Having been to a highschool that just got "computers in the classroom" kick while I was there, I've seen what it did to the teaching style.
The whole thing quickly turned into a babysitting device. "Do the math exercises the computer tells you to do while I grade your homework. When you're done, just sit quietly and keep yourself amused." Needless to say the plan lasted about a year before remarkably level-headed people sorted things out and things went back to normal (more-or-less).
Here's a less popular viewpoint, at least amongst professors.
Quit using your class to sell your textbook.
Look, I don't care how many PhD's you have in Math, your personal Calculus textbook is no different than any other. In fact, you didn't even make any stunning breakthroughs in the field of undergraduate integration and derivation, so quit writing a new version every year!
Students wouldn't have to pay $120 a textbook if the professors didn't want it to be that way.
Actually, learning Latin is a pretty good idea. It's a base for many European languages, and the subject object verb structure matches several more languages not based on it (and gets English speakers used to forming and reading sentences in this structure). Having a good Latin vocabulary will let people studying Spanish or French or Italian recognize words that used Latin roots, and the grammar concepts do carry over some.
The sad part is that over 200 years ago, thousands of people died to create a country here where they hoped to live without the government keeping them from speaking their mind or arresting them and holding them indefinitely.
And 4 years ago thousands of people died to make it a place where citizens can be held indefinitely without a trial. Where "suspicion of terrorism" (without any proof) is enough to have searches of your house without notifying you. Where the books you check out from your library can be used against you.
"most of which aren't even citizens"... do you think the non-citizens being held somehow cancel out the citizens?
Re:Why people don't RTFA
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My faith in the article was lost long ago, with an average of 1 grammatical error per sentence.
Aside from that, what do you bet that HD-DVD wins despite its low bandwidth and storage space, just so that the movie studios can have their precious control locking so I can't skip through the 20 3 minute long previews before the movie starts?
The judge will hopefully smack this one down. If the company doesn't like the CAN-SPAM act, they should appeal whatever case they lost against it, not go and sue the guy who reported them to the cops.
Well, in this case, theres more hanky-panky going on than my simplified version accounts for, however in the general case like I laid out, GPL and patents can go hand in hand. All you have to do is add to the GPL a line reading "Everyone using or redistributing or modifying this application is hereby granted free and irrevocable license to US Patents #555,555,555, #666,666,666, (and so on) when using, modifying, or distributing this software or any derivatives bearing this license." Since you are permitted to grant additional rights in the GPL license, this should be perfectly alright, since the GPL doesn't permit removing terms from the license.
The best part? Aluminum Oxide can be recycled straight into the middle of the smelting process (aluminum is extracted from bauxite ore as aluminum hydroxide, which is then converted to aluminum oxide, which is then converted to aluminum.
Of course, it might play havoc with the market for used aluminum cans, but I can just drop the soda cans into my engine;) (ok, not quite;) And you still need power to convert aluminum oxide to aluminum, however that means you can set up nuclear power plants in a few key distribution centers, and ship aluminum out to everyone else for local energy generation, vehicle propulsion, etc.
Not sure what the energy density and efficiency for this process is though. Could be that you'd need 1 ton of aluminum to generate enough hydrogen to generate enough energy to propel a 1 ton car;)
Transport solutions like this solve another problem as well: Hydrogen seepage. Hydrogen can't easily be stored for long periods of time as it seeps through cracks just larger than its own atom, and sealing these cracks is very difficult.
And your company will have to write some code from scratch to make use of their patent.
Thats not strictly true.
(what follows is vastly simplified)
If I write a GPL program called "cherry_picking", and I patent the process within, generalized to "fruit_picking", I can never sue anyone for using cherry_picking, distributing cherry_picking, modifying cherry_picking, etc. However, if someone else appears selling a proprietary program called "apple_picking" that infringes on my "fruit_picking" patent, I can use that patent against them.
Such patents might be a useful defense against corporations "secretly" incorporating GPL'd products into proprietary software. They'd either have to stop because of the patent, or admit to the GPL infringment (still requiring them to either stop or capitulate to the terms of the GPL) to shield themselves from the patent.
With a tilting scroll wheel, its pretty easy to move it up or down OR left or right. With a trackball, probably more than half the users would be frustrated with their inability to roll the ball in a straight line.
Ah, now I see, I was just confused. I thought you were arguing that the Creative Commons copyright was a terrible license because it didn't disclaim your liability, yet let everyone else do whatever the hell they wanted with your work, and if 10 people's copies down the line someone's player crashes, you could be sued because you wrote the original song.
Of course if you personally damage someone else you're liable, I wasn't arguing that, I was just arguing against what I thought you were arguing for.
We're talking about the public domain with regards to copyright, in which case public domain as public (physical) property doesn't enter into the picture. I'd hate to be sued because some kid slipped in the public park 15 miles from here that I've never been to, but everyone is liable for because its owned by "the people".
But wait, what were we arguing about again? I thougt it was somethign about how if I made a song and a copy of that song blew up your player, that was my fault. Somewhere there was a disconnect. Care to point it out for me? Remember, just because "This Land is Your Land" is in the public domain doesn't mean that every mp3 of the song now existing is made by the now long dead author of the original. If an mp3 of "This Land is Your Land" crashes your ipod, regarless of "nefarious copying" or not, you intend to dig up the author's grave and drag the skeleton to court?
Regardless of "physical" embodiment (hint, even before Teh Intarweb, live performances were copyrighted even if they were never set to any media) the core of the matter does not change. The copyright exists for the tune of the song, the words of the song, and the performance of the song (separately, even! just ask ASCAP and BMI!). If you write the Greatest Novel Ever, copyright it, then someone burns the original, you still own the copyright to the Greatest Novel Ever, even if you have to beg the copyright office to return the copy of it you submitted to them for registration back so you can scribble it on the backs of napkins to get it published. It's not the paper, its the words.
No, copyright does not cover the "idea" which your song expressed, it covers the exact embodiment of your song. When I convert your song to another embodiment I'm making a derivative work of your embodiment, which is why it is also covered by your copyright.
The copyright isn't about the paper I put ink on or the canvas I painted on or the floppy disk I saved my thesis on then stapled to the submission form. It is about the text in the floppy, the image on the canvas that matters. Your logic is flawed (calling a copy in a different format "derivative work" indeed. The term is applied to works where you add some small value such as a translation or typesetting or performance or additional text or notes, where the original work makes up a basis for the derivative too large to dismiss as fair use or quoting. Ripping your CD to mp3s adds no literary or other artistic merit to the work, it simply copies it to newer, more convenient "paper" with "better" ink) yet the outcome of your thought process is still valid: the song/picture/movie/document is still copyrighted.
Yes, you are responsible for the damage an mp3 does to my equipment.
So if you download an Aerosmith mp3 from kazaa, and your ipod freezes up, you're going to sue Aerosmith? You ignore the fact that beyond my song being present, there is no control over the container with certain CC licenses that allow re-encoding or re-distributing (hell, with "All Rights Reserved" copyright in effect, they still can't crush all illegal copying. Are you going to go to court and insist that you thought the mp3 was an authorized Aerosmith good being given away by Aerosmith for free because copying is illegal so therefore the mp3 must be legal?). If A records a song, B re-encodes it in a malicious format and sends it to you, you can try suing A, but the judge will call you to the bench, slap you, tell you to sue B, and dismiss the case. If you somehow win, A will appeal, and appleals court judges slap harder.
present something as factually correct when it is not you open yourself up to litigation if your claims cause damage.
Yet there are millions of idiots in this world all claiming things that are flagrantly, even intentionally incorrect. Yet aside from claiming incorrect things about someone (ie, libel or slander) I don't see a lot of lawsuits over how Jane told Billy she had a headache that night but was really just turned off by the fact that he ate a garlic sandwitch after dinner. If I have a page reading "On Formally Decidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems" consisting of a thesis that at every turn attempts to disprove Godel's law, with no text beyond the title and the body of the thesis and a CC license at the bottom, with no other statement indicating that in reality, I stapled my Mathematics PhD to my application form and failed to get my Doctorate, can you sue me for that? Even though I make no claims claiming I am a math whiz? Does the CC license matter? What if I marked it "All Rights Reserved"?
A formular for making styrofoam cups is indeed an invention Yes, and I explicitly stated that inventions are separate, as they can blow up and kill people. Shakespeare does not blow up and kill people, no matter how long you cook it. Brittney Spears does not blow up and kill people. Mona Lisa secretly blows up when noone is looking, the rest of the time she smirks about what she's getting away with. The formula for TNT can be used to blow up and kill people. See the difference? Literary work, musical work, artistic work, invention.
And now we're on rat poison on a playground which has nothing to do with copyright, and even less to do with creative commons licenses for copyrighted works.
a formular for making styrofoam cups is an invention.
If you put an encyclopedia entry in the public domain and I fail my history lesson as a result I can sue you for damages. For the crime of being wrong? I can sue you for damages because the color of your tie offended me and caused my widdle heart to go pitter-patter, but I'd lose. And so would you.
Blah, if you put an mp3 in the public domain and it trashes my mp3 player I can sue you for damages. Hofstadter posits in one of his essays (published either in Godel Escher Bach or Metamagical Themas, read them both, they're very good) that it would be possible for me to analyze the construction of your music player and develop a song specifically designed to destroy it. Additionally, if you build a machine that analyzed my song and then built a machine immune to the player-smashing effects of my song, that it would be possible to analyze the construction of THAT player-building machine to create a song that would be improperly analyzed by your music-analyzer, resulting it in producing a machine which was not, in fact, immune to the player-breaking effect of my song, and upon attempting to play it would shatter into a million pieces. And so on.
What was the point of that? Not much. However, the "mp3" is NOT whats covered under the Creative Commons license. The song itself is. If I designed a song whose melodies and frequencies were designed to destroy piezoelectric speakers, THAT would be a clear case of damage caused by my song. If it was the mp3 itself that caused the damage, it would be due to the encoders fault (software) or the decoders fault (again software, even if disguised as hardware). Or even your fault (guess you should have let the download finish before getting too impatient and cutting the torrent off at 50% to see what it sounded like)
That makes sense. Think about what kind of damages the copywritten material CC is designed to cover can cause. Unlike an invention, it can't blow up and kill anyone. Unlike software it can't erase your harddrive.
Instead, damages for copyright are generally plagarism, libel, various hate-speech laws. I'd like to see you try license away your responsibility for the content you put out from these kind of things.
You've got to play by certain rules or rights holders revoke permissions or simply send over their Bucket o' Lawyers to cut you off at the knees.
Or you could come up with your own new characters and go from there, with no licenses, no lawyers, no oversight. Of course, you'll have to work harder to build a brand from the ground instead of buying your way into Star Wars or The Jungle Book, or I Robot (was any oversight involved there?)
Its basically an actors' guild, and actors' guilds have always been asshats about what their members do or don't do. I'm sure if the actors want to show up in CC films, they'll do what actors who want to ignore their guilds have always done: be credited with a pseudonym.
It's a time-honored tradition. Don't look too deeply into it.
Even the trolls can't be bothered to read the damned thing. Debian will still be available on all those plaforms, but Debian Stable won't be after Sarge releases.
We're currently facing a group that has already murdered thousands of civilians
Whoa! Better start cracking down on all those beer companies. The nerve of those terroists causing thousands of people to ram vehicles into other objects leading to thousands of deaths a month!
In the US, we call them trials. You know, where the government gets some smart people together, and they come up with this totally incredible thing called "proof" and convince this group of people who do nothing but sit all day and stare at the theatrics that they are, in fact, correct.
Or yeah, we could just throw random people into jails and claim they are obviously terrorists because otherwise they wouldn't have been thrown in jail. That works too.
Can you prove you made a single person's life better, other than your pride of course?
I would say that the reforms instituted after the year-long investigation helped everyone who was in a mental hospital within that jurisdiction. If you don't like how your tax money was spent in protecting the livelihood of the people there, why don't you just stroll on down to the police station and tell them they're all fired.
Since you say we should worry when someone says they are not guily of abuse, what abuses are you guilty of, and against whom?
You missed the point. Its not about individual abuses, though with child abuse rates at their current level you probably could pick someone out of a crowd at random and end up with someone who slapped their child around at least once in their life.
In any institution, it is impossible to perfectly screen every member of that institution, and believe me, the corrupt ones do get through, especially when they want to join for the purpose of abusing that institution. This is why we have hospital orderlies who enjoy beating up feeble people applying to work at psychiatric hospitals where they know they'll get to beat up people who can't fight back. Or why we get corrupt cops who deal the drugs they seize from gangs right back out onto the streets.
So if you have hundreds of thousands of police officers (remember, the usapatriot act is a federal law applied everywhere in this country) and they tell you that not a single person in the collective force has misused law X, where X has clear opportunities for misuse, statistically speaking they are very likely wrong.
And be crushed by the Republicans? After what they did to Texas with their mid-census redistricting, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to destroy you politically. If I was a Democrat, I'd have to be ready to go down in flames, and name some really good Republican names to take with me, and have rock solid evidence to back me up.
Hell, look at the shitstorm the republicans are kicking up over DeLay's TRMPAC's illegal campaign financing. They're doing everything in their power to tar and feather the DA, claiming that he's on an anti-republican witch hunt for attempting to prosecute the misbehavior of DeLay's toy action committee (despite the fact that in his career he has prosecuted about twice as many Democrats as Republicans. What an anti-republican record!)
If it does really allow for Civil Rights violations than the Supreme Court will deal with it. Until the Supreme Court or Federal Courts say it's violating Civil Rights, its not.
That, of course, requires that the violation come first. People who tout the Supreme Court as the "check and balance" its been claimed to be always manage to forget this. It costs money to appeal your way up the ladder. This isn't the stomping grounds of your $20 traffic ticket lawyer, no, you'll be paying a pretty penny for your representation if you can't catch the attention of the EFF, ACLU, NRA, or any other organization that exists to defend those the government picks on.
Once someone wins the contract from the government, they'd pull the exact same shit, because the government knows that if they didn't pay up for whatever "cost overruns" and grant whatever time extensions, NOBODY would finish the job if the current bidder walked off the field, everyone would want to rip it out and start over.
Where I live all road projects are done contractually, and we get crap like this all the time. Near my house there is a 2 mile section of road that has been "under improvements" for about 8 years. It was supposed to be converted from a two lane road to a four lane divided road, and the company doing the work decided to spend a couple of years building 1000 feet of northbound lane, then 1000 feet of southbound lane, alternating back and forth checkerboard style, and that was the temporary road! People had to zigzag back and forth for years while they built the "white squares" of permanent road into the pattern, at which point traffic had to be switched to zigzag back and forth along the permanent road (requiring new temporary patches to be built from segment to segment, as well)
So don't blame bullshit like this on the government. Capitalists are every bit as skilled at extracting every last penny from the taxpayer.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been to a highschool that just got "computers in the classroom" kick while I was there, I've seen what it did to the teaching style.
The whole thing quickly turned into a babysitting device. "Do the math exercises the computer tells you to do while I grade your homework. When you're done, just sit quietly and keep yourself amused." Needless to say the plan lasted about a year before remarkably level-headed people sorted things out and things went back to normal (more-or-less).
Here's a less popular viewpoint, at least amongst professors.
Quit using your class to sell your textbook.
Look, I don't care how many PhD's you have in Math, your personal Calculus textbook is no different than any other. In fact, you didn't even make any stunning breakthroughs in the field of undergraduate integration and derivation, so quit writing a new version every year!
Students wouldn't have to pay $120 a textbook if the professors didn't want it to be that way.
Actually, learning Latin is a pretty good idea. It's a base for many European languages, and the subject object verb structure matches several more languages not based on it (and gets English speakers used to forming and reading sentences in this structure). Having a good Latin vocabulary will let people studying Spanish or French or Italian recognize words that used Latin roots, and the grammar concepts do carry over some.
It will all come down in the end to marketing - do the cinemas think they'll get away with a lower grade product (i.e. crappy quality) - I don't know.
Thats the beauty of switching all of the theaters in the country (nearly) at once. Whichever choice they make, the consumer is stuck with.
The sad part is that over 200 years ago, thousands of people died to create a country here where they hoped to live without the government keeping them from speaking their mind or arresting them and holding them indefinitely.
And 4 years ago thousands of people died to make it a place where citizens can be held indefinitely without a trial. Where "suspicion of terrorism" (without any proof) is enough to have searches of your house without notifying you. Where the books you check out from your library can be used against you.
"most of which aren't even citizens"... do you think the non-citizens being held somehow cancel out the citizens?
My faith in the article was lost long ago, with an average of 1 grammatical error per sentence.
Aside from that, what do you bet that HD-DVD wins despite its low bandwidth and storage space, just so that the movie studios can have their precious control locking so I can't skip through the 20 3 minute long previews before the movie starts?
The judge will hopefully smack this one down. If the company doesn't like the CAN-SPAM act, they should appeal whatever case they lost against it, not go and sue the guy who reported them to the cops.
Well, in this case, theres more hanky-panky going on than my simplified version accounts for, however in the general case like I laid out, GPL and patents can go hand in hand. All you have to do is add to the GPL a line reading "Everyone using or redistributing or modifying this application is hereby granted free and irrevocable license to US Patents #555,555,555, #666,666,666, (and so on) when using, modifying, or distributing this software or any derivatives bearing this license." Since you are permitted to grant additional rights in the GPL license, this should be perfectly alright, since the GPL doesn't permit removing terms from the license.
The interesting thing is that there is (kind of) an alternative to nuclear for generating hydrogen from water.
;) (ok, not quite ;) And you still need power to convert aluminum oxide to aluminum, however that means you can set up nuclear power plants in a few key distribution centers, and ship aluminum out to everyone else for local energy generation, vehicle propulsion, etc.
;)
Aluminum + Water + mercury = Aluminum Oxide + Hydrogen + mercury (take a look at the other reactions on there as well. There are some that don't use dangerous stuff like mercury as a catalyst, though you can do it slower without the mercury.)
The best part? Aluminum Oxide can be recycled straight into the middle of the smelting process (aluminum is extracted from bauxite ore as aluminum hydroxide, which is then converted to aluminum oxide, which is then converted to aluminum.
Of course, it might play havoc with the market for used aluminum cans, but I can just drop the soda cans into my engine
Not sure what the energy density and efficiency for this process is though. Could be that you'd need 1 ton of aluminum to generate enough hydrogen to generate enough energy to propel a 1 ton car
Transport solutions like this solve another problem as well: Hydrogen seepage. Hydrogen can't easily be stored for long periods of time as it seeps through cracks just larger than its own atom, and sealing these cracks is very difficult.
And your company will have to write some code from scratch to make use of their patent.
Thats not strictly true.
(what follows is vastly simplified)
If I write a GPL program called "cherry_picking", and I patent the process within, generalized to "fruit_picking", I can never sue anyone for using cherry_picking, distributing cherry_picking, modifying cherry_picking, etc. However, if someone else appears selling a proprietary program called "apple_picking" that infringes on my "fruit_picking" patent, I can use that patent against them.
Such patents might be a useful defense against corporations "secretly" incorporating GPL'd products into proprietary software. They'd either have to stop because of the patent, or admit to the GPL infringment (still requiring them to either stop or capitulate to the terms of the GPL) to shield themselves from the patent.
With a tilting scroll wheel, its pretty easy to move it up or down OR left or right. With a trackball, probably more than half the users would be frustrated with their inability to roll the ball in a straight line.
Ah, now I see, I was just confused. I thought you were arguing that the Creative Commons copyright was a terrible license because it didn't disclaim your liability, yet let everyone else do whatever the hell they wanted with your work, and if 10 people's copies down the line someone's player crashes, you could be sued because you wrote the original song.
Of course if you personally damage someone else you're liable, I wasn't arguing that, I was just arguing against what I thought you were arguing for.
Thanks for clearing that up.
We're talking about the public domain with regards to copyright, in which case public domain as public (physical) property doesn't enter into the picture. I'd hate to be sued because some kid slipped in the public park 15 miles from here that I've never been to, but everyone is liable for because its owned by "the people".
But wait, what were we arguing about again? I thougt it was somethign about how if I made a song and a copy of that song blew up your player, that was my fault. Somewhere there was a disconnect. Care to point it out for me? Remember, just because "This Land is Your Land" is in the public domain doesn't mean that every mp3 of the song now existing is made by the now long dead author of the original. If an mp3 of "This Land is Your Land" crashes your ipod, regarless of "nefarious copying" or not, you intend to dig up the author's grave and drag the skeleton to court?
Regardless of "physical" embodiment (hint, even before Teh Intarweb, live performances were copyrighted even if they were never set to any media) the core of the matter does not change. The copyright exists for the tune of the song, the words of the song, and the performance of the song (separately, even! just ask ASCAP and BMI!). If you write the Greatest Novel Ever, copyright it, then someone burns the original, you still own the copyright to the Greatest Novel Ever, even if you have to beg the copyright office to return the copy of it you submitted to them for registration back so you can scribble it on the backs of napkins to get it published. It's not the paper, its the words.
Forwards this time!
No, copyright does not cover the "idea" which your song expressed, it covers the exact embodiment of your song. When I convert your song to another embodiment I'm making a derivative work of your embodiment, which is why it is also covered by your copyright.
The copyright isn't about the paper I put ink on or the canvas I painted on or the floppy disk I saved my thesis on then stapled to the submission form. It is about the text in the floppy, the image on the canvas that matters. Your logic is flawed (calling a copy in a different format "derivative work" indeed. The term is applied to works where you add some small value such as a translation or typesetting or performance or additional text or notes, where the original work makes up a basis for the derivative too large to dismiss as fair use or quoting. Ripping your CD to mp3s adds no literary or other artistic merit to the work, it simply copies it to newer, more convenient "paper" with "better" ink) yet the outcome of your thought process is still valid: the song/picture/movie/document is still copyrighted.
Yes, you are responsible for the damage an mp3 does to my equipment.
So if you download an Aerosmith mp3 from kazaa, and your ipod freezes up, you're going to sue Aerosmith? You ignore the fact that beyond my song being present, there is no control over the container with certain CC licenses that allow re-encoding or re-distributing (hell, with "All Rights Reserved" copyright in effect, they still can't crush all illegal copying. Are you going to go to court and insist that you thought the mp3 was an authorized Aerosmith good being given away by Aerosmith for free because copying is illegal so therefore the mp3 must be legal?). If A records a song, B re-encodes it in a malicious format and sends it to you, you can try suing A, but the judge will call you to the bench, slap you, tell you to sue B, and dismiss the case. If you somehow win, A will appeal, and appleals court judges slap harder.
present something as factually correct when it is not you open yourself up to litigation if your claims cause damage.
Yet there are millions of idiots in this world all claiming things that are flagrantly, even intentionally incorrect. Yet aside from claiming incorrect things about someone (ie, libel or slander) I don't see a lot of lawsuits over how Jane told Billy she had a headache that night but was really just turned off by the fact that he ate a garlic sandwitch after dinner. If I have a page reading "On Formally Decidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems" consisting of a thesis that at every turn attempts to disprove Godel's law, with no text beyond the title and the body of the thesis and a CC license at the bottom, with no other statement indicating that in reality, I stapled my Mathematics PhD to my application form and failed to get my Doctorate, can you sue me for that? Even though I make no claims claiming I am a math whiz? Does the CC license matter? What if I marked it "All Rights Reserved"?
A formular for making styrofoam cups is indeed an invention Yes, and I explicitly stated that inventions are separate, as they can blow up and kill people. Shakespeare does not blow up and kill people, no matter how long you cook it. Brittney Spears does not blow up and kill people.
Mona Lisa secretly blows up when noone is looking, the rest of the time she smirks about what she's getting away with. The formula for TNT can be used to blow up and kill people. See the difference? Literary work, musical work, artistic work, invention.
And now we're on rat poison on a playground which has nothing to do with copyright, and even less to do with creative commons licenses for copyrighted works.
a formular for making styrofoam cups is an invention.
If you put an encyclopedia entry in the public domain and I fail my history lesson as a result I can sue you for damages. For the crime of being wrong? I can sue you for damages because the color of your tie offended me and caused my widdle heart to go pitter-patter, but I'd lose. And so would you.
Blah, if you put an mp3 in the public domain and it trashes my mp3 player I can sue you for damages. Hofstadter posits in one of his essays (published either in Godel Escher Bach or Metamagical Themas, read them both, they're very good) that it would be possible for me to analyze the construction of your music player and develop a song specifically designed to destroy it. Additionally, if you build a machine that analyzed my song and then built a machine immune to the player-smashing effects of my song, that it would be possible to analyze the construction of THAT player-building machine to create a song that would be improperly analyzed by your music-analyzer, resulting it in producing a machine which was not, in fact, immune to the player-breaking effect of my song, and upon attempting to play it would shatter into a million pieces. And so on.
What was the point of that? Not much. However, the "mp3" is NOT whats covered under the Creative Commons license. The song itself is. If I designed a song whose melodies and frequencies were designed to destroy piezoelectric speakers, THAT would be a clear case of damage caused by my song. If it was the mp3 itself that caused the damage, it would be due to the encoders fault (software) or the decoders fault (again software, even if disguised as hardware). Or even your fault (guess you should have let the download finish before getting too impatient and cutting the torrent off at 50% to see what it sounded like)
That makes sense. Think about what kind of damages the copywritten material CC is designed to cover can cause. Unlike an invention, it can't blow up and kill anyone. Unlike software it can't erase your harddrive.
Instead, damages for copyright are generally plagarism, libel, various hate-speech laws. I'd like to see you try license away your responsibility for the content you put out from these kind of things.
You've got to play by certain rules or rights holders revoke permissions or simply send over their Bucket o' Lawyers to cut you off at the knees.
Or you could come up with your own new characters and go from there, with no licenses, no lawyers, no oversight. Of course, you'll have to work harder to build a brand from the ground instead of buying your way into Star Wars or The Jungle Book, or I Robot (was any oversight involved there?)
Its basically an actors' guild, and actors' guilds have always been asshats about what their members do or don't do. I'm sure if the actors want to show up in CC films, they'll do what actors who want to ignore their guilds have always done: be credited with a pseudonym.
It's a time-honored tradition. Don't look too deeply into it.
Even the trolls can't be bothered to read the damned thing. Debian will still be available on all those plaforms, but Debian Stable won't be after Sarge releases.
If this proposal passes.
We're currently facing a group that has already murdered thousands of civilians
Whoa! Better start cracking down on all those beer companies. The nerve of those terroists causing thousands of people to ram vehicles into other objects leading to thousands of deaths a month!
How can we possibly make everyone happy?
In the US, we call them trials. You know, where the government gets some smart people together, and they come up with this totally incredible thing called "proof" and convince this group of people who do nothing but sit all day and stare at the theatrics that they are, in fact, correct.
Or yeah, we could just throw random people into jails and claim they are obviously terrorists because otherwise they wouldn't have been thrown in jail. That works too.
Can you prove you made a single person's life better, other than your pride of course?
I would say that the reforms instituted after the year-long investigation helped everyone who was in a mental hospital within that jurisdiction. If you don't like how your tax money was spent in protecting the livelihood of the people there, why don't you just stroll on down to the police station and tell them they're all fired.
Since you say we should worry when someone says they are not guily of abuse, what abuses are you guilty of, and against whom?
You missed the point. Its not about individual abuses, though with child abuse rates at their current level you probably could pick someone out of a crowd at random and end up with someone who slapped their child around at least once in their life.
In any institution, it is impossible to perfectly screen every member of that institution, and believe me, the corrupt ones do get through, especially when they want to join for the purpose of abusing that institution. This is why we have hospital orderlies who enjoy beating up feeble people applying to work at psychiatric hospitals where they know they'll get to beat up people who can't fight back. Or why we get corrupt cops who deal the drugs they seize from gangs right back out onto the streets.
So if you have hundreds of thousands of police officers (remember, the usapatriot act is a federal law applied everywhere in this country) and they tell you that not a single person in the collective force has misused law X, where X has clear opportunities for misuse, statistically speaking they are very likely wrong.
And be crushed by the Republicans? After what they did to Texas with their mid-census redistricting, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to destroy you politically. If I was a Democrat, I'd have to be ready to go down in flames, and name some really good Republican names to take with me, and have rock solid evidence to back me up.
Hell, look at the shitstorm the republicans are kicking up over DeLay's TRMPAC's illegal campaign financing. They're doing everything in their power to tar and feather the DA, claiming that he's on an anti-republican witch hunt for attempting to prosecute the misbehavior of DeLay's toy action committee (despite the fact that in his career he has prosecuted about twice as many Democrats as Republicans. What an anti-republican record!)
If it does really allow for Civil Rights violations than the Supreme Court will deal with it. Until the Supreme Court or Federal Courts say it's violating Civil Rights, its not.
That, of course, requires that the violation come first. People who tout the Supreme Court as the "check and balance" its been claimed to be always manage to forget this. It costs money to appeal your way up the ladder. This isn't the stomping grounds of your $20 traffic ticket lawyer, no, you'll be paying a pretty penny for your representation if you can't catch the attention of the EFF, ACLU, NRA, or any other organization that exists to defend those the government picks on.
Not to mention that once the courts rule on something, it has no explicit power to enforce its ruling. What punishment does the DoJ face for ignoring the federal court ruling a few days ago that Jose Padilla, as a Citizen of this country, must be given a speedy trial, and most importantly, be charged with a crime?
The Supreme Court is NOT the solution to Congress's and the executive branch's stupidity and/or malice. The Supreme Court already ruled on Padilla's case. Their majority statement? "You can't sue the government for imprisoning you for years without a trial, you have to sue the Commander." What a copout!
What rock have you been living under?
Once someone wins the contract from the government, they'd pull the exact same shit, because the government knows that if they didn't pay up for whatever "cost overruns" and grant whatever time extensions, NOBODY would finish the job if the current bidder walked off the field, everyone would want to rip it out and start over.
Where I live all road projects are done contractually, and we get crap like this all the time. Near my house there is a 2 mile section of road that has been "under improvements" for about 8 years. It was supposed to be converted from a two lane road to a four lane divided road, and the company doing the work decided to spend a couple of years building 1000 feet of northbound lane, then 1000 feet of southbound lane, alternating back and forth checkerboard style, and that was the temporary road! People had to zigzag back and forth for years while they built the "white squares" of permanent road into the pattern, at which point traffic had to be switched to zigzag back and forth along the permanent road (requiring new temporary patches to be built from segment to segment, as well)
So don't blame bullshit like this on the government. Capitalists are every bit as skilled at extracting every last penny from the taxpayer.