Actually, the courts are quite clear on the matter. Labels on books or records sold are not sufficient to remove the right of first sale. If it acts like a sale, it's a sale. There have been attempts to sticker books to prevent resale that have been struck down. Furthermore, gifts count as sales for purposes of the doctrine of first sale, as does any other means of legally acquiring a legally produced copy. Merchandise sent through the mail unsolicited may be treated by the recipient as a gift (there's a long court history for this, mostly motivated by people sending unsolicited products and then billing the recipients). And, even if it wasn't a gift, UMG abandoned the CD under California law, since they gave up possession and their actions clearly indicated they had no intent to regain possession (they don't keep records of who has the CDs, and they have never in the past attempted to reaccquire one). So, whether by gifting or abandonmnent, ownership of the CD was legally transferred in a manner equivalent to a sale, and any sticker on it is insufficient to prevent the doctrine of first sale from taking effect.
The brief is quite readable, and quite thorough in explaining how UMG are being completely and utterly ridiculous.
PS, by reading this post you agree to... We've all seen comments like this in regard to EULAs and such; those stickers are no less ridiculous, and no more legally binding.
When your own VP of content protection admits in a deposition that he has bought some of your promo CDs on the second hand market, your case that someone selling them on eBay is infringing your copyrights starts to look, well, ridiculous.
Similar, but different. Both are oscillations, but pogo is characterized by low frequency variations in chamber pressure coupling through the thrust structure and into the propellant feed system (and from there back to the chamber pressure). These are high frequency (kHz, no tens of Hz) acoustic modes, contained entirely within the chamber. They're much harder simulate and much harder to get rid of, and much less well understood. They couple from local chamber pressure to the injectors, and operate much like an organ pipe.
Pogo, pump-related oscillations, and plumbing related oscillations are all low frequency (tens of Hz, sometimes less). These are acoustic modes internal to the chamber, in the kHz range. They're very distinct phenomenon, with distinct causes and distinct solutions. They're still a 50 year old problem with 50 year old techniques to solve them, but they're by no means understood in any meaningful sense -- the current technique mostly involves testing the engine and then tweaking it until they go away.
The new and interesting work here is the modelling, combined with the photography techniques. Seeing pressure waves at the injector face through the chamber full of flame is not trivial.
Aerospike engines still have an enclosed chamber; it's only the nozzle that's been changed. The chamber is where the problems occur, not the nozzle. The odd chamber shapes certainly make things complicated, but I have no idea whether they hurt or help overall. The usual technique to get rid of these involves various ways to de-tune the engine -- for example, some of the SSME injectors protrude deeper into the chamber to interrupt the otherwise flat injector face.
No, you're on the right track, but not quite there. Computational techniques are only barely able to simulate rocket chambers well; combustion dynamics are complex and not well understood. That's a large part of what makes this work interesting (the other part being the imaging techniques to actually photograph the waves).
The problem isn't actually the chamber or nozzle walls resonating, it's the acoustic cavity -- exactly analogous to an organ pipe. There are a variety of techniques used to de-tune the resonance modes. (It also happens in the chamber, not the nozzle -- gas in the expansion portion of the nozzle is locally supersonic, so sound can't propagate backwards, which means no resonance.) For example, the SSME has some of the injectors protruding further into the chamber than others, creating interruptions in the flat surface of the injector face. There exist other techniques, and some google searching will turn up some. Also, playing with the metals in the chamber wall is probably right out -- they're basically already decided by thermal considerations, and high performance engines almost universally use copper.
Historically, the design process has involved experienced engineers, rules of thumb, and lots of testing. Computer models will help, but they'll never really replace the "lots of testing" stage. At least for small engines (up to several thousand pounds of thrust), it's cheaper, easier, and more accurate to just build the thing.
The laser beam is way more feasible, even if you ignore considerations of range. Not to mention that when a liquid-fueled military rocket is operating, it's going to be either over the horizon or in vacuum -- we're not talking about small tactical missiles here.
We're talking about loud sounds here -- and not just a little bit loud. 1 pascal of pressure wave is 94dB SPL -- a fairly loud sound. 1 psi is 6894 pascals; we're talking about many psi of pressure variation. A 10 psi wave would be 190dB. That's not just loud enough to cause hearing damage; that's well past loud enough to knock over buildings. Overpressure from large bombs is less than that at the edge of the blast radius.
It should be obvious why that's destructive when it happens inside a rocket chamber, especially since oscillations like that tend to start small, grow *rapidly*, and not stop growing until something breaks. It should also be obvious why you won't be able to create such a wave via external influence unless the chamber can already resonate in that mode. When developing the F1 (Saturn V main engine) NASA had trouble with instability; in order to see whether the engine was barely stable or had plenty of margin, they had to find techniques to induce these waves. What they developed, and still use today, is a set of techniques for putting an explosive charge *inside* the engine, bringing the engine up to normal operating conditions (making the charge survive this is nontrivial), and *then* detonating it to see how the engine responded.
No. We're talking about pressure waves inside the engine, at pressures measured in tens or hundreds of psi, that resonate with the injector to build power -- think about blowing across the top of a beer bottle. The small power input from your breath induces a higher power oscillation. Same effect, where the bottle is replaced by the combustion chamber and your breath by the injectors. Except the power involved is a hundred million times higher (maybe more, I didn't do the math very carefully).
These waves can't be set up unless the engine will support them, and if it will then they'll happen on their own. If you could deliver that much energy to the engine remotely, you could just as easily destroy the rocket. It's the *resonance* that's the problem, not the fact that there's a crapload of sound energy available.
The new result here isn't acoustic instabilities; those have been known for a long time. The interesting result is a new set of imaging techniques that give a better understanding of *why* they occur, rather than simply observing on pressure traces that they *do* occur. After a bit more research, this may turn into techniques to more reliably avoid them in the design stage, rather than having to go through various tweaks on the injector / combustion chamber to remove them should they appear.
This is very cool work. Of course, it's rocket science, not rocket engineering, so it's unlikely to impact new designs for several years yet.
In what way is a civil penalty insufficient to stop the scenario you describe? It's worked well enough in the past, hasn't it? (Well, if anything, it gets overzealous.)
I'm still not clear on the details (sounds like I should read the paper...). Given a past conservative voter who acquires a mistaken belief about the liberal party, we would expect the probability of them switching parties to be much higher if their mistaken belief presents the liberals in a more favorable light than is correct. So if the direction of mistaken beliefs is equal (50% favorable, 50% unfavorable), and we then select voters who switched from conservative to liberal, we expect to find in our sample a much higher proportion of mistaken beliefs that cast the liberals in a favorable light than in an unfavorable one.
I believe in cognitive dissonance, btw -- I'm just trying to figure out how you'd create a rigorous experiment to prove it.
How do you account for the fact that the mistaken beliefs may be influencing their like or dislike, as opposed to the other way around? I would expect the same (qualitative) results naturally -- if a voter is mistaken about a candidate's position in such a way that the candidate likes the perceived position more than the actual one, the voter will like the candidate more than you would otherwise expect (assuming that like or dislike is a result of evaluating their positions, as opposed to the reverse).
This effect is of nontrivial magnitude and in the same direction as the one you say you can show. How do you separate the two? I'm not trying to say your research is wrong (or right), obviously I don't have enough data to conclude that. I'm just saying that it's the same effect as in the article, and you don't explain how you account for it. I'd love more details, it seems a very subtle (and important) problem to correct for.
For future reference (and for anyone else reading this), don't take Adderall so late in the day. Effects last 8 hours or more, longer with Adderall XR. I can't take my (prescription) XR after perhaps 10AM if I want to get to sleep at a decent hour (I usually take it just after waking up). A lot of people using it without a prescription don't realize this, and take it when they want to study -- after dinner, say. That causes problems, because you won't sleep that night and then it wears off right about the time you need to be starting the next day.
In my experience (both first hand and otherwise) that's very true at low levels, but becomes much less true at higher doses. Caffeine causes the jitters while having a comparable effect to a relatively mild dose of amphetamines (ie, a dose that generally will produce much lower side effect incidence).
It's similar to the difference between laevo- and dextro-amphetamines (though more pronounced) -- the laevo-amphetamines cause more jitters, the dextro-amphetamines are better at making you focus. This is why Adderall is generally preferred to normal (racemic) amphetamine (it's a mix of the two, but weighted toward dextro-amphetamine).
I have no clue how to go doctor shopping; I come by my drugs the hard way (ie, having problems that really screw up my life if I'm not on them).
Of course, my personal sense of ethics says these drugs should be available to anyone making an informed choice. At least some doctors are willing to prescribe low doses to people they feel are responsible and would be helped by them. If you're intending to use them non-recreationally (ie, to help with focus) you may well qualify. So seriously, if you and your doctor have a good relationship, just... ask. Tell them you have difficulty focusing sometimes (or whatever the case is) and were wondering if some sort of stimulant might help. Don't lie to them, or exagerrate symptoms. There's quite possibly no need, and it probably won't work (not to mention being illegal and imo unethical).
In short, if you want to convince a physician that CNS stimulants would enhance your quality of life... then tell them so:) Say why you think that's true, and approach the issue as asking your doctor for help, not trying to con them out of drugs.
There are a variety of drug options, as well as non-drug options (various techniques for focusing, etc -- they actually do work, and they work in concert with the drugs as well). You'll want to get detailed input from someone who knows the drugs better than you or I, so give them all the info they need and give them correct info.
Huh? No I'm not. My personal research has included both WP and Erowid, but it's also included journal articles, discussions with several doctors (ie, the ones who write the prescriptions), and a variety of other well-qualified sources.
Wikipedia and Erowid are not places to get information that is guaranteed accurate. They are good places to go when starting research, as much of what they have is accurate. More importantly, however, they have lots of references that you can use to continue the research. Any encyclopedia, be it WP or something else, should be treated as a summary and a collection of citations, nothing more or less. I put a similar level of trust in Erowid -- ie not lots, but not zero -- which leaves it as needing double-checking but being worth reading as an alternate perspective.
Seriously, do your own research. Don't trust Wikipedia, a random/. poster, or even any single journal article. Follow references and keep reading; talk to people with personal experience -- anecdotal evidence is not data and is not sufficient, but it can offer valuable perspective that you won't find in articles.
That sort of report usually relates to any of the amphetamine relatives or methylphenidate (ritalin) relatives (the two are related but not the same). By amphetamine relatives, I include amphetamine, methamphetamine, dexedrine, Adderall (mixed amphetamine salts), and some others. Methylphenidates include Ritalin and Focalin and some others. Brand names vary, especially by country.
All the amphetamine derivatives have the same mode of action in the brain, but they aren't all "the same." Delivery route (oral, injected, insufflated, smoked) matters, as does the specific salt (eg amphetamine sulfate vs amphetamine hydrochloride). These have an impact on how rapidly your body absorbs the drug, and therefore the response vs time curve. Extended release versions also exist (Adderall XR, Concerta (methylphenidate)), which has a similar effect -- the duration is extended, and the response vs time curve flattened (generally considered a good thing -- the response varying with time is generally not what you want).
As always... don't take without a prescription. If you must take it without a prescription, you're much safer buying illicit Adderall than street meth, and you'll probably like the results better too (especially for functional, rather than recreational, purposes). Use an appropriate dosage (aka do your research), realize that the effect will be stronger in someone who doesn't take it regularly, and be aware of what drugs it reacts badly with. (Most notably, avoid mixing stimulants to excess, though the results of mixing with weak ones like caffeine won't surprise you. Do not, under any circumstances, mix stimulants with MAOIs (some antidepressants, possibly other uses) -- that can be fatal.)
I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice. Don't take drugs you haven't researched. Taking them without a prescription is likely illegal. In general: do your research before taking them, and be really sure you know what you're taking!
Erowid is a great place to start said research, though it's more geared toward recreational / spiritual / exploratory drug use. Wikipedia has a lot of good info. In any case, beware of inaccuracies.
Actually, "Hey, we thought of that first. Don't steal our ideas, please." seems like a much better way of doing things than patents and lawsuits. It seems to me that Google is just being polite, here. 37Signals is being a bit asinine, but if it matters to them and not to Google, why shouldn't they honor the request?
I'd note that I don't expect these roadblocks to the RIAA getting student's identities to hold forever. It simply isn't permissible in the US legal system to prevent a plaintiff with a legitimate claim from discovering the identity of the person they have that claim against. The best the students can hope for in the long run is to require the RIAA to prove that the IP address and client they have a record of did in fact commit copyright infringement. That's probably a significant hurdle, but if the RIAA clears it then the students will not be able to block discovery of their identities.
So perhaps the courts should be requiring them to demonstrate the legitimateness of the claim first. Especially the highly-questionable joinder of unrelated cases solely for purposes of discovery, followed by dropping of the suit and re-filing individual suits.
Ah, that explains the confusion. The value, or utility, or reservation price, is the maximum amount I would be willing to pay, if I had to -- ie the maximum price above which I won't buy the item. Obviously I'll pay less if I can (because, for example, market forces have set the price lower than that, be they monopoly pricing or competitive pricing). If I pay less than my perceived value, then I am better off after the transaction than before. The difference is called consumer surplus -- seriously, read the article, it does a better job explaining it than I can.
Think of it like the reserve price in an auction (for producer surplus) or the complementary concept (consumer surplus). Below the reserve price, the seller is uninterested in selling -- they'd rather have the item than the money. Above the reserve, they'd rather have the money. But, of course, they're quite happy to get more from it if the market supply / demand factors conspire to let that happen. Hence, reservation price.
I'm being quite careful to distinguish price from value, here. Artificial scarcity raises prices without changing the value per copy (to first order approximation). Value only changes significantly with price for a small minority of luxury goods. I'm quite sure music and books and such aren't among them -- though something like a $1000 concert ticket might be.
By raising the price, value per copy remains unchanged, but the number of copies goes down, which decreases the *total* value resulting from the work (apologies if I was unclear on that distinction). However, since the price of the work is higher, more of that value is shifted to the producer in the form of producer surplus, and less to the consumer as consumer surplus.
Monopolies tend to decrease the total surplus, while increasing the monopolist's surplus. Normally this is considered a bad thing, because the total value to society is less. In the case of copyright, however, we make an exception in an attempt to increase the number of distinct works created. The tricky part lies in setting the limits on copyright in a reasonable place to maximize societal value from all works created. Of course, the producers would like stronger copyright restrictions so that they end up with more money. Balance is, as always, difficult to find.
There is truth to it in the sense that the profit motive changes the quantity produced. It wouldn't be zero without the profit motive, but it would be less. The assertion as commonly made, while incorrect, does have some basis in fact.
Wealth and value are the same thing. Supply and demand sets price, not value -- value is the utility of the object to the consumer. The fact that creating a copy of a book costs nothing does not change its value to me as a consumer (ignoring, of course, any pleasure I derive from the book as a physical object -- I'm speaking here of reading an electronic copy). Artificial scarcity raises the price without changing the value, thereby passing more of that value to the producer (via the sale transaction). Without the scarcity, all the value appears as consumer surplus; with it, it appears as some mix of producer and consumer surplus. The total utility (or value) is unchanged. The wiki article explains the concept far better than I can do in a/. comment.
As you can probably gather from this, I'm in favor of some degree of copyright. As I hope is also obvious, I believe the current system is horribly out of balance, and acting to the detriment of society at large. Limited copyright terms and real protections for fair use are as important to the purpose of copyright as the limited monopoly it grants is. Take away any of those aspects, and society is worse off for it. And no, I don't consider the current terms limited, especially since Congress keeps extending them.
The purpose of copyright is to promote creation and enrich society.
The purpose of Copyright is to create artificial scarcity and, hence, "value".
Everything else said about it is just marketing fluff.
On the contrary, that is the marketing fluff. To the extent that is true (it's largely true, but not completely so -- yet), it's because powerful interests have distorted the original intent. At a fundamental level, that is still the justification that everyone uses -- "without copyright, there would be no [music|movies|books|etc]" is hyperbole, but there is truth to it.
As any economist will be happy to tell you, wealth is diminished by scarcity, not created by it. Monopolies, including copyright, concentrate wealth and diminish it -- see consumer surplus for the basics. The economic argument for copyright is not that scarcity creates wealth directly, but rather the incentive provided by that monopoly power motivates people to create copyrightable works, which is where the wealth comes from. The distinction is somewhat subtle, but important. When copyright is examined from first principles, it becomes obvious why limited terms and fair use are important -- we need to enforce enough scarcity to stimulate creation, but not have so much that it diminishes the overall value of the works created. The fact that the value to society of having creative works be freely available is difficult to compute directly in dollars does not mean that value is zero, or even small.
Licenses by themselves are a legal protection. If copyright does not restrict what you plan to do with the software, then there is no need for you to agree to the license. I have no objection to software creators using copyright to control their creations, so long as they do not restrict fair use or use after the copyright expires.
Copy prevention on games is no different from any other form of DRM. The same logic applies. Copy protection is a feature I have yet to see on a game. The mechanisms that go by that name do not attempt to protect copies, but rather prevent them from working -- quite the opposite effect, I think.
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Actually, the courts are quite clear on the matter. Labels on books or records sold are not sufficient to remove the right of first sale. If it acts like a sale, it's a sale. There have been attempts to sticker books to prevent resale that have been struck down. Furthermore, gifts count as sales for purposes of the doctrine of first sale, as does any other means of legally acquiring a legally produced copy. Merchandise sent through the mail unsolicited may be treated by the recipient as a gift (there's a long court history for this, mostly motivated by people sending unsolicited products and then billing the recipients). And, even if it wasn't a gift, UMG abandoned the CD under California law, since they gave up possession and their actions clearly indicated they had no intent to regain possession (they don't keep records of who has the CDs, and they have never in the past attempted to reaccquire one). So, whether by gifting or abandonmnent, ownership of the CD was legally transferred in a manner equivalent to a sale, and any sticker on it is insufficient to prevent the doctrine of first sale from taking effect.
The brief is quite readable, and quite thorough in explaining how UMG are being completely and utterly ridiculous.
PS, by reading this post you agree to... We've all seen comments like this in regard to EULAs and such; those stickers are no less ridiculous, and no more legally binding.
Dear record companies:
When your own VP of content protection admits in a deposition that he has bought some of your promo CDs on the second hand market, your case that someone selling them on eBay is infringing your copyrights starts to look, well, ridiculous.
(EFF Brief, page 18.)
Similar, but different. Both are oscillations, but pogo is characterized by low frequency variations in chamber pressure coupling through the thrust structure and into the propellant feed system (and from there back to the chamber pressure). These are high frequency (kHz, no tens of Hz) acoustic modes, contained entirely within the chamber. They're much harder simulate and much harder to get rid of, and much less well understood. They couple from local chamber pressure to the injectors, and operate much like an organ pipe.
Pogo, pump-related oscillations, and plumbing related oscillations are all low frequency (tens of Hz, sometimes less). These are acoustic modes internal to the chamber, in the kHz range. They're very distinct phenomenon, with distinct causes and distinct solutions. They're still a 50 year old problem with 50 year old techniques to solve them, but they're by no means understood in any meaningful sense -- the current technique mostly involves testing the engine and then tweaking it until they go away.
The new and interesting work here is the modelling, combined with the photography techniques. Seeing pressure waves at the injector face through the chamber full of flame is not trivial.
Aerospike engines still have an enclosed chamber; it's only the nozzle that's been changed. The chamber is where the problems occur, not the nozzle. The odd chamber shapes certainly make things complicated, but I have no idea whether they hurt or help overall. The usual technique to get rid of these involves various ways to de-tune the engine -- for example, some of the SSME injectors protrude deeper into the chamber to interrupt the otherwise flat injector face.
No, you're on the right track, but not quite there. Computational techniques are only barely able to simulate rocket chambers well; combustion dynamics are complex and not well understood. That's a large part of what makes this work interesting (the other part being the imaging techniques to actually photograph the waves).
The problem isn't actually the chamber or nozzle walls resonating, it's the acoustic cavity -- exactly analogous to an organ pipe. There are a variety of techniques used to de-tune the resonance modes. (It also happens in the chamber, not the nozzle -- gas in the expansion portion of the nozzle is locally supersonic, so sound can't propagate backwards, which means no resonance.) For example, the SSME has some of the injectors protruding further into the chamber than others, creating interruptions in the flat surface of the injector face. There exist other techniques, and some google searching will turn up some. Also, playing with the metals in the chamber wall is probably right out -- they're basically already decided by thermal considerations, and high performance engines almost universally use copper.
Historically, the design process has involved experienced engineers, rules of thumb, and lots of testing. Computer models will help, but they'll never really replace the "lots of testing" stage. At least for small engines (up to several thousand pounds of thrust), it's cheaper, easier, and more accurate to just build the thing.
The laser beam is way more feasible, even if you ignore considerations of range. Not to mention that when a liquid-fueled military rocket is operating, it's going to be either over the horizon or in vacuum -- we're not talking about small tactical missiles here.
We're talking about loud sounds here -- and not just a little bit loud. 1 pascal of pressure wave is 94dB SPL -- a fairly loud sound. 1 psi is 6894 pascals; we're talking about many psi of pressure variation. A 10 psi wave would be 190dB. That's not just loud enough to cause hearing damage; that's well past loud enough to knock over buildings. Overpressure from large bombs is less than that at the edge of the blast radius.
It should be obvious why that's destructive when it happens inside a rocket chamber, especially since oscillations like that tend to start small, grow *rapidly*, and not stop growing until something breaks. It should also be obvious why you won't be able to create such a wave via external influence unless the chamber can already resonate in that mode. When developing the F1 (Saturn V main engine) NASA had trouble with instability; in order to see whether the engine was barely stable or had plenty of margin, they had to find techniques to induce these waves. What they developed, and still use today, is a set of techniques for putting an explosive charge *inside* the engine, bringing the engine up to normal operating conditions (making the charge survive this is nontrivial), and *then* detonating it to see how the engine responded.
No. We're talking about pressure waves inside the engine, at pressures measured in tens or hundreds of psi, that resonate with the injector to build power -- think about blowing across the top of a beer bottle. The small power input from your breath induces a higher power oscillation. Same effect, where the bottle is replaced by the combustion chamber and your breath by the injectors. Except the power involved is a hundred million times higher (maybe more, I didn't do the math very carefully).
These waves can't be set up unless the engine will support them, and if it will then they'll happen on their own. If you could deliver that much energy to the engine remotely, you could just as easily destroy the rocket. It's the *resonance* that's the problem, not the fact that there's a crapload of sound energy available.
The new result here isn't acoustic instabilities; those have been known for a long time. The interesting result is a new set of imaging techniques that give a better understanding of *why* they occur, rather than simply observing on pressure traces that they *do* occur. After a bit more research, this may turn into techniques to more reliably avoid them in the design stage, rather than having to go through various tweaks on the injector / combustion chamber to remove them should they appear.
This is very cool work. Of course, it's rocket science, not rocket engineering, so it's unlikely to impact new designs for several years yet.
In what way is a civil penalty insufficient to stop the scenario you describe? It's worked well enough in the past, hasn't it? (Well, if anything, it gets overzealous.)
Interesting work :)
I'm still not clear on the details (sounds like I should read the paper...). Given a past conservative voter who acquires a mistaken belief about the liberal party, we would expect the probability of them switching parties to be much higher if their mistaken belief presents the liberals in a more favorable light than is correct. So if the direction of mistaken beliefs is equal (50% favorable, 50% unfavorable), and we then select voters who switched from conservative to liberal, we expect to find in our sample a much higher proportion of mistaken beliefs that cast the liberals in a favorable light than in an unfavorable one.
I believe in cognitive dissonance, btw -- I'm just trying to figure out how you'd create a rigorous experiment to prove it.
How do you account for the fact that the mistaken beliefs may be influencing their like or dislike, as opposed to the other way around? I would expect the same (qualitative) results naturally -- if a voter is mistaken about a candidate's position in such a way that the candidate likes the perceived position more than the actual one, the voter will like the candidate more than you would otherwise expect (assuming that like or dislike is a result of evaluating their positions, as opposed to the reverse).
This effect is of nontrivial magnitude and in the same direction as the one you say you can show. How do you separate the two? I'm not trying to say your research is wrong (or right), obviously I don't have enough data to conclude that. I'm just saying that it's the same effect as in the article, and you don't explain how you account for it. I'd love more details, it seems a very subtle (and important) problem to correct for.
That sucks. Hard.
For future reference (and for anyone else reading this), don't take Adderall so late in the day. Effects last 8 hours or more, longer with Adderall XR. I can't take my (prescription) XR after perhaps 10AM if I want to get to sleep at a decent hour (I usually take it just after waking up). A lot of people using it without a prescription don't realize this, and take it when they want to study -- after dinner, say. That causes problems, because you won't sleep that night and then it wears off right about the time you need to be starting the next day.
In my experience (both first hand and otherwise) that's very true at low levels, but becomes much less true at higher doses. Caffeine causes the jitters while having a comparable effect to a relatively mild dose of amphetamines (ie, a dose that generally will produce much lower side effect incidence).
It's similar to the difference between laevo- and dextro-amphetamines (though more pronounced) -- the laevo-amphetamines cause more jitters, the dextro-amphetamines are better at making you focus. This is why Adderall is generally preferred to normal (racemic) amphetamine (it's a mix of the two, but weighted toward dextro-amphetamine).
Exactly. "Fair" and "equal" are not the same thing, nor should they be treated as such.
I have no clue how to go doctor shopping; I come by my drugs the hard way (ie, having problems that really screw up my life if I'm not on them).
Of course, my personal sense of ethics says these drugs should be available to anyone making an informed choice. At least some doctors are willing to prescribe low doses to people they feel are responsible and would be helped by them. If you're intending to use them non-recreationally (ie, to help with focus) you may well qualify. So seriously, if you and your doctor have a good relationship, just... ask. Tell them you have difficulty focusing sometimes (or whatever the case is) and were wondering if some sort of stimulant might help. Don't lie to them, or exagerrate symptoms. There's quite possibly no need, and it probably won't work (not to mention being illegal and imo unethical).
In short, if you want to convince a physician that CNS stimulants would enhance your quality of life... then tell them so :) Say why you think that's true, and approach the issue as asking your doctor for help, not trying to con them out of drugs.
There are a variety of drug options, as well as non-drug options (various techniques for focusing, etc -- they actually do work, and they work in concert with the drugs as well). You'll want to get detailed input from someone who knows the drugs better than you or I, so give them all the info they need and give them correct info.
Huh? No I'm not. My personal research has included both WP and Erowid, but it's also included journal articles, discussions with several doctors (ie, the ones who write the prescriptions), and a variety of other well-qualified sources.
Wikipedia and Erowid are not places to get information that is guaranteed accurate. They are good places to go when starting research, as much of what they have is accurate. More importantly, however, they have lots of references that you can use to continue the research. Any encyclopedia, be it WP or something else, should be treated as a summary and a collection of citations, nothing more or less. I put a similar level of trust in Erowid -- ie not lots, but not zero -- which leaves it as needing double-checking but being worth reading as an alternate perspective.
Seriously, do your own research. Don't trust Wikipedia, a random /. poster, or even any single journal article. Follow references and keep reading; talk to people with personal experience -- anecdotal evidence is not data and is not sufficient, but it can offer valuable perspective that you won't find in articles.
That sort of report usually relates to any of the amphetamine relatives or methylphenidate (ritalin) relatives (the two are related but not the same). By amphetamine relatives, I include amphetamine, methamphetamine, dexedrine, Adderall (mixed amphetamine salts), and some others. Methylphenidates include Ritalin and Focalin and some others. Brand names vary, especially by country.
All the amphetamine derivatives have the same mode of action in the brain, but they aren't all "the same." Delivery route (oral, injected, insufflated, smoked) matters, as does the specific salt (eg amphetamine sulfate vs amphetamine hydrochloride). These have an impact on how rapidly your body absorbs the drug, and therefore the response vs time curve. Extended release versions also exist (Adderall XR, Concerta (methylphenidate)), which has a similar effect -- the duration is extended, and the response vs time curve flattened (generally considered a good thing -- the response varying with time is generally not what you want).
As always... don't take without a prescription. If you must take it without a prescription, you're much safer buying illicit Adderall than street meth, and you'll probably like the results better too (especially for functional, rather than recreational, purposes). Use an appropriate dosage (aka do your research), realize that the effect will be stronger in someone who doesn't take it regularly, and be aware of what drugs it reacts badly with. (Most notably, avoid mixing stimulants to excess, though the results of mixing with weak ones like caffeine won't surprise you. Do not, under any circumstances, mix stimulants with MAOIs (some antidepressants, possibly other uses) -- that can be fatal.)
I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice. Don't take drugs you haven't researched. Taking them without a prescription is likely illegal. In general: do your research before taking them, and be really sure you know what you're taking!
Erowid is a great place to start said research, though it's more geared toward recreational / spiritual / exploratory drug use. Wikipedia has a lot of good info. In any case, beware of inaccuracies.
Actually, "Hey, we thought of that first. Don't steal our ideas, please." seems like a much better way of doing things than patents and lawsuits. It seems to me that Google is just being polite, here. 37Signals is being a bit asinine, but if it matters to them and not to Google, why shouldn't they honor the request?
I'd note that I don't expect these roadblocks to the RIAA getting student's identities to hold forever. It simply isn't permissible in the US legal system to prevent a plaintiff with a legitimate claim from discovering the identity of the person they have that claim against. The best the students can hope for in the long run is to require the RIAA to prove that the IP address and client they have a record of did in fact commit copyright infringement. That's probably a significant hurdle, but if the RIAA clears it then the students will not be able to block discovery of their identities.
So perhaps the courts should be requiring them to demonstrate the legitimateness of the claim first. Especially the highly-questionable joinder of unrelated cases solely for purposes of discovery, followed by dropping of the suit and re-filing individual suits.
Ah, that explains the confusion. The value, or utility, or reservation price, is the maximum amount I would be willing to pay, if I had to -- ie the maximum price above which I won't buy the item. Obviously I'll pay less if I can (because, for example, market forces have set the price lower than that, be they monopoly pricing or competitive pricing). If I pay less than my perceived value, then I am better off after the transaction than before. The difference is called consumer surplus -- seriously, read the article, it does a better job explaining it than I can.
Think of it like the reserve price in an auction (for producer surplus) or the complementary concept (consumer surplus). Below the reserve price, the seller is uninterested in selling -- they'd rather have the item than the money. Above the reserve, they'd rather have the money. But, of course, they're quite happy to get more from it if the market supply / demand factors conspire to let that happen. Hence, reservation price.
I'm being quite careful to distinguish price from value, here. Artificial scarcity raises prices without changing the value per copy (to first order approximation). Value only changes significantly with price for a small minority of luxury goods. I'm quite sure music and books and such aren't among them -- though something like a $1000 concert ticket might be.
By raising the price, value per copy remains unchanged, but the number of copies goes down, which decreases the *total* value resulting from the work (apologies if I was unclear on that distinction). However, since the price of the work is higher, more of that value is shifted to the producer in the form of producer surplus, and less to the consumer as consumer surplus.
Monopolies tend to decrease the total surplus, while increasing the monopolist's surplus. Normally this is considered a bad thing, because the total value to society is less. In the case of copyright, however, we make an exception in an attempt to increase the number of distinct works created. The tricky part lies in setting the limits on copyright in a reasonable place to maximize societal value from all works created. Of course, the producers would like stronger copyright restrictions so that they end up with more money. Balance is, as always, difficult to find.
There is truth to it in the sense that the profit motive changes the quantity produced. It wouldn't be zero without the profit motive, but it would be less. The assertion as commonly made, while incorrect, does have some basis in fact.
Wealth and value are the same thing. Supply and demand sets price, not value -- value is the utility of the object to the consumer. The fact that creating a copy of a book costs nothing does not change its value to me as a consumer (ignoring, of course, any pleasure I derive from the book as a physical object -- I'm speaking here of reading an electronic copy). Artificial scarcity raises the price without changing the value, thereby passing more of that value to the producer (via the sale transaction). Without the scarcity, all the value appears as consumer surplus; with it, it appears as some mix of producer and consumer surplus. The total utility (or value) is unchanged. The wiki article explains the concept far better than I can do in a /. comment.
As you can probably gather from this, I'm in favor of some degree of copyright. As I hope is also obvious, I believe the current system is horribly out of balance, and acting to the detriment of society at large. Limited copyright terms and real protections for fair use are as important to the purpose of copyright as the limited monopoly it grants is. Take away any of those aspects, and society is worse off for it. And no, I don't consider the current terms limited, especially since Congress keeps extending them.
The purpose of copyright is to promote creation and enrich society.
The purpose of Copyright is to create artificial scarcity and, hence, "value".
Everything else said about it is just marketing fluff.
On the contrary, that is the marketing fluff. To the extent that is true (it's largely true, but not completely so -- yet), it's because powerful interests have distorted the original intent. At a fundamental level, that is still the justification that everyone uses -- "without copyright, there would be no [music|movies|books|etc]" is hyperbole, but there is truth to it.
As any economist will be happy to tell you, wealth is diminished by scarcity, not created by it. Monopolies, including copyright, concentrate wealth and diminish it -- see consumer surplus for the basics. The economic argument for copyright is not that scarcity creates wealth directly, but rather the incentive provided by that monopoly power motivates people to create copyrightable works, which is where the wealth comes from. The distinction is somewhat subtle, but important. When copyright is examined from first principles, it becomes obvious why limited terms and fair use are important -- we need to enforce enough scarcity to stimulate creation, but not have so much that it diminishes the overall value of the works created. The fact that the value to society of having creative works be freely available is difficult to compute directly in dollars does not mean that value is zero, or even small.
Licenses by themselves are a legal protection. If copyright does not restrict what you plan to do with the software, then there is no need for you to agree to the license. I have no objection to software creators using copyright to control their creations, so long as they do not restrict fair use or use after the copyright expires.
Copy prevention on games is no different from any other form of DRM. The same logic applies. Copy protection is a feature I have yet to see on a game. The mechanisms that go by that name do not attempt to protect copies, but rather prevent them from working -- quite the opposite effect, I think.