Actually, if you want the *real* rationale, allowing interfaces to be copyrighted would be a violation of the purpose and intents of copyright. Interfaces are *functional*, not expressive. If anything should cover them it's patents, not copyrights.
I've always thought this distinction is without a difference, because how do you *describe* an implementation. It can only be done in abstract language, at which point it *is* an idea.
"Have a machine first do A, then do B, then do C". That's an idea. That's all it can ever be. That's all patents can do, protect ideas.
If you want to say that patents should only cover exact copies of a specific implementation, fine, but just call for all patents to be repealed in that case, because that's useless.
Actually, the *reports* of it happening to Toyotas occurred more often. However, the frequency of those reports is highly correlated to the news reports of the problem with a time offset that implies the causality is news->reports rather than the other way around.
This problem *does* occur with considerable regularity to all brands. Some get attention at some times more than others, that's about all you can say.
I think it's a very much more interesting question to ask what technologies we *can't* replicate in modern times, vs. ones that have just become obsolete.
Examples include: Stradivarius violins, Greek Fire, Damascus steel, etc.
Then there's another category of technologies where we could theoretically do it, but we've lost the necessary tools and designs, and it would take a big research project that probably will never happen because there are better solutions now. E.g. the Saturn V rocket.
Umm, guys... *even* if this mechanism didn't have all the problems described, there's still *energy* conservation. The energy to create those particle pairs *still* would have had to come from a terrestrial source (or extracted from a non-terrestrial source that would have otherwise increased the mass of the Earth absent this behavior).
Antimatter doesn't have negative mass. *If* the positrons *were* able to escape, that would imply that the world would become *less* massive, not more. Because some of its mass escaped into space. This is no different than if some regular matter were fired out into space.
Analogously, Hawking radiation makes black holes *less* massive, not more.
Is anyone else skeptical that this experiment was *really* designed and performed by 8 year olds, and the paper written entirely by them?
I've met a lot of 8 year olds. Indeed, I've tutored a lot of them on science fair projects. I've also seen a *lot* of examples where motivated teachers and parents, ahem, "encourage" them a bit more than is strictly in accordance with the rules.
ISPs can't have it both ways. Either they get to control the data they are transporting based on content, *or* they can have the safe harbor legal provisions available to common carriers.
It's *logically inconsistent* for them to have both. If they control it, they are partly liable... that's a major part of the legal definition of the term.
If you make them liable for the data they transport if they control the data based on content, I can guarantee this whole net neutrality problem will go away. Regulations aren't necessary. Holding people accountable for their actions is. No free passes!
The problem isn't that ISPs want to filter content, it's that they want to filter content and still have common carrier safe harbor provisions that relieve them of all liability for the content they are controlling.
You can't have it both ways (well, logically, at least... of course ISPs may get it both ways, but they shouldn't). If you don't want to be responsible for content, you can't filter on content.
If this were made legally clear, I doubt many ISPs would touch content filtering with a 10' pole. They *want* freedom from liability.
They really should just have called this a tax in the first place, because it's indistinguishable from one. Raise taxes by $750 on everyone and provide a $750 tax credit for showing proof of insurance. Done. 16th Amendment.
The fact that it had to be disguised as a "penalty" or "fee" just shows yet again what incredible wimps the Democrats are in standing up to Republican bullying.
For me the question is one of time. I don't mess around with websites that waste my time. It takes me maybe 5-10 seconds to decode and type in a ReCaptcha, for example. Less for some other flavors.
If the video shows the text in the first few seconds, I guess I wouldn't have a problem with that, but somehow I doubt that will happen.
I also doubt that it would be very hard to write a tool that breaks these, unless they go to some almost as hard to decipher text, which will just be even harder on a video background.
FWIW, that's 3 gallons ~= 13.5kg of gasoline plus approximately 38kg of *oxygen* for the same amount of energy.
The energy density of gasoline+oxygen is only about 2.25 times that of TNT. Which is still impressive.
It is true that the car only has to "hold" the gasoline. But it's just a bit misleading to reference the "energy equivalence" of TNT and gasoline this way.
I think this entire discussion is unnecessary, and should be replaced by a different one: why do ISPs think they can filter data based on content and then have absolutely no responsibility for the content that flows on their network. That's not only unfair it's logically absurd.
Make it clear that they can filter all the data they want, but that they are therefore liable for damages caused by the data they carry and you will have net neutrality within a hour.
ISPs should *want desperately* to have common carrier status... the fact that this is even an argument only shows how much the political process has been twisted.
Yeah, it would have been *much* simpler and avoided most of this problem if Congress had just passed this as a new tax... with a corresponding tax credit if you have health insurance. The Constitution gives the federal government the power to tax income however derived without regard to a census or other enumeration.
The problem I have with this kind of logic is that phrase "who is a citizen of your society". What the hell does that matter as far as compassion goes? Some kids in Africa are starving, and you have more than you need, why is that?
And why is it *any* different?
The only coherent answers I've ever gotten devolve to racism and/or tribalism.
None of this means anything unless you know the relative priorities assigned to these tasks.
If there are 1000 agents assigned to missing persons, and they reduced that to 995 by having those 5 people work on copyright, it's nonsense to say that they prioritize copyright over missing people. Missing people are still a much much larger priority than copyright in that case.
Only if they have more resources working on copyright enforcement than missing persons would it make any sense at all to say they're prioritizing the former over the latter.
Look at it this way, they must have a top priority (though it's possible there might be ties)... unless they have every single person at the FBI working on that top priority, this fallacious reasoning would deduce that the top priority is lower than the next highest priority. That's clearly nonsense.
This was true in the early days of the internet, but these days the amount of money pumped into building the infrastructure by private parties *far* exceeds any money the government has every put into it. Generally they even have done it using easements they already had for other reasons, so even that's not a particularly good argument.
Still, this whole thing is dumb. ISPs should be clamoring for the inherent protection from liability they would get by *not* discriminating by content the data that traverses their network. You control it, you're (at least partially) liable for it. Period.
All of these legal tricks strike me as incredibly unnecessary and vastly more complicated than they need to be.
It is prima facie obvious that if ISPs control the data that goes over their pipes in *any way* based on the content then they are at least partially liable for the content of that data, and should be exposed to lawsuits over it.
They seem to want to get all the benefits of being a common carrier without suffering any of the logically necessary consequences of that.
We shouldn't *need* to enact net neutrality. The ISPs should be rushing to insist on it. You just have to lay out the liability in a form everyone can understand.
Am I the only one that misread the headline and expected to see an announcement that Rolls Royce had won a bid to build a Mars rover for the first time?
Real books don't work the way this particular gesture does. Drawing your finger down the right edge of a book doesn't cause a bunch of pages to flip over to the other side progressively, nor do the pages become transparent.
There may be (probably is?) prior art for this invention, but books are not it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you want the *real* rationale, allowing interfaces to be copyrighted would be a violation of the purpose and intents of copyright. Interfaces are *functional*, not expressive. If anything should cover them it's patents, not copyrights.
"Have a machine first do A, then do B, then do C". That's an idea. That's all it can ever be. That's all patents can do, protect ideas.
If you want to say that patents should only cover exact copies of a specific implementation, fine, but just call for all patents to be repealed in that case, because that's useless.
This problem *does* occur with considerable regularity to all brands. Some get attention at some times more than others, that's about all you can say.
Hmmm... Does that mean we can take up a collection to fund it privately?
Examples include: Stradivarius violins, Greek Fire, Damascus steel, etc.
Then there's another category of technologies where we could theoretically do it, but we've lost the necessary tools and designs, and it would take a big research project that probably will never happen because there are better solutions now. E.g. the Saturn V rocket.
Antimatter doesn't have negative mass. *If* the positrons *were* able to escape, that would imply that the world would become *less* massive, not more. Because some of its mass escaped into space. This is no different than if some regular matter were fired out into space.
Analogously, Hawking radiation makes black holes *less* massive, not more.
"Hypocrisy" is almost completely unrelated to "lying". The only overlap would be if you're telling other people not to lie, and are lying yourself.
I've met a lot of 8 year olds. Indeed, I've tutored a lot of them on science fair projects. I've also seen a *lot* of examples where motivated teachers and parents, ahem, "encourage" them a bit more than is strictly in accordance with the rules.
It's *logically inconsistent* for them to have both. If they control it, they are partly liable... that's a major part of the legal definition of the term.
If you make them liable for the data they transport if they control the data based on content, I can guarantee this whole net neutrality problem will go away. Regulations aren't necessary. Holding people accountable for their actions is. No free passes!
You can't have it both ways (well, logically, at least... of course ISPs may get it both ways, but they shouldn't). If you don't want to be responsible for content, you can't filter on content.
If this were made legally clear, I doubt many ISPs would touch content filtering with a 10' pole. They *want* freedom from liability.
The fact that it had to be disguised as a "penalty" or "fee" just shows yet again what incredible wimps the Democrats are in standing up to Republican bullying.
It would still take enough time for the fastest monkey to type it out. Monkeys are not of infinite speed, AFAIK.
If the video shows the text in the first few seconds, I guess I wouldn't have a problem with that, but somehow I doubt that will happen.
I also doubt that it would be very hard to write a tool that breaks these, unless they go to some almost as hard to decipher text, which will just be even harder on a video background.
FWIW, that's 3 gallons ~= 13.5kg of gasoline plus approximately 38kg of *oxygen* for the same amount of energy. The energy density of gasoline+oxygen is only about 2.25 times that of TNT. Which is still impressive. It is true that the car only has to "hold" the gasoline. But it's just a bit misleading to reference the "energy equivalence" of TNT and gasoline this way.
It used to be that only porn sites had these warnings.
Make it clear that they can filter all the data they want, but that they are therefore liable for damages caused by the data they carry and you will have net neutrality within a hour.
ISPs should *want desperately* to have common carrier status... the fact that this is even an argument only shows how much the political process has been twisted.
Yeah, it would have been *much* simpler and avoided most of this problem if Congress had just passed this as a new tax... with a corresponding tax credit if you have health insurance. The Constitution gives the federal government the power to tax income however derived without regard to a census or other enumeration.
Then they can relax about the helium shortage, right? (N.B.: yes, I know)
And why is it *any* different?
The only coherent answers I've ever gotten devolve to racism and/or tribalism.
The difference here is that (at least theoretically) you can turn it off.
If there are 1000 agents assigned to missing persons, and they reduced that to 995 by having those 5 people work on copyright, it's nonsense to say that they prioritize copyright over missing people. Missing people are still a much much larger priority than copyright in that case.
Only if they have more resources working on copyright enforcement than missing persons would it make any sense at all to say they're prioritizing the former over the latter.
Look at it this way, they must have a top priority (though it's possible there might be ties)... unless they have every single person at the FBI working on that top priority, this fallacious reasoning would deduce that the top priority is lower than the next highest priority. That's clearly nonsense.
Still, this whole thing is dumb. ISPs should be clamoring for the inherent protection from liability they would get by *not* discriminating by content the data that traverses their network. You control it, you're (at least partially) liable for it. Period.
It is prima facie obvious that if ISPs control the data that goes over their pipes in *any way* based on the content then they are at least partially liable for the content of that data, and should be exposed to lawsuits over it.
They seem to want to get all the benefits of being a common carrier without suffering any of the logically necessary consequences of that.
We shouldn't *need* to enact net neutrality. The ISPs should be rushing to insist on it. You just have to lay out the liability in a form everyone can understand.
Am I the only one that misread the headline and expected to see an announcement that Rolls Royce had won a bid to build a Mars rover for the first time?
There may be (probably is?) prior art for this invention, but books are not it.