So the kid unveils the banner and gets suspended for breaking school policy for "promoting illegal drug abuse". Once could also argue he crossed the line on the separation of church and state by promoting his religious views during school time.
Actually promoting religion migh well be a far better position for the school to have taken against him. Rather than taking exception to the student's views on a political position held by the school.
but wouldn't pouring concrete into a "form" that uses hardened concrete as one of the four walls result in "fusing" the two blocks of concrete together instead of leaving a tight crack in between the two?
The only way you'd get this to happen would be via a "continuious pour"
If so, I thought there was a clear separation between blocks at the pyramids.
Even if the blocks started off stuck together several thousand years of expansion/contraction, as well as the odd earthquake, is enough to "unstick" them.
Besides, making a sort of concrete from powdered stone and lime just to pour it at the bottom seems like a real bad idea - why not just carry the mud and forms to the top and save the effort of moving and aligning the final bricks?
Especially given that pouring the blocks means that they will fit. As opposed to needing teams of masons to make final adjustments. If you were going to cast then move the blocks you'd need to carefully judge when to do it. Ideally you want a block soft enough for fine adjustment, but not so soft it's liable to get damaged.
I think you have completely missed the point about what means being obvious. An obvious idea is something you don't bother about publishing. You don't consider it worth the effort. I usually come up about 20 "obvious" ideas every day. If I would start publishing those in the way you suggest, then I wouldn't be able to do my work
If the ideas in question were obvious to people working in the same field publishing them could easily make you look like a fool.
A portable email device is "bloody fucking obvious" the minute you live in a world where both email and small wireless devices are common.
Even when such devices wern't common it was obvious to quite a few people that a "walkie-talkie" which could work as a telphone was a good idea. When it comes to electrical telecommunications sending text happened before sending voice. When radio was invented it was obvious that any kind of communication which could be sent over wires could be sent "wireless".
Someone like H G Wells could have come up with the idea of what we would now call a "portable email device" a century ago. He'd have called it something else and there is no way he could possibly have built one (or more usefully two).
As noted in another post, the first NTP patent was filed in 1991 -- was a portable device for email "bloody fucking obvious" in 1991?
A portable device for would have been an obviously useful idea in 1973, when email (as we know it now) was invented. In the same way that portable telephones were an obviously useful idea, even though one one shown in the Hanna Barbara cartoon "Inch High Private Eye" would have been virtually impossible to make with the technology of the day. Anyway ACARS would probably qualify as "portable email", even if it was built into a vehicle. If "email" were defined to just mean text sent by electronic means then telex and the cypher machines used in WWII would certainly qualify. Enigma machines were certainly man portable.
On the other hand, you have patents on portable electronic devices for sending and receiving email--- that's bloody fucking obvious, and not just in hindsight. Portable email was not a solution waiting for an insightful genius to discover it, but a solution waiting for technological progress to make it feasible.
You probably couldn't even reasonably try and patent "txtspeak". Because it's a consequence of the character limit of SMS that users would come up with method of encoding longer messages.
I find it interesting though how fast it was dropped. Appearently, the status quo is that its ok to make a boarding pass generator, but its not ok to create DVD decrypting software. Granted, I understand why the latter generates more lawsuits, but still this is pretty much the end result.
Maybe they couldn't manage to convince an judges that there was actually a case to answer.
If I were Chris, I'd thoroughly check and wipe the disks of the computers that the FBI gave back to him.
Being sure to record (and publish) any evidence to tampering.
Great idea, except that the RIAA (and, I'd assume the MPAA as well, not that it's relevant to this case) is basically an army of salaried lawyers, so they're not being paid by the hour. While so much as "Ok then, I'll see you in court" almost ensures that the case gets dropped (for both lack of evidence and unwillingness to set a precedent against themselves), dragging the thing out only wastes your time, because if their lawyers aren't going after you, they're going after someone else and will get paid the same amount.
They still have to spend time deciding to drop the case. Also they can't drop the case without you knowing about it, if you have made a counter claim they can't simply ignore it (even if they drop their original claim.)
Who said anything about going to court? I said I'd bog them down with paperwork, answers, interrogatories, etc, etc. I can file those on my way home from work.
The relevent factor is how many times you need to visit the court, especially in working hours. If you can conduct the case exclusivly by mailing documents to the court and/or the RIAA's lawyers then it wouldn't be a problem.
Those billions of dollars of lawyers cost money. If I was sued by RIAA I'd go pro-say and drag it out for as long as humanly possible. I'd file motion after motion that they'd have to answer (while paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour for that legal help) and tie it up for years. I'd drag out any depositions that they requested for hours and hours. You think it can't be done? I've known people that turned "What is your name and occupation?" into a four page long answer about how that question reminds them of their favorite childhood pet.
This isn't really a viable option for someone who has to earn a living. Only someone who is either retired or unemployed can really take on the RIAA as a LiP.
Same with a lot of software patents. Yes, when you look at them, they seem totally brainlessly obvious. But then why hadn't anyone thought of it until that point? Why did the idea not exist, or at the very least have a patent pending? Because until someone sat down and thought of how to best implement something, it simply hadn't been thought of seriously until then.
Or maybe the first 10-100 people to think of it either thought it was so obvious that it wasn't worth trying to patent it or they wern't in the "patent everything" frame of mind. The problem with the issue of "obvious" is that it tends to be poorly documented...
In Europe where TV is still mainly low definition, the blurry 320x240 quality of internet video probably has an edge. In UKnowWhere where all prime time is HD, there's still a big difference. They've also been saying internet video would catch up to TV quality someday. It's still blurry 320x240.
The average viewer dosn't actually much care about these kind of things. The advantage of DVD over VHS random access (which is why sequences of propaganda which cannot be skipped are so annoying).
Episodes of shows aren't broadcast at the same time in different places. There is often a lag of days or weeks between airing in one country and another.
In some cases this can be months to years.
The television industry shoots itself in the foot again.
Quit frankly, anything more the 15 years(based on typical earning for a work) is stealing from the public domain.
Most copyrights (95%+) make nothing after 15 years, and keeping it away from the public longer for just a small minority it absurd.
Even 15 years may be excessive. Maybe instead the period should be based around the economic life of a typical work... There's also a big problem with current copyright in that many works may never get a chance to enter the public domain, since recording media are now more ephemeral than copyright terms.
Sure it does! The local pub sign performs every night, and draws paying customers, but the guy who painted the boar doesn't get a cut for fifty years, and neither does his manager.
Let alone someone claiming that their grandfather or great uncle painted the sign...
There is a fundamental philosophical principle in play. How far down the line of posterity should the "dead hand" control freedom of the living? In the English common law, which is the basis of US law as well, no conveyance of an interest in real property shall be valid unless it must vest in an ultimate, unrestricted owner within twenty-one years of the termination of a life in being. This means you can leave your realty to your son for life, and 21 years later to those of your descendants then living, but you CANNOT leave it to your son for life, then to your unborn grandson for life, then to your unborn great-grandson in perpetuity.
There is also inheritance tax. Because ending up with a class of people who can live of the interest on their ancestors' money can lead to all sorts of economic problems.
MMmmm, I think that number is maybe a little too restrictive.
There are quite a few situations where 10 years might be quite excessive.
If you're talking about 10 years from publication, maybe that's one thing.
Measuring from publication has the advantage that the date of entry into the public domain can be recorded on every copy. Which makes copyright libraries viable again.
Also, have you ever heard of a popular album that didn't really "take off" with the public until a year or two after it was released? The songs might not have been heard all that much due to the label's poor marketing or mismanagement of the artist, but under the 10-year copyright clause, the net effect is the same: two years of the artist's legally-allowed "monopoly" time -- the time in which the artist is allowed to profit from the work -- wasted.
An ability to make a profit is not the same as obliging a profit. Many, possibly the vast majority, of business ventures fail to make any kind of profit.
The bottom line is that it takes longer for a work to make it into the hands of the public than some people realize. 95 years for copyright seems a ridiculously long time, but 10 seems a trifle short.
The vast majority of entertainment media make the majority of the money they are ever going to make within a short time of publication. There just arn't that many works which suddenly start making money after decades of obscurity (even fewer if you exclude the works of dead people, who obviously can't be motivated to create more works.) Note that the people lobbying for copyright extension here are the tiny minority who's work is still making a reasonable amount of money after half a century. Where are the people saying "give me another 45 years to make a go at it"?
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation of new works. Anything more than 10 years (in my view) is actually counterproductive.
The questions which need asking are along the lines of "What is the optimal copyright term to do this?" (Which may well differ for different media.) Together with "What is more harmful too much or too little?"
Derivative works are stymied by the monopoly the original creator has. Sure, you can negotiate and pay big dollar to license a derivative work. But, for example, had Disney been the original creator of "Alice in Wonderland" you can bet that the video game "Alice" would never have been made.
How much original, work has Disney actually produced? One rather nasty thing Disney likes to do is to deliberatly put their works "out of print".
I just don't see Microsoft being very successful in suing open source apps out of existence. Their is a ton of money behind linux and if you actualyl take a minute to look at some of the patents Microsoft has, you'll see that most of them are silly and unenforceable.
It's not just a matter of money. Microsoft themselves are quite vulnerable to being sued over software patents. Not withstanding that software patents arn't valid in most of the world in the first place.
My point was that they would cease to exist in the Linux distros which (in my opinion) would kill Linux. I mean, who would use Linux without a graphical environment? Maybe some hardcore people but not me.
Servers and embedded systems would be the obvious situations where a WIMP GUI is of little use. Indeed where an OS such as Windows can be handicapped by it's difficulty in running without a GUI, especially on hardware which does not support the possibility of one...
Now I am against the UK model like the next guy. The problem with public surveillance is that humans are operating it. Such a system can be abused in so many ways, from ogling hot chicks, over stalking your neighbour to racial profiling and monitoring dissident activities.
Which dosn't leave much time for any actual law enforcement. It's all too easy to end up with a situation where actual security is reduced.
If however the system is operated by computers who work with publicly known and approved heuristics and human operators are only allowed to watch if specific events occur, I am perfectly fine with that.
Heuristics can be changed and computers are not very adept at spotting when humans are trying to fool them. About the only workable "solution" is to have the video viewable by anyone.
Why is information like height, weight and eye colour even being stored on your licences? It has nothing to do with your ability to drive. Looks like the fight for privacy should be on two fronts in this instance.
Nor is there actually a reason for age/DOB to actually be on the document. The root of the problem is trying to modify a machine operator's permit into some kind of identity document.
Personally I'd be suspicious of anybody that wanted to swipe my ID for the purposes of checking my age, when my DOB is printed on the card itself.
Maybe they need a machine to work out age from DOB. Of course a simpler machine could display the date X years ago...
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So the kid unveils the banner and gets suspended for breaking school policy for "promoting illegal drug abuse". Once could also argue he crossed the line on the separation of church and state by promoting his religious views during school time.
Actually promoting religion migh well be a far better position for the school to have taken against him. Rather than taking exception to the student's views on a political position held by the school.
but wouldn't pouring concrete into a "form" that uses hardened concrete as one of the four walls result in "fusing" the two blocks of concrete together instead of leaving a tight crack in between the two?
The only way you'd get this to happen would be via a "continuious pour"
If so, I thought there was a clear separation between blocks at the pyramids.
Even if the blocks started off stuck together several thousand years of expansion/contraction, as well as the odd earthquake, is enough to "unstick" them.
Besides, making a sort of concrete from powdered stone and lime just to pour it at the bottom seems like a real bad idea - why not just carry the mud and forms to the top and save the effort of moving and aligning the final bricks?
Especially given that pouring the blocks means that they will fit. As opposed to needing teams of masons to make final adjustments.
If you were going to cast then move the blocks you'd need to carefully judge when to do it. Ideally you want a block soft enough for fine adjustment, but not so soft it's liable to get damaged.
I think you have completely missed the point about what means being obvious. An obvious idea is something you don't bother about publishing. You don't consider it worth the effort. I usually come up about 20 "obvious" ideas every day. If I would start publishing those in the way you suggest, then I wouldn't be able to do my work
If the ideas in question were obvious to people working in the same field publishing them could easily make you look like a fool.
A portable email device is "bloody fucking obvious" the minute you live in a world where both email and small wireless devices are common.
Even when such devices wern't common it was obvious to quite a few people that a "walkie-talkie" which could work as a telphone was a good idea. When it comes to electrical telecommunications sending text happened before sending voice. When radio was invented it was obvious that any kind of communication which could be sent over wires could be sent "wireless".
Someone like H G Wells could have come up with the idea of what we would now call a "portable email device" a century ago. He'd have called it something else and there is no way he could possibly have built one (or more usefully two).
As noted in another post, the first NTP patent was filed in 1991 -- was a portable device for email "bloody fucking obvious" in 1991?
A portable device for would have been an obviously useful idea in 1973, when email (as we know it now) was invented. In the same way that portable telephones were an obviously useful idea, even though one one shown in the Hanna Barbara cartoon "Inch High Private Eye" would have been virtually impossible to make with the technology of the day.
Anyway ACARS would probably qualify as "portable email", even if it was built into a vehicle. If "email" were defined to just mean text sent by electronic means then telex and the cypher machines used in WWII would certainly qualify. Enigma machines were certainly man portable.
On the other hand, you have patents on portable electronic devices for sending and receiving email--- that's bloody fucking obvious, and not just in hindsight. Portable email was not a solution waiting for an insightful genius to discover it, but a solution waiting for technological progress to make it feasible.
You probably couldn't even reasonably try and patent "txtspeak". Because it's a consequence of the character limit of SMS that users would come up with method of encoding longer messages.
I find it interesting though how fast it was dropped. Appearently, the status quo is that its ok to make a boarding pass generator, but its not ok to create DVD decrypting software. Granted, I understand why the latter generates more lawsuits, but still this is pretty much the end result.
Maybe they couldn't manage to convince an judges that there was actually a case to answer.
If I were Chris, I'd thoroughly check and wipe the disks of the computers that the FBI gave back to him.
Being sure to record (and publish) any evidence to tampering.
Great idea, except that the RIAA (and, I'd assume the MPAA as well, not that it's relevant to this case) is basically an army of salaried lawyers, so they're not being paid by the hour. While so much as "Ok then, I'll see you in court" almost ensures that the case gets dropped (for both lack of evidence and unwillingness to set a precedent against themselves), dragging the thing out only wastes your time, because if their lawyers aren't going after you, they're going after someone else and will get paid the same amount.
They still have to spend time deciding to drop the case. Also they can't drop the case without you knowing about it, if you have made a counter claim they can't simply ignore it (even if they drop their original claim.)
Who said anything about going to court? I said I'd bog them down with paperwork, answers, interrogatories, etc, etc. I can file those on my way home from work.
The relevent factor is how many times you need to visit the court, especially in working hours. If you can conduct the case exclusivly by mailing documents to the court and/or the RIAA's lawyers then it wouldn't be a problem.
Those billions of dollars of lawyers cost money. If I was sued by RIAA I'd go pro-say and drag it out for as long as humanly possible. I'd file motion after motion that they'd have to answer (while paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour for that legal help) and tie it up for years. I'd drag out any depositions that they requested for hours and hours. You think it can't be done? I've known people that turned "What is your name and occupation?" into a four page long answer about how that question reminds them of their favorite childhood pet.
This isn't really a viable option for someone who has to earn a living. Only someone who is either retired or unemployed can really take on the RIAA as a LiP.
Same with a lot of software patents. Yes, when you look at them, they seem totally brainlessly obvious. But then why hadn't anyone thought of it until that point? Why did the idea not exist, or at the very least have a patent pending? Because until someone sat down and thought of how to best implement something, it simply hadn't been thought of seriously until then.
Or maybe the first 10-100 people to think of it either thought it was so obvious that it wasn't worth trying to patent it or they wern't in the "patent everything" frame of mind. The problem with the issue of "obvious" is that it tends to be poorly documented...
In Europe where TV is still mainly low definition, the blurry 320x240 quality of internet video probably has an edge. In UKnowWhere where all prime time is HD, there's still a big difference. They've also been saying internet video would catch up to TV quality someday. It's still blurry 320x240.
The average viewer dosn't actually much care about these kind of things. The advantage of DVD over VHS random access (which is why sequences of propaganda which cannot be skipped are so annoying).
Episodes of shows aren't broadcast at the same time in different places. There is often a lag of days or weeks between airing in one country and another.
:)
In some cases this can be months to years.
The television industry shoots itself in the foot again.
Or would do if it actually had any feet left
Quit frankly, anything more the 15 years(based on typical earning for a work) is stealing from the public domain.
Most copyrights (95%+) make nothing after 15 years, and keeping it away from the public longer for just a small minority it absurd.
Even 15 years may be excessive. Maybe instead the period should be based around the economic life of a typical work... There's also a big problem with current copyright in that many works may never get a chance to enter the public domain, since recording media are now more ephemeral than copyright terms.
Sure it does! The local pub sign performs every night, and draws paying customers, but the guy who painted the boar doesn't get a cut for fifty years, and neither does his manager.
Let alone someone claiming that their grandfather or great uncle painted the sign...
There is a fundamental philosophical principle in play. How far down the line of posterity should the "dead hand" control freedom of the living? In the English common law, which is the basis of US law as well, no conveyance of an interest in real property shall be valid unless it must vest in an ultimate, unrestricted owner within twenty-one years of the termination of a life in being. This means you can leave your realty to your son for life, and 21 years later to those of your descendants then living, but you CANNOT leave it to your son for life, then to your unborn grandson for life, then to your unborn great-grandson in perpetuity.
There is also inheritance tax. Because ending up with a class of people who can live of the interest on their ancestors' money can lead to all sorts of economic problems.
MMmmm, I think that number is maybe a little too restrictive.
There are quite a few situations where 10 years might be quite excessive.
If you're talking about 10 years from publication, maybe that's one thing.
Measuring from publication has the advantage that the date of entry into the public domain can be recorded on every copy. Which makes copyright libraries viable again.
Also, have you ever heard of a popular album that didn't really "take off" with the public until a year or two after it was released? The songs might not have been heard all that much due to the label's poor marketing or mismanagement of the artist, but under the 10-year copyright clause, the net effect is the same: two years of the artist's legally-allowed "monopoly" time -- the time in which the artist is allowed to profit from the work -- wasted.
An ability to make a profit is not the same as obliging a profit. Many, possibly the vast majority, of business ventures fail to make any kind of profit.
The bottom line is that it takes longer for a work to make it into the hands of the public than some people realize. 95 years for copyright seems a ridiculously long time, but 10 seems a trifle short.
The vast majority of entertainment media make the majority of the money they are ever going to make within a short time of publication. There just arn't that many works which suddenly start making money after decades of obscurity (even fewer if you exclude the works of dead people, who obviously can't be motivated to create more works.)
Note that the people lobbying for copyright extension here are the tiny minority who's work is still making a reasonable amount of money after half a century. Where are the people saying "give me another 45 years to make a go at it"?
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation of new works. Anything more than 10 years (in my view) is actually counterproductive.
The questions which need asking are along the lines of "What is the optimal copyright term to do this?" (Which may well differ for different media.) Together with "What is more harmful too much or too little?"
Derivative works are stymied by the monopoly the original creator has. Sure, you can negotiate and pay big dollar to license a derivative work. But, for example, had Disney been the original creator of "Alice in Wonderland" you can bet that the video game "Alice" would never have been made.
How much original, work has Disney actually produced? One rather nasty thing Disney likes to do is to deliberatly put their works "out of print".
I just don't see Microsoft being very successful in suing open source apps out of existence. Their is a ton of money behind linux and if you actualyl take a minute to look at some of the patents Microsoft has, you'll see that most of them are silly and unenforceable.
It's not just a matter of money. Microsoft themselves are quite vulnerable to being sued over software patents. Not withstanding that software patents arn't valid in most of the world in the first place.
My point was that they would cease to exist in the Linux distros which (in my opinion) would kill Linux. I mean, who would use Linux without a graphical environment? Maybe some hardcore people but not me.
Servers and embedded systems would be the obvious situations where a WIMP GUI is of little use. Indeed where an OS such as Windows can be handicapped by it's difficulty in running without a GUI, especially on hardware which does not support the possibility of one...
Now I am against the UK model like the next guy. The problem with public surveillance is that humans are operating it. Such a system can be abused in so many ways, from ogling hot chicks, over stalking your neighbour to racial profiling and monitoring dissident activities.
Which dosn't leave much time for any actual law enforcement. It's all too easy to end up with a situation where actual security is reduced.
If however the system is operated by computers who work with publicly known and approved heuristics and human operators are only allowed to watch if specific events occur, I am perfectly fine with that.
Heuristics can be changed and computers are not very adept at spotting when humans are trying to fool them.
About the only workable "solution" is to have the video viewable by anyone.
This, that doesn't record your finger prints and can't keep them.
How do you know that this system dosn't?
This would be done by the "back end", the devices the police carry may simply be glorified wireless cameras.
Of course it will be misused; you can make money out of it.
Which is not the only reason for possible misuse anyway...
Younger adults don't care because they have no knowledge or perception of the risks involved with the digitization of private data.
Possibly depends where they live. Those in Germany might have a rather better idea than those in the US.
Why is information like height, weight and eye colour even being stored on your licences? It has nothing to do with your ability to drive. Looks like the fight for privacy should be on two fronts in this instance.
Nor is there actually a reason for age/DOB to actually be on the document.
The root of the problem is trying to modify a machine operator's permit into some kind of identity document.
Personally I'd be suspicious of anybody that wanted to swipe my ID for the purposes of checking my age, when my DOB is printed on the card itself.
Maybe they need a machine to work out age from DOB. Of course a simpler machine could display the date X years ago...