright infringes. And since YouTube promotes Prince's commerce much more than it competes with it, no copyright is promoting "progress in science and the useful arts". In fact, this DMCA abuse is killing that progress, right when it could be exploding, but instead miserly copyright owners are pretending they represent "progress", when all they represent is profit.
I think we'll do it with something like geobacter cultures GM'ed to require a critical "mask" nutrient that is easy to supply to only the target soil volumes where it doesn't occur otherwise (and is itself both harmless and, naturally, biodegradable). That way we can just "innoculate" target areas, work the nutrient into the soil, and let nature do the rest. Perhaps a variety of geobacter that putrefies the plastic into a recoverable sludge, then physically work the sludgy soil to collect the sludge into recoverable pits.
Or maybe there's a way to harvest the geobacter products with earthworms. Maybe we can get the earthworms to depend on the sludge - or some material in it, leaving the energetic oil undigested or stored in their bodies - into their diet. As well as some other "bait" nutrient that we leave at the surface. Then maybe we can just let "nature" do the work of digging the treasure out of the dirt and bringing it home to harvest, with minimum energy input and maximum sniffed out recovery, but all under control so we don't unleash some terrible plague that entirely destroys our "pre-trash" stock of plastic.
I'd love to see someone use these materials to filter regular polluted water in our waterways (after a regular filter to keep living creatures out) to both clean the water and recover usable chemicals for fuel.
And someday someone's going to figure out how to cheaply and easily mine our landfills for all that plastic we've buried for nearly a century. When the cheap oil's gone soon, that's going to be a reasonable alternative if we have the tech.
Banks never transport the life savings of 4.5 million people without an armored car. There's probably even a lot of laws that prohibit such blatantly reckless behavior, to say nothing of their insurance coverage depending on following those rules. And if they do "lost" that life savings in transit, without an armored car, the bank has to replace it at the bank's cost, even if that drives the bank out of business.
Of course these people's life data is no different: the bank is responsible for protecting it. So the bank should be required to transport only encrypted media (in an armored car). If the bank "loses" the data, the bank should have to pay and organize the resecuring of all that data, including notifying all the many databases that maintain it, changing ID numbers, getting new ID cards, etc, at absolutely no cost in time or money to the people. And the bank should pay a service that monitors those people for ID theft for at least a dozen years, if not the rest of their lives, and assume liability (for losses and extra bureaucratic work) for any fraud using the data the bank "lost".
There oughtta be a law. As long as the cost of these "accidental losses" is minimal to the banks and other corps handling the data, they will of course spend as little as possible on securing it.
In fact there should be a Federal database of people whose personal data has been exposed. Every database that maintains any significant amount of personal data should be required to check that database every day or so to be sure they aren't using data exposed elsewhere. If they are, they should have to notify the FBI, the org that exposed the data, and the person whose data was exposed, then initiate the replacement process at the cost and effort of the org that exposed it.
Of course such a DB of exposed (and therefore exploitable, and at a rich org's expense) data would be extremely valuable, and the world's primary target of attacks by fraudsters and other bad guys. And the government (especially the one we have today) would be tempted to datamine that data for many other big brother purposes, all supposedly to "protect us" (from "the terrorists", etc). The government would love to use such a service as a pretext for other tyrannies, like a required "national ID card". But securing such a DB, even by the government, is absolutely possible. There are many databases already in use that are never compromised, in both government and private control. If the incentive and procedures are strong enough, this is an operation we can pull off. Probably if supported by a Constitutional Privacy Amendment that puts teeth back into the 4th Amendment, the government would protect our data at least as effectively as it protects, say, our nuclear arsenal. There might be some abuses, but they'd be much fewer, and the damage would be recovered by the irresponsible party instead of ruining the people's lives.
Why not? The difference between us and "primitive" people is entirely in our technology. And the aliens we're talking about would make the difference between our tech and Amazonian tech look pretty small, compared to what the aliens would have to come here (unless they really do come from a hole to the center of the Earth or something).
Look at how we're dealing with these Amazonians. Even though they're greeting us with violence, we're not going to let that stop us from getting to a peaceful relationship with them. Even though our society, that sent the helicopters, is a vastly more warlike society than the tribe that met us with their spears.
So like I said in the first place, we don't have much to lose by learning from our Amazonian cousins how to great some creature showing up in your territory with superior tech: throw spears at them. If that pisses them off, they'd inevitably destroy us anyway. But it's more likely to earn some respect and some bargaining. The Amazonians are much more familiar with confronting the ignorance about the outside world we'd like to pretend we've outgrown, but we haven't, and also are more familiar with recognizing threats to their existence. I'm with them, not with some sneaky, fast-talking alien maybe out to eat me.
Do you know anything I can use in Linux to import PostScript paths extracted from a PDF into a 3D model I can edit and export into Google Earth? That is in fact my main use case.
It failed in the same way that several reviews I saw said it might. Bug reports would be redundant, but evidently not enough to get Google to fix them.
If you think that "nearly as little" is just the same as "just as little" then you're as wrong as the Earth isn't flat.
I searched for kml and google earth and found nothing in their wiki. I searched for collada , and found only a plugin that opens .dae files, but no way to export a file that Google Earth can import.
So I can download a whatever.dae file and its texture images, change the filename from whatever.dae to whatever.kml , and upload that file into Google Earth? And I can download a Google Earth whatever.kml file, rename it to whatever.dae, and open that with Collada or those other apps?
Is there a way to tell which version Google Earth is compatible with?
3D models for inserting into Google Earth are made with SketchUp, which is a 3D desktop studio available only for Windows, and MacOS, not Linux. When will Google finally release a Linux SketchUp, or at least include its main modeling features into the Web version?
Or even better, when will there be a simple way to use existing (and good) Linux 3D studio tools to make standard-format datasets that are easily and completely importable into Google Earth (whether desktop or Web)?
Hell, at this point I'd even settle for a way to import the paths in a 2D PostScript (or PDF) file into something that makes them 2D lines/areas on a 3D canvas that I can put into Google Earth, rotated and positioned for at least an idea of what a fully 3D model would look like. But to do anything like that right now, I need a Mac or a Windows machine.
See, you expect it to be a "flying saucer", "landing". Because we're no different from these tribespeople: we've got our own myths and legends, and nothing else, just like them. When aliens arrive, it's more likely (out of the infinite possibilities) that their kind of arrival will scare the shit out of most of us, confirm some coincidental crazy superstition some of us have (and contradictory different ones between different groups of us), and generally just blow our minds.
We know nothing of these "new" people we just found in the Amazon, so I of course can't be sure about their particular beliefs. But unless they're perfectly unique among all peoples we've ever known, they also will have stories of strangers from "outside" coming, who they don't really consider human (because their tribe is the only humans, just like every tribe always believes until contacted).
Your basic reaction that we're somehow different from these tribespeople is exactly the reason that we're not, because they too think they understand the rest of the universe, even though they don't. Just like we thing, but are wrong. And since the universe is practically entirely misunderstood, when you compare our glimmer of understanding to the perhaps infinite vastness to understand, our degree of misunderstanding is almost indistinguishable from theirs, in proportion.
We should be certain only that we are certain of nearly as little as these Amazonians are. And take some more lessons from a people who have managed to keep their ways intact, as we hope to do when contacted by aliens ourselves. At the very least it's the best bargaining position from which to start the rest of our lives after contact.
These tribespeople are giving the rest of our species a valuable lesson in how to greet the aliens when they land.
None of this kumbaiyaa stuff that lets sinister aliens into our arms before we know they'll enslave us. Throw some spears at them to see how serious they are about making contact. If they aren't sophisticated enough to anticipate our violent reaction to their sudden appearance, they won't have anything worth learning that we can't get from just capturing some of their spacecraft. If they're really that superior, they'll take it in stride and calm us down.
And if they're really evil, we'll at least have a chance to fight them off, rather than falling for some kind of "To Serve Man" conjob.
That's exactly how this Amazon contact will play out. Why shouldn't we expect at least as much from our even more distant cousins when they arrive at our little backwater planet?
As so many learned (or at least heard) in the Dotcom Bubble, "there's nothing so permanent as a temporary solution".
The language has to start out exposing lots of functionality of the machine it's to program. Its syntax has to be the most consistent, so new functionality and techniques are more easily learned on the fly. But that's just the entry fee.
The more existing code there is to "just use" (by calling it, simply and easily), the further ahead the language will pull in the competition. The easier it is to get that code, the more that existing code will count. The more documentation and people who answer questions about using the code, the more the code available will get used well.
And that's why I love Perl. It does everything, really everything, but not necessarily all at once. Most programming problems have already been solved in Perl, and usually in as many ways as there are to do it. And there's so many people who can answer the questions, and already have in googlable pages, that it's pretty reliable to get up to speed to do something, and master it quickly - if the programmer is any good.
Now if I could just store my Perl programs' call graph in a relational DB instead of a flat file, and flip the view between flowchart and lexical subroutines/modules, Perl would be nearly flawless. If it could import other languages like Java, Ruby, Python and C/C++, and output concise, efficient Perl to edit, then spit back efficiently revised code in the original language, it would be perfect.
Windows 95 was so high a point for Microsoft that it got Microsoft officially declared an abusive monopoly, violating its consent decree with the Justice Department by the way it bundled and sold Windows 95.
In fact, as abusive and monopolistic as Microsoft might have been before or since, only with Windows 95 did the corporation ever reach that "high" point.
What if a very tiny meteorite hit the new president while being inaugurated? That would set off World War IV!
Our world is certainly too much armed to the teeth, on hair triggers around the globe, jumping to believe the worst of each other. But inventing such an improbable confluence of several improbable events as a threat worth addressing is almost as irrational as pretending that the mutual destruction machine we've erected is not a threat in itself. There are real threats making that machine risky to deal with, without discrediting the notion with these movie plot threats.
"Reasonable" means you have a reason (as opposed to arbitrary), not some vague standard like "the Age of Reason". The due process specified in the Constitution and laws empowered under it ensure that the reason exists and is tested by experts, known as judges.
But now I think we're going in circles for at least the third time. Which is reason to quit.