And especially Budweiser is a very bad example, because Anheuser-Busch is some decades older than Budvar, which was founded in 1895. Ironically Anheuser-Busch making money of the fact, that they were selling Budweiser hinted to the local czech people of Ceske Budejovice that the type of beer they were drinking for themselves (the Germans living in Böhmisch Budweis at the same time normally didn't drink beer following the Budweiser recipe, since the Lager beer was invented in Pilsen and thus you could drink beer from other sources than the local breweries), might have something for it, so they founded a brewery to brew czech beer for czech people. In a twist of history the fact that the Budweiser beer recipe went overseas and became a wellknown brand was the root cause for the Budweiser recipe to finally become a brand in its home town.
I guess, the original claim just messed up GByte and MByte, because with 1200x1200 dpi in 24 bit color you get about 420 MByte per A4 sheet, throw in some error correction (e.g. 8 in 14 encoding), and you are very close to 256 MByte.
This is called the inductive principle (we assume, that the future is not much different from the past), but in fact it has not much value in science as such. It is one of the possible hypothesis generators, but it is neither the only one nor does it warrant a "better" hypothesis than others. Each hypothesis, independent from it's origin, still has to undergo evaluation, until it finally dies in an experiment which proves, that the hypothesis is wrong, or it goes thrown out because it is only a restatement of "Zero equals Zero".
Just nitpicking: The U.S. is also larger than Australia if you look at the area. The only countries larger than the U.S. (9.4 mio square km) are Russia (17 mio square km), Canada (9.9 mio square km) and China (9.6 mio square km).
The main reason for the U.S. dominance is the fact that the U.S. didn't had any war on its soil since 1865 and no foreign troups fighting there since 1836. Same is valid for Switzerland, which hadn't had any foreign troups on its soil since 1477 [Battle at Murrgarten] and wasn't involved in any other wars since 1515 [against the Dukedom of Milano]. Wonder why Switzerland one of the richest countries of the world...
For some reason NOT losing your people, resources, infrastructure and industry in armed conflicts helps.
... and in the end most of those organic pollutants will become carbon dioxide anyway... not immediately as it were after hitting name brand concrete, but within days or weeks anyway. So this concrete doesn't actually change the CO2 contribution, it just moves it forward a few weeks.
No. It didn't. A problem only exists, if it is spotted. If no one cares or knows, then it is not a problem. It may still be a fault though.
In this case the fault was lurking in Wikipedia for nearly a year. But when the problem arised (Hey, guys, look at this article. Doesn't it look suspicious?) it was dealt with on short notice. It's the same with bugs. Of course bugs exists everywhere, but one of the main problems with existing bugs is, that they aren't discovered, until someone stumbles on it and can nail it down to an identifiable bug (e.g. reproducing it again and again). So how to fix something you don't know it exists in the first play?
The Wikipedia way is to have everything in the open: All texts, all versions, and everyone can have a look. But for such a special interest field as the NPA theory, no one except the author knows about or wants to know about, how do you get the second glance? It seems that the only people ever looking at the article for nearly a year weren't specialists in the field, so they could only look for formal criteria and didn't feel inclined to cross examine the contents.
"Explaining away" meant that I try to convince myself or someone else that the things I see, I feel, I experience or I test are not the real truth, but products of someone trying to cheat me. E.g. "Dinosaurs never existed, GOD buried the bones to test the strength of our belief". Or "The earth is only 6000 years old. Towns like Jericho or Catal Huyuk were created 4000 years old, so they now seem to have more than 10,000 years of continious history."
"Explaining away" means to postulate hidden mechanisms that allow to close the gap between the personal belief and the personal experience. Sometimes it is productive, and the postulated mechanism actually seems to explain more than the first gap, and it allows to close the gap between the expectations of the people using it and the futural experiences of the same people. In this case it is called a "testable hypothesis" or a "scientific theory". Sometimes it only works for this single gap ("It had to happen, because I broke the mirror yesterday"), then it is called "superstition", or it is so universal that it explains each and every gap, wherever it happens, and also the nonexistance of the same gap, then it is called "tautology" or "religion".
There are christians who think, evolution might be a correct model of specification, and there are creationists, who are not christian (for instance islamic creationists). Basicly we have a new system of belief which draws ideas from jewish, christian and islamic roots (and maybe from some other roots too, some wiccans or pagans also might be creationists), whose common denominator is: Against all evidence I believe that evolutionary processes can be explained away.
There is a normal thermodynamic problem with high storage densities. Information has a very high enthalpy and thus is prone to lose that to entropy. If you look at the concept of information being the reciprocal of the probability, and how complete randomness has the highest entropy, thus the highest probability and thus the lowest information density, you understand the problem.
Stone carving is so well preserved because the information density is so low. (Let's say: A boulder of 3 times 3 feet and a thickness of another feet may weigh about a metric ton, but on its flat surface you get chiselled in maybe the contents of a sheet of paper, about 2kbyte of information). Papyrus already has a higher information density and thus information stored on papyrus is often less well preserved, and most of the information ever stored on papyrus is lost already. Printed paper takes the information density to the next level, and thus the danger of destroying it by degradation is much higher. With DVDs we are just short of information stored at the molecular level, and thus it is no wonder that this information degrades so fast.
I think the sheer amount of information people from 5000 years ago could retrieve from today's information storage will still be a multiple of today's information about pre-pharaonean Egypt. The impression that so much information is lost today compared with ancient Egypt comes from the fact, that today many people can remember the TV shows from the early 60ies and thus they know what is lost due to missing storage of it. But do we have even the textbooks of all the plays played for instance in London in the late 19th century? Do we even have pictures of all the actors? I think not. But we don't miss them in daily life, because we don't remember them at all. Some specialists might cry for the fact that there is not enough information left from that time. But we don't feel that something we know today about the late 19th century will be forgotten and unrecoverable tomorrow. Because tomorrow we will have forgotten about it.
There is an old saying in Germany: Ist der Handel noch so klein, bringt er mehr als Arbeit ein (May the trade be small, it still yields more than work). You may look at any economy you want: the people who make a living by bashing on matter are always outnumbered by people moving things or agree to each other how to let other people move things.
Even if you look into a mine: There are much more people moving ore or coal from the deep pit to the surface or from the surface to the processing plant or whatever than people actually mining (e.g. drilling into rock, putting in dynamite etc.pp.)
If you look at Western Europe's largest conglomeration of towns and industry, the Ruhr Area with about six million inhabitants, even the towns with the largest industry sector like Gelsenkirchen, Bochum or Dortmund have only 16% industry workers compared with about 40% workers in the services sector. (Ironically the small towns and villages in the rural regions southeast of the Ruhr Area, in the Sauerland, have 25% of workers in the industry sector).
In the end most of our productivity doesn't come from mending and bending matter, but from moving things in a coordinated way. And that's why moving and coordinating is much better paid than hammering on things.
But if anything, Hugo Chavez would actually be interested in keeping the current administration in power. It keeps the oil prices high (good for Hugo Chavez), it is so incompetent, that any uprising it tries to initiate against Hugo Chavez is easily defeated (the last one was gone after 48 hrs), and it gives him enough populist argumentation to use any means to stay in power and also suppress any other uprising.
I also think that al-Qaida would vote G.W.Bush: Never ever have the recruiting possibilities have be better, never ever have the arguments of al-Qaida being existant better. Never ever have the means and possibilities of getting money from the Arab world being better due to high income on oil and an general feeling of being waged an undeclared war against from the U.S..
Never ever have allies of the U.S. being more alienated from the U.S., making "divide et impera" the most easiest ever. Never ever was the danger of the own population being in favor of U.S. so minimal. The U.S. was actually managing to get the same people of Iran, who were burning candles on the streets in condolence to the victims of 9/11 and thus expressing their sympathy for the U.S., now being nearly unified against the same U.S..
If I was the U.S. administration, I would recommend to hush up any possible ties between Sequoia voting machines and Venezuela.
No. The cash value comes from the fact, that other people want to pay something to get it. What you are talking about is the effort that went into it. This has nothing to do with the value of a single copy.
If someone designs a new car, and someone else is constructing the engine to run it and a third one is inventing the machines to build it, then the effort necessary to do this surely goes into the billions of dollars (about 3 billion for a new midclass car), but that has nothing to do with the price you can charge for a car. Quite contrarily one tries design the car in a way that one can charge a price high enough and still sell enough cars to recover the initial costs plus the cost to actually build the cars. Sometimes this works out, sometimes the company fails in the effort.
For a car there is some inherent protection due to the fact that even if the initial design is copied, the construction of the machines and the building of the plant and the access to the materials is still so expensive, that it doesn't pay if you just want to sell a small, limited number. That's one reason why cars seldom get copied (ok, you can get ripoffs, but they often have to try to be actually cheaper to build than the original and thus differ in design). It is more expensive to create your own copy than just to buy a original car. To offset the cost of the copy you would have to create a lot of copies, and you would need a huge amount of money, of logistics, of markets to sell enough of them for a high enough price.
So only entities that already have enough machines, staff, plants and logistics to build a large number of cars are able to do this cheaply enough per car, that they might be able to build cheaper copies. The number of those entities is quite limited, and so legal proceedings to keep them from doing this is possible, and they have enough assets to set off your legal costs if you win.
It used to be the same for books and music sheets and vinyl records: Copying something like that was either not feasible for the normal guy, or in nearly every other case it was cheaper to just buy an original (There were exceptions though: In East Europe it was often not possible to even get enough copies of a Work of Art because it was either not condoned by the government, or just not available for sale, so there was the pure necessity of copying it on your own. People were typing copies of novels on their typewriters with carbon paper, or were trying to make hectographies of music sheets).
Only entities with their own printing/vinyl/whatever press were able to create enough copies to break even on the copies or make a profit. But they had still to sell the copies to actually recover their costs on the copies. They had to go to the public to do that, and they had enough assets to lose, so one could use copyright and similar concepts to restrict their possibilities of doing so. Thus was the business model: Make it cheap for you to create copies and prevent other people to create copies of the same work and sell them.
With the digital age this is no longer the case. Now even the actual consumer can create a copy cheaper than anything he gets offered from legal or not so legal channels. So the infringment of copyrights doesn't need to go to the public anymore, and the motivation of profit from a sale of an illicit copy has gone. It pays for everyone to create his or her own single copy, because it is always cheaper than the original.
For the first time in history copyright infringment is no longer bound to large numbers of copies, or to go to the public with the copies in any way. That's why it is completely necessary to invade the privacy of the consumer to prevent alleged or real copyright infringement.
For the first time in history the actual act of making a copy has to be detected to preserve the opportunity to sell yet another (legal) copy of a work. It's no longer possible to recover your initial costs by the fact that you can create and sell copies cheaper than the
And maybe also debunking some of the copyright myths:)
- For instance: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart indeed was dying poor, but not because of missing protection of his works: He just spent too much money. Michael Jackson is also broke, and he has the full protection of copyrights;) W.A.Mozart's widow Konstanze later one was well off because of the money coming in from her late husbands work, also without current copyrights.
- Copyright in the U.S. at first protected only works of U.S. origin. British works like the novels from Charles Dickens were printed in the U.S. without permission from Charles Dickens or his editor, and only when the first U.S. writers like Mark Twain became famous all over the world (not that he was the first U.S. writer. Just one of the first becoming famous outside of the U.S.), and British printers started to print their works, the U.S. agreed to expand copyright protection also to non U.S. citizens.
- Most developing nations with a strong economic growth have to deal with accusations of mistreating intellectual property. It was so with the U.S. in the mid-19th century, with Japan after WWII, later with Taiwan and now China. The time when protections like patents, copyrights and trademarks get fully developed is often correlated with a new period of a more "normal" economic growth. But at that point the developing nations often have accumulated enough own IP they consider worth protecting. Knowledge that has not a single entity to be attributed to, like old folk myths, songs, traditions, medical treatments, never gets protected, and is considered free for plundering by everyone.
It's an estimation I made from the fact that the 80 mio Germans suffer 700 deaths each year from fishbone chokes. So I estimated the 300 mio U.S. americans being roughly at the same risk, thus having about 3.75 * 700 = 2625 ~ 2500 victims of the dreaded fish. The number 700 in turn was taken from "Die Pommes-Panik" (the french fries panic), which dealt with the risk of different food types to your health. There was a food chemist quoted about bovine spongioform encephalitis (BSE, mad cow disease) who said: "Since the discovery of BSE, there were 91 reported deaths worldwide because of a new form of Creutzfeld-Jacobs' disease [the suspected human form of BSE]. There are 700 deaths each year in Germany alone from choking on fishbones." So even though the number 2500 might be wrong for the U.S., just ask the Census Bureau for other statistics. There have to be hundreds of risks more dangerous than Terrorism. Normal flu for instance kills about 10,000 people each year in Germany. Lately there was a study published in Great Britain, where hundreds of deaths each year were attributed to understaffing in hospitals because of money saving.
The people flying airplanes into our assets need to die, not be liberated or whatever..
That's what they do. They are called suicide bombers for that reason. Earnestly: There are still more U.S. citizens dying because they choke on a fishbone (about 2500 each year) than because of terrorism. Puts things to perspective, doesn't it?
That's why democratic societies allow not only everyone (except foreigners, felons, slaves, wives, children, blacks, traders, non residents, communists, non believers, ) to vote, but also everyone to watch the counting.
For the sake of the argument, there were several people who intentionally had their TV set crippled so it couldn't receive public broadcasting anymore (by fixed frequency setting to non public stations for instance) and then argued in court that their TV set was not "ready". They lost.
The government can't do exactly that, because of the Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (Radio State Contract) the TV stream has to be available to everyone indiscriminately. It's not about avoiding getting something for free. No, the whole idea is that the programming should be free to anyone who is ready to receive it, subventioned by the fees of all people who want programming in general, independently of the source of THEIR programming.
It is in fact the same story. In 2004 the introduction was first discussed, and now it's reality. It's a little more complicated than stated in the blurb though. If you are already paying the fee for a TV set, you have not to pay for the computer. But businesses normally don't operate a TV set, so they are now hit by the fee. The fee is due not for watching TV, but for "having a TV set ready for reception of a TV signal". Because the public TV programming is available as an IP stream, every computer that could be hooked to the Internet is "being ready for reception". And don't try to argue that your computer is running Linux and thus not "ready". It is able to run an operating system that could display the TV stream, even though it is not running it right now. In general you have to pay the fee only once, independent of the number of "TV ready" equipment you are using. Only if you have some private radio/TV sets and some in your business, the fee is due twice (a car radio in a car used for business for instance has to be paid for in addition to the one in your home).
You mean, LUGs might lose the patent on living in basements? Because the article states that those bacteria live there since at least 3 million years:)
Slashdot Mirror
And especially Budweiser is a very bad example, because Anheuser-Busch is some decades older than Budvar, which was founded in 1895. Ironically Anheuser-Busch making money of the fact, that they were selling Budweiser hinted to the local czech people of Ceske Budejovice that the type of beer they were drinking for themselves (the Germans living in Böhmisch Budweis at the same time normally didn't drink beer following the Budweiser recipe, since the Lager beer was invented in Pilsen and thus you could drink beer from other sources than the local breweries), might have something for it, so they founded a brewery to brew czech beer for czech people. In a twist of history the fact that the Budweiser beer recipe went overseas and became a wellknown brand was the root cause for the Budweiser recipe to finally become a brand in its home town.
I guess, the original claim just messed up GByte and MByte, because with 1200x1200 dpi in 24 bit color you get about 420 MByte per A4 sheet, throw in some error correction (e.g. 8 in 14 encoding), and you are very close to 256 MByte.
This is called the inductive principle (we assume, that the future is not much different from the past), but in fact it has not much value in science as such. It is one of the possible hypothesis generators, but it is neither the only one nor does it warrant a "better" hypothesis than others.
Each hypothesis, independent from it's origin, still has to undergo evaluation, until it finally dies in an experiment which proves, that the hypothesis is wrong, or it goes thrown out because it is only a restatement of "Zero equals Zero".
Just nitpicking: The U.S. is also larger than Australia if you look at the area. The only countries larger than the U.S. (9.4 mio square km) are Russia (17 mio square km), Canada (9.9 mio square km) and China (9.6 mio square km).
But Volkswagen has a 400 km/h Beetle... Ok. They call it differently.
At least it makes as much sense as the claim I was replying to :)
The main reason for the U.S. dominance is the fact that the U.S. didn't had any war on its soil since 1865 and no foreign troups fighting there since 1836.
Same is valid for Switzerland, which hadn't had any foreign troups on its soil since 1477 [Battle at Murrgarten] and wasn't involved in any other wars since 1515 [against the Dukedom of Milano]. Wonder why Switzerland one of the richest countries of the world...
For some reason NOT losing your people, resources, infrastructure and industry in armed conflicts helps.
... and in the end most of those organic pollutants will become carbon dioxide anyway... not immediately as it were after hitting name brand concrete, but within days or weeks anyway. So this concrete doesn't actually change the CO2 contribution, it just moves it forward a few weeks.
No. It didn't. A problem only exists, if it is spotted. If no one cares or knows, then it is not a problem. It may still be a fault though.
In this case the fault was lurking in Wikipedia for nearly a year. But when the problem arised (Hey, guys, look at this article. Doesn't it look suspicious?) it was dealt with on short notice. It's the same with bugs. Of course bugs exists everywhere, but one of the main problems with existing bugs is, that they aren't discovered, until someone stumbles on it and can nail it down to an identifiable bug (e.g. reproducing it again and again). So how to fix something you don't know it exists in the first play?
The Wikipedia way is to have everything in the open: All texts, all versions, and everyone can have a look. But for such a special interest field as the NPA theory, no one except the author knows about or wants to know about, how do you get the second glance? It seems that the only people ever looking at the article for nearly a year weren't specialists in the field, so they could only look for formal criteria and didn't feel inclined to cross examine the contents.
"Explaining away" meant that I try to convince myself or someone else that the things I see, I feel, I experience or I test are not the real truth, but products of someone trying to cheat me. E.g. "Dinosaurs never existed, GOD buried the bones to test the strength of our belief". Or "The earth is only 6000 years old. Towns like Jericho or Catal Huyuk were created 4000 years old, so they now seem to have more than 10,000 years of continious history."
"Explaining away" means to postulate hidden mechanisms that allow to close the gap between the personal belief and the personal experience.
Sometimes it is productive, and the postulated mechanism actually seems to explain more than the first gap, and it allows to close the gap between the expectations of the people using it and the futural experiences of the same people. In this case it is called a "testable hypothesis" or a "scientific theory".
Sometimes it only works for this single gap ("It had to happen, because I broke the mirror yesterday"), then it is called "superstition", or it is so universal that it explains each and every gap, wherever it happens, and also the nonexistance of the same gap, then it is called "tautology" or "religion".
There are christians who think, evolution might be a correct model of specification, and there are creationists, who are not christian (for instance islamic creationists). Basicly we have a new system of belief which draws ideas from jewish, christian and islamic roots (and maybe from some other roots too, some wiccans or pagans also might be creationists), whose common denominator is: Against all evidence I believe that evolutionary processes can be explained away.
The Berlin Wall worked for 28 years quite well. Without it Germany would have been reunified in the 60ies already.
There is a normal thermodynamic problem with high storage densities. Information has a very high enthalpy and thus is prone to lose that to entropy. If you look at the concept of information being the reciprocal of the probability, and how complete randomness has the highest entropy, thus the highest probability and thus the lowest information density, you understand the problem.
Stone carving is so well preserved because the information density is so low. (Let's say: A boulder of 3 times 3 feet and a thickness of another feet may weigh about a metric ton, but on its flat surface you get chiselled in maybe the contents of a sheet of paper, about 2kbyte of information). Papyrus already has a higher information density and thus information stored on papyrus is often less well preserved, and most of the information ever stored on papyrus is lost already. Printed paper takes the information density to the next level, and thus the danger of destroying it by degradation is much higher. With DVDs we are just short of information stored at the molecular level, and thus it is no wonder that this information degrades so fast.
I think the sheer amount of information people from 5000 years ago could retrieve from today's information storage will still be a multiple of today's information about pre-pharaonean Egypt. The impression that so much information is lost today compared with ancient Egypt comes from the fact, that today many people can remember the TV shows from the early 60ies and thus they know what is lost due to missing storage of it. But do we have even the textbooks of all the plays played for instance in London in the late 19th century? Do we even have pictures of all the actors? I think not. But we don't miss them in daily life, because we don't remember them at all. Some specialists might cry for the fact that there is not enough information left from that time. But we don't feel that something we know today about the late 19th century will be forgotten and unrecoverable tomorrow. Because tomorrow we will have forgotten about it.
There is an old saying in Germany: Ist der Handel noch so klein, bringt er mehr als Arbeit ein (May the trade be small, it still yields more than work). You may look at any economy you want: the people who make a living by bashing on matter are always outnumbered by people moving things or agree to each other how to let other people move things.
Even if you look into a mine: There are much more people moving ore or coal from the deep pit to the surface or from the surface to the processing plant or whatever than people actually mining (e.g. drilling into rock, putting in dynamite etc.pp.)
If you look at Western Europe's largest conglomeration of towns and industry, the Ruhr Area with about six million inhabitants, even the towns with the largest industry sector like Gelsenkirchen, Bochum or Dortmund have only 16% industry workers compared with about 40% workers in the services sector. (Ironically the small towns and villages in the rural regions southeast of the Ruhr Area, in the Sauerland, have 25% of workers in the industry sector).
In the end most of our productivity doesn't come from mending and bending matter, but from moving things in a coordinated way. And that's why moving and coordinating is much better paid than hammering on things.
But if anything, Hugo Chavez would actually be interested in keeping the current administration in power. It keeps the oil prices high (good for Hugo Chavez), it is so incompetent, that any uprising it tries to initiate against Hugo Chavez is easily defeated (the last one was gone after 48 hrs), and it gives him enough populist argumentation to use any means to stay in power and also suppress any other uprising.
I also think that al-Qaida would vote G.W.Bush: Never ever have the recruiting possibilities have be better, never ever have the arguments of al-Qaida being existant better. Never ever have the means and possibilities of getting money from the Arab world being better due to high income on oil and an general feeling of being waged an undeclared war against from the U.S..
Never ever have allies of the U.S. being more alienated from the U.S., making "divide et impera" the most easiest ever. Never ever was the danger of the own population being in favor of U.S. so minimal. The U.S. was actually managing to get the same people of Iran, who were burning candles on the streets in condolence to the victims of 9/11 and thus expressing their sympathy for the U.S., now being nearly unified against the same U.S..
If I was the U.S. administration, I would recommend to hush up any possible ties between Sequoia voting machines and Venezuela.
No. The cash value comes from the fact, that other people want to pay something to get it. What you are talking about is the effort that went into it. This has nothing to do with the value of a single copy.
If someone designs a new car, and someone else is constructing the engine to run it and a third one is inventing the machines to build it, then the effort necessary to do this surely goes into the billions of dollars (about 3 billion for a new midclass car), but that has nothing to do with the price you can charge for a car. Quite contrarily one tries design the car in a way that one can charge a price high enough and still sell enough cars to recover the initial costs plus the cost to actually build the cars. Sometimes this works out, sometimes the company fails in the effort.
For a car there is some inherent protection due to the fact that even if the initial design is copied, the construction of the machines and the building of the plant and the access to the materials is still so expensive, that it doesn't pay if you just want to sell a small, limited number. That's one reason why cars seldom get copied (ok, you can get ripoffs, but they often have to try to be actually cheaper to build than the original and thus differ in design). It is more expensive to create your own copy than just to buy a original car. To offset the cost of the copy you would have to create a lot of copies, and you would need a huge amount of money, of logistics, of markets to sell enough of them for a high enough price.
So only entities that already have enough machines, staff, plants and logistics to build a large number of cars are able to do this cheaply enough per car, that they might be able to build cheaper copies. The number of those entities is quite limited, and so legal proceedings to keep them from doing this is possible, and they have enough assets to set off your legal costs if you win.
It used to be the same for books and music sheets and vinyl records: Copying something like that was either not feasible for the normal guy, or in nearly every other case it was cheaper to just buy an original (There were exceptions though: In East Europe it was often not possible to even get enough copies of a Work of Art because it was either not condoned by the government, or just not available for sale, so there was the pure necessity of copying it on your own. People were typing copies of novels on their typewriters with carbon paper, or were trying to make hectographies of music sheets).
Only entities with their own printing/vinyl/whatever press were able to create enough copies to break even on the copies or make a profit. But they had still to sell the copies to actually recover their costs on the copies. They had to go to the public to do that, and they had enough assets to lose, so one could use copyright and similar concepts to restrict their possibilities of doing so. Thus was the business model: Make it cheap for you to create copies and prevent other people to create copies of the same work and sell them.
With the digital age this is no longer the case. Now even the actual consumer can create a copy cheaper than anything he gets offered from legal or not so legal channels. So the infringment of copyrights doesn't need to go to the public anymore, and the motivation of profit from a sale of an illicit copy has gone. It pays for everyone to create his or her own single copy, because it is always cheaper than the original.
For the first time in history copyright infringment is no longer bound to large numbers of copies, or to go to the public with the copies in any way. That's why it is completely necessary to invade the privacy of the consumer to prevent alleged or real copyright infringement.
For the first time in history the actual act of making a copy has to be detected to preserve the opportunity to sell yet another (legal) copy of a work. It's no longer possible to recover your initial costs by the fact that you can create and sell copies cheaper than the
And maybe also debunking some of the copyright myths :)
;) W.A.Mozart's widow Konstanze later one was well off because of the money coming in from her late husbands work, also without current copyrights.
- For instance: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart indeed was dying poor, but not because of missing protection of his works: He just spent too much money. Michael Jackson is also broke, and he has the full protection of copyrights
- Copyright in the U.S. at first protected only works of U.S. origin. British works like the novels from Charles Dickens were printed in the U.S. without permission from Charles Dickens or his editor, and only when the first U.S. writers like Mark Twain became famous all over the world (not that he was the first U.S. writer. Just one of the first becoming famous outside of the U.S.), and British printers started to print their works, the U.S. agreed to expand copyright protection also to non U.S. citizens.
- Most developing nations with a strong economic growth have to deal with accusations of mistreating intellectual property. It was so with the U.S. in the mid-19th century, with Japan after WWII, later with Taiwan and now China. The time when protections like patents, copyrights and trademarks get fully developed is often correlated with a new period of a more "normal" economic growth. But at that point the developing nations often have accumulated enough own IP they consider worth protecting. Knowledge that has not a single entity to be attributed to, like old folk myths, songs, traditions, medical treatments, never gets protected, and is considered free for plundering by everyone.
It's an estimation I made from the fact that the 80 mio Germans suffer 700 deaths each year from fishbone chokes. So I estimated the 300 mio U.S. americans being roughly at the same risk, thus having about 3.75 * 700 = 2625 ~ 2500 victims of the dreaded fish.
The number 700 in turn was taken from "Die Pommes-Panik" (the french fries panic), which dealt with the risk of different food types to your health. There was a food chemist quoted about bovine spongioform encephalitis (BSE, mad cow disease) who said: "Since the discovery of BSE, there were 91 reported deaths worldwide because of a new form of Creutzfeld-Jacobs' disease [the suspected human form of BSE]. There are 700 deaths each year in Germany alone from choking on fishbones."
So even though the number 2500 might be wrong for the U.S., just ask the Census Bureau for other statistics. There have to be hundreds of risks more dangerous than Terrorism. Normal flu for instance kills about 10,000 people each year in Germany.
Lately there was a study published in Great Britain, where hundreds of deaths each year were attributed to understaffing in hospitals because of money saving.
That's what they do. They are called suicide bombers for that reason.
Earnestly: There are still more U.S. citizens dying because they choke on a fishbone (about 2500 each year) than because of terrorism. Puts things to perspective, doesn't it?
So it was broken by design?
That's why democratic societies allow not only everyone (except foreigners, felons, slaves, wives, children, blacks, traders, non residents, communists, non believers, ) to vote, but also everyone to watch the counting.
For the sake of the argument, there were several people who intentionally had their TV set crippled so it couldn't receive public broadcasting anymore (by fixed frequency setting to non public stations for instance) and then argued in court that their TV set was not "ready". They lost.
The government can't do exactly that, because of the Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (Radio State Contract) the TV stream has to be available to everyone indiscriminately. It's not about avoiding getting something for free. No, the whole idea is that the programming should be free to anyone who is ready to receive it, subventioned by the fees of all people who want programming in general, independently of the source of THEIR programming.
It is in fact the same story. In 2004 the introduction was first discussed, and now it's reality. It's a little more complicated than stated in the blurb though. If you are already paying the fee for a TV set, you have not to pay for the computer. But businesses normally don't operate a TV set, so they are now hit by the fee.
The fee is due not for watching TV, but for "having a TV set ready for reception of a TV signal". Because the public TV programming is available as an IP stream, every computer that could be hooked to the Internet is "being ready for reception". And don't try to argue that your computer is running Linux and thus not "ready". It is able to run an operating system that could display the TV stream, even though it is not running it right now.
In general you have to pay the fee only once, independent of the number of "TV ready" equipment you are using. Only if you have some private radio/TV sets and some in your business, the fee is due twice (a car radio in a car used for business for instance has to be paid for in addition to the one in your home).
You mean, LUGs might lose the patent on living in basements? Because the article states that those bacteria live there since at least 3 million years :)