No. Building a new and more flashy wheel is not inventing it again. Writing yet another quicksort implementation is not reinventing it. But if you just had to sort a list and no one lets you look at how she did it, you are bubblesorting the list again and again.
It is more complicated than you state: 1. First, most of the coding you know and learn you do from code someone else wrote already. You won't be able to get to speed that fast if you had to pay for every single line of code you will ever encounter. 2. There is no point in inventing the wheel again and again, so why not post the description how to build a wheel somewhere, and everyone can go and do more sensible stuff than to design a wheel again? (But if they are actually good in designing wheels, who should step forward and forbid it?) 3. About 95% of the code you write is either uninventive or ripped from somewhere else, because most of the tasks are routine anyway, and you don't have the brain to outsmart the last 60 years of software development. So it's better to get those 95% quickly and go on with the task you are really good at. 4. This is a rephrasing of the argument we all know: "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." (Isaac Newton usually gets credited with that quote). It is quite immoral to make broad and free use of the shoulders of others, but require money for your own shoulders to use by others.
Going back to what Open Source really is about: It is about building a foundation for everyone to use, and to build their own stuff on. And everyone who uses the foundation in turn has to add to the foundation itself, thus keeping it stable and enforcing it for further use.
And the business in Open Source? It's simple. It's about lowering initial costs. If you don't have to pay for your first software, and are building a business on it, you are more flexible in the beginning and have money left to spend on your real business development.
Open Source is the quintessence of a wellknown law of economics: The law of the diminishing marginal utility. To produce yet another unit of the same software is extremely cheap: cp program program-copy. And the number of copies that are of actual use for you is limited, so yet another copy of the same program to you doesn't add any value to you, because programs don't get "used up". So the fair price of commodity software would be near zero, and the only money that is in there is customization, maintenance and individual software built on the standard one, e.g. consultation, administration, software patches and locally developped applications. To facilitate that the commodity software has to be as transparent, moveable and adaptable as possible: It has to be Open Source.
If you look at it this way, then the "shared folder" facility in Windows is also "contributory copyright infringment", because if this folder is set up with weak or no security, anyone who can reach the network can also map it to a local drive, e.g. copy its content. So if you share your My Music folder, you are becoming part of a peer to peer network. (Actually there was the case of two students who wrote a little script which searched all IPs on their campus for shared folders and for music files in it. They settled with the RIAA for $12,500. So this is not a theoretical issue, it's a very real one.)
That's right. It was just an answer to the theory of the parent poster that Spamhaus doesn't do anything worth a civil lawsuit, because they don't actually block. If an theoretical, alleged spammer would say that even the evidence Spamhaus might have about him wouldn't prove spamming, and thus the blacklisting were wrong, he could sue for libel. So even though Spamhaus' own list doesn't actually block anything, the fact that it is published to everyone, and other people use it for for blocking makes everything Spamhaus publishes on the list a public statement. And this might be contested in court.
It can get a little bit more complicated. In a civil lawsuit more often than not no one completely wins. The final judgement is somewhere inbetween the initial demands of both parties. The legal costs are depending on the initial demands, and how much of them you actually get rewareded with. Take for instance the infamous SCO Group vs. IBM. SCO Group initially demanded $5 billion. If for instance they manage to prove in the end a damage of $5, they technically lost 999,999,999/1,000,000,000 of their case, so even though in the end they would get money, they have to pay 99,9999999 percent of the legal costs. Talk about a Pyrrhus' victory.
They could be liable for libel though. If they blacklist an IP, and the blacklisting is not valid, then having it on the list is like labelling the operator of the IP a spammer, which is somehow libellous if incorrect.
This is not exactly true, as the ocean itself is influenced by Man. What we have here are multiple feedback loops, some are positive feedbacks, increasing the force, others are negative feedbacks, leading to a balance. One of those loops is closely connected to the sun's energy received by the earth. If the temperature of the earth is constant, it just means, that the earth itself radiates exactly as much energy as it receives from the sun (not necessarily in the same frequency range though). If the earth radiates less, the temperature of the earth increases (by absorbing the not reflected energy and thus turning it into warmth). If the earth radiates more, the earth cools down. The energy an object radiates is proportional to the forth power of its temperature, if the object itself doesn't change. So for a stable object we have a negative feedback loop, leading to a balance: As soon as the object gets warmer, it increases its energy radiation, until it reaches balance with the incoming energy. As soon as an object cools down, it's energy radiation is dropping until it reaches equilibrium with the incoming energy.
What we now have is not a stable object, we have the earth with an atmosphere and ocean currents and reflective surfaces at the poles and on the glaciers, and with chemical reactions using incoming energy to create compounds with higher chemical energy, or releasing chemical energy with was used to create those compounds before. Each of them has a different balance temperature than the others, so the average balance temperature of the whole earth depends on how much energy each of the different parts reflects or radiates. It gets more complicated as the earth's atmosphere reflects in both ways: Incoming sun rays and also warmth radiated by the earth's surface items (energy they absorbed from sunlight before, or they got from the cooling of the earth core, or from radioactive decay). Because the earth's atmosphere is much more reflective for warmth than for sunlight, the equilibrium temperature of the earth is higher than for an atmosphere-less object at the same orbit than the earth (it's estimated to be about 10-15 Celsius). This is called the Green House Effect. Everything that influences the difference in reflectivity for warmth and sunlight in the atmosphere directly affects the Green House Effect. Dust in the atmosphere for instance increases the reflectivity for sunlight, thus cooling the atmosphere (the Green House Effect gets smaller). Methan and Carbondioxide keep the reflectivity for sunlight about the same, but increase the reflectivity for warmth, thus increasing the Green House Effect.
Each square meter of the earth's surface gets about 1.5 kJoule of energy per second from the sun. With the reflectivity of the atmosphere only about 150 Joule per square meter and second are reaching the earth's surface. That means that nearly 90% of the sun's energy are reflected immediately and not even warming the earth's surface. If we would lower the reflectivity of the atmosphere around 10%, we suddenly got 300 Joule per square meter and second, in fact doubling the heating of the earth! So even a small change in the atmosphere can have huge impact on the earth's surface temperature.
We should keep that in mind when we start discussing the man made Green House Effect and its strength.
I would recommend also a biography about Alexander von Humboldt, the famous traveller, discoverer and researcher in biology, geography and ethnography.
I'm surprised at Charon too, I understand that the centre of gravity of the two is outside either of their masses, but Charon is more of an orbiting hunk of ice and dust and crap than a planet - on its own it'd be very ignorable.
But also is Pluto. Mainly snow mixed with dirt. Same as Ganymedes, Io, Titan and the other large Saturn and Jupiter moons.
First: Drugs are drugs, and mind altering substances are mind altering substances. They have a common subset, but are not equal. Sugar for instance is a drug too, pepper and most other spices are. Xtasy (and other artificial MDMA) are no drugs in the pure sense of the word ('drug' comes from the same roots as 'dry', meaning natural substances won by drying herbs).
Second: Mind altering substances are not bad per se. Most people like caffeine. There is nothing wrong with Acetylsalicyl acid (Aspirin et.al.) Acetylsalicyl acid basicly is processed, dried willow bark (from latin acetum = vinegar and salica = willow). Many coughing remedies contain Thymian extract. Codeine, another coughing medicine, is an opiate, as cocaine or heroine. Actually heroine was marketed as cold medicine by B.A.S.F. in the beginning, until the addictive potential was too obvious.
The problem is our relationship with those substances. Certain people have a habit of getting addicted to something very easily. There is some evidence, that those people have a strong potential to get addicted to something anyway, it doesn't have to be a mind altering substances. Some get addicted to gambling, other to adrenaline from extreme sports, some get work addicted, some smoke or dring alcohol. There is a tendency to get addicted to something in each of us, and it's the task for us to control this tendency. Some think it can be done by making a difference between 'good addictions' (sports, work) and 'bad addictions' (gambling, mind altering substances). But those differences have a tendency to be inconsequential (alcohol is bad, but not forbidden, smoke is not as bad, but gets outlawed more and more, heroine and derivates are very, very bad and very very forbidden, THC seems to be mostly harmless, but is very, very forbidden, gambling is bad, but it is partly outlawed, partly welcome).
In the end an addiction is some kind of shortcut to satisfaction, and we won't hinder people to take shortcuts. We just have to make sure that people don't take shortcuts to often or make to much damage while taking them.
I would just expect it to be a hyperbolic distribution. The best renting item is rented about twice as much as the second, about three times the third one, about four times the fourth one etc.pp. (Zipf's Law). For Netflix with the 60,000 items inventory it would mean thus: Best item rents out 60,000 times (in a given time...), second best 30,000 times, third best 20,000 times etc.pp. until the last one, which was rented out on one single occasion.
Using this we can estimate, that the first 50 items are good for about 270,000 rentals out of a total of 695,000 rentals, or about 40% of the total rentals. This is slightly more than Netflix actually reports, but for such a simple model pretty close.
No. No. No. Cops are special. They have special rights no one else has. And that's why they should be closely monitored for an abuse of those rights. Journalists have no rights you don't also have. Because everyone can be a journalist. It's the journalism itself which got special protection from the Constitution. It's called free press there. So if you are doing something journalistic, like publishing a story you investigated for, you get protection for this from the Constitution. Everyone is entitled to this protection, not only employees of certain newspapers or stations, as long as she is doing journalistic work.
KOffice or OpenOffice doesn't cut it when you're posting your resume online for potential employers. It never looked right when viewed with Word.
I am using plain HTML without fancy stuff for the resume. People who expect everything to open in Word, don't acutally expect it to open in Word, they just want it to open with double click, and.html does the trick. Editing the pages works fine also, and most of the above mentioned have Word als Default HTML Editor anyway. I have used HTML to send project plans around and never got any complaint about this (but the average project plan acceptance rate).
To have the movie and the ads together figure as a new copyrighted work would require the agreement of all the copyright holder of the movie and the copyright holders of the ads to agree for the creation of a new derivative Work of Art. So I guess there is some legal paraphrasing that explicitely states that the playlists of the movie intermixed with the ads do not create a 'movie collage' or other Work of Art to avoid exactly those hassles.
Just a moment: TiVo is NOT generating a derivative work from a copyrighted Work of Art. The issue at hand is that a movie with certain scenes cut out is a derivative work from a movie which contains said scenes. This is (as the court stated) a clear violation of copyright. Cutting out advertisements doesn't change anything in the Work of Art and thus is NO violation of copyright. There is some argument going on that this is a violation of an implicit contract between the distributor of the work and the audience, where the distributor doesn't charge money for the service but requires attention to the ads. But that's a completely different can of worms.
In the eye of the LAW it's not property, no:) In the eye of the LAW there are several exclusive rights. And because the Berne Convention keeps the original author still as the author, the only way would be for the EU to claim authorship. The EU could seize the exclusive rights for sale, distribution, edition et.al. though, but to enforce the exclusive rights, it has to adhere to the Berne Convention...
Ok... but this amounts to 'pacta non sunt servanda'. So let me rephrase that: Under the Berne convention copyright can not be suspended. A state indeed can suspend the whole Berne convention.
Most european countries don't grant copyrights, they have signed the Berne Convention, which indeed states an inalienable right to the Author of a Work of Art. But this right is bound to the author himself and can not be contracted away (there is no work for hire in the Berne Convention). According to the Berne Convention MS Windows and MS Office would have hundreds and thousands of authors, and it's just for the sake of simplicity that Microsoft can act with power of attorney for those authors, but only for those derivated rights that come from Authorship and are an explicit part of the work contract. So Microsoft would not be allowed to agree to a completely new usage of the Work (e.g. using its binary sequence to generate music scores) for itself, but it would be forced to get the permission from the original authors.
All that said: A signature state of the Berne Convention can NOT suspend copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Building a new and more flashy wheel is not inventing it again. Writing yet another quicksort implementation is not reinventing it. But if you just had to sort a list and no one lets you look at how she did it, you are bubblesorting the list again and again.
It is more complicated than you state:
1. First, most of the coding you know and learn you do from code someone else wrote already. You won't be able to get to speed that fast if you had to pay for every single line of code you will ever encounter.
2. There is no point in inventing the wheel again and again, so why not post the description how to build a wheel somewhere, and everyone can go and do more sensible stuff than to design a wheel again? (But if they are actually good in designing wheels, who should step forward and forbid it?)
3. About 95% of the code you write is either uninventive or ripped from somewhere else, because most of the tasks are routine anyway, and you don't have the brain to outsmart the last 60 years of software development. So it's better to get those 95% quickly and go on with the task you are really good at.
4. This is a rephrasing of the argument we all know: "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." (Isaac Newton usually gets credited with that quote). It is quite immoral to make broad and free use of the shoulders of others, but require money for your own shoulders to use by others.
Going back to what Open Source really is about: It is about building a foundation for everyone to use, and to build their own stuff on. And everyone who uses the foundation in turn has to add to the foundation itself, thus keeping it stable and enforcing it for further use.
And the business in Open Source? It's simple. It's about lowering initial costs. If you don't have to pay for your first software, and are building a business on it, you are more flexible in the beginning and have money left to spend on your real business development.
Open Source is the quintessence of a wellknown law of economics: The law of the diminishing marginal utility. To produce yet another unit of the same software is extremely cheap: cp program program-copy. And the number of copies that are of actual use for you is limited, so yet another copy of the same program to you doesn't add any value to you, because programs don't get "used up". So the fair price of commodity software would be near zero, and the only money that is in there is customization, maintenance and individual software built on the standard one, e.g. consultation, administration, software patches and locally developped applications. To facilitate that the commodity software has to be as transparent, moveable and adaptable as possible: It has to be Open Source.
If you look at it this way, then the "shared folder" facility in Windows is also "contributory copyright infringment", because if this folder is set up with weak or no security, anyone who can reach the network can also map it to a local drive, e.g. copy its content. So if you share your My Music folder, you are becoming part of a peer to peer network.
(Actually there was the case of two students who wrote a little script which searched all IPs on their campus for shared folders and for music files in it. They settled with the RIAA for $12,500. So this is not a theoretical issue, it's a very real one.)
That's right. It was just an answer to the theory of the parent poster that Spamhaus doesn't do anything worth a civil lawsuit, because they don't actually block. If an theoretical, alleged spammer would say that even the evidence Spamhaus might have about him wouldn't prove spamming, and thus the blacklisting were wrong, he could sue for libel. So even though Spamhaus' own list doesn't actually block anything, the fact that it is published to everyone, and other people use it for for blocking makes everything Spamhaus publishes on the list a public statement. And this might be contested in court.
It can get a little bit more complicated. In a civil lawsuit more often than not no one completely wins. The final judgement is somewhere inbetween the initial demands of both parties. The legal costs are depending on the initial demands, and how much of them you actually get rewareded with. Take for instance the infamous SCO Group vs. IBM. SCO Group initially demanded $5 billion. If for instance they manage to prove in the end a damage of $5, they technically lost 999,999,999/1,000,000,000 of their case, so even though in the end they would get money, they have to pay 99,9999999 percent of the legal costs. Talk about a Pyrrhus' victory.
They could be liable for libel though. If they blacklist an IP, and the blacklisting is not valid, then having it on the list is like labelling the operator of the IP a spammer, which is somehow libellous if incorrect.
This is not exactly true, as the ocean itself is influenced by Man. What we have here are multiple feedback loops, some are positive feedbacks, increasing the force, others are negative feedbacks, leading to a balance. One of those loops is closely connected to the sun's energy received by the earth. If the temperature of the earth is constant, it just means, that the earth itself radiates exactly as much energy as it receives from the sun (not necessarily in the same frequency range though). If the earth radiates less, the temperature of the earth increases (by absorbing the not reflected energy and thus turning it into warmth). If the earth radiates more, the earth cools down. The energy an object radiates is proportional to the forth power of its temperature, if the object itself doesn't change. So for a stable object we have a negative feedback loop, leading to a balance: As soon as the object gets warmer, it increases its energy radiation, until it reaches balance with the incoming energy. As soon as an object cools down, it's energy radiation is dropping until it reaches equilibrium with the incoming energy.
What we now have is not a stable object, we have the earth with an atmosphere and ocean currents and reflective surfaces at the poles and on the glaciers, and with chemical reactions using incoming energy to create compounds with higher chemical energy, or releasing chemical energy with was used to create those compounds before. Each of them has a different balance temperature than the others, so the average balance temperature of the whole earth depends on how much energy each of the different parts reflects or radiates. It gets more complicated as the earth's atmosphere reflects in both ways: Incoming sun rays and also warmth radiated by the earth's surface items (energy they absorbed from sunlight before, or they got from the cooling of the earth core, or from radioactive decay). Because the earth's atmosphere is much more reflective for warmth than for sunlight, the equilibrium temperature of the earth is higher than for an atmosphere-less object at the same orbit than the earth (it's estimated to be about 10-15 Celsius). This is called the Green House Effect. Everything that influences the difference in reflectivity for warmth and sunlight in the atmosphere directly affects the Green House Effect. Dust in the atmosphere for instance increases the reflectivity for sunlight, thus cooling the atmosphere (the Green House Effect gets smaller). Methan and Carbondioxide keep the reflectivity for sunlight about the same, but increase the reflectivity for warmth, thus increasing the Green House Effect.
Each square meter of the earth's surface gets about 1.5 kJoule of energy per second from the sun. With the reflectivity of the atmosphere only about 150 Joule per square meter and second are reaching the earth's surface. That means that nearly 90% of the sun's energy are reflected immediately and not even warming the earth's surface. If we would lower the reflectivity of the atmosphere around 10%, we suddenly got 300 Joule per square meter and second, in fact doubling the heating of the earth! So even a small change in the atmosphere can have huge impact on the earth's surface temperature.
We should keep that in mind when we start discussing the man made Green House Effect and its strength.
Just cut out the middle man: Zap-flash your garbage for yourself and provide yourself with electricity.
I would recommend also a biography about Alexander von Humboldt, the famous traveller, discoverer and researcher in biology, geography and ethnography.
But also is Pluto. Mainly snow mixed with dirt. Same as Ganymedes, Io, Titan and the other large Saturn and Jupiter moons.
You didn't order the room or the board. It was handed down to you with force. So why should you pay?
First: Drugs are drugs, and mind altering substances are mind altering substances. They have a common subset, but are not equal. Sugar for instance is a drug too, pepper and most other spices are. Xtasy (and other artificial MDMA) are no drugs in the pure sense of the word ('drug' comes from the same roots as 'dry', meaning natural substances won by drying herbs).
Second: Mind altering substances are not bad per se. Most people like caffeine. There is nothing wrong with Acetylsalicyl acid (Aspirin et.al.) Acetylsalicyl acid basicly is processed, dried willow bark (from latin acetum = vinegar and salica = willow). Many coughing remedies contain Thymian extract. Codeine, another coughing medicine, is an opiate, as cocaine or heroine. Actually heroine was marketed as cold medicine by B.A.S.F. in the beginning, until the addictive potential was too obvious.
The problem is our relationship with those substances. Certain people have a habit of getting addicted to something very easily. There is some evidence, that those people have a strong potential to get addicted to something anyway, it doesn't have to be a mind altering substances. Some get addicted to gambling, other to adrenaline from extreme sports, some get work addicted, some smoke or dring alcohol. There is a tendency to get addicted to something in each of us, and it's the task for us to control this tendency. Some think it can be done by making a difference between 'good addictions' (sports, work) and 'bad addictions' (gambling, mind altering substances). But those differences have a tendency to be inconsequential (alcohol is bad, but not forbidden, smoke is not as bad, but gets outlawed more and more, heroine and derivates are very, very bad and very very forbidden, THC seems to be mostly harmless, but is very, very forbidden, gambling is bad, but it is partly outlawed, partly welcome).
In the end an addiction is some kind of shortcut to satisfaction, and we won't hinder people to take shortcuts. We just have to make sure that people don't take shortcuts to often or make to much damage while taking them.
I would just expect it to be a hyperbolic distribution. The best renting item is rented about twice as much as the second, about three times the third one, about four times the fourth one etc.pp. (Zipf's Law). For Netflix with the 60,000 items inventory it would mean thus: Best item rents out 60,000 times (in a given time...), second best 30,000 times, third best 20,000 times etc.pp. until the last one, which was rented out on one single occasion.
Using this we can estimate, that the first 50 items are good for about 270,000 rentals out of a total of 695,000 rentals, or about 40% of the total rentals. This is slightly more than Netflix actually reports, but for such a simple model pretty close.
No. No. No. Cops are special. They have special rights no one else has. And that's why they should be closely monitored for an abuse of those rights. Journalists have no rights you don't also have. Because everyone can be a journalist. It's the journalism itself which got special protection from the Constitution. It's called free press there. So if you are doing something journalistic, like publishing a story you investigated for, you get protection for this from the Constitution. Everyone is entitled to this protection, not only employees of certain newspapers or stations, as long as she is doing journalistic work.
I am using plain HTML without fancy stuff for the resume. People who expect everything to open in Word, don't acutally expect it to open in Word, they just want it to open with double click, and
Editing the pages works fine also, and most of the above mentioned have Word als Default HTML Editor anyway. I have used HTML to send project plans around and never got any complaint about this (but the average project plan acceptance rate).
To have the movie and the ads together figure as a new copyrighted work would require the agreement of all the copyright holder of the movie and the copyright holders of the ads to agree for the creation of a new derivative Work of Art. So I guess there is some legal paraphrasing that explicitely states that the playlists of the movie intermixed with the ads do not create a 'movie collage' or other Work of Art to avoid exactly those hassles.
Just a moment: TiVo is NOT generating a derivative work from a copyrighted Work of Art. The issue at hand is that a movie with certain scenes cut out is a derivative work from a movie which contains said scenes. This is (as the court stated) a clear violation of copyright. Cutting out advertisements doesn't change anything in the Work of Art and thus is NO violation of copyright.
There is some argument going on that this is a violation of an implicit contract between the distributor of the work and the audience, where the distributor doesn't charge money for the service but requires attention to the ads. But that's a completely different can of worms.
That was the way it was supposed to be. But the first software players available, based on WinDVD's decoder, don't black the screen at PrintScreen.
The tactic known as 'Shock and Awe' comes pretty close to this definition, don't you think?
Ok. Let me rephrase that: *IRA claims to be catholic. Ok? (I am neither american nor irish.)
Because all arabs belong to a single race (the semitic one) and are by far the largest group there.
Last time I checked the Irish-Republican Army was claiming to be catholic. And the basque ETA is catholic as well.
In the eye of the LAW it's not property, no :) In the eye of the LAW there are several exclusive rights. And because the Berne Convention keeps the original author still as the author, the only way would be for the EU to claim authorship. The EU could seize the exclusive rights for sale, distribution, edition et.al. though, but to enforce the exclusive rights, it has to adhere to the Berne Convention...
Ok... but this amounts to 'pacta non sunt servanda'. So let me rephrase that: Under the Berne convention copyright can not be suspended. A state indeed can suspend the whole Berne convention.
Most european countries don't grant copyrights, they have signed the Berne Convention, which indeed states an inalienable right to the Author of a Work of Art. But this right is bound to the author himself and can not be contracted away (there is no work for hire in the Berne Convention). According to the Berne Convention MS Windows and MS Office would have hundreds and thousands of authors, and it's just for the sake of simplicity that Microsoft can act with power of attorney for those authors, but only for those derivated rights that come from Authorship and are an explicit part of the work contract. So Microsoft would not be allowed to agree to a completely new usage of the Work (e.g. using its binary sequence to generate music scores) for itself, but it would be forced to get the permission from the original authors.
All that said: A signature state of the Berne Convention can NOT suspend copyright.