A couple days ago somebody sent me spam with the subject heading, "I owe you lunch."
Is that a legally binding contract? Maybe if I track down this asshole I can sue him (or her) for a free lunch. Better yet, I'd love to force some spammer to actually produce the hundreds of hot young girls who are horny for me.
Pretty tedious read. Is there a "most padded story" award?? Many of the items just didn't seem all that dumb. The general background stupidity level of the world makes it hard to tell sometimes. The one about K-Mart being declared "retailer of the year" and declaring bankruptcy the next day was a corker though.
Nobody would do software development except companies that can afford massive liability insurance. Experts don't even agree on whether it is theoretically possible to guarantee that code is bug-free. Software liability is an attempt to milk money out of the inevitable. Bugs happen. Kids fall off tricycles. Coffee is hot. The last thing I want to see is for the litigation industry to grow in yet another direction at everyone else's expense.
Does anybody really still not understand this? Companies do not PAY taxes, they COLLECT taxes. Business tax of any kind is just another expense that has to be built into the price of the product. Any legislator whose version of tax relief for us peasants is to tax those big old evil corporations is lying, plain and simple.
If we completely did away with all corporate taxation and replaced it with a national sales tax, properly calculated, the net cost of living would be the same. The differende would be that we would KNOW how much tax we were paying. Congress wouldn't like that at all. Educated citizens (oops, sorry, I meant "consumers") are the last thing they want.
Right on! And yet these same legislators think it's fine to put up a colossal firewall to control their own citizens' access to the Internet. Tough shit boys.
The part about everything on their site being copyrighted by them looked to me like just the standard copyright satement applies to material they publish on their site. I don't think they say that the papers in their database belong to them.
But it also seemed to me that the teachers subscribe to the service and submit the papers. Maybe I misunderstood... do you actuall submit your own work and then somehow send the report to the teacher?
I think they realize that people who are capable of breaking security will keep doing it, but they also know that the vast masses are just consumers afraid of getting in trouble. The average person will simply tolerate whatever inconveniences and costs are imposed by copy protection, and blame it all on those damned hackers. People may grumble about things they don't like, but mostly they don't do anything about it. And if they have no choice, thanks to our bought-and-paid-for Congress, well... problem solved.
Where does it say that? After careful reading of the agreement I can't find any reference to Turnitin owning the submitted papers. That idea doesn't make sense anyway, because the students don't subscribe to the service or submit their papers; the instructors do. There's no way a student loses any rights to a paper just because an instructor uploads it somewhere.
Maybe the confusion comes from the phrase, "our exclusive database of submitted papers." That doesn't imply that Turnitin has exclusive rights to the papers, only that nobody else can search their database.
I think it's obvious that "Larry" does get what the law's "place" is. His very informative review of copyright history makes it clear that the more recent actions of lawmakers and the courts have become inconsistent with the original constitutional mission of copyright law. He goes on to propose specific rules that would be more in line with encouraging innovation by giving limited exclusive rights to innovators. What's more, the article does something few lawyer-written articles do: it acknowledges the very existence of culture and its value in the human world. I wish the legal system would start seeing these copyright issues as more than a series of financial transactions.
This article over on FoodDot reports that researchers at Nutriglomerate have invented bread that toasts itself. A network of conductive thermal protein monofibers woven through the bread during baking draws power from an organic battery in the center of each slice. When the toast is done the battery's own heat converts it to a pat of butter. Bon apetit!
Sounds good in theory, but how many cents per gallon is your gasoline tax right now, and what was it 5 years ago? I doubt there is one person in a hundred who could answer accurately, let alone have it really affect their driving.
Notice that no matter how bad traffic is, no matter how much time people have to invest to drive around, they STILL DO IT. Any transportation system has built-in penalties for overuse/undercapacity. Inventing new and better penalties to discourage people from using a system they paid won't solve the problem. But is a typical anal administrator solution that will increase revenues.
Here's an idea. How about if the government starts printing money that disintegrates in a few days, so we can use it to buy self-destructing DVDs. But no, only criminals pull crap like that.
A few more consumption-encouraging ideas for our innovative captains of industry:
- Beer that goes flat in 2 minutes.
- Cigarettes that go out after 3 drags.
- Condoms that leak on the third spurt.
And if any recording business mogul out there is looking for a car whose brakes fail the third time it's driven, I will be MORE than happy to sell you one. Please! In fact you can take it for 3 free test drives, and hey the radio works!
Read the CamelotExchange website, especially their plea for donations to help their cause. Playing the victim in some sort of moral crusade to justify a business built around people who cheat at a role-playing game. Absolutely pathetic, yet the worst part is that enough people find it so strangely plausible as to actually merit serious debate. Will comic book readers file a class action suit if Batman beats up Spiderman? Well gosh, some people are thinking right now as they read this, maybe that's not such a silly idea. Yes, it is. It is as lame and fucking ridiculous an idea as CamelotExchange's suit.
It is definitely interesting that a real-world economy can spring up to trade virtual nothings, and in a way it just adds another dimension to the game, a kind of extraplanar realm where game characters can go get nifty stuff, as if from the gods. But role-playing games are controlled environments, at least to the extent of preserving an important principle called game balance.
Game balance can be ruined by overzealous dungeon masters who throw arch-demons at low-level characters, or hand out vorpal nuclear swords of god-slaying like candy. Game balance can be ruined by online players who hack their game cients so they can't be killed. Offline trading of virtual goods is just a social engineering hack. If the people who run an online game don't like it, well it's their game and their rules isn't it? It's their game, and more importantly, it's A game.
Thanks for your posting. Very informative and well written. I had never heard of the notion of exclusive rights implying the obligation to publish. Makes a lot of sense.
The guy from Temple University foreseeing the headline, "Music Industry Fails in Attempts to Get Users to Patronize Sponsored Music Services."
None of the writers seemed inclined toward the one obvious prediction: that law on the Internet, as elsewhere, will continue to serve the interests promoted by the most money.
We may have had a justice system at one time, but now we have a litigation industry instead, and it favors the people with the most money (just ask OJ). But I bet a larger phenomenon than the high-profile legal battles is the vast bulk of cases that never get heard because there isn't enough money in them to interest attorneys. Yes, you have a case but there's nothing in it for me, so thanks for stopping by. NEXT!
I would like to see this cybercourt idea evolve into a system with sufficient AI to listen to legal claims, ask questions, even render judgements in simple cases. Or a cyber lawyer smart enough to compete with F. Lee Bailey. Hey, it works with chess! How about a legal harassment/frivolous lawsuit filter that all cases would have to be pass before burdening the human-driven system. Even just a publicly available AI lawyer that answers legal questions reliably would be a real boon to the common citizen, who already paid to get the laws written and can't afford to pay a consultant to explain them.
1. How many people live close enough to work that they can afford the time to commute on a device that moves at walking speed?
IT goes 3 times walking speed (mentioned repeatedly in the articles). This is a key point, and is central to Kamel's plan to get people to use mass transportation to get to and from town, and use IT to get to and from the mass transportation. In his words, "turn a 30-minute walk into a 10-minute ride."
2. How many people live in places where the weather is neither too warm or too cold to spend the time outside?
Hardly anybody really. Come on, generations of New Yorkers have been trudging through freezing sleet and sweltering heat from the subway to the office. It's weather, we just deal with it.
3. How many businesses have the infrastructure to handle storing and charging these things?
All of them. Every company has had electrical outlets, and even a Dilbert-size cubicle has a corner to lean an IT. Bikes haven't created an insurmountable storage problem for employers, and ITs are smaller.
4. Is it really going to share the sidewalk with pedestrians? Where are they going to go now?
They'll stay right where they are. Pedestrians already share the sidewalk with joggers (and people who are just in a big hurry). IT riders won't go any faster than that, and possibly will smell better.
5. What about security? Riding around on a $3000 device that can't move faster than walking speed is a huge crime oppurtunity.
Good point, except that it goes 3 times walking speed. In certain places ITs might have to be locked up like bikes, but probably not nearly as often since, unlike bikes, ITs are rideable indoors. If I paid $3000 for one, I would sure as hell ride it into stores and park it between my knees in movie theaters.
Certainly IT won't get rid of cars. But Kamen isn't saying that it will. His goal is for IT to make cars unnecessary within urban centers by extending the distance people are willing to travel without them. Doesn't sound crackpot to me.
Interesting observation. Why wait for the RIAA to sue a deep-pockets company like Cisco? I like the idea of suing the RIAA better. How about a class-action suit by musicians and music buyers against the RIAA companies for usury and monopolistic business practices? I would join the class on that one.
Meteorite communications are apparently old-tech
on
Listening to Leonids
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
According to this old ABCNews article, communications systems that work by bouncing radio signals off momentary streaks of ionized air created by meteorites have been in use for decades. I remember reading about a truck tracking system based on this. Kind of cool actually.
They work on the principle that if you send out a weak, omnidirectional radio signal it will randomly be reflected to the right target every so often by a streak of ionized air from one of the 80,000 or so meteorites that hit the atmosphere every second. If the target radio sends out a return signal quickly enough, it will be reflected back along the same path to the sender. The ionized streak of air lasts about a second, which is long enough to shake hands and send a little data back and forth, like a truck's position or an updated delivery schedule. Radio signals can be reflected several thousand miles this way.
Re:Another question about the shower...
on
Listening to Leonids
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's because the meteorites don't all hit the Earth head-on. As the planet moves through the cloud of particles, it plows straight into some and misses others entirely. A few pass by close enough to get captured by the Earth's gravity and spiral in. The direction they are moving when they burn up depends on where they were when they got captured (which could be over the poles) and how much of an orbit they manage to make before hitting the atmosphere. So they can actually streak in from any direction.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple days ago somebody sent me spam with the subject heading, "I owe you lunch."
Is that a legally binding contract? Maybe if I track down this asshole I can sue him (or her) for a free lunch. Better yet, I'd love to force some spammer to actually produce the hundreds of hot young girls who are horny for me.
"They can have my joystick when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
Pretty tedious read. Is there a "most padded story" award?? Many of the items just didn't seem all that dumb. The general background stupidity level of the world makes it hard to tell sometimes. The one about K-Mart being declared "retailer of the year" and declaring bankruptcy the next day was a corker though.
Nobody would do software development except companies that can afford massive liability insurance. Experts don't even agree on whether it is theoretically possible to guarantee that code is bug-free. Software liability is an attempt to milk money out of the inevitable. Bugs happen. Kids fall off tricycles. Coffee is hot. The last thing I want to see is for the litigation industry to grow in yet another direction at everyone else's expense.
Does anybody really still not understand this? Companies do not PAY taxes, they COLLECT taxes. Business tax of any kind is just another expense that has to be built into the price of the product. Any legislator whose version of tax relief for us peasants is to tax those big old evil corporations is lying, plain and simple.
If we completely did away with all corporate taxation and replaced it with a national sales tax, properly calculated, the net cost of living would be the same. The differende would be that we would KNOW how much tax we were paying. Congress wouldn't like that at all. Educated citizens (oops, sorry, I meant "consumers") are the last thing they want.
Right on! And yet these same legislators think it's fine to put up a colossal firewall to control their own citizens' access to the Internet. Tough shit boys.
The part about everything on their site being copyrighted by them looked to me like just the standard copyright satement applies to material they publish on their site. I don't think they say that the papers in their database belong to them.
But it also seemed to me that the teachers subscribe to the service and submit the papers. Maybe I misunderstood... do you actuall submit your own work and then somehow send the report to the teacher?
I think they realize that people who are capable of breaking security will keep doing it, but they also know that the vast masses are just consumers afraid of getting in trouble. The average person will simply tolerate whatever inconveniences and costs are imposed by copy protection, and blame it all on those damned hackers. People may grumble about things they don't like, but mostly they don't do anything about it. And if they have no choice, thanks to our bought-and-paid-for Congress, well... problem solved.
Where does it say that? After careful reading of the agreement I can't find any reference to Turnitin owning the submitted papers. That idea doesn't make sense anyway, because the students don't subscribe to the service or submit their papers; the instructors do. There's no way a student loses any rights to a paper just because an instructor uploads it somewhere.
Maybe the confusion comes from the phrase, "our exclusive database of submitted papers." That doesn't imply that Turnitin has exclusive rights to the papers, only that nobody else can search their database.
I think it's obvious that "Larry" does get what the law's "place" is. His very informative review of copyright history makes it clear that the more recent actions of lawmakers and the courts have become inconsistent with the original constitutional mission of copyright law. He goes on to propose specific rules that would be more in line with encouraging innovation by giving limited exclusive rights to innovators. What's more, the article does something few lawyer-written articles do: it acknowledges the very existence of culture and its value in the human world. I wish the legal system would start seeing these copyright issues as more than a series of financial transactions.
Slashdot item for 2012:
This article over on FoodDot reports that researchers at Nutriglomerate have invented bread that toasts itself. A network of conductive thermal protein monofibers woven through the bread during baking draws power from an organic battery in the center of each slice. When the toast is done the battery's own heat converts it to a pat of butter. Bon apetit!
Sounds good in theory, but how many cents per gallon is your gasoline tax right now, and what was it 5 years ago? I doubt there is one person in a hundred who could answer accurately, let alone have it really affect their driving.
Notice that no matter how bad traffic is, no matter how much time people have to invest to drive around, they STILL DO IT. Any transportation system has built-in penalties for overuse/undercapacity. Inventing new and better penalties to discourage people from using a system they paid won't solve the problem. But is a typical anal administrator solution that will increase revenues.
This comment gets a score of 4 Insightful??? Uh, okay Beavis.
Here's an idea. How about if the government starts printing money that disintegrates in a few days, so we can use it to buy self-destructing DVDs. But no, only criminals pull crap like that.
A few more consumption-encouraging ideas for our innovative captains of industry:
- Beer that goes flat in 2 minutes.
- Cigarettes that go out after 3 drags.
- Condoms that leak on the third spurt.
And if any recording business mogul out there is looking for a car whose brakes fail the third time it's driven, I will be MORE than happy to sell you one. Please! In fact you can take it for 3 free test drives, and hey the radio works!
Read the CamelotExchange website, especially their plea for donations to help their cause. Playing the victim in some sort of moral crusade to justify a business built around people who cheat at a role-playing game. Absolutely pathetic, yet the worst part is that enough people find it so strangely plausible as to actually merit serious debate. Will comic book readers file a class action suit if Batman beats up Spiderman? Well gosh, some people are thinking right now as they read this, maybe that's not such a silly idea. Yes, it is. It is as lame and fucking ridiculous an idea as CamelotExchange's suit.
It is definitely interesting that a real-world economy can spring up to trade virtual nothings, and in a way it just adds another dimension to the game, a kind of extraplanar realm where game characters can go get nifty stuff, as if from the gods. But role-playing games are controlled environments, at least to the extent of preserving an important principle called game balance.
Game balance can be ruined by overzealous dungeon masters who throw arch-demons at low-level characters, or hand out vorpal nuclear swords of god-slaying like candy. Game balance can be ruined by online players who hack their game cients so they can't be killed. Offline trading of virtual goods is just a social engineering hack. If the people who run an online game don't like it, well it's their game and their rules isn't it? It's their game, and more importantly, it's A game.
"The more they overwork the plumbing, the easier it is to block up the pipes."
Cdr. Montgomery Scott, USS Enterprise
Thanks for your posting. Very informative and well written. I had never heard of the notion of exclusive rights implying the obligation to publish. Makes a lot of sense.
Let's analyze this:
1) The customers AOL loses because of sticker shock will discover that they never needed AOL to begin with, so they won't go back.
2) Since Bob Pittman has apparently gone off his fucking gourd, he is sure to make even more idiotic decisions in the near future.
I ask you, other than an announcement that they will stop sending everybody another useless CD every couple months, what better news could there be?
None of the writers seemed inclined toward the one obvious prediction: that law on the Internet, as elsewhere, will continue to serve the interests promoted by the most money.
I would like to see this cybercourt idea evolve into a system with sufficient AI to listen to legal claims, ask questions, even render judgements in simple cases. Or a cyber lawyer smart enough to compete with F. Lee Bailey. Hey, it works with chess! How about a legal harassment/frivolous lawsuit filter that all cases would have to be pass before burdening the human-driven system. Even just a publicly available AI lawyer that answers legal questions reliably would be a real boon to the common citizen, who already paid to get the laws written and can't afford to pay a consultant to explain them.
1. How many people live close enough to work that they can afford the time to commute on a device that moves at walking speed?
IT goes 3 times walking speed (mentioned repeatedly in the articles). This is a key point, and is central to Kamel's plan to get people to use mass transportation to get to and from town, and use IT to get to and from the mass transportation. In his words, "turn a 30-minute walk into a 10-minute ride."
2. How many people live in places where the weather is neither too warm or too cold to spend the time outside?
Hardly anybody really. Come on, generations of New Yorkers have been trudging through freezing sleet and sweltering heat from the subway to the office. It's weather, we just deal with it.
3. How many businesses have the infrastructure to handle storing and charging these things?
All of them. Every company has had electrical outlets, and even a Dilbert-size cubicle has a corner to lean an IT. Bikes haven't created an insurmountable storage problem for employers, and ITs are smaller.
4. Is it really going to share the sidewalk with pedestrians? Where are they going to go now?
They'll stay right where they are. Pedestrians already share the sidewalk with joggers (and people who are just in a big hurry). IT riders won't go any faster than that, and possibly will smell better.
5. What about security? Riding around on a $3000 device that can't move faster than walking speed is a huge crime oppurtunity.
Good point, except that it goes 3 times walking speed. In certain places ITs might have to be locked up like bikes, but probably not nearly as often since, unlike bikes, ITs are rideable indoors. If I paid $3000 for one, I would sure as hell ride it into stores and park it between my knees in movie theaters.
Certainly IT won't get rid of cars. But Kamen isn't saying that it will. His goal is for IT to make cars unnecessary within urban centers by extending the distance people are willing to travel without them. Doesn't sound crackpot to me.
Interesting observation. Why wait for the RIAA to sue a deep-pockets company like Cisco? I like the idea of suing the RIAA better. How about a class-action suit by musicians and music buyers against the RIAA companies for usury and monopolistic business practices? I would join the class on that one.
According to this old ABCNews article, communications systems that work by bouncing radio signals off momentary streaks of ionized air created by meteorites have been in use for decades. I remember reading about a truck tracking system based on this. Kind of cool actually.
They work on the principle that if you send out a weak, omnidirectional radio signal it will randomly be reflected to the right target every so often by a streak of ionized air from one of the 80,000 or so meteorites that hit the atmosphere every second. If the target radio sends out a return signal quickly enough, it will be reflected back along the same path to the sender. The ionized streak of air lasts about a second, which is long enough to shake hands and send a little data back and forth, like a truck's position or an updated delivery schedule. Radio signals can be reflected several thousand miles this way.
It's because the meteorites don't all hit the Earth head-on. As the planet moves through the cloud of particles, it plows straight into some and misses others entirely. A few pass by close enough to get captured by the Earth's gravity and spiral in. The direction they are moving when they burn up depends on where they were when they got captured (which could be over the poles) and how much of an orbit they manage to make before hitting the atmosphere. So they can actually streak in from any direction.