It's ok though -- no irony or hypocrisy. Since Android ripped off iOS, then any innovations that Android came up with only came about because the whole system was ripped off from iOS first,
I can't tell, are you trying to be sarcastic or funny?
For the record, Android did not rip off iOS. iOS ripped off Danger, Palm, Nokia, Microsoft, and a bunch of others. The AppStore, desktop sync for media and PIM data, the launcher, iCloud, notification bars, error correcting touch screen keyboards, mobile web browsing and highlighting of phone numbers, you name it, other phones and PDAs had it before Apple, often years earlier. In fact, several of the major features of the iPhone were pioneered by Android developers when they were at Palm and Danger. I can't think of any significant feature of iOS that Apple actually invented themselves. (They didn't even develop multitouch, although at least they paid for that one.)
We have not been pure, and we have failed to uphold these virtues from day one.
The US has succeeded through practical compromises instead of idealism. You can see where idealism leads by looking at Europe and its wars, as government after government tried to impose its idealized vision of society onto the continent.
it does not change the fact that the actions shown in the videos are indefensible
If we deploy our military, some soldiers are going to violate laws and rape, torture, and murder. It's what happens when you take tens of thousands of teens and twens, hand guns to them, and send them to foreign lands. Talking about whether that is "defensible" is no more meaningful than talking about whether car accidents are "defensible". All you can do is what we always do: reduce the frequency, convict those who are clearly guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, let the rest off the hook, and move on.
You need to decide ahead of time whether the cause you're fighting for is worth the human cost that entails, both to others and to ourselves. In the civil war and WWII, US soldiers committed many such crimes, yet it was worth it. In the case of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, I think it was not worth it: the US shouldn't have dirtied itself with cleaning up messes it didn't create in the first place, in particular while the nations who created those messes were largely sitting on the sidelines and criticizing us.
How come Apple seem to think the rules on stealing ideas apply to everyone except themselves?
Group think: if you talk to Apple employees, they really firmly believe that Apple invented it all. Steve Jobs's reality distortion field also applied to himself, as you can see from his over-the-top remarks on a "thermonuclear war on Android" (ironic given how much iPhone rips off from the people who created Android).
And it's self-reinforcing because they keep getting away with it.
Given how fast the Android market is evolving, Samsung only had a few months to make a profit on the 10.1. Apple killed that window of opportunity with their injunction. Now, newer and better tablets are already out.
Apple lost the case but they hurt Samsung badly. Apple should be made to pay for the harm they did to Samsung. And Apple may have opened themselves up to similar claims against them in the future, as other companies will now start to take out silly design patents as well and use them against Apple product launches.
You're confusing design patents and utility patents. Patents that cover the external appearance of a device are design patents, not utility patents.
(Design patents must be on non-utilitarian aspects of a design. Given that thinness, bezels, and rounded corners are utilitarian, Apple's design patents don't have a chance in hell to stand up to any serious legal challenge.)
Since when did that stop you? Sauce for the goose, pal.
I don't have anything to prove because I don't want anything to change. You have to make a convincing case if you want people to change and give up part of their money. All you have done so far is attack my arguments and credibility, list some unlikely horror scenarios (milliions dead, runaway greenhouse effect, etc.), and refused to quantify many of the supposed consequences of climate change. And in doing so, you have actually represented the people calling for action on climate change pretty accurately.
In the end, even according to the IPCC, our choice comes down to the possibility of losing a few percent of global GDP if we do nothing, and a certainty of losing a few percent of global GDP if we follow the IPCC emissions restrictions. The rational choice is therefore to do nothing. And until someone comes up with better arguments than you have, that's where it's going to stay.
I just quoted you the relevant law verbatim, and nothing in there says any of what you just wrote.
You claimed that that passage showed that "fairness" was a consideration in US copyright law. I pointed out that you misunderstood the passage. The passage says that it is "fair" (legitimate) for the public to do something even with copyrighted books, nothing more. The only basis of giving privileges to authors is utility under US law.
Right here in this discussion, there is someone posting who says Google used his copyrighted book without making any contact with him.
People claim all sort of bizarre things about US copyright law, as you yourself have been doing, so "someone said" is not an argument.
(I would imagine that Google rarely if ever contacts authors of books, since they make most deals with the publishers.)
I find your implication that the US government is on the side of the people and/or organisations like Google, rather than bought and paid for by Big Media more than any other first world nation, to be highly amusing.
Well, you just reaffirm again your political biases against the US and US corporations. In fact, the US government by and large actually represents the will of the people. I know that must be hard for a European to fathom, first because European media provide you a steady diet of anti-American propaganda and selective reporting, and second because European governments represent the will of the European people so poorly.
As long as people like you refuse to even discuss rationally in the first place, we're never going to get anywhere.
It is ironic that you, whose responses are full of statements like "I believe in the tooth fairy, too" accuse others of refusing to have rational discussions. As I was saying, trying to shoot down my points does nothing to strengthen yours, so you might as well stop that. You need to make a compelling case that climate change is dangerous because you want political and economic change. The rest of us is happy to go on as before.
and our current civilization and its infrastructure is no more than a couple thousand years old; the vast majority of it being built in the last two hundred or so. What do you think 1-2m of sea level rise over the course of the next couple of centuries would do to said infrastructure?
Well, you just answered your own question: we have been able to build that infrastructure over the time span of a couple of centuries, so even in the worst case, rebuilding from scratch it over the next couple of centuries should not be a problem. But even that is overestimating the cost and effort. Most infrastructure depreciates within a few decades, reflecting the fact that it is essentially constantly being rebuilt anyway. There is no permanent, valuable physical infrastructure that needs protection.
What about biodiversity?
Environmental change tends to spur evolutionary change.
Tell that to the Somalis and the Kenyans. I'm sure they'll heartily agree with your assessment of their wonderful situation at present.
Refugee and population problems in Africa existed long before climate change. Africa needs economic and social development, and these people need to overcome their ancient divisions and enmities. If they do that, they can deal as well as Europe and the US with even the worst case climate change scenarios. And if they don't do that, addressing climate change won't make any difference because they'll just kill each other for one of dozens of other reasons.
No, we're having this "discussion" because there's a big problem and some people are too clueless to understand its impact and implications for the future. Fortunately, I don't need to convince you and your ilk. You'll be just another nameless, faceless Joe Blow in the crowd wondering why the world went to shit and having to live with your regret; well, assuming you live long enough TO regret it, anyway.
Even the IPCC report doesn't talk about "the world going to shit", it merely talks about tradeoffs between a few percent of global GDP between mitigation costs and warming costs.
It's people like you who spin such arcane and minor economic tradeoffs into horror scenarios.
The only regret I would have is if people like you manage to reverse the progress the world has made on liberalization and economic development.
(Lastly, I think technologically, the whole issue will become moot when China, India, and the US switch to Thorium, U238 and fusion reactors over the course of this century. Of course, then you will be up in arms about that too, right?)
Well, reading the paper, I think they are actually aiming for something more limited, and although theoretically you might be able to handle program source code, I doubt that this will be a good tool for it. However, what they are aiming for doesn't even seem to require full context free parsing. Their motivating example, "files divided into sections" can be handled trivially using small Python or Perl scripts (that's what Perl is for). The paper also also seems pretty weak on prior work. Sorry to be so negative, but I really think there are better things they could spend their efforts on (I listed them before).
The use cases, options, and interfaces are different for searching programming language source files, XML files, and other text. So, you really need at least three tools: bgrep-lang, bgrep-xml, and bgrep text. Each of those might then have a plugin mechanism. But these three classes of tools already exist. Trying to force them into a single command line tool makes little sense to me.
"bgrep-text" is just pcregrep.
"bgrep-xml" is any one of a number of XML query and search tools, using XQuery or similar languages.
"bgrep-lang" is any one of a number of language-aware search tools (often with tons of options that make no sense for text or xml).
PCRE has recursive patterns (available as pcregrep) and.NET has balancing groups, also allowing grep-like operations involving context-free grammars. For XML data, there are various XML query languages that allow wonderfully complex queries over XML structures. There are also refactoring tools that allow syntax-aware searches across source files.
For diff, the situation is a bit more complicated. There are XML-based diff tools, programming language syntax aware diff tools, and complex edit distance based diff tools already. It seems difficult to come up with something more generic. Let's say you want to diff programming language source files in languages for which there is no diff tools. What good is a context free diff tool going to be? You'd need to specify the entire grammar for the language.
I think the most useful way these people could spend their time and money would be to port PCRE-style recursive patterns and.NET like balancing groups to more UNIX regular expression libraries (foremost, Python).
CO2 concentrations have been 10 times higher in times when solar output was lower.
Yes, but fortunately we aren't talking about 10x increases in CO2 concentrations due to human activity, leaving a large safety margin (increase in solar output has been much smaller in comparison). And you can go back to more recent figures where solar output was closer to what it is and CO2 concentrations were still several times what they are today without any runaway effects.
I don't think any particular temperature range can be considered "normal". The warm/cool phases appear to be pretty well-balanced.
Have you ever even bothered to look at climate history?
You can't possibly be serious. We had two of the most devastating wars in history in the last century, let alone all the other conflicts across the world since then. As for less hunger, some of the largest famines have also occurred in the last 200 years. Where are you getting your misinformation?
No misinformation, you just read it wrong: "Despite the supposed environmental destruction, the world is experiencing less war, less conflict, and less hunger today than it has since the start of the industrial revolution." Do we have less war today than during WWII? Yes. My point exactly. After consigning fascism and communism to the dustbins of history and liberalizing trade and migration, things have improved greatly for all of humanity.
The source of the numbers doesn't give them any more credence or validity. Greenpeace is just as capable of being wrong in their prognostications as anyone. No, I don't have better numbers; many problems that are plausible effects of climate change are very hard to put numbers on.
In different words, you don't have numbers, Greenpeace doesn't have numbers, and everybody's prognostications may be wrong. Yet, you still claim that there is a "consensus" that there is going to be global devastation unless we act now.
At least I said "I don't know", and "probably not". Sounds pretty reasonable and rational to me. *shrug*
You raised the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect and used it to justify limiting CO2 emissions. I'm saying "that doesn't seem plausible to me because..." In response, you just say "I don't know" and attack my objection. Where does that leave us? Still with no evidence or rational argument that a runaway greenhouse effect can happen.
Attacking my objections to your statements doesn't actually provide any more factual, rational support for your statements.
Even still, none of that changes the nature of the problem of AGW-induced climate change. Our civilation's infrastructure depends on a fairly steady-state climate, and rapid changes will cause serious problems.
There is no such thing as a "steady-state climate"; global temperatures have been oscillating wildly for the past several million years. Over the past 20000 years alone, sea levels have changed by more than 80m, glaciers covered much of Europe and the US, and temperatures have risen many times than what IPCC predicts.
Furthermore, our civilization's infrastructure does not depend on a stable climate. The US has undergone vast changes in settlement, transportation, and agriculture over the last decades. Germany and Japan rebuilt modern technological societies after the devastation of WWII. The notion that human societies are based on stable, long-term infrastructure and settlement is ridiculous. No scenario predicted by IPCC would require anything near the changes humanity has experienced over the last century.
Climate refugees from any nation migrating to other countries just to survive put a strain on said countries, creating conflict.
That statement is just an expression of your xenophobic and anti-immigrant biases. In fact, immigration does not "put a strain" on countries, it contributes positively to their economies and their cultures.
How much is a human life worth? How about a million lives? Hundreds of millions? What about just human suffering? What about mass extinction of species? How do you put a dollar amount on those things? I don't need to put dollar figures on such things, because they are beyond having such meaningless valuations placed on them. Why do you?
It is the policies you advocate--limits on CO2 emissions and limits on migration--that will impede economic development and as a result cause people to suffer and die by the millions. That is why we are having this discussion. On the other hand, even the "worst case" predicted consequences of warming are easy to fix with money and liberal migration and immigration policies. That is why we need to put figures on this, so that we can minimize human suffering and maximize human welfare.
It is you who wants to condemn people to continue to eek out existences in already marginal environments because of misguided notions of "stability", misty-eyed idealizations of idyllic island life, and apparently some deep-seated anti-immigrant prejudices. You want to sacrifice millions of people on the altar of some abstract principles. As long as people like you refuse to put specific figures on the table that allow cost/benefit analyses, no rational discussion is possible.
you have no case whatsoever based on the wording of the Constitution to argue for automatic rights for others in specific contexts.
The US Constitution doesn't grant rights, it takes them away, leaving all remaining rights in place. The fact that the Constitution gives Congress the power to enact copyright laws tells you that by default, everybody has the right to copy everything, but Congress has the power to limit that right temporarily for utilitarian purposes.
So, I don't have "to argue for automatic rights [to copyrighed works] for others" because everybody has the right to copy everything, unless specifically limited by copyright law. And limitations by copyright law need to be justified by utility. If there is some new, money-making way of using a copyrighted work, under US law, by default, it is permitted until Congress enacts legislation to limit it.
This is fundamentally different from Europe. European Constitutions enumerate a limited set of rights that you have instead of enumerating a limited set of rights that you don't have, and European law recognizes "moral rights" in copyrighted works, which the US does not.
I've added emphasis, so you can see exactly where the US statute books say fairness is relevant.
"Fair use" is a technical term meaning a defined "legitimate use". It says "even though we have given authors these special restrictions for utilitarian purposes, it is nevertheless always legitimate for people to copy for the following purposes...". It doesn't refer to "fairness" in the sportsmanship sense or balancing of interests.
I have nothing against them indexing books that are out of copyright. They're playing the legal "might is right" game as they so often do.
Out-of-copyright and orphan works is exactly what this lawsuit is about. Publishers and guilds want to rip off the public, and neither libraries, nor archives, scholars, or other non-profits have been able to reign them in. I'm glad Google is mighty enough to take on these scoundrels, because nobody else has been able to.
It's also about whether one of the largest businesses in the world, with business practices that (by their then-CEO's repeated admission) ignore fundamentals like a right to privacy, can get away with their behaviour by effectively being above the law. Consequently, I have no problem with a court that finds they crossed a line then slapping them down so hard that they bounce.
You're almost literally spewing the anti-Google propaganda of people like Murdoch, Berlusconi, and German state TV (and if you're from somewhere else, there are similar people everywhere), companies and individuals that have monopolized the European media markets and conned Europeans out of huge sums of money. European politicians are doing their bidding because they know they can't get reelected if they act against them. Berlusconi just skipped that step and used his media empire to become the leader of Italy.
These people see their obsolete business models and their control over public opinion threatened and they are fighting back. Someone needs to take them on, and the only one powerful enough is other big companies and the US government, which is why they publish all that anti-US and anti-corporate claptrap. If Google uses its "might" to destroy their businesses, we'll all be better off.
The ability to explain observations is most certainly evidence in favour of a theory, particularly when you're choosing between two theories, one of which explains more observations than the other.
By that reasoning, believing that an almighty God makes everything work out the way it does should be the best scientific theory of all, because it explains all observations. That's not how science works.
Yeah, sorry, your assessment of my fitness as a scientist doesn't really sting much.
It wasn't supposed to; it was just an observation.
Says who? That's the first time you've mentioned anything about "utility".
OK, I that was in another thread. Nevertheless, if you engage in arguments about US legal cases, it is your responsibility to inform yourself about US law.
Apparently those who wrote the law in the US agree
Why do you persist in making things up? US copyright law is based in the US Constitution, which defines it to be utilitarian. There is no "apparently" about it. Notions of "fairness" only enter into European copyright law.
That's because I think a fair result for both sides is the most beneficial to society.
Great! I consider the original US copyright system to be fair: 28 years plus mandatory registration. I consider the current system (life+70 years, no registration) to be highly unfair, because it lets publishers control works they did not create and keep works out of the public domain that should be in the public domain. Hence, in the interest of fairness, let's go back to the original copyright terms and system. It's only fair, right?
Well, actually, there IS a scenario where it becomes uninhabitable, it's called a "runaway greenhouse effect", similar to what happened to Venus. Is it plausible? I don't know.
Well, you should know. CO2 concentrations have been ten times (!) their current levels and at higher temperatures without runaway greenhouse effects. Throughout most of the ages since the dinosaurs, there have been no polar ice caps or glaciers. The normal climate on this planet is significantly warmer than it is now. Positing the possibility of a "runaway greenhouse effect similar to Venus" in arguments about climate change is completely unreasonable and irrational.
But history and climatology does tell you that even slight decreases in temperature have devastating effects on human populations, causing crop failures and starvation.
There's definitely a VERY strong indication that the Arctic will be effectively ice-free within 10-20 years. Antarctica/Greenland, probably not by 2100, but well, you never know.
Good, let's go for it! The long term benefits would far outweigh the costs.
I don't know if those numbers are meaningful or not.
They are Greenpeace's own numbers. If even advocacy groups like Greenpeace come up with such small numbers in their worst case scenarios, why should we do anything about climate change? Do you have better numbers? Because right now, you're just waving your hands.
You mean like mass starvation, increased disease and pestilence, and the associated increases in conflict/unrest/war? We've just about ended our little trysts in Iraq and Afghanistan which have contributed significantly to the bankrupting of our country. Wars waged over resources like food and clean water on a global scale will make the Iraq/Afghan wars look like scrimmages on a football pitch.
Despite the supposed environmental destruction, the world is experiencing less war, less conflict, and less hunger today than it has since the start of the industrial revolution. And those countries that are a military threat to us (e.g., Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) do not suffer from either flooding or climate-induced starvation. On the other hand, those countries that do experience starvation and flooding (e.g., Bangladesh, Somalia) are no threat to our security.
Major wars are, however, often caused when the inhabitants of rich, industrialized countries see their fortunes decline. And that is what restrictions on carbon emissions are much more likely to cause.
That's like saying "this rationality stuff may work , but not ". Science is science. If you (or anyone, for that matter) think you have better evidence, research, or answers, by all means publish them
Rationality and science do work, and they tell you that there is going to be no runaway greenhouse effect, that life can thrive with CO2 levels 10 times as high as current levels, and that an ice-free planet is the norm. You can look up those facts in any textbook on paleoclimatology; they are uncontroversial. And a simple look around the planet shows you that that neither flooding nor starvation (should they occur, which seems unlikely) are a threat to us; the threat is rich industrialized countries in depressions.
If you want to make rational counterarguments, based on facts and observations, I'm all ears.
in this issue other than getting a fair result for both the public and those who create and share their work. I just happen not to agree with you about the best way to do that
US copyright is based on utility, not "fairness". Even though I have pointed this out multiple times and pointed you at the Constitution, you still keep droning on about "fairness". And even though the issue is clearly legally unsettled and the court hasn't ruled, you keep talking as if it were a fact that Google is violating the law. Don't expect people to remain civil if you just keep ignoring them and the facts.
so my views are in no way knee-jerk reactions and I'm amused that you seem to think I'm on the side of Big Media
But you are on the side of Big Media--you are parroting their attacks on Google, with the same irrelevant arguments about "fairness" and the same attacks on the public domain.
I read it. I'm not sure how it's relevant to my statement. I suppose it's possible that MACHOs could explain the bullet cluster, far field gravity could explain galactic rotation curves
Good.
non-baryonic dark matter explains all the other observations like the CMB and galactic cluster behaviour. But you still haven't succeeded in getting rid of non-baryonic dark matter.
You still seem to have trouble with the distinction between "could be explained by" and "provides evidence for".
But it's pretty cute that you're resorting to personal insults.
Nothing cute about it: I don't think you are a good scientist (if you are a scientist at all).
Did you even bother to read what I wrote? Or is your thinking really that fuzzy?
So, we have two hypotheses. (1) Both galactic rotation and the Bullet Cluster are explained by non-baryonic dark matter (but we have no idea what that might be). (2) The paper is right and galactic rotation is explained by standard gravity, while the Bullet Cluster is explained by some kind of MACHOs. If the math in the paper is right, I personally find (2) a lot more attractive than (1) because it doesn't involve inventing new physics.
MACHOs can't explain our galactic rotation. But they can explain the Bullet Cluster.
Now, I know that they all are intellectually dishonest, if not downright maliciously ignorant.
That is a gross misrepresentation. Until fairly recently, even the claim that it has gotten warmer was based on extremely sloppy by climatologists who lacked expertise in statistics (the ASA itself criticized that work). The fact that the statistical work has been cleaned up now doesn't change the fact that the original work was sloppy and criticism of it was valid. And what has been shown is just that it has been getting a little warmer on average, over some large regions, nothing else.
The second gross misrepresentation implying that the observation of man-made human warming has automatic policy implications, like the proposed reductions in CO2 emissions. In fact, the "consensus of scientists" is absolutely clear: there is no plausible scenario in which human CO2 emissions make our planet uninhabitable. Even the IPCC doesn't believe that humans will be able to melt the polar ice caps under the worst case scenario. Even their worst case forecasts amount to only a tiny fraction of what humanity has experienced over the last 20000 years anyway. Sea level rise, islands flooding, expansion of equatorial deserts, balanced by increasing habitability of northern zones, are climate changes humanity has not only coped with but thrived under.
Greenpeace estimates a cost of $156 billion for a 1m sea level rise for the US (multiply that by 4-5 for the whole world). But the IPCC predicts only a 60cm rise over a hundred years if nothing changes (and even that requires some assumptions of unobserved feedback mechanisms). The cost of sea level rise is therefore negligible even according to Greenpeace's and the IPCC's own data and predictions. The other consequences of climate change are likely even less costly. That's the so-called "climate catastrophe" we are supposedly facing.
with the tidal wave of the ignorant masses constantly threatening to wash them "away" in one form or another.
Well, fortunately we live in a democracy in the US, and "believe me, we are the experts" is not good enough to get people to spend trillions of dollars to save a billion or so every year. That kind of technocratic b.s. may work in the EU but not in the US. Here, either the "experts" present their work in a plausible and reproducible way, or nothing's gonna happen. Handwaving, iffy statistics, and gigantic computational climate models aren't going to cut it. And insulting people isn't gonna work either.
Of course, you're welcome to cite additional evidence to support your position
Well, as you yourself observed: most books on Google Books show you more than snippets, which means that most people choose to opt in.
If the process is as beneficial to rightsholders as you claim, what is the problem with making it opt-in?
Making opt-in the default further limits the rights of the public; it has effects far beyond Google. Just because you hate Google's guts doesn't mean that we should screw archives, non-profits, and scholars even more than they are already screwed by the overreaching lobbying activities of the movie and publishing industries.
By the way, for someone so hot on promoting liberty, I can't help noticing how keen you seem to be on taking the decision out of the hands of the people who have done the hard work and favouring the organisation that is profiting off the back of someone else's work.
Liberty doesn't mean that you can force people to pay for whatever crap you produce. Copyright is a utilitarian tradeoff, not a natural law. Since we have a glut of books and movies, we don't need even stricter copyright legislation.
And I am not concerned with Google, I am concerned with the ill effect your kind of knee-jerk law-making has on everybody else.
That is essentially a tautology. The question is whether it would be excessive to prohibit what Google is doing.
Actually, it's not a tautology, it is rhetoric and implies that it would be excessive. Maybe your inability to comprehend simple English is why you have trouble making a living from your "intellectual creations"?
I'll just finish by observing that having one law for multinational corporations with in-house legal teams and millions to spend on lobbying and another law for everyone else is harmful to democracy, too.
Oh, how right you are! And the multinational corporations that are lobbying here are big, bloated, obsolete publishers that are screwing authors and customers alike and have been pushing one copyright extension after another. Those organizations are the real threat. Google showing a bunch of small snippets and giving you an opt-out if you are dumb enough to take it is a threat to nobody.
Being available for free is not the same as being in the public domain. However, such availability weighs on several of factors that determine whether a use is fair in the US
I.e. you don't need explicit permission for some uses of copyrighted materials. As I was saying...
However, one of the four factors in determining fair use is, explicitly, right out of the statute books, the effect of the use on the potential market or value of the work.
Yes, and for most people, the market value of their books goes up. For a few badly written books, it may go down. And that is why the default should be opt-out, not opt-in.
All laws ultimately limit liberty through the power of the state. My signature is a warning against permitting the state to become too powerful, not a call for anarchy.
And that is exactly why we should not give authors or the government too much control over our culture or intellectual creations. Excessive copyright restrictions are a threat to our economy, our liberty, and our democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't tell, are you trying to be sarcastic or funny?
For the record, Android did not rip off iOS. iOS ripped off Danger, Palm, Nokia, Microsoft, and a bunch of others. The AppStore, desktop sync for media and PIM data, the launcher, iCloud, notification bars, error correcting touch screen keyboards, mobile web browsing and highlighting of phone numbers, you name it, other phones and PDAs had it before Apple, often years earlier. In fact, several of the major features of the iPhone were pioneered by Android developers when they were at Palm and Danger. I can't think of any significant feature of iOS that Apple actually invented themselves. (They didn't even develop multitouch, although at least they paid for that one.)
The US has succeeded through practical compromises instead of idealism. You can see where idealism leads by looking at Europe and its wars, as government after government tried to impose its idealized vision of society onto the continent.
If we deploy our military, some soldiers are going to violate laws and rape, torture, and murder. It's what happens when you take tens of thousands of teens and twens, hand guns to them, and send them to foreign lands. Talking about whether that is "defensible" is no more meaningful than talking about whether car accidents are "defensible". All you can do is what we always do: reduce the frequency, convict those who are clearly guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, let the rest off the hook, and move on.
You need to decide ahead of time whether the cause you're fighting for is worth the human cost that entails, both to others and to ourselves. In the civil war and WWII, US soldiers committed many such crimes, yet it was worth it. In the case of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, I think it was not worth it: the US shouldn't have dirtied itself with cleaning up messes it didn't create in the first place, in particular while the nations who created those messes were largely sitting on the sidelines and criticizing us.
Group think: if you talk to Apple employees, they really firmly believe that Apple invented it all. Steve Jobs's reality distortion field also applied to himself, as you can see from his over-the-top remarks on a "thermonuclear war on Android" (ironic given how much iPhone rips off from the people who created Android).
And it's self-reinforcing because they keep getting away with it.
Given how fast the Android market is evolving, Samsung only had a few months to make a profit on the 10.1. Apple killed that window of opportunity with their injunction. Now, newer and better tablets are already out.
Apple lost the case but they hurt Samsung badly. Apple should be made to pay for the harm they did to Samsung. And Apple may have opened themselves up to similar claims against them in the future, as other companies will now start to take out silly design patents as well and use them against Apple product launches.
You're confusing design patents and utility patents. Patents that cover the external appearance of a device are design patents, not utility patents.
(Design patents must be on non-utilitarian aspects of a design. Given that thinness, bezels, and rounded corners are utilitarian, Apple's design patents don't have a chance in hell to stand up to any serious legal challenge.)
I don't have anything to prove because I don't want anything to change. You have to make a convincing case if you want people to change and give up part of their money. All you have done so far is attack my arguments and credibility, list some unlikely horror scenarios (milliions dead, runaway greenhouse effect, etc.), and refused to quantify many of the supposed consequences of climate change. And in doing so, you have actually represented the people calling for action on climate change pretty accurately.
In the end, even according to the IPCC, our choice comes down to the possibility of losing a few percent of global GDP if we do nothing, and a certainty of losing a few percent of global GDP if we follow the IPCC emissions restrictions. The rational choice is therefore to do nothing. And until someone comes up with better arguments than you have, that's where it's going to stay.
He is laughing all the way to the bank, and he still controls the Italian media.
You claimed that that passage showed that "fairness" was a consideration in US copyright law. I pointed out that you misunderstood the passage. The passage says that it is "fair" (legitimate) for the public to do something even with copyrighted books, nothing more. The only basis of giving privileges to authors is utility under US law.
People claim all sort of bizarre things about US copyright law, as you yourself have been doing, so "someone said" is not an argument.
(I would imagine that Google rarely if ever contacts authors of books, since they make most deals with the publishers.)
Well, you just reaffirm again your political biases against the US and US corporations. In fact, the US government by and large actually represents the will of the people. I know that must be hard for a European to fathom, first because European media provide you a steady diet of anti-American propaganda and selective reporting, and second because European governments represent the will of the European people so poorly.
It is ironic that you, whose responses are full of statements like "I believe in the tooth fairy, too" accuse others of refusing to have rational discussions. As I was saying, trying to shoot down my points does nothing to strengthen yours, so you might as well stop that. You need to make a compelling case that climate change is dangerous because you want political and economic change. The rest of us is happy to go on as before.
Well, you just answered your own question: we have been able to build that infrastructure over the time span of a couple of centuries, so even in the worst case, rebuilding from scratch it over the next couple of centuries should not be a problem. But even that is overestimating the cost and effort. Most infrastructure depreciates within a few decades, reflecting the fact that it is essentially constantly being rebuilt anyway. There is no permanent, valuable physical infrastructure that needs protection.
Environmental change tends to spur evolutionary change.
Refugee and population problems in Africa existed long before climate change. Africa needs economic and social development, and these people need to overcome their ancient divisions and enmities. If they do that, they can deal as well as Europe and the US with even the worst case climate change scenarios. And if they don't do that, addressing climate change won't make any difference because they'll just kill each other for one of dozens of other reasons.
Even the IPCC report doesn't talk about "the world going to shit", it merely talks about tradeoffs between a few percent of global GDP between mitigation costs and warming costs.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains5-6.html
It's people like you who spin such arcane and minor economic tradeoffs into horror scenarios.
The only regret I would have is if people like you manage to reverse the progress the world has made on liberalization and economic development.
(Lastly, I think technologically, the whole issue will become moot when China, India, and the US switch to Thorium, U238 and fusion reactors over the course of this century. Of course, then you will be up in arms about that too, right?)
Well, reading the paper, I think they are actually aiming for something more limited, and although theoretically you might be able to handle program source code, I doubt that this will be a good tool for it. However, what they are aiming for doesn't even seem to require full context free parsing. Their motivating example, "files divided into sections" can be handled trivially using small Python or Perl scripts (that's what Perl is for). The paper also also seems pretty weak on prior work. Sorry to be so negative, but I really think there are better things they could spend their efforts on (I listed them before).
The use cases, options, and interfaces are different for searching programming language source files, XML files, and other text. So, you really need at least three tools: bgrep-lang, bgrep-xml, and bgrep text. Each of those might then have a plugin mechanism. But these three classes of tools already exist. Trying to force them into a single command line tool makes little sense to me.
"bgrep-text" is just pcregrep.
"bgrep-xml" is any one of a number of XML query and search tools, using XQuery or similar languages.
"bgrep-lang" is any one of a number of language-aware search tools (often with tons of options that make no sense for text or xml).
It's similar for diff.
Indeed: progressives and fundamentalist Christians are both religious nuts.
PCRE has recursive patterns (available as pcregrep) and .NET has balancing groups, also allowing grep-like operations involving context-free grammars. For XML data, there are various XML query languages that allow wonderfully complex queries over XML structures. There are also refactoring tools that allow syntax-aware searches across source files.
For diff, the situation is a bit more complicated. There are XML-based diff tools, programming language syntax aware diff tools, and complex edit distance based diff tools already. It seems difficult to come up with something more generic. Let's say you want to diff programming language source files in languages for which there is no diff tools. What good is a context free diff tool going to be? You'd need to specify the entire grammar for the language.
I think the most useful way these people could spend their time and money would be to port PCRE-style recursive patterns and .NET like balancing groups to more UNIX regular expression libraries (foremost, Python).
Yes, but fortunately we aren't talking about 10x increases in CO2 concentrations due to human activity, leaving a large safety margin (increase in solar output has been much smaller in comparison). And you can go back to more recent figures where solar output was closer to what it is and CO2 concentrations were still several times what they are today without any runaway effects.
Have you ever even bothered to look at climate history?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png
(Note the non-linear time scale)
No misinformation, you just read it wrong: "Despite the supposed environmental destruction, the world is experiencing less war, less conflict, and less hunger today than it has since the start of the industrial revolution." Do we have less war today than during WWII? Yes. My point exactly. After consigning fascism and communism to the dustbins of history and liberalizing trade and migration, things have improved greatly for all of humanity.
In different words, you don't have numbers, Greenpeace doesn't have numbers, and everybody's prognostications may be wrong. Yet, you still claim that there is a "consensus" that there is going to be global devastation unless we act now.
You raised the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect and used it to justify limiting CO2 emissions. I'm saying "that doesn't seem plausible to me because..." In response, you just say "I don't know" and attack my objection. Where does that leave us? Still with no evidence or rational argument that a runaway greenhouse effect can happen.
Attacking my objections to your statements doesn't actually provide any more factual, rational support for your statements.
There is no such thing as a "steady-state climate"; global temperatures have been oscillating wildly for the past several million years. Over the past 20000 years alone, sea levels have changed by more than 80m, glaciers covered much of Europe and the US, and temperatures have risen many times than what IPCC predicts.
Furthermore, our civilization's infrastructure does not depend on a stable climate. The US has undergone vast changes in settlement, transportation, and agriculture over the last decades. Germany and Japan rebuilt modern technological societies after the devastation of WWII. The notion that human societies are based on stable, long-term infrastructure and settlement is ridiculous. No scenario predicted by IPCC would require anything near the changes humanity has experienced over the last century.
That statement is just an expression of your xenophobic and anti-immigrant biases. In fact, immigration does not "put a strain" on countries, it contributes positively to their economies and their cultures.
It is the policies you advocate--limits on CO2 emissions and limits on migration--that will impede economic development and as a result cause people to suffer and die by the millions. That is why we are having this discussion. On the other hand, even the "worst case" predicted consequences of warming are easy to fix with money and liberal migration and immigration policies. That is why we need to put figures on this, so that we can minimize human suffering and maximize human welfare.
It is you who wants to condemn people to continue to eek out existences in already marginal environments because of misguided notions of "stability", misty-eyed idealizations of idyllic island life, and apparently some deep-seated anti-immigrant prejudices. You want to sacrifice millions of people on the altar of some abstract principles. As long as people like you refuse to put specific figures on the table that allow cost/benefit analyses, no rational discussion is possible.
The US Constitution doesn't grant rights, it takes them away, leaving all remaining rights in place. The fact that the Constitution gives Congress the power to enact copyright laws tells you that by default, everybody has the right to copy everything, but Congress has the power to limit that right temporarily for utilitarian purposes.
So, I don't have "to argue for automatic rights [to copyrighed works] for others" because everybody has the right to copy everything, unless specifically limited by copyright law. And limitations by copyright law need to be justified by utility. If there is some new, money-making way of using a copyrighted work, under US law, by default, it is permitted until Congress enacts legislation to limit it.
This is fundamentally different from Europe. European Constitutions enumerate a limited set of rights that you have instead of enumerating a limited set of rights that you don't have, and European law recognizes "moral rights" in copyrighted works, which the US does not.
"Fair use" is a technical term meaning a defined "legitimate use". It says "even though we have given authors these special restrictions for utilitarian purposes, it is nevertheless always legitimate for people to copy for the following purposes...". It doesn't refer to "fairness" in the sportsmanship sense or balancing of interests.
Out-of-copyright and orphan works is exactly what this lawsuit is about. Publishers and guilds want to rip off the public, and neither libraries, nor archives, scholars, or other non-profits have been able to reign them in. I'm glad Google is mighty enough to take on these scoundrels, because nobody else has been able to.
You're almost literally spewing the anti-Google propaganda of people like Murdoch, Berlusconi, and German state TV (and if you're from somewhere else, there are similar people everywhere), companies and individuals that have monopolized the European media markets and conned Europeans out of huge sums of money. European politicians are doing their bidding because they know they can't get reelected if they act against them. Berlusconi just skipped that step and used his media empire to become the leader of Italy.
These people see their obsolete business models and their control over public opinion threatened and they are fighting back. Someone needs to take them on, and the only one powerful enough is other big companies and the US government, which is why they publish all that anti-US and anti-corporate claptrap. If Google uses its "might" to destroy their businesses, we'll all be better off.
By that reasoning, believing that an almighty God makes everything work out the way it does should be the best scientific theory of all, because it explains all observations. That's not how science works.
It wasn't supposed to; it was just an observation.
OK, I that was in another thread. Nevertheless, if you engage in arguments about US legal cases, it is your responsibility to inform yourself about US law.
Why do you persist in making things up? US copyright law is based in the US Constitution, which defines it to be utilitarian. There is no "apparently" about it. Notions of "fairness" only enter into European copyright law.
Great! I consider the original US copyright system to be fair: 28 years plus mandatory registration. I consider the current system (life+70 years, no registration) to be highly unfair, because it lets publishers control works they did not create and keep works out of the public domain that should be in the public domain. Hence, in the interest of fairness, let's go back to the original copyright terms and system. It's only fair, right?
Well, you should know. CO2 concentrations have been ten times (!) their current levels and at higher temperatures without runaway greenhouse effects. Throughout most of the ages since the dinosaurs, there have been no polar ice caps or glaciers. The normal climate on this planet is significantly warmer than it is now. Positing the possibility of a "runaway greenhouse effect similar to Venus" in arguments about climate change is completely unreasonable and irrational.
But history and climatology does tell you that even slight decreases in temperature have devastating effects on human populations, causing crop failures and starvation.
Good, let's go for it! The long term benefits would far outweigh the costs.
They are Greenpeace's own numbers. If even advocacy groups like Greenpeace come up with such small numbers in their worst case scenarios, why should we do anything about climate change? Do you have better numbers? Because right now, you're just waving your hands.
Despite the supposed environmental destruction, the world is experiencing less war, less conflict, and less hunger today than it has since the start of the industrial revolution. And those countries that are a military threat to us (e.g., Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) do not suffer from either flooding or climate-induced starvation. On the other hand, those countries that do experience starvation and flooding (e.g., Bangladesh, Somalia) are no threat to our security.
Major wars are, however, often caused when the inhabitants of rich, industrialized countries see their fortunes decline. And that is what restrictions on carbon emissions are much more likely to cause.
Rationality and science do work, and they tell you that there is going to be no runaway greenhouse effect, that life can thrive with CO2 levels 10 times as high as current levels, and that an ice-free planet is the norm. You can look up those facts in any textbook on paleoclimatology; they are uncontroversial. And a simple look around the planet shows you that that neither flooding nor starvation (should they occur, which seems unlikely) are a threat to us; the threat is rich industrialized countries in depressions.
If you want to make rational counterarguments, based on facts and observations, I'm all ears.
US copyright is based on utility, not "fairness". Even though I have pointed this out multiple times and pointed you at the Constitution, you still keep droning on about "fairness". And even though the issue is clearly legally unsettled and the court hasn't ruled, you keep talking as if it were a fact that Google is violating the law. Don't expect people to remain civil if you just keep ignoring them and the facts.
But you are on the side of Big Media--you are parroting their attacks on Google, with the same irrelevant arguments about "fairness" and the same attacks on the public domain.
Good.
You still seem to have trouble with the distinction between "could be explained by" and "provides evidence for".
Nothing cute about it: I don't think you are a good scientist (if you are a scientist at all).
Did you even bother to read what I wrote? Or is your thinking really that fuzzy?
MACHOs can't explain our galactic rotation. But they can explain the Bullet Cluster.
That is a gross misrepresentation. Until fairly recently, even the claim that it has gotten warmer was based on extremely sloppy by climatologists who lacked expertise in statistics (the ASA itself criticized that work). The fact that the statistical work has been cleaned up now doesn't change the fact that the original work was sloppy and criticism of it was valid. And what has been shown is just that it has been getting a little warmer on average, over some large regions, nothing else.
The second gross misrepresentation implying that the observation of man-made human warming has automatic policy implications, like the proposed reductions in CO2 emissions. In fact, the "consensus of scientists" is absolutely clear: there is no plausible scenario in which human CO2 emissions make our planet uninhabitable. Even the IPCC doesn't believe that humans will be able to melt the polar ice caps under the worst case scenario. Even their worst case forecasts amount to only a tiny fraction of what humanity has experienced over the last 20000 years anyway. Sea level rise, islands flooding, expansion of equatorial deserts, balanced by increasing habitability of northern zones, are climate changes humanity has not only coped with but thrived under.
Greenpeace estimates a cost of $156 billion for a 1m sea level rise for the US (multiply that by 4-5 for the whole world). But the IPCC predicts only a 60cm rise over a hundred years if nothing changes (and even that requires some assumptions of unobserved feedback mechanisms). The cost of sea level rise is therefore negligible even according to Greenpeace's and the IPCC's own data and predictions. The other consequences of climate change are likely even less costly. That's the so-called "climate catastrophe" we are supposedly facing.
Well, fortunately we live in a democracy in the US, and "believe me, we are the experts" is not good enough to get people to spend trillions of dollars to save a billion or so every year. That kind of technocratic b.s. may work in the EU but not in the US. Here, either the "experts" present their work in a plausible and reproducible way, or nothing's gonna happen. Handwaving, iffy statistics, and gigantic computational climate models aren't going to cut it. And insulting people isn't gonna work either.
Well, as you yourself observed: most books on Google Books show you more than snippets, which means that most people choose to opt in.
Making opt-in the default further limits the rights of the public; it has effects far beyond Google. Just because you hate Google's guts doesn't mean that we should screw archives, non-profits, and scholars even more than they are already screwed by the overreaching lobbying activities of the movie and publishing industries.
Liberty doesn't mean that you can force people to pay for whatever crap you produce. Copyright is a utilitarian tradeoff, not a natural law. Since we have a glut of books and movies, we don't need even stricter copyright legislation.
And I am not concerned with Google, I am concerned with the ill effect your kind of knee-jerk law-making has on everybody else.
Actually, it's not a tautology, it is rhetoric and implies that it would be excessive. Maybe your inability to comprehend simple English is why you have trouble making a living from your "intellectual creations"?
Oh, how right you are! And the multinational corporations that are lobbying here are big, bloated, obsolete publishers that are screwing authors and customers alike and have been pushing one copyright extension after another. Those organizations are the real threat. Google showing a bunch of small snippets and giving you an opt-out if you are dumb enough to take it is a threat to nobody.
I.e. you don't need explicit permission for some uses of copyrighted materials. As I was saying...
Yes, and for most people, the market value of their books goes up. For a few badly written books, it may go down. And that is why the default should be opt-out, not opt-in.
And that is exactly why we should not give authors or the government too much control over our culture or intellectual creations. Excessive copyright restrictions are a threat to our economy, our liberty, and our democracy.