If it takes socialism to teach people and companies that there are costs to doing business beyond the green bits of paper, I'm all for it.
Except that it doesn't, all it takes is real regulation with teeth. Not our current system of "oh, if you fuck up and pour arsenic in the river, kindly let us know so that we can negotiate a low, low fine for you, then use the taxpayer's money to declare the river a superfund site while you enjoy your riches and move to someplace where people aren't dropping like flies"
Those "pesky governments" are far more likely to pass pro-business
THIS is what needs to change. Vote Green, not [L|l]ibertarian on your next election, the latter can't even figure out what they stand for these days, much less bother to care about the environment.
Why aren't fields of these things going up like crazy?
The real reason? Because cities can think of better things to do with their land than use 4500 acres (3/4 football field is about 1 acre. You could put a lot of stadiums on that land) of it on stuff like this, and unlike other cultures that have become used to growing upwards, planning a city to have all of the buildings the same height so that the entire array can sit on top of them just isn't an accepted idea here.
As someone else pointed out, all contracts have exit clauses, all such contracts typically point out the penalties for using such exit clauses.
This is no more "thievery" or "money-grubbing" than me paying my apartment manager $500 so that I can move to a cheaper apartment. These artists took a look at the numbers, and decided that with iTunes selling more music in its first week than sony can sell in almost half a year, that they could pay off Sony from the profits from iTunes.
The only sense that this is news is the sense in that Sony is clinging tight to its sinking ship, as it has done so many times before, and unlike ATRAC/minidisc or memorystick/PSP, they have nothing to keep this business plan afloat.
Do you really think a 70s band like Pink Floyd (for example) got all the rights to their recordings back just because CDs replaced vinyl, or compact cassettes replaced the 8 track?
I don't have a contract with Sony or any other music publisher. All I have is my contract with my credit card company who occasionally tells me something changed and I have 30 days to cancel my account or accept the changes. For all I know Pink Floyd got the same notice: "Hey, we want to sell your songs on CD, agree in 30 days or pay back all the money we lent you"
They do disallow derived works, and it's perfectly obvious why they should.
Except that they don't disallow "derivative" works of the license, they just restrict what changes you can make (if the code was already GPLd) and you can't call the new license "GPL" or mention "GNU": http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #ModifyGPL
If anyhthing (as The Register noted), now CNet can freely bash Google until the ban expires, which will actually help their business.
So? Isn't that what they were doing before? After all, it's not like punching the guy's name into Yahoo or All The Web or one of the hojillion other search engines doesn't give you the exact same information, yet somehow this is Google's fault?
It may not rise to "asshole reporting" levels, but this is certainly biased reporting at its finest.
But you sold away that right in exchange from a large advance from Sony
Did they? What if they signed the contract in the 80's or early 90's before the internet became a way to sell music? Does Sony have the right to retroactively add terms that weren't even conceivable at the time to the contract? If so, I've got a contract here for you that says I'll pay you $50. Don't worry about the blank space at the bottom, I won't scribble in that you'll owe me $50 million after you've signed it. I promise.
Kant Ethics tells us that when a person acts they whish for those actions to be a universal truth. Hence, if I go on a killing spree, I am saying it is o.k. to murder. Therefore capital punishment is simply treating to murderer as they wish to be treated, as evidenved by their actions.
The problem with Kant Ethics is that it rarely is applied beyond the immediate action to extenuating circumstances, usually because the extenuating circumstances are rarely known, unless its a hollywood movie where Bruce Willis goes on a shooting spree because terrorists are trying to take over the world. What does America's activity in Iraq say about what America thinks is OK?
Perhaps right this second they can. But if companies start discriminating on a wide scale, where does the "ticking time bomb" go to work? Even McDonald's, if given the choice, would prefer to hire someone who might not get RSI over someone who might.
Eventually, we just have to decide that humanity is overrated, the almighty dollar is king, and begin the eugenics plan with retroactive abortions for the undesirables among us.
Without said worker's comp insurance, the exact same thing would happen to the company as would happen to an uninsured patient facing medical bills: they'd go bankrupt.
No matter how much you're "in control of your finances" or whatever the buzzword of the day for the libertarians is, there will always be some disaster that can cost you more to recover from than you currently have, and that is why insurance companies exist.
While it's true that there are understood to be expenses outside a consumer's control, this is a bad example. If my car breaks down, I decide if I want to take it to the car dealership and pay $$$$$, take it to a garage and pay $$$ and get generic parts, or take the risk that I'll never figure it out, pay $ for parts, and do it myself.
I suspect that your students would have a hard time convincing you not give them an F for the homework they completely made up because they went the last route;)
The whole driving into oncoming traffic thing is what gets me. It seems with such a large number of fatal crashes being offset frontal wrecks (oops, someone swerved across the line a few feet into oncoming traffic, and the drivers are both crushed like pancakes) that sitting on the right and driving on the right (sorry, I'm American;) is what makes sense. Especially with the number of Americans who drive alone, it should greatly reduce the number of fatalities, since to hit the driver's side, you'd have to swerve all the way across the lane, otherwise you're crushing a (usually, unlike the driver's side) empty passenger seat. This even works for red-light runners, since when crossing an intersection, for the first lanes, traffic approaches from the left and again hits the passenger side, rather than the driver (by the time you got to the other side of the road, the people too stupid to stop should have cleared out).
Swap everything right with left and it'd still work wherever such driving habits are preferred.
I have no problem having my auto information on an RFID tag somewhere on the car
Neither does the terrorist. Of course, since he's not planning on driving for much longer, he pulled his RFID off and for shits and giggles in the afterlife, stuck it to someone elses car.
Just including them in your patent is free. If you patent a table leg, I can patent a table that uses four of your table legs and a tabletop.
Now, If I were to actually build a table, I would have to obtain from you the right to use table legs. Having patented the table, your lawyer would have pretty good grounds to convince a court that I used at least one table leg during the development of the invention, and therefore should have licensed the table leg from you. This is where the "pay" part comes from;)
The same goes for any of my customers: if someone licenses the table patent from me, they would also have to license the table leg patent from you before they could build one.
Though expect that these Web interface will pop up, and have already, I also know that the underlying interfaces often doesn't lend itself for easy integration with others.
The neat thing about web-based applications is that you only need one thing to make integration work: a promise that the application interface is as stable as possible. With that, I can make my application integrate with your application simply by firing up curl with the appropriate URL and post and cookie variables. This gets harder if every three days your login cookie variable changes names.
looks at ALL the know oil shale, rock oil, tar sands, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of years of petroleum avaliable.
So where are the developers looking to perfect their tar sand extraction techniques? It costs many times as much to extract oil from tar sands as it does to pump loose oil out of the ground.
When we run out of loose oil, how many times higher will oil cost until someone gets around to inventing a way to extract it from shale and sand at a reasonable cost? What if that invention never happens? What if the inflated cost of oil causes energy prices of all kinds to skyrocket, making it impossible to implement such an invention cheaply, because it uses then-expensive oil?
I have less faith than you do in the fate of oil-consumers.
The same problem exists when adopting animals. People want the cute little puppies and kittens, then drop them back off at the shelter when they grow up. I wonder how many of these infant adoptions will end the same way?
I don't know why everyone else does, but as a software developer, I can tell you that a bug is still a bug even if it only affects 1 in 1000000 users. Every day I have to take that one-in-a-million case into account in what I do. Sure, most people pay their bill with a check, what what about the guy who comes into the office and pays their bill with a check for $52.29, two nickels and a penny he found on the street, and two different credit cards?
Well, I can't find modern stats, but googling around tells me that in mid-90's, there were half a million kids sitting around in foster care not getting adopted. I wonder how many of these foster homes provide the kids with a car for their 16th birthday and support them through college?
She does? They teach that in school or something these days?
she musta fucked somebody if she's pregnant
Or someone forced her into having sex, or someone just drugged her and raped her while she was out.
Second, who the hell wouldn't put up a child for adoption but would kill it?
Texas's "Baby Moses" law exists precisely because people were leaving newborns in trashcans or alleyways. So the "who" are "enough people to convince the government to change the child abandonment laws".
I think the anti-abortion groups should look into the "why" of that, it might explain a lot, and go a long way towards reaching their goal, without throwing around laws and constitutional amendments to enforce those laws.
Slashdot Mirror
If it takes socialism to teach people and companies that there are costs to doing business beyond the green bits of paper, I'm all for it.
Except that it doesn't, all it takes is real regulation with teeth. Not our current system of "oh, if you fuck up and pour arsenic in the river, kindly let us know so that we can negotiate a low, low fine for you, then use the taxpayer's money to declare the river a superfund site while you enjoy your riches and move to someplace where people aren't dropping like flies"
Those "pesky governments" are far more likely to pass pro-business
THIS is what needs to change. Vote Green, not [L|l]ibertarian on your next election, the latter can't even figure out what they stand for these days, much less bother to care about the environment.
Why aren't fields of these things going up like crazy?
The real reason? Because cities can think of better things to do with their land than use 4500 acres (3/4 football field is about 1 acre. You could put a lot of stadiums on that land) of it on stuff like this, and unlike other cultures that have become used to growing upwards, planning a city to have all of the buildings the same height so that the entire array can sit on top of them just isn't an accepted idea here.
As someone else pointed out, all contracts have exit clauses, all such contracts typically point out the penalties for using such exit clauses.
This is no more "thievery" or "money-grubbing" than me paying my apartment manager $500 so that I can move to a cheaper apartment. These artists took a look at the numbers, and decided that with iTunes selling more music in its first week than sony can sell in almost half a year, that they could pay off Sony from the profits from iTunes.
The only sense that this is news is the sense in that Sony is clinging tight to its sinking ship, as it has done so many times before, and unlike ATRAC/minidisc or memorystick/PSP, they have nothing to keep this business plan afloat.
Do you really think a 70s band like Pink Floyd (for example) got all the rights to their recordings back just because CDs replaced vinyl, or compact cassettes replaced the 8 track?
I don't have a contract with Sony or any other music publisher. All I have is my contract with my credit card company who occasionally tells me something changed and I have 30 days to cancel my account or accept the changes. For all I know Pink Floyd got the same notice: "Hey, we want to sell your songs on CD, agree in 30 days or pay back all the money we lent you"
They do disallow derived works, and it's perfectly obvious why they should.
l #ModifyGPL
l #GPLIncompatibleLibs
Except that they don't disallow "derivative" works of the license, they just restrict what changes you can make (if the code was already GPLd) and you can't call the new license "GPL" or mention "GNU": http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.htm
You can also add your own exceptions outside of the GPL, as suggested for cases where you have no choice but to link with a nonfree library: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.htm
If anyhthing (as The Register noted), now CNet can freely bash Google until the ban expires, which will actually help their business.
So? Isn't that what they were doing before? After all, it's not like punching the guy's name into Yahoo or All The Web or one of the hojillion other search engines doesn't give you the exact same information, yet somehow this is Google's fault?
It may not rise to "asshole reporting" levels, but this is certainly biased reporting at its finest.
But you sold away that right in exchange from a large advance from Sony
Did they? What if they signed the contract in the 80's or early 90's before the internet became a way to sell music? Does Sony have the right to retroactively add terms that weren't even conceivable at the time to the contract? If so, I've got a contract here for you that says I'll pay you $50. Don't worry about the blank space at the bottom, I won't scribble in that you'll owe me $50 million after you've signed it. I promise.
Don't be too hasty, they're already working on books that can only be read three times.
Kant Ethics tells us that when a person acts they whish for those actions to be a universal truth. Hence, if I go on a killing spree, I am saying it is o.k. to murder. Therefore capital punishment is simply treating to murderer as they wish to be treated, as evidenved by their actions.
The problem with Kant Ethics is that it rarely is applied beyond the immediate action to extenuating circumstances, usually because the extenuating circumstances are rarely known, unless its a hollywood movie where Bruce Willis goes on a shooting spree because terrorists are trying to take over the world. What does America's activity in Iraq say about what America thinks is OK?
can find work elsewhere.
Perhaps right this second they can. But if companies start discriminating on a wide scale, where does the "ticking time bomb" go to work? Even McDonald's, if given the choice, would prefer to hire someone who might not get RSI over someone who might.
Eventually, we just have to decide that humanity is overrated, the almighty dollar is king, and begin the eugenics plan with retroactive abortions for the undesirables among us.
Without said worker's comp insurance, the exact same thing would happen to the company as would happen to an uninsured patient facing medical bills: they'd go bankrupt.
No matter how much you're "in control of your finances" or whatever the buzzword of the day for the libertarians is, there will always be some disaster that can cost you more to recover from than you currently have, and that is why insurance companies exist.
Think cars and car repairs.
;)
While it's true that there are understood to be expenses outside a consumer's control, this is a bad example. If my car breaks down, I decide if I want to take it to the car dealership and pay $$$$$, take it to a garage and pay $$$ and get generic parts, or take the risk that I'll never figure it out, pay $ for parts, and do it myself.
I suspect that your students would have a hard time convincing you not give them an F for the homework they completely made up because they went the last route
The whole driving into oncoming traffic thing is what gets me. It seems with such a large number of fatal crashes being offset frontal wrecks (oops, someone swerved across the line a few feet into oncoming traffic, and the drivers are both crushed like pancakes) that sitting on the right and driving on the right (sorry, I'm American ;) is what makes sense. Especially with the number of Americans who drive alone, it should greatly reduce the number of fatalities, since to hit the driver's side, you'd have to swerve all the way across the lane, otherwise you're crushing a (usually, unlike the driver's side) empty passenger seat. This even works for red-light runners, since when crossing an intersection, for the first lanes, traffic approaches from the left and again hits the passenger side, rather than the driver (by the time you got to the other side of the road, the people too stupid to stop should have cleared out).
Swap everything right with left and it'd still work wherever such driving habits are preferred.
I have no problem having my auto information on an RFID tag somewhere on the car
Neither does the terrorist. Of course, since he's not planning on driving for much longer, he pulled his RFID off and for shits and giggles in the afterlife, stuck it to someone elses car.
aren't their exceptions for R&D in patent law?
Only after you've thrown lawyers at the problem, which is the problem with just about every "exception" in the law.
Just including them in your patent is free. If you patent a table leg, I can patent a table that uses four of your table legs and a tabletop.
;)
Now, If I were to actually build a table, I would have to obtain from you the right to use table legs. Having patented the table, your lawyer would have pretty good grounds to convince a court that I used at least one table leg during the development of the invention, and therefore should have licensed the table leg from you. This is where the "pay" part comes from
The same goes for any of my customers: if someone licenses the table patent from me, they would also have to license the table leg patent from you before they could build one.
The prior art neest to be before Apr 22 1995.
amazon.com: Creation Date: 01-nov-1994
Is North America really so backwards and stubborn they refuse to use units that the rest of the world is perfectly happy with.
Ok, it's a 5klbf engine. Happy?
Though expect that these Web interface will pop up, and have already, I also know that the underlying interfaces often doesn't lend itself for easy integration with others.
The neat thing about web-based applications is that you only need one thing to make integration work: a promise that the application interface is as stable as possible. With that, I can make my application integrate with your application simply by firing up curl with the appropriate URL and post and cookie variables. This gets harder if every three days your login cookie variable changes names.
looks at ALL the know oil shale, rock oil, tar sands, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of years of petroleum avaliable.
So where are the developers looking to perfect their tar sand extraction techniques? It costs many times as much to extract oil from tar sands as it does to pump loose oil out of the ground.
When we run out of loose oil, how many times higher will oil cost until someone gets around to inventing a way to extract it from shale and sand at a reasonable cost? What if that invention never happens? What if the inflated cost of oil causes energy prices of all kinds to skyrocket, making it impossible to implement such an invention cheaply, because it uses then-expensive oil?
I have less faith than you do in the fate of oil-consumers.
I'd go around campus killing everything in sight
I found out that bumping into things repeatedly doesn't do much damage, then I realized I needed to equip a better weapon, like a car.
The same problem exists when adopting animals. People want the cute little puppies and kittens, then drop them back off at the shelter when they grow up. I wonder how many of these infant adoptions will end the same way?
I don't know why everyone else does, but as a software developer, I can tell you that a bug is still a bug even if it only affects 1 in 1000000 users. Every day I have to take that one-in-a-million case into account in what I do. Sure, most people pay their bill with a check, what what about the guy who comes into the office and pays their bill with a check for $52.29, two nickels and a penny he found on the street, and two different credit cards?
Well, I can't find modern stats, but googling around tells me that in mid-90's, there were half a million kids sitting around in foster care not getting adopted. I wonder how many of these foster homes provide the kids with a car for their 16th birthday and support them through college?
she knows that fucking makes babies.
She does? They teach that in school or something these days?
she musta fucked somebody if she's pregnant
Or someone forced her into having sex, or someone just drugged her and raped her while she was out.
Second, who the hell wouldn't put up a child for adoption but would kill it?
Texas's "Baby Moses" law exists precisely because people were leaving newborns in trashcans or alleyways. So the "who" are "enough people to convince the government to change the child abandonment laws".
I think the anti-abortion groups should look into the "why" of that, it might explain a lot, and go a long way towards reaching their goal, without throwing around laws and constitutional amendments to enforce those laws.