John Glenn lost all credibility with me when, as a US senator, he pulled that garbage line about "exploring the effects of age on space travel" as an excuse to get NASA to launch him back to space.
Yes, of course it was an excuse. Can you blame him for wanting to see space just one more time? Can you blame him for wanting to experience space in something a little less confining than than the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule? Can you blame him for wanting to spend more time up there than the ~5 hours of his 1962 flight?
Well, I suspect that some here can blame him, but I can't. After a lifetime of government service, one ticket on a shuttle flight was as fitting a reward as we could have given the man. And, as other posters have pointed out, he made himself a real part of that crew and did real work while he was up there. I'll never earn a reward like that, but I can't begrudge it to anyone who does.
From the article, On February 27, [HardOCP] filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division.... Documents were served to Infinium Labs representatives in Florida yesterday.
It's possible that HardOCP just wanted any suit to be in the Federal Court in Texas instead of the court in Florida. Far cheaper for them that way.
This is going in the wrong direction. Currently, "cyberspace" is, at least in concept, a locationless realm that transcends national borders. By relabeling all sites by country code, the whole notion that what kind of organization you have is more important than where you have it would be lost. Reducing cyberspace to a loose confederation of balkanized nation-states would be a step away from worldwide egalite, fraternite, and, yes, liberte.
It's a little like parceling up Antarctica or the moon merely for the administrative convenience of knowing whose law would apply where. Better to spend our efforts selecting laws for cyberspace that are the best we can make them.
Was that in any particular order? To me, ABC is one of the most interesting properties on there. More than that, this would make a cable company the owner of one of the big three over-the-air TV networks.
BTW, who owns the other two right now: NBC and CBS?
Unneccessary complexity slows down work in the field, and in the long run can actually prove counterproductive to the field as a whole...
Sure unnecessary complexity is unhelpful, but necessary complexity is, well, necessary. It would be magnificent to find a simple explanation for the observed events now attributed to dark matter and dark energy. But, how easily students/we would be able to understand a simpler model is just about the least reason to seek one.
Some things are just hard. Some things are even so hard that by the time you've figured them out, you've earned a PhD. We can't make the universe _be_ simpler just so students can learn it more easily. To be sure, more students would be able to study physics if they didn't first have to learn the complicated subject of calculus, but that doesn't mean that calculus is false or bad. To the contrary, it's the best thing going. For now.
I don't think that music/movies vs. porn can be compared...
There are other differences. Unlike music/movies, porn hides. The sellers hide and the buyers hide. Larry Flint excepted, porn succeeds best when it doesn't directly confront that large segment of the population that wants it prohibited. As long as porn can find its customers, it's happy. As long as the prohibitionists can pretend not to know porn is there, we have detente.
Pornographers cannot have confidence that their legal rights will be upheld/enforced by the courts and government. In addition, even if the courts did enforce, the prohibitionists might take notice and begin yet another crusade. I'm sure that pornographers are a little happy from the advertising effect of file sharing. However, they also have an extra reason not to be sueing.
we need to have some kind of IP court that determines whether or not a certain idea/ algorithm/ process deserves a patent to begin with. If not, no patent.
Well first, there's the examiner, then the PTO Board of Appeals, then the PTO Commissioner. Trouble is, the applicant gets to keep narrowing what he says he wants in his patent, so most patents eventually issue. (Total money so far, ~$15000, all from the applicant.) Then there's trial in a local Federal District Court somewhere. (Total money, >$1M each side.) After that, appeals pre-1983 used to go to a local Circuit Court of Appeals, and maybe to the Supreme Court. (More money per side.) Back in that time, it was very very rare to see a patent successfully enforced.
But, in 1983, congress decided that a "special patent court" was needed, so they rerouted all appeals in patent cases to a new Circuit Court called the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The idea was to make patent law consistent nationwide without having to get up to the Supreme Court, who could seldom be bothered.
And what's happened since 1983? Well, computers came into widespread use. The Federal Circuit decided that methods of doing business (including computerize methods) were patentable, and then the late 1990s rush to the PTO was on. The result of having a "special patent court" has been vastly expanded enforcement of patents, not a contraction.
Found it, finally. The authority for the private party (record labels) to raid Sharman's various offices came from something called an Anton Piller order. The would-be raiders go before the court, lay out their accusation of copyright infringement, and then explain that the evidence may be removed if the soon-to-be defendant learns of the raid before it happens. If the court buys it, the court issues an order stating that the raid can take place and what the conditions are going to be. The order gets its name from a 1976 court case called Anton Pillar KG. v. Manufacturing Processes Ltd. et al. [1976] R.P.C. 719, which was the first time a court issued such an order.
Copyrights exist to prevent precisely this. It's to keep the rights of mass communication in the hands of the few.
I see the issues as near neighbors, but separate.
Copyright is the idea that the author/artist (and later, owner) may prevent others from copying his creation.
Freedom of the press is the idea that if you have a press, you can mass distribute stuff regardless of whether the powers that be like what it says.
Copyright isn't the bar that prevents most individual people from wielding most forms of mass communication, for instance, radio or TV. What stops them is the lack of a big transmitter and the lack of a license to build one. Ditto the lack of a printing press.
However, it's a good point that some entrenched money interests (such as RIAA, the broadcasters, and the publishing houses) were pretty happy when individuals couldn't mass-communicate. They were also pretty happy when we couldn't easily copy things (pre-photocopy, pre-laser printer, pre-cd burner, pre-cassette tape), because that gave them a market with barriers to entry that they could thrive in by producing books, music, etc. for us. But now, the means of reproduction and mass-transmission have dropped to prices people can afford.
What are the old money media going to do now that every individual has a powerful printing press / transmitter (personal computer) at his/her disposal? I'll tell you what:
(1) Try to make personal copying and transmission devices illegal by over-extending copyright-type laws.
(2) Lose.
So long as we prevent (1), eventually the masses will learn that there are other sources of content besides the old media. Oh, it won't be quick -- 20-30 years minimum -- but without a real barrier to competition in the production of content, the transition will happen. Plus, in the meantime, we early adopters will already be happy. This is a fundamental shift in society, this business of everyone owning presses. The only advantages that old money has left are marginally lower cost of production (due to strong organization and high-volume equipment) and its expertise at making the masses think that it's products/music are "popular" and therefore "better". Don't get me wrong -- those guys have mad marketing skills -- but that will only get them so far.
Incidentally, what's with that "taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright"?
Ditto. Of all the things in the submission that needed a link to document them . ..
why the big quote from the U.S. Constitution? . . . Can't you quote someting Australian?:-)
No, sorry. Can't quote anything Australian on the issue of freedom of speech or the press. Australia has no constitutional clause or bill of rights on this topic. These issues seem to be decided by Australia's High Court, which since 1992 has said that there is an implied right in the Australian constitution to freedom of expression of public political topics, but not on much else.
What the Australian constitution does say is, "Chapter I. Sec. 51.The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:... (xviii.) Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks." This is a great deal simpler than the version found in the U.S. Constitution: "Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". The actual Australian Copyright Law of 1968 makes for pretty dense reading.
IANA Australian (in fact, IAA American), but it seems that Australia lacks a rallying cry to match that part of the U.S. constitution that the *IAA keeps trying to monopolize for themselves: Amendment I. Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . ..
None of this should be taken as a disparagement of Australia, of course. For instance, the U.S. copyright laws are at least as dense and a good deal more restrictive besides. It just seems that prohibiting the ownership and use of presses (e.g. CD burners) in the U.S. would involve slightly more hypocrisy than doing so in Australia. It is an equally bad idea in both places.
Let me see if I've got this right. Slashdot is carrying an article about USA Today running a story about Google and the businesses that want to be googled, which story is featured on Google's news page, and which article is running on the same day as another Slashdot article about an academic site that got slammed by hits from users that googled it, which academic site now has substituted a page pointing both to Google and to the Slashdot article.
Right. Ok. Never mind me. Just talk amongst yourselves.
Could Lindows have made any worse choice of a name? Why did they think they could use Lindows and get away with it?
They don't actually have to get away with it to win. Already, they have managed to become rather famous with help from Microsoft's massive PR engine. Let's hear it for the mantra "There's no such thing as bad press"!
If Booble had been a parody, then the point would have been to make us laugh at / think about Google. But that's not their point. Their point is to sell something else, using Google's fame to do it.
For instance, a real Google parody might try to return the funniest / most twisted search results for a query. Booble, by contrast, is returning serious results so that they can sell advertising. It's not that the joke, such as it was, wasn't a little funny -- it's that they can't keep using it to promote their business.
A search engine, like google, but that finds porn?
This, of course, is Google's point. By using a similar name and a similar look/feel/colorscheme, the Booble folks may get everyone to assume that their search engine is "like Google". That would let Booble profit from Google's good reputation, which has been built by hard work and good results.
If Booble wants to become known as the Google of porn, that's fine. They can build a good search engine and build their own reputation, one user at a time. What they shouldn't be doing is grabbing onto Google's name and hoping it will carry into their business into prominence. Bad joss.
Yes, and the Pyrex brand sells nylon spatulas. Only if they actually said, "this system contains a 9200 card" is this going to go anywhere, more's the pity.
So, the next time England goes to war are Elton John, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger going to be leading the charge?
No, of course not. Everyone knows that for the leading of charges, we will call upon Sir Ian McKellen. (Perhaps with the newly-knighted Sir Tim Berners-Lee providing some upgraded signal fires.)
OK, the "we created AI and it destroyed us" has been borrowed from the Matrix, and before that Terminator, and before that War Games, and before that other antecedents that I'm about to be embarrassed that I can't think of right away. Bladerunner is probably one of them, I suppose. This story line is called "we're afraid of technology." Of sci-fi series, few have presented a utopian future (Star Trek, Foundation); most tell us technology will kill us (Star Wars, Terminator, 1984, Brave New World, Tolkien, Galactica, Matrix, Bladerunner).
I cannot forgive the fembots and the too-frequent sex. Sure, infiltrators are a good idea, but let's not add Austin Powers to the list of places we borrowed from. Again Bladerunner, or Alien 4.
Now, the CGI special effects were no better than anything B5 or Farscape or Firefly have done. But, those shows are no longer in production.
Heck yeah, let's have a series. Though I'd rather it be Firefly, I'll take Galactica if that's all you've got. The characters are solid and so is the physics.
Slashdot Mirror
John Glenn lost all credibility with me when, as a US senator, he pulled that garbage line about "exploring the effects of age on space travel" as an excuse to get NASA to launch him back to space.
Yes, of course it was an excuse. Can you blame him for wanting to see space just one more time? Can you blame him for wanting to experience space in something a little less confining than than the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule? Can you blame him for wanting to spend more time up there than the ~5 hours of his 1962 flight?
Well, I suspect that some here can blame him, but I can't. After a lifetime of government service, one ticket on a shuttle flight was as fitting a reward as we could have given the man. And, as other posters have pointed out, he made himself a real part of that crew and did real work while he was up there. I'll never earn a reward like that, but I can't begrudge it to anyone who does.
From the article, On February 27, [HardOCP] filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division.... Documents were served to Infinium Labs representatives in Florida yesterday.
It's possible that HardOCP just wanted any suit to be in the Federal Court in Texas instead of the court in Florida. Far cheaper for them that way.
Or than Arthur C. Clarke invented the space elevator. Much praise though Foundations of Paradise (1978) deserves.
This is going in the wrong direction. Currently, "cyberspace" is, at least in concept, a locationless realm that transcends national borders. By relabeling all sites by country code, the whole notion that what kind of organization you have is more important than where you have it would be lost. Reducing cyberspace to a loose confederation of balkanized nation-states would be a step away from worldwide egalite, fraternite, and, yes, liberte.
It's a little like parceling up Antarctica or the moon merely for the administrative convenience of knowing whose law would apply where. Better to spend our efforts selecting laws for cyberspace that are the best we can make them.
OK, I'll byte. Why in the name of George Seurat's greyscale ghost define a screen area with this many pixels for handheld devices?
Was that in any particular order? To me, ABC is one of the most interesting properties on there. More than that, this would make a cable company the owner of one of the big three over-the-air TV networks.
BTW, who owns the other two right now: NBC and CBS?
I hereby nominate this site for the Most Annoying Interface of All Time Hall of Fame. Do I hear a second?
Unneccessary complexity slows down work in the field, and in the long run can actually prove counterproductive to the field as a whole...
Sure unnecessary complexity is unhelpful, but necessary complexity is, well, necessary. It would be magnificent to find a simple explanation for the observed events now attributed to dark matter and dark energy. But, how easily students/we would be able to understand a simpler model is just about the least reason to seek one.
Some things are just hard. Some things are even so hard that by the time you've figured them out, you've earned a PhD. We can't make the universe _be_ simpler just so students can learn it more easily. To be sure, more students would be able to study physics if they didn't first have to learn the complicated subject of calculus, but that doesn't mean that calculus is false or bad. To the contrary, it's the best thing going. For now.
I don't think that music/movies vs. porn can be compared...
There are other differences. Unlike music/movies, porn hides. The sellers hide and the buyers hide. Larry Flint excepted, porn succeeds best when it doesn't directly confront that large segment of the population that wants it prohibited. As long as porn can find its customers, it's happy. As long as the prohibitionists can pretend not to know porn is there, we have detente.
Pornographers cannot have confidence that their legal rights will be upheld/enforced by the courts and government. In addition, even if the courts did enforce, the prohibitionists might take notice and begin yet another crusade. I'm sure that pornographers are a little happy from the advertising effect of file sharing. However, they also have an extra reason not to be sueing.
we need to have some kind of IP court that determines whether or not a certain idea/ algorithm/ process deserves a patent to begin with. If not, no patent.
Well first, there's the examiner, then the PTO Board of Appeals, then the PTO Commissioner. Trouble is, the applicant gets to keep narrowing what he says he wants in his patent, so most patents eventually issue. (Total money so far, ~$15000, all from the applicant.) Then there's trial in a local Federal District Court somewhere. (Total money, >$1M each side.) After that, appeals pre-1983 used to go to a local Circuit Court of Appeals, and maybe to the Supreme Court. (More money per side.) Back in that time, it was very very rare to see a patent successfully enforced.
But, in 1983, congress decided that a "special patent court" was needed, so they rerouted all appeals in patent cases to a new Circuit Court called the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The idea was to make patent law consistent nationwide without having to get up to the Supreme Court, who could seldom be bothered.
And what's happened since 1983? Well, computers came into widespread use. The Federal Circuit decided that methods of doing business (including computerize methods) were patentable, and then the late 1990s rush to the PTO was on. The result of having a "special patent court" has been vastly expanded enforcement of patents, not a contraction.
Who's left to prosecute?
The cops. The government. The military. Does that make you feel comfortable in your civil liberties?
If not, you may need to kill them, too. Then what? Repeat until all dissent is gone? Me, I'd rather just endure the presence of lawyers.
Found it, finally. The authority for the private party (record labels) to raid Sharman's various offices came from something called an Anton Piller order. The would-be raiders go before the court, lay out their accusation of copyright infringement, and then explain that the evidence may be removed if the soon-to-be defendant learns of the raid before it happens. If the court buys it, the court issues an order stating that the raid can take place and what the conditions are going to be. The order gets its name from a 1976 court case called Anton Pillar KG. v. Manufacturing Processes Ltd. et al. [1976] R.P.C. 719, which was the first time a court issued such an order.
I see the issues as near neighbors, but separate.
Copyright is the idea that the author/artist (and later, owner) may prevent others from copying his creation.
Freedom of the press is the idea that if you have a press, you can mass distribute stuff regardless of whether the powers that be like what it says.
Copyright isn't the bar that prevents most individual people from wielding most forms of mass communication, for instance, radio or TV. What stops them is the lack of a big transmitter and the lack of a license to build one. Ditto the lack of a printing press.
However, it's a good point that some entrenched money interests (such as RIAA, the broadcasters, and the publishing houses) were pretty happy when individuals couldn't mass-communicate. They were also pretty happy when we couldn't easily copy things (pre-photocopy, pre-laser printer, pre-cd burner, pre-cassette tape), because that gave them a market with barriers to entry that they could thrive in by producing books, music, etc. for us. But now, the means of reproduction and mass-transmission have dropped to prices people can afford.
What are the old money media going to do now that every individual has a powerful printing press / transmitter (personal computer) at his/her disposal? I'll tell you what:
(1) Try to make personal copying and transmission devices illegal by over-extending copyright-type laws.
(2) Lose.
So long as we prevent (1), eventually the masses will learn that there are other sources of content besides the old media. Oh, it won't be quick -- 20-30 years minimum -- but without a real barrier to competition in the production of content, the transition will happen. Plus, in the meantime, we early adopters will already be happy. This is a fundamental shift in society, this business of everyone owning presses. The only advantages that old money has left are marginally lower cost of production (due to strong organization and high-volume equipment) and its expertise at making the masses think that it's products/music are "popular" and therefore "better". Don't get me wrong -- those guys have mad marketing skills -- but that will only get them so far.
Incidentally, what's with that "taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright"?
.
Ditto. Of all the things in the submission that needed a link to document them . .
why the big quote from the U.S. Constitution? . . . Can't you quote someting Australian? :-)
... (xviii.) Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks." This is a great deal simpler than the version found in the U.S. Constitution: "Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". The actual Australian Copyright Law of 1968 makes for pretty dense reading.
.
No, sorry. Can't quote anything Australian on the issue of freedom of speech or the press. Australia has no constitutional clause or bill of rights on this topic. These issues seem to be decided by Australia's High Court, which since 1992 has said that there is an implied right in the Australian constitution to freedom of expression of public political topics, but not on much else.
What the Australian constitution does say is, "Chapter I. Sec. 51.The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:
IANA Australian (in fact, IAA American), but it seems that Australia lacks a rallying cry to match that part of the U.S. constitution that the *IAA keeps trying to monopolize for themselves: Amendment I. Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . .
None of this should be taken as a disparagement of Australia, of course. For instance, the U.S. copyright laws are at least as dense and a good deal more restrictive besides. It just seems that prohibiting the ownership and use of presses (e.g. CD burners) in the U.S. would involve slightly more hypocrisy than doing so in Australia. It is an equally bad idea in both places.
Aye! There's the rub. And me with no mod points.
Search Engine Watch says that Google now performs an estimated 80% of the searches (200 million) on the Internet every day.
Something hasn't added up here yet. If Google gets 13% of so of search visits and we know who powers whom, how do we get to 80%?
Let me see if I've got this right. Slashdot is carrying an article about USA Today running a story about Google and the businesses that want to be googled, which story is featured on Google's news page, and which article is running on the same day as another Slashdot article about an academic site that got slammed by hits from users that googled it, which academic site now has substituted a page pointing both to Google and to the Slashdot article.
Right. Ok. Never mind me. Just talk amongst yourselves.
Could Lindows have made any worse choice of a name? Why did they think they could use Lindows and get away with it?
They don't actually have to get away with it to win. Already, they have managed to become rather famous with help from Microsoft's massive PR engine. Let's hear it for the mantra "There's no such thing as bad press"!
Yeah, yeah!
If Booble had been a parody, then the point would have been to make us laugh at / think about Google. But that's not their point. Their point is to sell something else, using Google's fame to do it.
For instance, a real Google parody might try to return the funniest / most twisted search results for a query. Booble, by contrast, is returning serious results so that they can sell advertising. It's not that the joke, such as it was, wasn't a little funny -- it's that they can't keep using it to promote their business.
A search engine, like google, but that finds porn?
This, of course, is Google's point. By using a similar name and a similar look/feel/colorscheme, the Booble folks may get everyone to assume that their search engine is "like Google". That would let Booble profit from Google's good reputation, which has been built by hard work and good results.
If Booble wants to become known as the Google of porn, that's fine. They can build a good search engine and build their own reputation, one user at a time. What they shouldn't be doing is grabbing onto Google's name and hoping it will carry into their business into prominence. Bad joss.
it's False and Misleading advertising
Yes, and the Pyrex brand sells nylon spatulas. Only if they actually said, "this system contains a 9200 card" is this going to go anywhere, more's the pity.
So, the next time England goes to war are Elton John, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger going to be leading the charge?
No, of course not. Everyone knows that for the leading of charges, we will call upon Sir Ian McKellen . (Perhaps with the newly-knighted Sir Tim Berners-Lee providing some upgraded signal fires.)
I'll bet some horrifying data could be gathered on the speed with which . . . the motorcyclists were travelling. Forget accidents.
OK, the "we created AI and it destroyed us" has been borrowed from the Matrix, and before that Terminator, and before that War Games, and before that other antecedents that I'm about to be embarrassed that I can't think of right away. Bladerunner is probably one of them, I suppose. This story line is called "we're afraid of technology." Of sci-fi series, few have presented a utopian future (Star Trek, Foundation); most tell us technology will kill us (Star Wars, Terminator, 1984, Brave New World, Tolkien, Galactica, Matrix, Bladerunner).
I cannot forgive the fembots and the too-frequent sex. Sure, infiltrators are a good idea, but let's not add Austin Powers to the list of places we borrowed from. Again Bladerunner, or Alien 4.
Now, the CGI special effects were no better than anything B5 or Farscape or Firefly have done. But, those shows are no longer in production.
Heck yeah, let's have a series. Though I'd rather it be Firefly, I'll take Galactica if that's all you've got. The characters are solid and so is the physics.
Next sig: "Adamo lied."