The real reason is that the RIAA is lazy. They don't want to make the effort to (or pay someone to) find infringing content and send out DMCA take down notices. They would rather require that Google do the legwork. If it is an impossible task (finding out whether the item or a piece of it is copyrighted, by whom and whether or not the upload is authorized) then too bad because they (the RIAA) won't be doing it.
You can see a similar laziness in their shotgun lawsuits. Instead of filing 14,000 separate lawsuits in the defendants' home districts (or as close as they could guess), they file one mass lawsuit in one district even if said district is a thousand miles away. They could do the former approach but that would take too much time and money and so they take the lazy approach and then try to claim that it is legal because it's easier for them.
I think we need two words for marriage. There's Religious Marriage which involves going to a church/temple/whatever and having your priest/rabbi/whatever declare you husband and wife in the eyes of your religion's god/gods/goddess/etc. Then there's Civil Marriage which is a legal contract which grants spouses rights not normally granted to non-blood relatives (and, in fact, rights greater than blood relatives). The latter can be obtained during the course of a Religious Marriage or by simply seeing a Justice of the Peace who effectively stamps a few forms and says "you're married."
I don't think there should be any governmental pressures on Religious Marriage. If a church doesn't want to marry Tom and Joe or Mary and Jane then those couples can find another church that will or just not have a Religious Marriage. Meanwhile, Civil Marriage should have no limits so long as the two people being joined in marriage are consenting adults. So Tom and Joe should be able to get a Civil Marriage even if they've never set foot in a church.
The problem is that the word "marriage" has been used for both types of marriage up until now and neither side (Civil or Religious) is going to give it up for an alternative word.
I can definitely see that as being the case. The story has two angels (disguised as human travelers) coming to Sodom and Gomorrah and stopping by Lot's house. He takes them in, feeds them and generally treats them well. A mob forms outside his house demanding that Lot give them the travelers so they can beat/rape them. Lot refuses and even goes so far as to offer his daughters instead (meant to show how much he would protect these strangers from the mob). In the end, he and his family is saved (minus his wife who disobeys the "don't look back" rule) and the towns are destroyed.
There are certainly anti-homosexual references in the Bible, but I don't think Sodom and Gomorrah is one of them.
I wish the US were so enlightened. When my first son was born, I took a week off to help my wife. When my second son was born, I took a few days off and went back to work.
All the time I took off came from my standard vacation time. If I had no vacation time saved up, I could have taken up to 12 weeks off as per FMLA. Here's the twist, though. That time would be unpaid. What normal family can survive for 12 weeks without any income? Especially a family with a new child? So rather than helping my wife during the first few weeks of my babys' lives, I had to go into the office (most times on an hour or two of sleep).
You'd better just hope that you don't listen to your music someplace that has an echo or you'll really need to pay. And if you watch a video on your smartphone in one of those store dressing rooms with mirrors on opposing walls (creating an "infinite" array of reflections) you'll go bankrupt pretty quickly.
That's easy. Go for Pi. As in all the digits that will fit in tiny print across your body from your head to your feet. Sure, it'll be highly painful and but you'll get to laugh derisively when people ask you why you've got "a bunch of random" numbers tattooed all over you. And think of the pick-up lines! "Hey baby, care to come back to my place to see the millionth digit of Pi?"
"conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as.com or.org"
And exactly how will these conservative members of Congress do this? Will they pass laws banning sexually explicit content from.com/.org? It's been tried and has failed in the courts. Besides, even if they were able to craft a law that would withstand the courts, how do you force SomePornSite.com, registered in Russia and hosted in Turkey from abiding by the US law? Also, as a side note, don't the conservative members of Congress usually argue against government intervention in private industry? (I know, they're against it except when they're for it, but I always think it is good to point out hypocrisy.)
I'm all for copyrights on sentences. Because after that will come copyrights on individual words and then copyrights on individual letters. I've already got copyright applications pending for A, E, I, O, and U. (I'm considering a copyright on Y as well.) Soon I'll be very rich. Well, either that or everyone will switch to a language with completely different letters like Russian or Chinese.
Old file formats are a problem for individuals too. I booted up an old computer and copied some old stories and papers I had written which were in Multimate or ProPrint format. I was lucky enough to be able to recover the text of one of them, but some of the others might take a lot more effort. If these were in OpenDocument format, I'd be able to decompress them and pull the XML-text (worst case scenario). Since they are long-forgotten proprietary formats, though, I'm forced to piece together what text I can see and hope that the gobbledygook is just formatting information being lost. (Of course, if someone knows how to import Multimate or Proprint into OpenOffice.org, I'd love to hear it.)
Hey, politicians do care. They care deeply about the copyright situation. They'll submit legislation that will fix it all up perfectly as soon as the lobbyists' check clears and the lobbyist-written legislation goes through a few more drafts.
Not only that, but if enough people begin encrypting everything, the government will just declare such encryption for the purposes of bypassing their logging illegal (except for site-by-site HTTPS). Proxies will be blocked and attempted use of them will be logged and prosecuted. After all, they're doing this to Stop The Terrorists and Save The Children and you're not pro-terrorist and anti-child now are you?
When I was growing up, my maternal grandmother would insist that we belong to "Clean The Plate Club." She would go to the extreme. One day my sister (who had a tiny appetite) had a tuna melt for lunch. My grandmother made it on two halves of an english muffin with an entire can of tuna and cheese. Needless to say, my sister didn't finish it. So my grandmother wrapped it up and sternly told my sister that she'd eat it for breakfast. While she wasn't looking, my mother threw it out.
I, on the other hand, had no trouble cleaning my plate... and the leftovers on the plates of everyone else at the table. My other extreme was one of the factors that led me to be overweight for much of my life.
This page seems relevant also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) The RIAA saying that LimeWire owes them $1.5 trillion is basically saying that the RIAA is owed the GDP of Brazil or 10% of the US's GDP or 2.5% of the world's GDP.
One wonders if the RIAA lawyer put his pinky to mouth when he named the amount.
Both of those are true. There are many different types of downloaders. Those who download items they would never have actually paid for if the not-legal free download option wasn't available. Some of these people download just what they use and some act as if they are addicted to downloading - getting thousands of items that they have no intention of ever using for the sole reason that they saw a download link. These people shouldn't be counted in a "lost sales" calculation.
Then there are people who download illegally instead of paying when they would have paid for the title otherwise. These people do actually represent lost sales and should be counted.
There's also a third class of downloaders: Those who download as an "unofficial trial version" and then buy the title if they like it. Rather than constituting lost sales, these people are more like "gained sales." Of course, the flip side is that they might not like the title and not buy it. At this point, an "honest trial downloader" would delete his downloaded copy. Still, absent the download option, some of these people would have bought the item to try and some would have just steered clear. So these people aren't a clear lost or gained sale. They might balance out or tip the scales in one direction or another.
The problem is that studies like this one don't differentiate between real lost sales and "virtual" lost sales. Doing that would take a lot of work and would wind up reducing piracy figures (not a good thing if you are an industry group trying to get additional powers to clamp down on piracy). So they assume that each download is a lost sale. Toss in a few more assumptions (like "multiply by 4 to get worldwide figures" or "we should be making X but are only making Y") and you get an industry piracy cost estimate.
I'd be willing to wager that an actual piracy cost study, one that accounted for true lost sales versus plain downloaders, would come up with a much smaller piracy figure than the industry comes up with.
A hurricane is one thing. It blows through, you rebuild/repair and get on with your life. However, up until the day before the BP disaster, a situation that rendered such a large area unfishable for such a long time was unthinkable. This wasn't a case of fishermen refusing to change as technology rendered their profession obsolete. This is the case of a man-made disaster robbing them of their livelihood in a very short time. In this case, I could see some help to the fishermen to keep them on their feet until the disaster passes (or help finding new careers if it gets too much worse). Now, failing to adapt to advances in computers/The Internet for years, that shouldn't get any governmental response.
It's sad that, even though they have zero experience doing this kind of thing, I now have more confidence that the Mythbusters could get the oil leak plugged up quicker than BP.
I disagree with your assessment of Obama's actions, but agree with your reasoning for opposing the Patriot Act (and bills like it). Whenever you are granting a government agency a new power, you should always ask yourself: How would someone with political views exactly opposite mine use these powers? How would I feel about those uses?
If you wouldn't disapprove of that hypothetical person's use of the powers, go ahead and support the new government powers. If you'd oppose it even a little bit, then don't support the new governmental powers. Eventually, someone will come into power who will use it in a way you don't approve of 100%. When that happens, your wonderful new law that the official you supported was going to use to better society will become an awful law being used to destroy our great country. (Or so it will seem in your mind.)
Any parents out there whose kids watch the TV show WordWorld? This "word lion looks like a lion" sounds exactly like the premise of the show. The basic idea is that the world has all of these letters and when they are combined they form the object that they spell. So the Dog character is made up of the letters d, o and g. The Pig character is made up of p, i and g. And so on. Towards the end of every episode, they decide to resolve the main problem of the episode by building a word. So if they need a cake, they'll take the letters c, a, k and e and push them together. The letters then morph into a cake for the characters to eat.
Is Microsoft going to patent clues given by a blue puppy next? Or maybe the act of exploring with a backpack, map and boot-wearing monkey?
I will support them fully, however, if they decide to patent a big, purple dinosaur who sings about how much he loves everyone so long as that patent is only used to squash any competitors as messily as possible.
Actually the odds would be 1 in (52*51*50*49*48*...*5*4*3*2*1) or 1 in 8.06581752 × 10^67.
Think of it this way. You've shuffled the deck and laid it down. The first card could be any of 52 possible cards. The next card will be any of 51 possible cards. And so on through the deck.
An ID proponent would say that, since the odds are so tiny that the deck would come out that way, The Intelligent Designer (*cough*God*cough*) must have done it.
Unless the theory of evolution is 100% correct, inconclusive and conclusive, we SHOULD be teaching the criticisms of it. You can't ban teachings because of a group you don't like supports those teachings. That's how theories get better.
So because some scientists disagree on the precise details of evolution, we should teach ID in science class? This isn't banning a perfectly legitimate scientific theory. This is not teaching a non-science theory in science class. Should we also teach the Hindu creation story or some Native American ones or some Aboriginal Australia creation stories? After all, there are groups that support those teachings so, by your reasoning, we obviously should be teaching those as well.
Theories don't get better by playing up tiny differences of opinion as huge theory-shaking controversies. Theories get better by testing them against available data, finding new data, figuring out where the theories don't match and adjusting them accordingly. In the case of evolution, the tiny differences of opinion are likely too complex/obscure to address in a high school classroom. The general theory of evolution, though, could be taught in a way that 99.999% of biologists would agree with. ID, on the other hand, can not be falsified by any evidence. Anything you find would just be answered with "God - I mean, The Designer - did that!" (Heck, even a booming voice from the heavens saying "I didn't do this, it was evolution" would likely be interpreted by some as a test of their faith, not as proof for evolution.)
Slashdot Mirror
The real reason is that the RIAA is lazy. They don't want to make the effort to (or pay someone to) find infringing content and send out DMCA take down notices. They would rather require that Google do the legwork. If it is an impossible task (finding out whether the item or a piece of it is copyrighted, by whom and whether or not the upload is authorized) then too bad because they (the RIAA) won't be doing it.
You can see a similar laziness in their shotgun lawsuits. Instead of filing 14,000 separate lawsuits in the defendants' home districts (or as close as they could guess), they file one mass lawsuit in one district even if said district is a thousand miles away. They could do the former approach but that would take too much time and money and so they take the lazy approach and then try to claim that it is legal because it's easier for them.
To paraphrase an old joke:
Jesus saves.... but Moses has invested in an off-site backup system!
I think we need two words for marriage. There's Religious Marriage which involves going to a church/temple/whatever and having your priest/rabbi/whatever declare you husband and wife in the eyes of your religion's god/gods/goddess/etc. Then there's Civil Marriage which is a legal contract which grants spouses rights not normally granted to non-blood relatives (and, in fact, rights greater than blood relatives). The latter can be obtained during the course of a Religious Marriage or by simply seeing a Justice of the Peace who effectively stamps a few forms and says "you're married."
I don't think there should be any governmental pressures on Religious Marriage. If a church doesn't want to marry Tom and Joe or Mary and Jane then those couples can find another church that will or just not have a Religious Marriage. Meanwhile, Civil Marriage should have no limits so long as the two people being joined in marriage are consenting adults. So Tom and Joe should be able to get a Civil Marriage even if they've never set foot in a church.
The problem is that the word "marriage" has been used for both types of marriage up until now and neither side (Civil or Religious) is going to give it up for an alternative word.
I can definitely see that as being the case. The story has two angels (disguised as human travelers) coming to Sodom and Gomorrah and stopping by Lot's house. He takes them in, feeds them and generally treats them well. A mob forms outside his house demanding that Lot give them the travelers so they can beat/rape them. Lot refuses and even goes so far as to offer his daughters instead (meant to show how much he would protect these strangers from the mob). In the end, he and his family is saved (minus his wife who disobeys the "don't look back" rule) and the towns are destroyed.
There are certainly anti-homosexual references in the Bible, but I don't think Sodom and Gomorrah is one of them.
I wish the US were so enlightened. When my first son was born, I took a week off to help my wife. When my second son was born, I took a few days off and went back to work.
All the time I took off came from my standard vacation time. If I had no vacation time saved up, I could have taken up to 12 weeks off as per FMLA. Here's the twist, though. That time would be unpaid. What normal family can survive for 12 weeks without any income? Especially a family with a new child? So rather than helping my wife during the first few weeks of my babys' lives, I had to go into the office (most times on an hour or two of sleep).
Since when did making up your own laws to enforce (and changing them several times during the incident) become "a supreme amount of calm and reason"?
You'd better just hope that you don't listen to your music someplace that has an echo or you'll really need to pay. And if you watch a video on your smartphone in one of those store dressing rooms with mirrors on opposing walls (creating an "infinite" array of reflections) you'll go bankrupt pretty quickly.
That's easy. Go for Pi. As in all the digits that will fit in tiny print across your body from your head to your feet. Sure, it'll be highly painful and but you'll get to laugh derisively when people ask you why you've got "a bunch of random" numbers tattooed all over you. And think of the pick-up lines! "Hey baby, care to come back to my place to see the millionth digit of Pi?"
"conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org"
And exactly how will these conservative members of Congress do this? Will they pass laws banning sexually explicit content from .com/.org? It's been tried and has failed in the courts. Besides, even if they were able to craft a law that would withstand the courts, how do you force SomePornSite.com, registered in Russia and hosted in Turkey from abiding by the US law? Also, as a side note, don't the conservative members of Congress usually argue against government intervention in private industry? (I know, they're against it except when they're for it, but I always think it is good to point out hypocrisy.)
I'm all for copyrights on sentences. Because after that will come copyrights on individual words and then copyrights on individual letters. I've already got copyright applications pending for A, E, I, O, and U. (I'm considering a copyright on Y as well.) Soon I'll be very rich. Well, either that or everyone will switch to a language with completely different letters like Russian or Chinese.
Old file formats are a problem for individuals too. I booted up an old computer and copied some old stories and papers I had written which were in Multimate or ProPrint format. I was lucky enough to be able to recover the text of one of them, but some of the others might take a lot more effort. If these were in OpenDocument format, I'd be able to decompress them and pull the XML-text (worst case scenario). Since they are long-forgotten proprietary formats, though, I'm forced to piece together what text I can see and hope that the gobbledygook is just formatting information being lost. (Of course, if someone knows how to import Multimate or Proprint into OpenOffice.org, I'd love to hear it.)
I can't believe nobody's posted this yet...
The Internet is for PORN!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TA57L0kuc&feature=related
Hey, politicians do care. They care deeply about the copyright situation. They'll submit legislation that will fix it all up perfectly as soon as the lobbyists' check clears and the lobbyist-written legislation goes through a few more drafts.
Not only that, but if enough people begin encrypting everything, the government will just declare such encryption for the purposes of bypassing their logging illegal (except for site-by-site HTTPS). Proxies will be blocked and attempted use of them will be logged and prosecuted. After all, they're doing this to Stop The Terrorists and Save The Children and you're not pro-terrorist and anti-child now are you?
All planes remotely flown? That would make a "Network Connection Lost" situation quite horrific.
When I was growing up, my maternal grandmother would insist that we belong to "Clean The Plate Club." She would go to the extreme. One day my sister (who had a tiny appetite) had a tuna melt for lunch. My grandmother made it on two halves of an english muffin with an entire can of tuna and cheese. Needless to say, my sister didn't finish it. So my grandmother wrapped it up and sternly told my sister that she'd eat it for breakfast. While she wasn't looking, my mother threw it out.
I, on the other hand, had no trouble cleaning my plate... and the leftovers on the plates of everyone else at the table. My other extreme was one of the factors that led me to be overweight for much of my life.
This page seems relevant also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) The RIAA saying that LimeWire owes them $1.5 trillion is basically saying that the RIAA is owed the GDP of Brazil or 10% of the US's GDP or 2.5% of the world's GDP.
One wonders if the RIAA lawyer put his pinky to mouth when he named the amount.
Both of those are true. There are many different types of downloaders. Those who download items they would never have actually paid for if the not-legal free download option wasn't available. Some of these people download just what they use and some act as if they are addicted to downloading - getting thousands of items that they have no intention of ever using for the sole reason that they saw a download link. These people shouldn't be counted in a "lost sales" calculation.
Then there are people who download illegally instead of paying when they would have paid for the title otherwise. These people do actually represent lost sales and should be counted.
There's also a third class of downloaders: Those who download as an "unofficial trial version" and then buy the title if they like it. Rather than constituting lost sales, these people are more like "gained sales." Of course, the flip side is that they might not like the title and not buy it. At this point, an "honest trial downloader" would delete his downloaded copy. Still, absent the download option, some of these people would have bought the item to try and some would have just steered clear. So these people aren't a clear lost or gained sale. They might balance out or tip the scales in one direction or another.
The problem is that studies like this one don't differentiate between real lost sales and "virtual" lost sales. Doing that would take a lot of work and would wind up reducing piracy figures (not a good thing if you are an industry group trying to get additional powers to clamp down on piracy). So they assume that each download is a lost sale. Toss in a few more assumptions (like "multiply by 4 to get worldwide figures" or "we should be making X but are only making Y") and you get an industry piracy cost estimate.
I'd be willing to wager that an actual piracy cost study, one that accounted for true lost sales versus plain downloaders, would come up with a much smaller piracy figure than the industry comes up with.
A hurricane is one thing. It blows through, you rebuild/repair and get on with your life. However, up until the day before the BP disaster, a situation that rendered such a large area unfishable for such a long time was unthinkable. This wasn't a case of fishermen refusing to change as technology rendered their profession obsolete. This is the case of a man-made disaster robbing them of their livelihood in a very short time. In this case, I could see some help to the fishermen to keep them on their feet until the disaster passes (or help finding new careers if it gets too much worse). Now, failing to adapt to advances in computers/The Internet for years, that shouldn't get any governmental response.
It's sad that, even though they have zero experience doing this kind of thing, I now have more confidence that the Mythbusters could get the oil leak plugged up quicker than BP.
I disagree with your assessment of Obama's actions, but agree with your reasoning for opposing the Patriot Act (and bills like it). Whenever you are granting a government agency a new power, you should always ask yourself: How would someone with political views exactly opposite mine use these powers? How would I feel about those uses?
If you wouldn't disapprove of that hypothetical person's use of the powers, go ahead and support the new government powers. If you'd oppose it even a little bit, then don't support the new governmental powers. Eventually, someone will come into power who will use it in a way you don't approve of 100%. When that happens, your wonderful new law that the official you supported was going to use to better society will become an awful law being used to destroy our great country. (Or so it will seem in your mind.)
Stop anthropomorphizing evolution, it hates it when you do that.
Any parents out there whose kids watch the TV show WordWorld? This "word lion looks like a lion" sounds exactly like the premise of the show. The basic idea is that the world has all of these letters and when they are combined they form the object that they spell. So the Dog character is made up of the letters d, o and g. The Pig character is made up of p, i and g. And so on. Towards the end of every episode, they decide to resolve the main problem of the episode by building a word. So if they need a cake, they'll take the letters c, a, k and e and push them together. The letters then morph into a cake for the characters to eat.
Is Microsoft going to patent clues given by a blue puppy next? Or maybe the act of exploring with a backpack, map and boot-wearing monkey?
I will support them fully, however, if they decide to patent a big, purple dinosaur who sings about how much he loves everyone so long as that patent is only used to squash any competitors as messily as possible.
Actually the odds would be 1 in (52*51*50*49*48*...*5*4*3*2*1) or 1 in 8.06581752 × 10^67.
Think of it this way. You've shuffled the deck and laid it down. The first card could be any of 52 possible cards. The next card will be any of 51 possible cards. And so on through the deck.
An ID proponent would say that, since the odds are so tiny that the deck would come out that way, The Intelligent Designer (*cough*God*cough*) must have done it.
So because some scientists disagree on the precise details of evolution, we should teach ID in science class? This isn't banning a perfectly legitimate scientific theory. This is not teaching a non-science theory in science class. Should we also teach the Hindu creation story or some Native American ones or some Aboriginal Australia creation stories? After all, there are groups that support those teachings so, by your reasoning, we obviously should be teaching those as well.
Theories don't get better by playing up tiny differences of opinion as huge theory-shaking controversies. Theories get better by testing them against available data, finding new data, figuring out where the theories don't match and adjusting them accordingly. In the case of evolution, the tiny differences of opinion are likely too complex/obscure to address in a high school classroom. The general theory of evolution, though, could be taught in a way that 99.999% of biologists would agree with. ID, on the other hand, can not be falsified by any evidence. Anything you find would just be answered with "God - I mean, The Designer - did that!" (Heck, even a booming voice from the heavens saying "I didn't do this, it was evolution" would likely be interpreted by some as a test of their faith, not as proof for evolution.)