If it works for email, then you should be able to sue an employer if somebody from outside the company mails you porn in an envelope. There's no precedent for employers being responsible for censoring incoming mail, and I certainly wouldn't want a few litigious opportunists to force it on society. Ridiculous.
Valenti: You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved.
But, for the benefit of the few people who own the motion picture industry, Jack wants Congress to restrict technology no matter what the side effects are on everybody else.
Valenti: I don't want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.
Jack is all about defining morality for other people. For example, the public has always had a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. NOBODY "OWNS" COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. Copyright is a right, granted and enforced by the government for a limited time. It's not property, and you can't steal it any more than you can steal the carpool lane by driving in it all by yourself. The difference between infringement and theft because infringement is more complicated. Losses from infringement are supposed to be proven, not taken for granted. Theft is a much simpler concept with a solid and obvious position in the general public's moral landscape. By mislabelling infringement as theft, the copymaking industry gets to play the role of the little old lady chasing the purse snatcher. Who could argue with someone trying to get back their property?
But as Valenti says" I try to make things simple and clear as I can, and I think that helps you persuade other people.
The Tech: He spoke passionately several times about his commitment to the "ideal of civic discourse" and his disgust at Washington, D.C.'s lack of it.
But he's not disgusted with being able to shovel money at elected officials to get them to ignore whatever the people who voted for them want. Jack seems as ignorant of the term "civic" as he is of "fair use." Maybe he's confusing "discourse" and "marketing."
By the way, I did read the article, and I saw that AXA says "the use of such words [within a search engine] infringes on its patents and copyrights," but that would seem to be mixing the ideas of copyrights and patents. Maintaining internal copies of copyrighted terms isn't the same as publishing them, so there should be no copyright infringement. And if using copyrighted terms within a search engine is infringement then searching any copyrighted web page is probably also infringement. This doesn't make sense to me at all, unless AXA is just harassing Google for a settlement.
IANAL and I am trying to understand the legal basis of AXA's case, and in general the theory that search engine operators have any legal obligation to anyone whatsoever. If someone asks you where they can get a Big Mac, and you give them directions to Burger King instead of McDonalds, apparently McDonalds can sue you. WTF???
A much simpler way to keep your hand from overheating is to grasp and lift an ice-cold refreshing beverage at regular intervals. Low-tech approach, but it works for me.
Now that India is fully equipped for e-voting, maybe the US could outsource all our elections. Just add a line on the 1040: Do you want to outsource your vote to India? Yes/No
Software analysis of your tax return would determine your economic status and probable political stance, and cast your vote automatically. The evolution of American democracy would be complete:
1. Revolution 2. Participation 3. Spectator sport 4. Honey, The Simpsons are on!
This could be a good sign for the prospect of robotic cars. I expect that when self-driving cars hit the streets in a few years there will be a decrease in car buying. For one thing they'll be expensive. For another, why let the car sit in the parking lot after it drives you to work, when it can go back home and ferry other family members around. Net result: more one-car families.
Next step is why let the car sit in the home garage at all? Instead of buying the car just subscribe to a taxi service -- a fleet of robotic cars runs around picking up riders continuously.
The fact that cars in general are getting too expensive to maintain could give an encentive for this pattern. I think in 30 years very few people will actually own their own cars. My house will be have a lot more space when I don't need a garage!
Great article, except did we really have to see those sideways unitard views? I was eating breakfast at the time, and he's forever ruined Cap'n Crunch for me.
Amazon.com is a website. Period. Their relationship with you consists of selling you books and other things occasionally, and that's it. There's absolutely no excuse for them prying into anybody's web browsing habits, or collecting any information not necessary for sales transactions.
I've bought plenty of books from Amazon.com, but I have removed them from my favorites list and from this moment forward they get no more of my money, ever. Store that on your hard drive, Jeff.
This is as good a place as any to remind people of the potential of reusable rockets based on Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactors, which could make possible a Mars mission of about 9 months, not 3 years. I highly recommend reading this fascinating detail design for a fully reusable rocket based on the Saturn-V form factor, that could launch a 2 MILLION pound payload and return intact to a powered landing with an equal size payload.
Essentially, the rocket engine consists of a chamber containing a transparent quartz bulb, which contains a core cloud of UF4 gas surrounded by a swirling buffer gas that controls the shape and size of the UF4 core. The core heats to about 30,000 C, emitting intense ultraviolet light that heats hydrogen gas flowing past the bulb. The hydrogen, absorbing the ultraviolet but no neutrons, superheats and shoots out through the rocket nozzle, providing many times the thrust possible with any chemical rocket, and without radioactivity.
One issue the NuclearSpace.com article addresses that is rarely discussed is the need for radiation shielding during interplanetary travel. So far, humans have barely ventured beyond the Earth's protective magnetic field. Prolonged exposure to the solar wind would take a heavy toll on Mars astronauts during a 3-year mission. With a GCNR rocket the round-trip travel time would total only 6 months. The enormous payload capacity would allow for extremely heavy radiation and particle shielding, not to mention ample supplies and equipment for a comfortable, productive stay.
This technology really excites me -- the potential for spaceships that are roomy and well equipped, even luxuriously so, and well shielded from the real-life hazards of space travel. Sign me up!
Re:Naivety (Where's Hugo Weaving when you need him
on
P2P News Syndication?
·
· Score: 1
"That's their tough luck" is second only to "Dude, watch this!" as an intro to a disaster. "That's their tough luck" sounds good until their lawyers come into the picture, and then the situation suddenly changes.
I think anyone who provides or relays P2P news will have to be extremely careful of stepping into the twin potholes of copyright infringement and libel, as people who publish tell-all weblogs have already found out. In defamation suits you get treated just like a big publisher, except for not being owned by a media conglomerate with a multimillion dollar legal budget. Calling yourself part of "The Press" means nothing unless you have the resources to actually take your case into court.
It's not the despotic governments I'm afraid of, it's the toady governments (starts with a U, ends with SA) whose corporate sponsors demand a structure of rules that limits their own exposure to lawsuits. I don't know whether that means more RIAA-like waves of lawsuits against individuals or another crusade to harass ISPs for carrying P2P news feeds, or some other form of restriction, but you can bet there will be something.
I want anyone who writes ad-ware that disables anti-virus protection -- the programmer, not just their company -- personally prosecuted as a terrorist. People who use cheesy web games to bait kids to click on 16-page EULAs that grant full access to their parents' computers know damn well that they aren't dealing with adults of legal contract-signing age. Don't tell me it's the parent's fault for not staring over their kid's shoulders every minute they're on the computer. The people to blame for the world being so fucked up are the people who constantly fuck it up, not the ones who just want to mind their own business. This isn't the Middle Ages, and we shouldn't all have to maintain castles and moats around ourselves anymore.
One of the topics that came up late one night in college was what life would be like if everybody was highly telepathic. You would have little if any privacy, and it would be impossible to lie to anybody. So politics and personal relationships would be radically different from what they are. It strikes me that the potential to be recorded in detail at any time might have a big impact on society. People could carry these things around to cover their asses or gather blackmail material. Crooked politicians would be unable to trust anybody, which might be a good thing. In fact, the degree to which our lawmakers freak out about this particular technology being in the public's hands is probably a good indicator of how dirty they are.
That is an alternative view, but a highly distorted one. Shareholders pay tax themselves when they receive income from their investments. Taxing a business as if it were another person is like taxing your bank account and then taxing you separately when you withdraw money from it.
Please feel free to post links to some of these dozens of other articles. One short paragraph in a long political commentary hardly qualifies as research. Rockwell says (without explanation) that the transition cost to business would be "draconian." I seriously doubt that anyone in business would object to making a transition from paying business taxes to not paying them.
A quick Google search reveals a number of commentaries on national sales tax by people other than political groups lobbying for it. Here are the first two:
"If a universal rebate tied to poverty thresholds is coupled with the national sales tax, as is the case in the Schaefer-Tauzin bill (H.R. 2001), the sales tax is about as progressive as the current income tax. Alternatively, if a payroll tax rebate is provided to low-income families, the new system is only slightly less progressive than the current income tax system." - Gilbert E. Metcalf is an associate professor of economics at Tufts University
"Replacing all federal personal and corporate income taxes with a national retail sales tax would have a dramatic favorable effect on the U.S. economy.
* The saving rate, now at about 2.5 percent, would immediately triple.
* After beginning slowly, U.S. capital stock would gradually increase at least 29 percent and potentially as much as 49 percent.
* Over time, the increase in capital stock would raise per capita productivity by 7 percentage points, and increase real wages by 6 percent." - Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the Cato Institute
The only negative commentaries I could find center are based on sales tax rates of 50%-60%. Many transactions would go underground and spawn the need for "draconian" (there's that word again) enforcement. Strangely, I couldn't find anything explaining why such high tax rates would be necessary; people only quote them as a basis for enumerating the dismal consequences. In point of fact, the various proposals actually put forth in Congress have all been around 20%, making these predictions of gloomy side-effects moot.
Seems to me this is a good analog to proprietary file formats. Instead of having people pay tolls, maybe the government should build roads with inverted caternary bumps and sell the square wheels!
Back in the '80s Scientific American ran an article describing ancient ice making in the Arab lands. They would build walls running east to west about 6 feet tall, a couple feet apart, with a flat, tiled bottom between them which was flooded with a thin layer of water. The sun never touched the bottom, and during the night it got cold enough to form a thin skin of ice, which workers would scrape off before dawn and store underground.
They took this a step farther and used the ice to cool buildings. On top of the building they would put a tower with a single window that was tangent to the prevailing winds. The wind blowing past the window would suck out air (Bernoulli effect), drawing cool air up from tunnels beneath the building.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Score 4: Informative? Uhhhh, okay.
If it works for email, then you should be able to sue an employer if somebody from outside the company mails you porn in an envelope. There's no precedent for employers being responsible for censoring incoming mail, and I certainly wouldn't want a few litigious opportunists to force it on society. Ridiculous.
Valenti: You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved.
But, for the benefit of the few people who own the motion picture industry, Jack wants Congress to restrict technology no matter what the side effects are on everybody else.
Valenti: I don't want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.
Jack is all about defining morality for other people. For example, the public has always had a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. NOBODY "OWNS" COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. Copyright is a right, granted and enforced by the government for a limited time. It's not property, and you can't steal it any more than you can steal the carpool lane by driving in it all by yourself. The difference between infringement and theft because infringement is more complicated. Losses from infringement are supposed to be proven, not taken for granted. Theft is a much simpler concept with a solid and obvious position in the general public's moral landscape. By mislabelling infringement as theft, the copymaking industry gets to play the role of the little old lady chasing the purse snatcher. Who could argue with someone trying to get back their property?
But as Valenti says" I try to make things simple and clear as I can, and I think that helps you persuade other people.
The Tech: He spoke passionately several times about his commitment to the "ideal of civic discourse" and his disgust at Washington, D.C.'s lack of it.
But he's not disgusted with being able to shovel money at elected officials to get them to ignore whatever the people who voted for them want. Jack seems as ignorant of the term "civic" as he is of "fair use." Maybe he's confusing "discourse" and "marketing."
By the way, I did read the article, and I saw that AXA says "the use of such words [within a search engine] infringes on its patents and copyrights," but that would seem to be mixing the ideas of copyrights and patents. Maintaining internal copies of copyrighted terms isn't the same as publishing them, so there should be no copyright infringement. And if using copyrighted terms within a search engine is infringement then searching any copyrighted web page is probably also infringement. This doesn't make sense to me at all, unless AXA is just harassing Google for a settlement.
IANAL and I am trying to understand the legal basis of AXA's case, and in general the theory that search engine operators have any legal obligation to anyone whatsoever. If someone asks you where they can get a Big Mac, and you give them directions to Burger King instead of McDonalds, apparently McDonalds can sue you. WTF???
A much simpler way to keep your hand from overheating is to grasp and lift an ice-cold refreshing beverage at regular intervals. Low-tech approach, but it works for me.
[Note: If someone can identify the third plane on the lower left corner of the picture, please tell me what it is.]
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
The working link is http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/11192 003hearing1133/Thompson1799.htm (no space in the middle).
"We would first like to put this material in a soldier's sleeves and pants..."
So the hookers of the future will ask soldiers, "Is that shear-thickening liquid armor in your pants, or are you just glad to see me?"
The character in the movie Real Genius. Or girls of similar bent.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Now that India is fully equipped for e-voting, maybe the US could outsource all our elections. Just add a line on the 1040: Do you want to outsource your vote to India? Yes/No
Software analysis of your tax return would determine your economic status and probable political stance, and cast your vote automatically. The evolution of American democracy would be complete:
1. Revolution
2. Participation
3. Spectator sport
4. Honey, The Simpsons are on!
This could be a good sign for the prospect of robotic cars. I expect that when self-driving cars hit the streets in a few years there will be a decrease in car buying. For one thing they'll be expensive. For another, why let the car sit in the parking lot after it drives you to work, when it can go back home and ferry other family members around. Net result: more one-car families.
Next step is why let the car sit in the home garage at all? Instead of buying the car just subscribe to a taxi service -- a fleet of robotic cars runs around picking up riders continuously.
The fact that cars in general are getting too expensive to maintain could give an encentive for this pattern. I think in 30 years very few people will actually own their own cars. My house will be have a lot more space when I don't need a garage!
Great article, except did we really have to see those sideways unitard views? I was eating breakfast at the time, and he's forever ruined Cap'n Crunch for me.
The horror! The horror!
Amazon.com is a website. Period. Their relationship with you consists of selling you books and other things occasionally, and that's it. There's absolutely no excuse for them prying into anybody's web browsing habits, or collecting any information not necessary for sales transactions.
I've bought plenty of books from Amazon.com, but I have removed them from my favorites list and from this moment forward they get no more of my money, ever. Store that on your hard drive, Jeff.
This is as good a place as any to remind people of the potential of reusable rockets based on Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactors, which could make possible a Mars mission of about 9 months, not 3 years. I highly recommend reading this fascinating detail design for a fully reusable rocket based on the Saturn-V form factor, that could launch a 2 MILLION pound payload and return intact to a powered landing with an equal size payload.
Essentially, the rocket engine consists of a chamber containing a transparent quartz bulb, which contains a core cloud of UF4 gas surrounded by a swirling buffer gas that controls the shape and size of the UF4 core. The core heats to about 30,000 C, emitting intense ultraviolet light that heats hydrogen gas flowing past the bulb. The hydrogen, absorbing the ultraviolet but no neutrons, superheats and shoots out through the rocket nozzle, providing many times the thrust possible with any chemical rocket, and without radioactivity.
One issue the NuclearSpace.com article addresses that is rarely discussed is the need for radiation shielding during interplanetary travel. So far, humans have barely ventured beyond the Earth's protective magnetic field. Prolonged exposure to the solar wind would take a heavy toll on Mars astronauts during a 3-year mission. With a GCNR rocket the round-trip travel time would total only 6 months. The enormous payload capacity would allow for extremely heavy radiation and particle shielding, not to mention ample supplies and equipment for a comfortable, productive stay.
This technology really excites me -- the potential for spaceships that are roomy and well equipped, even luxuriously so, and well shielded from the real-life hazards of space travel. Sign me up!
"That's their tough luck" is second only to "Dude, watch this!" as an intro to a disaster. "That's their tough luck" sounds good until their lawyers come into the picture, and then the situation suddenly changes.
I think anyone who provides or relays P2P news will have to be extremely careful of stepping into the twin potholes of copyright infringement and libel, as people who publish tell-all weblogs have already found out. In defamation suits you get treated just like a big publisher, except for not being owned by a media conglomerate with a multimillion dollar legal budget. Calling yourself part of "The Press" means nothing unless you have the resources to actually take your case into court.
It's not the despotic governments I'm afraid of, it's the toady governments (starts with a U, ends with SA) whose corporate sponsors demand a structure of rules that limits their own exposure to lawsuits. I don't know whether that means more RIAA-like waves of lawsuits against individuals or another crusade to harass ISPs for carrying P2P news feeds, or some other form of restriction, but you can bet there will be something.
I want anyone who writes ad-ware that disables anti-virus protection -- the programmer, not just their company -- personally prosecuted as a terrorist. People who use cheesy web games to bait kids to click on 16-page EULAs that grant full access to their parents' computers know damn well that they aren't dealing with adults of legal contract-signing age. Don't tell me it's the parent's fault for not staring over their kid's shoulders every minute they're on the computer. The people to blame for the world being so fucked up are the people who constantly fuck it up, not the ones who just want to mind their own business. This isn't the Middle Ages, and we shouldn't all have to maintain castles and moats around ourselves anymore.
One of the topics that came up late one night in college was what life would be like if everybody was highly telepathic. You would have little if any privacy, and it would be impossible to lie to anybody. So politics and personal relationships would be radically different from what they are. It strikes me that the potential to be recorded in detail at any time might have a big impact on society. People could carry these things around to cover their asses or gather blackmail material. Crooked politicians would be unable to trust anybody, which might be a good thing. In fact, the degree to which our lawmakers freak out about this particular technology being in the public's hands is probably a good indicator of how dirty they are.
It was Courtney after a Hole concert backstage party. Difficult to tell, I know.
Encoding in Windows Media format should definitely be a crime.
That is an alternative view, but a highly distorted one. Shareholders pay tax themselves when they receive income from their investments. Taxing a business as if it were another person is like taxing your bank account and then taxing you separately when you withdraw money from it.
When I think of all the times my sterling comments have been ignored...
Please feel free to post links to some of these dozens of other articles. One short paragraph in a long political commentary hardly qualifies as research. Rockwell says (without explanation) that the transition cost to business would be "draconian." I seriously doubt that anyone in business would object to making a transition from paying business taxes to not paying them.
A quick Google search reveals a number of commentaries on national sales tax by people other than political groups lobbying for it. Here are the first two:
"If a universal rebate tied to poverty thresholds is coupled with the national sales tax, as is the case in the Schaefer-Tauzin bill (H.R. 2001), the sales tax is about as progressive as the current income tax. Alternatively, if a payroll tax rebate is provided to low-income families, the new system is only slightly less progressive than the current income tax system."
- Gilbert E. Metcalf is an associate professor of economics at Tufts University
"Replacing all federal personal and corporate income taxes with a national retail sales tax would have a dramatic favorable effect on the U.S. economy.
* The saving rate, now at about 2.5 percent, would immediately triple.
* After beginning slowly, U.S. capital stock would gradually increase at least 29 percent and potentially as much as 49 percent.
* Over time, the increase in capital stock would raise per capita productivity by 7 percentage points, and increase real wages by 6 percent."
- Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the Cato Institute
The only negative commentaries I could find center are based on sales tax rates of 50%-60%. Many transactions would go underground and spawn the need for "draconian" (there's that word again) enforcement. Strangely, I couldn't find anything explaining why such high tax rates would be necessary; people only quote them as a basis for enumerating the dismal consequences. In point of fact, the various proposals actually put forth in Congress have all been around 20%, making these predictions of gloomy side-effects moot.
Seems to me this is a good analog to proprietary file formats. Instead of having people pay tolls, maybe the government should build roads with inverted caternary bumps and sell the square wheels!
Back in the '80s Scientific American ran an article describing ancient ice making in the Arab lands. They would build walls running east to west about 6 feet tall, a couple feet apart, with a flat, tiled bottom between them which was flooded with a thin layer of water. The sun never touched the bottom, and during the night it got cold enough to form a thin skin of ice, which workers would scrape off before dawn and store underground.
They took this a step farther and used the ice to cool buildings. On top of the building they would put a tower with a single window that was tangent to the prevailing winds. The wind blowing past the window would suck out air (Bernoulli effect), drawing cool air up from tunnels beneath the building.