This is really interesting. I haven't dug into their number (beyond looking at the pretty graphs) to see what "cost effecient to operate", and "cheap to install" really means. But this system would appear to scale much better than traditional mass transit, perhaps making it economical for suburban mass transit.
That is the biggest problem with mass transit in the US - we are so spread out. Either you have a convienient transit schedule and end up running a whole bunch of buses/trains that would be empty most of the time, and thus unable to pay for themselves. Or you only run buses/trains every so often which makes the system inconvient/impractical enough that most people won't/can't use it.
I didn't mean to imply that they quantity of files shared made infringement a crime, just that charging money did. Sorry bad choice of words.
However to clarify - civil penalties always apply, but criminal penalties do not apply unless you charged money or profited or the material you infringed upon in the last 180 days has a total retail value of over $1000. See Copyright Code Section 506 . For now at least - the cut-off for what is criminal has been decreased several times in the last 10 years.
While a BSA visit would be absolutely hilarious, I for one am glad that they are getting a lighter treatment than Maksym Kovalchuk. Individual copyright violation (a civil offense) is a whole other ballgame than selling thousands of copies of pirated software (a criminal offense). Proportionality in punishment is a good thing.
It only takes one season. Given modern crops that means harvest can be happening year round. This is especially for algae based biodiesel (the only one capable of being produced in the quantities needed), which can effectively be produced continuously. It has the added benefit that it's production can simultaneously serve as a waste management process at coal burning and human waste treatment plants. It can be burned in any diesel car with little or no modifications (at most replacing some seals) - in fact it is a better lubricant than the additives we currently use. The only obstacle is to get the cost down (it is nearly 2x the cost of gasoline), or wait for oil shortages to bring the cost of fossil fuels up to where it is economically justifiable to switch.
I agree with you that the only "primary" sources of energy available on earth are nuclear and gravitational, but where are you getting your info on the comparative effeciency of those two fuels? As far as I know:
Hydrocarbons are far more energy dense than any other way of storing hydrogen.
Plants are far more efficient at turning sunlight into hydrocarbons than any method we have for generating hydrogen.
Hydrocarbons are much easier to handle and transport as their natural state is liquid, not gas.
If hydrogen was so much more efficient than gasoline, or even biomass fuels, then we would be using it.
I'd like to amend my previous statement. I was thinking from a legal point of view not a practical one. While legally customers never had any liability in court, that didn't prevent anyone from sueing them. So basically what Microsoft is saying is that it will pay for any of these unbased, frivilous lawsuits brought against their customers. When they do so however, they need not prove or disprove whether MS is infringing, just that the customer has no legal liablility.
Sad. Our legal system is so screwed up that people are afraid to do something completely legal, simply because someone with more money might bring an baseless case against them.
No it doesn't say any of those things. In fact all it really says is this:
If Microsoft infringes on someone's IP, it is Microsoft that is liable, not their customers.
That was true regardless of whether they made the statement or not. The only purpose of this announcement is to create doubt that other software may have this liability, but MS software definately doesn't.
In particular they want you to think that open source software does have a potential for liability. Don't get me wrong - simply using a peice of software does not infringe on any IP rights, regardless of whether it is open source or not. However open source software lets you redistribute and modify it. If you redistribute software which infringes someone's copyright you might have some liability. In reality I'm pretty sure that the person who originally redistributed the software under an open source licence would be at fault for illegally sublicencing a copywritten work, and the people who redistributed the software later under the open source license would not be liable.
But basically this is just an empty statement that Microsoft is making to help prop up it's FUD campain.
That is not how things work. This isn't like debian where after a certain amount of time unstable is simply renamed stable. RHEL is developed completely apart from Fedora and the purpose of Fedora is not to be a testing version of RHEL. The purpose of Fedora is to get the bugs out of the bleeding edge software as fast as possible, not to debug the distro. A release early, release often strategy is the best way to obtain that goal.
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Distributing other peoples works without thier permission is indeed against the law and has been for a couple hundred years. The only difference that selling makes is that it then becomes a criminal offense instead of just a civil one.
Of course not, they are practically commodities. People only shop for them when they move into a house or the old one dies, and no-one cares about being the first to get the latest kenmore.
But video game and movie consumers really do want to get the game/movie as soon as they can. The producers encourage this, but the demand would exist even without their encouragement. They are not controlling demand by having a first day of sale - it is logically impossible not to have a first day that a product is available.
If they did do what you said and allowed stores to sell as soon as they got it, that would artificially limit supply on the first days, allowing lucky retailers to gouge people that were willing to buy it, and hurting the sales of unlucky stores whose shipment arrived a day latter.
Given there is demand for a popular game, and that there has to be a first time that it is available, the most fair thing to do - for the retailers and the customers - is to make it available for all the retailers to sell on the same day.
No you should notify the author of the software - the Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter 5.0 team. And possibly gv, since they could possibly be out of date or wrong as well.
I mean, I know that they government is in bed with the cooporations and all, but I think they have better ways to abuse their power then to waste time skiming the web for bug reports:)
I agree that conceding is a very gentlemanly thing to do, but comming from one of the states who hasn't even finished processing our ballots I am a little annoyed. At this point, the electoral votes in are 254 to 252, with 32 votes out. Even if the exit polls showed that it was likely that Kerry would not win, it is the votes that determine the election not the polls. It wouldn't have divided the country any more to have given those states time to complete their tallies and then concede. But oh well, splitting hairs I guess. I am glad it is over, and here's to hoping the next 4 years will be better than the last.
Unless a language is actively used it will be forgotten by the average person. My grandfather came over on the boat when he was 8 and barely remembers is native tongue.
Of course, but someone who has learned more than one language - even if they have forgotten it - has an easier time learning additional languages. Secondly, if everyone in an area knows more than one language, there would be more people to talk to and less cultural bias against speaking a single tongue, so the second languages would get more use. Compare this to you grandfather's case where most people around him spoke English and his parents probably preferred him to speak English as much as possible, so he would have better opportunities then they did.
Alternately, I don't remember a good deal of I learned in Calc II - does that mean that I should never have taken the class? Hell no - it is much easier to give myself a quick refresher on when I need to use it, than to have never taken it at all, or waited to take later in life.
you can't teach creativity, you either have it or you don't.
Well rather than having a philosophical argument about something immeasurable like creativity, let's look at something a bit more concrete. Studies have shown that multi-lingual people, and/or people who studied music as a child do better at math and science, than those who don't. This still holds true after you statistically isolate and remove the effects of external criteria, like wealth and parental involvement. So problem solving and critical thinking skills are not just genetic, but partially influenced by environment as well.
Studies show that starting kids late on lanuguage greatly hampers their ability to learn their lanugage. But they also show that starting kids early or late on arithmatic does not have any meaningfull impact in the long run. So somethings are more affected by age than others.
The conclusion: we should be focusing education during the younger years on areas where youth is an advantage. Children should be brought up multilingual rather than spending years learning it poorly in high school and college. We should care more about art, music and exploration in younger years, even if it means that math and others are pushed back a few years.
People will be arguing about the election over the next several days regardless of whether this story was posted or not. But hopefully, since this thread exists, it will decrease the amount of off-topic conversation in other threads.
Sure, no one has found any bugs Knuth's TeX in years. Same for Qmail, and others. You have to know exactly what you are doing before you start - which often means writing a throw away version of the software first to work out the kinks in the design. You have to have a simple clean design, and coding practice - as one of the Unix developers said debuging is 10x harder than writing code, so you you write code as cleverly as you can, you are, by definition, not qualified to debug that code. You have to know upfront how to write secure code, and think about with every function you write - never put this off for later. Then you have to have some one else rigorously read over every line of code to find any mistakes. Lastly you have to systematically test each part of the code individually and together. Then after years of widespread use without any major feature changes you will have weeded out nearly all of the bugs.
Nearly all software that is written leaves out some of these things, choosing to balence getting something done with quality. Some find a better balance than others:)
BTW. The mozilla programs are definately good programmers, but the codebase is certainly not the paragon of clean code. It is huge and unweildy, which is the main reason that Apple chose to build off of KHTML instead of Gecko when they made Safari. The situation has improved over time, but making an existing non-secure program secure, is much harder than doing it (mostly) correct from the start.
Yeah, it would have been nice if they did previous years as well, since (according to CSPAN) Kerry missed less than 2% of the all votes during the his time in the senate, prior to the begining of his campain, casting over 6000 votes in his senate career.
I can't see myself memorizing too many words over 5 letters though, even after repeated use. They tend to just look like random scribbling.
Well, typing just looks like random pecking in a grid. You may never really be able to memorize these intentionally, but the brain and musle memory are much better at learning habits than you would think. It's just a matter of time and repetition.
And those are not loopholes. You can't double tax companies just because the government wants to spend it.
Yes they are. Like I said, neither of them are really bad by themselves. If a company only paid the foreign tax that would be fair. If they paid foreign taxes + US taxes - a deduction to offset the double payment, that is fair. But when a company pays only the foreign tax - a US deduction to offset double payment, when there isn't double payment, then that is a unfair tax loophole. It means these outsourced companies have advantages over both domestic and foreign companies who both have to full taxes for the country that they are in.
I absolutely agree that we shouldn't double tax our companies. So we should get rid of one of these two discounts (and simplify that portion of the code to make in less gamable). IIRC, the plan Kerry offered was to get rid of tax deferments, and make every US company pay the full US taxes minus the foreign taxes. Then outsourced companies would pay the exact same total taxes as US domestic ones. Outsourced US companies would have no more of a tax disadvantage than domestic US companies, when competing with foreign companies. It has the added advantage that there would be no tax penelties for investing money earned abroad back home. Not the best solution (IMHO, we should get rid of corporate tax altogether), but much better than the current situation.
Besides, the thing Kerry ignores is that taxes are not the reason for offshoring.
Well, he doesn't really ignore it. He has said repeatedly that his policies will not stop offshoring - just end some government interferences that encourage it. You are right that less expensive labor is the primary reason that work has been moving out of the country. But I don't know that causing some companies to leave by requiring better treatment than they are willing to give is any better or worse than convincing them to stay by giving into all their demands and joining into a race to the bottom. More importantly, I don't know that we will have much of a choice in the long run. I just hope that China's and India's internal markets grow quickly and evenly.
Basically, the current tax laws for American companies operating overseas is a mess, and does have loopholes. The way I understand it,
* Companies do not have to pay US taxes on foriegn operations, until (unless) they bring it back to the US.
* If you pay taxes in another country and the US you can get deductions on your US taxes to account for this double taxation.
These two individually are not that bad, but thanks to the complexity of the tax code and fancy book-work a company can take advantage of both simultaneously. Ie they pay taxes only in the foreign country on their foreign operations, but at the same time, they get deductions in their US taxes, even though there is no double taxation. So essentially the US tax payer is paying part of their foreign taxes for them. This is what Kerry means when he says he want to close loop holes that force you to subsidize the outsourcing that is taking your job.
He plans to simplify the tax code, which as you said would bring in some revenue, and use that to decrease the overall corporate tax rate. It would also illiminate the relative penalty on bringing money back into the country, verses keeping it (and thus investing it) abroad. I can't find the document I read that explained this plan well - both the bullet point, and detail plans currently on the John Kerry site are fairly vague.
Perkins Coie is one of Seattle's oldest firms, established in 1912. As I mentioned in an early post, they have been doing this sort of thing for Nintendo since at least 2001. Google searches show that several high level employees including a senior vice president, and Head Legal Counsel have had jobs at both companies. I doubt that Nintendo had direct knowledge of this suit, but Perkins Coie is definately working for them.
Apparently this is not the first time that lawyers from Perkens Coie have sent meritless cease and decist letters to websites on behalf of Nintendo.
It would be interesting to find out more about thier relationship with Nintendo. It doesn't make any sense that Nintendo would actually want to sue it's fans for promoting their games. Almost seems like some lawyer who is paid on commision and got over eager, expecting that it would never garner Nintendo's or the press's attention.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really interesting. I haven't dug into their number (beyond looking at the pretty graphs) to see what "cost effecient to operate", and "cheap to install" really means. But this system would appear to scale much better than traditional mass transit, perhaps making it economical for suburban mass transit.
That is the biggest problem with mass transit in the US - we are so spread out. Either you have a convienient transit schedule and end up running a whole bunch of buses/trains that would be empty most of the time, and thus unable to pay for themselves. Or you only run buses/trains every so often which makes the system inconvient/impractical enough that most people won't/can't use it.
I didn't mean to imply that they quantity of files shared made infringement a crime, just that charging money did. Sorry bad choice of words.
However to clarify - civil penalties always apply, but criminal penalties do not apply unless you charged money or profited or the material you infringed upon in the last 180 days has a total retail value of over $1000. See Copyright Code Section 506 . For now at least - the cut-off for what is criminal has been decreased several times in the last 10 years.
While a BSA visit would be absolutely hilarious, I for one am glad that they are getting a lighter treatment than Maksym Kovalchuk. Individual copyright violation (a civil offense) is a whole other ballgame than selling thousands of copies of pirated software (a criminal offense). Proportionality in punishment is a good thing.
It only takes one season. Given modern crops that means harvest can be happening year round. This is especially for algae based biodiesel (the only one capable of being produced in the quantities needed), which can effectively be produced continuously. It has the added benefit that it's production can simultaneously serve as a waste management process at coal burning and human waste treatment plants. It can be burned in any diesel car with little or no modifications (at most replacing some seals) - in fact it is a better lubricant than the additives we currently use. The only obstacle is to get the cost down (it is nearly 2x the cost of gasoline), or wait for oil shortages to bring the cost of fossil fuels up to where it is economically justifiable to switch.
If hydrogen was so much more efficient than gasoline, or even biomass fuels, then we would be using it.
I'd like to amend my previous statement. I was thinking from a legal point of view not a practical one. While legally customers never had any liability in court, that didn't prevent anyone from sueing them. So basically what Microsoft is saying is that it will pay for any of these unbased, frivilous lawsuits brought against their customers. When they do so however, they need not prove or disprove whether MS is infringing, just that the customer has no legal liablility.
Sad. Our legal system is so screwed up that people are afraid to do something completely legal, simply because someone with more money might bring an baseless case against them.
No it doesn't say any of those things. In fact all it really says is this:
If Microsoft infringes on someone's IP, it is Microsoft that is liable, not their customers.
That was true regardless of whether they made the statement or not. The only purpose of this announcement is to create doubt that other software may have this liability, but MS software definately doesn't.
In particular they want you to think that open source software does have a potential for liability. Don't get me wrong - simply using a peice of software does not infringe on any IP rights, regardless of whether it is open source or not. However open source software lets you redistribute and modify it. If you redistribute software which infringes someone's copyright you might have some liability. In reality I'm pretty sure that the person who originally redistributed the software under an open source licence would be at fault for illegally sublicencing a copywritten work, and the people who redistributed the software later under the open source license would not be liable.
But basically this is just an empty statement that Microsoft is making to help prop up it's FUD campain.
Or you could just put the bonus in a decent savings fund and be much better off than with stock options for a single company.
That is not how things work. This isn't like debian where after a certain amount of time unstable is simply renamed stable. RHEL is developed completely apart from Fedora and the purpose of Fedora is not to be a testing version of RHEL. The purpose of Fedora is to get the bugs out of the bleeding edge software as fast as possible, not to debug the distro. A release early, release often strategy is the best way to obtain that goal.
Distributing other peoples works without thier permission is indeed against the law and has been for a couple hundred years. The only difference that selling makes is that it then becomes a criminal offense instead of just a civil one.
Are there 'release dates' for white goods?
Of course not, they are practically commodities. People only shop for them when they move into a house or the old one dies, and no-one cares about being the first to get the latest kenmore.
But video game and movie consumers really do want to get the game/movie as soon as they can. The producers encourage this, but the demand would exist even without their encouragement. They are not controlling demand by having a first day of sale - it is logically impossible not to have a first day that a product is available.
If they did do what you said and allowed stores to sell as soon as they got it, that would artificially limit supply on the first days, allowing lucky retailers to gouge people that were willing to buy it, and hurting the sales of unlucky stores whose shipment arrived a day latter.
Given there is demand for a popular game, and that there has to be a first time that it is available, the most fair thing to do - for the retailers and the customers - is to make it available for all the retailers to sell on the same day.
who honor the release date so they can all start selling the product on the same day and have a fair marketplace to compete in.
No you should notify the author of the software - the Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter 5.0 team. And possibly gv, since they could possibly be out of date or wrong as well.
:)
I mean, I know that they government is in bed with the cooporations and all, but I think they have better ways to abuse their power then to waste time skiming the web for bug reports
I agree that conceding is a very gentlemanly thing to do, but comming from one of the states who hasn't even finished processing our ballots I am a little annoyed. At this point, the electoral votes in are 254 to 252, with 32 votes out. Even if the exit polls showed that it was likely that Kerry would not win, it is the votes that determine the election not the polls. It wouldn't have divided the country any more to have given those states time to complete their tallies and then concede. But oh well, splitting hairs I guess. I am glad it is over, and here's to hoping the next 4 years will be better than the last.
Unless a language is actively used it will be forgotten by the average person. My grandfather came over on the boat when he was 8 and barely remembers is native tongue.
Of course, but someone who has learned more than one language - even if they have forgotten it - has an easier time learning additional languages. Secondly, if everyone in an area knows more than one language, there would be more people to talk to and less cultural bias against speaking a single tongue, so the second languages would get more use. Compare this to you grandfather's case where most people around him spoke English and his parents probably preferred him to speak English as much as possible, so he would have better opportunities then they did.
Alternately, I don't remember a good deal of I learned in Calc II - does that mean that I should never have taken the class? Hell no - it is much easier to give myself a quick refresher on when I need to use it, than to have never taken it at all, or waited to take later in life.
you can't teach creativity, you either have it or you don't.
Well rather than having a philosophical argument about something immeasurable like creativity, let's look at something a bit more concrete. Studies have shown that multi-lingual people, and/or people who studied music as a child do better at math and science, than those who don't. This still holds true after you statistically isolate and remove the effects of external criteria, like wealth and parental involvement. So problem solving and critical thinking skills are not just genetic, but partially influenced by environment as well.
Studies show that starting kids late on lanuguage greatly hampers their ability to learn their lanugage. But they also show that starting kids early or late on arithmatic does not have any meaningfull impact in the long run. So somethings are more affected by age than others.
The conclusion: we should be focusing education during the younger years on areas where youth is an advantage. Children should be brought up multilingual rather than spending years learning it poorly in high school and college. We should care more about art, music and exploration in younger years, even if it means that math and others are pushed back a few years.
People will be arguing about the election over the next several days regardless of whether this story was posted or not. But hopefully, since this thread exists, it will decrease the amount of off-topic conversation in other threads.
Sure, no one has found any bugs Knuth's TeX in years. Same for Qmail, and others. You have to know exactly what you are doing before you start - which often means writing a throw away version of the software first to work out the kinks in the design. You have to have a simple clean design, and coding practice - as one of the Unix developers said debuging is 10x harder than writing code, so you you write code as cleverly as you can, you are, by definition, not qualified to debug that code. You have to know upfront how to write secure code, and think about with every function you write - never put this off for later. Then you have to have some one else rigorously read over every line of code to find any mistakes. Lastly you have to systematically test each part of the code individually and together. Then after years of widespread use without any major feature changes you will have weeded out nearly all of the bugs.
:)
Nearly all software that is written leaves out some of these things, choosing to balence getting something done with quality. Some find a better balance than others
BTW. The mozilla programs are definately good programmers, but the codebase is certainly not the paragon of clean code. It is huge and unweildy, which is the main reason that Apple chose to build off of KHTML instead of Gecko when they made Safari. The situation has improved over time, but making an existing non-secure program secure, is much harder than doing it (mostly) correct from the start.
Yeah, it would have been nice if they did previous years as well, since (according to CSPAN) Kerry missed less than 2% of the all votes during the his time in the senate, prior to the begining of his campain, casting over 6000 votes in his senate career.
I can't see myself memorizing too many words over 5 letters though, even after repeated use. They tend to just look like random scribbling.
Well, typing just looks like random pecking in a grid. You may never really be able to memorize these intentionally, but the brain and musle memory are much better at learning habits than you would think. It's just a matter of time and repetition.
And those are not loopholes. You can't double tax companies just because the government wants to spend it.
Yes they are. Like I said, neither of them are really bad by themselves. If a company only paid the foreign tax that would be fair. If they paid foreign taxes + US taxes - a deduction to offset the double payment, that is fair. But when a company pays only the foreign tax - a US deduction to offset double payment, when there isn't double payment, then that is a unfair tax loophole. It means these outsourced companies have advantages over both domestic and foreign companies who both have to full taxes for the country that they are in.
I absolutely agree that we shouldn't double tax our companies. So we should get rid of one of these two discounts (and simplify that portion of the code to make in less gamable). IIRC, the plan Kerry offered was to get rid of tax deferments, and make every US company pay the full US taxes minus the foreign taxes. Then outsourced companies would pay the exact same total taxes as US domestic ones. Outsourced US companies would have no more of a tax disadvantage than domestic US companies, when competing with foreign companies. It has the added advantage that there would be no tax penelties for investing money earned abroad back home. Not the best solution (IMHO, we should get rid of corporate tax altogether), but much better than the current situation.
Besides, the thing Kerry ignores is that taxes are not the reason for offshoring.
Well, he doesn't really ignore it. He has said repeatedly that his policies will not stop offshoring - just end some government interferences that encourage it. You are right that less expensive labor is the primary reason that work has been moving out of the country. But I don't know that causing some companies to leave by requiring better treatment than they are willing to give is any better or worse than convincing them to stay by giving into all their demands and joining into a race to the bottom. More importantly, I don't know that we will have much of a choice in the long run. I just hope that China's and India's internal markets grow quickly and evenly.
Basically, the current tax laws for American companies operating overseas is a mess, and does have loopholes. The way I understand it,
* Companies do not have to pay US taxes on foriegn operations, until (unless) they bring it back to the US.
* If you pay taxes in another country and the US you can get deductions on your US taxes to account for this double taxation.
These two individually are not that bad, but thanks to the complexity of the tax code and fancy book-work a company can take advantage of both simultaneously. Ie they pay taxes only in the foreign country on their foreign operations, but at the same time, they get deductions in their US taxes, even though there is no double taxation. So essentially the US tax payer is paying part of their foreign taxes for them. This is what Kerry means when he says he want to close loop holes that force you to subsidize the outsourcing that is taking your job.
He plans to simplify the tax code, which as you said would bring in some revenue, and use that to decrease the overall corporate tax rate. It would also illiminate the relative penalty on bringing money back into the country, verses keeping it (and thus investing it) abroad. I can't find the document I read that explained this plan well - both the bullet point, and detail plans currently on the John Kerry site are fairly vague.
Now this is what I call overkill :)
Perkins Coie is one of Seattle's oldest firms, established in 1912. As I mentioned in an early post, they have been doing this sort of thing for Nintendo since at least 2001. Google searches show that several high level employees including a senior vice president, and Head Legal Counsel have had jobs at both companies. I doubt that Nintendo had direct knowledge of this suit, but Perkins Coie is definately working for them.
Apparently this is not the first time that lawyers from Perkens Coie have sent meritless cease and decist letters to websites on behalf of Nintendo.
It would be interesting to find out more about thier relationship with Nintendo. It doesn't make any sense that Nintendo would actually want to sue it's fans for promoting their games. Almost seems like some lawyer who is paid on commision and got over eager, expecting that it would never garner Nintendo's or the press's attention.