This is, I think, the most significant argument against copyright extensions. I have no problem with someone living off their own creative works. But when a corporation lives off the work of an individual long since dead, thats a sign of something gone askew.
If 95 years isn't too long, take it to its logical conclusion. Indefinite copyright extensions. Sound absurd? I bet I'll see it in my lifetime, bought and paid for with Disney's dollars.
Copyright was a grant to artists for the benefit of society. We get to enjoy their art years after they produce it. They get temporary exclusivity to make money off it, supposedly to produce more art for us to enjoy. It was a great idea conceptually. Kind of like a patent. The pendulum has swung far, far in favor of artists or corporations. Society is no longer a benefactor of the copyrights they grant.
The pendulum will swing back eventually, but not before populists takes over completely.
You obviously don't understand the manufacturing market if you can't see the mass appeal in Pro/E, SolidWorks, Catia, Inventor and CoCreate. These 5 programs dominate their market because they're extremely easy to use and designers can be very productive with them.
BRL-CAD is probably just as powerful mathematically but it lacks all of the features from SolidWorks and Pro/E that make them easy to use.
There really is no OSS alternative for professional CAD users. If the BRL-CAD folks would take hints from the commercial CAD market with respect to UI usability, they would find a big uptick in user count.
There could be a market for this. I see 2 obvious applications.
First application would be for photo and movie processing. An FPGA that could be configured by photoshop plugins or other linear movie editing programs could see dramatic speedups.
Another would be finite element analysis, in CAD/CAM applications or others such as Inventor, Simulia, Catia, MathCad, etc.
I see some desire for GPGPU in these areas but with a little added complexity, I think these applications would see a big speedup even over GPGPU.
If you do any embedded hardware development, there are a number of targets that are not well supported for Linux.
Beyond that, if you develop Windows software, there is no better platform to do it on than Windows. Oh and if you do CAD/CAM, there are a number of holes in the Linux platform. For example, there is no SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer support for Linux is ending, AutoCAD under Wine is sketchy at best, no Inventor, et. al.
There are numerous reasons to continue using Windows, for the time being. It's important though that people tell their vendors they need/want Linux and if a competitor releases a Linux alternative, you would switch.
Blizzard Entertainment is probably the only gaming company right now with that kind of clout. Basic math and publicly available statistics seem to indicate the company and Vivendi have made $1.5 billion or more. Thats big money.
I wouldn't count on them though. They might be willing to invest a bit of money for preferred treatment from ISP's and leave their competition behind.
There are a number of custom downloaders which silently use BitTorrent in the background. You wouldn't know it unless you monitor your traffic.
I think this is a dangerous direction. The telecoms insist on using an unlimited bandwidth price model because if they charged based on bandwidth per month, their income would go down dramatically. The cost for maintaining their network is primarily a fixed cost.
I have no problem with them trying other price models, or using overage charges for people who consume obscene amounts of bandwidth. I will never support filtering of traffic based on content though. Singling out any particular protocol is bad.
IMO, it's a large combination of factors. Police misconduct during the 90's lead to a lot of people taking an us-vs-them mentality and the police were more than happy to oblige that. Many police now view themselves as a class above and beyond normal citizens, where the rule of law doesn't apply.
Citizens want police who are tough on crime. To do that, the police often resort to brutish and misguided tactics, leading to abuse of law abiding citizens. It's tolerated by the public because they typically share a naive view of the police that their actions are justified because they're The Law and they must have had a reason to do what they did.
Being from portland, incidence of police brutality was a common thing for me to hear about. A friend of mine had her nose broken on a concrete driveway because she was resisting arrest. She's 5'3" and 115 pounds. You're telling me 2 grown men had to break a little girls nose to make her comply? Racial profiling occurs daily, and despite 20 years of police chiefs saying they will stop profiling - it continues on.
In another case, during an arrest policeman Christopher Humphreys shot the suspect(a non-compliant 12 year old girl) with a bean bag from a shotgun at a range of about 3 feet to force compliance. There was widespread outrage among police because he was suspended for a short time because of the incident. This is the same cop who beat James Chasse to death(featured in the video I linked). Yes, you heard that right. He beat a terrified schizophrenic to death and was still an active duty policeman to beanbag a girl from 3 feet.
In this case, the resistance to punishment comes from within the ranks and not from management. The portland police chief refused to suspend Humphreys so the Police Commissioner over-rode his decision. The chief, in addition to other likely reasons, refused to suspend Humphreys because the portland police officers union threatened a vote of no confidence in the chief, which could have cost him his job.
In short, citizens tolerate use of force because they think the police are always justified in using it.
The article seems credible. No way I could verify it obviously but it has enough detail that I think it could be verified easily by the FBI or DOJ. If you could get them to do their job, that is.
The ability for a suspect to be released from jail depends on quite a lot of socioeconomic factors such as race, location and their ability to obtain legal representation. In most states, if you have a lawyer, you can obtain Release on own Recognizance pretty quickly if they don't plan on filing charges right away. This depends a lot on what you're suspected of doing.
As for holding people without charging them... terrorism laws have changed a lot of the governments power in this respect. Beyond even the 4th amendment and 5th amendment, the US government has shown a willingness to ignore the constitution and even international law altogether if they feel national security interests are at stake. The somewhat recent case of an extraordinary rendition of a Canadian citizen while on US soil to Syria poses significant opposition to commonly held beliefs about constitutional protection. After being tortured and returned to Canada, in 2007 he came back to the US to testify before congress about his experience and as far as I know, nothing has ever come of that hearing.
The Alien Terrorist Removal Provisions of the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 allows for the FISA court to deport an alien suspected of terrorism based solely on classified evidence, to which the target cannot try to suppress evidence or intervene in any way including having representation at any hearings. Whether they are deported or not, they receive very little(if any) information about the proceedings or how any decision was reached. Oddly enough, after reading the entire bill, I could not find any reference anywhere describing where the persons can be deported to. In essence, our government formally legalized extraordinary rendition 15 years ago, although I doubt in many cases of extraordinary rendition that they follow the appropriate steps(however rudimentary they may be) through the FISA court. All they have to do is call it a deportation instead of rendition. And since the target cannot intervene in any proceedings of the process, they cannot suppress any evidence gathered via illegal means.
If anyone was hoping for "change", you didn't get it the way you thought you would. The Alien Terrorist Removal Provisions of this bill were sponsored by your very own Joe Biden. Clinton formulated the bill but it wasn't until the Oklahoma bombing that the political will to pass it existed.
So if you're a foreigner, in the US on a Visa, you can be held indefinitely or extradited to Syria or any other country willing to torture you on our behalf.
Either you're with us or you're against us. You have nothing to hide, right comrade?
I came from Portland, OR, which is sadly featured repeatedly in this short movie. I really wish someone could do some sort of satellite hack and force the entire country to watch this video, just once in their lifetime.
People really need to open their eyes and reevaluate what level of force police should be allowed to use against non-compliant persons. The most tragic cases highlighted in that video are those where police were engaging citizens who had broke no law.
Indeed, this is becoming the reality. Software and hardware vendors have become complacent with the fact that researchers will give them ample time to ignore a problem.
The only reasonable solution to reduce vulnerability in the wild is to publicly expose the issues to force vendor resolution more quickly. Seems counterintuitive, but it does work.
Yes, bending stress would be a significant hazard. With $500 million dollars though, I'm sure an engineer can find a way to add rigidity to it.
As far as catching, no not really. They get the apogee of the launch vehicles trajectory to lie somewhere in the vicinity of where the payload can maneuver itself. This would require extreme precision for controlling the amount of gases used to pressurize the tube since the payload won't be able to control its movement after firing, unlike the space shuttle which maintains absolute control over thrust during a launch.
Nonsense. The human body has an average resistance of 300-1000 ohms. Not great, but far weaker than modern electrical insulation.
Evidence has been shown that some frequencies in the EM spectrum indeed do cause damage to DNA and in some cases that damage is propagated to future divisions of that cell, meaning the damage is permanent.
From an industrial point of view, this is very interesting. Laser cutter machines are expensive to purchase, but upkeep isn't high and they are very versatile. A machine like this doesn't seem to have the versatility of a laser and might even consume more power. Punches are very fast but manual deburring is expensive.
I noticed in the article they said this works based on magnetic repulsion, and also that it works on stainless steels. I'm curious if this works on the largely non-magnetic 300 series SS.
I got a smart phone for the full size keyboard, multimedia capability and that I need my email on the go. My emails are high volume but around 3-10kb each so edge is just fine.
Edge vs. 3G in my area doesn't seem to have a big speed impact. I live in a small town and although I have 3G coverage, it's not great and I think they've got some bandwidth problems.
The most likely scenario here is that Google didn't have a lot of negotiating power being a brand new phone developer. Typically, you buy a subsidized phone from the carrier that they paid only a slightly discounted price for($50-200 below retail).
The ETF they collect is to cover the difference if you drop your service before they make enough off of you to pay for the phone.
So when you buy a new Nexus One from TMobile for $179, ~$150 of that goes to Google. To minimize risk for TMobile, they only pay Google for the phone in small monthly installments from service fees. Essentially, they have shifted the risk to Google, because if the credit card is declined, Google never gets paid for the full cost of the phone.
TMobile imposes their own ETF because they're greedy. And honestly if you do the math, TMobile probably isn't making much money off subscribers for the first 4 months. That doesn't make a $200 ETF fair.
Really though, this is just a complex demonstration of why phone subsidies are bad for consumers. People sign contracts because they think a cheaper phone up front is saving them money, but really they're locking themselves into a carrier for 12-24 months and the carriers raised rates dramatically over the last 10 years under this scheme.
Carriers should be required by law to offer an equitable plan at a price reduced from their contract rates. This is equitable because the carrier faces no risk if the consumer is providing the handset.
Are you outside AT&T's 3G network? Or does the Nexus One just not support 3G on AT&Ts network?
I would consider the Nexus One instead of my current Nokia E71 but switching carriers just isn't an option for me. I have 5 lines on a 2 year plan with AT&T, so if I were to switch carriers I'm looking at $1k+ in ETF's right off the bat.
As a long time worker in a call center, I can vouch for this. The official business plan for customer support is to find the least effort solution that will make them happy enough to not need to call you again. You couldn't get an engineer on the line unless you knew exactly the right questions to ask or were a top 20 client.
That's one thing I don't understand about the expensive drugs they use to execute people. They've been said to be quite painful when they don't work right.
Junkies kill themselves with heroine all the time. $40 of heroine all at once will knock your ass out and stop your heart, essentially painlessly.
Aside from heroine, I can think of quite a few cheaper ways to painlessly kill a person. Carbon monoxide overdose is another way. You basically fall asleep and your brain dies from lack of oxygen. This is super cheap.
Some states probably spend millions of dollars keeping staff, equipment, materials, procedures, etc. on hand and updated and still they end up in court because lethal injection doesn't always work right. They could save a fortune, and it's better(in relative terms) for the prisoner. They may still die, but they can do it comfortably and it costs us all a hell of a lot less money.
You can't leave innocent. In the eyes of the military, they're all guilty of *something*, if they would just confess they can go to prison(oh lol they're already there) and then get shipped to some anonymous random country.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're suffering from this-isn't-goddamned-1972-unix. A cryptic CLI is no match for a well designed UI when it comes to solid modeling.
This is, I think, the most significant argument against copyright extensions. I have no problem with someone living off their own creative works. But when a corporation lives off the work of an individual long since dead, thats a sign of something gone askew.
If 95 years isn't too long, take it to its logical conclusion. Indefinite copyright extensions. Sound absurd? I bet I'll see it in my lifetime, bought and paid for with Disney's dollars.
Copyright was a grant to artists for the benefit of society. We get to enjoy their art years after they produce it. They get temporary exclusivity to make money off it, supposedly to produce more art for us to enjoy. It was a great idea conceptually. Kind of like a patent. The pendulum has swung far, far in favor of artists or corporations. Society is no longer a benefactor of the copyrights they grant.
The pendulum will swing back eventually, but not before populists takes over completely.
No, they don't.
You obviously don't understand the manufacturing market if you can't see the mass appeal in Pro/E, SolidWorks, Catia, Inventor and CoCreate. These 5 programs dominate their market because they're extremely easy to use and designers can be very productive with them.
BRL-CAD isn't comparable. Not by a long shot.
BRL-CAD is probably just as powerful mathematically but it lacks all of the features from SolidWorks and Pro/E that make them easy to use.
There really is no OSS alternative for professional CAD users. If the BRL-CAD folks would take hints from the commercial CAD market with respect to UI usability, they would find a big uptick in user count.
Linus?
There could be a market for this. I see 2 obvious applications.
First application would be for photo and movie processing. An FPGA that could be configured by photoshop plugins or other linear movie editing programs could see dramatic speedups.
Another would be finite element analysis, in CAD/CAM applications or others such as Inventor, Simulia, Catia, MathCad, etc.
I see some desire for GPGPU in these areas but with a little added complexity, I think these applications would see a big speedup even over GPGPU.
If you do any embedded hardware development, there are a number of targets that are not well supported for Linux.
Beyond that, if you develop Windows software, there is no better platform to do it on than Windows. Oh and if you do CAD/CAM, there are a number of holes in the Linux platform. For example, there is no SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer support for Linux is ending, AutoCAD under Wine is sketchy at best, no Inventor, et. al.
There are numerous reasons to continue using Windows, for the time being. It's important though that people tell their vendors they need/want Linux and if a competitor releases a Linux alternative, you would switch.
Blizzard Entertainment is probably the only gaming company right now with that kind of clout. Basic math and publicly available statistics seem to indicate the company and Vivendi have made $1.5 billion or more. Thats big money.
I wouldn't count on them though. They might be willing to invest a bit of money for preferred treatment from ISP's and leave their competition behind.
There are a number of custom downloaders which silently use BitTorrent in the background. You wouldn't know it unless you monitor your traffic.
I think this is a dangerous direction. The telecoms insist on using an unlimited bandwidth price model because if they charged based on bandwidth per month, their income would go down dramatically. The cost for maintaining their network is primarily a fixed cost.
I have no problem with them trying other price models, or using overage charges for people who consume obscene amounts of bandwidth. I will never support filtering of traffic based on content though. Singling out any particular protocol is bad.
IMO, it's a large combination of factors. Police misconduct during the 90's lead to a lot of people taking an us-vs-them mentality and the police were more than happy to oblige that. Many police now view themselves as a class above and beyond normal citizens, where the rule of law doesn't apply.
Citizens want police who are tough on crime. To do that, the police often resort to brutish and misguided tactics, leading to abuse of law abiding citizens. It's tolerated by the public because they typically share a naive view of the police that their actions are justified because they're The Law and they must have had a reason to do what they did.
Being from portland, incidence of police brutality was a common thing for me to hear about. A friend of mine had her nose broken on a concrete driveway because she was resisting arrest. She's 5'3" and 115 pounds. You're telling me 2 grown men had to break a little girls nose to make her comply? Racial profiling occurs daily, and despite 20 years of police chiefs saying they will stop profiling - it continues on.
In another case, during an arrest policeman Christopher Humphreys shot the suspect(a non-compliant 12 year old girl) with a bean bag from a shotgun at a range of about 3 feet to force compliance. There was widespread outrage among police because he was suspended for a short time because of the incident. This is the same cop who beat James Chasse to death(featured in the video I linked). Yes, you heard that right. He beat a terrified schizophrenic to death and was still an active duty policeman to beanbag a girl from 3 feet.
In this case, the resistance to punishment comes from within the ranks and not from management. The portland police chief refused to suspend Humphreys so the Police Commissioner over-rode his decision. The chief, in addition to other likely reasons, refused to suspend Humphreys because the portland police officers union threatened a vote of no confidence in the chief, which could have cost him his job.
In short, citizens tolerate use of force because they think the police are always justified in using it.
You mean how like the CIA recently suicided 3 detainees by hanging in Guantanamo bay?
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368
The article seems credible. No way I could verify it obviously but it has enough detail that I think it could be verified easily by the FBI or DOJ. If you could get them to do their job, that is.
The ability for a suspect to be released from jail depends on quite a lot of socioeconomic factors such as race, location and their ability to obtain legal representation. In most states, if you have a lawyer, you can obtain Release on own Recognizance pretty quickly if they don't plan on filing charges right away. This depends a lot on what you're suspected of doing.
As for holding people without charging them... terrorism laws have changed a lot of the governments power in this respect. Beyond even the 4th amendment and 5th amendment, the US government has shown a willingness to ignore the constitution and even international law altogether if they feel national security interests are at stake. The somewhat recent case of an extraordinary rendition of a Canadian citizen while on US soil to Syria poses significant opposition to commonly held beliefs about constitutional protection. After being tortured and returned to Canada, in 2007 he came back to the US to testify before congress about his experience and as far as I know, nothing has ever come of that hearing.
The Alien Terrorist Removal Provisions of the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 allows for the FISA court to deport an alien suspected of terrorism based solely on classified evidence, to which the target cannot try to suppress evidence or intervene in any way including having representation at any hearings. Whether they are deported or not, they receive very little(if any) information about the proceedings or how any decision was reached. Oddly enough, after reading the entire bill, I could not find any reference anywhere describing where the persons can be deported to. In essence, our government formally legalized extraordinary rendition 15 years ago, although I doubt in many cases of extraordinary rendition that they follow the appropriate steps(however rudimentary they may be) through the FISA court. All they have to do is call it a deportation instead of rendition. And since the target cannot intervene in any proceedings of the process, they cannot suppress any evidence gathered via illegal means.
If anyone was hoping for "change", you didn't get it the way you thought you would. The Alien Terrorist Removal Provisions of this bill were sponsored by your very own Joe Biden. Clinton formulated the bill but it wasn't until the Oklahoma bombing that the political will to pass it existed.
So if you're a foreigner, in the US on a Visa, you can be held indefinitely or extradited to Syria or any other country willing to torture you on our behalf.
Either you're with us or you're against us. You have nothing to hide, right comrade?
If you haven't seen it already, watch this video.
The Largest Street Gang In America
I came from Portland, OR, which is sadly featured repeatedly in this short movie. I really wish someone could do some sort of satellite hack and force the entire country to watch this video, just once in their lifetime.
People really need to open their eyes and reevaluate what level of force police should be allowed to use against non-compliant persons. The most tragic cases highlighted in that video are those where police were engaging citizens who had broke no law.
lol my thoughts exactly. Slashdot is the anti-ugg crowd. If you wanna spam, at least spam geeky shit. I might click on that.
Indeed, this is becoming the reality. Software and hardware vendors have become complacent with the fact that researchers will give them ample time to ignore a problem.
The only reasonable solution to reduce vulnerability in the wild is to publicly expose the issues to force vendor resolution more quickly. Seems counterintuitive, but it does work.
Theres an IEC standardized resistor-capacitor module to simulate human body resistance. I believe it has roughly 10,000 ohms of resistance.
It's used to measure leakage current in appliances and medical devices primarily.
Yes, bending stress would be a significant hazard. With $500 million dollars though, I'm sure an engineer can find a way to add rigidity to it.
As far as catching, no not really. They get the apogee of the launch vehicles trajectory to lie somewhere in the vicinity of where the payload can maneuver itself. This would require extreme precision for controlling the amount of gases used to pressurize the tube since the payload won't be able to control its movement after firing, unlike the space shuttle which maintains absolute control over thrust during a launch.
Nonsense. The human body has an average resistance of 300-1000 ohms. Not great, but far weaker than modern electrical insulation.
Evidence has been shown that some frequencies in the EM spectrum indeed do cause damage to DNA and in some cases that damage is propagated to future divisions of that cell, meaning the damage is permanent.
From an industrial point of view, this is very interesting. Laser cutter machines are expensive to purchase, but upkeep isn't high and they are very versatile. A machine like this doesn't seem to have the versatility of a laser and might even consume more power. Punches are very fast but manual deburring is expensive.
I noticed in the article they said this works based on magnetic repulsion, and also that it works on stainless steels. I'm curious if this works on the largely non-magnetic 300 series SS.
I got a smart phone for the full size keyboard, multimedia capability and that I need my email on the go. My emails are high volume but around 3-10kb each so edge is just fine.
Edge vs. 3G in my area doesn't seem to have a big speed impact. I live in a small town and although I have 3G coverage, it's not great and I think they've got some bandwidth problems.
The most likely scenario here is that Google didn't have a lot of negotiating power being a brand new phone developer. Typically, you buy a subsidized phone from the carrier that they paid only a slightly discounted price for($50-200 below retail).
The ETF they collect is to cover the difference if you drop your service before they make enough off of you to pay for the phone.
So when you buy a new Nexus One from TMobile for $179, ~$150 of that goes to Google. To minimize risk for TMobile, they only pay Google for the phone in small monthly installments from service fees. Essentially, they have shifted the risk to Google, because if the credit card is declined, Google never gets paid for the full cost of the phone.
TMobile imposes their own ETF because they're greedy. And honestly if you do the math, TMobile probably isn't making much money off subscribers for the first 4 months. That doesn't make a $200 ETF fair.
Really though, this is just a complex demonstration of why phone subsidies are bad for consumers. People sign contracts because they think a cheaper phone up front is saving them money, but really they're locking themselves into a carrier for 12-24 months and the carriers raised rates dramatically over the last 10 years under this scheme.
Carriers should be required by law to offer an equitable plan at a price reduced from their contract rates. This is equitable because the carrier faces no risk if the consumer is providing the handset.
Are you outside AT&T's 3G network? Or does the Nexus One just not support 3G on AT&Ts network?
I would consider the Nexus One instead of my current Nokia E71 but switching carriers just isn't an option for me. I have 5 lines on a 2 year plan with AT&T, so if I were to switch carriers I'm looking at $1k+ in ETF's right off the bat.
As a long time worker in a call center, I can vouch for this. The official business plan for customer support is to find the least effort solution that will make them happy enough to not need to call you again. You couldn't get an engineer on the line unless you knew exactly the right questions to ask or were a top 20 client.
That's one thing I don't understand about the expensive drugs they use to execute people. They've been said to be quite painful when they don't work right.
Junkies kill themselves with heroine all the time. $40 of heroine all at once will knock your ass out and stop your heart, essentially painlessly.
Aside from heroine, I can think of quite a few cheaper ways to painlessly kill a person. Carbon monoxide overdose is another way. You basically fall asleep and your brain dies from lack of oxygen. This is super cheap.
Some states probably spend millions of dollars keeping staff, equipment, materials, procedures, etc. on hand and updated and still they end up in court because lethal injection doesn't always work right. They could save a fortune, and it's better(in relative terms) for the prisoner. They may still die, but they can do it comfortably and it costs us all a hell of a lot less money.
You can't leave innocent. In the eyes of the military, they're all guilty of *something*, if they would just confess they can go to prison(oh lol they're already there) and then get shipped to some anonymous random country.