On his website he claims the subject of a photograph should have copyright of it, that using the image should require written consent, and that abusers should pay $50-1,500 in fines
So what? Plenty of people have opinions on how laws should work, which are different from the way they actually do (including copyright laws) this is basic "political speach".
This was about claiming to own copyright when you don't, which is explicitly in violation of the DMCA; the "MAFIAA" actually work on behalf of the legal copyright holders, and so it's doubtful that that provision would apply.
Actually it's quite possible for this to apply. Especially when there have been cases of claiming a copyright infringement based purely on regular expression matching of filenames.
I know I'm not in the most sympathetic crowd for this kind of thing, but does anyone else find it irritating that as soon as anyone in power sides with the **AA on the copyright issue, they are guilty of corruption (or at the very least, brainwashing)? Could these human beings genuinely believe that copyright infringement is actually a problem?
Except that their job is patents and trademarks. If these people want to say something about copyright they should do so as private individuals. An analogy would be if you bought a bus ticket and the driver gave a lecture about the safety of aircraft instead of driving the bus.
"that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, exposing those children to copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those who protect their copyrighted material appear antagonistic"
More to the point why is the Patent and Trademark Office making a fuss about this? Or can we expect the Copyright Office to produce reports vaguely related to Patents and Trademarks...
"file-sharing software could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job"
It seems to me that it's not file-sharing software to blame, but the shitty sys/net admins that the government employs to "secure" the computers that contain this sensitive data.
Indeed the real problem here is systems which allow end users to install any software.
Call me crazy, but I'd think that with the use of Active Directory, even a dimwitted NT admin could setup a computer that wouldn't allow people to install software like this in the first place.
Maybe securing Windows isn't that easy... Maybe it's a poor OS choice for this kind of situation.
"Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file actions, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge."
What does any of this have to do with examining patents? Maybe what they should have said is "The Patent Office is Harmful to Children and a threat to National Security".
But you forgot about cueing the guy pointing out that one of the most important factors for vehicular power sources is energy density, and that currently hydrogen along with its containment system absolutely sucks in this regard.
There's also the issue of refueling. Fuels which are liquid at the kind of temperatures you naturally find are just so much easier to handle. As well as being possible to manufacture using plants, bacteria or fungi.
How about they put it with carbon! Then they could pack one more hydrogen in and have less than half the weight for the carrier atom, creating a great storage molecule. CH4. I've even got an idea of what to call it: "methane". This "methane" could then be "burnt" in an "internal combustion engine" to make torque, which could be mechanically coupled to the wheels to make the car go. Alternatively, the "methane" could be "burnt" in fuel cell to make electricity, which could be used to power a motor, which could be mechanically coupled to the wheels, which could make the car go.
You could even feed it into a piped distribution system (which conveniently many places already have) where it can be burned with air for heating purposes or in static internal combustion engines to generate electricity.
My comments were mostly on the fact that alane, as you noted, *is* rocket fuel. There's been great interest in economically bulk producing alane that is stable at low pressures, because you get get an Isp with LOX/Alane that's almost as good as LOX/LH.
Is a hybrid rocket using LOX/Alane a better rocket than purely liquid fueled one using LOX/LH? You still have the problem of keeping the oxidiser cool...
For example, sodium alanate (NaAlH4) has a theoretical storage fraction of 5.6%, and the reversible fraction is starting to approach 4-5%, which is a very, very good track record. However, when it sees water (which it might, in a car accident) it EXPLODES. Well, deflagrates, but you get the point.
Thus your car would probably need to have hazmat warnings on it to ensure that people like firemen didn't try squirt water at it if it was on fire, the vehicle battery was broken, etc. It would also mean that if the vehicle was driven into water or caught in a flood it would be a potential bomb.
Likewise you want to be able to recharge it with hydrogen quickly and with small energy requirements. Many really great hydrogen storage solutions have run into problems at this end of the problem and need metal catalysts, which increases the weight and cost. Frankly, practical hydrogen fuel vehicles are still a couple of decades off.
Assuming you can produce the hydrogen easily in the first place. It might well be easier to produce fuels which existing engines will run on from non petroleum sources, including what is otherwise waste.
As for your assertion that public transportation needs to be on-demand and show up at the front of your house in order to be useful, clearly you've never lived anywhere with a good public transportation system.
There do appear to be parts of the world which are almost designed with an assumption of everyone having a private car. Conversely there are places where private cars end up clogging the streets even (sometimes especially) when they are not in use.
As long as the bus/tram/metro stop is within easy walking distance from your home,
Which is easier if you are not using huge quantities of land for parking cars. Any urban space which has been around for more than a century simply isn't going to have lots of space dedicated to car parking. Simply because cars didn't exist when the property boundries were created.
and one comes frequently (ten minutes or less is a common interval in Europe and Asia), you aren't honestly impacted much. Especially if the public transportation schedule is accurate, it's very easy to plan your commute around.
There are certainly parts of the world where public transportation is an easier option.
It's not just laziness, it's resources. If the police accuse someone of reckless driving due to someone using a blackberry, first they have to prove that it happened, and they have to prove that it's reckless. That could encourage a large number of people ticketed on that basis to fight it, and the courts can't handle all that and it would basically require the cops to spend all their time in court supporting the ticket.
The police could produce video recordings, from either a police car or a statically mounted video camera. These are also pefectly good for proving speeding too.
I once worked with a fellow who said he drove under the assumption that "basically, no one wants to get in a wreck," so he would cut people off all the time and perform other unsavory maneuvers. He has a point: people really do want to avoid accidents while driving. I wished him good luck on the chance he comes across someone with the same outlook on driving he has and never rode with him again.
The really worrying thing is that there are people with this outlook driving ordinary cars. Maybe if they drove a large truck (or a tank) they might have a point. A few years back I was on a bus where some idiot appeared to think like this. Resulted in a couple of body panels were knocked off the bus, but it was still perfectly roadworthy. The car however couldn't even be pushed, let alone driven.
Try looking at some of the studies on how badly people drive while simply on the cell phone. Even the Mythbusters tackled this one and found that using a cell phone while driving has about the same affect on your driving skills as being slightly drunk.
Whilst pointing out that it is easier to switch a phone off than to sober up.
If there is going to be a law, it should be a real DWD - Driving While Distracted - statute that covers everything from Texting to the Revlon Dashboard. A few people get $150 tickets for being idiots, they're a lot less likely to do it a again.
Or maybe having their vehicle impounded. Which not only costs them money but also stops them doing whatever stupid thing they were doing in the first place.
If you cause an accident because you're being stupid. You (not your insurance company) have to pay for the damage you to to other people and their property. You should still have insurance to cover the damage if you can't pay, but you should have your license revoked until you finish repaying your debt to the insurer.
Maybe even after you have paid off the debt (including interest) you should still have to take a driving test.
I also completely agree that the driving test should be crafted to weed out bad drivers, rather than giving a license to anybody that can afford the fee.
It also certainly dosn't help (ab)using the document for other purposes. If the idea was to improve safety there would also be retests every 5-10 years.
Going after assholes who dodder along in the left lane, forcing everyone overtaking them to not only brake but to pass them on the right, isn't as efficient a revenue-generator as going after speeders, because you can't catch them by simply parking a cop off on the side of the road with a radar gun zapping people as they go by.
There is a slight possibility that a real live cop might actually stop someone who is driving dangerously. However if the "cop" is actually a robot, e.g. a speed camera, all it can check for is speed. Problem is that these can actually cause dangerous driving. Such as speeding up and slowing down so as to be under the limit when they pass the camera or (not having seen Mythbusters) thinking that rapidly changing lanes with evade a camera.
Giving away the boxes makes perfect sense when one has all of the facts. The government wants to SELL the VHF spectrum and can't do that until they can move the current occupants out.
In which case just providing the boxes might only do half the job. In order to use them you need an antenna suitable for the digital signals. This is rather different from the situation in somewhere like the UK where the existing UHF waveband is being used...
Genetics works over time. I don't see a miracle happening where we are breeding at the rate of bacteria to go thru hundreds of generations to breed 'fat' people.
What rate do you think gut bacteria breed at? These can have quite an influence on what does and dosn't get adsorbed from the food people eat.
This suggests what many geeks have been suggesting for a long time: Eliminate PE from the required school cirriculum. Every since it was made mandatory under (IIRC) Kennedy, Americans have only gotten fatter. It doesn't help the problem, and it institutionalizes the bullying of the weak by the strong.
An alternative might be to restrict the use of motor vehicles in transporting the students. Thus giving all of them at least two miles walking/cycling per day.
If other diets haven't worked, try putting Little Tubby on Atkins. No, it won't necessarily work for everyone. It depends on the type of metabolism you have. But if you've tried low-fat and it doesn't work, Atkins (or another carb-restrictive diet) might.
Actually the key to Atkins is high protein. It may be fashionable to lable diets as "low something or other" but this is potentially highly misleading.
Anyways, thermodynamics does not directly relate calories consumed to weight. It only sets the lower bound. A hotdog and bun has about 350 calories, and a pound of fat is 3500 calories. When Kobayashi eats 53 hot dogs at a sitting, you think he puts on 5 pounds of fat?
The whole "calories" thing has lead to many people have strange ideas about how the human body works. The way calories are actually measured is to burn something in pure oxygen.
(My guess would be a massive attack of diarrhea). It's entirely possible that one person's body might be more prone to put on fat than another's even if they both eat and burn the same number of calories. Poop contains calories, too, you know.
Part of the hotdog and bun cannot be digested by any human, ever. It's also a mistake to assume that the amount of food adsorbed is constant either between people or at different times.
Normally animals and for that matter people given unlimited diets will only have a few individuals get fat. As a general rule diet and for that matter exercise just have little or no effect. We do know several things that to cause weight gain. It is known for example that deliberate malnutrition will cause weight gain.
Have there been any studies to see if low fat/low calorie food can have this effect? Something else which appeats to be poorly researched is if any food additives are weight gain drugs.
Surely they could have a closed trial before one of the FISA Court judges? Oh wait, I forgot... the whole reason they're under investigation is that the FISA court judges' security clearances weren't good enough to let them oversee this perfectly legal but so supersecret we can't tell the judges about it program.
Presumably this list of judges is kept with the list of people so dangerous they cannot be allowed near an aircraft, whilst being so innocent they can't be arrested...
learly the FISA judges aren't vetted well enough for us to be absolutely sure they're not working for al Qaeda.
Maybe they couldn't find enough who were working for the "Gaza Al Qaeda"...
Slashdot Mirror
On his website he claims the subject of a photograph should have copyright of it, that using the image should require written consent, and that abusers should pay $50-1,500 in fines
So what? Plenty of people have opinions on how laws should work, which are different from the way they actually do (including copyright laws) this is basic "political speach".
This was about claiming to own copyright when you don't, which is explicitly in violation of the DMCA; the "MAFIAA" actually work on behalf of the legal copyright holders, and so it's doubtful that that provision would apply.
Actually it's quite possible for this to apply. Especially when there have been cases of claiming a copyright infringement based purely on regular expression matching of filenames.
I know I'm not in the most sympathetic crowd for this kind of thing, but does anyone else find it irritating that as soon as anyone in power sides with the **AA on the copyright issue, they are guilty of corruption (or at the very least, brainwashing)? Could these human beings genuinely believe that copyright infringement is actually a problem?
Except that their job is patents and trademarks. If these people want to say something about copyright they should do so as private individuals. An analogy would be if you bought a bus ticket and the driver gave a lecture about the safety of aircraft instead of driving the bus.
"that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, exposing those children to copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those who protect their copyrighted material appear antagonistic"
More to the point why is the Patent and Trademark Office making a fuss about this? Or can we expect the Copyright Office to produce reports vaguely related to Patents and Trademarks...
"file-sharing software could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job"
It seems to me that it's not file-sharing software to blame, but the shitty sys/net admins that the government employs to "secure" the computers that contain this sensitive data.
Indeed the real problem here is systems which allow end users to install any software.
Call me crazy, but I'd think that with the use of Active Directory, even a dimwitted NT admin could setup a computer that wouldn't allow people to install software like this in the first place.
Maybe securing Windows isn't that easy... Maybe it's a poor OS choice for this kind of situation.
"Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file actions, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge."
What does any of this have to do with examining patents? Maybe what they should have said is "The Patent Office is Harmful to Children and a threat to National Security".
But you forgot about cueing the guy pointing out that one of the most important factors for vehicular power sources is energy density, and that currently hydrogen along with its containment system absolutely sucks in this regard.
There's also the issue of refueling. Fuels which are liquid at the kind of temperatures you naturally find are just so much easier to handle. As well as being possible to manufacture using plants, bacteria or fungi.
How about they put it with carbon! Then they could pack one more hydrogen in and have less than half the weight for the carrier atom, creating a great storage molecule. CH4. I've even got an idea of what to call it: "methane". This "methane" could then be "burnt" in an "internal combustion engine" to make torque, which could be mechanically coupled to the wheels to make the car go. Alternatively, the "methane" could be "burnt" in fuel cell to make electricity, which could be used to power a motor, which could be mechanically coupled to the wheels, which could make the car go.
You could even feed it into a piped distribution system (which conveniently many places already have) where it can be burned with air for heating purposes or in static internal combustion engines to generate electricity.
My comments were mostly on the fact that alane, as you noted, *is* rocket fuel. There's been great interest in economically bulk producing alane that is stable at low pressures, because you get get an Isp with LOX/Alane that's almost as good as LOX/LH.
Is a hybrid rocket using LOX/Alane a better rocket than purely liquid fueled one using LOX/LH? You still have the problem of keeping the oxidiser cool...
For example, sodium alanate (NaAlH4) has a theoretical storage fraction of 5.6%, and the reversible fraction is starting to approach 4-5%, which is a very, very good track record. However, when it sees water (which it might, in a car accident) it EXPLODES. Well, deflagrates, but you get the point.
Thus your car would probably need to have hazmat warnings on it to ensure that people like firemen didn't try squirt water at it if it was on fire, the vehicle battery was broken, etc. It would also mean that if the vehicle was driven into water or caught in a flood it would be a potential bomb.
Likewise you want to be able to recharge it with hydrogen quickly and with small energy requirements. Many really great hydrogen storage solutions have run into problems at this end of the problem and need metal catalysts, which increases the weight and cost. Frankly, practical hydrogen fuel vehicles are still a couple of decades off.
Assuming you can produce the hydrogen easily in the first place. It might well be easier to produce fuels which existing engines will run on from non petroleum sources, including what is otherwise waste.
As for your assertion that public transportation needs to be on-demand and show up at the front of your house in order to be useful, clearly you've never lived anywhere with a good public transportation system.
There do appear to be parts of the world which are almost designed with an assumption of everyone having a private car. Conversely there are places where private cars end up clogging the streets even (sometimes especially) when they are not in use.
As long as the bus/tram/metro stop is within easy walking distance from your home,
Which is easier if you are not using huge quantities of land for parking cars. Any urban space which has been around for more than a century simply isn't going to have lots of space dedicated to car parking. Simply because cars didn't exist when the property boundries were created.
and one comes frequently (ten minutes or less is a common interval in Europe and Asia), you aren't honestly impacted much. Especially if the public transportation schedule is accurate, it's very easy to plan your commute around.
There are certainly parts of the world where public transportation is an easier option.
It's not just laziness, it's resources. If the police accuse someone of reckless driving due to someone using a blackberry, first they have to prove that it happened, and they have to prove that it's reckless. That could encourage a large number of people ticketed on that basis to fight it, and the courts can't handle all that and it would basically require the cops to spend all their time in court supporting the ticket.
The police could produce video recordings, from either a police car or a statically mounted video camera. These are also pefectly good for proving speeding too.
I once worked with a fellow who said he drove under the assumption that "basically, no one wants to get in a wreck," so he would cut people off all the time and perform other unsavory maneuvers. He has a point: people really do want to avoid accidents while driving. I wished him good luck on the chance he comes across someone with the same outlook on driving he has and never rode with him again.
The really worrying thing is that there are people with this outlook driving ordinary cars. Maybe if they drove a large truck (or a tank) they might have a point. A few years back I was on a bus where some idiot appeared to think like this. Resulted in a couple of body panels were knocked off the bus, but it was still perfectly roadworthy. The car however couldn't even be pushed, let alone driven.
Try looking at some of the studies on how badly people drive while simply on the cell phone. Even the Mythbusters tackled this one and found that using a cell phone while driving has about the same affect on your driving skills as being slightly drunk.
Whilst pointing out that it is easier to switch a phone off than to sober up.
If there is going to be a law, it should be a real DWD - Driving While Distracted - statute that covers everything from Texting to the Revlon Dashboard. A few people get $150 tickets for being idiots, they're a lot less likely to do it a again.
Or maybe having their vehicle impounded. Which not only costs them money but also stops them doing whatever stupid thing they were doing in the first place.
The exact same argument could be used to pass a law making it illegal to build a campfire in the passenger seat of your car while driving.
In some parts of the world if it wasn't stated in the manual that you shouldn't do this some idiot might try it then sue the car maker...
If you cause an accident because you're being stupid. You (not your insurance company) have to pay for the damage you to to other people and their property. You should still have insurance to cover the damage if you can't pay, but you should have your license revoked until you finish repaying your debt to the insurer.
Maybe even after you have paid off the debt (including interest) you should still have to take a driving test.
I also completely agree that the driving test should be crafted to weed out bad drivers, rather than giving a license to anybody that can afford the fee.
It also certainly dosn't help (ab)using the document for other purposes. If the idea was to improve safety there would also be retests every 5-10 years.
Going after assholes who dodder along in the left lane, forcing everyone overtaking them to not only brake but to pass them on the right, isn't as efficient a revenue-generator as going after speeders, because you can't catch them by simply parking a cop off on the side of the road with a radar gun zapping people as they go by.
There is a slight possibility that a real live cop might actually stop someone who is driving dangerously. However if the "cop" is actually a robot, e.g. a speed camera, all it can check for is speed. Problem is that these can actually cause dangerous driving. Such as speeding up and slowing down so as to be under the limit when they pass the camera or (not having seen Mythbusters) thinking that rapidly changing lanes with evade a camera.
Giving away the boxes makes perfect sense when one has all of the facts. The government wants to SELL the VHF spectrum and can't do that until they can move the current occupants out.
In which case just providing the boxes might only do half the job. In order to use them you need an antenna suitable for the digital signals. This is rather different from the situation in somewhere like the UK where the existing UHF waveband is being used...
Genetics works over time. I don't see a miracle happening where we are breeding at the rate of bacteria to go thru hundreds of generations to breed 'fat' people.
What rate do you think gut bacteria breed at? These can have quite an influence on what does and dosn't get adsorbed from the food people eat.
I can learn plenty about Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Football, etc. without playing any of them.
Which is highly relevent given that these are primarily spectator sports.
This suggests what many geeks have been suggesting for a long time: Eliminate PE from the required school cirriculum. Every since it was made mandatory under (IIRC) Kennedy, Americans have only gotten fatter. It doesn't help the problem, and it institutionalizes the bullying of the weak by the strong.
An alternative might be to restrict the use of motor vehicles in transporting the students. Thus giving all of them at least two miles walking/cycling per day.
If other diets haven't worked, try putting Little Tubby on Atkins. No, it won't necessarily work for everyone. It depends on the type of metabolism you have. But if you've tried low-fat and it doesn't work, Atkins (or another carb-restrictive diet) might.
Actually the key to Atkins is high protein. It may be fashionable to lable diets as "low something or other" but this is potentially highly misleading.
Anyways, thermodynamics does not directly relate calories consumed to weight. It only sets the lower bound. A hotdog and bun has about 350 calories, and a pound of fat is 3500 calories. When Kobayashi eats 53 hot dogs at a sitting, you think he puts on 5 pounds of fat?
The whole "calories" thing has lead to many people have strange ideas about how the human body works. The way calories are actually measured is to burn something in pure oxygen.
(My guess would be a massive attack of diarrhea). It's entirely possible that one person's body might be more prone to put on fat than another's even if they both eat and burn the same number of calories. Poop contains calories, too, you know.
Part of the hotdog and bun cannot be digested by any human, ever. It's also a mistake to assume that the amount of food adsorbed is constant either between people or at different times.
Normally animals and for that matter people given unlimited diets will only have a few individuals get fat. As a general rule diet and for that matter exercise just have little or no effect. We do know several things that to cause weight gain. It is known for example that deliberate malnutrition will cause weight gain.
Have there been any studies to see if low fat/low calorie food can have this effect?
Something else which appeats to be poorly researched is if any food additives are weight gain drugs.
Surely they could have a closed trial before one of the FISA Court judges? Oh wait, I forgot... the whole reason they're under investigation is that the FISA court judges' security clearances weren't good enough to let them oversee this perfectly legal but so supersecret we can't tell the judges about it program.
Presumably this list of judges is kept with the list of people so dangerous they cannot be allowed near an aircraft, whilst being so innocent they can't be arrested...
learly the FISA judges aren't vetted well enough for us to be absolutely sure they're not working for al Qaeda.
Maybe they couldn't find enough who were working for the "Gaza Al Qaeda"...
Polls on Muslim diaspora communities in the West regularly show a disturbingly large percentage of Muslims desire the institutionalization of sharia,
There are probably as many interpretations of "sharia" as there are Muslims studying it.
regard certain terrorists as noble figures
There are plenty of other groups of people who regard "terrorists" as noble figures.