I just keep thinking about how this was supposed to be a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (or vice versa?)
It was partly as a counter-point to Starship Troopers. I think it went too far in the other direction and got a little stupid. Being an actual combat vet myself, I can say that the training and doctrine portrayed in ST was a hell of a lot more realistic that TFW. TFW was more like a snide caricature of what anti-war people think military training and tactics are like. And topping it off, TFW bizarrely had only "genius IQ" types being conscripted, which is completely asinine. Geniuses don't make good soldiers... at all. Still, TFW was an interesting read once you got past the silly axe-grinding to the story.
I was fine with the Arial example, but perhaps Helvetica would be a better choice. Still boring enough for income tax forms and I think still commonly installed on systems.
Actually, Helvetica isn't commonly installed in systems because Helvetica is something you have to buy. That's why Arial is so widespread. Microsoft wanted a Helvetica, but didn't want the Helvetica licensing fee. I found this out last year when I was using Photoshop to forge a city parking placard* at work. The typeface is Helvetica, and no one anywhere at my worksite had it. I had to go on Pirate Bay to find it.
* Exempts you from posted limits, including meters and school zones. I work for a very large school district. The city offers us placards, but the pointy-haired bosses decreed "bottom-level techs shall not be allowed to apply for placards, only managers", despite the fact that managers never leave the office, while techs are the ones trying to park near schools in a big city with predatory parking enforcement. So naturally I concluded that a color laser printer + a sample placard + a couple hours in Photoshop was the best solution.
I really hope that this Pirate party gets elected to power in Sweden and abolish the copyright laws. The economic chaos that would ensue and the ridicule that that country would be subjected to worldwide would hopefully make even the most pea brained anti-copyright wannabe crusader realize what a stupid and childish idea that is.
Actually, what's childish is your over-the-top strawman argument. If you'd bothered to check out their web site, you'd see that they're for copyright reform, not abolition. Go back and study your subject, ignorant child.
among = between, and there's really no issue. Regardless of what laws congress passes, states cannot charge sales tax on interstate commerce. Congress can pass its own uniform sales tax, and even give the proceeds back to the states however it likes, but it can't just pass a law and hand over its constitutionally enumerated power over interstate commerce. Can congress pass a law saying congressional budgets will be passed by American Idol style SMS voting at the state level, rather than a floor vote as stipulated by the constitution? No. They have to have the floor vote, and any attempt to change that by any means other than a constitutional amendment would be unconstitutional. It's pretty simple, really.
Simple solution to this is find another business. You are not in the computer business, you are in the shipping / moving business if that is where you have to charge.
That's his entire point, numbnuts. If what little margin there is gets eaten by this tax, then an entire swathe of the retail channel is just going to close up and go sell aluminum siding door to door or whatever. This isn't going to raise much in the way of tax money, but rather is just going to limit our purchase options to a few big retailers, most of them local.
Satellites in a predictable orbit are much easier to shoot down than the Blackbird (it was done last by an F-15 in 1985). For that reason alone, I am sure the SR-71's that are 'mothballed' are far from retired.
The real problem with satellites is that the predictable orbit allows the enemy to hide his shit when they're overhead.
And I think it more likely that the SR-71 is retired, and that there is "something else" available. The fact that all the airframes are accounted for and only the few NASA airframes are airworthy pretty much makes it unlikely they're still being used. If you look at the history of the multiple retirements of the SR-71 at the AIr Force's request, it becomes fairly obvious that there is something else. All the noise about how "we have no replacement" seems to come from congressmen, who despite their hamfisted attempt to insert themselves into the "classified" military budget process, are really a bunch of dumbass rubes who would spill the beans, so it's unsurprising the DoD has done what they could to keep them out of the loop.
They're fine in the morning, but by afternoon they're starting to lose their calibration
How is it that my HTC phone's touch screen calibration remains dead-on for years of continuous use without a recalibration, yet their voting machine "drifts" over the course of a single day? Is simple touch screen technology not mature yet?
Isn't that demand based on some theory of "collateral" and cumulative damage caused by someone sharing a media file? In other words, you share the file, which thousands of other people receive for free and thus don't pay to own, so YOU are responsible for the (theoretical/estimated) cumulative loss of profit?
Yes, but that's part of why it's bullshit. You can't make one person pay for the transgressions of 100 others. That's the canonical definition of "scapegoating", and it has no place in law.
You should hope you're wrong. The good thing about the global warming scare, true or false, is it gives the masses of dumb people some kind of tangible cost in the near future for their use of an unsustainable and unhealthy energy policy.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still a bad idea, particularly when the mechanism being employed is government regulation. Allowing that sort of behavior opens the door to all kinds of stupid crap. Next thing you know, we'll have rules restricting us to arbitrarily small quantities of liquid on airplanes, when the supposed danger from them was completely imaginary.
Is that 'greater civil right' a sufficient excuse for me to kill you and harvest your organs?
No, because appropriating an orphaned work is not the same as taking a human life--- your argument is a strawman. I know you were trying to create an analogous situation, but by now you should have realized that when you jump from civil law to murder/manslaughter, you're jumping to a completely different train. You're behaving like one of those idiots who asks "if it's OK to spank your child, I guess it's OK for me to shoot my kids too, if they make me mad".
the man is concerned about Google being the exclusive source of access to these books
The man is free to scan all the books in his and everyone else's library and come to a similar settlement with the author's guild. There's no exclusivity here, other than the fact that few organizations have the resources to devote to the project. I'm not sure what he's complaining about anyway. There's already no way to access these books other than in out of print dead-tree format, and with no way of contacting the rights holders, no chance of them coming back into print any other way. Google is actually adding a means of access. Perhaps he is annoyed that he and his ilk are no longer the sole source for the information in those works?
The way to go is incredibely hard : to encourage nations to abandon their nuclear programs, like Libya did.
I think Libya really is a special case. It's a military dictatorship with a leader who, through some unknown mechanism (loss of soviet sponsorship? meditation? reading Lee Iacocca's biography?) has turned from a saber rattling nut into a reasonable person. Heck, Muammar Qaddafi even had a really good editorial in the NY Times recently about the religious madness that underlies the Israel-Palestine mess.
first of all, the taliban you yanks are hunting now are the same taliban you yanks were funding and calling heroes and freedom fighters 25 years ago.
So what? So were the "Northern Alliance" groups that helped the US kick the Taliban out of Kabul. Allegiances shift over time. The world is not static.
second, thanks to your intervention in yugoslavia, albanian cutthroats have murdered lots of serbs and tried to invade macedonia.
Not that it excuses the albanians' behavior, but who started murdering whom? Serbs murdered about the same number of albanians in the first place. All those fuckers have been at each others' throats for centuries. At some point you just have to throw up your hands and say "fine, kill each other".
third, not american military leadership has prevented the nazis, the russians have. americans preferred to sit on their collective arses until it was sure that russians would win the war and then they went in to steal the laurels.
Of course the aid sent to the soviets by the US basically kept them in the game . Seems more like smart strategy than a plan to "steal the laurels". Nobody really conducts a war with the history books in mind. The western front does indeed get all the glory, while the eastern front is spoken of only in hushed whispers. Probably has something to do with the fact that the Germans vs the Russians was essentially a case of brutal inhumanity vs brutal inhumanity. It's extremely difficult to laud the real-life heroism of Soviet troops when their commanders were sending them to the front unarmed and saying "pick up a rifle from a dead man"; having a second line of armed men at the rear whose sole purpose was to shoot any of their front line comrades who dared retreat; the murdering and enslavement of German POWs--- none of that stuff makes for a good story. It tends to look like a crocodile fighting a tiger: no matter who loses, the rest of us win.
not to mention all other crazy dicatorships you you yanks funded.
The funny thing about "funded" dictatorships is that they only seem to happen in places where they're already prone to dictatorships. The only thing the "funding" seemed to do is reduce the amount of "churn".
because with friends like you, who needs enemies?
It's all in the eye of the beholder. South Korea came out ahead. So did Kuwait. Likewise France and the UK.
Yup - since they themselves submitted an estimate of the value of the copyright that should give him a strong case. I'd think that a lot of lawyers would take something like this on contingency - we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
Don't forget that they also probably have detailed records of how much money they've collected selling his work in violation of copyright. He may have a right to that money as well.
And second, typing "jai" instead of "joi" appears to be a simple typo
What are editors for, if not correcting typos? Besides, it's been fairly solidly established that the "editors" at slashdot are nothing of the sort, but rather are analogous to trained chimps that have learned to click a "publish to front page" button.
They found like 4 dead birds in the field where they were off and around 8 dead birds where they were on. So each half of the farm might kill an extra 4 birds a month versus having standing towers. That's 96 birds a year for a very large windfarm.
If you can find a way to bring these numbers up by an order of magnitude and have the birds largely be mockingbirds, I would be willing to pay you a lot of money.
Oh, start your little nation, my friends and I will simply take a few AR15s and shoot any pasty-geek clutching "Atlas Shrugged" and take all your shit.
The funny thing about your little fantasy is that it's even more unrealistic than the utopian libertarian society you think you and your gang would be able to loot. A lot of libertarian geeks are like me: military veterans with combat experience. I already know what a firefight is like. Do you? And even if you do, I guarantee I'd put up a better fight than a "pasty-geek". I'd say your odds of survival would be no better than 60-40 (defenders tend to have the advantage). Still sound like a good time?
Nah, nutjobs tend to end up trespassing, and are thereby eliminated through gunfire. Thing is, simply declaring oneself a libertarian doesn't make it so. If they couldn't walk the walk, they wouldn't last long.
Autogiro boats can't harness the power of the wind to counter the force of the wind pushing them and stay in a fixed position, much less generate electrical power on top of it.
Citing small experimental reactors that were built with poor containment in the 50's is like citing the crash of a Wright Flyer or a Bell X-1 as evidence that US air travel is unsafe.
They go after people for taking non-informative pictures of miscellaneous microwave antennas and a big repeater array? Un-fucking-likely.
There's no access to those areas, but only because that's where the city of LA has a number of fire, police, and agency radio repeaters. There's an emergency communications bunker up there, but it's not the governor's, it's the city's--- and it's hardly secret.
Slashdot Mirror
"Eclipse" is when the Sun is blocked/hidden/occulted
I think you mean occluded. "occulted" is when you wave a dead chicken at it at midnight.
I just keep thinking about how this was supposed to be a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (or vice versa?)
It was partly as a counter-point to Starship Troopers. I think it went too far in the other direction and got a little stupid. Being an actual combat vet myself, I can say that the training and doctrine portrayed in ST was a hell of a lot more realistic that TFW. TFW was more like a snide caricature of what anti-war people think military training and tactics are like. And topping it off, TFW bizarrely had only "genius IQ" types being conscripted, which is completely asinine. Geniuses don't make good soldiers... at all. Still, TFW was an interesting read once you got past the silly axe-grinding to the story.
I was fine with the Arial example, but perhaps Helvetica would be a better choice. Still boring enough for income tax forms and I think still commonly installed on systems.
Actually, Helvetica isn't commonly installed in systems because Helvetica is something you have to buy. That's why Arial is so widespread. Microsoft wanted a Helvetica, but didn't want the Helvetica licensing fee. I found this out last year when I was using Photoshop to forge a city parking placard* at work. The typeface is Helvetica, and no one anywhere at my worksite had it. I had to go on Pirate Bay to find it.
* Exempts you from posted limits, including meters and school zones. I work for a very large school district. The city offers us placards, but the pointy-haired bosses decreed "bottom-level techs shall not be allowed to apply for placards, only managers", despite the fact that managers never leave the office, while techs are the ones trying to park near schools in a big city with predatory parking enforcement. So naturally I concluded that a color laser printer + a sample placard + a couple hours in Photoshop was the best solution.
ust FYI, you can get 7 segment display like devices that can display letters
Do you even know what "7 segment" means?
hint: count the number of lines in the following
I really hope that this Pirate party gets elected to power in Sweden and abolish the copyright laws. The economic chaos that would ensue and the ridicule that that country would be subjected to worldwide would hopefully make even the most pea brained anti-copyright wannabe crusader realize what a stupid and childish idea that is.
Actually, what's childish is your over-the-top strawman argument. If you'd bothered to check out their web site, you'd see that they're for copyright reform, not abolition. Go back and study your subject, ignorant child.
Still not illegal. Have you never been to the Las Vegas strip? The "escort service" fliers are all over the place.
among = between, and there's really no issue. Regardless of what laws congress passes, states cannot charge sales tax on interstate commerce. Congress can pass its own uniform sales tax, and even give the proceeds back to the states however it likes, but it can't just pass a law and hand over its constitutionally enumerated power over interstate commerce. Can congress pass a law saying congressional budgets will be passed by American Idol style SMS voting at the state level, rather than a floor vote as stipulated by the constitution? No. They have to have the floor vote, and any attempt to change that by any means other than a constitutional amendment would be unconstitutional. It's pretty simple, really.
Simple solution to this is find another business. You are not in the computer business, you are in the shipping / moving business if that is where you have to charge.
That's his entire point, numbnuts. If what little margin there is gets eaten by this tax, then an entire swathe of the retail channel is just going to close up and go sell aluminum siding door to door or whatever. This isn't going to raise much in the way of tax money, but rather is just going to limit our purchase options to a few big retailers, most of them local.
Satellites in a predictable orbit are much easier to shoot down than the Blackbird (it was done last by an F-15 in 1985). For that reason alone, I am sure the SR-71's that are 'mothballed' are far from retired.
The real problem with satellites is that the predictable orbit allows the enemy to hide his shit when they're overhead.
And I think it more likely that the SR-71 is retired, and that there is "something else" available. The fact that all the airframes are accounted for and only the few NASA airframes are airworthy pretty much makes it unlikely they're still being used. If you look at the history of the multiple retirements of the SR-71 at the AIr Force's request, it becomes fairly obvious that there is something else. All the noise about how "we have no replacement" seems to come from congressmen, who despite their hamfisted attempt to insert themselves into the "classified" military budget process, are really a bunch of dumbass rubes who would spill the beans, so it's unsurprising the DoD has done what they could to keep them out of the loop.
They're fine in the morning, but by afternoon they're starting to lose their calibration
How is it that my HTC phone's touch screen calibration remains dead-on for years of continuous use without a recalibration, yet their voting machine "drifts" over the course of a single day? Is simple touch screen technology not mature yet?
Isn't that demand based on some theory of "collateral" and cumulative damage caused by someone sharing a media file? In other words, you share the file, which thousands of other people receive for free and thus don't pay to own, so YOU are responsible for the (theoretical/estimated) cumulative loss of profit?
Yes, but that's part of why it's bullshit. You can't make one person pay for the transgressions of 100 others. That's the canonical definition of "scapegoating", and it has no place in law.
You should hope you're wrong. The good thing about the global warming scare, true or false, is it gives the masses of dumb people some kind of tangible cost in the near future for their use of an unsustainable and unhealthy energy policy.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still a bad idea, particularly when the mechanism being employed is government regulation. Allowing that sort of behavior opens the door to all kinds of stupid crap. Next thing you know, we'll have rules restricting us to arbitrarily small quantities of liquid on airplanes, when the supposed danger from them was completely imaginary.
Also, the plagiarist should be locked in a basement room, we should throw away the key, then brick up the doorway, then throw away the bricklayer.
Is that 'greater civil right' a sufficient excuse for me to kill you and harvest your organs?
No, because appropriating an orphaned work is not the same as taking a human life--- your argument is a strawman. I know you were trying to create an analogous situation, but by now you should have realized that when you jump from civil law to murder/manslaughter, you're jumping to a completely different train. You're behaving like one of those idiots who asks "if it's OK to spank your child, I guess it's OK for me to shoot my kids too, if they make me mad".
the man is concerned about Google being the exclusive source of access to these books
The man is free to scan all the books in his and everyone else's library and come to a similar settlement with the author's guild. There's no exclusivity here, other than the fact that few organizations have the resources to devote to the project. I'm not sure what he's complaining about anyway. There's already no way to access these books other than in out of print dead-tree format, and with no way of contacting the rights holders, no chance of them coming back into print any other way. Google is actually adding a means of access. Perhaps he is annoyed that he and his ilk are no longer the sole source for the information in those works?
The way to go is incredibely hard : to encourage nations to abandon their nuclear programs, like Libya did.
I think Libya really is a special case. It's a military dictatorship with a leader who, through some unknown mechanism (loss of soviet sponsorship? meditation? reading Lee Iacocca's biography?) has turned from a saber rattling nut into a reasonable person. Heck, Muammar Qaddafi even had a really good editorial in the NY Times recently about the religious madness that underlies the Israel-Palestine mess.
first of all, the taliban you yanks are hunting now are the same taliban you yanks were funding and calling heroes and freedom fighters 25 years ago.
So what? So were the "Northern Alliance" groups that helped the US kick the Taliban out of Kabul. Allegiances shift over time. The world is not static.
second, thanks to your intervention in yugoslavia, albanian cutthroats have murdered lots of serbs and tried to invade macedonia.
Not that it excuses the albanians' behavior, but who started murdering whom? Serbs murdered about the same number of albanians in the first place. All those fuckers have been at each others' throats for centuries. At some point you just have to throw up your hands and say "fine, kill each other".
third, not american military leadership has prevented the nazis, the russians have. americans preferred to sit on their collective arses until it was sure that russians would win the war and then they went in to steal the laurels.
Of course the aid sent to the soviets by the US basically kept them in the game . Seems more like smart strategy than a plan to "steal the laurels". Nobody really conducts a war with the history books in mind. The western front does indeed get all the glory, while the eastern front is spoken of only in hushed whispers. Probably has something to do with the fact that the Germans vs the Russians was essentially a case of brutal inhumanity vs brutal inhumanity. It's extremely difficult to laud the real-life heroism of Soviet troops when their commanders were sending them to the front unarmed and saying "pick up a rifle from a dead man"; having a second line of armed men at the rear whose sole purpose was to shoot any of their front line comrades who dared retreat; the murdering and enslavement of German POWs--- none of that stuff makes for a good story. It tends to look like a crocodile fighting a tiger: no matter who loses, the rest of us win.
not to mention all other crazy dicatorships you you yanks funded.
The funny thing about "funded" dictatorships is that they only seem to happen in places where they're already prone to dictatorships. The only thing the "funding" seemed to do is reduce the amount of "churn".
because with friends like you, who needs enemies?
It's all in the eye of the beholder. South Korea came out ahead. So did Kuwait. Likewise France and the UK.
Yup - since they themselves submitted an estimate of the value of the copyright that should give him a strong case. I'd think that a lot of lawyers would take something like this on contingency - we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
Don't forget that they also probably have detailed records of how much money they've collected selling his work in violation of copyright. He may have a right to that money as well.
And second, typing "jai" instead of "joi" appears to be a simple typo
What are editors for, if not correcting typos? Besides, it's been fairly solidly established that the "editors" at slashdot are nothing of the sort, but rather are analogous to trained chimps that have learned to click a "publish to front page" button.
They found like 4 dead birds in the field where they were off and around 8 dead birds where they were on. So each half of the farm might kill an extra 4 birds a month versus having standing towers. That's 96 birds a year for a very large windfarm.
If you can find a way to bring these numbers up by an order of magnitude and have the birds largely be mockingbirds, I would be willing to pay you a lot of money.
Oh, start your little nation, my friends and I will simply take a few AR15s and shoot any pasty-geek clutching "Atlas Shrugged" and take all your shit.
The funny thing about your little fantasy is that it's even more unrealistic than the utopian libertarian society you think you and your gang would be able to loot. A lot of libertarian geeks are like me: military veterans with combat experience. I already know what a firefight is like. Do you? And even if you do, I guarantee I'd put up a better fight than a "pasty-geek". I'd say your odds of survival would be no better than 60-40 (defenders tend to have the advantage). Still sound like a good time?
Nah, nutjobs tend to end up trespassing, and are thereby eliminated through gunfire. Thing is, simply declaring oneself a libertarian doesn't make it so. If they couldn't walk the walk, they wouldn't last long.
Autogiro boats can't harness the power of the wind to counter the force of the wind pushing them and stay in a fixed position, much less generate electrical power on top of it.
Citing small experimental reactors that were built with poor containment in the 50's is like citing the crash of a Wright Flyer or a Bell X-1 as evidence that US air travel is unsafe.
They go after people for taking non-informative pictures of miscellaneous microwave antennas and a big repeater array? Un-fucking-likely.
There's no access to those areas, but only because that's where the city of LA has a number of fire, police, and agency radio repeaters. There's an emergency communications bunker up there, but it's not the governor's, it's the city's--- and it's hardly secret.