Exactly why should the families of artists get a benefit that the families of, say, bricklayers do not?
If I record a song, what right do my heirs have to perpetual income from my work? If the purpose of copyright is to encourage people to produce works, how does enabling those who do not produce to profit from the works of their ancestors help?
...the rich people that live and vacation on the lake got sick of having to wait a stop sign when they wanted to leave... Sometimes the stupid people know things that the intellectual elite are too smart to see for themselves
Sometimes our biases are plain to see. For some reason, you seem to equate "rich" with "intellectual elite." I've known a lot of rich people, and I've known a lot of smart people. While there is some overlap between the two, I wouldn't say that it's large, or that intelligence, or even education, is a defining characteristic of the wealthy. The wealthy may be elite, but they tend not to be intellectual (e.g. our last president was definitely an east coast ivy league elite who was born to incredible wealth, but he wasn't an intellectual. Our current one is an intellectual, but was not born to wealth. Crazy, huh? Barak Obama has more in common with a poor suburban white man living in a trailer than G.W.B ever did. But that white guy is afraid of "eliteist" Obama, because he watches Glen Beck.)
Off the top of my head, I'd guess either you don't know many rich people or maybe you have some interest in perpetuating the idea that wealth always is earned and is always deserved as the result of hard work. That, unfortunately, is the exception rather than the rule. I know high school teachers with 150 IQ and lawyers with IQs less than 100. I'm not sure I know an MBA with an IQ above 115. I know people who worked and invested their way into wealth, but I know far more people who were born into it, married into it, were in the right place at the right time, or were just really pretty. There's a better correlation between height and business advancement than there is with IQ. If you look good in a suit, you will go far.
Any how, I'm one of those rich intellectual elites now, and I have nothing but disdain for rich NIMBYs who don't let their kids outside for fear of kidnappers and want a stoplight on every street corner. Please don't include all of the rich in with the few who happen to be intellectuals. And please, when Fox News is talking about the intellectual elites, understand that this is a bogeyman that they have developed that is there to make everyone think that "liberals think they are better than you" while hiding the fact that they (Fox News) are mouthpieces for the rich non-intellectual elites who want you to ignore them standing behind the curtain.
I watch Beck. I'm also a fan of Jefferson, who had an estimated IQ of 160, and I'm sure would also enjoy Beck's "question boldly" show theme
I'm fairly sure Jefferson would find Beck to be whack-job nut-case conspiracy theorist whose "facts" rarely line up with reality. Beck doesn't "question boldly" where his right wing masters are involved. It's freaking amazing how all of Beck's economic views did a 180 on January 20th. On the 19th, bank bailouts were great. On the 20th, they are the road to slavery, communism, and totalitarianism.
Jefferson would also be pretty disappointed how far down the road toward theocracy we've fallen. His biggest disappointment with Obama would probably be his religiosity.
On the other hand, if you were sold software that violates the GPL, the fact that dollars were transferred would probably give you standing. Whether you could recover anything more than the purchase price would depend upon the jurisdiction.
Similarly, if someone sold you a pirated version of Windows 7, you would have legal recourse to sue the vendor even though you are not the copyright holder.
Informative, my ass. The collision of an electron with a positron with a collision energy greater than 1.022 MeV could result in the creation of one or more electron-positron pairs. The positrons would then collide with an electron, and the annihilation would release a pair of 511keV photons. It's certainly not the only possible result of such a collision, but I'm not teaching a physics course here, so I won't give you a list of the possible products at various energies.
There already is an efficient way to produce positrons. Bombard a target with any charged particle with kinetic energy greater than 1.022 MeV. Which appears to be what happens in a lightning bolt. This appears to be surprising only to journalists and slashdot readers.
Any second year physics major should be able to tell you the electric field required in a plasma for electron positron pair production. The calculation is easy in a near vacuum. At atmospheric pressure it's a bit more difficult, but not that much.
I'm willing to bet a substantial sum that there won't be any unusual meteor activity during the last week of August, 2013. How about $100k even money that there are no events with energies larger than 10 megaton during that week?
The reason Chinese can still be read is because it is an ideographic system and the orthography is conservative. This is also why we can read Shakespeare and Chaucer, even though both sounded considerably different from Modern English. It's not that Chinese hasn't changed -- it's changed a lot -- but that the writing system hasn't.
The Chinese writing system has been so well conserved that it is used by several different spoken languages. For example Japanese (who use a similar ideographic written language as one of their written languages) and Koreans (who currently use a phonetic alphabet with occasional ideographs scattered within texts) can often decipher written Chinese languages, but could not understand the same language when spoken.
XP X64 sucks
Do you have a source for that claim, i've only run it briefly but the only real issue I found was driver availibility.
Driver availability is a problem on all 64 bit Windows. Buy a camera and chances are the driver and the even the bundled image editing software won't work. Negative/slide scanner, same problem. Video capture, same problem. Even printer drivers can be a problem. Trying to do it under virtualization doesn't help in many cases. My graphics card has drivers, but gets unstable for no apparent reason. The same problems affect XP64, Vista 64, and I'll bet it also affects 64 bit Windows 7.
After all the problems I started to consider what I needed 64bit for.... And came to the conclusion that I didn't need it for anything yet. I've heard that VMware will let you run 64 bit windows under 32 bit windows, so maybe it's time to downgrade to XP32.
If you really do want to go to 64 bit windows, be prepared to throw away every peripheral you have.
Assuming $5M is hardware and purchased software, the remaining $27 million would get you about 150 FTE years at government salaries, benefits, and overhead rates. Assuming the project is 3 years in duration, that's 50 FTEs, which seems high for doing something of this scope. Maybe they are planning to build a building to house it.
Sounds like being dependent on the government for your bread is great. Constantly jerked around by bureaucrats. Let's go ahead and expand the system even further.
Or we could privatize it, the way health care is private, because getting jerked around by for-profit insurance company bureaucrats is so much better than getting jerked around by government bureaucrats.
Israeli military brass has already stated that, if there's no progress in talks with Iran (where by "progress" they mean shutting down enrichment facilities) by the end of the year, they will likely launch an air strike. Simply because if they wait any longer, Iran will have enough material for a decent warhead.
The problem with that is that Israel's options for getting into Iran without passing through U.S. controlled airspace are quite limited. Because of that, allowing it to happen is politically no different than doing it with the USAF. On the other hand, nothing would improve the U.S. standing in the region more than preventing such a strike. By force, if necessary. Unconditional U.S. support of Israel is part of the region's problems. Showing a willingness to constrain Israel might ease tensions somewhat.
This facility hasn't been a secret to intelligence agenices for years. They are making this a big deal now only to justify tough sanctions and possible action against Iran.
It wasn't even secret outside the intelligence agencies. I remember the "Hey, look! Iran is building a large underground facility over here. I'd guess it's related to nuclear weapons" article and photos in Aviation Week at least 3 years ago.
That's one problem with big underground facilities. To build one you need to make some big above-ground piles of dirt.
If I understand the sets of circumstances here, the Edu4 stripped the GPL and copyright notices from the product and pretended it was their own. They even pretended that they didn't distribute the product even though they left it on the computers they installed.
If these claims are true, it would be near impossible for an end user in the US to claim to be the intended beneficiary.
I think you might be wrong about that. Whether the GPL was available to AFPA or not, EDU4 sold AFPA a hacked copy of software that EDU4 had no license to distribute. AFPA was under no obligation to pay them for counterfeit software, so when EDU4 sued AFPA for breech of contract, that suit was without basis. Therefore, even in the US, AFPA would have had standing to counter sue to recover legal fees. I think holders of the VNC copyrights should sue as well for breech of contract. After all, a French court has already held that EDU4 was in violation.
Slashdot Mirror
If I record a song, what right do my heirs have to perpetual income from my work? If the purpose of copyright is to encourage people to produce works, how does enabling those who do not produce to profit from the works of their ancestors help?
...the rich people that live and vacation on the lake got sick of having to wait a stop sign when they wanted to leave... Sometimes the stupid people know things that the intellectual elite are too smart to see for themselves
Sometimes our biases are plain to see. For some reason, you seem to equate "rich" with "intellectual elite." I've known a lot of rich people, and I've known a lot of smart people. While there is some overlap between the two, I wouldn't say that it's large, or that intelligence, or even education, is a defining characteristic of the wealthy. The wealthy may be elite, but they tend not to be intellectual (e.g. our last president was definitely an east coast ivy league elite who was born to incredible wealth, but he wasn't an intellectual. Our current one is an intellectual, but was not born to wealth. Crazy, huh? Barak Obama has more in common with a poor suburban white man living in a trailer than G.W.B ever did. But that white guy is afraid of "eliteist" Obama, because he watches Glen Beck.)
Off the top of my head, I'd guess either you don't know many rich people or maybe you have some interest in perpetuating the idea that wealth always is earned and is always deserved as the result of hard work. That, unfortunately, is the exception rather than the rule. I know high school teachers with 150 IQ and lawyers with IQs less than 100. I'm not sure I know an MBA with an IQ above 115. I know people who worked and invested their way into wealth, but I know far more people who were born into it, married into it, were in the right place at the right time, or were just really pretty. There's a better correlation between height and business advancement than there is with IQ. If you look good in a suit, you will go far.
Any how, I'm one of those rich intellectual elites now, and I have nothing but disdain for rich NIMBYs who don't let their kids outside for fear of kidnappers and want a stoplight on every street corner. Please don't include all of the rich in with the few who happen to be intellectuals. And please, when Fox News is talking about the intellectual elites, understand that this is a bogeyman that they have developed that is there to make everyone think that "liberals think they are better than you" while hiding the fact that they (Fox News) are mouthpieces for the rich non-intellectual elites who want you to ignore them standing behind the curtain.
I watch Beck. I'm also a fan of Jefferson, who had an estimated IQ of 160, and I'm sure would also enjoy Beck's "question boldly" show theme
I'm fairly sure Jefferson would find Beck to be whack-job nut-case conspiracy theorist whose "facts" rarely line up with reality. Beck doesn't "question boldly" where his right wing masters are involved. It's freaking amazing how all of Beck's economic views did a 180 on January 20th. On the 19th, bank bailouts were great. On the 20th, they are the road to slavery, communism, and totalitarianism.
Jefferson would also be pretty disappointed how far down the road toward theocracy we've fallen. His biggest disappointment with Obama would probably be his religiosity.
On the other hand, if you were sold software that violates the GPL, the fact that dollars were transferred would probably give you standing. Whether you could recover anything more than the purchase price would depend upon the jurisdiction.
Similarly, if someone sold you a pirated version of Windows 7, you would have legal recourse to sue the vendor even though you are not the copyright holder.
I guess the real particle physicists do go out drinking on Saturday nights...
Informative, my ass. The collision of an electron with a positron with a collision energy greater than 1.022 MeV could result in the creation of one or more electron-positron pairs. The positrons would then collide with an electron, and the annihilation would release a pair of 511keV photons. It's certainly not the only possible result of such a collision, but I'm not teaching a physics course here, so I won't give you a list of the possible products at various energies.
There already is an efficient way to produce positrons. Bombard a target with any charged particle with kinetic energy greater than 1.022 MeV. Which appears to be what happens in a lightning bolt. This appears to be surprising only to journalists and slashdot readers.
Any second year physics major should be able to tell you the electric field required in a plasma for electron positron pair production. The calculation is easy in a near vacuum. At atmospheric pressure it's a bit more difficult, but not that much.
I'm willing to bet a substantial sum that there won't be any unusual meteor activity during the last week of August, 2013. How about $100k even money that there are no events with energies larger than 10 megaton during that week?
It's fun to calculate what the sky will look like 3 months from now, and then see how accurate you are (with a bit of research).
I've always found it more fun just to wait 6 hours for the universe to give me the answer.
The reason Chinese can still be read is because it is an ideographic system and the orthography is conservative. This is also why we can read Shakespeare and Chaucer, even though both sounded considerably different from Modern English. It's not that Chinese hasn't changed -- it's changed a lot -- but that the writing system hasn't.
The Chinese writing system has been so well conserved that it is used by several different spoken languages. For example Japanese (who use a similar ideographic written language as one of their written languages) and Koreans (who currently use a phonetic alphabet with occasional ideographs scattered within texts) can often decipher written Chinese languages, but could not understand the same language when spoken.
XP X64 sucks Do you have a source for that claim, i've only run it briefly but the only real issue I found was driver availibility.
Driver availability is a problem on all 64 bit Windows. Buy a camera and chances are the driver and the even the bundled image editing software won't work. Negative/slide scanner, same problem. Video capture, same problem. Even printer drivers can be a problem. Trying to do it under virtualization doesn't help in many cases. My graphics card has drivers, but gets unstable for no apparent reason. The same problems affect XP64, Vista 64, and I'll bet it also affects 64 bit Windows 7.
After all the problems I started to consider what I needed 64bit for.... And came to the conclusion that I didn't need it for anything yet. I've heard that VMware will let you run 64 bit windows under 32 bit windows, so maybe it's time to downgrade to XP32.
If you really do want to go to 64 bit windows, be prepared to throw away every peripheral you have.
+5 insightful.
How continually stupid can you be? The contents of the letters are also public records, and are searchable on the FCC web site.
Letters to the FCC are public records, so AT&T can find out if you wrote a letter to the FCC and what you put into it.
Assuming $5M is hardware and purchased software, the remaining $27 million would get you about 150 FTE years at government salaries, benefits, and overhead rates. Assuming the project is 3 years in duration, that's 50 FTEs, which seems high for doing something of this scope. Maybe they are planning to build a building to house it.
These are great straw men you keep demolishing. Are any of them related to reality in any way?
Government bureaucracies aren't the only kind. You haven't lived until you've been raped by a corporate bureaucracy.
That $600 limit is to reduce the workload on those hiring independent contractors, not to reduce the taxes paid by independent contractors.
Too many people don't seem to know the rules for reporting income on their taxes. Until they've been audited that is.
Sounds like being dependent on the government for your bread is great. Constantly jerked around by bureaucrats. Let's go ahead and expand the system even further.
Or we could privatize it, the way health care is private, because getting jerked around by for-profit insurance company bureaucrats is so much better than getting jerked around by government bureaucrats.
Israeli military brass has already stated that, if there's no progress in talks with Iran (where by "progress" they mean shutting down enrichment facilities) by the end of the year, they will likely launch an air strike. Simply because if they wait any longer, Iran will have enough material for a decent warhead.
The problem with that is that Israel's options for getting into Iran without passing through U.S. controlled airspace are quite limited. Because of that, allowing it to happen is politically no different than doing it with the USAF. On the other hand, nothing would improve the U.S. standing in the region more than preventing such a strike. By force, if necessary. Unconditional U.S. support of Israel is part of the region's problems. Showing a willingness to constrain Israel might ease tensions somewhat.
This facility hasn't been a secret to intelligence agenices for years. They are making this a big deal now only to justify tough sanctions and possible action against Iran.
It wasn't even secret outside the intelligence agencies. I remember the "Hey, look! Iran is building a large underground facility over here. I'd guess it's related to nuclear weapons" article and photos in Aviation Week at least 3 years ago.
That's one problem with big underground facilities. To build one you need to make some big above-ground piles of dirt.
Release the following under public domain, GPL, and BSD
10 print "The 50 states of the US" 20 print "Alabama"
What happens next?
You get sued by a user of the public domain version, because you neglected to include a disclaimer of warranty.
If I understand the sets of circumstances here, the Edu4 stripped the GPL and copyright notices from the product and pretended it was their own. They even pretended that they didn't distribute the product even though they left it on the computers they installed.
If these claims are true, it would be near impossible for an end user in the US to claim to be the intended beneficiary.
I think you might be wrong about that. Whether the GPL was available to AFPA or not, EDU4 sold AFPA a hacked copy of software that EDU4 had no license to distribute. AFPA was under no obligation to pay them for counterfeit software, so when EDU4 sued AFPA for breech of contract, that suit was without basis. Therefore, even in the US, AFPA would have had standing to counter sue to recover legal fees. I think holders of the VNC copyrights should sue as well for breech of contract. After all, a French court has already held that EDU4 was in violation.