The thing is that it isn't just similar, but that it is an attempt to recreate someone else's work. EVERYTHING is the same, except for the angle, which appears to have been an attempt to do an end-run technicality around the original guy's copyright.
As for the public building thing, I think that rule depends on what the subject of the photograph is. "Here is my photo of the Chrysler Building" is a lot different from "here is my photo of grandma in NYC in front of the Chrysler building" or "here is my photo of the skyline as I saw it from my balcony" or even "here is my photo of lightning striking the Chrysler Building". The difference is, what is the subject of the work, and where does the value of the work come from? In the first one, the value comes from the fact that it is their building. The rest are other things that their building is ancillary to. Preventing someone from deriving value from someone else's creation is what copyright is for.
Also, there is a big difference between "taking a photo" and "taking a photo and using it to make money."
I have to agree. If these two photographs were completely coincidental, I would think it is a wrong ruling. (IE, the second guy got the idea independently and sold his photo for big $$$, and then the first guy pulls out a snapshot and tries to cash in.) But the second photo was created in an attempt to mimic the first one after negotiations at licensing failed. The second guy wasn't creating his own work, he was copying someone else's. The "it still took a lot of work" argument fails, because it doesn't really matter how much work it takes. Intent is the only thing that matters.
I also think this would have failed had the original been simply a true-life photograph (or recording) of the same scene. But the post-processing makes the original a unique creation. Had the second guy instead made the background out of focus, or even just less saturated rather than completely black and white, or with clouds in the sky instead of the stark over-exposed whiteness, I think it also would have failed.
Perhaps copyright shouldn't be this particular, but it currently is whether we like it or not, and this seems like a correct application of the law.
From 1950 to 1980, we were paying it down quite nicely (as a percentage of GDP) because we had sane tax rates. Same thing again in the 90's. The debt is growing simply because of the Bush tax cuts. This chart here shows it.Here is another one. Notice how the only component of the deficits that is expanding is the Bush tax cuts.
I'm all for paying less in taxes. Who isn't? But you can't lower revenue before you lower spending (*). Even if "starve the beast" worked, you'd still be left with the old debt still on the books. To use the simplistic home budget analogy, if you are in debt and want to get out, you have to keep working overtime until the debt is paid off, not just until you can afford the minimum payments. You can't spend what you don't have, sure, but you also can't pretend that your past debts don't exist. You have to keep earning more than you need until the debt is paid off.
Also, not all federal debt is a bad thing. The Treasury needs to be able to issue temporary debt to keep the money flowing. You know who is the biggest holder of US debt? US citizens. A couple trillion of it is in Social Security holdings, and then there are the bonds held by citizens and businesses as savings. Further, if you look at it from a very macro level, the debt is a way for us to get our money back. Think about it: we buy foreign goods. They give us stuff, we give them dollars. They use those dollars to buy our stuff, and when they have bought all the stuff they can handle, they still have some dollars left over. They can't use dollars, so they give them back to us in exchange for pieces of paper (bonds). So the US has their stuff, AND we get our dollars back. They will only start reversing the flow when they need dollars for something, and that can really only be to buy more of our stuff. So we would STILL get our dollars back. It's not as bad as people make it out to be.
(*) And government spending doesn't just disappear. Every dollar they spend goes into someone's pocket. Some of it is "wasteful" in that it lines the pockets of the owners of the big contractors, but much of it goes into people's paychecks. Less spending means fewer jobs. Eventually, hopefully, that would work out as those laid off workers retrain and get other jobs. But the friction in that process means that in the meantime, there will be more people in the unemployment lines, and more people competing for a relatively fixed number of private sector jobs. Being more experienced means that they will probably get more of those jobs, meaning that the more entrenched jobless remain jobless, putting further pressure on social services, further dampening the "savings" of the lower spending. I don't know if it would even be break-even, budget-wise. Even if it was, they would be saving a little money to the detriment of many citizens. The time to reduce spending is not when unemployment is high.
All it would have to do is put a santa hat on the man on the moon, place a bottle of Coke at his lips, and make him wink. Confusing as hell to our friends in the Southern hemisphere, but you gotta break some eggs...
The job of President is so huge that literally nothing, except actual experience as President, can adequately prepare someone for it. EVERY election of President is a leap of faith that depends on what the voters hope the candidate can accomplish. Not on what they have already accomplished. The path to the presidency is about three things:
1- Luck 2- Building an organization in all 50 states to deliver the message and win votes. 3- Having a message and a vision about what they want to accomplish.
Obama WAS hugely lucky. (Specifically in that the Illinois Naz- I mean Illinois GOP- chose a clown to run against him for Senate) But so was Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon and so on and so on. Presidents win as much on their own merits as they do on the failures of their opponents.
And yes, it does say a lot about this country: we don't really care for the idea that it is someone's "turn" to be president because they have punched all their experience cards. We elect the leaders that we hope will lead the country to a better place.
I, as well as many of my more conservative friends, voted for Obama because he was a hometown boy, because his story is a great story of rags to riches, pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, because he is of the same generation as me (grandpa fought in WWII) and mostly because I liked his vision of how to improve the country. I could have voted for McCain except for two things: instead of holding to his "maverick" principals, he sold his soul and veered right to win an election, and because his choice of VP was irresponsible. (And that isn't a dig on Palin- he made the decision without knowing anything about her except that she would get him votes. The choice of VP should be about, as macabre as it might be, who will be able to take the reins should the candidate become incapacitated, and I didn't feel that McCain took that decision seriously.)
This rejoinder reminds me of that old saying that goes something like "the greatest evil the Devil did was convincing the world he didn't exist". It is easy to say that all politicians lie, because for nearly all of them, you can find something they said they wanted to do but didn't do. But the difference is in the details. Some politicians say things to get votes with no intention of doing them. That's lying. Others fully intend to try to do what they say, but then get elected and find out that they were wrong, or that it is impossible to do, or yes, get bought off and end up having lied.
My former governor, Blagojevich, was a shitbag from the start. I had no evidence of it, but I was pretty confident in my judgement. So confident that I actually donated time to one of his opponents. First and last time I've done that. (Though I did donate some money to Obama.) Anyway, after Blago was arrested and impeached, unanimously (*), and the trial was going on, I was terribly disappointed by my fellow citizens when the nearly universal attitude of them was "eh, they all do it, why pick on this guy?" Yes, they all make promises they can't keep, but not because they necessarily don't want to, but because they can't. This guy (like Newt) was making promises he didn't intend to keep, and even further than that, was simply and brazenly using the power entrusted in him to try to enrich himself. Every decision he made was based on the metric of "how does this benefit ME?"
Remember his line: "I've got this thing, and it's fucking golden. I'm not giving it away for nothing." To him, the decision wasn't about how best to represent the interests of the state in the Senate, but what he could do for himself.
Compare that to his successor, Schlub-in-Chief Quinn. He campaigned on raising taxes, and won. He promised to do things that would normally get a guy thrown out of office, because he believed they were the right thing to do for the State, regardless of whether it won or lost him elections.
Except for one vote, his sister-in-law. I can't blame her for that, even though it was slightly corrupt to vote based on family ties rather than facts.
I don't know the logistics of it, but aren't we at a point where it is easier to bring the supplies and people to the carrier than it is to bring the carrier into port? Not to mention, with longer range aircraft, aren't carriers a little less necessary than they used to be?
See that's the thing. Occasionally, Newt makes a lot of sense. When I had seen him as an analyst on TV, I was struck at how smart and incisive he was about the issues being discussed. Unfortunately, that does not track with what he actually does. And that is: amass power and money for himself. You can't trust Newt.
Romney, on the other hand, and as boring as he is, seems trustworthy. He is sort of like Al Gore in that respect- a relatively decent guy who seems to want to do good things for the country, who might be listening to his advisers and swagger coaches a bit too much.
Also, Romney and Newt remind me of Abbot and Costello.
Except they aren't hiding it, they just aren't importing their foreign revenues back into the US. It's the same reason Boeing doesn't owe Illinois income tax on planes built and sold outside the state. They only owe income tax on the money they actually bring back into IL.
No, they have machines now that don't need a trench to be dug. They just installed a water line under a canal by me, and they just dug a big pit on either side and used the machine to punch a hole through the earth. I've seen it with fiber too.
What I mean is that in a flex-fuel vehicle, things like cam profiles, injector sizes and compression ratios have to be, at best, compromises between what e85 needs and what gasoline needs. Design an e85 engine that "can take" regular gasoline, and I'd bet we'd be hearing a different story. The lower energy content just isn't an issue when we are only getting ~20% of the energy out of the fuel anyway.
Re:Maybe we can see E10/E15 dead too?
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Is E85 Dead Now?
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Sure it can. Plenty of engines can take advantage of higher octane fuels, and e85 has higher octane.
Re:It was never worth it to begin with
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 1
Not if your engine is manufactured with higher compression to begin with.
Re:It was never worth it to begin with
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 1
It only cost 6% less? Sounds like your gas station is ripping you off. Or they have already priced in the loss of the subsidy. I'm used to seeing it more like 33 - 20% less.
Unless the fuel is stored above ground, it's going to be the same temperature all year. Also, the difference in density is negligible at normal temperatures.
Gas prices went down and nobody cared any more. Also, I'm pretty sure the components in the fuel system can take the ethanol, it's just that the manufacturer(s) don't want to play games. Also, ethanol is a pretty good solvent and might accidentally dissolve too much gasoline residue in the system and clog shit up.
Honest to god flex fuel vehicles also have changes to their computers so it can vary the mixture when it sees the different fuels. e85 needs a richer mixture, and a non-flex fuel vehicle might not have enough room in its fuel map to compensate. Even if it does, it will probably light up a check engine light.
And I suspect that's why flex fuel vehicles don't get that great mileage with e85. The engines aren't designed for it, they can merely "take" it. They don't take advantage of any of the benefits of e85.
Is the research on average hours worked per capita, or something more opinion-based like surveys? Because I imagine most people would say they would work more if only taxes weren't so high, but do they actually do it when a tax gets lowered?
Slashdot Mirror
What murder? Who did he kill?
The thing is that it isn't just similar, but that it is an attempt to recreate someone else's work. EVERYTHING is the same, except for the angle, which appears to have been an attempt to do an end-run technicality around the original guy's copyright.
As for the public building thing, I think that rule depends on what the subject of the photograph is. "Here is my photo of the Chrysler Building" is a lot different from "here is my photo of grandma in NYC in front of the Chrysler building" or "here is my photo of the skyline as I saw it from my balcony" or even "here is my photo of lightning striking the Chrysler Building". The difference is, what is the subject of the work, and where does the value of the work come from? In the first one, the value comes from the fact that it is their building. The rest are other things that their building is ancillary to. Preventing someone from deriving value from someone else's creation is what copyright is for.
Also, there is a big difference between "taking a photo" and "taking a photo and using it to make money."
I have to agree. If these two photographs were completely coincidental, I would think it is a wrong ruling. (IE, the second guy got the idea independently and sold his photo for big $$$, and then the first guy pulls out a snapshot and tries to cash in.) But the second photo was created in an attempt to mimic the first one after negotiations at licensing failed. The second guy wasn't creating his own work, he was copying someone else's. The "it still took a lot of work" argument fails, because it doesn't really matter how much work it takes. Intent is the only thing that matters.
I also think this would have failed had the original been simply a true-life photograph (or recording) of the same scene. But the post-processing makes the original a unique creation. Had the second guy instead made the background out of focus, or even just less saturated rather than completely black and white, or with clouds in the sky instead of the stark over-exposed whiteness, I think it also would have failed.
Perhaps copyright shouldn't be this particular, but it currently is whether we like it or not, and this seems like a correct application of the law.
From 1950 to 1980, we were paying it down quite nicely (as a percentage of GDP) because we had sane tax rates. Same thing again in the 90's. The debt is growing simply because of the Bush tax cuts. This chart here shows it. Here is another one. Notice how the only component of the deficits that is expanding is the Bush tax cuts.
I'm all for paying less in taxes. Who isn't? But you can't lower revenue before you lower spending (*). Even if "starve the beast" worked, you'd still be left with the old debt still on the books. To use the simplistic home budget analogy, if you are in debt and want to get out, you have to keep working overtime until the debt is paid off, not just until you can afford the minimum payments. You can't spend what you don't have, sure, but you also can't pretend that your past debts don't exist. You have to keep earning more than you need until the debt is paid off.
Also, not all federal debt is a bad thing. The Treasury needs to be able to issue temporary debt to keep the money flowing. You know who is the biggest holder of US debt? US citizens. A couple trillion of it is in Social Security holdings, and then there are the bonds held by citizens and businesses as savings. Further, if you look at it from a very macro level, the debt is a way for us to get our money back. Think about it: we buy foreign goods. They give us stuff, we give them dollars. They use those dollars to buy our stuff, and when they have bought all the stuff they can handle, they still have some dollars left over. They can't use dollars, so they give them back to us in exchange for pieces of paper (bonds). So the US has their stuff, AND we get our dollars back. They will only start reversing the flow when they need dollars for something, and that can really only be to buy more of our stuff. So we would STILL get our dollars back. It's not as bad as people make it out to be.
(*) And government spending doesn't just disappear. Every dollar they spend goes into someone's pocket. Some of it is "wasteful" in that it lines the pockets of the owners of the big contractors, but much of it goes into people's paychecks. Less spending means fewer jobs. Eventually, hopefully, that would work out as those laid off workers retrain and get other jobs. But the friction in that process means that in the meantime, there will be more people in the unemployment lines, and more people competing for a relatively fixed number of private sector jobs. Being more experienced means that they will probably get more of those jobs, meaning that the more entrenched jobless remain jobless, putting further pressure on social services, further dampening the "savings" of the lower spending. I don't know if it would even be break-even, budget-wise. Even if it was, they would be saving a little money to the detriment of many citizens. The time to reduce spending is not when unemployment is high.
All it would have to do is put a santa hat on the man on the moon, place a bottle of Coke at his lips, and make him wink. Confusing as hell to our friends in the Southern hemisphere, but you gotta break some eggs...
The job of President is so huge that literally nothing, except actual experience as President, can adequately prepare someone for it. EVERY election of President is a leap of faith that depends on what the voters hope the candidate can accomplish. Not on what they have already accomplished. The path to the presidency is about three things:
1- Luck
2- Building an organization in all 50 states to deliver the message and win votes.
3- Having a message and a vision about what they want to accomplish.
Obama WAS hugely lucky. (Specifically in that the Illinois Naz- I mean Illinois GOP- chose a clown to run against him for Senate) But so was Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon and so on and so on. Presidents win as much on their own merits as they do on the failures of their opponents.
And yes, it does say a lot about this country: we don't really care for the idea that it is someone's "turn" to be president because they have punched all their experience cards. We elect the leaders that we hope will lead the country to a better place.
I, as well as many of my more conservative friends, voted for Obama because he was a hometown boy, because his story is a great story of rags to riches, pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, because he is of the same generation as me (grandpa fought in WWII) and mostly because I liked his vision of how to improve the country. I could have voted for McCain except for two things: instead of holding to his "maverick" principals, he sold his soul and veered right to win an election, and because his choice of VP was irresponsible. (And that isn't a dig on Palin- he made the decision without knowing anything about her except that she would get him votes. The choice of VP should be about, as macabre as it might be, who will be able to take the reins should the candidate become incapacitated, and I didn't feel that McCain took that decision seriously.)
This rejoinder reminds me of that old saying that goes something like "the greatest evil the Devil did was convincing the world he didn't exist". It is easy to say that all politicians lie, because for nearly all of them, you can find something they said they wanted to do but didn't do. But the difference is in the details. Some politicians say things to get votes with no intention of doing them. That's lying. Others fully intend to try to do what they say, but then get elected and find out that they were wrong, or that it is impossible to do, or yes, get bought off and end up having lied.
My former governor, Blagojevich, was a shitbag from the start. I had no evidence of it, but I was pretty confident in my judgement. So confident that I actually donated time to one of his opponents. First and last time I've done that. (Though I did donate some money to Obama.) Anyway, after Blago was arrested and impeached, unanimously (*), and the trial was going on, I was terribly disappointed by my fellow citizens when the nearly universal attitude of them was "eh, they all do it, why pick on this guy?" Yes, they all make promises they can't keep, but not because they necessarily don't want to, but because they can't. This guy (like Newt) was making promises he didn't intend to keep, and even further than that, was simply and brazenly using the power entrusted in him to try to enrich himself. Every decision he made was based on the metric of "how does this benefit ME?"
Remember his line: "I've got this thing, and it's fucking golden. I'm not giving it away for nothing." To him, the decision wasn't about how best to represent the interests of the state in the Senate, but what he could do for himself.
Compare that to his successor, Schlub-in-Chief Quinn. He campaigned on raising taxes, and won. He promised to do things that would normally get a guy thrown out of office, because he believed they were the right thing to do for the State, regardless of whether it won or lost him elections.
Except for one vote, his sister-in-law. I can't blame her for that, even though it was slightly corrupt to vote based on family ties rather than facts.
I don't know the logistics of it, but aren't we at a point where it is easier to bring the supplies and people to the carrier than it is to bring the carrier into port? Not to mention, with longer range aircraft, aren't carriers a little less necessary than they used to be?
See that's the thing. Occasionally, Newt makes a lot of sense. When I had seen him as an analyst on TV, I was struck at how smart and incisive he was about the issues being discussed. Unfortunately, that does not track with what he actually does. And that is: amass power and money for himself. You can't trust Newt.
Romney, on the other hand, and as boring as he is, seems trustworthy. He is sort of like Al Gore in that respect- a relatively decent guy who seems to want to do good things for the country, who might be listening to his advisers and swagger coaches a bit too much.
Also, Romney and Newt remind me of Abbot and Costello.
Does it follow at the workers also attempt to exploit the business for the least amount as possible?
I think that's what unions are for.
Except they aren't hiding it, they just aren't importing their foreign revenues back into the US. It's the same reason Boeing doesn't owe Illinois income tax on planes built and sold outside the state. They only owe income tax on the money they actually bring back into IL.
No, they have machines now that don't need a trench to be dug. They just installed a water line under a canal by me, and they just dug a big pit on either side and used the machine to punch a hole through the earth. I've seen it with fiber too.
What I mean is that in a flex-fuel vehicle, things like cam profiles, injector sizes and compression ratios have to be, at best, compromises between what e85 needs and what gasoline needs. Design an e85 engine that "can take" regular gasoline, and I'd bet we'd be hearing a different story. The lower energy content just isn't an issue when we are only getting ~20% of the energy out of the fuel anyway.
An $80,000 niche vehicle. Well done.
Sure it can. Plenty of engines can take advantage of higher octane fuels, and e85 has higher octane.
Not if your engine is manufactured with higher compression to begin with.
It only cost 6% less? Sounds like your gas station is ripping you off. Or they have already priced in the loss of the subsidy. I'm used to seeing it more like 33 - 20% less.
1- How do you know what you started with? Are you sure the gas didn't absorb atmospheric water?
2- How does ethanol make a chainsaw overheat and seize?
3- Sounds like you didn't mix in enough oil 2-cycle oil.
What is your cost per mile?
Wait, we can get cars with big-block V8 engines in the US? Where do I sign up?
Unless the fuel is stored above ground, it's going to be the same temperature all year. Also, the difference in density is negligible at normal temperatures.
Gas prices went down and nobody cared any more. Also, I'm pretty sure the components in the fuel system can take the ethanol, it's just that the manufacturer(s) don't want to play games. Also, ethanol is a pretty good solvent and might accidentally dissolve too much gasoline residue in the system and clog shit up.
Honest to god flex fuel vehicles also have changes to their computers so it can vary the mixture when it sees the different fuels. e85 needs a richer mixture, and a non-flex fuel vehicle might not have enough room in its fuel map to compensate. Even if it does, it will probably light up a check engine light.
And I suspect that's why flex fuel vehicles don't get that great mileage with e85. The engines aren't designed for it, they can merely "take" it. They don't take advantage of any of the benefits of e85.
If it is so obvious, why didn't you patent it first?
Is the research on average hours worked per capita, or something more opinion-based like surveys? Because I imagine most people would say they would work more if only taxes weren't so high, but do they actually do it when a tax gets lowered?