This statement is utter "pferd merde": "I guess I should rephrase what I said and say that you can have free software without copyrights but just not for very long." It is not only disproved by more than three decades' experience (yes, there was free software for the PDP-11)
Even longer than that. The reason that Richard Stallman came up with the GPL concept in the first place is that what we now call "open source" had been the established model for much software distribution. Note that 20 odd years ago there was much debate about if copyright was even applicable to computer software.
While some inventors (flight, rockets, cars, radio, software) and artists are motivated by money, or, at least, would like to be able to "make a living" doing what they enjoy,
For this to actually happen tends to take a mixture of both talent and luck.
there are also more than sufficient examples of those who would do, and have done, creative work for the pleasure and/or prestige of doing so. Music existed long before copyright (or patronage). Research was conducted by hobbyists and university students/professors in the fields previously listed without recompense, other than "bragging rights" (and grades and tenure). Free software was distributed through users' groups, BBSs, and USENET long before the GPL.
Sometimes people can wind up making a lot of money from a creative work without that having been their motivation in the first place. e.g. I don't recall JK Rowling ever saying that she wanted to be the best selling author in the history of publishing.
This world would not be nice.. I could walk into a museum, take photos of all the art, get it printed with (this painting was by....) and then sell/give away those photos. Why would anyone pay full price when I can sell them a (fully credited) version for far less?
Maybe people would want to see the original or look at it from a different position/under different lighting conditions from your photo (the latter especially if you used a flash). Anyway many museums/art gallaries already use photographs to advertise their collections.
That is a very uncomfortable point for the MPAA/RIAA et al.
Fact: Copyrigth exists at all in order to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
At least according to the US Constitution. As the MPAA/RIAA are US based entities that is highly relevent.
So, the relevant question is, if we cut copyrigth to say 15 years, would that actually result in less progress in science and the useful arts ? That is, is it likely that production of creative works would actually be seriously harmed by this ?
15 years is still much longer than the useful commercial lifespan of many works. Indeed having a limited copyright term may provide more incentive for publication than having one which is to all intents and purposes unlimited.
For software, the answer is a pretty definitive "no". There's no way in hell anyone will write a new program -- because of 100 years copyrigth, while not being able to do the same for 15 years copyrigth.
There's also the issue of how much software, etc is produced because of copyright in the first place. Another question which needs to be asked is if current copyright laws are actually impeding "the progress of science and the useful arts". Something which definitly appears to be the case with the DMCA.
Or, how about Copyright laws revert to something reasonable, like 15 years.
Or even some shorter time period.
he copyright length was originally 14 or 28 years, per United States copyright law. If 28 years was enough time in the late 1700s, when printing was a slow process, and dissemination of information was slow, why on EARTH would we need authors life PLUS 70 years, when a work can be distributed across the world in seconds?
You can easily send a live broadcast to the entire planet with a maximum "lag time" of well under a second. Even with a physical media you can transport it to anywhere on the planet within hours. The likes of newspapers use a combination of multiple printing places and internal combustion engine vehicles to do this routinely. In the 18th century the fastest vehicles were wind propelled ships, assuming the wind was blowing in the right direction at the time... The fastest land transport was a galloping horse, horses also have a rather limited "range".
Technology also allows for EASY copies. Copying a book used to be a VERY time consuming task. In other words, copying wasn't a problem because copying was unrealistic / expensive.
In quite a few cases lack of copying is a problem. Since it's impossible to read any book where no copies still exist. There's also the issue of it being daft to enforce restrictions which technology has rendered obsolete. e.g. who now would advocate that a flagman walk in front of every motor vehicle (thus restricting them to walking pace)...
Copyrights also used to be short in duration - now they are effectively forever.
They also used to start at publication and require copies to be placed in certain libraries. However these libraries cannot do their job since now the "clock" dosn't even start until some point in the future and many types of works arn't even deposited there in the first place.
This is why a McKinnon (who broke US PCs into had a look around and left) is being accused of doing $5000 damage to each PC, in order for it to be a Federal crime and hence extraditable.
A pity this dosn't get applied to spammers, who probably cost far more real money than anything McKinnon might have done...
[rant]F***ing Blair. We elected a leader, and he became a Bush follower and sold us out. I'll piss on his grave when he dies for the damage he's done to the UK sovereignty. [/rant]
Make up your mind: do you want the US to play World Police or not?
Most people, with the obvious exception of Zionists and some corporations, would answer "no".
Damned if we do, damned if we don't
Except that "damned if we don't" is hardly applicable since there hasn't been a time since the Second World War (possibly not even since the Spanish American War) when the US hasn't been "playing World Police".
The US has a Constitution which says that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
This is about a corrupt administration which feels it is above the law.
Also it's unclear how they could prevent such a prosecution, especially when they are out of power.
Such substances are controlled because they are toxic to the human body, to various degrees. In sufficient quantities - which are easily reachable - they can cause permanent damage to your various organs or even death.
The problem is that drug restrictions appear to have little relationship with toxicity. If that was the case you'd expect many currently legal drugs to be illegal and many currently illegal drugs to be legal.
Ok, then a virtual policeman should arrest you and put you in front of a virtual court and if they find you virtually guilty, you (or rather, your virtual character, the imaginary cartoon that raped the other cartoon) should go to Second Life prison and pay a sum of virtual, non-real money for virtual restitution.
Or possibly avatar A tried to do something to avatar B and either avatar B left leaving avatar A looking very silly or avatar B did some serious virtual violence on avatar A...
Well, I'd seen one of those Dateline NBC specials that have been on with the scenario of the police acting as kids to set up meetings with child predators. And they seemed to indicate not only near 99%+ conviction rates, but, also very long sentences.
That assumes that they are showing a random sample. For all anyone knows they could be being highly selective. It's unlikely that they would get much co-operation from the authorities in cases where there was no conviction. Let alone cases where the "actor" themselves got into trouble. An adult who wants to attract "child predators" may themselves be enguaging in some kind of paraphilia...
If everyone switched to more efficient tankless hot water heaters (simple heat exchanges), huge amounts of energy would be saved (since energy is used only when water is flowing) but since more energy is drawn down to heat water from 50 degrees F to 115 degrees F, utilities would have a higher peak demand to plan for.
Since water has a high SHC you need a powerful heater for such a system. In many cases these a gas powered because it's rather easier to deliver 10-20kW of power via a gas pipe than via electrical cable. Whereas with a tank you can get away with a lower power heater. The starting temperature of the water can also vary, especially if it is drawn from outside, rather than an inside storage tank. Thus your average of 10C could end up varying between 1 and 25 depending on the season, but still needs to wind up somewhere around 47C.
Beer has been saving this planet for thousands of years. Can you imagine if people had to actually deal with their problems?
Whilst this was modded as "funny" it is actually the case that up until about a century ago beer was the usual way in which many people were supplied with safe drinking water. To the extent that people who's ancestors tended to drink beer are able to handle alcohol much better than people who's ancestors tended to drink tea. (Tea being the other traditional way of making water safe to drink.)
I'm curious how (sustainable) biofuel isn't environmentally friendly? It's carbon neutral, leverages our existing overproduction of food crops, seems all good all round. The only thing I can think of is that it's smelly and bad for your valve seats... obviously logging old growth forest for biomass doesn't count here, just things like maize and grain crops.
It depends on the details. Filtering used vegetable oil and using it as a fuel probably is a good idea. Using maize to produce alcohol isn't remotly efficent. If you were to grow plants specifically for fuel production you'd probably want something which dosn't require much in the way of fertilizer/herbicide/pesticide and as much of the plant as possible being useful for producing fuel. Rather than just its fruit or seeds.
Hydro plants are protested against because they flood large areas of wildlife habitats and peoples' homes. That's an 'environmental' issue but not an emissions one.
It is possible to have a hydro electric plant without needing to create a lake. You just need something like the Niagra river. Also where lakes are created there are often "water management" issues so much as power generating ones. e.g. reducing seasonal variation in water flow to prevent seasonal flooding.
Note that TFA indicates that this is a method to remove brewer's waste, with the byproduct of producing electricity. As a method for producing electricity in general, it is not a clean method because you'd first have to produce alcohol (which would then we cleaned by the bacteria).
But it could be useful to cut the brewery's electricity bill. Possibly also their water usage...
I made a map of my school shortly after the Columbine thing, for Duke Nuken 3D. I got extra credit from my Visual Arts teacher for being 'creative', and lemme tell you, I had a HELL of a lot more than a hammer for weapons at my house.
In most people's houses the best place to look for "potential weapons" would be the kitchen. You might even discover that someone keeps a broom together with tape/string in there. Thus they'd have the capacity to put together a "military weapon"...
Why not? So long as it's not handled like an inquisition, I don't see the problem.
The simplist reason is that everyone, including the student, probably has better things to do with their time than asking daft questions.
If you ask "Why did you make a map of the school?"
About the only context in which it would be reasonable for the school to be asking would be if he did it when he was ment to be doing something else or misappropriated school resources to do it.
Just why should he be evaluated or asked about what he's done?
It's not in any way strange to apply your day-to-day experiences to hobbies and fantasies.
Maybe the people who need to be evaluated (or medicated) are those who kicked up the fuss in the first place.
Even worse: The might eventually learn to operate CAD-Programs, study Architecture and build real schools! Just imagine the horrors that could happen in those places... !
They'd have problems if they wanted to install timber framed walls if they didn't have a hammer though.
They are the same number, only in base 10 and base 2 respectively.
Nothing to to stop someone using a more obscure radix than 10, 2, or 16. e.g. 11, 13 or some other number which is not a multiple (or factor) of 10, 2 & 16...
Ugh, related to that last one, one that I hope is listed as a failure soon: Billboard trucks. Have you seen these? They're trucks with nothing on the back but a big flat sign with ads on both sides.
There are also billboard trailers. Where the trailers can range in size from something pulled by a small car to something needing a big truck.
Yay! Advertising that pollutes AND makes traffic worse!
They might be intended to be parked, rather than advertise on the move.
Possibly because of the lack of private firearms in Japan. Whereas they are common in the US.
Made me want to take a baseball bat to the damn things. Consider yourself lucky they don't exist in the US anymore.
It's rather easier to make such a truck "baseball bat resistant" as opposed to "shotgun resistant". You also don't need to be capable of running as fast as the truck is going.
Slashdot Mirror
This statement is utter "pferd merde": "I guess I should rephrase what I said and say that you can have free software without copyrights but just not for very long." It is not only disproved by more than three decades' experience (yes, there was free software for the PDP-11)
Even longer than that. The reason that Richard Stallman came up with the GPL concept in the first place is that what we now call "open source" had been the established model for much software distribution. Note that 20 odd years ago there was much debate about if copyright was even applicable to computer software.
While some inventors (flight, rockets, cars, radio, software) and artists are motivated by money, or, at least, would like to be able to "make a living" doing what they enjoy,
For this to actually happen tends to take a mixture of both talent and luck.
there are also more than sufficient examples of those who would do, and have done, creative work for the pleasure and/or prestige of doing so. Music existed long before copyright (or patronage). Research was conducted by hobbyists and university students/professors in the fields previously listed without recompense, other than "bragging rights" (and grades and tenure). Free software was distributed through users' groups, BBSs, and USENET long before the GPL.
Sometimes people can wind up making a lot of money from a creative work without that having been their motivation in the first place. e.g. I don't recall JK Rowling ever saying that she wanted to be the best selling author in the history of publishing.
This world would not be nice.. I could walk into a museum, take photos of all the art, get it printed with (this painting was by....) and then sell/give away those photos. Why would anyone pay full price when I can sell them a (fully credited) version for far less?
Maybe people would want to see the original or look at it from a different position/under different lighting conditions from your photo (the latter especially if you used a flash). Anyway many museums/art gallaries already use photographs to advertise their collections.
That is a very uncomfortable point for the MPAA/RIAA et al.
Fact: Copyrigth exists at all in order to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
At least according to the US Constitution. As the MPAA/RIAA are US based entities that is highly relevent.
So, the relevant question is, if we cut copyrigth to say 15 years, would that actually result in less progress in science and the useful arts ? That is, is it likely that production of creative works would actually be seriously harmed by this ?
15 years is still much longer than the useful commercial lifespan of many works. Indeed having a limited copyright term may provide more incentive for publication than having one which is to all intents and purposes unlimited.
For software, the answer is a pretty definitive "no". There's no way in hell anyone will write a new program -- because of 100 years copyrigth, while not being able to do the same for 15 years copyrigth.
There's also the issue of how much software, etc is produced because of copyright in the first place.
Another question which needs to be asked is if current copyright laws are actually impeding "the progress of science and the useful arts". Something which definitly appears to be the case with the DMCA.
Or, how about Copyright laws revert to something reasonable, like 15 years.
Or even some shorter time period.
he copyright length was originally 14 or 28 years, per United States copyright law. If 28 years was enough time in the late 1700s, when printing was a slow process, and dissemination of information was slow, why on EARTH would we need authors life PLUS 70 years, when a work can be distributed across the world in seconds?
You can easily send a live broadcast to the entire planet with a maximum "lag time" of well under a second. Even with a physical media you can transport it to anywhere on the planet within hours. The likes of newspapers use a combination of multiple printing places and internal combustion engine vehicles to do this routinely.
In the 18th century the fastest vehicles were wind propelled ships, assuming the wind was blowing in the right direction at the time... The fastest land transport was a galloping horse, horses also have a rather limited "range".
Technology also allows for EASY copies. Copying a book used to be a VERY time consuming task. In other words, copying wasn't a problem because copying was unrealistic / expensive.
In quite a few cases lack of copying is a problem. Since it's impossible to read any book where no copies still exist.
There's also the issue of it being daft to enforce restrictions which technology has rendered obsolete. e.g. who now would advocate that a flagman walk in front of every motor vehicle (thus restricting them to walking pace)...
Copyrights also used to be short in duration - now they are effectively forever.
They also used to start at publication and require copies to be placed in certain libraries. However these libraries cannot do their job since now the "clock" dosn't even start until some point in the future and many types of works arn't even deposited there in the first place.
This is why a McKinnon (who broke US PCs into had a look around and left) is being accused of doing $5000 damage to each PC, in order for it to be a Federal crime and hence extraditable.
A pity this dosn't get applied to spammers, who probably cost far more real money than anything McKinnon might have done...
[rant]F***ing Blair. We elected a leader, and he became a Bush follower and sold us out. I'll piss on his grave when he dies for the damage he's done to the UK sovereignty. [/rant]
No doubt nu-Labour will pass a law against that.
Make up your mind: do you want the US to play World Police or not?
Most people, with the obvious exception of Zionists and some corporations, would answer "no".
Damned if we do, damned if we don't
Except that "damned if we don't" is hardly applicable since there hasn't been a time since the Second World War (possibly not even since the Spanish American War) when the US hasn't been "playing World Police".
The US has a Constitution which says that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
This is about a corrupt administration which feels it is above the law.
Also it's unclear how they could prevent such a prosecution, especially when they are out of power.
Such substances are controlled because they are toxic to the human body, to various degrees. In sufficient quantities - which are easily reachable - they can cause permanent damage to your various organs or even death.
The problem is that drug restrictions appear to have little relationship with toxicity. If that was the case you'd expect many currently legal drugs to be illegal and many currently illegal drugs to be legal.
Ok, then a virtual policeman should arrest you and put you in front of a virtual court and if they find you virtually guilty, you (or rather, your virtual character, the imaginary cartoon that raped the other cartoon) should go to Second Life prison and pay a sum of virtual, non-real money for virtual restitution.
Or possibly avatar A tried to do something to avatar B and either avatar B left leaving avatar A looking very silly or avatar B did some serious virtual violence on avatar A...
Well, I'd seen one of those Dateline NBC specials that have been on with the scenario of the police acting as kids to set up meetings with child predators. And they seemed to indicate not only near 99%+ conviction rates, but, also very long sentences.
That assumes that they are showing a random sample. For all anyone knows they could be being highly selective. It's unlikely that they would get much co-operation from the authorities in cases where there was no conviction.
Let alone cases where the "actor" themselves got into trouble. An adult who wants to attract "child predators" may themselves be enguaging in some kind of paraphilia...
then why the heck is the article titled 660 gallon fuel cell!
Is that US or Imperial gallons? No doubt the original specification was in litres anyway.
If everyone switched to more efficient tankless hot water heaters (simple heat exchanges), huge amounts of energy would be saved (since energy is used only when water is flowing) but since more energy is drawn down to heat water from 50 degrees F to 115 degrees F, utilities would have a higher peak demand to plan for.
Since water has a high SHC you need a powerful heater for such a system. In many cases these a gas powered because it's rather easier to deliver 10-20kW of power via a gas pipe than via electrical cable. Whereas with a tank you can get away with a lower power heater. The starting temperature of the water can also vary, especially if it is drawn from outside, rather than an inside storage tank. Thus your average of 10C could end up varying between 1 and 25 depending on the season, but still needs to wind up somewhere around 47C.
Beer has been saving this planet for thousands of years. Can you imagine if people had to actually deal with their problems?
Whilst this was modded as "funny" it is actually the case that up until about a century ago beer was the usual way in which many people were supplied with safe drinking water. To the extent that people who's ancestors tended to drink beer are able to handle alcohol much better than people who's ancestors tended to drink tea. (Tea being the other traditional way of making water safe to drink.)
I'm curious how (sustainable) biofuel isn't environmentally friendly? It's carbon neutral, leverages our existing overproduction of food crops, seems all good all round. The only thing I can think of is that it's smelly and bad for your valve seats... obviously logging old growth forest for biomass doesn't count here, just things like maize and grain crops.
It depends on the details. Filtering used vegetable oil and using it as a fuel probably is a good idea. Using maize to produce alcohol isn't remotly efficent. If you were to grow plants specifically for fuel production you'd probably want something which dosn't require much in the way of fertilizer/herbicide/pesticide and as much of the plant as possible being useful for producing fuel. Rather than just its fruit or seeds.
Hydro plants are protested against because they flood large areas of wildlife habitats and peoples' homes. That's an 'environmental' issue but not an emissions one.
It is possible to have a hydro electric plant without needing to create a lake. You just need something like the Niagra river. Also where lakes are created there are often "water management" issues so much as power generating ones. e.g. reducing seasonal variation in water flow to prevent seasonal flooding.
Note that TFA indicates that this is a method to remove brewer's waste, with the byproduct of producing electricity. As a method for producing electricity in general, it is not a clean method because you'd first have to produce alcohol (which would then we cleaned by the bacteria).
But it could be useful to cut the brewery's electricity bill. Possibly also their water usage...
I made a map of my school shortly after the Columbine thing, for Duke Nuken 3D.
I got extra credit from my Visual Arts teacher for being 'creative', and lemme tell you, I had a HELL of a lot more than a hammer for weapons at my house.
In most people's houses the best place to look for "potential weapons" would be the kitchen. You might even discover that someone keeps a broom together with tape/string in there. Thus they'd have the capacity to put together a "military weapon"...
Why not? So long as it's not handled like an inquisition, I don't see the problem.
The simplist reason is that everyone, including the student, probably has better things to do with their time than asking daft questions.
If you ask "Why did you make a map of the school?"
About the only context in which it would be reasonable for the school to be asking would be if he did it when he was ment to be doing something else or misappropriated school resources to do it.
Just why should he be evaluated or asked about what he's done?
It's not in any way strange to apply your day-to-day experiences to hobbies and fantasies.
Maybe the people who need to be evaluated (or medicated) are those who kicked up the fuss in the first place.
A Hammer is a hammer is a hammer... You should all pay attention to the details.
:)
It could have been The Hammer of Justice, as described in the well known song. That could have been really frightening to the authorities.
Never trust a man that keeps a hammer in his house. He can be one of those psycopaths that hangs pictures on the wall or worse, a carpenter.
A bit like that guy who caused so much trouble for the Romans about 2,000 years ago
Even worse: The might eventually learn to operate CAD-Programs, study Architecture and build real schools! Just imagine the horrors that could happen in those places... !
They'd have problems if they wanted to install timber framed walls if they didn't have a hammer though.
They are the same number, only in base 10 and base 2 respectively.
Nothing to to stop someone using a more obscure radix than 10, 2, or 16. e.g. 11, 13 or some other number which is not a multiple (or factor) of 10, 2 & 16...
For example, several Disney motion pictures are based on older fairy tales,
As well as other identifiable earlier works
and there have been numerous motion pictures made from Shakespeare's plays.
Quite a few of his plays are based on stories popular around 400 years ago anyway.
Ugh, related to that last one, one that I hope is listed as a failure soon: Billboard trucks. Have you seen these? They're trucks with nothing on the back but a big flat sign with ads on both sides.
There are also billboard trailers. Where the trailers can range in size from something pulled by a small car to something needing a big truck.
Yay! Advertising that pollutes AND makes traffic worse!
They might be intended to be parked, rather than advertise on the move.
Sound trucks are still prevalent here in Japan.
Possibly because of the lack of private firearms in Japan. Whereas they are common in the US.
Made me want to take a baseball bat to the damn things. Consider yourself lucky they don't exist in the US anymore.
It's rather easier to make such a truck "baseball bat resistant" as opposed to "shotgun resistant". You also don't need to be capable of running as fast as the truck is going.